The Fear Index (30 page)

‘Tell me what he was doing here, what went wrong. I gather he had a breakdown, and I have a bad feeling it’s happening all over again. I’m sorry.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘I don’t know who else to ask.’

Walton was sitting behind his desk. He had made a steeple of his long fingers and had it pressed to his lips. He studied her for a while. Eventually he said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Desertron?’

THE DESERTRON, SAID Walton, was supposed to be America’s Superconducting Super Collider – eighty-seven kilometres of tunnel being dug out of the rock at Waxahachie, Texas. But in 1993 the US Congress, in its infinite wisdom, voted to abandon construction. That saved the US taxpayer about $10 billion. (‘There must have been dancing in the streets.’) However, it also pretty much wiped out the career plans of an entire generation of American academic physicists, including those of the brilliant young Alex Hoffmann, then finishing his PhD at Princeton.

In the end Alex was one of the lucky ones – he was only twenty-five or thereabouts, but already sufficiently renowned to be awarded one of the very few non-European scholarships to work at CERN on the Large Electron–Positron Collider, forerunner of the Large Hadron Collider. Most of his colleagues unfortunately had to go off and become quants on Wall Street, where they helped build derivatives rather than particle accelerators. And when
that
went wrong and the banking system imploded, Congress had to rescue it, at a cost to the US taxpayer of $3.7 trillion.

‘Which is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences,’ said Walton. ‘Did you know Alex offered me a job about five years ago?’

‘No.’

‘This was before the banking crisis. I told him that in my view high-end science and money don’t mix. It’s an unstable compound. I may have used the words “dark arts”. I’m afraid we fell out all over again.’

Gabrielle, nodding eagerly, said, ‘I know what you mean. It’s a sort of tension. I’ve always been aware of it in him, but especially lately.’

‘That’s it. Over the years I’ve known quite a few who’ve made the crossover from pure science to making money – none as successfully as Alex, I admit – and you can always tell, just by how loudly they insist the opposite, that secretly they despise themselves.’

He looked pained by what had happened to his profession, as if they had somehow fallen from a state of grace, and again Gabrielle was reminded of a priest. There was an other-worldly quality to him, as there was to Alex.

She had to prompt him. ‘But about the nineties …’

‘Yes, so anyway, back to the nineties …’

Alex had arrived in Geneva only a couple of years after CERN’s scientists had invented the World Wide Web. And oddly enough, it was that which had seized his imagination: not re-creating the Big Bang or finding the God particle or creating antimatter, but the possibilities of serial processing power, emergent machine reasoning, a global brain.

‘He was a romantic on the subject – always dangerous. I was his section head at the Computing Centre. Maggie and I helped him get on his feet a bit. He used to babysit our boys when they were small. He was hopeless at it.’

‘I bet.’ She bit her lip at the thought of Alex with children.

‘Completely
hopeless
. We’d come home and find him upstairs asleep in their beds and them downstairs watching television. He was always pushing himself far too hard, exhausting himself. He had this obsession with artificial intelligence, although he disliked the hubristic connotations of AI and preferred to call it AMR – autonomous machine reasoning. Are you very technically minded?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Isn’t that difficult, being married to Alex?’

‘To be honest, I think the opposite. It’s what makes it work.’
Or did
, she nearly added. It was the self-absorbed mathematician – his social artlessness, the strange innocence of him – that she had fallen in love with; it was the new Alex, the billionaire hedge-fund president, she found difficult to take.

‘Well, without getting too technical about it, one of the big challenges we face here is simply analysing the sheer amount of experimental data we produce. It’s now running around twenty-seven trillion bytes each day. Alex’s solution was to invent an algorithm that would learn what to look for, so to speak, and then teach itself what to look for next. That would make it able to work infinitely faster than a human being. It was theoretically brilliant, but a practical disaster.’

‘So it didn’t work?’

‘Oh yes, it worked. That was the disaster. It started spreading through the system like bindweed. Eventually we had to quarantine it, which meant basically shutting everything down. I’m afraid I had to tell Alex that that particular line of research was too unstable to be continued. It would require containment, like nuclear technology, otherwise one was effectively just unleashing a virus. He wouldn’t accept it. Things became quite ugly for a while. He had to be forcibly removed from the facility on one occasion.’

‘And that was when he had his breakdown?’

Walton nodded sadly. ‘I never saw a man so desolate. You would’ve thought I’d murdered his child.’

15

As I was considering these issues … a new concept popped into my head: ‘the digital nervous system’ … A digital nervous system consists of the digital processes that enable a company to perceive and react to its environment, to sense competitor challenges and customer needs, and to organise timely responses
…

BILL GATES,
Business at the Speed of Light
(2000)

BY THE TIME Hoffmann reached his office, it was the end of the working day – about 6.00 p.m. in Geneva, noon in New York. People were coming from the building, heading for home or a drink or the gym. He stood in a doorway opposite and checked for any sign of the police, and when he was satisfied they were not in evidence he went loping across the street, stared bleakly at the facial scanner and was admitted, passed straight through the lobby, up in one of the elevators, and on to the trading floor. The place was still full; most people did not leave their desks until eight. He put his head down and headed for his office, trying not to notice the curious looks he was attracting. Sitting at her desk, Marie-Claude watched him approach. She opened her mouth to speak and Hoffmann held up his hands. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I need ten minutes on my own and then I’ll deal with all of it. Don’t let anyone in, okay?’

He went inside and closed the door. He sat in his expensive orthopaedic chair with its state-of-the-art tilt mechanism and opened the German’s laptop. Who had hacked into his medical records – that was the question. Whoever it was must be behind everything else. It baffled him. He had never thought of himself as a man with enemies. It was true he did not have friends; but the corollary of his solitariness, he had always assumed, was that he did not have enemies either.

His head was hurting again. He ran his fingers over the shaved area; it felt like the stitching on a football. His shoulders were locked with tension. He started massaging his neck, leaning back in his chair and looking up at the smoke detector as he had done a thousand times before when he was trying to focus his thoughts. He contemplated the tiny red light, identical to the one on their bedroom ceiling in Cologny that always made him think of Mars as he fell asleep. Slowly he stopped massaging. ‘Shit,’ he whispered.

He sat up straight and looked at the screensaver image on the laptop: the picture of himself, gazing up with a vacant, unfocused expression. He clambered on to his chair. It shifted treacherously beneath his feet as he stepped from it on to his desk. The smoke detector was square, made of white plastic, with a carbon-sensitive plate, a light to show that it was receiving power, a test button and a grille that presumably covered the alarm itself. He felt around the edges. It seemed to be glued to the ceiling tile. He pulled at it and twisted it, and finally in fear and frustration he grasped it hard and yanked it free.

The screech of protest it set up was physical in its intensity. The casing trembled in his hands, the air pulsed with it. It was still connected to the ceiling by an umbilical cord of wire, and when he put his fingers into the back of it to try to shut it down, he received an electric shock that was as vicious as an animal bite; it travelled all the way to his heart. He cried out, dropped it, let it dangle, and shook his fingers vigorously as if drying them. The noise was a physical assault: he felt his ears would bleed unless he stopped it quickly. He grabbed the detector by the casing this time and pulled with all his weight, almost swinging on it, and away it came, bringing down a chunk of the ceiling with it. The sudden silence was as shocking as the din.

MUCH LATER, WHEN Quarry found himself reliving the next couple of hours, and when he was asked which moment for him had been the most frightening, he said that oddly enough it was this one: when he heard the alarm and went running from one end of the trading floor to the other, to find Hoffmann – the only man who fully understood an algorithm that was even now making a thirty-billion-dollar unhedged bet – flecked with blood, covered in dust, standing on a desk beneath a hole in his ceiling, gabbling that he was being spied upon wherever he went.

Quarry was not the first on the scene. The door was already open and Marie-Claude was inside with some of the quants. Quarry shouldered his way past them and ordered them all to get back to their work. He could tell at once, craning his neck, even from that angle, that Hoffmann had been through some kind of trauma. His eyes were wild, his clothes dishevelled. There was dried blood in his hair. His hands looked as if he had been punching concrete.

He said, as calmly as he could, ‘Okay then, Alexi, how’s it going up there?’

‘Look for yourself,’ cried Hoffmann excitedly. He jumped down from the desk and held out his palm. On it were the components of the dismantled smoke alarm. He poked through them with his forefinger as if he were a naturalist inspecting the innards of some dead creature. He held up a small lens with a bit of wire trailing from the back. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘I’m not sure that I do, no.’

‘It’s a webcam.’ He let the dismantled pieces trickle through his fingers and across his desk; some rolled to the floor. ‘Look at this.’ He gave Quarry the laptop. He tapped the screen. ‘Where do you think that picture was taken from?’

He sat down again and lolled back in his chair. Quarry looked at him and then at the screen and back again. He glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Bloody hell. Where did you get this?’

‘It belonged to the guy who attacked me last night.’

Even at the time Quarry registered the odd use of the past tense –
belonged?
– and wondered how the laptop had come into Hoffmann’s possession. There was no time to ask, however, as Hoffmann jumped to his feet. His mind was running away with him now. He couldn’t stay still. ‘Come,’ he said, beckoning. ‘Come.’ He led Quarry by the elbow out of his office and pointed to the ceiling above Marie-Claude’s desk, where there was an identical detector. He put his finger to his lips. Then he took him to the edge of the trading floor and showed him – one, two, three, four more. There was one in the boardroom, too. There was even one in the men’s room. He climbed up on to the wash basins. He could just reach it. He pulled hard and it came away in a shower of plaster. He jumped down and showed it to Quarry. Another webcam. ‘They’re everywhere. I’ve been noticing them for months without ever really seeing them. There’ll be one in your office. I’ve got one in every room at home – even in the bedroom. Christ. Even in the
bathroom
.’ He put his hand to his brow, only just registering the scale of it himself. ‘Unbelievable.’