The Mandel Files (120 page)

Julia visited once a week, never shirking, closing her ears to the pitiful pleas and wails, his demands just to end it all. Royan hated the clinic, it was a constant reminder of the time he had spent hospitalized after the riot, a helpless pain-racked dependant. At least in Mucklands Wood he had been somebody; Son, the one the Trinities depended on for information and technology, an electronic guru. Vital. Venerated. Now she had reduced him to a slab of meat again.

When the process of grafting his new limbs began, the clinic kept him in a near-permanent state of induced somnolence. The few times she visited when he was awake he hadn’t been lucid, crying out at the pain, trapped in a looped nightmare of flames and black whips.

Then one day, more than a year after they rescued him from Mucklands, she walked into his room to find him standing, skinny paper-white hands gripping a zimmer frame, blue veins bulging. Pride and wonder illuminated his face. The nurses had to catch him almost straight away, but he’d wanted her to be the first to see him upright again. She had to turn quickly so he couldn’t see her tears.

After that, the physiotherapists went to work on him, building the muscles, teaching him co-ordination. Even something as simple as lifting a spoon to his mouth had to be relearnt from scratch. They spent another two months bringing him up to full health with exercises and high-protein diets, massages and deep-heat toning. All the while, Royan’s complaints growing louder and crabbier.

Then, when the last medical team had completed their final checks, Julia took him away from the clinic. They went to a small island she owned off Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, her retreat from the world.

She had bought it a couple of years earlier. A desolate uninhabited place, barely two kilometres across. Grass had survived the Warming, as it always did; but all that remained of the stunted windswept trees were parched white branches lying on the marly soil. She got the island for a song; the hard-pressed Canadian ecological teams were still absorbed with reseeding the continental biosphere, replacing the forests and replanting the prairies. It would be decades before they got round to isolated regions like Mahone Bay.

Event Horizon’s botanical crew moved in to reshape the island’s habitat, transforming it into the kind of pre-Warming Bahamian paradise she’d seen on the channel shows.

There was a simple wooden bungalow set back from a long sandy beach, the only building. The two of them walked aimlessly along the shore the afternoon they arrived, exploring the gentle bluff behind the beach. A small dense selva forest was spreading out from the island’s core, broad-leaved trees draped in pale grey and green epiphyte mosses, tied together by a filigree of vines. The company crew had hatched families of small colourful birds to fill out the ecology. Julia laughed in delight at their antics as they swooped in and out of the branches. Royan was entranced by the profusion of flowers in a natural habitat, smelling their exotic scents, picking them and holding them up to the sun. He reminded her of a child let loose in a spring garden after a long icebound winter.

They ate supper on the creaking veranda, and slipped off to bed as the last fragments of light drained from the day.

Royan had been moulded by her subconscious desire, tall, strong, broad-shouldered, exactly how she imagined the shell of his mind to be in her fantasies, a physique to match the intellect. There was something strangely enticing about a power which could incarnate a lover exactly as envisaged, making sure neither of them would be disappointed. Royan had never argued about the rehabilitation programme she’d selected, it was an anodyne to his previous state. Like her, he wanted his new self to be as far removed from the crippled husk in Mucklands as it was physically possible to get.

For three months they did nothing but laze in the sun and make love. Royan learned to swim. Julia learned to cook, or at least barbecue. Then she found she was pregnant with Daniella.

They returned to England flush with optimism and an inflated sense of omnipotence. It was the future they laid claim to; rich, young, and data smart, digital godlings forging their new bright empire.

She often thought, later, that they were both slightly crazy, the kind of hubristic crazy that always came when the power to build dreams was granted. But they had been a unique combination: her money, his hotrod talent; the result was synergistic. She gave him access to ‘ware coming out of Event Horizon’s research divisions, so new the security programmers didn’t even know it existed. He rewarded her with the personality package, a digital micro-entity capable of functinning within any processor core, self-contained and selfdeterminative, its purpose reflected in its originator’s thought processes.

Together they unleashed a deluge of the sprite-like composites in the global data networks, raiding the research cores of rival companies, adding to Event Horizon’s technological base. Then they went for the big one, the electron-compression warhead. Their super-compressed packages squirted into the Sandia National Laboratories processor cores, established themselves within the management routines, and downloaded every file they could find.

The channels called electron compression the rich man’s nuke; an explosive which produced a megaton blast without the radioactive fallout of nuclear weapons. Only America, the Russian republic, and China had mastered the technology, though there were rumours of Japan making a successful test under the Pacific.

Julia built the electron-compression warheads on a cyberfactory ship floating in international waters, and used them to knock New London into Earth orbit. The asteroid’s mineral reserves, coupled with the giga-conductor royalties, gave Event Horizon a financial primacy which the kombinates could never match.

She gave Royan challenges he could never have conceived of back in Mucklands Wood, she gave him a love he’d never known before, she gave him the most exquisite pair of children. Then she had to stand beside him and watch him lose interest in each one of her gifts. It made her feel so small and destitute, for she had nothing else left to give. Finally, when he walked out without any explanation, she was left clinging desperately to the children in a reflex defence. They were all she had left of the good times, and her sole hope for the future.

Three men were already in the office waiting for her. The first was Peter Cavendish, the director of Event Horizon’s collaborative ventures office. A bulky fifty-year-old with snow-white hair, his charcoal suit showing signs of being worn too long. Accompanying him was Nicholas Beswick, a physics professor who unfailingly managed to set Julia’s nerves on edge with his combination of eagerness and timidity. Nicholas Beswick was basically a complete nerd, but one whose understanding of quantum mechanics was unsurpassed, making him tremendously important to Event Horizon. It was his research team which five years ago had finally produced a processor that utilized one-dimensional wire to carry single electrons. The technology had invigorated the global ‘ware industry to a degree which hadn’t been seen since the late nineteen-eighties. The amount of money licensed production of quantum-wire processor chips raked in for Event Horizon was second only to that of the gigaconductor royalties.

Nicholas Beswick half bowed, half flinched when Julia entered the office. She gave him a gracious smile as she sat behind her desk, and turned down the window’s opacity to let the wan early morning light flood the big room. There were no flowers in the vases yet, the tower’s daytime maintenance crew were only just starting their shift.

“Thanks for coming in so quickly, Julia,” Peter Cavendish said. “I know it was short notice, but I really do think this is important enough to warrant your personal attention.”

“Yes, so I understand. Can you give me a summary of where we stand before Mutizen’s negotiator arrives, please.”

Peter Cavendish settled into one of the high-backed chairs in front of her desk. “Mutizen came to us yesterday with what is a pretty standard proposal. They claimed they have made a breakthrough in atomic structuring, and asked if we would go into partnership with them to develop and market the technology. They offered us a look at their data under a confidentiality contract. If we decide not to join them we can’t research or sell the same technology for five years. Since we don’t have any atomic structuring projects right now, I agreed. We were in a no-lose situation. That’s what I thought.”

“This atomic structuring process,” she asked. “You mean they can just assemble blocks of atoms in any pattern they want?”

Nicholas Beswick rocked forwards in his chair, an eager schoolboy grin on his face. “Yes, that’s exactly it. We didn’t quite comprehend the implications until after we reviewed their data. At first we were under the assumption that it was just an improved method of our current solid-state assembly techniques; as you know quantum-wire construction is still fairly laborious even with today’s ion positioners. But it turned out that Mutizen was talking about a method of locking atoms into place with coherent emissions of gluons, the field particles of the strong nuclear force. They operate directly on the quarks which make up neutrons and protons. If it is possible to manipulate the force like this you could literally solidify air, turn it into a block stronger than monolatrice filament.” He sighed, breath hissing through his teeth. “Ms Evans, I’m not kidding, the potential of this thing frightens the living shit out of me. My staff have been working out applications more or less nonstop ever since they got Mutizen’s data package. It can strengthen metal to make it impregnable, harden a bubble of air over a city to withstand a nuclear attack, squeeze deuterium together for fusion, manipulate weather fronts, heck, we could probably even produce lumps of neutronium—”

“Have Mutizen actually physically demonstrated it?” she asked sharply.

“If they have, they haven’t told us,” Peter Cavendish said. “This was just a taster to gain our undivided attention.”

“And believe me it worked,” Nicholas Beswick said. “All we’ve been given so far is the force’s behavioural equations. No word on the method of generation.”

“Hmmm.” Julia stared at Nicholas Beswick until he started to redden. “You’re the best I’ve got, Nicholas, can you see how to build a nuclear force generator?”

He made a farting sound with his lips. “No way, sorry. It’s totally beyond me. In fact, gluon emission of the type they describe isn’t even explainable with our current understanding of quantum chromodynamics. They must have something totally and radically new.”

“But the rest of it makes sense to you?” she persisted.

“Absolutely, the maths checks out perfectly. That’s not difficult at all, we do know enough about quark properties to confirm their predictions.”

“Interesting.” Julia switched her gaze to the ceiling. Open Channel to SelfCores. What do you three think?

Mutizen hasn’t built a working nuclear force generator, her grandfather said. It stands to reason. If they had, they wouldn’t be offering you a partnership.

Yes, but why offer me a partnership anyway? They have a lead in a field which no one else even knew existed. Why not just keep plugging away?

Mutizen is a heavy industry kombinate, NN core one said. Their production is geared towards cars, ships, civil engineering plant, macro-cybernetics, more or less anything mechanical, with mining and foundry divisions. Interesting that a kombinate like that should have a research team working on such fundamental physics in the first place.

I concur, NN core two said.

Me too, Juliet. The obvious conclusion is that the data isn’t theirs. And they don’t have the means to develop it themselves, which is why they’ve come running to you. No skin off their nose. You say yes, and crack the generator; they’re plugged into a whole new technology with a minimal outlay. Trouble is, if Event Horizon commits funds and research teams to developing the technology, and in the mean time the real owner emerges with the completed system, you’re going to be out in the cold. The gigaconductor and New London aren’t going to be worth bugger-all if this atomic structuring is haif as good as Beswick reckons.

You mean I’ve got a little more bargaining power than we thought originally?

Damn right, m’girl! Screw the bastards for every penny you can get—

A smile touched Julia’s lips. Good old Grandpa, they weren’t made like that any more. Yes, you’re probably right. What I can certainly do is buy us a breathing space. In the mean time, I think it would be a good idea to try and track down the source of this atomic structuring concept. Assemble the most comprehensive profile of Mutizen possible, turn over their financial backing consortiums, review their research personnel for a likely candidate in the atomic structuring field—someone like Beswick. The works. Then get our economic intelligence division to see if any of the other kombinates are building up an investment reserve. If one of them is working on atomic structuring they’re going to need some hefty production facilities when it’s perfected.

My girl.

We’ll initiate now, said NN core two.

Julia pondered whether to squirt a personality package into Mutizen’s management cores to see what it could find, and decided to wait until the preliminary findings were complete first. She refocused on Peter Cavendish and Nicholas Beswick. “Tea, please, Kirsten, we might as well do this properly. And have Mutizen’s negotiator come in now. What’s his name, anyway?”

“Eduard Muller,” Peter Cavendish told her. “He’s one of Mutizen’s vice-presidents, in charge of their Prior’s Fen Atoll power engineering division. Top notch.”

“Power engineering,” Julia mused. “It has a certain ring to it, I suppose.”

Eduard Muller was a professional premier-grade executive, London suit, Italian shoes, French shirt, sado smile. He had a ginger crew cut, and carefully shaded tan, cloned clear green eyes; his age was indeterminately forty.

Julia hated the sight of him, his manners would be as smooth as his clothes, his English unaccented, they might as well have sent her a cyborg.

He sat in a high-back chair beside Peter Cavendish, radiating friendliness. Two young assistants stood behind him, one male, one female, blank courteous faces. The woman kept a slim black leather briefcase folded under her arm.