Emergence Read online

  EMERGENCE

  Ray Hammond

  © Ray Hammond 2001

  Ray Hammond has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2001 by Macmillan.

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For my daughter, Jane

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to many people who have helped me during the writing and production process of this first novel. Mic Cheetham, my agent and friend, knew exactly when to encourage, when to ignore and how best to help me shape this story. Simon Kavanagh, her assistant at the time, also made incredibly useful suggestions about plot possibilities. Thanks to them both.

  At Macmillan I have been lucky enough to find in Peter Lavery an editor who is both an enthusiast for what is properly described as ‘mainstream’ fiction and is unerring in his instinct for weeding out weaknesses in both plot and prose. He has made an immense contribution to this novel.

  A number of people have been kind enough to help me with scientific, medical, professional, cultural, technical or production issues. I wanted as much detail as possible in this book to be scientifically plausible and technically accurate but I haven’t always taken the advice that has so generously been offered, so no blame can be attached to any of them for any errors, omissions, misunderstandings or inaccuracies. All faults are mine.

  In alphabetical order, I thank Nick Austin who copy-edited and prepared this manuscript for press; Dr James Dodd, co-author of The Ideas of Particle Physics, and formerly of DresdnerKleinwortBenson Merchant Bank, for his detailed and enthusiastic input on both quantum physics and fund management; Professor Allison Druin of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland for her thoughts regarding my ‘companion’ characters; science and technology writer Simon Eccles for his comments and advice on space technologies and astronomy; Anne Hardy for amazingly good proofreading skills (and for her patience and understanding while the manuscript was under development); Peter Kraus for his help with Yiddish colloquialisms; Judith Hall for her assistance with Spanish translations; Janice Nagourney for her assistance with French translations; Dr Brian Rossiter, Consultant at Whipps Cross Hospital, London for help with medical details; Dr John Rossiter, Senior Lecturer at Imperial College, London for advice on some possibilities for genetically modified plants and Dr Bruno Stanek of Astrosoftware, Switzerland for advice about space technologies and astronomical details.

  Thanks also go to the novelist Terry Bisson for permission to reproduce a section from his short story, ‘They’re Made Out of Meat’ which appears in chapter twenty-four. His copyright is fully and gratefully acknowledged.

  In addition, I thank Dagmar O’Toole and Alex Krywald of Celebrity Speakers Ltd, whose skilful management of my public-speaking career made this project possible.

  Finally, thanks to Liz Hammond for her tireless and good humoured proofreading and for her belief and support over the years.

  For more information about Endeavour Press, the UK's leading independent digital publisher, please visit http://www.endeavourpress.com/

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  PROLOGUE

  In summer, the skies above the city of Stockholm remain blue for most of the Earth’s daily revolution: the Sun might be thought unwilling to withdraw fully in night’s favour. By late evening azure becomes amethyst, eventually giving way to an ecclesiastical indigo. This allows a few of the brightest stars to compete to make their presence known alongside the ever-growing network of communications satellites and their intermittent matrix of laser beams made brilliant and multicoloured solely for purposes of marketing advantage and brand identity.

  Luxuriating in his hot tub, Rolf Larsson gazes through the glass ceiling panels of his attic bathroom and allows the deep purple of the late evening sky to engulf him. He can still feel the press of Laila’s embrace, her body urgent against his, and he savours their closeness again. He slips into a gentle mood of detachment, floating, as the swirling surreality of Debussy’s Cello Sonata in D minor marks a distant punctuation elsewhere in the apartment. Laila has chosen his favourite piece of music. She is sending him a message of love and contentment from the living room beyond. It is Friday night, the start to their weekend.

  He names every star he can see, constructs a pattern to connect them and quickly factors their prime numbers. It is a game his father taught him even before he went to high school. Then he makes his topology three-dimensional, placing and naming the more distant star clusters and invisible galaxies where he knows them to be. Once again his mind turns to the infinite billions of stars whose presence is masked in summer by the light Scandinavian atmosphere. Sweden’s twenty-seven-year-old media-acclaimed ‘prodigy’ of astrophysics tries once more to predict his pattern in a way that will make them denumerable. As always, the model in his head shatters soon after he tries to push beyond the counter-intuitive irrationality of string theory, quantum mechanics, parallel states and the concept of infinity. He exhales and lies back, dipping his head under the water.

  He sits up, dries his face on a towel and leans forward to add more hot water. As he does so, a sudden contrapuntal rhythm created nearly a century earlier fills his head and he gains another point of observation that flickers in and out of his grasp.

  Suddenly his four-dimensional model of matter extends with the music and gains a fifth, then a sixth, then more, in a mental cascade of observations that pulse with potential for proof. In a moment it, too, shatters but then, with the counterpoint of the rational mathematics Debussy used to build his temporal dance, it slowly reassembles as an intellectual scaffolding that provides multiple observation points which extend and transcend the thinness of the present.

  Larsson probes the new patterns of space, place, time and matter that are now crystallizing in his consciousness. It seems to be an entirely new metalanguage! Then he realizes what he might have.

  He leaps from his bath and runs, naked and wet, into his wood-floored attic living room. ‘Wake!’ he shouts as he reaches his computer display screens and, dripping, he begins to work, oblivious of Laila’s puzzled gaze.

  *

  The stars were reappearing by the time Larsson pushed himself back from his screens and ran his fingers through his hair. He should have been preparing for two tutorials for his supplementary PhD in particle physics, but he was sure he had just discovered something no tutorial could offer. Yet, despite the scale of this achievement, it didn’t occur to him that he might never return to his university.

  Laila had padded over to investigate soon after he had started communing with his machine. He hadn’t said anything when she had draped a towell
ing robe around his shoulders and she understood his frequent intellectual obsessions well enough to leave him undisturbed. Later, when she had been swallowing yawns for an hour, she had brought black coffee from the kitchen, guessing that he was settling down for a long session. He hadn’t even looked up as she leaned over his shoulder to place the mug beside his keyboard. She had kissed his cheek, feeling his stubble against her lips, and he had at last acknowledged her presence by placing his hand over hers as she squeezed his shoulder. She had kissed him once more and left him to it.

  Now, nearly a day later, he was finished.

  ‘Save with remote back-up,’ Larsson told his computer. ‘Disconnect from all networks.’

  He slept for fourteen hours and when he woke, sweaty and unshaven in the broad daylight of Sunday, he panicked. He couldn’t recapture the complex matrix in his mind. Two minutes later his computer confirmed he had not dreamed it: his new language and concepts had created formulae that expressed a polydimensional method of observing the smallest particles of matter – a means of calculating and proving their positions at all times.

  When he had showered and wolfed down cold baked beans straight from the can, Larsson called his academic supervisor at home. He had been summoned as a standby juror, he explained: sudden and unavoidable. The trial was scheduled to last a few weeks.

  Laila had given up on their weekend plans and returned to her own apartment in Trossa, leaving a message for him to call when he finally surfaced. She took his call and, after apologizing, he explained that he’d found something that might be important for his new doctorate and that he needed some time alone.

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’ she asked. He could see the worry on her face, and pursed his lips towards her in a kiss.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You’ll be so proud of me if this turns out to be what I think it is.’

  She smiled, a reaction that produced a small dimple at the corner of her mouth. He felt a pang of desire but fought it.

  ‘Just give me a little while to concentrate, OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s not so easy when you’re around.’

  She smiled again. ‘Well, call me when you can.’

  *

  Three weeks later, having provided only the briefest explanations for his solitary preoccupation to his family and friends, Larsson had completed the coding for his software. It worked flawlessly on the few secure messages he had in local storage. He then logged on to the global networks and dispatched the software robots he had created.

  After decades of continuous investment in virtual technologies, the world had become totally reliant on the vast web of fibre-optic cables, wireless networks and satellite chains that, each day, created an ever more dense matrix around the planet. Almost every aspect of government, business and social life raced through the man-made digital cosmos at the speed of light. Everything sensitive, controversial or financial was scrambled by super-strong security techniques that were unbreakable even by the largest network of optical supercomputers. It was a safe, trustworthy and instant domain.

  Within an hour Larsson’s software surrogates reported back with copies of two thousand separate messages, all painstakingly gathered, collated and reconstructed from the millions of tiny parts into which they had been split in order to pursue separate routes to their intended destinations. Of these, just over 400 had been scrambled, using unbreakable cryptography.

  Larsson found 107 errors in his coding as he ran his new prime-number generator repeatedly against the encrypted messages. With mounting cries of frustration at his own stupidity, he corrected and recompiled the software until his engine was producing a continuous string of the super-rare high prime numbers that lie at the heart of unbreakable encryption technology.

  Once the software was stable – or stable enough to complete more than a few passes without crashing – it took him a little less than fifteen minutes to break the first message. As he tuned his algorithms, plain text emerged at an ever-faster rate from the jumble of letters and symbols that made up the encrypted communications.

  Six hours after he broke the first message, all 409 were in plain text for him to examine. Ignoring the messages that were in languages he couldn’t read without using auto-translation, Larsson’s first ten minutes of scrolling revealed a draft agreement on agricultural trade subsidies between Washington DC and the European Union, four bank transfer instructions for sums ranging between two hundred million and seven hundred million dollars, and three sets of draft company accounts.

  The young Swede pushed his chair back from his computer screens and yelled at the ceiling. He jumped to his feet and clasped his hands behind his head, turning in tiny circles. For twenty minutes he walked around his apartment staring at blank walls, at the table top and out of the window. He looked, but registered nothing.

  An hour later he dispatched his team of software robots again. This time they had a particular target and, as soon as they had departed into the world’s networks, he left his apartment, carefully double-locking the heavy old metal door of the converted warehouse building.

  He was shocked by the brilliance of the June day. Other than occasional late-evening sorties to the convenience store, he had hardly stepped outdoors in a month. The sun created a panorama of flashing reflections across the gentle swell of the harbour like a flotilla of miniature ships frantically signalling the shore.

  Not for the first time, Larsson reflected on how the apparent reality of the physical world made the intangible space of the digital environment seem unreal – the classic mistake. He smiled and reminded himself that it was his brain that was adding the brilliant colours to the scene in front of him. All that existed in the physical world were varying achromatic wavelengths of light. Man created his own world: it had been virtual, a product of human creativity, from the moment consciousness emerged and thus it was humans who gave meaning to quantum particles which, Larsson had proved, included many alternative states, all of them useful in the creation of new concepts for language and, consequently, thought.

  He strolled past the innumerable outdoor café tables on the cobbled quayside, oblivious of the sharp looks of interest and query from the young and less-young female patrons. Tall, lank and with an unruly mop of flaxen hair, his thin T-shirted figure appeared deep in thought.

  His mind was on Thomas Tye and his company, the Tye Corporation. Since the eruption of global wealth created by the virtual and biotech economies, thousands of new companies had emerged to take over from the old industrial-age behemoths such as car makers and oil companies. The corporate riches of the late twentieth century had been dwarfed by the immense wealth created by enterprises that focused on delivering virtual and information-specific products via the networks, by companies that could quadruple the produce of an acre of land and by corporations that created miracle cures based on the map of the human genome. All such products and services were delivered to a global market made one by the networks’ elimination of physical boundaries and borders.

  Even the old software and computer giants of the pre-network age now looked puny compared with the distributed and virtually based corporations that had come to dominate the global economy. Of these, by far the richest was the Tye Corporation, the world’s most valuable company and the biggest telecommunications, software, pharmaceutical, biotech, healthcare, aerospace, media and banking conglomerate on the planet.

  Almost everybody in the world, in the rapidly emerging economies as well as in the developed countries, was familiar with the face and the public opinions of Thomas Tye, the company’s founder, major shareholder and environmental campaigner; the man who had become the planet’s richest citizen. As such, he was the obvious target for Larsson, and by the time the astrophysicist returned to his apartment, his trawling robots had reappeared with copies of over 300 Tye Corporation communications that had been flashing through the world’s networks as they lay in wait.

  Larsson saved the material that had been harvested
and started work. Inside an hour he had decoded and read plans to relocate offices, fund transfers between a dozen banks and outline designs for a new generation of 3D hologram software. Then he found something ideal for his purpose. It was a highest-security, deeply encrypted message that had been sent to Thomas Tye’s confidential mailbox. When he had broken the code, Larsson read the final draft of the Tye Corporation’s annual report and consolidated accounts that was due to be published in sixteen days’ time. The document had been on its way to Tye for his final approval when it had been silently and untraceably intercepted and copied, in less than one one-hundredth of a second.

  Larsson printed out the 120 pages and spent several hours struggling to understand the unfamiliar formats of multinational corporate accounting. He visited the Tye Corporation’s main network resource and downloaded the previous year’s accounts. He could interpret enough of the financial statements to see that the company’s revenue had jumped sixty per cent and its net income was up by forty-eight per cent.

  He stood up and allowed himself a few small revolutions in the middle of the floor. Then he sat back down, extracted Tye’s personal network address from the decoded file and prepared a message containing a copy of the draft accounts in plain, unscrambled text. To reinforce his point, he also added three further confidential Tye Corporation messages in plain language and sent them to Tye with a cryptic message;

  New software. Want to discuss?

  Larsson left his audio alert on and went to bed. But sleep did not come. At three a.m., just as he was finally drifting off his computer alerted him to incoming v-mail. He opened his three screens, enabled the videoconferencing system and saw the best-known face on the planet in front of him.

  Involuntarily, his response was formal.

  ‘Mr Tye.’

  ‘Doctor Larsson?’ That rich, full voice; so well known.