Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (7 page)

‘Space planes on Earth?’

‘Twelve planes at Outback Spaceport and sixteen at various other smaller facilities across the world are all operational. Twenty-three are in for overhaul, and SPP – Space Plane
Production – has a further twelve near to completion, though production has halted for the present due to a scramjet crashing into part of the main factory.’

Serene nodded again, feeling slightly numb. She needed to enquire further into all she had set in motion, for it felt almost as if it was careening out of her control. Surely, despite her
optimism, it couldn’t be this easy to restart a planet after so much death and destruction?

She stepped through into her apartment, took a steadying breath, then headed over to her big-screen console and sat down before it. One minute to eight, and the screen was already dividing up as
delegates came online. And some, it seemed, had come online and gone off again – the screen segments they had occupied now just displaying a United Earth logo. Next, one of the segments
expanded, pushing others to the border, and a stern-looking Asian face became clearly visible.

‘It seems, despite the seriousness of the situation, some delegates have not seen fit to attend,’ said Delegate Angone of Region SE Africa.

Serene kept her expression bland, even as one of the smaller screen sections turned a blurry red. It seemed one of the delegates had just coughed blood all over his webcam.

‘I would first like to speak to you all individually, then I’ll permit half an hour of open discussion through me, as the chair of this meeting,’ he said.

A screen segment expanded, cramming Angone to one side. Serene recognized Yinnister from New Zealand, whom she had known was one of the twenty-four surviving delegates but whose presence she had
not originally expected. Yinnister had been close to Messina, and Serene had assumed Messina had taken all those loyal to him up to Argus.

‘I would like to know,’ Yinnister said, pausing to cough into a handkerchief, ‘what makes you think you can claim the authority to chair this meeting.’

Another screen division and Delegate Sinegal added, ‘Yes, I too would like to know that.’

It seemed that three delegates who, under the previous regime, had authority over Serene were still alive, though Yinnister didn’t look too good.

‘My position in the hierarchy is not open to question,’ Angone stated.

‘A hierarchy that effectively no longer exists,’ said Sinegal, over Yinnister’s coughing. ‘Messina is gone and, as far as we can gather, is either dead or a captive. Here
and now we must establish a new world order.’

Serene couldn’t agree more, but suspected it would not include Yinnister or Sinegal, since now Sinegal seemed to have developed a pronounced tic, and there appeared to be a tear of blood
at the corner of his eye. Also, of the eighteen screen segments that had appeared, yet more had flicked over to the United Earth holding logo so that, apart from her and the conversing three, only
five more delegates were present.

‘You are arguing against yourself, Delegate Sinegal,’ said Angone, still looking stubbornly healthy. Perhaps, like Serene, he had decided keep his ID implant separate from his body.
She opened her palmtop and started running a signal trace, quickly locating Angone not in Southeast Africa as expected, but in Egypt, in the newly rebuilt Red Sea resort of Sharm-El-Sheikh –
a place where many delegates took their vacations.

‘If a new world order is to be established, who’s to say
any
of us Committee delegates should have
anything
to do with it? Our hierarchy therefore stands since, by dint
of our positions, we are rightly placed to take up the reins of power, and my status over you all puts me in the prime position to assume the chairmanship.’ He paused, obviously staring at
his screen. ‘What is the matter with you, Delegate Sinegal?’

Sinegal’s head was down on his desk, but he raised it for a second to say, ‘I am unwell.’ Then his screen segment also switched to the icon.

‘This is ridiculous,’ said Angone, as three more segments also switched to icons. ‘What is going on here?’

Serene resisted the temptation to tell him, as she wanted no recorded proof of her guilt. Better to let this Alan Saul take the blame – he was far enough away now to be beyond being caught
and questioned. Angone went to holding. Was he, too, starting to feel the effects of the virus? Serene sat back and waited patiently, her fingers interlaced below her breasts. After a moment Angone
reappeared, looking very worried.

‘It appears that this Scour presently sweeping our world is not confined to the zero-asset population.’ He paused as the last screen segments blinked out, leaving only him and
Serene. ‘Delegate Galahad, I see that it is now just you and me.’ Again that pause. ‘It’s somewhat coincidental that it was you who identified the source of this
Scour.’

Obviously the alarm bells were ringing in his head. She needed to deal with him before he tried to assert authority in Europe.

He continued, ‘I need you to send me details of this rebel biowarfare laboratory your people found. We’ll reconvene tomorrow at the same time.’ His screen segment blinked
out.

Serene was out of her seat in a second and into Oversight, standing over Clay. She hesitated for just a moment. The human cost was irrelevant, but the Red Sea was on the endangered list . . .
No, this had to be done. She said, ‘I want a launch from TEB immediately. Here are the coordinates.’

She put her palmtop down beside him, it showing only the numbers her signal search had found. He keyed them in, a map coming up on his screen showing a location on the Red Sea coast.

‘Why there?’ he asked.

‘It is not for you to question my authority,’ she told him. ‘However, just this once I will reply. A large contingent of the African Inspectorate military wing has occupied the
city and is disobeying direct orders from Delegate Angone. It seems someone is intent on carving out their own kingdom, and this cannot be allowed.’

The firing order was now up on the screen.

‘I’ll need confirmation of the order.’ Clay’s expression was bland as he slid a palm-reader across to her. He didn’t believe a word of what she had just said, but
that didn’t matter just so long as he obeyed. Serene pressed her hand down against the reader and then instinctively stooped forward, even though the retinal scanner and pulse transmitter
inset in his screen would easily find both her eye and the ID implant contained in her watch.

A beep of acceptance followed, then a screen segment opened to show a cam view of part of the launch facility. A pan-pipes missile rack rose into view from some underground silo, and one of the
four-tonne cruise missiles blasted into the sky. The thing, which would go SCRAM shortly after going airborne, would arrive at its target very quickly.

‘Give me the map,’ she instructed.

He punched a couple of keys and it appeared: Europe, North and Northeast Africa, the missile’s route showing as a dotted line, the missile itself as an amber light travelling along that,
joining up the dots, slowly at first then accelerating as it went into SCRAM. The thing was now accelerating at a rate not allowed with passenger scramjets, since though the occupants would
certainly arrive, most of them would be dead. Still, it would take at least another ten minutes for it to reach its target and, if he realized his danger, Angone could abort the thing. Serene
watched the timer up in the corner of the screen, herself remaining a still point with all the activity in Oversight swirling around her. Finally, when the missile was joining up the last few dots,
she stepped back, reached up to her temple for the control for her fone, called up a visual cortex menu and quickly found Angone’s number.

‘I said not until tomorrow,’ was Angone’s immediate response. Obviously he wore one of the newer fones that could link to local webcams, for his image appeared in her visual
cortex. He looked distracted, angry. Doubtless he was busy learning about the terrible toll the Scour was taking on the surviving delegates.

‘I am contacting you to confirm,’ said Serene, deliberately vague.

‘Well, you’ll have your confirmation: tomorrow at 20.00 GMT. Incidentally, I still haven’t received your report on this biowarfare lab. You do have a report, don’t
you?’

‘In fact, that’s the other reason I’ve contacted you. As you can imagine, things have been rather chaotic here, so I’ve had little time to file it. The laboratory itself
was mostly destroyed by the assault team, and we only learned what they were making there after our interrogation of a captive.’

‘So there must be a vid file of that interrogation?’

‘Certainly: I should be able to transmit it to you within the next few minutes. You need it immediately?’

‘You’re damned sure I need— What?’ He turned, obviously being addressed by a shady figure behind him. ‘What!’

‘Very well,’ she said calmly, ‘I’ll send it to you shortly.’

‘Get me TEB!’ he shrieked, moving out of the webcam frame as he shot up out of his seat, cam tracking jerking as it followed him up. The scene whited out for a moment, Angone
transformed into a charcoal silhouette, then blinked out completely. The moving light on Clay’s screen abruptly expanded and the words ‘objective achieved’ briefly appeared before
the screen switched to whatever Clay had been dealing with before.

A tone chimed in Serene’s head: current number unobtainable.

Dig up the Foundations

Back in the twenty-first century, a technological singularity did not just seem possible, it seemed inevitable; but those booting up their computer models of human
technological development neglected one critical force: the power of human stupidity. For technology to develop so fast that it goes beyond the ability of humans to model it, the underlying bedrock
of science must be rigorous and stable. Yet, even in that century, science was becoming unduly influenced by political thought and execrable creations like post-normal science. Science itself began
to break down when Karl Popper’s dictum of falsifiability was abandoned in favour of faith, and when funding for it became wholly controlled by political expediency. Scientific thought
stagnated when the scientists themselves became frightened to pursue lines of research that led them away from whatever consensus happened to be the love child of the politicians who controlled the
funding. They became merely puppets producing the results required of them, distorting their research to fit, taking their thirty pieces of silver and crying in their laboratories; dwarfs scuttling
away from the shadows of giants like Feynman and Dyson.

Zero Plus One Month – Argus

‘You’re done?’ Saul said, gazing at Hannah steadily.

She felt a tightness growing in her stomach with the return of her fraudulent friend, her panic attacks. With the pressure off, it seemed it was stirring from slumber. She clamped down on it as
best she could and surveyed the gleaming surfaces around her.

It had taken her some hours beyond what she had considered her shift to set the surgical equipment in her operating theatre back to a general-purpose mode, clear away all the additional
equipment she had been using over the last month, and return her laboratory to order – return it to a place for research rather than production-line surgery. No more would station police be
bringing her yet another heavily sedated Committee delegate, facilitator or executive who had remained blithely indifferent while signing orders for mass murder. No longer would she be destroying
memories and adjusting minds down to a base template – a mostly blank slate. Now she could get back to her real work. But he knew that, of course he knew.

‘Yes, I’m done,’ she agreed.

It should have taken her longer but a sickness spreading through Arcoplex One, probably from the decaying corpses there, had shortened the duration of her chore to a month by killing off
twenty-two delegates. She wasn’t sure whether to be glad about that or not.

Her gaze now slid to one of her work tables, on which stood three half-metre-square brushed-aluminium boxes. Even after tidying everything up, she had continued working: bringing these boxes out
of her clean-room to ensure that the samples from Saul’s brain were still growing in their aerogel matrices, that the nutrients remained balanced and the waste was being properly extracted.
She had even connected them up to her computers here and studied the waveforms – the shapeless thoughts already being generated in the growing brain matter. Now exhaustion was catching up
with her, and she was too tired for the panic attack to get a firm grip on her.

‘And you’re okay?’ he prompted.

He thought she was burdened with guilt, beating herself up about erasing the minds of erstwhile Committee delegates, and styling herself no better than them because of what she had done. Or did
he really think that? Considering how Hannah had reacted to violence of any kind, a normal human being would perhaps surmise that what he had driven her to do was reason for her to be miserable.
But Alan Saul had never been a normal human being, even before Director Smith had tortured him to the point of extinction, before his strange resurrection, before the advanced implants in his skull
and before he melded his mind with the artificial intelligence, Janus. Perhaps he could see through her, and knew that Hannah’s problem was that she felt no guilt at all.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. ‘I got the impression you were staying in Tech Central until we can turn off the EM field.’ She glanced towards the spidergun crouching
just inside the door. Doubtless the usual horde of robots would also be scattered throughout Arcoplex Two, though she didn’t think that was about cowardice but about control.

‘I’ve come to speak with Professor Jasper Rhine,’ he said.

Before she could stop herself, Hannah emitted a snort of disbelief.

‘You have some opinion?’ he enquired.

Hannah tried to read his expression. Was he amused, angry or indifferent? It was difficult to tell. His eyes were still a dark pink – something initially due to blood-pressure imbalances
in his skull, but now due to she knew not what.