Текст книги "Influx"

Автор книги: Daniel Suarez

Соавторы: Daniel Suarez
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

SIX MONTHS LATER

CHAPTER 6

Exile

Jon Grady gazed from the edge of a thousand-foot cliff, across an endless expanse of deep water. He guessed the plunge continued straight down beneath the waves to crushing depths. Such cliffs ringed the island. An island so distant from everywhere that there were only two species of local bird—one flightless—and almost no wildlife. No rodents. No snakes. Limited plants even. Perhaps one day a migratory bird population would arrive. That might give him some indication of where he was.

At nights Grady stood in the darkness near his cottage, gazing up at a riot of stars and the cloud of the Milky Way arching overhead. It was even more glorious than he’d remembered from his years wandering the Sierra Nevada and Canadian Rockies with his parents. Those were blissfully innocent times. An escape from a childhood otherwise spent enduring therapeutic efforts to “fix” him. He credited his parents with saving him from that.

Psychosis was a mental disorder whereby a person lost contact with external reality. And to all outward appearances the young Jon Grady did not engage with reality. As a toddler he had stared in wonder at things unseen, absorbed in his own world. Thought to be suffering from severe autism, he spent most of his early years under specialized care—not uttering his first words until the age of five.

And yet those first words were a complete sentence: “I want to go home now.”

And home he went, to all appearances noticing the outside world more each day.

It wasn’t until Grady was seven years old that his mother helped him understand that other people did not perceive numbers as colors—that five was not a deep indigo, nor three a vermilion red. Likewise musical tones were not part of most people’s mathematics. Grady “heard” math as he pored through its logic. Discordant notes were immediately evident. Mathematical concepts took on specific shapes in his mind relative to one another. At times the shape and sound of math problems seemed somehow wrong. Cacophonous.

He was usually correct when he had that feeling.

All of this made him different from other children. And different meant he became a target. So from an early age mathematics was his only playmate. He formed a close relationship with the natural laws all around him.

As the only child of grammar school teachers, Grady received the best care they could afford and a loving, stable home life. But it wasn’t until age ten—after he’d undergone years of fruitless autism therapies—that he was correctly diagnosed.

Congenital synesthesia was a condition where one or more of the senses were conflated within the brain. In Grady’s case he suffered from both color and number-form synesthesia—sometimes known as grapheme—which meant he perceived numbers as colors, geometric shapes, and sounds. He saw numbers normally as well and could draw their actual outlines, but he simultaneously imbued them with more than was actually there.

The neural basis for synesthesia was imperfectly understood, but a normal brain dedicated certain regions to certain functions. The visual cortex processed image perceptions but was further subdivided into regions involved in color processing, motion processing, and visual memory. The prevailing theory was that increased cross talk between different specialized subregions of the visual cortex caused different forms of synesthesia. Thus, Jon Grady’s brain had more internal information exchange than those of most people.

The effect made him sound crazy to those who didn’t know him. About the only thing that gave Grady peace was being outdoors. Hiking and stargazing seemed to calm him more than any therapy ever had, filling his senses with wonder. And his parents resolved to give him that wonder. They sold the family home, bought a camper, and began a protracted tour of national and state parks—homeschooling Grady as they went.

Those years were his happiest childhood memories. Visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and more; soaking in the natural world as they roughed it; backpacking through the wilderness. The more he saw, the more comfort he took in the natural world. Observing the stars in Tuolumne Meadows. Traversing the Chinese Wall in Montana or the gorges of the Canadian Rockies. Stringing bear bags at night with his father and staring up at the stars in the deep darkness of arboreal forests. He’d never felt so much at peace, watching the majesty of the physical laws that governed the cosmos arrayed above him. It was all there before his eyes.

It was in that remote wilderness that Grady began to formulate his concept of the universe and its structure. By age thirteen he began reading widely in physics—which drew him to brilliant minds like Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Feynman, Einstein, Maxwell, and especially Faraday. For the first time he felt a connection with other minds. The fact that Faraday had little formal training yet discovered the magnetic field through his intuitive lab observations inspired Grady to pursue his passion for inquiry into the natural world.

Eventually, as Grady reached college age, his parents again settled down and took teaching positions. They encouraged Grady to pursue an education, short on money though they now were.

Never a joiner and with scant academic records, Grady was nonetheless accepted to the State University of New York at Albany as a physics major. Yet he quickly grew frustrated at the survey-level courses taught not by professors but by harried graduate student teaching assistants. Grady’s impatience with others undermined him socially—as it always had.

By the time Grady dropped out of SUNY, he’d become deeply interested in the work of Bertrand Alcot, the head of Columbia University’s physics department. Alcot focused on hydrodynamics—a branch of physics that deals with the motion of fluids and the forces acting on solids immersed in fluids. Grady directed a flurry of unsolicited and unanswered emails to Alcot, making outrageously ambitious assertions, always including mathematical proofs (flawed as they later turned out to be).

Then one day he got an answer.

A year and a half after he’d starting sending his messages, while working as a mathematics tutor, Grady received a reply with a simple correction to one of his equations. As he studied Alcot’s change, Grady realized the revision was a more succinct solution—and one that gave him new ideas.

And so they continued, communicating mostly in mathematics—beginning a chess game whose pieces were the elemental forces of the natural world.

Grady’s reverie was disturbed by a gust of wind. The smell of the sea brought him back to his new reality and surroundings. The tiny island that was his prison.

He remembered the deep wilderness of North America as unspoiled by light pollution, but the night sky here had a clarity unlike anything he’d experienced. In this pristine world even satellites were readily visible, pinpoints of reflected sunlight racing through the firmament. At first he’d mistaken them for aircraft, raising hopes of signaling for rescue. But no, these moved too fast and lacked navigation lights. As days and weeks passed, it was clear no aircraft—nor indeed any ship—ever crossed the horizon. He was far from the air and shipping lanes.

Grady had examined the constellations overhead, trying to derive his position on the globe. Normally he’d locate the North Star and use it to judge his latitude with an outstretched hand—its position above the horizon would roughly correspond with his own latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. But the polestar was nowhere to be seen. The Southern Cross in the Crux constellation was clearly visible, though—which meant he was somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, and that made his location more difficult to divine. There was no comparable polestar in the global south. Calculating latitude here involved tracking the movements of the top and bottom stars of the Southern Cross as they crossed the meridian—or something like that. He couldn’t recall precisely.

And longitude? Forget longitude. He’d have to have his starting point and record the passage of time and velocity. But he’d been brought here in the delta-wave-induced sleep the BTC was so fond of. He simply awoke in his neat stone cottage at the edge of a cliff overlooking the boundless blue.

A garden, low stone walls, and a circuitous path comprised his new world. Early on he’d traversed the entire island, looking for a way down to the water’s edge, but even though he’d walked every yard of the mile-wide landscape, it was ringed with towering cliffs. No trees dotted the terrain either, just hardy windblown shrubs and grasses. His fireplace was fueled by peat, which appeared mysteriously every time he returned from his morning walks. So, too, did his food, water, milk, and wine. He’d tried to catch his provisioners in the act. No luck. They were like gnomes. For all he knew they were gnomes; no doubt mythical creatures were within the biotech capabilities of the BTC.

Grady pondered a pale crescent moon in the midday sky. Even this ghostly white apparition was sharply detailed. Everything was pristine out here. The only intrusion was the occasional detritus from the modern world washed in among the rocks below. Plastic barrels, shipping pallets, or on one occasion a section of advertising billboard with French writing on it. He had a pair of binoculars that he used to scan the horizon, hoping to signal some ship to rescue him from his Elba-like exile. But his captors probably left the binoculars so he could know how utterly hopeless his chance of rescue was.

Grady closed his scratchy wool jacket against the wind. It was coarse with wooden buttons, and he had soft leather boots that laced high up his calves. Canvas pants and tunic. He looked like some sourdough islander, living rough off the land. In the past few months his long hair and beard had grown even longer.

The irony.

A high-tech despotic organization had exiled him not only from society but also from modernity itself. And from all social contact. So that his mind wouldn’t “poison” the world.

The chill wind picked up, so Grady headed back to the distant cottage and its inviting column of peat smoke. He picked his way carefully along the cliff-side path, listening to the terns squeal overhead. More than once he’d contemplated leaping from these heights, but depressed as he was, he still couldn’t bring himself to end his life. Depressed, yes. But not yet without hope. Not yet. And in some ways this solitude was a childhood friend.

Before long Grady pulled open the thick plank door of his cottage and entered the warmth of the space inside. One room, but spacious enough for a kitchen, with a wood stove, a table, pots, pans, a writing desk, a large feather bed, and a toilet that drained out to the cliffs below through a channel. It was a simple existence, but the months had brought about a change in him. As horrible as things were, those problems seemed strangely over the horizon. His captivity, the revelations that the BTC covered up advanced technologies, that his own gravity research, his life’s work, had been stolen by them—all these seemed like worries that could only restart once he got off this island prison. Until then, he tried to keep his mind busy on more positive concerns—like devising a means of escape.

So far it didn’t look good. Even if he could fashion a raft from the materials in his cottage, how would he reach the water? Even if he reached the water, a group as technologically advanced as the BTC would probably detect him immediately. No hiding out in the open sea. They were no doubt scanning every inch of it with sensors.

So he passed his days thinking, and lately not just about escape.

Grady removed his scratchy coat and hung it up on a peg by the door. He passed by his writing desk, flipping through his papers. He had plenty of paper and pens but only one book. They had provided him with a slim leather-bound volume, its title etched on the spine in gold leaf: Omnia. The first time he flipped through the book’s vellum pages, they were entirely blank—except for one page on which the words “While I’m open, ask me anything” were written. He tried writing questions on the facing page but couldn’t mark the surface. In frustration he finally spoke aloud the first thing that came to mind.

“How do I get off this island?”

Suddenly the pages filled with text and images relating to his own gravity research, including a table of contents on the first page and an annotated bibliography in the back. He flipped through the newly filled pages, and noticed hyperlinks that when tapped refilled the book with more detailed information. In this way he zoomed in and out of his research papers, poring through the thousands of pages of lab notes, diagrams, spreadsheets, and test results from years of work—everything he and Bert had written. Even the handwritten Post-it notes had somehow been recorded and projected onto the vellum pages. Photos of the gravity mirror apparatus being constructed, the works he’d read on kinematics, Ricci curvatures—everything he’d ever absorbed on quantum mechanics. It was endless.

The book was clearly some form of advanced technology—for while the pages appeared to be quality vellum, they acted like high-definition digital displays. A private Internet. Yet no matter how hard he examined the material, he couldn’t see any flicker. The text seemed physical—like quality ink. Neither did the book have any apparent battery or power connector. It looked and felt like a very old encyclopedia. He opened it again to the title page and spoke the words, “What does Omnia mean?”

The current page went blank and was replaced by the word Everything.

Grady had nodded to himself, then said, “Teach me ocean navigation.”

The pages quickly filled with articles on sea navigation, but large sections appeared to be redacted with black bars and boxes—concealing the most necessary details.

Grady then demanded, “Show me small-boat building techniques.”

Again, the book filled with censored articles, the images and text blacked out, only their promising titles revealed—as if in spite.

Not an Internet then but a redacted virtual library. All of it tightly controlled. And as if to demonstrate how controlled it was—it returned results but didn’t let you see them. Only offering answers deemed harmless or helpful to its masters. But how was it able to determine what to censor almost instantaneously? Obviously some highly advanced technology.

But then, it had to have some wireless technology in it to transmit requests and receive data—a radio transmitter and receiver. Probably low power, but he might be able to rig something like a shortwave device. Make an antenna. Boost the signal. He spent the next several days trying to tear the book apart to cannibalize it, but it was made of sterner stuff than he expected. Even cutting or tearing the pages was beyond him with knives, fire, or brute force. The leather was just as durable. Smashing it, crushing it—nothing so much as scratched it. There must have been some major advances in materials science he was unaware of. Probably fashioned of carbon lattices or something similar. He had to admit that their technology was formidable.

At some point Grady closed the book and never picked it up again. It now sat on his shelf beneath a crystalline rock he’d found inland.

His experience with the disarmingly high-tech “ancient” book made him suspicious about the paper and pens, too. At first he was determined not to use them, reasoning that his captors would use advanced tech to monitor whatever he wrote down. But then he’d rediscovered an old pastime he hadn’t thought about in ages.

He started writing music again.

When he was young, he would sometimes ponder the tones he heard in math. After teaching himself to read music, he decided to try his hand at composing—although he had little interest in traditional music. Now he decided to cultivate one, and the BTC could monitor it if they liked. They would be his audience. He wished he had a piano or guitar, but he could always play the music in his head. It amused him to think of his BTC captors trying to derive the deeper meaning from this work. To the best of his knowledge there wasn’t one—just a pleasing, fractal symmetry.

Grady picked up a piece of parchment covered with musical notations and ran through several movements of an amateur symphony, waving one hand as if conducting. He laughed to himself. He was writing a goddamned symphony. It was a ridiculous thing, and he never would have done it in a million years if he weren’t a prisoner.

And it wasn’t going well. He wondered how Mozart, Beethoven, and those guys did it. He had some good movements, but unifying the whole was a mother—he wasn’t going for Copland’s Billy the Kid here. He was going for beauty, a mournful melancholy like that inside him. But he seemed to lack the vocabulary. He had to admit that for all his talents, music was not one of them. It did not come as easily to him as math—even though the two fields seemed in some way related.

Grady walked over to the kitchen to see what the gnomes had brought him. They always placed his food supplies on the kitchen table in wax paper bundles bound with twine. He sniffed them separately. Some white fish. A packet of salted pork. Vegetables. Sweet butter. Fresh loaves of bread—not soft French or Italian stuff but sturdy dark loaves that lasted several days. Milk. Water. Another jug of red table wine. He always resisted the temptation to finish off the wine in a binge, instead having a mug with dinner and no more. There were plenty of reasons to want to drown his sorrows, but he knew they were watching him; he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing how hopeless he felt. He’d searched for cameras and microphones for weeks after he’d arrived—dragging every stick of furniture out of the place. But if the BTC was using surveillance devices, they were too small or well concealed to detect.

It was the same every week. Fresh supplies came when he was out. If he tried to spy upon his benefactors, then the supplies did not come, and he went hungry. Several times he searched for hidden doors but always came up empty. So he’d decided to forget about it. It was the BTC. No mystery, but apparently they didn’t want him to have companionship. So he took his daily walk, and on Foodday (as he’d taken to calling it), the food arrived. There were seven days in Grady’s week, and he’d used them to create a calendar that he tacked to the wall: Foodday, Cookday, Exerciseday, Workday, Writingday, Watchingday, Escapeday. He kept the schedule as a way to stay sane. Structure was important to keep the human mind from getting lost.

Grady stared out the distorted, rustic window glass at the dark sea far below. A bank of fog was coming in from the north. It was the evening of Foodday. Schedule or no, his mind was indeed starting to get lost.

I might grow old and die here.

What had happened to Bert and the others? He wondered that several times a day. Had they taken up roles in the BTC? He couldn’t picture that. Then what happened to them? Were they on some island, too? And why place any of them on an island? Why, in fact, did they let them live at all? They clearly had all Grady’s gravity research. They didn’t need him. He was a liability. Why keep him around?

Hedrick had suggested that this prison would change his mind, but this was simply banishment. Banishment to the Iron Age.

He laughed. Isn’t that what Richard Cotton’s group, the Winnowers, stood for—returning mankind to the Iron Age? Grady could become a member now.

He’d had way too much time to contemplate these things in the past few months. He kept turning them over and over in his head. Had he been wrong to tell the BTC to piss off? Not that he could lie to them, but what good was he doing by sitting on this rock for the remainder of his days? Surely that wasn’t going to slow them down or stop them one iota. And this way he couldn’t influence how they’d use his breakthrough. He wouldn’t have a seat at the table.

Grady felt defiance rise in him.

It was the principle. Wasn’t it? He knew he could not ethically assist the BTC in covering up fundamental discoveries that would advance mankind’s knowledge. The BTC’s simulations of progress-borne disaster had to be wrong—he felt it in his bones.

But what sort of assertion was that for a scientist to make? They had evidence. He had a “feeling.”

But he’d never seen their evidence, had he? It all seemed too convenient. They justified their domination of others—but who could say they were even being honest with themselves? Just look what they were willing to do in pursuit of their mission. Was Grady’s wasting away on this rock really a good use of brainpower?

And yet there were many historical precedents for this—periods when belligerent ignorance trumped reason.

During the Roman Inquisition, the Catholic Church had done something similar with Galileo—condemned him to imprisonment in his own home. To never publish again. The church wanted to suppress the spread of knowledge during the Enlightenment—to maintain its control. It went so far as to have church officials searching through the private libraries of dukes and other nobles, looking for passages in books that offended the church, literally crossing out ideas that violated church doctrine and scribbling official church doctrine in its place. Agents of the inquisition were stationed in ports to find seditious books coming in by sea. Grady couldn’t help but think that the church was, in a way, the BTC of the seventeenth century.

No. This situation wasn’t new. And Grady knew which side he needed to be on. The side of reason.

Grady’s manipulation of gravity would change civilization. But was that so bad? Change could be good. Of course the BTC wanted to stop change—they were currently in charge. And that’s what the church thought it was doing by preventing Galileo’s ideas from spreading. Preventing change.

But it didn’t work, did it? That gave Grady some measure of hope.

Okay, you’re comparing yourself with Galileo now.

Grady stared through the window at the darkening sea for untold minutes as thoughts rolled around in his mind. Was the BTC right about Grady’s ego? Was Grady really making this all about him? Was he an egomaniac?

Just then there was a knock on the cottage door.

Grady spun toward it. His heart raced as adrenaline coursed through him. It had been months. No one had ever knocked on his door. Were they coming for him again? He looked around uncertainly, but then resolve came over him.

Grady shook his head slowly. No. He would not give them the satisfaction of being afraid.

He approached the thick wooden door confidently and pulled it open by its wooden latch.

On the doorstep stood a slim humanoid robot, not unlike the one he’d seen in Hedrick’s office all those months ago. This one was surfaced in brushed-steel panels. It had glowing tourmaline eyes and no mouth. It was different enough from a human that no uncanny valley effect occurred—clearly a machine. It had an appealing design, like an upscale espresso machine. Obviously it was meant to seem friendly. Harmless.

The robot nodded to him and a vaguely familiar female voice spoke: “Good evening, Mr. Grady. I wanted to see how you were settling in.”

Grady stood aside and dramatically swept his arm. “Come on in. I’d offer you a drink, but . . .” He let his voice trail off.

The robot was inscrutable as it stepped gracefully inside. “Thank you.” It looked around. “I’m a person, you know. This is just a telepresence unit.”

“Telepresence. Nifty. You guys imprison the person who invented that, too?” Grady closed the door.

The robot managed a nonplussed look and moved through the room to gaze out the window at the ocean. “Do you remember me?”

“How could I forget? Alexa. You were more lifelike last time I saw you . . . but not by much.”

“I’m here on official BTC business.”

“You’re not here, actually. You’re just a walking phone. Anyone else in on this conference call?”

“Our conversation is being recorded for the file, yes. But then, everything is recorded for the file.”

“Well, for the file then: What the fuck do you want?”

“You look in good health. Have you been treated well?”

“Yeah. Fine. Just fine.” He snapped his fingers. “Although there was that rough patch when you guys”—Grady pounded his fist on the kitchen table—“STOLE EVERYTHING I CARED ABOUT!” A bowl and stoneware mug went flying and shattered on the floor.

The robot just stared at him.

“How do you think I’m being treated?”

The robot waited several moments. “Most of the innovators we harvest manage to find calm after a period of solitude. They use the time to reflect—on both what was lost and what can still be gained.”

“You have got to be joking.”

“As your BTC case officer, I came to offer you another chance to join us, Mr. Grady. Now that you’ve had a chance to reflect.”

“I see. So I’m supposed to just forget that you guys are deliberately keeping all of humanity in the Dark Ages. That you stole my life’s work. That you imprisoned me.”

The robot resumed its tour of the cottage. “All of that is a regrettable necessity, but we’ve been over this. Complaining about it won’t change anything.” The robot picked up one of Grady’s symphony parchments from the desk, turning it around.

“Put that down.”

“Does your synesthesia also make you musically gifted? Interesting . . .”

Grady moved toward her to grab the paper, but just then the sound of his own music filled the cottage. Violins. And a French horn. It played for a few seconds, then stopped.

The robot lowered the page. “Apparently not.”

“It’s a work in progress.” He grabbed it from her and collected all the other papers from the desk. “Why are you even bothering me? You don’t seriously expect me to forgive all this and join the BTC, do you?”

“Approximately seventeen percent of uncooperative innovators have a change of heart during the isolation phase.” The robot picked up a quartz rock from a shelf and retrieved the Omnia book from under it. The machine flipped through the book’s blank pages. “Most innovators work with the Omnia to learn more about the advances that we’ve made—to see how they might fit into the big picture.”

“You mean the advances that others have made. That you stole.”

“You still have the wrong impression of us. Everything we do is designed to protect the human race. The rich and the poor. The strong and the weak. To keep humanity from driving itself to extinction.”

“And I suppose if I’d spent all my time reading your redacted propaganda, I would have realized that by now. You’re never going to convince me the BTC has the best interests of humanity at heart. You’re like every tyrant throughout history.”

“We’re part of the U.S. government. Our legitimacy stems from—”

“Did you come here to convince me or convince yourself?”

“I want to try to reach you. To help you understand.”

“Then why not brainwash me? Why not just change my thoughts? You guys can do that, can’t you?”

There was a moment of silence.

“That would damage you.”

“I find it hard to believe that’s stopping you.”

“The human mind is the most complex object in the known universe. Innovation only arises from free will. We don’t yet understand the mental processes behind it, but it’s what makes people like you so rare, Jon.”

“But you are admitting that you’ve researched mind control.”

“Technologically it’s possible, yes, but only in a very limited way.”

“Well then. That definitely makes things easier.” He grabbed the crystalline rock from the desk. “Here’s my answer—for the file . . .” And he smashed the rock into the robot’s forehead, sending it backpedaling toward the kitchen table.

“Jon. Don’t do this.”

Grady pursued the robot, smashing it repeatedly in the head as it flailed its arms crazily to keep its balance. Already the top of its head was dented. A brushed-steel panel flew off.

“What you’re doing is counterproductive.”

He grabbed one of the machine’s arms to anchor it and pounded it in the head again and again. “Are you getting all this?”

“Violent outbursts won’t accomplish anything.”

Another massive blow and the rock broke in two. The robot stood, its head battered, but appearing otherwise unaffected. Grady was disappointed.

It gazed at him. “I came here to speak with you before I turn over your case file. You haven’t been using the Omnia. You haven’t been doing research. You keep resisting. But you still have a chance to come back from this place.”

“I agree. I was hoping to smash your head open and steal the radio transmitter.”

The robot cocked its head. “Surely you don’t think you can use it to signal for help?”

“The thought had occurred to me. You are remotely controlling this tin can, after all.”

“We don’t use radios, Jon. Our communications transit a compactified fifth-dimension, not three dimensional space.”

Grady was taken aback. “Hold it—like a Calabi-Yau space? Are you serious? Brane theory has been proven?”

“If you want to know, then stop resisting us. And in any event you can’t harm the critical systems of this unit with anything you can find on the island. Trying to hurt me is pointless.”

He stared at the machine for several moments then sighed. “Fine.” Grady opened the front door. “Then let me show you out.”

“Why do you resist what’s in your and humanity’s best interest?”

“Because I don’t believe that it is. You’re telling me everything will be fine if I agree to be your slave.”

“We’re not asking you to be a slave.”

“Then you’re asking me to be a slaver—and that’s even worse.” He approached the robot and knelt—grabbing one of its legs.

“What are you doing?”

He pulled the robot’s foot out from under it, and it started bouncing on one leg. Even the one leg felt heavy. “Jesus, what is this thing made of?”

“You’re acting irrationally.”

Grady shoved the robot back against the kitchen table, where it fell backward. He then grabbed both legs and pulled it off its feet. Its head hit the stone floor with the weight of a lawn mower engine, and he started dragging it toward the door as it flailed uselessly. The machine weighed easily a couple hundred pounds and left scrape marks on the flagstones.