Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (22 page)

“For Daniel, yes, but it’s much bigger than that,” I said. “I can only help Daniel if I understand what the Architects did—but they’re a threat to everyone. And one of the few leads I have is the thought that Maynard Jones was on Ararat because he knew something about them—and that you can help me find out what it was.”

He considered that for a long time. “The Architects are real, you say. I haven’t seen them, but I’m inclined to believe you. A funny word, though,
real
. Isn’t it? You and I and this table are real. Easy cases. But gravity is real too, and the past, and the number three—and now we find ourselves in very deep water indeed. Are you enjoying the tea?”

I nodded. “Cardamom’s one of my favorite spices.” I was about to say,
Daniel loved to use the whole pods in curries
, but I kept the thought to myself: I didn’t like the idea that I was falling into the habit of referring to your likes and dislikes in the past tense.

“The
flavor
of cardamom is real, wouldn’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said.

“No less real than the chemical compounds that underlie it! Yet the chemicals are basic, textbook science, and the flavor itself, the experience that the chemicals generate, is an enigma utterly beyond the grasp of science.”

“Hence ISOC.”

“Yes. And no. I’m afraid I was never entirely honest about the real motive behind my little Institute.”

(I had to admire the sheer scale of Balakrishnan’s ambitions. You pony up a hundred million and change, to build an organization dedicated to discovering the meaning of life—and it’s
my little Institute
.)

“Let me take you back a few years. Most people get very interested in not dying when they grow old. Somewhat unusually, I’ve been obsessed with the thought ever since I was a child. Daniel watched his mother die from a fall in Patagonia, when he was seventeen. I watched my mother die from a burst appendix, in a squalid tin shack on the Sabarmati River, when I was seven. After that, my lifelong insomnia began. I’d spend entire nights wide awake in a state of the most pure, most refined terror, thinking,
Death is there, waiting! Tomorrow, or next week, or seventy years from now, death will be there. No escaping it: one day, sooner or later, I will be extinguished forever.
”

“And then you discovered a group of people who were terrified of death, like you, but determined to do something about it. The Extenders. Who were interested in pushing death back as far as humanly possible.”

“Just so. And when I discovered that I was not merely mortal in the ordinary way, but likely to die well before my time, I began to make myself something of a guinea pig for their ideas. Special ultrahigh vitamin diet. Cloned muscle grafts. Nerve-fiber reconstruction. Daily blood plasma nanofiltering. Replacement joints, of course. All that sort of thing. I had a cancer scare too, and half my esophagus is straight off a 3-D printer.”

He stroked a finger down one side of his throat. A scar was just visible among the wrinkles. There was a thin film of sweat on his cheeks.

“May I ask what you—um—?”

“I am the proud owner of a rare and thoroughly fatal blood disease. Its cause is four different faulty genes, all doing their mischief together like an evil string quartet. The probability of getting all four mutations in a single genome is about one in a billion. Something akin to winning the lottery four days in a row.”

“They diagnosed it here?”

“Only tracked down the exact genetic villains. The diagnosis came many years ago, so I’ve known this time bomb was ticking nearly all my adult life.”

“And you’ve just undergone a new round of treatment?”

“A new round of hopeful experimentation, I’d call it. It involved keeping me in a medically induced coma while they did clever things to my spinal fluid and bone marrow. A last-ditch attempt to buy me more time by slowing down the collapse of my cellular machinery. That’s what the Extenders are all about. Buying time. Unfortunately this round of experimentation was, um, not successful.”

The uncharacteristic pause, the little
um
at the end of the sentence, said it all. He was letting me know that he’d accepted defeat, that he was dying, like everyone dies, and that there was nothing more he and all his money could do about it. It struck me then why Iona had liked him. Hugely ambitious, aye, maybe even self-absorbed in his concern about his own mortality. But he was aware of his own flaws, didn’t try to hide them, and, even though he’d barely admitted the fact even to himself, he was really driven by something larger than his own survival: before the end, he wanted to
understand
.

“I’m sorry,” I said, conscious that it was a pathetically inadequate response. But the word made him flinch, and I got the impression that he thought there was something distasteful about the idea of wasting time on being sorry
for him
. He started waving his arms around. He was trying to get up again. I helped him stand. When he was leaning against the railing, I stayed close, worried that he might tumble headlong into the garden.

“Thank you, my dear. I absolutely hate sitting down, and these days I do very little else. What was I going to say? Oh yes. David Maynard Jones was interested in all the Extender technology too. That’s why I knew him. But the thing that really excited me about him, and made me put him in charge of ISOC, was discovering that he was already a step ahead of those people. Why buy yourself an extra ten or twenty years? Because it’s good in itself. But there’s a much bigger prize. An infinitely bigger prize: living long enough to see the day when it’s possible to stop repairing the body and simply leave it behind. David saw that the body’s just a vehicle. The Extenders are obsessed with the vehicle. But the fundamental goal is preserving its cargo.”

He raised his walking stick and used it to tap his forehead.

“Consciousness,” I said.

“Not needing a body any more than God needs a body! A newer, more reliable way to immortality! According to religion, consciousness was the flickering of your immortal soul—the thing that survives death. Just at the point in my life when I was despairing of all that, and was hoping at best to die at a ripe old age instead of far too young, David came to me and persuaded me that there was something else. ‘Mr. Balakrishnan,’ he said—very formal: I could tell he was about to ask for money—‘Mr. Balakrishnan, we’re close to a technological tipping point. Science fiction is about to be science fact. Soon, we won’t need to repair the physical medium in which the mind resides. We’ll be able to save the conscious mind as code—as software. Who needs God to check you in at the Cloud Hotel when you can build a cloud all of your own?’”

“And you agreed? You accepted that?”

He tried to laugh; it came out as a wheeze. “I believed what I needed to believe. Naturally I wanted to know whether we were five years out from his goal or fifty—whether I personally had any hope of getting there. He said, oh, ten years or less, and I chose to believe that too. In retrospect, it was an absurd figure—it was like being told as a boy that soon we’d have atomic cars—but I didn’t want to think about the possibility of failure. And he was very persuasive. Emulating the whole brain would be just like taking a photograph. There were some technical obstacles, certainly, because it would be a photograph with a fifty-yottabyte file size. I confess that I nodded sagely and had to look up
yottabyte
afterward. I was too giddy with joy to be skeptical. I said, ‘David, if this works, you’ll go down in history as the man who invented the very thing we’ve all been looking for. Something better even than wealth, or youth, or excellent cheekbones. Infinity. Eternity. An alternative to God.’ I think it was in that very conversation that he came up with the idea that it was Route Two against the old Route One.”

I picked up my teacup, then put it down again. I could see Sunil gesturing to his sister. “I never did quite believe that ISOC existed just so that you could scratch some personal philosophical itch,” I said. “The origin of consciousness? I mean, I get why it’s a puzzle. But it seems a bit abstract.”

“On the contrary, it’s the most practical and urgent of all questions. Especially for those of us who assume that one day we are in fact going to die. I knew the medical interventions would fail me in the end. The only way I could hope to stay alive in the long term was by digging deeper. Investigating what ‘being alive’ means. The biologists think that’s a question about cell regeneration, genetic damage, and the length of your telomeres. It isn’t. The question of what being alive means, for a human being, is inextricably bound up with the philosopher’s question about consciousness. Can
that
survive without a body? Or does it depend absolutely on the failing brain? If consciousness could be separated from the brain, then I had a chance. ISOC was a Hail Mary pass, as I believe they say in American football.”

“I’m not good at sports metaphors.”

“Seconds left on the clock and nothing to lose. Might as well throw a long ball and pray.”

“But something changed Mayo’s mind. Something, or someone, made him take seriously the idea that the whole technological approach, the whole concept of ‘Route Two,’ was missing something. That there was more to it than just bytes?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Balakrishnan—”

“Charlie, please. I’ve been Charlie ever since discovering that so few people in the West can get
Akshay
right. They say
Ash-kay
, which sounds like
ashtray
, and I have never smoked.” He grinned, showing off his pink gums, and made a rippling gesture with his long, delicate fingers.

“Charlie, then.” I felt uncomfortable saying it: he was too old, too rich, and too sick to be
Charlie
. “Look, I don’t have much time—”

Too late, I realized how bad that sounded. He was the one who didn’t have time. But he just smiled.

“Morag, don’t feel sorry for me. If you do, you don’t understand. Let me tell you something very important. People want to live for a long time, and then at some point they think, oh, if only it could be forever! Sounds good, doesn’t it, ‘eternal life’? I made the same mistake, but I’ve changed my mind. I have Gilgamesh standing in there as a reminder and a warning. People think they want eternity only because they haven’t thought about what the word truly means. Eternity isn’t just a long time! It’s a place beyond time. The annihilation of time. And when you understand that, you come to see that eternal life is much, much more frightening than death.”

As he gave this little speech, your voice dinned in my head, and I thought that perhaps I’d glimpsed your meaning at last: not a call to action so much as a description of a place you’d seen:
There’s no time. No time.

“So why did you get me out here?” I asked. “What do you know about why the world’s top researcher into Route Two became interested in new religions and their gods? And why do you care?”

“Why I care is easy to answer,” he said. “I’m very fond of Sunil and Vandana. In fact, I think of them as my own grandchildren. And they represent for me all the other children in the world—the future of the human race. I don’t want them and their futures destroyed. As for the question about Maynard Jones—”

“That will be enough,” Mrs. Chaudry said. She had appeared silently again—as if by magic again—and her tone had the sharp finality she might have used to corral her grandchildren. I was being dismissed, and she probably had a point: Balakrishnan looked as if he’d reached a whole new level of exhaustion, and he did nothing to stop me leaving. “Take the folder,” he said. “There are a couple of things you may find relevant to your question, and we can talk about them tomorrow, perhaps. I do hope you’re comfortable in the guest house. Mrs. Chaudry will be delighted to provide you with anything you need.”

The name
Mrs. Chaudry
didn’t seem to belong in the same sentence with the word
delighted
. I picked up the folder. As she was escorting me out, he called after me, “Get Kai to show you the volcano. Can’t be on the Big Island and miss Mauna Loa. Especially since the Seraphim seem to want the Architects to blow it up.”

He was like Kit—I couldn’t tell when he was joking.

C
HAPTER
15

I
ONA
’
S
T
HESIS

At the guesthouse, invisible hands had laid out a meal for me. The choice made me want to cry: cold salmon, potatoes with chives, and a salad of green beans with preserved lemon—a combination almost identical to one you’d once prepared for me. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it and put the whole thing in the fridge. There I found the only concession to Hawaii, a single perfect mango laid out on a dark-red china plate with a paring knife next to it. I smelled it, picked up the knife, and took it to the table. Then I changed my mind and had a glass of water for dinner. Pathetic.

There were messages from Kit that I should have responded to. But there was something about the way they said nothing and everything: anxious bulletins filled with trivia, telling me indirectly about every up and down, mainly down, of your emotional state. You kept saying fragments of things she didn’t understand. You were drawing dozens of things at whirlwind speed. Your hands were steady when you drew but trembled violently when you held a cup.

She wanted me back ASAP; that was clear. Which would have been nice to know, if I’d had any sense that the emotion had something to do with
us
. But she didn’t say, or seem to imply, anything about
us
. Her tone suggested that ordinary facts (like her being sorta kinda interested in me maybe; like me being as helplessly in love with her as a novice swimmer in a rip current) were subjects too trivial to worry about now.

Some of what she said was about Rosko too, and I had to read between those lines as well. Words like
polite
and
helpful
, even
kind
, said loudly that I wasn’t getting the whole picture.

I had another delicious glass of water, and opened the
DMJ
folder. A single sheet, attached to the inside front cover with a paperclip, had just a few lines at the top in a hasty scribble that must have been Mayo’s:

T
HE
S
ERAPHIM WANT TO FOCUS ON KEY VOLCANOES IN POPULATED AREAS:
V
ESUVIUS
, P
OPOCATÉPETL
, F
UJI
, R
AINIER
,
ETC
. M
AKES SENSE
, I
SUPPOSE
—
INCREASE THE NUMBERS
,
INCREASE THE POWER
. G
OD HELP US
,
AS PEOPLE LIKE TO SAY
,
BUT THESE
“
GODS
”
ARE HELPING THEMSELVES TO US
. C
LEVER
I
ONA FOR FIGURING OUT WHAT THEY ARE AND GIVING ME A GLIMMER OF HOPE THAT THERE
’
S AN ESCAPE ROUTE
. B
UT HOW HOW HOW DID THEY DO IT
, I
ONA?
I
SUPPOSE YOU DIDN
’
T KNOW
.

It sounded like one magician talking to another about a rival’s best trick—an impression reinforced when I saw, penciled faintly in the margin, the words
Iona’s thesis
. But I didn’t pay much attention to the added words at first, because I thought it must be an obscure reference to, you know, her
academic thesis
, the stuff about information density that she’d ditched when she started her company.

Most of what followed was a letdown. A careful log of each “Mystery” incident. Ordinary information about Quinn and the Seraphim. A short summary of all Derek’s work on Thera and the Bronze Age Collapse. Notes about Bill, going back years, and about Iona, going back even further. Notes about me too, after the Babylon discovery. I read those extra carefully, out of vanity probably, but they only told me what I already knew: at some point, Mayo had become passionately interested in the Phaistos Disks and Shul-hura’s alternative Babel story.

Near the end I found a long, unpublished paper by Mayo that definitely fell into the
Show All This Technical Crap to Rosko
category. It was all tricked out with footnotes and a bibliography, like something waiting to be submitted to a research journal—but
PERSONAL FOR A. B.
was printed on the title page, as if he’d put it together exclusively for his paymaster. I only skimmed: there were pages and pages on the Bekenstein bound, scanner technology, and the need for both a working quantum computer “and fundamental breakthroughs in the efficiency of the algorithms we’re using, before real emulation can get off the ground.” The title was interesting, though—it pretty much summed up what ISOC was truly about, and what Carl Bates had been trying to do when he died in that little room on the top floor: Uploading the Soul: Problems and Prospects in the Technology of Human Immortality. No mention of the Seraphim. No hint that Mayo had started to have fundamental doubts about his scientific approach; it struck me as a stereotypical “further research needed; more money, please” kind of document. But at three different points that same phrase,
Iona’s thesis
, had been written in the margin.

No question, the last page in the file was last because Charlie B had placed it there. For dramatic effect. It echoed the first piece in Mayo’s writing: another single piece of white printer paper, but this time covered densely on both sides with Iona’s tiny script, as precise and uniform as a ten-point font:

D
REAMS
—
GOOD AND BAD
. A
LSO A REVELATION?

T
HE GOOD DREAMS ARE ALL ABOUT
N
EW
G
UINEA
. I
WAKE UP JUST WANTING TO GET ON A PLANE AND GO THERE
. W
HY IS A PLACE
I
VISITED ONCE
,
BRIEFLY
,
MURMURING TO ME SO URGENTLY?

T
HE
BAD DREAMS ARE ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCES
. T
HE
B
OLIVIAN WOMEN
:
NEVER MET THEM
,
BUT IN THE DREAMS WE
’
VE WALKED A HUNDRED MILES ACROSS THE ALTIPLANO TOGETHER
,
SISTERS IN ADVERSITY AND HOPE
. W
E PASS AROUND OUR BRIGHT
-
RED COPIES OF
A
NABASIS
,
AS IF IT
’
S BETTER TO HAVE TOUCHED MANY COPIES THAN JUST ONE
. T
HERE
’
S AN ATMOSPHERE OF ENERGY AND JOY AS WE REMIND EACH OTHER OF THE INFINITE ADVENTURE AHEAD
. T
HEN
I
COME TO MY SENSES
:
THEY
’
RE WRONG; THEY
’
RE BEING SEDUCED; THEY
’
RE WALKING TO THEIR DEATHS!
I
HAVE ALL
B
ILL
’
S LANGUAGES
,
SO
I
BEG THEM TO LISTEN IN
E
NGLISH
,
THEN
S
PANISH
,
THEN
Q
UECHUA
. B
UT THEY CAN ONLY RESPOND UNCOMPREHENDINGLY IN THE ONE LANGUAGE THAT
’
S LEFT TO THEM, THE LANGUAGE OF THE
A
RCHITECTS
. I
T SOUNDS INHUMAN, MACHINE
-
LIKE
. T
HEY THEMSELVES ARE NO LONGER HUMAN
.

W
HEN
I
WAKE UP
, I
FIND MYSELF THINKING ABOUT THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF THE
S
ERAPHIM
. B
UT ALSO ABOUT
DMJ
AND HIS
“
DIGITAL IMMORTALITY
.” A
S IF, INSTEAD OF BEING SEPARATE EXPRESSIONS OF THE SAME DESPERATE HOPE
,
THEY
’
RE CONNECTED
. A
ND THUS THE REVELATION
.

I
FEEL LIKE
E
INSTEIN
:
IT ALL FITS SO NEATLY THAT THE THEORY HAS TO BE RIGHT
.

A
ND IF IT IS
? W
E
’
RE FINISHED
.

It continued on the other side:

J
ULIUS ENCOUNTERS
“A
RCHITECTS
”
WHILE CLIMBING IN
M
EXICO
. H
IS VANISHED FRIENDS HAVE BEEN
“
TAKEN UP
,”
HAVE EXPERIENCED
“A
NABASIS
,”
HE SAYS
,
AND HE HAS BEEN GIVEN THE TASK OF A SECOND
M
OSES
,
BRINGING THE WORD OF THE
A
RCHITECTS DOWN TO HUMANITY
. A
ND THE MESSAGE IS THAT WE CAN BE SAVED
,
CAN BECOME INFINITE LIKE THEM
,
IF ONLY WE PREPARE OUR MINDS
. I
COULD ALMOST DISMISS IT
—
EXCEPT FOR THE WAY SO MANY PEOPLE DON
’
T DISMISS IT: HIS HYPNOTIC PERSUASIVENESS IS ITS OWN KIND OF EVIDENCE
.

P
OOR
D
AVID
:
IN LOVE WITH ME
,
AND DESPERATE TO IMPRESS
,
AND THUS UNABLE TO KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT ABOUT
√2. “T
HE VERGE OF IMMORTALITY!
”
HE SAID TO ME
. “I
T WILL BE THE MOST DELICATE SURGERY EVER UNDERTAKEN
—
USING SCALPELS MADE FROM CODE TO CUT AROUND THE MIND AND REMOVE IT FROM THE BODY
.”

I
DON
’
T THINK YOU
’
RE EVEN WARM
, D
AVID
,
THAT
’
S MY GUESS
. B
UT LISTEN TO ME
. S
UPPOSE
√2
REALLY IS POSSIBLE
. S
UPPOSE A ROUTE TO SOMETHING BEYOND THE HUMAN
—
BEYOND THE PHYSICAL
—
ISN
’
T JUST A MAD TECHIE DREAM BUT A THING WE COULD PULL OFF ONE DAY?

S
URELY
,
IN THAT CASE

In that case what?

I was exhausted suddenly, and even decided to be practical and sensible and resist the temptation to check for more messages before I went to bed. My determination lasted just long enough for me to pull a brush across my teeth.

H
E NOT SLEEP
,
NOT EAT
,
LOSE THE WEIGHT EVEN MORE ALSO
. I
DON
’
T KNOW WHERE ENERGY COME FROM
. S
AYS YOUR NAME A LOT
.

I
SWEAR YOU
,
HE HAS GONE THROUGH EVERY SINGLE PICTURE FIFTY TIMES
. H
E IS LIKE PUZZLED
,
FRUSTRATED
,
GROWLING
—
LOOKING FOR SOMETHING BUT CANNOT FIND
.

“In that case what? It just ends at the end of the page. There has to be more.”

I waved Iona’s note at Balakrishnan. He looked two shades paler than the day before and was coughing ominously. “Iona’s ‘thesis’ must be about the relationship between Route One and Route Two,” he said. “Between the religious, be-nice-to-the-gods path to eternity and David’s shinier, more modern vehicle.”

“You don’t happen to have page two?”

“I assure you, Morag, I’d happily swap the Voynich Manuscript for it, and throw in my Mughal ceramics collection too. Truthfully, I’d give up every single thing I own. I believe Iona knew something essential. She may even have tried to discuss it with Bill, only to have him dismiss it, and then she turned to her old boyfriend, who she thought would be more receptive. She shared with him some insight about the Architects that linked them to David’s own research on consciousness. His ISOC work on Route Two had been a sort of intellectual hobby, driven only by my money, my curiosity, and my obsession with not dying. But I suspect this note was why he started looking for the answer to Route Two in the very heart of Route One.”

“You must have some idea what the link could have been.”

“I’m not sure how much use my speculation—”

“Tell me.”

“Iona didn’t believe in any particular religion. But, like most religious people, she thought the world was made from two fundamentally different kinds of stuff. Matter and mind. Matter and spirit. Things that take up time and space, and things that are immaterial, and immortal, and don’t take up time or space.”

“Rosko’s talked about that. From that French guy. Descartes?”