Phaos
Cyber-Opera in Three Acts
And Two Interludes
And Two Interludes
Alain Bergeron
(Excerpt: Scene 1, p. 3-13)
Luna, Genesareth Urban Complex, (Enclave 7, Level 3, 2086, 06/13, 21:47 UT (universal time)
Contact.
A tiny silver wire pings seven times in the darkness, half-harp, half clavichord. Six notes in a sequence, six intervals of ascending fifths. An extremely banal call sign. The individual inhabiting this place must not have taken the time to personalize his ringtones. Not enough time, probably. His name is Luis Grindall and he makes a living as the chief of security at the Lunar facilities of Thor Corp. The kind of job that, although not in an obvious manner, ends up throwing your neurological system into hyperstress.
Grindall is at home, at this hour. If he doesn't answer, it's because he must be asleep.
Contact.
The silver wire pings again. Same audio sequence, but on a slightly more jerky rhythm. There must be an emergency. The man groans as he surfaces from the abyss of sleep.
"...fuck them.. fuck them all..."
Luis Grindall is also a coarse and vulgar individual. Tall, brown hair, a desperately ordinary look, he's been breathing in this world for thirty-nine years. The first time was even here on Luna, in one of those sordid popular clinics that the township of Bradbury hastily put together in order to weather the new waves of immigrants. Bad times. Terra kept on spitting her surplus of human misery into space. Illness, poverty and despair came with them and piled up between the walls of gloomy and badly ventilated cells. There were perhaps worse places to be born into, in this second half of the twenty-first century. But not many. When they opened their eyes for the first time, many newborns reflexively closed them again, once and for all. The others got a perpetual subscription to a bitter fight for survival. Grindall had no mother but a transitory one whom he'd seen just for the necessary period. He never knew his progenitor, but he never tried either. An immigrant, no doubt, less than nothing, a woman who, as soon as the deed was done, went back and disappeared into mass anonymity where she came from. Taken by public institutions with scant money, Luis Grindall grew up as best he could, that is neither especially well nor especially badly. He applied himself very early to examine the order of the world around him and determine who the winners and losers were, looking for a hook a bit less shaky than the rest to hang his existence onto.
The day he turned fourteen, he was recruited by the security services of the Thor Corp congregat. As hooks go, he could have found worse. Just on Luna, two thirds of what has ever been built under the vast protecting domes belong to Thor Corps, including the twelve enclaves and the seventeen levels of the Genesareth urban complex, the labs of the Moon Institute of Technology, the Lunaport warehouses and most of the Bradbury housing facility. Today the congregat still recruits its people young and trains them hard, but the recruits' accommodations are totally paid for. You're set for life, the way you once were when entering a religious order. Luis Grindall has never regretted his choice of hook. It took him twenty-five years to rise through the ranks to one of the highest posts a rent-a-cop of average talent can hope for, that of chief of security for Thor Corp's Lunar facilities. But he's made it.
Contact.
Grindall is sleeping. Or pretending to. Dozens of optical logiprocessors - they're familiarly called logops - have been standing at attention for some time in his bedroom. Most of them are barely visible to the naked eye and highly specialized. You don't see them, but they're everywhere, embedded in the walls, the furniture and everyday objects. They keep schedules running smoothly, they open and close doors or monitor the atmosphere's quality. They are such a part of the environment that they have become the environment. Nowadays wherever man treads, logops spread too. A bit like rats and lice in the past. Logops are not actual parasites. They are satisfied with making people dependent on them. They are omnipresent because no one is capable of living without them.
In the bedroom, since the very first alarm, the logops that control the telecoms have been waiting for the master of the house to authorize them to establish the link. But the master of the house doesn't seem to be in a hurry to accommodate them.
Contact.
Grindall finally surfaces. His eyes open. A wide band of harsh light floods the walls of concrete foam around his bed. The man takes time to stretch his arms and legs, that are quite long, then grabs a blue case lying on the sheets. He shakes out a tube of nicobar and puts it in his mouth. It's the last one of the pack, already used twenty times at least and it will only taste stale. Too bad. Grindall should have renewed his supply days ago. Time was scarce, as usual.
With the tip of his tongue, Grindall shakes the tube he holds between his lips to revive some hint of flavour. A light pressure on the tube's tip primes the combustion process. Immediately, the relaxing effect takes hold. Grindall inhales then exhales three times, deeply. Not great but good enough. A greyish smoke spirals above his head and disappears through the ceiling vents.
The man is standing now, naked, in front of his bed. The logops are still waiting for a signal to activate the link, but Luis Grindall is sulking. Bad enough that they jerk him around when he's on duty. Part of the job. But that they have the balls to forcefully take him away from his meagre rest is abject cruelty. In his opinion at least, not that of the logops, which are getting antsy. They're programming has determined that the master of the house suffers from a singular lack of manners if he insists on ignoring a call that is manifestly for him. They have another go at it. This time, zero tolerance.
Contact.
Ringing again. No more harp, no more clavichord, just a strident ringing, a nightmare of decibels. Startled, Grindall let the nicobar fall from his mouth.
"Oh, be quiet, bells! Shut up, fuck you! I'm linking!"
He resigns himself to turning on his cellulex, the universal interface logop grafted on his left forearm. The gadget is no bigger than a mouse's eye, but it gives him access to all his fellow creatures - those who count anyway. The cellulex is the gateway to the Net, the net of nets. The Net is the central nervous system of humankind, a very tightly woven tapestry of interconnected logops, crystalline fibres, laser relays and orbital dishes. In it, through it and with its help, knowledge flows, as well as money and power, coded in clusters of polarized photons.
A three-dimensional face appears on one of the concrete foam walls of Grindal's bedroom. A girl: hair like a red hedgehog, prominent cheekbones, lips and eyelids of silvery green. Who's the cutie? Never saw her before. Grindall glances inquisitively at his interlocutor's indax, the personal file that has just opened at shoulder level. Hille Stolen, he reads, twenty-two. Her access code shows that she belongs to the security services. A greenhorn, most likely.
"Mister Grindall..."
Hille Stolen is now receiving the image transmitted by the logops of Grindall's bedroom. Her eyes widen. Her interlocutor is standing in front of her, stark naked, with half an erection.
"All right," he snaps, "what do you want?"
"I apologize, sir. I've been told to notify you. There's been an accident at M.I.T."
"What kind? One of the old farts lost his intestinal prostheses again?"
"I... no, sir."
"And first of all, who is the bastard that told you to wake me up? Dunain?"
"No, Mr. Dunain is on vacation today. I'm calling you on behalf of Mr. Kahim."
"That Yegor kid? I thought he was on duty guarding the OAW lab."
"Precisely, sir. It's about the Phaos project."
Grindall pales. He has to sit on the edge of his bed. His penis is suddenly flaccid again.
"Go on, out with it," he says, trying his utmost to hide his trembling.
"I have no details, Sir, but I know someone has disappeared, an assistant to Mister Dunain, Jason Kolodine."
"Kolodine... Kolodine... Ah, yes. The fat faggot who wears shiny chromophens and trousers with studs."
Grindall is trying to show off in front of the cutie, but his heart is not in it. He's quite distressed at the moment, and if there's really been an accident with the Phaos project, he has reason to be. Because Phaos is what they call the Big Stuff, Capital Stuff, the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. The prototype is still experimental, but it was built by M.I.T and financed by Thor Corp. Three super-logops, ISIS, HERMES and PAN, totally isolated from the outside but interconnected to form a perfectly autonomous entity, a psycho-intellectual system, or "psystem." Grindall is not an expert in computer sciences, but he knows a little bit about the thing because, unfortunately, Phaos' protection is his responsibility.
FUCK!
The high points of Phaos' history run at high speed on the screen of his internal memory. At the beginning, it was M.I.T.'s old boss, Leonore Cantelo, a genius, who conceived it. A big raucous fury of a woman, no class at all, she always spoke too loudly, as Grindall recalls. She was considered the best mind of her generation. The Star Fairy, they nicknamed her, part mockery, part admiration. Phaos would have been her apotheosis, her masterpiece. And then, last year, barely a few weeks before the psystem became operational, Leonore Cantelo died, pulverized by an acid bomb in her New Bradbury house. The attempt was never claimed, but suspicion was focused on the Moon Knights, the local terrorist movement.
With the Star Fairy gone, Pierre Dunain, the new M.I.T. director, took over the project. But it was mainly thanks to Thor Corp's support that it was able to survive. The congregat's CEO, Simon Odako, intervened personally to keep Leonore Cantelo's heritage from being lost. The man the whole world calls the Lion God seems to have become uncommonly attached to Phaos. They say he's adopted it as a dear child and that he cherishes it more than anything else. Just thinking about it, Grindall is shaken to the bone, while myriads of insects nibble at his innards.
What can have happened? And this little idiot who knows nothing!
It should not have been possible for anything to happen to the psystem. The three super-logops are permanently locked up in the OAW lab. An honest to god safe made of eight fortified enclosures. Totally impregnable wall to wall, floor to ceiling. The psystem is devised to function in absolute isolation, without external intervention, protected from indiscreet hands and eyes. In order to avoid possible contamination, it has even been cut off from the Net. And in order to ensure there wouldn't be another one in the world, they even took the precaution of not making any back-up.
"Link me to Yegor at once," Grindall says while looking for something decent to wear. "And tell me why that brain eunuch didn't call me himself."
"Mr. Kahim has been ordered to stay in contact with Headquarters. I believe he is at this very moment talking with Mr. Odako."
"What? He's talking directly to the Lion God?"
Frustration. Grindall takes it very badly that his underling, this Yegor Kahim kid, can talk to the celestial powers, without going through the intermediate levels of the hierarchy. He doesn't like it when people ignore proper channels, especially when he's the one channel everybody skips.
Grindall finally finds his suit on the floor by the bed. A mauve lunar jumpsuit, a common model. The lining is full of gravific compensators that allow one to roam the Genesareth enclaves without flying away, butterfly-like, at the smallest sneeze.
"About that," the girl says as Grindall dresses in front of her, "Mr. Kahim asked me to say that Mr. Odako is already leaving for Luna."
"What? When did he leave?"
"He took the Archangel at 20:00 UT. He should be in Lunaport at 05:00 UT."
"The big boss is coming here and no one thought of telling me! Who's the fucking chief of security in this fucking dump?"
Hille Stollen has no idea what she should say. Tears are shining under her silvery lids. The poor girl would like to end the conversation here and go hide in a corner, but she doesn't dare.
"That's it? No more surprises?"
"No... er... Mr. Kahim says he is waiting for you as soon as you can come. Er... Enclave 4, Level 16."
"Oh, Mr. Kahim says, eh?" mutters Grindall, lacing his boots.
"Yes, sir."
"All right, listen to me, darling. Maybe in this instant there are lots of people around you who get nervous and give you the feeling they're important because they shout loudly. But I am going to give you a hint: until further proof to the contrary, the name of the chief of security at Thor Corp is Luis Grindall. And you're going to tell this tiny bit of an asshole, Yegor Kahim, that I'm the one who will be waiting for him. And that I will be in the Vertical Salon in half an hour. And that I want to see all the labs' staff, with no exceptions. And also tell him that if he hasn't sealed the access to the (OAW), he is ripe for instant retirement to the Mars mines."
"Yes, sir, and again, forgive me for..."
"We'll go have a drink together," Grindall cuts in, with a big wink whose meaning is totally devoid of ambiguity. "Afterwards, we'll see if I can forgive you."
The link is cut with those words, while Hille Stollen's face, now a deep red, also vanishes from the wall. Grindall finds himself in total darkness.
"Hey, lights, what the fuck! What you're waiting for?"
Quick reaction of the logops controlling the lighting system. A beautifully soft halo appears around Grindall. The man picks up the nicobar he let go a moment before, inhales the last dregs of taste, then laughs bleakly.
"I am the chief. My ass! Chief of what? Of nothing at all. Always the last to know what's happening in this shithole!"
Grindall is furious, but he also knows that his subordinate couldn't initiate a contact with Simon Odako on his own. Yegor Kahim is nothing but a third grade security officer who has been assigned to the monitoring of the OAW lab, the sanctuary of Project Phaos. If he was able to speak directly with the Lion God, it is because he has received special instructions in case of a crisis. Nothing to cry home about. They only omitted to warn his superior. It happens. Yes, but a little too often.
More than that, what really gets Grindall is whatever might have happened to Project Phaos. No need to ponder at length to realize that Thor Corp's top cop on Luna is up to his ears in the soup, and that the pot has begun boiling under his feet. When time comes to attribute responsibilities and to punish the guilty, Luis Grindall will find himself in the first batch of candidates to get roasted. He may still tell himself he shouldn't get so excited, he has no illusion whatsoever about what he's feeling. It's called terror. Pure and simple terror, close to a state of panic.
"And to top it off," he moans, "my heart is giving out on me, it's completely shot, it could go any time!"
It's hyperstress, the scourge of the century. Grindall has already undergone four heart transplants, and he knows his body won't tolerate another one. The next heart attack will be the last. He must calm down at once. It's urgent. He pushes the remains of his nicobar to the recycling aperture. Then he looks at the blood logops he wears as a medallion around his neck. The thousands of microscopic sensors that run in his blood stream send a constant flow of information, with the data appearing discreetly on a screen no bigger than a thumbnail. Grindall makes a face. He's not happy with what he sees, not at all. If this Phaos case is not quickly solved, his life might get a lot shorter...
© 2003 Éditions Alire & Alain Bergeron
To find out what happens next...
