Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

“It amazes me how you can rationalize your greed,” Levine typed.

“I’m not through. There are good, sensible reasons why the American military should have this virus. There can be little doubt that the existence of nuclear weapons prevented World War Three between the former Soviet Union and the United States. We finally did what Nobel hoped to do with dynamite; we made all-out war unthinkable. But now we have come to the next generation of weapons: biological hot agents. Despite treaties to the contrary, many unfriendly governments are working on biological agents just like this. If the balance of power is to be maintained, we cannot afford to be without our own. If we’re caught without a virus such as X-FLU II, any number of hostile countries could blackmail us, threaten us and the rest of the world. Unfortunately, we have a president who actually intends to obey the Biological Weapons Convention. We’re probably the only major country in the world still observing it! But this is a waste of time. I wasn’t able to convince you to join me in founding GeneDyne, and I won’t be able to convince you now. It’s a pity, really; we could have done great things together. But you chose, out of resentment, to devote your life to destroying mine. You’ve never been able to forgive me for winning the Game.”

“Great things, you say. Like inventing a doomsday virus to wipe out the entire population of the world?”

“Perhaps you know less than you let on. This so-called doomsday virus is a by-product of a germ-line therapy that will rid the human race of the flu. Forever. An immunization that will confer lasting immunity to influenza.”

“You call being dead immunity?”

“It should be obvious even to you that X-FLU II was an intermediate step. It had flaws, true. But I’ve found a way to make those very flaws marketable.”

The figure went over to a cabinet and removed a small object from one of the shelves. As the figure turned back, Levine saw it was a gun, similar in design to those used by his pursuers in the woods.

“What are you going to do?” Levine asked. “You can’t shoot me. This is cyberspace.”

Scopes laughed. “We shall see. But I won’t do it quite yet. First, I want you to tell me what really brings you here into my private world at such personal inconvenience. If you wanted to speak to me about X-FLU II, surely you could have found an easier way to do it.”

“I came to tell you that PurBlood is poisonous.”

The Scopes-wizard lowered the gun. “That is interesting. How so?”

“I don’t know the details yet. It breaks down in the body and starts poisoning the mind. It’s what drove Franklin Burt insane. It’s what drove your scientist, Vanderwagon, insane. It will drive all the beta-testers at Mount Dragon insane. And it’s what’s driving you insane.”

It was unsettling, speaking to the computerized image of Scopes. It did not smile, it did not frown; until Scopes’s own voice came over the speaker, Levine had no way of knowing what the GeneDyne CEO was thinking, or what the effect of his own words might be. He wondered if Scopes already knew; if he had read and believed Carson’s aborted transmission.

“Very good, Charles,” came the reply at last, laced with weary irony. “I knew you were in the business of making outrageous claims against GeneDyne, but this is your grandest achievement.”

“It’s no claim. It’s true.”

“And yet you have no proof, no evidence, and no scientific explanation. It’s like all your other charges against GeneDyne. PurBlood was developed by the most brilliant geneticists in the world. It has been thoroughly tested. And when it’s released this Friday, it will save countless lives.”

“Destroy countless lives, more likely. And you aren’t the slightest bit worried, having taken PurBlood yourself?”

“You seem to know a lot about my activities. I never was transfused with PurBlood, however. I took colored plasma.”

Levine did not reply for a moment. “And yet you let the rest of Mount Dragon take the real stuff. How courageous of you.”

“I had planned on taking it, actually, but my stalwart assistant, Mr. Fairley, prevailed on my better judgment. Besides, the Mount Dragon staff developed it. Who better to test it?”

Levine sat back helplessly. How could he have forgotten, in his haste to confront Scopes directly, what the man was like? The discussion reminded him of their college arguments. Back then, he had never succeeded in changing Scopes’s opinion on any subject. How could he possibly succeed now, when so much more was at stake?

There was a long silence. Levine maneuvered his view around the garret and noticed that the fog had cleared. He moved to the window. It was now dark, and a full moon was shimmering off the surface of the ocean like a skein of silk. A dragger, nets hung, chugged toward the harbor. Now that the conversation had lapsed into silence, Levine thought he could detect the sound of the surf on the rocks below. Pemaquid Point Light winked in the darkness.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Scopes said. “It captures everything but the smell of the sea.”

Levine felt a deep sadness steal over him. It was a perfect illustration of the contradictions in Scopes’s character. Only a genius of immense creativity could have written a program this beautiful and subtle. And yet the same person was planning to sell X-FLU II. Levine watched the boat glide into the harbor, its running lights dancing on the water. A dark figure leapt off the boat and caught the hawsers as they were thrown from the deck, looping them over cleats.

“Originally, it began as a set of separate challenges,” Scopes said. “My network was growing daily, and I felt I was losing control. I wanted a way to traverse it, easily and privately. I had spent a fair amount of time playing with artificial-intelligence languages, like LISP, and object-oriented languages such as Smalltalk. I felt there was a need for a new kind of computer language that could meld the best of both, with something else added, too. When those languages were developed, computer horsepower was minuscule. I realized I now had the processing capability to play with images as well as words. So I built my language around visual constructs. The Cypherspace compiler creates worlds, not just programs. It began simply enough. But soon, I realized the possibilities of my new medium. I felt I could create an entirely new art form, unique to the computer, meant to be experienced on its own terms. It’s taken me years to create this world, and I’m still working on it. It’ll never be finished, of course. But much of that time was spent in development, in making the programming language and tools sufficiently robust. I could do it again much more quickly, now.

“Charles, you could stand at that window for a week and never see the same thing twice. If you wished, you could go down to the dock and talk to those men. The tide goes in and out with the phases of the moon. There are seasons. There are people living in the houses: fishermen, summer people, artists. Real people, people I remember from my childhood. There’s Marvin Clark, who runs the local store. He died a few years back but he lives on in my program. Tomorrow, you could go down there and listen to him telling stories. You could have a cup of tea and play backgammon with Hank Hitchins. Each person is a self-contained object within the larger program. They exist independently and interact with each other in ways that I never programmed or even foresaw. Here, I’m a kind of god: I’ve created a world, but now that it’s created, it goes on without further input from me.”

“But you’re a selfish god,” Levine said. “You’ve kept this world to yourself.”

“True enough. I simply don’t feel like sharing it. It’s too personal.”