Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

Susanne came over to him and brushed a lock of blond hair back from his brow. ‘You’ll get there. Try not to worry. Just do what you always do and look at the big picture. No one else does it the way you do. You hungry?’

Fabel shook his head. ‘I’m going to catch up with my reading.’ He dropped the file onto the kitchen table. ‘Maybe you’re right, but somehow I think this particular picture is too big even for me.’

As he read the BfV file, Fabel found himself being drawn deeper and deeper into something more complex and wide-ranging than he had ever imagined. And a way of perceiving the world that he really could not understand.

He read again what Anna and Muller-Voigt had already told him: that Dominik Korn, the reclusive genius billionaire with joint US/German nationality, had taken over his father’s business empire and built it into the Korn-Pharos Corporation, the world’s number one environmental technologies group; how he had invested millions in environmental projects, including the ill-fated Pharos One deep-sea exploration to discover the true impact of deep-water oil drilling. As it turned out, Korn’s concerns had been proven correct with the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico; but the maiden voyage of Korn’s submersible had ended in its own disaster, with Korn suffering massive neurological damage as a result of his unprotected ascent.

No one saw much of Dominik Korn after that. He had been seriously ill for months and had made only one brief appearance — at a press conference, wheelchair-bound and speaking with an artificial voice through a computer — about a year after the accident. He had turned this one appearance into a clarion call for mankind to disengage from the environment, to reduce its impact on the natural world to zero. An impossible goal. But environmentalists around the world had been inspired by Korn’s courage and commitment. Fabel could see why a young Meliha Yazar would have drawn comparisons with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Korn really did seem to offer a new and radical vision. He had proposed a completely new political structure for the world, where global concerns like the environment were dealt with at a global level; that no one nation should have rights or control over any given natural resource. Much of Korn’s early reasoning made sense to Fabel, although he could see that even these original ideas would have been seen as dangerous to both commercial vested interests and national governments.

But after that single appearance, Korn had become more and more reclusive and his pronouncements, made through the Korn-Pharos press office, had become increasingly bizarre. He announced the foundation of the Pharos Project as an international environmental movement and his philosophy of disengagement became more and more extreme. It was once he started to call for the strict control of the human population — for euthanasia and enforced sterilisation — that alarm bells started to ring. Especially in Germany.

As the Pharos Project became quasi-religious and its attitude towards detractors more aggressive, one name pushed its way to the front with increasing frequency: Peter Wiegand. Wiegand was Korn’s deputy. It had been Wiegand who had been in charge of Korn’s rescue from Pharos One and who, after his boss had been incapacitated, had taken over the reins until Korn had been well enough to take control again, albeit from a motorised wheelchair and out of public view. Wiegand was a German national and the movement set up a European headquarters in the Federal Republic, while officially maintaining its main base in the United States. The truth was that the German headquarters, the architecturally innovative Pharos, on the south bank of the Elbe, was seen as the real world HQ of the Pharos Project. Korn may have been King, but Wiegand was his Prince Regent.

When the editor of a boulevard-press newspaper had compared some of the Pharos Project’s policies with those of the Nazis, and had alluded to the cult’s deputy as ‘Pharos’s Himmler’, Wiegand had sued for massive damages, and won.

Fabel could see where the BfV’s concerns had come from: Pharos fitted almost all the criteria for a destructive cult and an anti-democratic philosophy. There was the usual unquestioning adoration of the leader, one who was conveniently distant and aloof and whose disabilities had been turned into an expression of his particular breed of asceticism. And there was the total subjugation of the individual: when you joined Pharos your identity became subsumed into the single greater consciousness. And that meant, of course, that any personal wealth you might have would become the property of the cult. It was the first step in your disengagement from the physical world. Like most cults, Pharos had its Day of Judgement: The Consolidation.

An hour became two, then three. Eventually Susanne came into the kitchen and made a sandwich, placing the plate on top of the open file as Fabel was reading it. She handed him an opened bottle of Jever beer.

‘Eat,’ she said and sat down at the table opposite him.

‘Don’t tell me you’re getting domesticated…’ said Fabel, examining the sandwich suspiciously.

‘I’ve realised my mistake in going to university and having a career and everything. I’ve decided to stay at home and pander to your every whim.’ Susanne nodded at the sandwich. ‘It’s all my own recipe. Bread, butter and cheese.’

Fabel smiled and took a bite, leaned back in his chair and sipped his beer.

‘I now understand why Menke has been so cooperative,’ he said. ‘The BfV’s Cults Unit has an entire team working on the Pharos Project. They can’t get anything on them; nor can the FBI, who are equally suspicious. The Pharos Project has its European headquarters a little way along the Elbe and even the Polizei Niedersachsen has a team monitoring them.’

‘So what’s the Pharos Project’s particular angle? A meteor that’s going to take them to a different galaxy? Escape from the control of giant lizards who have disguised themselves as Freemasons? Or just that Jesus is coming in a spaceship? That’s always a good one.’

‘You know what the singularity is?’

‘Listen, smart-ass, just because I’ve made you a sandwich doesn’t mean my brains have turned to mush. Of course I know what the singularity is: the predicted point in history when computers and machines will be able to build other computers and machines that we can’t because of the restrictions of human intelligence. God knows how many science-fiction films have been based on it.’

‘The Pharos Project has a different definition,’ said Fabel. ‘They believe that we will become much more intelligent because we will become “one” with technology. That we will augment ourselves through genetic engineering and by basically adding bits to ourselves. Nanochips in our brains, microscopic machines to patrol around inside us to destroy cancer cells or dredge cholesterol from our arteries and help us live longer — that kind of thing.’

‘Yep… I’ve heard that interpretation of the singularity as well. Transhumanism, posthumanism… kick-starting the next phase in human evolution ourselves.’

‘Well, that’s what Dominik Korn seems to be into.’

‘Understandable when you already spend your life connected up to tubes and computers twenty-four hours a day. He has to believe there’s a better machine to sustain his existence just around the corner.’

‘Well, from what I’ve read here, the Pharos Project believes that mankind will be able to disengage from the environment by “uploading itself” onto some kind of computer mainframe.’

Susanne took a bottle of white wine from the fridge and poured herself a glass. ‘I’ve heard that hokey before,’ she said. ‘The concept that we’ll be able to digitise human consciousness and store it on whatever computers evolve into.’