Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“Bloody hell! What do they do, sleep here?”

Kirsten maintained a diplomatic silence.

Julia glanced back down at the Prior’s Fen Atoll, where the Mutizen kombinate’s arcology lifted out of the oily mist, up-draughts around its sloping walls stirred slow-moving eddies all around the base.

Open Channel to SelfCores. You three had better be right about this, she told them crisply.

We are, NN core one replied levelly. The Cambridge laboratory team has been up all night assessing the data; the concept is radically different from any current technology.

Julia paused at that. Different, or just more advanced?

Different, there’s a whole new set of principles involved. Mutizen have come up with a real breakthrough, by the look of things. That’s why we gave Peter Cavendish’s message a priority one grading.

Right, thanks. She screwed some of the sleep out of her eyes with her knuckles. The Fens Basin was so much quieter at this time of day, passive and clean, less fraught. “I’d forgotten how refreshing a sea dawn can be,” she told Kirsten McAndrews as they walked into the lift.

Royan had loved to sit on the beach and watch the dawn creeping up out of the Atlantic.

It had taken Event Horizon’s Bristol clinic twenty months to rebuild him. They cloned his muscles, blood vessels, tendons, nerves, skin, and bones, a hundred diverse glands, organs, and cell clusters, then painstakingly stitched the components together into entire limbs. It was a hugely expensive procedure, not that the money meant anything to her. She had to buy the clinic an extra thirty clone vats, draft in a regiment of specialists. Their so-called Frankenstein department was already one of the most advanced in Europe, but they didn’t have anything approaching the necessary capacity. None of the medical team had heard of a case where all four limbs had to be replaced. Normally amputees used kinaware prosthetics, but she wanted him whole again, human. She knew that was the only way he could ever hope to banish the past.

Julia visited once a week, never shirking, closing her ears to the pitiful pleas and wails, his demands just to end it all. Royan hated the clinic, it was a constant reminder of the time he had spent hospitalized after the riot, a helpless pain-racked dependant. At least in Mucklands Wood he had been somebody; Son, the one the Trinities depended on for information and technology, an electronic guru. Vital. Venerated. Now she had reduced him to a slab of meat again.

When the process of grafting his new limbs began, the clinic kept him in a near-permanent state of induced somnolence. The few times she visited when he was awake he hadn’t been lucid, crying out at the pain, trapped in a looped nightmare of flames and black whips.

Then one day, more than a year after they rescued him from Mucklands, she walked into his room to find him standing, skinny paper-white hands gripping a zimmer frame, blue veins bulging. Pride and wonder illuminated his face. The nurses had to catch him almost straight away, but he’d wanted her to be the first to see him upright again. She had to turn quickly so he couldn’t see her tears.

After that, the physiotherapists went to work on him, building the muscles, teaching him co-ordination. Even something as simple as lifting a spoon to his mouth had to be relearnt from scratch. They spent another two months bringing him up to full health with exercises and high-protein diets, massages and deep-heat toning. All the while, Royan’s complaints growing louder and crabbier.

Then, when the last medical team had completed their final checks, Julia took him away from the clinic. They went to a small island she owned off Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, her retreat from the world.

She had bought it a couple of years earlier. A desolate uninhabited place, barely two kilometres across. Grass had survived the Warming, as it always did; but all that remained of the stunted windswept trees were parched white branches lying on the marly soil. She got the island for a song; the hard-pressed Canadian ecological teams were still absorbed with reseeding the continental biosphere, replacing the forests and replanting the prairies. It would be decades before they got round to isolated regions like Mahone Bay.

Event Horizon’s botanical crew moved in to reshape the island’s habitat, transforming it into the kind of pre-Warming Bahamian paradise she’d seen on the channel shows.

There was a simple wooden bungalow set back from a long sandy beach, the only building. The two of them walked aimlessly along the shore the afternoon they arrived, exploring the gentle bluff behind the beach. A small dense selva forest was spreading out from the island’s core, broad-leaved trees draped in pale grey and green epiphyte mosses, tied together by a filigree of vines. The company crew had hatched families of small colourful birds to fill out the ecology. Julia laughed in delight at their antics as they swooped in and out of the branches. Royan was entranced by the profusion of flowers in a natural habitat, smelling their exotic scents, picking them and holding them up to the sun. He reminded her of a child let loose in a spring garden after a long icebound winter.

They ate supper on the creaking veranda, and slipped off to bed as the last fragments of light drained from the day.

Royan had been moulded by her subconscious desire, tall, strong, broad-shouldered, exactly how she imagined the shell of his mind to be in her fantasies, a physique to match the intellect. There was something strangely enticing about a power which could incarnate a lover exactly as envisaged, making sure neither of them would be disappointed. Royan had never argued about the rehabilitation programme she’d selected, it was an anodyne to his previous state. Like her, he wanted his new self to be as far removed from the crippled husk in Mucklands as it was physically possible to get.

For three months they did nothing but laze in the sun and make love. Royan learned to swim. Julia learned to cook, or at least barbecue. Then she found she was pregnant with Daniella.

They returned to England flush with optimism and an inflated sense of omnipotence. It was the future they laid claim to; rich, young, and data smart, digital godlings forging their new bright empire.

She often thought, later, that they were both slightly crazy, the kind of hubristic crazy that always came when the power to build dreams was granted. But they had been a unique combination: her money, his hotrod talent; the result was synergistic. She gave him access to ‘ware coming out of Event Horizon’s research divisions, so new the security programmers didn’t even know it existed. He rewarded her with the personality package, a digital micro-entity capable of functinning within any processor core, self-contained and selfdeterminative, its purpose reflected in its originator’s thought processes.

Together they unleashed a deluge of the sprite-like composites in the global data networks, raiding the research cores of rival companies, adding to Event Horizon’s technological base. Then they went for the big one, the electron-compression warhead. Their super-compressed packages squirted into the Sandia National Laboratories processor cores, established themselves within the management routines, and downloaded every file they could find.

The channels called electron compression the rich man’s nuke; an explosive which produced a megaton blast without the radioactive fallout of nuclear weapons. Only America, the Russian republic, and China had mastered the technology, though there were rumours of Japan making a successful test under the Pacific.

Julia built the electron-compression warheads on a cyberfactory ship floating in international waters, and used them to knock New London into Earth orbit. The asteroid’s mineral reserves, coupled with the giga-conductor royalties, gave Event Horizon a financial primacy which the kombinates could never match.