Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“You’re dead,” he told the image.

“Gone but not forgotten.”

That malicious chuckle. Perfect. Him.

“Sorry to give you a shock, m’boy, but I’d never have called unless it was absolutely vital. Can you come out to Wilholm? I really can’t discuss too much over the phone. I’m sure you appreciate that.”

The tone mocked.

Greg’s skittish nerves began to flutter down towards some kind of equilibrium. Shock numbness, probably. “I…I think I can manage that. When?”

“Soon as possible, Greg, please.”

The image wasn’t perfect, he realized. This was a Philip Evans he hadn’t seen before, flesh firmer, skin-colour salubrious. Stronger. Younger by about a decade.

“OK. Are you in any danger right now?” At some aloof level, he marvelled at his own reaction. Treating it as just another prosaic problem. Spoke volumes for Army training.

“Not from anything physical. The manor is well protected.”

Physical. So what was a ghost afraid of anyway, being exorcized? Should he stop off to buy a clove of garlic, a crucifix, a grimoire? “I’m on my way.”

He pulled on his one decent suit, barking a shin on that idiotically oversized bed in the scramble to shove his feet into a pair of black leather shoes. Thought about taking the Walther, and decided against.

The Duo bounced along the estate’s gravel track and lurched on to the road. He set off towards Wilholm Manor coaxing a full fifty-five kilometres per hour from the engine, rocking slowly in the seat. The Duo had thick balloon-type tyres, made out of a hard-wearing silicon rubber. They were designed to cope with the country’s shambolic road surfaces without being torn to ribbons. A typical PSP fix, he thought, adapting the cars to cope with their failure to maintain the roads.

There was a white watchman pillar standing outside Wilholm’s odd cattle grid. He wound the side window down, and showed his card to it.

“Your visit has been authorized, Mr Mandel,” a construct voice said. “Please do not deviate from the road. Thank you,”

The manor’s spread of ornate flora was in full bloom, a spectacular moiré patchwork of sharp, primary colours. Big jets of water were spurting across the parched lawns. He could see the two gardeners working away amongst the rose beds. They leant on their hoes to watch him walk up to the front doors. However did that idle pair manage to keep the grounds in such a trim condition?

The butler opened the door. Morgan Walshaw stood behind him, his face drawn. A quick check of his mind showed Greg he was labouring under a prodigious quantity of anxiety.

“Mandel.” Morgan Walshaw greeted him with a curt nod. “This way.” A stiff finger beckoned. Greg followed him up the big curving staircase. The butler shut the doors silently behind them as they ascended.

“What the fuck is going on?” he asked the security chief in a low tone. “Did he fake his death, or what?”

Walshaw’s face twisted into a grimace. “Explanations in a moment. Just ride it out, OK?”

They arrived at the study and Walshaw opened the door, giving Greg a semi-apologetic shrug as they went in.

The interior was almost the same as it had been on his last visit. Big table running down the middle, stone fireplace, dark panelling, warm sunlight streaming through small lead-lined panes of glass, dust motes sparkling in the beams.

In the middle of the table was a circular black column: seamless, a metre tall, seventy-five centimetres wide. It rested on a narrow plinth which radiated bundles of fibre-optic cables like wheel spokes. They fell over the edge of the table and snaked en masse across the Persian carpet to a compact bank of communication consoles standing by the wall.

Julia was seated at the head of the table where her grandfather used to sit, wearing a rusty-orange coloured cotton summer dress, with a slim red leather band around her brow holding back her long hair. One of the two gear cubes in front of her was showing tiny editions of himself and Walshaw walking up the stairs together; the other had his Duo driving up to the manor.

Her mind was beautifully composed. Greg recognized the state; the kind of tranquillity which follows a severe emotional jolt.

His skin crawled with rigor, an animal caution awoken. There was something deeply unsettling about walking into the study.

Her tawny eyes never left him.

He looked at the column, ghoulish images creeping into his mind. Frankenstein, zombies, the undead, brains in glass tanks…

“Thank you for coming,” said Philip Evans’s voice, all around, directionless.

Greg’s eyes remained fixed on the column. “Stop fucking about, where are you?”

“Good question. Unfortunately philosophy was never my strong point. I’ve thrown off my mortal coil sure enough; but my mind has been saved. You’re looking right at me, boy. It’s a neural-network bioware core. A real special one, custom grown, you might say. The lab team spliced my sequencing RNA into the ferredoxin nodes, replicating my neuronic structure. Then when I was dying they used a neuro-coupling to translocate my memories. Not a copy, not some clever Turing personality-responses program, but my actual thought processes. Axon stimulators literally squeezed me out of my skull and into the NN core. Continuity was unbroken, my faculties are intact-enhanced if anything. Memory retrieval is instantaneous, there’s none of that scratching around forgetting people’s names and faces. I have access to all Event Horizon’s data too. Locating that memox-crystal skim took me four days when I was flesh and blood. It wouldn’t take me ten seconds now. And there’s no pain, Greg. I’m free of it. Not just death illness, but all those aches which mount up over the years, the ones you learn to ignore, only you never can of course. They’ve gone.”

Greg pulled out one of the solid wooden chairs and sat heavily. “Jesus Christ.” The column must be solid bioware. He tried to work out how much that would cost. Fifteen, twenty million? Bioware was horrifically expensive. Immortality for billionaires. He wasn’t sure whether he was fascinated or utterly disgusted. The concept didn’t sink in readily.

“I can create the image of myself in a cube again, if that would be easier for you to talk to, boy.”

Greg shuddered. “No, thank you.”

Morgan Walshaw sat next to him, resting his hands on the table, face blank.

“Why am I here?” Greg asked stoically.

“Because we have a problem,” said Julia. “Someone is trying to wreck Event Horizon’s future.”

He received the distinct impression she was enjoying his discomfiture.

“You see, Greg,” she said, “Dr Ranasfari has succeeded in developing a viable room-temperature giga-conductor for us.”

Greg looked at her sharply. “You’re kidding!”

He remembered some Royal Engineering Corps officers he’d been stationed with once had talked about the stuff. A panacea, they’d called it. The answer to the energy shortage, to carbon dioxide pollution. Every university and kombinate in the world had its own research team working on giga-conductors before the Credit Crash. Then there were innumerable mega-budget military programmes; a giga-conductor would have produced a whole new generation of weapons.

“Told you he was a genius, boy. Edison of the age. Dedicated, too; it took him over a decade of solid grind to crack.”

“Quiet, please, Grandpa. It’s a tremendous breakthrough, Greg, its energy storage density is phenomenal. It will replace every other form of power-storage system in existence; gear, cars, ships, planes, airships, spaceplanes, they’ll all use it. And it’s cheap, clean, and relatively easy to produce. Our whole way of life will be altered, it’s a revolution equal to the introduction of the steam engine.”