Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘Yes, I’m done,’ she agreed.

It should have taken her longer but a sickness spreading through Arcoplex One, probably from the decaying corpses there, had shortened the duration of her chore to a month by killing off twenty-two delegates. She wasn’t sure whether to be glad about that or not.

Her gaze now slid to one of her work tables, on which stood three half-metre-square brushed-aluminium boxes. Even after tidying everything up, she had continued working: bringing these boxes out of her clean-room to ensure that the samples from Saul’s brain were still growing in their aerogel matrices, that the nutrients remained balanced and the waste was being properly extracted. She had even connected them up to her computers here and studied the waveforms – the shapeless thoughts already being generated in the growing brain matter. Now exhaustion was catching up with her, and she was too tired for the panic attack to get a firm grip on her.

‘And you’re okay?’ he prompted.

He thought she was burdened with guilt, beating herself up about erasing the minds of erstwhile Committee delegates, and styling herself no better than them because of what she had done. Or did he really think that? Considering how Hannah had reacted to violence of any kind, a normal human being would perhaps surmise that what he had driven her to do was reason for her to be miserable. But Alan Saul had never been a normal human being, even before Director Smith had tortured him to the point of extinction, before his strange resurrection, before the advanced implants in his skull and before he melded his mind with the artificial intelligence, Janus. Perhaps he could see through her, and knew that Hannah’s problem was that she felt no guilt at all.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked. ‘I got the impression you were staying in Tech Central until we can turn off the EM field.’ She glanced towards the spidergun crouching just inside the door. Doubtless the usual horde of robots would also be scattered throughout Arcoplex Two, though she didn’t think that was about cowardice but about control.

‘I’ve come to speak with Professor Jasper Rhine,’ he said.

Before she could stop herself, Hannah emitted a snort of disbelief.

‘You have some opinion?’ he enquired.

Hannah tried to read his expression. Was he amused, angry or indifferent? It was difficult to tell. His eyes were still a dark pink – something initially due to blood-pressure imbalances in his skull, but now due to she knew not what.

‘It’s interesting work,’ she said tentatively, ‘but I would rather rely on fusion, and I would rather not waste time and energy speculating about the transubstantiation of human souls into the fourth dimension, and the connection between the human “energy field” and holistic healing.’

‘But is that all his work is about?’ he asked.

She conceded to herself that it wasn’t. ‘I’m not completely dismissive,’ she said, formulating her opinion on the spot. ‘There are the possibilities inherent in Casimir batteries, rectifier convertors and the tangle communicator . . .’

‘All theorized and tested a century ago.’

‘So what’s your interest?’

He swung his gaze around her laboratory, it coming to rest on the three brushed-aluminium boxes. Hannah turned and noticed one of her nearby screens suddenly running streams of code. He was taking a look at it, in his own inimitable way.

‘We should be so much further ahead than we are now,’ he opined. ‘The Committee put human endeavour back a century at least. So much of the technology we have now is last century’s news.’

Despite her weariness, Hannah felt her curiosity stirring. ‘We should have entered the technological singularity by now?’

He shook his head. ‘Difficult to know where we are on the exponential curve, when you don’t know what the exponents are. No, I’m simply stating that, by subjecting the best minds in the world to the strongest political control, the Committee shut down free thought, hampered creativity and suppressed anything outside the box.’ He began heading to the door, then paused and turned back. ‘Do you want to come?’

He’d done it again. When he entered her laboratory, all she had wanted was sleep. Now she knew she had to go with him. She stripped off her lab jacket and tossed it over the back of a nearby chair.

‘So you’re saying that what Rhine is doing is creative . . . outside the box?’ she asked.

‘No, on the surface he is doing precisely the opposite.’

‘If you could elaborate?’

The spidergun rose up onto its legs and exited ahead of him. He stepped out too, and Hannah hurried to catch up.

‘At the start of the twenty-first century, the whole issue of zero-point energy was hijacked by pseudo-scientists,’ he lectured. ‘Like electricity and magnetism of two centuries before, it was associated with the supernatural, the miraculous. General scientific opinion gradually hardened against it and then, with the rise of the Committee, the whole issue petrified. There’s been very little real research into zero-point energy for over a hundred years.’

‘Which hardly explains Jasper Rhine’s function here, does it?’

‘Messina,’ explained Saul, stabbing a finger upwards, in the general direction of Robotics. ‘Just as with those androids the Saberhagens are working on, Jasper Rhine’s so-called research was another pet project of Messina’s. Rhine was instructed to investigate the interaction of the zero-point field with the human energy field. To put that into simpler terms: there have always been those who fear death so much they want to believe that something exists beyond it.’

Hannah suddenly got it. ‘Messina wanted proof that the human soul exists?’

‘On the button.’

‘So you’re visiting Jasper to tell him he’ll henceforth be working in Hydroponics?’

‘Certainly not.’

Jasper Rhine stood just inside the door to his huge laboratory. Thin and exceedingly tall, he had developed a constant stoop to make himself look smaller. His hair was blond and ragged, as if he had impatiently taken the scissors to it himself within recent days. His eyes were like black buttons and his narrow face bore the wrinkles of one who had suffered a great deal of pain. Just noticeable on his face and the backs of his hands was a web-work of narrow white scars.

Computers packed this place, jury-rigged in ways Hannah, during her few brief visits here, had been unable to fathom. Various experiments were also running. A complex tangle of glass tubes, through which clear fluid flowed, emitted bluish glows from within its midst. A framework supported a torus five metres across, this wrapped in electromagnets to which heavy cables snaked across the floor. Other machines here, within enclosed booths, Hannah knew to contain the tools for chip-etching and nano-machining. It seemed such a waste to have all this stuff here for the research of nonsense. What on earth did Saul intend?

Rhine looked terrified, and well he might, for here was someone who would be able to see through all his bullshit. He could babble all he liked about sono-luminescence, vacuum fluctuations and the ground state of hydrogen, and Saul would be baffled by none of it. However, Hannah remembered that he had looked terrified when last she saw him, and others who had met him had commented on this too. It seemed he spent his life in a constant state of fear.

‘You received my instructions precisely two weeks ago,’ Saul stated.

Rhine gave a sharp nod, and shivered. Hannah noticed that he seemed more tired and somewhat less clean than he had appeared last time she saw him. ‘You told me . . .’ he choked to a stop for a moment, took a deep breath, then continued, ‘to abandon a lot of research projects.’