Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  “Beautiful, though, isn’t it?” he said mildly, putting a hand against the glass cabinet. “And I have a sentimental attachment to the idea that this was designed by Archimedes of Syracuse himself, and since he may have had the highest IQ of anyone in history, I’d wager that he knew what he was up against. Still, Rosko’s pessimistic assessment may be right: not enough firepower then, and perhaps not enough even now. Let’s sit outside. Bring that file with you.”

  It was still in my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, as I followed him out into the sunshine. “I shouldn’t have looked at it. I shouldn’t have been in here. It’s just that I need answers. And I—”

  “No apology necessary, Ms. Chen. You need answers, because you want to save your brother—”

  “How did you—?”

  “You forget that Natazscha Cerenkov is my employee. You need answers because your brother’s mind has been stolen from you by strange forces that you don’t understand; you want to understand those forces so that you can bring him back, and you think I might be able to help. Which perhaps I can, and that indeed is why I asked you to come all this way. But of course you don’t know whether to trust me.”

  With painful slowness, and my hand steadying one elbow, he eased himself back into the wheelchair. I put the folder down on the table next to him. Bluntness seemed like the best strategy. “You’re right. I don’t know whether to trust you. If I did, I wouldn’t be behaving like a house thief.”

  I stood with my back against the railing. He steepled his fingers and looked up at me. His eyes were amazing: haunted by sickness, but at the same time sparkling, friendly, mischievous.

  “As Socrates observes, knowing how ignorant you are is the first step toward wisdom. So. If you don’t have reason to trust me, don’t. I hired Maynard Jones, and I certainly thought I could trust him. Apparently not. We all make mistakes.”

  “Maybe that’s a good place to start,” I said. “He took the Disks from Crete, right? He must have been watching Bill Calder for a long time, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. But one of the last things Bill said before he died was that Mayo had sent the Antikythera Disks to you in India.”

  “I’ve always been a magpie,” he said apologetically. “Easily distracted by shiny things. At my house in Delhi I have superb collections of everything from Renaissance maps to Japanese art deco movie posters. But undeciphered texts are my real passion. I own the Dorabella cipher, the Rohonc Codex, and whole rooms full of writing in Olmec, Rongorongo, and the Indus Valley script. And one of my most prized possessions is the Voynich Manuscript, for which I paid Yale University a positively absurd sum. I don’t regret a penny of it.”

  He stopped to breathe, aware that he still hadn’t answered me.

  “The thing is, I had the Disks diverted here because, at the point when they came under my control, I’d just found out that I would be stuck in Hawaii for some time.”

  “Stuck in Hawaii? That’s an odd thing to say.”

  “I have not been taking surfing lessons, I assure you. I’ve spent most of the time deeply unconscious in an oxygen tent at a clinic I set up in Honolulu. Please take a seat; you’re making me feel impolite. And let’s have some tea, shall we?”

  Let’s have some tea. It was like God saying “Let there be light”: the instant he said the words, Mrs. Chaudry emerged onto the balcony with a wheeled silver trolley. On it there was a carved wooden tray that looked Indian, a fancy tea service in blue china that looked English, and a plate of tiny white sandwiches that looked as if they’d been cut with a laser.

  Mrs. Chaudry poured silently for both of us, threw me another disapproving look, and left. “You met Sunil and Vandana?” he asked when she’d gone. “Her grandchildren. Very interesting. The only case we know of in which both parents are Babblers too.”

  When he picked up the delicate china cup, the sun shone right through it onto the tea. I took a sip of mine: it was scented with cardamom.

  “I am honored to meet you at last, Morag Chen,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you, of course, along with the Akkadian translations. Outstanding. But the reason I wanted to meet you is not to shower praise on a fellow Babbler or quiz you about the relevance of Shul-hura’s ‘alternative Babel’ to our current situation. My purpose, rather, is to acknowledge that you and I are facing the same puzzle. The difference being that I have been busy trying to save myself, while your concern is for someone else.”

  “For Daniel, yes, but it’s much bigger than that,” I said. “I can only help Daniel if I understand what the Architects did—but they’re a threat to everyone. And one of the few leads I have is the thought that Maynard Jones was on Ararat because he knew something about them—and that you can help me find out what it was.”

  He considered that for a long time. “The Architects are real, you say. I haven’t seen them, but I’m inclined to believe you. A funny word, though, real. Isn’t it? You and I and this table are real. Easy cases. But gravity is real too, and the past, and the number three—and now we find ourselves in very deep water indeed. Are you enjoying the tea?”

  I nodded. “Cardamom’s one of my favorite spices.” I was about to say, Daniel loved to use the whole pods in curries, but I kept the thought to myself: I didn’t like the idea that I was falling into the habit of referring to your likes and dislikes in the past tense.

  “The flavor of cardamom is real, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “No less real than the chemical compounds that underlie it! Yet the chemicals are basic, textbook science, and the flavor itself, the experience that the chemicals generate, is an enigma utterly beyond the grasp of science.”

  “Hence ISOC.”

  “Yes. And no. I’m afraid I was never entirely honest about the real motive behind my little Institute.”

  (I had to admire the sheer scale of Balakrishnan’s ambitions. You pony up a hundred million and change, to build an organization dedicated to discovering the meaning of life—and it’s my little Institute.)

  “Let me take you back a few years. Most people get very interested in not dying when they grow old. Somewhat unusually, I’ve been obsessed with the thought ever since I was a child. Daniel watched his mother die from a fall in Patagonia, when he was seventeen. I watched my mother die from a burst appendix, in a squalid tin shack on the Sabarmati River, when I was seven. After that, my lifelong insomnia began. I’d spend entire nights wide awake in a state of the most pure, most refined terror, thinking, Death is there, waiting! Tomorrow, or next week, or seventy years from now, death will be there. No escaping it: one day, sooner or later, I will be extinguished forever.”

  “And then you discovered a group of people who were terrified of death, like you, but determined to do something about it. The Extenders. Who were interested in pushing death back as far as humanly possible.”

  “Just so. And when I discovered that I was not merely mortal in the ordinary way, but likely to die well before my time, I began to make myself something of a guinea pig for their ideas. Special ultrahigh vitamin diet. Cloned muscle grafts. Nerve-fiber reconstruction. Daily blood plasma nanofiltering. Replacement joints, of course. All that sort of thing. I had a cancer scare too, and half my esophagus is straight off a 3-D printer.”

  He stroked a finger down one side of his throat. A scar was just visible among the wrinkles. There was a thin film of sweat on his cheeks.

  “May I ask what you—um—?”

  “I am the proud owner of a rare and thoroughly fatal blood disease. Its cause is four different faulty genes, all doing their mischief together like an evil string quartet. The probability of getting all four mutations in a single genome is about one in a billion. Something akin to winning the lottery four days in a row.”

  “They diagnosed it here?”

  “Only tracked down the exact genetic villains. The diagnosis came many years ago, so I’ve known this time bomb was ticking nearly all my adult life.”

  “And you’ve just
undergone a new round of treatment?”

  “A new round of hopeful experimentation, I’d call it. It involved keeping me in a medically induced coma while they did clever things to my spinal fluid and bone marrow. A last-ditch attempt to buy me more time by slowing down the collapse of my cellular machinery. That’s what the Extenders are all about. Buying time. Unfortunately this round of experimentation was, um, not successful.”

  The uncharacteristic pause, the little um at the end of the sentence, said it all. He was letting me know that he’d accepted defeat, that he was dying, like everyone dies, and that there was nothing more he and all his money could do about it. It struck me then why Iona had liked him. Hugely ambitious, aye, maybe even self-absorbed in his concern about his own mortality. But he was aware of his own flaws, didn’t try to hide them, and, even though he’d barely admitted the fact even to himself, he was really driven by something larger than his own survival: before the end, he wanted to understand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, conscious that it was a pathetically inadequate response. But the word made him flinch, and I got the impression that he thought there was something distasteful about the idea of wasting time on being sorry for him. He started waving his arms around. He was trying to get up again. I helped him stand. When he was leaning against the railing, I stayed close, worried that he might tumble headlong into the garden.

  “Thank you, my dear. I absolutely hate sitting down, and these days I do very little else. What was I going to say? Oh yes. David Maynard Jones was interested in all the Extender technology too. That’s why I knew him. But the thing that really excited me about him, and made me put him in charge of ISOC, was discovering that he was already a step ahead of those people. Why buy yourself an extra ten or twenty years? Because it’s good in itself. But there’s a much bigger prize. An infinitely bigger prize: living long enough to see the day when it’s possible to stop repairing the body and simply leave it behind. David saw that the body’s just a vehicle. The Extenders are obsessed with the vehicle. But the fundamental goal is preserving its cargo.”

  He raised his walking stick and used it to tap his forehead.

  “Consciousness,” I said.

  “Not needing a body any more than God needs a body! A newer, more reliable way to immortality! According to religion, consciousness was the flickering of your immortal soul—the thing that survives death. Just at the point in my life when I was despairing of all that, and was hoping at best to die at a ripe old age instead of far too young, David came to me and persuaded me that there was something else. ‘Mr. Balakrishnan,’ he said—very formal: I could tell he was about to ask for money—‘Mr. Balakrishnan, we’re close to a technological tipping point. Science fiction is about to be science fact. Soon, we won’t need to repair the physical medium in which the mind resides. We’ll be able to save the conscious mind as code—as software. Who needs God to check you in at the Cloud Hotel when you can build a cloud all of your own?’”

  “And you agreed? You accepted that?”

  He tried to laugh; it came out as a wheeze. “I believed what I needed to believe. Naturally I wanted to know whether we were five years out from his goal or fifty—whether I personally had any hope of getting there. He said, oh, ten years or less, and I chose to believe that too. In retrospect, it was an absurd figure—it was like being told as a boy that soon we’d have atomic cars—but I didn’t want to think about the possibility of failure. And he was very persuasive. Emulating the whole brain would be just like taking a photograph. There were some technical obstacles, certainly, because it would be a photograph with a fifty-yottabyte file size. I confess that I nodded sagely and had to look up yottabyte afterward. I was too giddy with joy to be skeptical. I said, ‘David, if this works, you’ll go down in history as the man who invented the very thing we’ve all been looking for. Something better even than wealth, or youth, or excellent cheekbones. Infinity. Eternity. An alternative to God.’ I think it was in that very conversation that he came up with the idea that it was Route Two against the old Route One.”

  I picked up my teacup, then put it down again. I could see Sunil gesturing to his sister. “I never did quite believe that ISOC existed just so that you could scratch some personal philosophical itch,” I said. “The origin of consciousness? I mean, I get why it’s a puzzle. But it seems a bit abstract.”

  “On the contrary, it’s the most practical and urgent of all questions. Especially for those of us who assume that one day we are in fact going to die. I knew the medical interventions would fail me in the end. The only way I could hope to stay alive in the long term was by digging deeper. Investigating what ‘being alive’ means. The biologists think that’s a question about cell regeneration, genetic damage, and the length of your telomeres. It isn’t. The question of what being alive means, for a human being, is inextricably bound up with the philosopher’s question about consciousness. Can that survive without a body? Or does it depend absolutely on the failing brain? If consciousness could be separated from the brain, then I had a chance. ISOC was a Hail Mary pass, as I believe they say in American football.”

  “I’m not good at sports metaphors.”

  “Seconds left on the clock and nothing to lose. Might as well throw a long ball and pray.”

  “But something changed Mayo’s mind. Something, or someone, made him take seriously the idea that the whole technological approach, the whole concept of ‘Route Two,’ was missing something. That there was more to it than just bytes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Balakrishnan—”

  “Charlie, please. I’ve been Charlie ever since discovering that so few people in the West can get Akshay right. They say Ash-kay, which sounds like ashtray, and I have never smoked.” He grinned, showing off his pink gums, and made a rippling gesture with his long, delicate fingers.

  “Charlie, then.” I felt uncomfortable saying it: he was too old, too rich, and too sick to be Charlie. “Look, I don’t have much time—”

  Too late, I realized how bad that sounded. He was the one who didn’t have time. But he just smiled.

  “Morag, don’t feel sorry for me. If you do, you don’t understand. Let me tell you something very important. People want to live for a long time, and then at some point they think, oh, if only it could be forever! Sounds good, doesn’t it, ‘eternal life’? I made the same mistake, but I’ve changed my mind. I have Gilgamesh standing in there as a reminder and a warning. People think they want eternity only because they haven’t thought about what the word truly means. Eternity isn’t just a long time! It’s a place beyond time. The annihilation of time. And when you understand that, you come to see that eternal life is much, much more frightening than death.”

  As he gave this little speech, your voice dinned in my head, and I thought that perhaps I’d glimpsed your meaning at last: not a call to action so much as a description of a place you’d seen: There’s no time. No time.

  “So why did you get me out here?” I asked. “What do you know about why the world’s top researcher into Route Two became interested in new religions and their gods? And why do you care?”

  “Why I care is easy to answer,” he said. “I’m very fond of Sunil and Vandana. In fact, I think of them as my own grandchildren. And they represent for me all the other children in the world—the future of the human race. I don’t want them and their futures destroyed. As for the question about Maynard Jones—”

  “That will be enough,” Mrs. Chaudry said. She had appeared silently again—as if by magic again—and her tone had the sharp finality she might have used to corral her grandchildren. I was being dismissed, and she probably had a point: Balakrishnan looked as if he’d reached a whole new level of exhaustion, and he did nothing to stop me leaving. “Take the folder,” he said. “There are a couple of things you may find relevant to your question, and we can talk about them tomorrow, perhaps. I do hope you’re comfortable in the guest house. Mrs. Chaudry will be delighted to provide you with anything you
need.”

  The name Mrs. Chaudry didn’t seem to belong in the same sentence with the word delighted. I picked up the folder. As she was escorting me out, he called after me, “Get Kai to show you the volcano. Can’t be on the Big Island and miss Mauna Loa. Especially since the Seraphim seem to want the Architects to blow it up.”

  He was like Kit—I couldn’t tell when he was joking.

  CHAPTER 15

  IONA’S THESIS

  At the guesthouse, invisible hands had laid out a meal for me. The choice made me want to cry: cold salmon, potatoes with chives, and a salad of green beans with preserved lemon—a combination almost identical to one you’d once prepared for me. I couldn’t bring myself to eat it and put the whole thing in the fridge. There I found the only concession to Hawaii, a single perfect mango laid out on a dark-red china plate with a paring knife next to it. I smelled it, picked up the knife, and took it to the table. Then I changed my mind and had a glass of water for dinner. Pathetic.

  There were messages from Kit that I should have responded to. But there was something about the way they said nothing and everything: anxious bulletins filled with trivia, telling me indirectly about every up and down, mainly down, of your emotional state. You kept saying fragments of things she didn’t understand. You were drawing dozens of things at whirlwind speed. Your hands were steady when you drew but trembled violently when you held a cup.

  She wanted me back ASAP; that was clear. Which would have been nice to know, if I’d had any sense that the emotion had something to do with us. But she didn’t say, or seem to imply, anything about us. Her tone suggested that ordinary facts (like her being sorta kinda interested in me maybe; like me being as helplessly in love with her as a novice swimmer in a rip current) were subjects too trivial to worry about now.

  Some of what she said was about Rosko too, and I had to read between those lines as well. Words like polite and helpful, even kind, said loudly that I wasn’t getting the whole picture.