Everyone around me suddenly grew strangely silent; then, one by one, they turned to Tressalian, who was staring at his fingertips as he slowly bounced them together. After a few seconds he looked up at me, the smile on his face more charming and yet more devious than it had been at any point in the evening. “We know, Doctor,” he said quietly, “because we’ve done it.”
“You?”
Tressalian nodded. “Quite a few times, actually. And the best, I dare say, is yet to come—if you’ll help us.”
“But—” I tried to grasp it. “But I mean—I thought you were against all that.”
“Oh, make no mistake, we are.” Tressalian struggled to turn his chair and then rolled to the forwardmost area of the dome, real disgust and even anger coming into his voice. “Human society is diseased, Doctor—this fatuous, trivial, information-plagued society. And our work?” He stared at the eerie, half-lit sky outside, growing calmer. “With luck, our work will be the antibiotic that spurs society to fight the infection.” A nagging doubt seemed to tighten his features. “Assuming, of course, that we don’t kill the patient . . .”
I was about to ask for clarification of this apparently unbalanced statement when the ship’s alert system suddenly sounded again. Slayton informed us that we were descending to “cruising altitude,” an innocuous expression that I soon learned had to do not with any kind of pleasure traveling but with flying some hundred feet above the landscape as we had done when I’d first boarded the ship in Florida. Everyone stood, the general level of excitement growing, and gathered around Tressalian; and while I tried to follow as best I could, my movements were slowed by the mental need to wrestle with everything I’d just heard. Could they be serious, these people? Could they really mean that they believed it was possible to manipulate the dissemination of important information to the public as a way of alerting that same public to just how easy—and therefore dangerous—such manipulation had, in our time, become? It was absurd, impossible—
And then, with a shudder that had nothing to do with Larissa’s close presence, I remembered the scenes of President Forrester’s assassination on the disc that Max and I had been given. For a year the world had accepted as true a version of those momentous events that was not even remotely factual. And now the strongest power in the world was about to engage in a military strike that was based on that same misapprehension—a misapprehension manufactured by Tressalian and his team, who were currently on their way to the scene of that strike to—what? Observe? Participate, with their amazing ship? Or manipulate the proceedings with still more manufactured information? Almost afraid to know the answers, I silently turned to watch the darkness ahead of us with the others.
Even through my renewed bewilderment, I realized that the ship had once more shifted altitude dramatically without so much as a bump or a perceptible change in cabin pressure. We were flying low over the ocean again, although I was shocked to learn that this ocean was the Arabian Sea, which meant that our high-altitude speed had been considerably in excess of anything achieved by the most advanced supersonic airplanes currently in use. As I watched the moonlit waters speed by under us, Larissa turned to murmur into my ear:
“Not that I don’t agree with everything the others have been saying, Doctor—I assure you I do—but try to put it aside for a moment and experience this ride. Can any philosophical discussion really make your blood race like this ship? I doubt it. So when you think about joining us, think about this, too—” I turned to face her. “You and I could travel to literally every corner of the world, just the way we are now—with no restrictions and no laws but our own. Are you game?”
I looked back outside. “Jesus—I’d like to say that I am,” I told her uncertainly. “But it’s all so—” I tried to get a grip. “Impulsiveness has never been the most comfortable mode of behavior for me.”
She let me have the coy smile. “I know.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
She made a judicious little humming sound. “Not entirely. It’s part of the reason we wanted you, after all.” She put a hand lightly to my cheek. “Part of the reason . . .”
Without turning toward us Tressalian called out, “Oh, Sister—if I may interrupt, perhaps you’d care to explain what avenue of approach you’ve chosen. Toward our geographical objective, that is.”
Larissa gave me one more searching look before answering him. “Very droll, Brother. We’ll make landfall south of Karachi, then follow the Indus Valley north. We’re safe from any radar, of course, and because the river’s been a nuclear dead zone since the start of the Kashmir war, we shouldn’t be risking any visual contact. We’ll move west along the thirty-fifth parallel into the Hindu Kush, then north to the valley of the Amu Darya. The camp is strung out along the Afghan side of the border with Tajikistan. We’ll arrive just past dawn, right on schedule. The apparatus will already have engaged.”
“Good.” Tressalian turned away from the transparent hull just as a black strip of coastline became faintly visible in the dark distance and fixed his gaze on me. “Then there’s time, yet, for the doctor to ask the rest of his questions.”
“Questions,” I said, trying to focus. “Yes, I’ve got questions. But there’s one thing I’ve got to know right now.” I moved over to stare down at him intently. “How many other lies like the Forrester assassination story am I believing without even knowing it?”
“You mean,” Tressalian answered, “how much of the information that makes up your reality is utterly unreliable?” I nodded and he opened his eyes wide, raising his brows as if to prepare me for what was coming: “Certainly more than you’d suspect, Doctor. And, quite probably, more than you’ll believe . . .”
C H A P T E R 1 6
How can I describe the hours that followed? How do I explain my transformation from skeptical (if fascinated) observer of Malcolm Tressalian’s outlandish, even mad, schemes to full-fledged participant in them? There were so many factors involved, not least the lingering trauma of having seen my oldest friend murdered before my eyes, along with the lack of any meaningful sleep in the days since that event. Yet mere emotional and physical exhaustion would be inadequate hooks upon which to hang my swift spiritual metamorphosis. No, the cascade of intellectual, visual, and physical stimuli that continued to rain down on me in those predawn and morning hours would, I think, have converted the strongest and most doubting of souls, and I say that not simply to excuse my reaction; rather, it is a testament to all that I heard, saw, and felt as we passed over the Pakistani coast and penetrated to the interior of the subcontinent.
As Larissa had said, the valley of the once-proud Indus River,mother of one of the mightiest and most mysterious of ancient civilizations, had been turned into a nuclear wasteland during the still-raging war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. But my beautiful companion’s further statement that the valley was uninhabited was not, strictly speaking, correct. As we sped along above the surface of the water, past riverbanks strewn with rotting bodies and bleached skeletons, we occasionally saw groups of what were perhaps the most desperate people on earth: farmers and villagers whose bodies and ways of life—whose very chances for life—had been terribly damaged as a result of the vicious nationalism and religious zealotry of both their enemies and their countrymen. They were moving down the hillsides in limping, shuffling lines, those weakened wraiths, moving down by the light of the moon to fill buckets with the river’s poisoned waters, which they would later boil in a futile attempt at purification so that they might try to go on for a few more days or weeks in the only way that, given the decimated condition of their nation and the unwillingness of the rest of its citizens to accept such nuclear lepers, was possible for them.
The sight hit all of us hard, suspending even my urgent curiosity about my companions; but it seemed to take the greatest toll on Malcolm. It was well-known that the development of India’s rabidly bellicose new breed of nationalism in the years since the turn of the century had coincided with
the rise to economic and social primacy of information technologies and networks in that country; and Larissa would later tell me that Malcolm had always held their father and his ilk personally responsible for the fact that the systems they had designed could be and were used to disseminate lies and hatred among such peoples in as unregulated a manner as characterized the purveyance of consumer goods. The extent of Malcolm’s anger, despair, and what I took at the time to be guilt over this matter was certainly evident as I watched him that night; indeed, it soon propelled him into something of a relapse. He once again began to hiss and clutch at his head—more covertly now, given the size of his audience—and these telltale signs quickly brought Larissa to his aid. She took his right hand in her two, whispered a few calming words in his ear, and then, reaching into the pocket of his jacket, withdrew a small transdermal injector and held it for an instant to a vein in his left hand. In moments he seemed to be dozing, though fitfully, at which point Larissa spread a small comforter over his legs.
Only when they were sure that Malcolm was asleep did the rest of the ship’s company feel comfortable attending to other duties. Colonel Slayton descended to the control level of the nose to man the ship’s helm, while Fouché and Tarbell went off to make sure that the vessel’s engines had come through the various “system transfers” smoothly. As for the Kupermans, Larissa asked if they wouldn’t mind prepping me for our visit to Afghanistan while she continued to look after her brother. Jonah replied that he thought it imperative that everyone on board get some rest before we reached our destination, but both he and his brother did agree to take me down to the armory first to show me how to operate the basic gear with which I would need to equip myself when we arrived. On our way out Eli added that the session would offer me a chance to ask at least a few questions about the group’s past activities, and it was therefore in a mood of no little anticipation that I descended into the deepest recesses of the vessel.
As we approached and then entered the armory—a compartment filled with racks of weapons unlike anything I’d ever seen—Eli and Jonah told me that the first members of the team to find their way to one another had been themselves and Malcolm, who had all been in the same class at Yale. Apparently the Kupermans—who since childhood had been idealistic opponents of the dominance of information technology over every field of human endeavor, including scholarship—had originally sought the young Tressalian out to confront him: Malcolm had recently assumed control of his father’s empire following the latter’s death under seemingly tragic circumstances, and Eli and Jonah wanted to know if he intended to end the Tressalian Corporation’s reliance on Third World hardware sweatshops, as well as conduct the company’s other operations in a more ethical and responsible manner. On finding that Malcolm’s philosophy was in fact far closer to their own than to his father’s, Eli and Jonah took to spending long hours in the company of the silver-haired young man in the wheelchair, hacking into corporate and government databases and generally raising informational hell. Malcolm eventually proposed that the three take their activities to a new and more daring level, and the twins quickly signed on for what turned out to be the first in a long string of attempts to hold a mirror up to the global information society and point out its very serious flaws and dangers. The result of this endeavor was to become infamous, in the years that followed, as the “Fools’ Congress” of 2010.
Utilizing the Tressalian Corporation’s resources but working in strict secrecy, Malcolm and the Kupermans created an imaginary, digitally generated candidate for the U.S. Congress. The fact that they were able to convince the good people of southern Connecticut that their almost absurdly virtuous creature actually existed was remarkable enough, but when they went on to get the imaginary character elected to office through clever manufacture and manipulation of bogus background information and news footage on the Internet and in other information media—and when genuine news cameras failed to find any trace of the up-and-coming leader on the day he was supposed to report for duty in the Capitol—a national frenzy was touched off. So great was the reaction, in fact, and so dire the threats of punishment from federal authorities, that Malcolm, Eli, and Jonah did not again return to the business of disseminating false information until they’d finished graduate school and had begun to make names for themselves in their respective fields. When they finally did indulge their passion for zealous mischief again, however, the effects were even more astounding—and dangerous.
Joined now by Larissa, who had earned several degrees of her own in physics, chemistry, and engineering (as well as gaining some darker experience to which I shall shortly turn), the young men selected for their next target nothing less than the whole of the European continent, over which the clouds of internecine conflict had by 2017 once again gathered. Economic pressures brought on by the ’07 financial crash had finally forced the United States to withdraw the last of its peacekeeping troops from the Balkans, and the hatreds endemic to that region had once more become glaringly obvious. The European Union, as pusillanimous as ever when it came to matters that involved not money but lives, had refused to fill the expensive gap left by the Americans and indeed prevented the only member state willing to undertake the task, Great Britain, from doing so. Thus it came about that, for a decade after the crash, the Balkans endured massacres and reprisals on a scale not seen for generations.
In concocting a hoax designed to show how little the development of information technology had done or could do to defuse such ancient animosities, Malcolm brought onto his team both Fouché, under whom he and the Kupermans had studied at Yale, and Tarbell, an accomplished scientist and scholar but expert in nothing so much as highly advanced forgery. It may be difficult to believe that the great divisions that still mark Europe were set in motion by a few sheets of paper created by the burly, congenial Fouché and the frenetic, gleeful little Tarbell; yet I can now report that such was indeed the case. Julien used his skills to molecularly manipulate samples of ink and paper so that they duplicated examples from a century earlier, while Tarbell, using a text dictated by Malcolm, turned these materials into a series of notes supposedly written by the British statesman Winston Churchill to none other than Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist who shot the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and set in motion the chain of events that led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In the notes, Princip was “revealed” to have been a British agent and the assassination to have been a plot engineered by the ever-devious Churchill and several other British leaders to ignite a war that, they believed, would end in the triumph and expansion of their empire.
The idea was far more outlandish than the Fools’ Congress business had been, but once again—and this was the very crucial point—Malcolm’s speedy and thorough manipulation of all materials relating to the “discovery” of the notes, on the Internet and in all ancillary information systems, led to their being accepted as genuine long before careful observers could offer more skeptical or scholarly opinions. The Germans rose to the bait laid out by Tressalian’s team, declaring that they would not sit in the halls of European power with the British until London had disavowed Churchill and accepted full responsibility for the war. France, too, seized the opportunity to wax indignant, as did every other country that had been involved in the conflict. The British, for their part, were not about to accept the demonization of their greatest twentieth-century hero; and so the first of what became many tumultuous cracks went singing through the Union, causing riotous demonstrations and several threats of war.
Even Malcolm had not anticipated either the violence of the reaction that his European work sparked or the danger to which he’d exposed himself and his team. Investigations were launched not merely by police forces and academics but by the various European security services, especially the British; and none of the band wanted to end up with an SAS bullet in his or her head. Realizing that they were now playing on a new and much more deadly field, Malcolm decided to enlist the aid of someone who cou
ld help him organize his efforts along the lines of what they appeared to have become: a campaign.
He examined the dossiers of disaffected military officers from around the world, although it was Larissa who eventually brought Colonel Justus Slayton to her brother’s attention. And in learning why she’d been in a position to make that introduction, I discovered something that caused me to recoil in shock:
Apparently, after completing her university studies, this impressive, beautiful girl with whom I’d been so taken since the moment of our first meeting had become an international assassin.
C H A P T E R 1 7
The revelation hit me like a proverbial brick. I stood there for long, dazed minutes, attempting to regain my composure as Eli fitted me first for a pair of highly insulated but lightweight boots and then for a seemingly ordinary suit of coveralls that was in fact highly advanced body armor. Jonah, meanwhile, removed some kind of handgun from one of the many racks around me and, slapping the thing into my palm, said, “There—that seems like a good fit. How does the balance feel, Gideon?”
“How—” I mumbled. “How does the—what?”
“It’s a long-range neural interrupter,” Jonah answered, pulling my limp arm up and squeezing my hand around the weapon. “In other words, a stun gun, though an extremely sophisticated one. Painless, with absolutely no aftereffects. I’m assuming that since you’re in the medical profession, you don’t want to carry anything lethal. But you will need protection—”