InterstellarNet: Origins (30 page)

Where the accursed Matthews clan was concerned, Dennis took no chances.

He had waited too many years for Joyce Matthews to vacate the Chief Technical Officer slot at the ICU, then too many more years for her to tire of being its Secretary-General. He would have realized his objectives long ago had she not clung like a remora to the S-G job. And once she finally shifted to the parent org, the United Planets, Dennis
still
had had to endure the family’s fan club inside the ICU.

So now a nosy financial reporter, the subject of a nervous call from Aaron O’Malley, turned out to be named Matthews. The Martian Biosciences exec had not suspected an ICU connection, but the reporter’s name raised obvious questions. When Gil Matthews
did
prove to be part of that damned family, Dennis preemptively set up a telecon.

The connection opened on the dot. If Gil Matthews’s pudgy avatar was any guide, the Loonie would fare badly on the Earth’s surface. Dennis, from an even-lower-gravity birthworld, now bench-pressed two hundred kilos. He felt smugly superior—

Until thoughts of Kevin Aldrich intruded. After nearly a quarter century, the memories still rankled. Remember that lesson, Dennis chided himself. Weak does not mean stupid.

“Thanks for proposing this meeting, Mr. Feulner,” Matthews began.

“Dennis is fine. Thank you for accepting. It’s not easy for a startup to get press attention.”

There was an unavoidable round-trip delay, almost three seconds. “Dennis, I’d like to begin by validating my research. You are CEO of Protein Sciences, correct? Moved over from the ICU?”

“Right.” That much was in Dennis’s public bio.

“All right, let’s start with the state of the industry.”

They spoke for a while, Matthews asking fairly vanilla questions, Dennis offering little beyond what anyone could learn with a bit of surfing. Accomplishments and limitations of genetic engineering. Medically therapeutic tweaks to existing proteins. Past attempts, generally failures, always expensive, to accurately model entire proteins. How engineered proteins probably would have been the basis of human nanotech—and how the introduction of mature Centaur nanotech, nearly a century earlier, had drained the funding from such research. The Holy Grail of modern medicine: from-scratch protein engineering.

Nothing
about Protein Sciences’ private aspirations.

Matthews cleared his throat. The rasping came across as artifice rather than poor avatar control. “If proteomics is so high-risk, why leave the ICU? The Secretary-General gig is not without its charms.”

Your family would know, pal. Dennis did not let his resentment show. “You left government after a long career, too.”

“Touché. And for a position with less cachet than CEO.” A knowing smile. “But neither am I competing with a deep-pocketed megacorp behemoth like Life Engineering. How many gazillions did they bid to win that Moby auction?”

The bigger they are, the larger the stain when they go splat. “Perhaps my esteemed competitors overpaid.”

The chubby reporter mulled that over for a while. “Not my area of expertise. Then again, neither is it yours. Before entering management weren’t you a computer type?”

Before, during, and still. Was it too soon to assert urgent business and end this? Clearly, O’Malley’s concerns were overblown.
This
Matthews was a nobody; his questions were more annoying than probing. “I’ll comment on that and take another few questions. I’m afraid that an unexpected matter has arisen requiring my attention. The short answer is that Protein Sciences is more than me. I have access to a wealth of biotech expertise.”

“Ah, yes. There are your backers.” Matthews’s avatar, which had been fidgeting with a virtual toy plucked from its imaginary desk, seemed to focus. “Martian Biosciences also bid in the ET auction we discussed. As you say, I was a United Planets civil servant. I’m very familiar with the conflict-of-interest laws for recently separated UP managers. So I know: You’re too newly departed from the ICU to work for Martian Biosciences on anything related to an ET auction.

“Your brand-new company isn’t owned by Martian Biosciences—just by its key executives. A cynic might ask whether a sham company had been set up to finesse the UP conflict rules.”

A chill shook Dennis’s body and, to his dismay, his avatar’s. “I would hope you aren’t that cynical.”

“I try,” the damned Matthews said.

Dennis could not help but notice, even as he declared himself out of time, how aggravating the reporter was.

■□■

Aareehl had always found Earth with its teeming billions a perplexing place. The Blindside disaster only confused him further.

Bids had arrived for its mineral-extraction technology. Aareehl had written in its solicitation that it would consider payments other than the customary up-front lump sum. It had encouraged royalty agreements, profit sharing, and equity stakes. The more flexibility Aareehl showed at first, the more it hoped to collect over the longer term. So it had expected creativity.

It got strangeness.

Most blatantly odd were matters of overall quality, as though the submissions had been cut-and-pasted from unrelated proposals. It could ignore those flaws, as peculiar as they were. What it could not disregard were the rosy forecasts for future earnings and royalties. Aareehl could not reconcile those generous profits with Earth’s newfound poverty, but it lacked the source information—and the computing resources—to be certain. Answers could come only from detailed econometric modeling.

It directed the first-round bidders to explain the economic rationales of their offers. What choice did it have? It needed urgently to free up some of its limited resources. The ICU, even Dennis Feulner himself, was pressing Aareehl to open for bid its recently received biotechnology.

■□■

The bigger they are, the larger the stain when they go splat.

Dennis sipped sherry, amused with the image. He had worried for nothing about Gil Matthews. Sure, the man was irritating. What Matthews wasn’t? Other than the ownership of Protein Sciences—and that, hardly a state secret—the little man knew nothing.

Splat.

Life Engineering, Inc. had made a
bad
investment. Since everything was going so well, why not make some extra money on the side? Dennis put through a call to his broker.

“Meiko Ashigawa,” she answered. Her virtual office was large, teak-paneled, book-filled, and impeccable. Her avatar wore a smartly tailored tangerine suit. “Hello, Dennis.”

She could be in her shower for all he knew. He liked to think she was. “Hi, Meiko. I’d like to place a sell order. A thousand shares of Life Engineering.” LEI was selling for 152 and change per share—for now.

“There’s no LEI in your account, Dennis.”

“I know. Sell it short.”

Her avatar squared its shoulders. “Here’s the brief form of the obligatory warning. ‘Short selling entails substantial risk to the investor, including the possible loss of capital.’ For the long form, I’m ’netting you the full disclosure text. That’s an SEC and a company rule.”

Dennis fumed about the nanny state as he digitally signed the brokerage’s forms. He looked after himself. He always had.

If Meiko hadn’t been so cute, he would long ago have started placing his trades online.

But not even executed forms on file could deflect Meiko’s lecture. “Allow me,” he interrupted.
Because
I
can be succinct.
“Short selling is the sale of borrowed stock, a bet that the price of the asset will decline. Bet right, and I’ve sold high and can buy back low, pocketing the difference. Bet wrong and whoever I borrowed the stock from will demand the shares back.”

Except for a frown, Meiko let
bet
pass without comment. “Dennis, when you buy stock, you can lose only what you paid for it. Selling it short, your potential losses are without limit. And since short sales eventually end with the return of the borrowed-and-sold stock, you’ll have to leave funds on deposit with the firm to guarantee the repurchase. If the stock goes up, you’ll have to deposit
more
money to cover your increased exposure. The fancy term when that happens is a margin call.”

How could this bet
not
be right? Life Engineering had paid a fortune and committed to huge royalties—for Moby technology that he was
so
close to stealing. Once Protein Sciences announced its “equivalent” competing technology, with no need to pay royalties, LEI could not possibly compete. Their stock was bound to crater.

That was more than Meiko needed to know. “Are you done coddling me?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Then place my sell order, please.

■□■

The bidders had submitted their expanded proposals for mining technologies, leaving Aareehl more confused than ever. No new light had been shed. Implausible offers, more urging from Feulner to offer its newly arrived biotech wares, the ongoing capacity bottleneck…

Confused and overwhelmed.

On Tau Ceti Four subclusters of a consciousness occasionally reached dissimilar conclusions. But never for long. Inconsistencies invariably resolved themselves as units of the mind exchanged light signals among themselves. One could trace any transient intra-mind misunderstanding to vision-related anomalies like fog, eclipses, and sensory defects.

Humans perceived the world far differently. Earthlings could hardly see, after all, being blind across most of the spectrum. Alien senses complicated their worldview, and no wonder. How might a human attempt to resolve the seemingly irreconcilable? With hearing? Smell?

That way lay only more confusion.

Aareehl redirected its thinking. It needed a
broader
view of the problem, not an alien view. It needed somehow to assess, independent of the confusing proposals, the commercial value of its mining technologies.

In time, a way forward occurred to Aareehl. It would purchase orbital multispectral scans of the catastrophe-altered planet.

■□■

“Priority interrupt. Urgent. Repeat, priority interrupt. Urgent.” Atonal wails framed the words.

Dennis woke instantly to the direct stimulation of his auditory nerves. The blonde from the club stirred, tugged the sheet over her head, and let out a snort. Well, he had not picked her up for her sophistication.

The alert was from the “ICU” AI surrounding the sandbox that in turn contained Aareehl-clone. Moat, in a bit of whimsy, Dennis had nicknamed that AI. What was wrong now? “Go ahead,” Dennis subvocalized.

“After receiving updated bids for its mining technologies, Aareehl ordered a great deal of multispectral satellite imagery. Earth observation data.” A mind’s-eye image of a slowly spinning globe, selected regions glowing softly, accompanied the answer.

Aareehl seemed most interested in areas around the Mediterranean, in the regions most disrupted by the Blindside asteroid. Floods, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes had rendered useless all past maps and surveys—

Or it would have obsoleted the old data, had there actually
been
an asteroid strike.

Hmm. Suppose Aareehl was sanity-checking the imaginary bids against “today’s” availability of ores. Old pictures photoshopped with random floods and a big crater at the bottom of the Med wouldn’t suffice. Aareehl was probably checking for changes in the accessibility of old mines. Dennis could imagine that investigation involving topography, geological stability, the carrying capacities of existing roads and railroads—and his off-the-top-of-the-head list was surely incomplete.

Damn! Responding would not be as simple as writing a few news stories or encyclopedia articles for Moat to paraphrase as needed. To enron credible images for Aareehl meant research, planning, and
serious
number crunching. Pulling it together would take time—
not
compatible with the clone’s reasonable expectations. The Moby must expect at least some of its order to be filled with standard products straight from a commercial imagery archive.

Dennis sketched out the project, breaking it into pieces that his staff, entirely uninformed, could execute in complete ignorance. He identified milestones where the worker bees would report interim progress. His companion, oblivious, snored. “And Moat, suspend Aareehl-clone until we’re ready.”

Another bleeping delay to explain to his impatient backers.

Dennis tried to get past the anger. The sooner he completed this forgery, the sooner Aareehl would bring this ridiculous mining auction to a close. Then, finally, he could focus the bleeping agent on important business: Moby biotech to enable the engineering of custom proteins.

5

The remote-sensed data had arrived, and at first Aareehl was pleased. The imagery was excellent, with minimal cloud cover and none of the glitches to which space-borne observations were prone. Sun glints from surface water, cosmic-ray-induced noise spikes in the sensors, worn gears momentarily sticking as the camera pointed and panned…. There were so many ways in which observations could be degraded.