The Lucifer Code (12 page)

Half of Amber wanted to tell Soames about her dream, but there was something about his almost clinical interest in her condition that stopped her. 'I suggest we keep my treatment discreet,' she said. 'We don't want the investors getting unduly concerned about my health. I think we should link my collapse at the presentation with stress and concern for my mother, and tell the Optrix board I'm taking compassionate leave. I know at least two people competent enough to run the main projects. Any other issues can handle themselves while I'm away'

Soames nodded. 'You seem to have everything under control. I suggest you tie up any loose ends and get back to your doctor.'

She smiled. 'Thanks for being so supportive, Bradley'

'No sweat,' he said, his scarred face creasing unnaturally as he returned her smile. 'I understand how important it is to look after your health.'

As she turned to leave, she heard him clear his throat, the signal that he was on the verge of uttering what he liked to pretend was a casual afterthought. 'Just an idea,' he said, 'but don't let Fleming be too linear in his diagnosis. If I were you I'd encourage him to think outside the box. You know, explore every eventuality, however bizarre.' He shrugged. 'Just a thought.'

Amber frowned. It was a good thought and echoed her own concerns about Ariel so closely that she felt uncomfortable. 'Thanks, Bradley' she said. 'I'll bear that in . . .'

But he'd already zoned out, immersed in his computer screens. That was the thing about Bradley: just when you thought he was being human and caring, you got a sharp reminder that he didn't think like other people.

*

The Red Ark. 33deg 26' S, 16deg 12' E.

The next day

Aboard the Red Ark, the Red Pope drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk as he waited for the KREE8 high-resolution holographic plasma screen to fizz into life. When the Doctor appeared, a blood-red cruciform brooch pinned to his white coat, the screen gave his face an eerily effective three-dimensional appearance. Cardinal Xavier Accosta studied it for a second, careful to hide his disgust. He needed this brilliant man and was grudgingly grateful for his dedicated and selfless support. Not only had the Doctor secretly helped fund the startup of Accosta's electronic Church but his technical expertise had enabled it to spread at a speed that had baffled the world. His genius had also been instrumental in fulfilling Accosta's dream of making the Soul Project a reality. But he still couldn't bring himself to like the young man.

The Doctor aggressively protected the secrecy of his allegiance to Accosta's Church, and although he always deferred to Accosta there was insolence in his eye and tone, which Accosta disliked. He was the only person who could address Accosta as 'Your Holiness' and sound condescending.

Accosta stared at him and smiled. 'You have something to show me, Doctor?'

Bradley Soames bowed his head deferentially. 'Yes, Your Holiness. I've conferred with Frank Carvelli and the third member of the Truth Council on all one hundred and eight trials.' A pause. 'The last experiment's the most representative of our progress.'

The plasma screen next to Soames buzzed into life. A woman was lying on a laboratory couch, her smooth shaven head encased in a glass sphere with a visor like that on an astronaut's helmet. Embedded in it was a small concave square of smoky glass resembling a tiny television screen.

The visor was up, revealing the woman's pegged-open eyelids. Lightly tinted lenses had been inserted in her eyes covering the eyeballs.

At first Accosta didn't know who the bald woman was, but as the camera zoomed in on her he recognized Mother Giovanna Bellini. Outraged, it took all his control not to cry out. He glared at Soames, trying to read his face, but the scientist's blank expression revealed nothing. 'How dare you do this?' he demanded. 'On whose authority?'

Soames shrugged apologetically. 'But, Your Holiness, I had no choice after Monsignor Diageo informed me you'd told him she was endangering the project Accosta's jaw clenched. He hadn't expected Soames to go this far. Monsignor Diageo was always discreet whenever necessary measures needed to be taken, but Soames seemed to enjoy testing him. 'She was loyal. I didn't expect you to - do this.'

'What did you expect me to do with your troublesome priest, Your Holiness?'

Silence.

Soames smiled. 'Mother Giovanna didn't die in vain, Your Holiness. By watching her death you'll see how much we've already achieved.'

Accosta hated Soames then. He hated his youthful arrogance and his relish for the ruthless decisions that so taxed his own soul. But most of all he hated Soames for not allowing him to pretend that betraying Mother Giovanna Bellini, one of his most loyal subjects, wouldn't result in her death. He had learnt to accept casualties of war in the navy and had resigned himself long ago to making sacrifices to protect God's work, but he still felt guilty.

'Dr Soames,' he said curtly, 'in future on all matters regarding the Soul Project you will act only on my authority. Now show me the experiment.'

Soames nodded. 'As you wish, Your Holiness.' He cleared his throat. 'Before we start, some background: through quantum physics we've learnt that human consciousness can exist both as a particle, our physical brain, and as a wave, the thoughts in our mind. Physics also teaches us that energy can't just disappear, it has to go somewhere. Life energy's no different. And through recent quantum experiments we now know that at the moment of death our life force - our consciousness - leaves our body as a coherent collection of subatomic photons. To detect these photons leaving the body we use a modified photon-detector screen. Interestingly each individual leaves a unique wave interference pattern. To avoid static the subject's head is shaved and to make the life force visible to the human eye we use polymer filter contact lenses, Flavion gas and green-light spectra to modify artificially the electromagnetic radiation frequency.'

Accosta stared grimly at the screen, eyes locked on the woman's, forcing himself to watch.

On screen a green gas invaded the glass sphere, giving her face a sickly actinic aura. On the right of the screen he could just see the electrode attached to her left temple. Offscreen he heard a countdown.

Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.

The electrode sparked, followed instantly by a flash of light so fast and intense that even on screen it made Accosta blink. Suddenly, like a blown bulb, Mother Giovanna's eyes were blank beneath the lenses.

Accosta was sweating as he watched those unblinking eyes, his heart pounding in his chest. Despite his guilt the thrill was almost sexual. What had she seen when she died? What was she seeing now?

'Let me talk you through what happened, Your Holiness. This was typical of all the latest trials.'

The screen changed to reveal the same experiment from a wider angle. Accosta could now see Giovanna Bellini's whole body lying on the laboratory couch. At the foot of the couch were two monitors.

'I'll play it back again but this time slowed down over two hundred thousand times. Light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Only by slowing the film can we track how successfully we channelled the life energy. I'll start from when the electric shock's administered, which sadly is the only way we can pinpoint the exact moment of death.'

This time when the lightburst occurred Accosta saw it as a spark emanating from the woman's eyes. Somehow a single spark passed through both tinted lenses simultaneously before colliding with the screen in the visor, leaving a zebra pattern of white stripy lines on the previously dark monitor.

'Note the quantum wave-particle duality exhibited here. For reasons we don't yet fully understand, life energy leaves through the eyes, allowing us to re-create the classic double-slit experiment. As the life energy leaves Mother Bellini's body it passes through both eyes before hitting the photon-detector screen in the visor. See how the screen records a classic wave interference pattern as the collection of light particles, or photons, leave the body and interfere with themselves. This stripy pattern is unique to Mother Giovanna Bellini, a barcode that's effectively her soul signature.'

Accosta nodded, absorbing the technical commentary as he followed the spark's progress past the screen and into the outer layer of the sphere. Here, although the film had been slowed to a snail's pace, the spark raced along every millimetre of the densely coiled translucent fibre in the outer layer in the blink of an eye, momentarily lighting it up like a halo. Then the light was gone.

'This is the problem,' said Soames. 'We can now identify and channel the passage of the Bose-Einstein condensate but-'

'You mean the soul,' Accosta said.

'Yes, Your Holiness. The Bose-Einstein condensate's merely the correct quantum term for the boson system that forms the soul.'

Accosta frowned. 'So in plain English you're saying that you can channel the departing soul but you still can't hold it long enough in the head sphere to get a trace?'

'I'm saying it'll take time, Your Holiness. In the same way electricity always seeks earth, this energy always seeks the heavens. Stopping it for even a millisecond so that we can get a trace is difficult. You must appreciate that proving the quantum duality between brain and mind, or body and soul, is a significant achievement. Just proving the existence of the quantum soul as a boson system of photons is a breakthrough.

'But tracking the soul goes beyond the realm of quantum physics and into the realm of quantum metaphysics. The window of death is so small it's virtually impossible to take the learning from one experiment to the next. Each individual's death is different, so we're reduced to trial and error, hoping eventually to stumble on the right tracking frequency. If people died more than once we'd be able to focus on one person, running self-correcting iterative experiments each time they died. We'd find the locking frequency of the Bose-Einstein condensate - the soul - in no time.'

'But people don't die more than once. So how close are you to locking on to the soul?'

'Real close. The principle of what we're trying to achieve already exists in optoelectronics. In the same way that an optical computer captures a coherent collection of light photons encoded with data, we should be able to capture an intact soul as a coherent boson system of life photons for long enough to lock on to its frequency. We just need time.'

'We haven't got time. What other contingencies are in place?'

'The Truth Council's explored all related technologies, however diverse, to see which may prove useful. The most promising are being monitored and offered significant donations so we'll gain the inside track on any that show potential, but this technology is still our best bet.'

Accosta frowned. 'Frank Carvelli said you were confident of a breakthrough.'

'There's an unexpected recent development that I'm watching closely but I want to confirm a few aspects before I discuss it with you.' He paused. 'However, perhaps you want to call a halt for a while, take stock . . .'

'No. No. Not at all,' Accosta said hastily. 'If anything, you must speed up the experiments. What we're embarked on is too important to delay and if your confidence in the technology is justified we're tantalizingly close. We're almost there. There's too much at stake.'

'But after your reaction to Mother Giovanna's death, surely we should . . . ?' Soames trailed off.

Accosta glared at him, hating his need for this man, wondering, not for the first time, at the scientist's real motives for helping him. Keeping his voice icily controlled, he said, 'Now that you have killed Mother Giovanna, Dr Soames, it's even more imperative that we succeed with the Soul Project. I'll not allow her death to have been in vain.'

*

Surrey, England.

The next day

Sitting in the front pew in the old church, Miles Fleming kept his eyes straight ahead and told himself again that when he returned to Barley Hall he would discover a rational explanation for why his brother had spoken six minutes after death. It troubled him more than he could articulate.

The small ancient church, close to his parents' home in Surrey, smelt of incense, beeswax polish and the dust of the past. Its dark wooden pews were worn and its stone wall-plaques commemorated local parishioners who had died in wars that were now centuries past.

Someone once said that funerals were for the living and not the dead, and it felt that way to Fleming today. Despite his atheism, he had unquestioningly arranged a church service for the sake of his parents and Jake. His mother and father needed to believe their son was going to a better place, and the ritual made it easier for Jake to understand and accept what had happened.

The church was full and people were standing at the back. As well as family, many of Rob's friends were there: an eclectic mix of ramrod straight military types in full uniform, people in suits and even a few climbing bums with badger-eye tans and crumpled fleeces had converged on this small village south of London to pay their respects and mark Rob's passing.

When Fleming carried the coffin into church with five of Rob's army colleagues he had felt an overwhelming need to shout that he'd let his brother die and had heard him speak after death. But instead he'd helped the others to lay the coffin before the altar, then taken his seat at the end of the front pew next to Jake and his parents. Sitting there now, he could feel Jake's warm thigh next to his and hear his breathing as the child stared at the coffin. Fleming was aware of the Anglican priest's measured tones but he didn't hear his words. All he could focus on were his nephew's ragged breaths, as he listened for any sign that the little boy was breaking down.