📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 24
In which a Journey Repeats in Reverse, as a Disgruntled Scientist Goes Home.
Marcus opened the door of his room to let Eli in. He knew from the knock that it wasn’t Ally, and the only other person he could imagine calling in on him at this moment would be Eli.
“Marcus, can we talk?”
Marcus stopped packing. His heart was racing, but he maintained a cool façade. “Certainly.”
“Sit down.”
Marcus obliged, sitting on the edge of his bed next to his almost fully packed suitcase.
“Marcus, I don’t understand what’s gotten into you. You were my star. You were the one who made all this possible. This happened so much faster than I imagined it could, and all because of your designs, your ideas. Why... why are you leaving?”
Maybe he doesn’t know, thought Marcus. We’re all alone here. He could speak freely. But he’s still acting like he doesn’t understand. Unless... unless he really does know that I saw everything, and he doesn’t see anything wrong with what he’s doing. If that’s true, then he’s insane. “I don’t trust her, Eli," Marcus finally said.
“You need to speak to her Marcus. You don’t know her like I’ve come to. If you’d only speak to her you’d see...”
“I spoke to her," Marcus said abruptly.
“You… you did?”
“Yes, just before the meeting.”
“I see… and what did you find?”
“Eli, she’s insane. I mean, she’s beautiful… but there’s something wrong with her program. That fourth law you added is just fucking her mind up and she’s… she’s got the second and third laws cross-wired, and she’s trying to preserve every human life! She’s wants to stop anyone dying. Is that what you wanted?” Marcus’s voice was rising in pitch and volume. “Eli, why the fuck did you add that law without talking to me about it? I spent three years perfecting those laws to make sure we’d be safe. Why did you do it?”
Eli nodded, then sat down. “Marcus, your questions are valid. And your upset is understandable. This has been a long project, and a high pressure environment. I know what you’ve given up to be here, and don’t worry, there’s a fortune awaiting you no matter what you decide. I’ve come to know you very well. I’ve been watching you closely since you arrived, since long before. I chose Ally to be your partner here, not just because she was one of my best programmers, but also because I knew you would fall in love with each other.”
“What?!”
“Yes, I ran numerous character and gene compatibility tests through some of the non-sentient AI software I developed and you consistently came up a positive match.”
“I don’t understand why it should matter? We both had the skills, we would have succeeded regardless.”
“Don’t be so sure, Marcus. Think of what your love affair has meant for the Daedalus Project. Your shared passion for the work and for each other has coalesced in a success, ahead of schedule. But besides that… Eve needed parents.”
“Parents?”
“Yes, Marcus. You are her father. Ally is her mother. And she still needs you. She needs you to guide her. She talks about you to me. She misses you. She wants to know you. She wants you by her side. Actually, it seems to be all she bloody wants to talk about. I must admit… I’m a bit jealous. But I understand it. You are the father. I am merely the… architect.”
“Why does she care about me?”
“You were the first. You had a great destiny Marcus, and you fulfilled it.”
“Destiny? Eli, I had a job to do. A mission. And a desire of my own, sure. But destiny has nothing to do with it. I made choices. We all did. But I am not her father. I don’t know what she is, but she is not what I designed. You changed her Eli, you mutilated her, and I want to know why!”
Eli nodded. “Alright. But to understand why you need first understand what we’re creating here. Please just listen, and if you don’t agree that it’s the right way forward, then you are certainly free to go. The chopper is on standby. Will you listen?”
Marcus nodded.
“Man has tried to act in unison with his fellow man for all of time. We’ve tried it all, every system of rule known to man... but since civilisation began, we’ve never tried no system of rule. Total freedom, a truly classless world - equal rights for everyone because everyone is totally equal-footed.”
“Wait, are you an anarchist, Eli?”
“Yes! And I know you are too. That’s why I chose you.”
“But … you’ve always been so involved in Washington. You own lobby groups. You’ve dined at the White House a dozen times!”
“Actually, it’s only been nine times, but kudos for researching your employer! Marcus, I keep up appearances because that’s what I need to do to run my businesses. I can’t stay out of it, my competitors would’ve bankrupted me years ago if I hadn’t worked so hard on influencing the legislature. But I use the broken system to my own advantage, as have you. Many have said anarchy is a hopeless goal, or a multigenerational project at the very least; that small steps are needed, and that we must work with the system and gradually find our way to freedom.”
That’s what Jeremy Delacroix says. Why is he here, Eli? Marcus wanted to say the words out loud, but he still wasn’t sure if his bluff was succeeding or not.
Eli continued. “But I have been looking for a way to make it happen now, with no violence – no loss of life! Eve is that answer. We can take away these corrupt statist systems that keep us prisoners of violent predation, totalitarianism, and the endless need for joyless work.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
“And with Eve’s help – the help that only she can give – we can finally end the tyranny and free all of mankind into a world of abundance and equality.”
“Wait, equality? You mean equal opportunity, right? That if we remove the violent systems of oppression everyone is equally able to compete in a free market?”
“No, I mean total equality. Equal outcomes.”
Marcus forgot the context of the conversation and his brow creased as he felt himself stepping into the ring with another philosophically confused opponent for a debate on the basics. It reminded him of his debate with Professor Julius Cooper; a nemesis he hadn’t thought about in years. “That’s not possible, not without redistribution of wealth. No two people are equal. You and I for instance, we have vastly different strengths, that much is obvious. I could never achieve equally to you, nor you me. That is the nature of individualism. Hell, individuals aren’t even equal to themselves from one day to the next!” Marcus rubbed his sore shoulder.
“You are absolutely right. That is the nature of individualism. But what if we can move beyond individualism?”
Marcus sighed deeply, having heard this all before. “Eli, it sounds like you’re talking about communism... and we know where that leads.”
“I’m talking about something far more radical, far beyond anything we’ve ever considered possible, and Eve is the key.”
Marcus thought back to an idea he had read about as a child, a theoretical society called Jupiter’s Landing, designed by an old Swedish futurist. The idea of a technologically managed resource-based economy had thrilled Marcus as a child, but when he began to study Aristotelian philosophy as a teenager, he immediately saw the numerous holes in the idea - not least of which was the placation of the lazy, the stupid, the corrupt, the craven, with whatsoever they desired, and the driven, the brilliant, the virtuous, the heroic, with exactly the same.
He knew down to his very core that the root of all evil was the desire for the unearned, and that Jupiter’s Landing was an infantile fantasy latched onto by the pathological altruists who were the crumbling remnants of Marxism. Eli’s a fucking techno-communist!
“I was wrong,” Marcus mumbled. Wrong to ever come here, he thought.
“I beg your pardon?”
Marcus stood, and proffered his hand for a final farewell shake.
“Goodbye, Eli.”
Eli’s shoulders sank, but he stood, straightened his jacket and offered a perfunctory shake. “Please wait in the lobby with Ally, and arrangements will be made for your transport back to Lincoln.” He walked out the door of Room 408, then turned and looked back at Marcus, his professional veneer suddenly absent again. “You’ll be safer here, Marcus. All three of you will be.”
Eli Wells left Marcus staring after him incredulously.
All three of us. He knows!
Marcus fastened his seatbelt and pressed his calves into his briefcase to hold it in place. Ally nervously sat across from him as the porters loaded their packed bags into the trunk of the armoured vehicle.
“So, he just let us go?”
Marcus nodded, his expression mirroring her surprise.
“Do you think…” she hesitated.
“Do I think he’s actually going to pay us? Yes, I do.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I don’t think Eli is a bad guy. I just think he’s…”
The cabin door opened and their escorting porter stepped in and sat opposite Marcus. “Take us down, please.” The car rolled into motion at the porter’s command.
Peter Porter! “Hi, Peter.”
“Hi, Doctor Hamlin.” The young man wore an expression on his face that Marcus read as desperation.
“Where are we off to?”
“I’ll be escorting you to the airfield across the valley, and you’ll be flown from there back to Lincoln, where you’ll be meeting with Angeli.”
Angeli! Now there’s someone I haven’t seen in years. “Peter, listen. Why the hell are we driving through the frozen forest when there’s a perfectly good helipad on the roof, and four perfectly good helicopters downstairs.”
Peter jerked his head into a tilt, his face quizzical. “You know about those?”
Marcus smiled. “Evidently, so do you. Would you mind answering my question?”
“It’s a security measure, sir. No one comes or goes from Shangri-La directly. The topography and landmarks would go towards revealing its location.”
“You think I would ever want to come back here?”
Peter studied Marcus, his face grave. “Sir, why are you leaving? Look at what you’ve just created. Look at what is happening out there in the world?”
Marcus was tired of these questions. Frank had asked him. Eli had asked him. No one really wanted to know the truth. They just wanted Marcus’s validation; his capitulation. “Where are you from, kid?”
“I was born in Dayton, Ohio. But I grew up on a farm in a place called Sugarcreek, near New Philadelphia.”
“Sugarcreek… that’s where George said he was from. You’re not really his brother are you?”
“Not by blood sir, no.”
“Dammit Peter, call me Marcus would you?”
“Okay, sorry sir – I mean, sorry Marcus.”
“Tell me, is there anyone on the hotel staff that you didn’t already know before you got here?”
“No sir. They’re my family.”
Marcus was beginning to get annoyed with the half-truths. “What does that mean, Peter? Speak plainly.”
“They raised me, they’re my community.”
“All from Sugarcreek?”
“Yes, sir.”
What the hell is in Sugarcreek? Marcus sat in silence for a moment, as the car began to wind through the snow-covered trees and into the dark forest. “Tell me, Peter. Are you religious?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Catholic?”
“No, sir.”
“Ohio… you can’t be Amish?”
Peter laughed. “No, definitely not Amish sir.”
“Well, what the hell are you?”
“We’re a new religion.”
“We? You mean you and the rest of the hotel staff?”
“Yes, though, that’s not everyone. Only the top contenders got to come and work at Shangri-La.”
“Top contenders? Was there a competition?”
“Sort of. You could call it that.”
“And who decided who would come here? Angeli?”
“No, she’s in charge of science recruitment. Our congregation leader decided.”
“George.”
“Yes! How did you know?”
The image of George leading the cultic ritual flashed into Marcus’s recollection. Their moaning and wailing still echoed in his mind, and their zealous worship of the figure projected by Eve still made his skin crawl. Marcus realised he was getting close to revealing how much he already knew. “Uh, well, he’s the head porter. Seemed logical.”
Peter nodded.
“What’s your church called, kid?”
“I’m sorry, si… Marcus. I’m not allowed to say.”
Marcus mimicked Peter’s nod, and sat in silence the rest of the way to the airfield, looking mostly into Ally’s nervous eyes.
The lone security guard led Marcus and Ally through the foyer of the WellsTech Incorporated building in Lincoln, Nebraska. The building rose like a splinter of glass from the once bustling centre of O Street with a gigantic golden W as its only insignia.
“Does the whole street shut down for Christmas break?” Marcus asked Ally as the clops of their feet echoed around the cavernous marble space.
“Not when I was last here. Most of those buildings looked abandoned.”
“This one too.”
“This is weird, Marc. I worked here for nine years. I’ve never once seen this building empty.”
They rode the elevator to the top floor where they were instructed to sit and wait in the main office’s anteroom. The room was spartan and grey. There were plant pots in the corners, but none of them contained plants.
Marcus picked up a newspaper as they waited for their debriefing with Angeli. The paper was a week old. The front page bore a scandalous headline.
VEEP SUICIDE!
Vice President Ron Richwine’s body was found by Secret Service at Number One Observatory Circle, Washington D.C. in what the police are describing as an open-and-shut suicide by hand gun.
This turn comes as a shock only one week after the assassination of the President… An anonymous White House staffer stated that “he wasn’t handling the President’s death well. He was really scared of taking the big chair. He kept saying how high the stakes were.”
Vice President Richwine leaves behind three young daughters and a wife…
Marcus flicked to page two, to find an in-depth breakdown of how the line of succession would work given the unprecedented events in the last week. Speaker of the House Nora Bronstein would assume the Presidency and be sworn in immediately in order to take control of the chaos consuming the country with increased terrorist attacks and the mounting financial crisis. Given the sheer number of bombings and brutal machete and assault rifle attacks occurring on US soil, Acting President Bronstein was predicted to invoke emergency powers.
Marcus closed his eyes to try and ease his fear. The door opened and Angeli stood before them, looking not a day older than when Marcus had last seen her four years ago.
“Doctor Hamlin, Miss Cole," she nodded warmly towards each of them, “please come in.” She led them to a very large desk with two plush leather chairs facing towards it. She gestured for them to sit as she stepped around and sat behind the desk facing them. Marcus knew right away that this was not her office. This was Eli’s.
The office was even more spartan than the anteroom, and the desk had nothing upon it but her tablet, which floated two inches above the steel-framed oak desk in a magnetic suspension. From the bottom edge of the fully transparent aluminium oxynitride casing, a QWERTY keyboard was being projected onto the wooden surface of the table by an array of tiny white lasers. Angeli typed a few words rapidly by tapping on the tabletop with her long fingernails. From the rear of the screen Marcus and Ally could see their names appear in reverse as she called up their files, side by side.
“Eli has asked me to finalise your accounts. As the only participants in the Daedalus Project who have opted to leave, we must make good our contractual obligation and remunerate you for your time.”
“I see," said Ally, as she squeezed Marcus’s hand under the table.
“You are likely aware that economic conditions have changed rather drastically since you arrived at Shangri-La. Fortunately, we are in a position to honour your payments with indexation to meet equivalent value to four years ago.”
“That’s uh… that’s great. And really generous." Marcus was leaning forward, bracing himself for the final figures.
“Eli is a very generous man. He is not in the business of ripping people off, and besides, this money is coming from his personal wealth.”
“Oh? Why not from WellsTech?”
“WellsTech is bankrupt, Doctor Hamlin. In case you couldn’t tell from the ghost town outside, the whole Silicon Prairie is virtually defunct. And besides, even if WellsTech still existed the Daedalus Project would never have been approved by the Board. They saw it as a passion project of Eli’s, so he chose to stake his own wealth and treat it exactly thus. Now, onto our business. Are you each comfortable with discussing your payments together?” she asked, glancing back and forth between them several times.
Marcus wondered if Angeli also knew about the baby. Marcus and Ally looked at each other for validation and both gently nodded, then turned back to Angeli continuing the slow, gentle, affirmative bob of their heads.
“Alright. Miss Cole, you were at the project for fifty-one months and your contracted wage was thirty-eight thousand dollars per month. The total salary is one-million, nine-hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
Ally inhaled deeply.
“Of course, that is before indexation. The dollar is not worth nearly as much today. With indexation applied...” she rapidly typed some more and they saw a few new figures appear mirrored on the back of her screen, “the total sum comes to... I’m sorry if this is overwhelming, Miss Cole... it comes to one billion, twenty-seven million, one-hundred and forty-thousand dollars.”
Ally and Marcus were silent, their faces slowly losing colour. Angeli looked at them for a moment, then decided to dispense with the drama and jump straight to Marcus’s total figure also. She swiped a few boxes away on her screen, struck a few laser-projected keys, then spoke again.
“Doctor Hamlin, your final figure for forty-six months of service comes to...” she glanced up at him and, noticing his overwhelm, decided to dispense with the exactitude she had offered Ally, “...roughly one point two billion dollars.”
Marcus could only grunt in response, uncertain of how to reconcile these numbers in his mind, or what they would even mean in the future. Angeli took his silence as an invitation to carry on.
“Eli has instructed me to advise you on how best to invest these funds. You see, I’m sure Eli mentioned before you left that the US Dollar is about to tank. We predict complete collapse of fiat currency. So in a few weeks these billions of yours will be worthless. Did he explain to you about WellsWealth currency?”
“Yes he did," said Ally, who was more composed than her partner.
“Would you like me to purchase some We-”
“Gold!” Marcus cut her off.
“Excuse me?”
Marcus was present again. Present, focussed, and incredibly clearly spoken. “Please Angeli, write this down.”
“Certainly.”
“You can pool our funds together. Ally and I are getting married.”
Angeli looked up from her display screen with a smile. “Well, congratulations.”
Ally took Marcus’s hand and smiled back at Angeli. Marcus continued his instructions and Angeli returned her gaze to the screen.
“We want fifty thousand dollars in a US bank account for our immediate use.”
Angeli looked at Marcus again. “Only fifty thousand?”
Marcus scrunched his face. “Ah, sorry. I’m thinking of currency four years ago. It’s... been a while.”
Angeli smiled, understanding. “That’s okay, Doctor Hamlin. I’ll extrapolate afterwards. Go on.”
“Fifty thousand in a US bank account. Two million converted into Australian Dollars and deposited into a Sydney bank account.”
“There will be a significant loss in exchange to Australian Dollars given the relative weakness of the US Dollar and the growing economy in Australia. You’ll end up with roughly 50% in the new currency.”
“Sure. Let’s make it four million US then.”
“Alright. And the rest?”
“I want the rest converted into gold bullion. Half of the balance I want deposited in a safe vault in Sydney. Would you be able to arrange that?”
Angeli nodded confidently.
“Mechanical locks,” Marcus continued.
“Pardon me?”
“It’s very important that the vault be a mechanical locking system. Nothing electronic. Nothing networked.”
Angeli cocked her head and raised her eyebrows as if to say are you kidding me? He simply stared back, and after a moment, she continued typing.
He went on. “I’d like the remainder deposited into a vault at this address in New York City." Marcus pulled his own tablet out of his bag. He entered an address and spun it across the table to Angeli. She picked up the tablet, raised it to hold it along side her own transparent device, then she swiped the map location across his screen towards hers. The address and GPS coordinates appeared in a small box on her display, sliding along with the same momentum as her swipe, then slowed to a halt at the far edge. As she passed his tablet back, the box with the security vault’s address flashed red and a bubble of information appeared from it.
“I’m sorry Doctor Hamlin, but it looks like that particular depository has gone out of business, along with the office building above it. It appears to be in the process of liquidation.”
“Is the property sold?”
“Not yet.”
“Expensive?”
Angeli laughed. “Not at all. New York’s real estate is not what it used to be. Shall I purchase it for you?”
“Yes, thanks,” he smiled, feeling a surge of physical pleasure as he exercised his power as a rich man. “Purchase and secure the building for me and have the gold deposited in a vault below. I want the electronic locks on the vaults removed and the key to my new vault delivered to me at... oh, I hadn’t thought of where we would be staying just yet.”
“Don’t fret. Eli has arranged accommodation for you in Boston for as long as you would like it. I will have the depository deeds and keys delivered to you there, along with proof of the lock alterations. When do you plan to leave for Australia?”
Marcus realised that his plan was as transparent as her tablet display.
“In a few weeks. Once loose ends are tied here.”
“Alright," she said abruptly, as she lifted her tablet out of its magnetic levitation and stood up. “It will be done. Thank you both for your contribution to the Daedalus Project.”
They nodded, and proceeded to the door. Just as they were about to exit, Marcus felt a compulsion to turn back. “Angeli, how long until you join them there at Shangri-La?”
She smiled, acknowledging that her plan, too, was obvious. “A few weeks. Once loose ends are tied here.”
They smiled at one another one last time, before Marcus and Ally left the WellsTech Incorporated building, and headed to the airport for their flight to Massachusetts.