The Lucifer Code (3 page)

*

Barley Hall Research Clinic

Cambridge, England

It was moments like this that restored Miles Fleming's belief in the possible, which had been sorely tested over the last eleven months. He turned to the young man sitting beside him. 'The arm okay, Paul?'

Adjusting the blue latticework Thinking Cap on his head, Paul stared at the anatomically correct figure on the upper half of the split computer screen in front of him. 'Fine, Doc. No pain at all.'

'No trace twinges?'

Paul grinned. 'Nothing.'

'Okay, let's see you move it again. Try raising it above your head.'

watching the on-screen figure lift its right arm, Fleming checked the horizontal lines spiking furiously on the lower half of the screen. 'Excellent, Paul. Your brainwaves are looking strong. You've got the Alphas under good control now: Lower the arm. Great.' He turned to his research patient, who was frowning with concentration as he willed his thoughts to control the arm on screen. The twenty-six-year-old wore a Nike sweatshirt and faded jeans. His right sleeve hung empty from his shoulder.

Four years ago Paul had lost his arm in a factory accident and until he had come to Barley Hall he had been tormented by severe pain in his absent limb. In Fleming's experience many amputees suffered phantom pain. It emanated from the brain, which had a virtual 3D map of the body in its neural net and often continued to send signals to a limb long after it had been amputated. In Paul's case the NeuroTranslator had helped identify the brainwaves sending pain signals to his missing limb, enabling Fleming to suppress them. He had responded so well to the treatment that a month ago Fleming had decided to extend it beyond stopping the pain signals to boosting the control signals.

'Okay, so you're pretty good on screen.' Fleming turned to the latex mannequin in the corner. 'How about handling Brian?'

Paul grinned. 'No problem.'

'Pretty confident, huh? Let's see you do the egg test then.'

'The what?'

Fleming stood up and went over to the body surrogate. 'Brian' was sexless, but otherwise every prosthetic muscle and joint beneath its latex skin replicated those of the average human body. Fleming retrieved a box from the pocket of his crumpled white coat, opened it and removed an egg packed in cotton wool. He moved to the small table beside the mannequin, placed the egg on one end of the polished wooden surface and the box on the other. Both were within reach of Brian's right hand.

He walked to the other side of the high-ceilinged Victorian room, and stopped at the glass window separating the Think Tank from the observation room. He bent to the workstation, and made some adjustments to the keypad by the translucent cube. 'Right, you're connected to Brian. Ignore the rest of its body. Just focus on the right arm. Lift the egg and put it back in the box.'

'From here?' said Paul, who was ten feet from the egg.

'Just think about moving your missing arm. Like you did with the figure on screen.'

Paul grimaced in concentration.

'Don't try so hard. Imagine that Brian's arm is your arm.'

At that moment the mannequin's right arm bent at the elbow and the hand shot forward, almost hitting the egg.

'Careful. Take your time.'

Slowly the hand opened, moved closer to the egg and gripped it. Paul flashed Fleming a grin.

'Not bad, not bad at all,' said Fleming. 'That's the easy part, though. Now you've got to lift it and put it into the box. Pay attention to the feedback sensors in the fingertips.'

The mannequin's hand raised and moved towards the box. Then it closed suddenly and crushed the shell, dripping yolk and white on to the polished wood.

Fleming laughed and patted Paul on the shoulder.

'Harder than it is on screen, isn't it? Good first effort, though.'

There was a knock at the door and Staff Nurse Frankie Pinner poked her head into the room. An attractive thirty-year-old with dark hair and a wide smile, she was the senior nurse among Fleming's team of doctors, scientists and nurses who helped run his research section in the east wing of Barley Hall. 'Dr Fleming, it's four o'clock. You wanted to check the ward.'

Fleming glanced at his watch. 'Thanks, Frankie. Could you stay and help Paul finish his exercises?' He turned back to Paul. 'Keep practising,' he said. 'Once you've mastered Brian you'll be ready for your own arm.'

He left the Think Tank, turned right into the east-wing corridor and pushed open the first pair of swing doors on the left.

The Barley Hall research ward was an imposing oak-panelled hall with tall lancet windows overlooking the ornamental lake and landscaped lawns to the rear of the clinic. It had been converted from what had been a gymnasium in the Victorian manor's days as a boys' boarding-school. The ward was composed of six roomy private cubicles surrounding an open central area with chairs and a television. It accommodated patients who had to sleep over during clinical trials. Most stayed a few nights before returning either to their homes or to one of the larger specialist hospitals, such as the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire.

Through the half-open screen doors of the first occupied cubicle he could see a girl lying asleep in bed. A nurse was standing over her. 'How is she?' he whispered. A year ago, two months after her sixteenth birthday, her boyfriend had taken her for a ride on his motorbike. He had walked away from the crash with bruises, but her spine had snapped at the base, paralysing her from the waist down. Yesterday, Fleming's team had inserted electrical implants in her lower spine and legs. With the NeuroTranslator, he hoped that her brain would be able to bypass the damaged spinal cord and control her legs directly.

The nurse looked up. 'She's doing fine, Dr Fleming. Should be ready in a few days' time for her first stint in the Think Tank.'

The adjacent cubicle was Paul's, and the doors to the next two were closed. Fleming opened each a crack to look at his charges. Both occupants were also asleep. He checked their monitors and left them undisturbed before moving on to the fifth cubicle. As he approached this one his usual detached professionalism wavered.

Fleming was only thirty-six but he had become hardened to suffering because he'd seen so much. He knew better than most how a charmed life could be destroyed in an instant. In his career he had come to understand one thing: suffering was arbitrary, and there was no point putting your faith in gods to protect you from it.

For all his fatalism, however, he still found it hard to accept the harsh reality of what had befallen the occupant of cubicle five eleven months ago. It reinforced his conviction that permanence couldn't be guaranteed. His family and friends, particularly ex-girlfriends, often accused him of wanting change for change's sake, but that wasn't true.

He had once been in love when he was at Cambridge, and had been prepared to devote his life to her. But she'd married a lecturer twenty years her senior. Fleming's heart had been broken, but he'd survived. Since then he had enjoyed a number of relationships, although none had yet rekindled in him the spark of true passion. More than one girlfriend had left him because he couldn't commit to marriage. Every time it became serious he shied away. Change was adventure. Change - even bad change - offered possibility, and striving for the possible, regardless of the odds, was his token antidote to suffering.

Most of the patients on this ward, along with the many others he had seen over the last few years, had been told by a doctor that their condition was hopeless, that any form of recovery or positive change was impossible. And he hated that. Particularly when it came to the occupant of cubicle five.

'Miles!'

Virginia Knight was standing in the doorway of the ward. The American director of Barley Hall was in her fifties but looked younger. Tall and slender, she was elegant in her classic navy suit, her fair hair cut short and feathered in a style that softened the angular lines of her long, intelligent face. She took off her glasses and smiled at him. 'Can I see you for a moment in my office? It's kind of urgent.'

Fleming glanced at cubicle five. It could wait. The patient wasn't going anywhere.

*

The director's office

Located in the central section of the Victorian mansion, the office was a grand room with ornate cornices, foot-high skirting boards and a splendid bay window overlooking the front driveway and manicured lawns.

Miles Fleming crossed his arms and sat back on the large chesterfield that the insomniac director often used at night. 'Virginia, you're not being serious! Since when was a migraine urgent?'

Virginia Knight rose from her desk and moved to her Italian coffee machine. She made two espressos and handed one to Fleming. 'It's important, Miles,' she said. 'Trust me.'

Fleming shook his head. 'But I need the Think Tank and the NeuroTranslator tonight. Paul's in there now, and Rob needs to be prepped for his communication trial tomorrow. The research schedule's overloaded as it is. After the success with Jake we're getting huge interest in the NeuroTranslator. We've already got a mile-long queue of research patients and I can't let anyone jump to the front and push the programme back -

particularly someone with a headache, for Christ's sake.'

Virginia Knight sighed. 'Miles, you're forgetting that both Jake and Rob jumped to the front of the line.'

'That was different. You can't compare their cases with this.'

'It was different for you - that's why I never challenged my predecessor's decision to turn a blind eye to your priority-shuffling - but according to the Barley Hall Trustees' strict research protocol, the rules were bent. All I'm saying is that, as director of Barley Hall, I've got to do what's best for the clinic and you've got to make time for this patient. Tonight.'

Miles Fleming sipped his coffee. He had nothing against Virginia Knight, but she wasn't the reason why he had come to Barley Hall eight years ago after a Cambridge medical degree and Ph. D. in neurology from Harvard. Unlike Knight, who was a doctor turned administrator, her predecessor had been a pure researcher, a true scientist. The great, and now sadly late, Professor Henry Trier had been one of Fleming's professors at Cambridge. And when Trier had taken over the Neurological Trust - a research council set up by private business, Cambridge University and the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville - Fleming had leapt at the chance to join him.

Eight months ago Trier had had a fatal heart-attack and Knight, who already held numerous executive and non-executive directorships, was appointed his successor. Fleming understood why she had been chosen: she excelled at management, publicity and fundraising, but he worried sometimes that she put commercial concerns above patients and research.

'Setting aside the issue of line-jumping,' she said, reaching for a magazine on her desk, 'let me explain the benefits of seeing Dr Amber Grant tonight.' She passed the magazine to him. 'First of all, you do realize who she is?'

'Sure, I've heard of her.' And that's what concerned him. Amber Grant was rich and celebrated, and in Knight's view that made her especially worthy of treatment. The magazine was Time and the front cover featured the airbrushed picture of Bradley Soames that appeared in every publication, and next to him the strikingly beautiful face of his business partner, Amber Grant. Beneath their picture was the line 'Turning the Spotlight on the Light Wizards'.

Fleming flicked through the magazine. On page six he found an interview with Amber Grant, timed no doubt to coincide with the much-hyped launch of the Lucifer soft-screen. Fleming's own NeuroTranslator was based on the Lucifer optical computer and dependent on the technology that Grant and Soames had developed. Despite his annoyance, Fleming was intrigued, and more so when he turned to a profile of the enigmatic and reclusive Bradley Soames - the man many regarded as the genius behind Optrix.

'Go ahead,' said Knight. 'Read it.'

Fleming skimmed the article. Much of it regurgitated the now famous legend of the man, but he was still fascinated by some sections - particularly the one on Soames's early years:

Bradley Soames suffers from xeroderma pigmen-tosum, commonly called XP; a syndrome caused by a mutant gene that means even the shortest exposure to the weakest sunlight causes skin cancers. Born into the wealthy Soames oil dynasty - during a full solar eclipse, so the story goes -many psychologists have wondered how Soames might have developed if he hadn't been so cursed.

He would certainly have been less eccentric but it is doubtful that he would have become so phenomenally successful. It goes beyond irony that this brilliant young man who has lived all his life at the mercy of light should be the one to cage its power and harness its speed.

From his early childhood, confined indoors to protect him from ultraviolet rays, Soames was obsessed with light photons, the subatomic quantum particles of electromagnetic radiation that made up the very thing that imprisoned him. Focusing his intellect on light, he was convinced by the age of thirteen that photons could be harnessed to process, store and transmit data.

At sixteen Soames outgrew even the most gifted private tutors his parents hired to teach him at home, so he attended Cal Tech in Pasadena, one of the leading technical colleges in the world, graduating with top honours two days prior to his eighteenth birthday - younger then than most students applying for the course. But he hadn't enrolled to pass exams: he was looking for a partner. He was seeking someone of sufficiently high intellect to understand his concepts and someone with the requisite drive, social skills and character to do what he couldn't do - go out into the light and help realize his dream. That person was to be a Ph. D. student researching particle physics: Amber Grant.