He nodded, and one by one the rest of his team gave their bleak reports: they all said pretty much the same, that shares were plummeting, the market was moribund, that a hiatus existed until the Serene made their next announcement and the restructuring of world markets and global industry commenced.
Towards the end of the meeting he said, “I, along with every other head of industry in the US, have been summoned to the White House tomorrow to meet our illustrious, but impotent, president. Apparently we’re meeting with ‘representatives’ of the Serene, and there we will learn what the future holds for us, if anything. Word is that the existing infrastructure will remain, though altered, with experts in place to ease us through the interim period of… adjustment.”
He looked around the table. He was met with understanding nods, the occasional timid smile.
“Very well, that will be all. I’ll convene a meeting in five days to go over what we’ve found out. Thank you all for coming.”
As the boardroom emptied, he turned to Lal. “Fetch me a coffee. And then there are one or two further things we need to discuss.”
“SO WHAT’S THE story with these sightings of so-called golden men?”
He sat before the floor-to-ceiling window, cupping his coffee in both hands, and stared out down the length of Manhattan. Nothing at all seemed to have changed out there; life went on as usual. It might have been a week ago, with no one dreaming of the Serene…
“There were rumours at first. People reported seeing tall, silent golden figures. They were stationed in elevated positions, staring out, unmoving. Then footage started coming in.”
Lal tapped his softscreen and routed the image to the wallscreen. Morwell swivelled his chair and stared at the scene. A cityscape, somewhere in America, and on a tall building a golden figure, staring down with authority, a certain silent majesty.
“They remain in position for up to six hours,” Lal said, “then simply fade away. People have tried to get near them, but can only approach to a distance of a couple of metres, then they come up against a… some kind of barrier, sir. An invisible, irresistible force.” He tapped the screen again and the image changed. The next one showed a young man approach a golden figure on a hilltop. He reached out, his outstretched hand hitting something solid, then patted his way around the figure like a mime-artist.
“Okay,” Morwell said, “I get the picture.”
“I have our best people looking into the manifestations, sir,” Lal assured him.
Morwell nodded. “And what’s the situation with the random factor weaponry you told me about?”
Lal cleared his throat. “There have been… developments, sir,” he said, and tapped his softscreen.
“I had Adams in weapon technology and Abrahams in computing put their heads together and they came up with something. The basic idea is to utilise the idea of unintended consequence, or accidental ramifications, to develop an effective weapon that would circumvent the Serene’s charea.”
He tapped his screen again and the image on the wall showed a young man garbed in what looked like a prison uniform. He was seated in a chair with a skull-cap fastened to his shaved head. The man’s eyes looked dead, or drugged.
“We found a volunteer from a local psychiatric institute. He has a long history of suicide attempts and self-mutilation, occasioned by manic depressive episodes. He also happens to be terminally ill. We cleared it with the family’s lawyers, and agreed to pay out a generous compensation package.” Lal smiled. “The young man was the perfect guinea pig, as it were.”
Lal indicated a computer terminal to the left of the image. “What we have here, sir, is the working end of the device. It’s basically a computer system that randomises the results of certain initial inputs.”
“In plain English, Lal.”
On the screen, a white-coated figure swung a keyboard on a boom so that it hovered before the seated young man. The image froze.
“Put simply, the subject presses one button on the keyboard before him. Now, this command initiates over a thousand possible results. The initialisation begins a sequenced command cascade, the majority of which subsequent commands will result in the electrodes in the subject’s skullcap failing to work. However, just one command in the millions generated will result in the desired effect — the electrodes firing and bringing about the subject’s death.” Lal smiled. “It works on the principle that an action taken might, somewhere down the line, result in an accident — and accidental deaths are not proscribed by the Serene.”
Morwell frowned. “But doesn’t that mean the subject will have to hit the command millions of times to achieve the desired result?”
Lal smiled. “No. The single command initiates a million such commands within the system’s program.”
“I see,” Morwell said, leaning forward. “Ingenious. And?”
Lal tapped his screen and the still image unfroze.
The young man leaned forward, reached out and attempted to tap a key on the board before him. His hand froze and he spasmed.
Morwell grunted. “But did the subject know what he was trying to do?” he asked.
“That’s the worrying thing, sir. He didn’t.”
“And yet he was stopped by the Serene, by their charea, from going through with the action…?” He shook his head. “The Serene have got that one covered, too.”
He sipped his coffee and turned to the view over Manhattan. He recalled something Lal had told him late last night. “And what about these ‘representatives’ of the Serene? They’re human, I take it?”
Lal sat side-saddle on the desk. “Apparently, yes, sir. I’ve been collating reports from around the world and it appears that an unknown number of humans have been selected, randomly, to facilitate the work of the Serene on Earth. As of yet, the identities of these people are not known — we only know of the ‘representatives’ because a few individuals spoke of being approached by golden figures and being told of their selection, though they have no recollection of being ‘deselected,’ as it were — these memories have only been recovered later when these people became suspicious of ‘lost’ hours and underwent hypnotism. It appears that the Serene are keen to keep their representatives incognito.”
Morwell leaned back in his chair and considered what Lal had just told him.
He pointed at his Indian facilitator. “Lal, I want you to start an investigation. This is priority. It’s important to know who these ‘representatives’ of the Serene are, what the exact nature of their work is, and why they were chosen. Work on it.”
“Yes, sir. Is that all?”
Morwell nodded, and Lal hurried from the boardroom.
Alone, he contemplated the events of the morning, one of the most disastrous business meetings he’d ever chaired.
Still, not everything had gone wrong.
When Cheryl had copiously urinated over him that morning, he’d managed to achieve a brief erection.
CHAPTER TEN
DAWN WAS LIGHTENING the skies over the Bay of Bengal when the midnight train from Delhi pulled into Howrah station.
Ana Devi, dressed in the shalwar kameez she’d stolen from Sanjeev, and a new pair of sandals bought from her savings, jumped from the last carriage, squeezed through a gap in the corrugated iron fence, and made her way quickly across the goods yard to where her friends would still be sleeping. She high stepped over the rusty tracks, lifting the leggings of her shalwar so as not to dirty the bottoms.
She was still trying to come to terms with what had happened to her over the course of the past day.