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Thirty-Six

"Gary can explain it better," she said. "Do you want to sit down?"

"No, just tell me."

"Okay. Gary says you're some kinda composite. He thinks you must have hundreds of parents, maybe more than a thousand. It's difficult to tell because so many of the donors appear related."

"Donors?"

"Gary says it's like someone took genetic information from all your parents on all the worlds and combined it into a single Graham Smith hybrid. No one has a clue how. It's way beyond anything they can do here. Gary's downloading genetics data from every advanced world he can find to see if there are any parallels."

"I'm a hybrid?"

"Of all your parents. Some kinda Smith soup that blended together to form two hundred billion identical Grahams."

"Smith soup?"

"Sounds kinda icky, doesn't it?" She screwed up her face. "Howard came up with it and . . . it kinda stuck. Sorry."

* * *

They took the tube to Putney Bridge. ParaDim's office was over the river—a modern tower block ten storeys high, gleaming white concrete and black tinted windows. Annalise inserted her card, placed her palm on the security panel by the front door and stared into the retinal camera. Graham stood to the side, trying to peer inside but seeing only his reflection in the black glass doors. A green light flashed and the door opened.

A lone security guard watched them walk across the foyer. "Good morning, Miss Kent," he said. "Is this the gentleman to see Mr. Mitchison?"

Annalise agreed on both counts. "It is a good morning, isn't it?"

She seemed so happy. Graham couldn't understand why. How could anyone walk into a ParaDim office and feel happy?

He swept his eyes around the marble-clad foyer—so huge, so quiet, so deserted. Where was everyone? And why the one-way glass? He could see people walking by outside—ordinary people going about their business, shopping, sightseeing, taking the dog for a walk. Not one of them glanced his way. Not one showed any interest in the strange unmarked building in their midst.

"Keep this with you at all times, Mr. Smith," said the security guard, handing Graham a temporary pass.

"Come on," said Annalise, dragging Graham towards the lifts. "Watch this."

She placed her palm on a console panel. "Location required for Gary Mitchison."

"Gary Mitchison is in 5G, Miss Kent." A woman's voice—American, natural, not a hint of being computer-generated.

"Neat, huh? You can find anyone in the building." She held up her card. "We're tracked by these."

They took the lift to the fifth floor. The doors opened on a wide corridor that stretched nearly the entire length of the building, doors and entry consoles were dotted along both its sides.

But still no people. The corridor was deserted. There was no glass in any of the doors, no sounds from within or without save the steady hum of the overhead lights.

They found 5G, three doors down on their left. Annalise went through the motions, the green light flashed, the door opened. Graham wondered if he was supposed to do the same? Was there somewhere he should insert his pass?

Annalise flowed into the room. "Gary?" she called.

Graham followed. There were banks of desks and screens around the walls. Two men were talking by a terminal in the corner. They both looked round. Graham recognized the shorter of the two men—Howard Sarkissian. A feeling of guilt washed over him. Was the Howard that he knew dead?

"You must be Mr. Smith. Can I call you Graham?" said the other man—tall, early thirties, a hint of a Scots accent. He held out his hand and smiled as he advanced towards Graham. "I'm Gary and my friend in the corner is the redoubtable Howard Sarkissian."

"Charmed, I'm sure," said Howard, bowing.

Graham shivered. He'd heard the exact same words barely twenty-four hours earlier. The same words, the same voice, the same craggy smile, the same twinkle in the eye behind the same thick-lensed glasses. It was unnerving.

"Have you told him?" Gary asked Annalise.

"On the way over," said Annalise, smiling up at Gary.

"So, what do you think about your remarkable family history, Mr. Smith?" asked Howard.

Graham shrugged. He didn't know what to think.

"The data's still coming in," said Gary. "At the last count you had 472 fathers and 4,487 mothers."

Graham blinked. The numbers meant nothing to him. He had one father and one mother. The others were mere strangers, as anonymous as a page of Smiths in a telephone directory.

"We'd like to perform further tests. If that's agreeable to you," asked Gary.

"We know you can exchange your consciousness," said Howard. "We're wondering if you can exchange other material as well?"

"Like genetic material," said Gary. "Could the source of your remarkable genetic make-up be in part caused by a transference of genetic material."

"We're very much in the dark," said Howard. "Unfortunately, we're not geneticists."

"Which is why Tamisha's in the States busily recruiting. We're desperately short of expertise."

"Graham flipped yesterday," Annalise told Gary. "Is that any help?"

Gary looked from Annalise to Howard to Graham. He looked as though he could barely contain himself. "Before or after the medical?" The words came out slow and precise. "This is very important."

"After, wasn't it, Graham?" prompted Annalise.

Graham nodded. He didn't like the way Annalise was looking at Gary. She had barely taken her eyes off him since entering the room. And did she have to stand so close?

Gary exchanged glances with Howard. "This is exactly what we wanted," he said. "We can do a before-and-after test and look for anomalies." He turned to Graham. "You couldn't have come to us at a better time."

Three faces smiled at Graham. Graham tried to smile back but Annalise turned and touched Gary's arm. He watched her fingers curl and caress and move away. He felt betrayed and stupid and guilty and . . .

What was the matter with him! How could he be jealous? She was Annalise and yet he knew she wasn't his Annalise. She wouldn't step in front of a gunman and threaten to set herself alight. She wasn't Annalise Fifteen. Annalise Fifteen was unique. There could never be anyone else like her.

And yet . . .

And yet there she was, standing right in front of him. Annalise Fifteen in a different guise—maybe the girl that Annalise Fifteen would or could have been if circumstances had been different.

It was disconcerting in the extreme.

"I'll call Shikha," said Gary, picking up a phone. "She'll want to see you anyway. And she'll need time to coordinate appointments with the Cavendish."

"Where is Shikha?" asked Howard.

"Trawling the medical databases last time I saw her. Looking for any world that has experimented with ways of measuring consciousness."

Graham drifted away from the conversation flying around him and walked over to the window. The Thames was laid out below like a vast blue snake. Small boats skidded silently like many-legged insects—their oars moving in unison. Clouds scudded across the sky, cars filed slowly over distant bridges. Everything so normal, so far removed from CAT scans, electroencephalography and submolecular analysis.

Gary replaced the phone and spoke to Howard. "Shikha's already booked the Cavendish for this afternoon. She'll catch up with us in an hour when she's finished downloading."

Graham turned away from the window. "What's any of this got to do with stopping the resonance wave?" he asked.

Gary and Howard looked at each other.

"Ah," said Gary, for the first time looking lost for words. "Unfortunately, we're not sure. If it wasn't for the interest shown in you by other Resonance projects—specifically the ones that were closed down—I'd say, very little. There is no obvious link that we can find between you and the resonance wave."

"Other than the possibility that you were the result of an earlier resonance wave," added Howard. "After all, there are two hundred billion of you. You appear identical in all respects. Could that be the result of a resonance wave that forced all your counterparts to develop the same way?"

"The truth is—we simply do not know where or if you fit in. These Resonance projects—were they closed down because they were close to finding an answer to the resonance wave or because they were close to uncovering the truth about you?"

"We hope the former, but fear it's neither. All this could be an elaborate scheme of disinformation to send research teams down a blind alley."

"But, for the moment, you're all we've got," said Gary. "And, believe me, we've travelled the same path as every other Resonance project. We've considered creating an interference pattern to nullify the resonance wave. We've discussed the possibility of creating a counterresonance wave—something so large it could overwhelm all other resonance effects."

"But everything stumbles on one very important hurdle. We just don't know enough about resonance."

"We've tried simulations," said Gary, "but we can't find an accurate model. Schenck's Law is more idea than hard fact. There are no equations to verify. We have approximations, ideas, but there are too many holes, too many variables that we don't fully understand."

"And we've trawled the advanced worlds," said Howard, "downloaded every model we can find . . . but," he paused, "even their simulations—ones we barely comprehend—don't predict the intensity that we see in this resonance wave. ParaDim projects are being created ten times faster than predicted. There has to be a missing component."

* * *

"What do you think of our setup, Graham?" asked Gary as they waited for the lift to take them down to the ground floor. Annalise had persuaded the two men to give Graham a guided tour while they waited for Shikha to arrive.

"I thought Adam Sylvestrus didn't like modern architecture," said Graham.

"Who?" Gary looked puzzled, his brow furrowed for a few seconds. "Oh, him! He doesn't exist on this world. Kenny Zamorra runs ParaDim here."

Graham wondered what Kenny Zamorra was like. An Adam Sylvestrus clone? Worse?

"ParaDim's not evil on this world, Graham," said Annalise. "They do a lot of good. They've really made a difference in the Third World with their drug programs. They've cut through a lot of red tape. Saved a lot of lives."

"I don't think you could call ParaDim evil on any world," said Howard. "Not the company. There are a few individuals who put profit before compassion but the majority of ParaDim employees only want what's best for the world."

"Does that include New Tech weapons?" asked Graham.

"No," said Howard. "The proliferation of New Tech weaponry is an unqualified disaster. But not every world has to repeat that mistake. We haven't here. There are no plans to open a weapons research program anywhere within ParaDim."

Graham wondered if that was true. And if anyone would tell Howard if it wasn't. ParaDim was caught up in a resonance wave. If one person didn't create a New Tech weapons project, someone else would. It was inevitable. Whatever anyone's good intentions.

"ParaDim is totally committed to solving this resonance problem," added Gary. "Believe me, I should know. The Resonance project is top priority. Kenny Zamorra said so himself. Whatever we need we can have. No questions asked. If we want people, ParaDim brings them in. If we want more computer capacity, it's there the next day. Money's no object. The only thing that counts is finding a solution."

"After all, who wants to live in a world that's going down the tubes? No one benefits from that scenario—you, me or the CEO of ParaDim," Howard added.

Graham shook his head. It all sounded so reasonable—even Annalise believed it—but Kevin said that all ParaDim boards were affected by resonance. Why should this one be different? Was there a boardroom coup just around the corner?

* * *

Gary placed his palm on the entry panel to Room G and stared into the retinal camera.

"Where is everybody?" asked Graham, looking up and down the corridor. It all looked so deserted. He hadn't seen anyone else since he'd entered the building.

"It is quiet, isn't it?" said Howard. "But you get used to it. Most of the building is filled with computers and equipment. Everything's automated. I doubt there's more than twenty people in the entire building."

The door slid open. Gary stood back to let Annalise enter first. A giant dimpled sphere dominated the room. It was like a matte black golf ball twelve feet in diameter sitting on a similarly colored plinth.

"And this is where it all begins," said Gary, waving a hand in the sphere's direction. "There are only twenty of these on the planet at the moment. This is the heart of ParaDim."

Graham half expected to see it pumping. He walked around it, wondering if he was allowed to touch, wondering what it was. It was so black and strange-looking—light seemed to slide off it, there was hardly any reflection from the overhead lights or from the windows. He let his hand hover near the surface, as far as he dare go; any closer and he was sure his hand would be sucked into some deep, cloying void.

At the back of the plinth an array of pipes—ten of them, each about a hand in circumference—ran along the floor before disappearing into the wall.

"Cabling to the front-end computers," explained Gary. "Imagine this black beauty as a giant sausage machine—raw data from parallel worlds being sucked in at one end and distributed about the building in neat packages for us to translate and analyze."

"This can access parallel worlds?" Graham continued his slow circumnavigation. There were no features on the sphere at all—other than the dimpling. There were no lights or dials or switches or even a line showing where two pieces had been joined together. Had the sphere been cast in one piece? And one piece of what? Metal? Plastic? Something else?

"Isn't it just the most mind-blowing thing you ever saw?" said Annalise, joining him on the far side.

"The technology underlying this machine is phenomenal," said Gary, his hand lightly brushing the sphere's side. Graham held his breath and peered at Gary's fingers, expecting them to come away stained black.

"It's a century beyond anything we should be able to produce," continued Gary. "We're only now adapting some of this technology for use elsewhere—New Tech computers, New Tech data storage. Another year and we'll be able to speed up the process a millionfold."

"But at the moment," said Howard, "we've a bottleneck at the processing end. We're sucking down data far faster than we can process it. Most of this building is filled with mainframes and disk drives trying to keep up."

"Isn't it neat?" Annalise said to Graham. "You can see which world's being accessed from that terminal over there."

"Which world is this one?" Howard asked Gary, who was standing by the terminal.

Gary leaned over and read from the screen. "024 544 691 337."

"Which means like less than nothing to everyone on this side of the room," said Annalise, smiling. "What kind of world is it?"

Gary tapped at the keyboard and a new screen came up.

"One of the more advanced ones," he said.

"According to Gary," Annalise inclined her head towards Graham, "most worlds are more advanced than us. We're an average, could-do-better world."

"Which is what you'd expect," said Howard. "The sample will always be skewed in favor of the more advanced worlds because they're the ones with data. What are you going to find on a less-developed world? Without the technology to broadcast or store data electronically all you'll get is static."

"This one's not much better," said Gary, peering at the screen. "It's one of the Chinese worlds. Most of the interesting files are in a distant variant of Mandarin. They take ages to translate and even then I'm sure we miss many of the inflections."

"Do you get many different languages?" asked Graham.

"Do they ever," said Annalise. "Tell him about the code freaks."

"Code freaks?" asked Graham.

"There's several worlds who encrypt everything," said Gary. "Even their radio broadcasts. We're not sure if it's a commercial consideration to make their customers buy decoders or a security matter."

"Very difficult to decrypt," said Howard. "But, with help from other worlds, we did it."

"Then there are the worlds with languages we've never met before or ones that have diverged radically from our own. Some use character sets we're not familiar with. Some use octal or duodecimal numbering systems. We even have worlds where all we can access is a white noise. It's not static but we can't tell if it's data, interference or something else. There's something there but we can't even begin to ascertain what it might be."

Annalise moved away from Graham and ran an absent-minded finger along a bank of screens on the wall behind her.

"What's this?" she said, turning to Gary. "Your name's all over this screen."

Gary walked over and peered over her shoulder. "Is that still there?"

"What's still there?" asked Howard.

"I was doing a 109 search over breakfast."

"What's a 109?" asked Annalise.

"Something we do more often than we should," explained Gary. "It's fun to see if any of your counterparts are famous. One of mine won a golf tournament in Ohio last month. Made me think I should take up the game."

"It does have more serious applications," added Howard. "It's part of the general name search against the other worlds. Developed for the Census project, though some of us"—he looked at Gary "—have found other uses for it."

"You're familiar with the Internet?" Gary asked Annalise.

"Duh!" she said, raising her eyes.

"Well, imagine the dross you pick up on an Internet query and multiply it by a thousand billion. You have to apply filters to the search to make them manageable. So we have preprogrammed filters. And Type 109 checks the media files. If any of your counterparts made the papers, a 109 scan will find them."

"Can I have a go?" asked Annalise, pulling the chair out and sitting herself down in front of the screen. "Where do I type my name?"

Gary took Annalise through the procedure.

"You can select name and date of birth, place of birth, country of birth, age range, parents. The tighter the search criteria, the tighter the match."

"I'll do it for all the girls. There can't be too many Annalise Mercados in the universe."

"I'd enter as much as you can. Some of the worlds out there have records going back several millennia."

Annalise selected U.S.A. and entered a one-week range for date of birth. The machine hung for ten seconds, twenty.

"You realize I can check how accurate this is?" she said. "If Annalise One's name doesn't come up for solving the De Santos kidnapping, you're busted."

"It'll come up," said Gary. "Don't worry."

A new screen came up. Slowly, names appeared. Several entries appeared for Annalise One—Psychic Saves Kimberly, Kimberly Psychic Questioned, Kimberly Psychic Gets Own Show, Psychic's Show Cancelled.

But it wasn't one of those headlines that drew Annalise's attention.

It was the one below.

 

Telepathy Project Ends In Failure.  

 

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