Lucifer (aka the Lucifer Code) (2001) Read online

  Amber smiled. 'My mind keeps wandering and I'm tired. Does that matter?'

  The nurse shook her head. 'Not at all. The stimuli are only used to get a broad read of mental activity and to keep you amused. Brian's fuzzy logic is flexible. If you need to drop off to sleep, don't worry about it. To be honest, for the baseline scan we get the most useful diagnostic data from the sleeping brain anyway. Good night and sleep well, Dr Grant.'

  'Night. Thanks.'

  She turned back to the screen and completed the crossword. Her eyelids began to droop and she didn't register the puzzles changing on the screen. Drifting in that hyper-lucid state between wakeful-ness and sleep, her mind returned to her sister.

  On and off over the last thirty years she had been disconcerted to feel that her life wasn't entirely her own. Whenever she tried to forge any deep relationship she was frequently accused of being mentally 'miles away' or with 'someone else'. It seemed that, asleep or awake, Ariel was always buried somewhere in her thoughts, as if Amber couldn't let her go, couldn't get on witih living her life because it wasn't entirely hers to live. Only when she threw herself into her work and her research had she found peace, a distraction from the other person in her head.

  The eight-year-old little girl she had loved more than she loved herself.

  The eight-year-old girl who was once part of her.

  The eight-year-old girl who had died for her.

  *

  The ward. Barley Hall

  When Fleming entered cubicle five in the research ward, the first place his eyes went to was the ECG monitor. 'How is he, Emma?' he asked the nurse sitting by the apparatus. 'His heart steady?'

  The nurse smiled. 'He's stable and should be fine for tomorrow.'

  'Thanks. You take a break. I'll look after him for now.'

  Turning to the bed, Fleming saw that the nurse had dressed his brother in his favourite faded black Ralph Lauren polo shirt and jeans, and his hair had been cut short in the military style he had favoured when he was in the army. Sitting upright on the motorized bed in his cubicle, Rob still looked good, although the shirt and jeans hung loose on his once powerful body.

  Fleming walked round the bed to be directly in line with Rob's good eye. 'Hi, Rob - your cognitive exercises have been great and your heart's behaving itself so we should be on for the trial tomorrow. I've got a great surprise for you now, though. Would you like to see it?' He looked down at the computer screen directly below Rob's face. Sixteen words were displayed on a four-by-four grid. They had formed Rob's vocabulary since he had suffered the stroke to his brainstem, which had paralysed all of his body except his left eye. Using electro-oculographic signals, Rob's eye movements directed a cursor on the screen. When he had chosen a word, he blinked and a computer-generated voice said the word.

  'No,' the computer voice said.

  Fleming laughed. 'In that case I won't show it to you, you ungrateful bastard.'

  He could tell that his older brother was trying to smile - and that the smile was as strained as his own banter. Rob had always been his hero, an action man who was always fitter, stronger and faster than he was. But now when he looked at Rob he felt a crushing sadness and remembered Billy French.

  Billy had been a friend when they were in their late teens. They had all shared a passion for climbing, and every summer they bummed around Europe trying their luck on the big Alpine peaks. Rob was already an exceptional climber, while Billy and Miles were merely enthusiastic amateurs. Nevertheless, with Rob as leader, they tackled most levels of climb up to ED, extremement difficile, and had even scaled a few ABOs, abominable ascents. It was on the notorious Nordwand of the Eiger that it happened.

  It was the end of the summer. Fleming was nineteen and due to start his medical degree at Cambridge. Rob was talking about joining the Royal Marines. Billy was still deciding what to do with the future, which stretched out before them, shimmering with endless possibilities.

  It had been one of the wettest Augusts on record and the mountain face was plastered with rime and loaded with unstable snow. But they had come to climb the Eiger and nothing could deter them. On the lower reaches, near the top of a buttress known as the First Pillar, Billy made a misstep. His ice axes and crampons sheared out of the rotten ice and he was airborne. The belays should have held him but the ice screws shot out of their moorings.

  Rob and Miles dug in deep and stopped themselves being pulled off the face, but Billy fell until the rope went taut, then swung in a pendulous arc and hit an overhang, which broke his neck. In seconds he went from being a fit young man pondering his future to a paraplegic with none.

  On the endless, harrowing descent down the mountain, Rob and Miles nursed Billy's trussed body and tried to keep him conscious, hoping to meet someone who could go for help. But no one appeared until they were almost at the base. On the last drop, as they lowered Billy, Rob turned to Miles. 'If this ever happens to me, Milo,' he whispered, his tanned face as pale as the snow, 'just cut the rope and let me go. You're never more alive than when you're close to death. But you're never more dead than when you're stuck in a life you don't want. So let me go. That's what I'd want. A little pain, don't mind that, a little fear and then nothing.' Two days later, Billy died in hospital.

  The Fleming brothers had continued climbing together even after Rob married Susan seven years ago. They had travelled round the world in their search for new mountains to conquer, and often felt as though Billy was with them, especially when the going got tough. Fleming had never forgotten his brother's words, and had always thought that if he did come to harm, it would be on a mountain or in combat. It never occurred to him that Rob would have a stroke while driving a Ford Mondeo up the Ml to Leeds.

  As he wheeled his brother's bed out of the ward and into the corridor, he told himself again that tomorrow he would help him. He recalled the countless times Rob had pulled him from a crevasse or helped him reach a difficult peak. Now he would support his brother on his toughest climb.

  He had already helped Jake to walk again. Tomorrow he 'would help Rob to talk.

  He hoped this was what Rob wanted. Their parents, especially their mother, wanted it. Their mother was an Anglican, who had become even more devout since the accident and believed with an almost blind fervour that in time, with God's love and Miles's skill, her eldest son would be restored to full health.

  Fleming knew, though, from witnessing laborious communication sessions with psychologists, that Rob wanted to die. His stroke had caused the car crash that had left him paraplegic, his wife dead and his young son's legs crushed. He had tried twice to broach Rob's depression with their parents, but each time they had been unwilling to talk about it. 'It's just a phase,' they said. 'He'll feel different when he starts to get better.'

  And when Fleming had tried to explain that there was no guarantee Rob would get better, his mother had smiled bravely and said that God and she weren't giving up on him just yet. 'God will guide him.'

  Like when Rob had had the accident, Miles had thought but not said.

  It never occurred to his mother that Rob might blame God for what had happened.

  For a guilty second Fleming envied Amber. At least she had the solace of knowing that her sister was beyond suffering. His brother's plight had only strengthened Fleming's conviction that there was no God and no afterlife. It had never been clearer to him that the only choice for any man was to make the best of this life with its suffering before oblivion took over for ever - and for ever was a long time. Fleming had one simple aim for his brother: to help him in the here and now. He needed to show him how Jake had been helped, and in turn convince him that one day he, too, could be whole and happy again.

  Almost there, Rob,' he said, wheeling the bed down the corridor towards the physiotherapy room.

  As they approached the swing doors, the surprise leapt out. Jake was hopping up and down as nimble and agile as if the accident had never happened. 'Dad! Dad! Look at my legs!' He ran to the bed and bounded up to kiss
his father's cheek.

  Pam Fleming had followed her grandson through the swing doors. 'He was too excited,' she said, with a beatific smile. 'He couldn't wait to show them off'

  Fleming turned to his brother and saw that even his good eye had failed him. Tears were leaking from it and he couldn't use it to choose his words on the screen. 'Save your words for tomorrow, Rob,' he said. 'You'll be able to say whatever you want then.'

  *

  The Think Tank

  As Amber Grant closed her eyes, the video camera and Brian were watching over her. The Neuro-Translator never slept. As it scanned Amber's brainwaves it correlated them with the exercises she had done, comparing her thought patterns to its battery of data, seeking out new patterns that would indicate significant aberrations. All the time it was learning about her brain, mapping the electrical architecture of her mind. Using the Lucifer optical processor that powered its own brain, it performed all these analyses at the speed of light.

  While Amber Grant was awake the Neuro-Translator discovered nothing unusual. Nor did it detect anything as she lost consciousness and descended rapidly through the first two stages of sleep. As Amber lingered in the third stage and her body twitched erratically, Brian still registered little outside its normal range. Even as Amber entered the fourth stage of sleep, and perspiration beaded her forehead, the humming mind-reader remained untroubled.

  It was only when she entered the state characterized by rapid eye movement, REM, that Brian registered something unusual in the still uncharted unconscious governed by dreams.

  She was sweating. Her forehead was covered with perspiration and her nightdress was saturated. Her lips moved and she mumbled, her words gradually becoming more coherent until she was calling her own name in a child's plaintive voice: Amber, Amber, where are you, Amber?'

  As she fell into the dream state random movements of her eyeballs were visible beneath the lids. Her body shook as if in distress. Then it became still and her eyes opened.

  Memories flashed before her like the jumbled shards of a broken mirror: Father Peter Riga in his Jesuit robes sweeping up Ariel and her in his arms; her father's proud smile when she graduated with top honours from Stanford; Bradley Soames on campus at Cal Tech wearing his tinted mask and protective clothing; her mother stroking her hair and kissing her cheek as she fell asleep; her sister squeezing her hand and whispering goodbye before the surgeon put them both to sleep.

  She felt the blade cut into her head. Through white-hot pain she heard herself screaming, her voice mingling with Ariel's, both trying to hold on to the other as they were torn apart. Even now as her mind left her body Amber felt she was attached in some way to Ariel, still being ripped from her. But the pain was emotional not physical, fear, loss, grief and rage combining together. She tried again to scream but she had no voice.

  She tried to struggle but she had no body. She was an amorphous entity, enveloped in darkness, rushing towards an unknowable void.

  Ahead, a bright cone of light appeared, flickering in the dark, drawing her into its magnetic field. She was travelling so fast that she was soon inside it, a part of it. It appeared to stand still, its beam disintegrating into particles as she merged with it, becoming indivisible from it. Her being was no more than a collection of shimmering packets of light. The light evoked a memory and she waited for Ariel to join her again and lead her to the source.

  Then, just as she thought Ariel might be there, the emotional pain spiked to new heights as the last raw connection pulled at her. She wished then that she could cut herself free and float peacefully away.

  But there was no escaping the elastic grip that pulled her out of the light, back into the darkness, back to herself. . .

  Her staring eyes closed and then opened again as Amber woke with a start. All the time the NeuroTranslator continued to monitor her. And now the night nurse was soothing her, mopping her brow.

  She was so focused on her patient that she paid no heed to the pulsing wavelengths dancing across the top half of the NeuroTranslator screen as Brian's neural net assimilated the abnormal aspect of Amber's brain. She rearranged the disturbed bedclothes, relieved that her charge was calm now, and didn't register the twenty-six-second change in tone emitted by the humming device.

  When Amber Grant went back to sleep, and the nurse retreated gratefully for a cup of coffee, the NeuroTranslator had returned to its even hum.

  *

  The Red Ark. Cape Town. 33deg 55' S, 18deg 22' E

  Six thousand miles away, Xavier Accosta, the Red Pope, sat alone in his office on the upper deck of the Red Ark. The leatherbound book cradled in his hands looked even older than its hundred years, its spine cracked from being opened too many times at the same page. He let it fall open at the same passage it always did. Breathing deeply, he rearranged his scarlet robes and flexed his damaged left leg, allowing the pain to dissipate. Then he began to read, his dark eyes moving slowly across the page as he savoured each word of the familiar text:

  Extract from the Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Montpellier, France, 1905

  Notes on the experiment between Dr Baurieux and the criminal Languille in which the doctor tries to communicate with the condemned man's severed head immediately after execution by guillotine.

  Immediately after the decapitation, the condemned man's eyelids and lips contracted for five or six seconds ... I waited a few seconds and the contractions ceased, the face relaxed, the eyelids closed half-way over the eyeballs so that only the whites of the eyes were visible, exactly like dying or newly deceased people.

  At that moment I shouted 'Languille' in a loud voice, and I saw that his eyes opened slowly and without twitching, the movements were distinct and clear, the look was not dull and empty, the eyes which were fully alive were indisputably looking at me. After a few seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and steadily.

  I addressed him again. Once more, the eyelids were raised slowly, without contractions, and two undoubtedly alive eyes looked at me attentively with an expression even more piercing than the first time. Then the eyes shut once again. I made a third attempt. No reaction. The whole episode lasted between twenty-five and thirty seconds.

  Dr Baurieux, Montpellier, France, 1905

  whenever Accosta read these words he felt both disturbed and excited, imagining what Languille's eyes had seen as his soul departed.

  He looked up at four high-resolution holographic plasma screens on the oak-panelled wall in front of him. Two were blank. One showed the looped video of his last service, with the sound turned down, and another the BBC's live coverage of the eighty-thousand tonne Red Ark departing Cape Town harbour to continue its pilgrimage around the world, its blood-red hull and white superstructure gleaming in the African sun. Panning round the pier the cameras captured the crowds straining for a glimpse of the physical embodiment of their Church, the Church of the Soul Truth, the floating city that housed the Red Pope's virtual cathedral, and all the administrative and technical staff that made the world's first e-Church possible.

  But as the Red Ark set sail, Cardinal Xavier Accosta ignored the television screens and the spectacular views of Cape Town through the panoramic picture window to his left. He was impatient for the doctor's report on the Soul Project. Time was slipping away, and if the scientists couldn't achieve their goal, all he had achieved since breaking away from Rome ten years ago would be meaningless. And yet, although he wanted to hear from the doctor, he was anxious about Mother Giovanna Bellini. He looked down at the old book and tried not to think about her, but the more he endeavoured to put her out of his mind, the more she dwelt there.

  A sudden knock interrupted his thoughts.

  Accosta stiffened. 'Enter.'

  Monsignor Paulo Diageo opened the door, his powerful body filling the frame. Diageo was similarly attired in scarlet, although his robes were trimmed with a single stripe of gold braid to Accosta's two. Unlike Accosta, who had fine, photogenic features, Diageo's face was heavy and brutish: a low f
orehead punctuated by dark eyebrows, heavy-lidded recessed eyes and a broad, protruding jaw. His fleshy, almost feminine lips were at odds with the rest of his face and gave his otherwise impassive features a cruel, petulant quality.

  Accosta braced himself. 'Mother Giovanna? Any news?'

  The Monsignor shrugged. 'It's been resolved, Holy Father.'

  Like Monsignor Diageo, Mother Giovanna Bellini had been a loyal follower from the early days. When Accosta had first been promoted to the Vatican twenty years ago she was a lowly nun. She had served him so devotedly that when he was excommunicated a decade later and founded his own Church, she followed him. As a reward he made her one of his first female priests.

  Nine months ago, after years of research on the Soul Project, it had been decided to test the technology on dying subjects. Terminal patients with no surviving family were selected from Church-run hospices around the world and pronounced dead before they were taken to the foundation to die. Since a priest was needed to deliver the last rites, and her devotion to Accosta was absolute, Mother Giovanna Bellini had been assigned to the patients on the understanding that she would ask no questions.