Purpose (Propósito): A Lowell Story, #3

By Richard Hollman

Our galaxy is a dangerous place.  Can life on Earth, or anywhere else, survive?

The human race is undergoing a miraculous transformation that is turning society upside down.  The poor, the sick, the neglected and oppressed have suddenly become the leaders of a new world, with abilities and lifespans far beyond anything seen before.  In the more prosperous nations of the world, the general population is still unaware of these changes.  But a young California couple, who have started noticing strange things they can't ignore, discover the full extent of the transformation, and why it is so urgent.
Our galaxy is a killing field.  Terrible beings roam the depths of interstellar  space, seeking out life for the sole purpose of destroying it.  One such threat is headed directly for Earth, carrying death in a myriad of forms.  These transformed humans are needed to deal with this onslaught, and the ones that will surely follow.  What is at stake is not just life on Earth, but the possibility of life anywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Hollman
• Release date: Jan 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507095195

Book preview

Prologue - Wildflowers in the Graveyard

The Gardener was worried.  We can call it the Gardener, although it never had a need for a name.  The Gardener and its billions of peers were spread far apart in the universe, no more than one for each galaxy.  Communication among them was out of the question, except in the most indirect and disconnected manner, like semaphore from a distant hilltop.  The Gardener did not feel lonely or isolated because of this: it was simply the nature of its existence.

It was not alone at all, in truth.  This entire galaxy was its garden, and it tended its plot with great care and attention.  Still, something was going terribly wrong, and it was by no means certain that the remedies that it had applied would be successful.

The Gardener was a creature whose substance consisted of subtle twists and ripples in spacetime, spread over vast distances.  Like every one of its kind, it had been brought to life in the formation of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, taking its form, its life and its awareness from the powerful wake of that cataclysm.  Whether it was given its form by means of some design, or was simply a natural and inevitable byproduct of the galaxy's formation, even the Gardener did not know, nor would it find this question interesting.  It understood enough. 

The caretaker of each galaxy had a single clear and obvious purpose: the cultivation of life.  It was a simple enough mission to describe, but astoundingly complex in execution.  By gentle, patient manipulation of spacetime over billions of years, the Gardener had encouraged the formation of stars of a type that could support life, drawing them together with the heavier elements that could form planets, and keeping most of those stars far enough apart that their planets could settle into stable orbits.

Once this was done, the rest would happen naturally, with no further intervention needed.  On billions of planets, life should emerge, and beings should evolve who would one day look at the sky and try to imagine how the universe came to be.  To them, the Gardener would seem no more substantial than the rumor of a shadow of a whisper: and yet, there was nothing more powerful in the galaxy, a galaxy whose present form was the living embodiment of the Gardener’s work over the vast stretches of time.

But something had gone badly wrong.  At the inner end of one of the spiral arms was the first planet on which life had appeared.  Life had arisen there in the form in which it must appear first on any planet: elemental beings whose substance and thought were the flows of air, water and magma.  Like planet-bound versions of the Gardener, their lives and conscious actions established and maintained the necessary equilibrium on the planet's surface, allowing life of the more solid and short-lived variety to exist.  So it had happened, with these ‘Firsts’ creating the conditions in which organic life could grow.

However, as these elemental beings came to understand that their planet was the very first in the galaxy to support life, their thoughts grew dark and fearful.  Knowing that life would most certainly arise on other worlds in time, they became obsessed with the potential threat that this posed to their world.  They could visualize a multitude of forms which this threat could take.  Small perturbations in the orbits of asteroids could turn them into projectiles which could destroy a planet in a distant system, incinerating any form of life upon its surface.  Elemental creatures modeled on Firsts, which could be spawned from microscopic spores, elaborately coded and broadcast through space in the trillions, could poison every form of life on any planet on which they landed.  Planetary orbits could be altered to eliminate any hope of a stable climate; stars could be induced to flare violently, to collapse or to explode: the list went on and on.  The Firsts of this ancient planet convinced themselves that it was too dangerous to allow life to spontaneously arise anywhere else, so what they imagined others doing to them, they themselves proceeded to do. Over a period of a hundred million years, they evolved upon their planet’s surface a sentient organic species as a tool for producing technological weapons.  Over tens of millions of years more, they spread a vast wave of death and destruction, affecting one planetary system after another, using all the various methods of genocide which they had imagined and feared.  Throughout the galaxy, primitive life, just beginning to arise on countless planets, was abruptly snuffed out.  Other planets which might have become nurseries for life were poisoned, rendered barren for ages to come.

The Gardener had watched, with patience spanning billions of years, but with growing anxiety.  The actions perpetrated by this first living world threatened to undo all of the Gardener’s careful work, and this was bad enough.  But it was even worse: the grand mission of annihilation, conceived as a defense of this world, had become a cruel irony.  For the original planet was now itself barren: total extinction had occurred millions of years ago.  Had their efforts to extinguish life everywhere else exhausted their own planet’s capacity to sustain life?  Had one of their terrible weapons backfired?  It was not clear exactly how it happened.  Yet the wave of destruction, once set in motion, continued still, blindly, with no awareness of the tragic futility of its mission.

There were a precious few remaining planets upon which life still survived, but most of these were already doomed: with large asteroids, microscopic black holes or other terrible weapons hurtling towards them.  The fatal collisions might occur millions of years from now, but the Gardener could do nothing to stop them.  However, there was a planet in one of the outer fringes which had somehow managed to survive several different forms of attack, either by incredible good fortune or exceptional alertness of its Firsts.  The Unraveler, a very nasty type of world-killing virus carried by spores through space, had landed on this planet and come to life.  But it had been trapped, alive but unable to wreak its destruction unless it could escape its prison.  A scant few thousand years ago, the Gardener had created a special type of spacetime twist in the vicinity of this planet.  The visible effect of this twist would be a very slight shift in the apparent position of several stars, discernible over a period of several centuries.  It was a message, one which short-lived organisms were not capable of seeing, but which, to the right sort of mentality, was a clear indication of what was happening and what could be done about it....

From the Gardener’s point of view, the placement of this spacetime twist, the recognition of it by the appropriate entity on the planet's surface, and the ensuing action, had all happened in the blink of an eye, as it were.  The Unraveler was now gone from that world, and this was good.  But it was not the end.  The devastation devised by that ancient world was thorough.  Its deranged minions still roamed the galaxy, seeking out planets which had escaped the onslaught, determined to complete the annihilation.

If this planet fell, it would be a disappointing setback, but not the end for the Gardener.  Eventually, after another billion years, perhaps two billion, the cycle of destruction would be played out, and the cultivation could begin anew.  There was still plenty of hydrogen, the essential fuel of creation, available in the galaxy.  The Gardener could start over, once again working to cultivate the formation of new stars and planets, nurturing the conditions of life again, and hoping that this new life could find a way to avoid the deadly paranoia that had made the first appearance of life such a terrible disaster.  Eventually, the seeds would again take root, and the blossoms would grow, like wildflowers in a vast cosmic graveyard.  Once this new crop developed intelligence, and came to understand the history of their galaxy, what would they think?

Part One - Present At the Creation

Chapter 1 - Spare Change for the Oncologist

It feels so odd, recalling my life before the Transformation, like the vague memories of a different person altogether.  But it is important for all of us to record our personal stories, so that we never lose sight of who we were and where we came from.

At that time, the world had already undergone some major changes, but these all seemed quite remote, and not especially relevant to my daily life.  I had not given them much thought until that day, which began as usual with the drive to work from my apartment in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley.  I was making the turn from Bernardo Ave onto El Camino Real, and I saw a panhandler standing on the corner.  He looked pretty well-dressed, which was odd, but it was his sign that got me.  Not crayon or laundry marker on a ragged piece of filthy cardboard, but a precisely-cut piece of white foam core with the message neatly glued onto it, on white paper, done on a good printer, with a bold and readable font.  It was easy to make out from a distance, which was clearly the idea.  Of course, if the purpose was to look pathetic, his sign failed completely. But the oddest part was the message itself:

Oncologist:  Please Help

That got my attention, all right.  In the back of my mind, this almost made sense, but I couldn’t exactly say why.  I pulled over with the intention of giving the guy a few bucks, which was when I realized that I recognized him. We had both attended Monta Vista High at the same time, and I remembered him as a high achiever even in that crowd, where so many kids felt the pressure to make as great a mark in the world as the Two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) had done.

I rolled down the window.  George?  I yelled over the sound of the traffic.  Eric! he replied after a second of bewilderment. Come on, get in! I said, leaning over to unlock the door.  I might be interrupting his best panhandling time, but I was really curious, and I had enough money in my pocket to make it worth his while.  He was actually pretty eager to get off the street and talk to somebody, it turned out.  God, this is embarrassing, he said, although from his tone he seemed a little more strung out than embarrassed. I really don't know what got into me, going out on the street with a sign like that.  I guess everything just got to me, that's all.  Things have happened so suddenly, and it’s all so confusing.  A lot of my colleagues saw it coming, and managed to change their specialty. But it was really hard for me, you know?  I was so focused...

I was beginning to get his drift, sort of.  As I said, there had been a lot of changes in the past couple of years.  Changes for the better, it seemed.  Since that big war that fizzled before it even got started (and which nobody liked to talk about), a lot of bad stuff had all but disappeared: most kinds of violent crime, pollution, some bad diseases... Wait a minute, I said, You mean to say that not so many people are getting cancer anymore?

NOBODY is getting cancer anymore!  He went all bug-eyed, staring at me, as if it was suddenly my responsibility to make sense of this for him. He continued, Can you imagine what a spot this puts me in?  My whole life, I thought I was so noble. I was going to save people, do battle against an enemy that was truly evil.  Now what?  Should I be wishing for more people to have cancer?  God help me, I don't know what other kind of work to do!

He was clearly getting himself all jazzed up, and it was time to talk him down a little.  Listen, you need to calm down a bit, George.  It's not that bad, and you know it.  A lot of professionals have been displaced, what with all this progress that's been going on.  But nobody's hurting.  What about that place that advertises on the radio all the time, the Windsor-Worthington Institute?

He got a petulant look about him, hearing this. I know, I know he said, they are the experts in retraining, they find new jobs for people, better jobs than the ones that they lost...  I know all that, but I just couldn't accept the idea of walking away from my whole life's work!

I was getting a little tired of the guy by this point, to tell the truth.  Maybe it was time to treat him like a child.  Hey, dude, how do you know that it wasn't your work that put an end to people coming down with cancer?  You know, the final nail in its coffin?

He got a strange look.  That is, a different strange look.  Ha he said. Heh heh. Heh heh heh heh..  Then, there he was, doubled over in the car seat, heaving with silent, uncontrollable laughter, like I had just said the funniest thing ever, and he was just going to die laughing.  Crazy, yes, but now a different kind of crazy.  Maybe this will turn out OK, I thought, as long as he doesn’t puke on the floor mat.  All the time that we were talking I had been driving toward my office, but I chose a route that would take us by the big W-W Institute branch on Lawrence Expressway.  There it was, a cheerful-looking building in coral-colored stucco, gorgeously landscaped with palm trees, fragrant star jasmine, and duck ponds, blending in nicely with the nearby apartment complexes and restaurants.  I gave it a careful look as we approached.  The place had a very welcoming entrance, yes.  But I could see that the building was a lot bigger than it appeared at first glance: it seemed to occupy most of the block, with huge extensions behind the other buildings.  A pretty big facility for just a retraining and job placement service, I thought.  The sign over the door said Windsor-Worthington Institute: Guaranteed Help for the Displaced.  A little fussy and Victorian-sounding, which seemed consistent with the name.

George was recovering from his laughing fit when I pulled up in front.  It had a semicircular driveway that seemed designed for drop-offs, like a hotel lobby or hospital emergency room.  I could picture a lot of people being ‘delivered’ there the way I was about to deliver my old high school classmate.  When he looked up and saw where we were, he seemed to be pretty much sane again.  Thanks, Eric, I really mean it he said. I know that this is where I need to go, and it's fine.  I was out of my mind there for a bit, but I'm OK now.

I had my doubts on that score, but as long as he was heading out of my car and into that place, then he was OK enough, and likely to be much better very soon.  I had heard nothing but good things about the Institute.  Apparently they were doing a terrific job of retraining people and finding them high-paying professional jobs.  Maybe they were brainwashing them, who knows.  As long as it worked.

With that little diversion out of the way, I continued on to my office on San Carlos Street.  I pulled into the parking lot in front of a short strip of storefronts, one of the last little islands of grunginess left on this road, which was being rapidly taken over by boutiques, high-priced condos, and the type of restaurants where the residents of those high-priced condos could afford to eat.  This little strip, by contrast, looked dark and menacing even on a blindingly sunny California day.  There was a pawn shop, a gun shop (which had been boarded up since that ‘thing’ happened), and a porn palace.  And there, right in the middle, was my office.  Big letters painted on the picture window announced Eric Price Baker, Private Investigator.  If you put my place together with those others, I suppose they told a pretty depressing story, but I had actually put a lot of thought into the location of my PI business. It had just the right balance of sleaze and professionalism that I was aiming for.  Believe me, this grim-looking location didn't keep the well-heeled clients away.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  It seemed like the whole world came pouring down this street twice a day, into and out of San Jose, so visibility was no problem.  And at this point in time, a couple of decades after things had really taken off in Silicon Valley, there was an abundant supply of people with a lot of money and really lousy personalities, which was just what I needed to keep my little business profitable.

As I unlocked the door, I checked myself out in the plate glass. A tall guy, a little over six feet, not especially athletic but with a frame that can easily hide a few extra pounds (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it).  Light brown hair, which I kept fairly short (because you never know what a crazy person is likely to do, and you never really know who the crazy ones are until it is too late).  Blue eyes, and a bit of a goofy expression, when I wasn’t putting on my professional face for a client.

My mother used to tell me I was named after four musicians from her two favorite Sixties rock bands.  Thank God I wasn’t born with red hair, so my parents weren’t tempted to burden me with the nickname ‘Ginger’.  They had ambitions for me musically, and it must have been a bitter disappointment when it turned out I couldn't carry a tune to save my life, and I was hopeless at keeping time on a set of drums (so ‘Ginger’ would have been even more wrong).  Fortunately, I was good at lots of other things.  So many things, in fact, that I was never able to settle down to one major in college.  How could I devote myself exclusively to one subject when there was so much cool stuff to be learned in all the other ones?  To me, the world was a really large puzzle, and the best way to understand it was to find a few pieces from a lot of different parts of it, instead of trying to assemble all the pieces in one little section.  What was the point of having a very clear and detailed picture if you didn’t know what it’s a picture of?

I somehow managed to piece together a triple major and get my bachelor’s degree.  More importantly, I finished college knowing just a little about an awful lot of things.  I also came out with an insatiable appetite for learning just a little about a lot more things.  It was clearly not the most straightforward route to making a living in those specialized times.  But I had also discovered that I was fascinated by people: what made them tick, and what was behind the masks they put on.  Most of the professions in which I could pursue this interest also required the same kind of exclusive dedication of which I seemed to be incapable.  A year or so out of college I finally hit upon the idea of PI work, and never looked back.  Each case was a puzzle, with vital information hidden under the surface, hidden risks to be outguessed, and new and interesting things to learn.  I was good at it, too.  One thing that helped was the knack I had for hacking into computer networks.  In high school and college, I used to do it just to make trouble and amuse myself.  When I came to understand that others were using that sort of skill to make tons of money, essentially by robbing innocent people, it made me look at it a little differently.  I had no desire to do this, because I could visualize the victims too easily.  Plus, I knew that I would eventually get caught, maybe go to jail, and be separated from the fun and interesting parts of the world for who knows how long.  But in private investigation, hacking made it possible to resolve most of my cases embarrassingly easily, although there was no need for the clients to know this.  It was a lot more than just snooping people’s accounts and emails: there was a world of security cameras out there that I could access, which made it ridiculously easy for me to find out where people had been and what they had been up to.

I settled in behind my desk and got to work.  This was a small office, which was all that I needed.  There was a privacy screen in front of the big picture window, and in the narrow space between I had arranged some raked gravel, bamboo stalks, stone lanterns, and other things, giving the impression of an Asian-style terrarium.  It was important to give clients a feeling of privacy as soon as they came in.  There was also a door to the back parking lot for clients who felt the need for extra privacy.  Aside from that, there was a bathroom, a little kitchenette and a storage room for my tools and computer gear.

I was presently between active cases, which was no great cause for concern, since financially I was all set for a long dry spell.  I had ongoing contracts with a number of insurance companies, who always needed the kind of information that I was able to gather and digest.  I could pursue this type of work on my own schedule, depending on how much time I had available and how badly I needed the money.  But today I decided to spend some time ‘sharpening my tools’, which meant getting up to date on the security arrangements and passwords for my favorite online databases: banks, police, FBI, utility companies, and several large corporations, and of course, all the major security firms.  These things changed regularly, and while it wasn't that difficult to figure out the changes, doing this work up front would save me valuable time if I became involved in a high-pressure case.

I was making good progress on these updates when a new client came through the front door.  A big guy, dressed casually, but I could tell that those casual clothes had cost a bundle.  He had a tense look about him, like he expected to have to intimidate somebody at any moment and he wanted to make sure he was ready.  Middle manager or low-level executive at one of the bigger high-tech firms, I guessed.  Not brilliant enough to create anything, but sharp, clear-headed and aggressive enough to grab control of anything of value that was created by somebody else.  I took an immediate dislike to him, but that usually happened with my clients, and it never seemed to get in the way.

The case began normally enough.  Good morning! I said, My name is Eric Price Baker.  How can I help you?

A lot of times people come to me about some problem that they're embarrassed about, and it's like pulling teeth to get them to tell me what they're really here for.  Not this guy.  My wife is missing and I need you to find her he said. That sounded simple enough.  So I went on to the next step.  My fee is $2000 per day plus expenses.  And I charge by the day, not the hour or fraction of a day.  If I estimate that the case will require more than 5 days of my time, I will need a deposit of $5000 before starting.

Emphasizing my fee up front like this was my way of weeding out the useless clients.  If they whined about the cost, it meant that they were not really serious, and would be more trouble than they were worth.  If they didn't blink at the price, it either meant that they were rich enough or desperate enough that the money didn't matter, or that they had no intention of paying me.  If it was the latter, I had a number of nonviolent but effective ways of making damn sure they did pay.

So now we could get down to business.  His name was Arnold Whistler, and was looking for his wife Eleanor.  Three days ago, she had left their home in Los Altos Hills to pick up a few groceries at the Lucky supermarket, and he hadn't seen her since.  The obvious question was: why hadn't he contacted the police?  I asked him this as delicately as I could, and he gave a lame answer about respecting his wife's feelings, not wanting to embarrass her, and so on.  I didn't believe a word of it, of course, I just wanted to see what kind of story he had prepared ahead of time to answer this question.  I proceeded to ask a few other delicate questions about the state of their marriage, their finances, any legal entanglements, and I got the usual useless drivel in response.  By his account, he was the perfect devoted husband, she wanted for nothing, it was rose petals and long walks on the beach every day.  So this much was clear: in order to find his wife (underneath his rose garden, perhaps?),  I was going to have to investigate him first.  This was also pretty normal, in my experience.

While he was talking, I was activating two different holographic projection displays: one that could be viewed by both the client and myself, and another one that only I could see.  I was controlling my computer by means of a very sensitive and discreetly camouflaged finger-pad built into my desktop.  It was designed to respond to the tiniest of motions, and this had taken a great deal of practice to master, but the effect it had on people was worth all the effort.  This was technology that was not yet available to the public, but I had a friend at the Media Lab at San Jose State University, which at that time was at least two years ahead of what they were doing at MIT or Stanford.

On this hidden screen, I was doing a quick search on Eleanor Whistler.  In particular, I was looking for a photo of her.  It only took a few seconds, and I immediately copied her photo to the other display.  Is this is your wife? I asked.  Of course, I was watching his eyes as I displayed the image, to see what his reaction was before he had a chance to think about it.  And there it was: his eyes were drawn to her image, and his pupils dilated.  That sort of thing is very hard to fake.

I gathered the essential information from him that I would need to get started: his address and phone number; his place of business (I was wrong about him: apparently he was the sole owner of a company that I had never heard of in Milpitas, with a vaguely high-tech name that meant nothing to me).  His wife Eleanor (maiden name Silva) was the same age as he was (42).  She had family in Massachusetts and Brazil, and the two of them had met while they were both attending UC Berkeley.

With this information, and his signature on the contract, I sent him on his way and promised him an update within 24 hours.  I also checked out his reaction to this: if he had to struggle to look pleased, then it meant that he knew I wasn't going to find her, and hiring me was all for show.  However, he looked sincerely relieved to hear it, which made me think that the guy really didn't know what had