The Dissonance Factor

By Graham Storrs

Walking away from the world never kept Rik Sylver out of trouble before and it didn’t this time. Even working in a mining camp on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, didn’t stop the transhumans of Omega Point reaching out across the Solar System and dragging him back into their world of danger and intrigue. A transhuman has been murdered and, somehow, this is tied to a covert plot within the US Government that has MI6 operative, Fariba Freymann, investigating against the orders of her superiors. When the upload, Rivers Valdinger, is drawn into the operation, the action ratchets up a notch and the violence escalates. Rik, as ever, is well out of his depth but, as the scope of the conspiracy is finally revealed, he finds himself once more to be the only person with any chance of preventing a catastrophe. The Dissonance Factor is the third Rik Sylver novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Graham Storrs
• Release date: Jul 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9780994589910

Graham Storrs

Graham Storrs is a science fiction writer who lives miles from anywhere in rural Australia with his wife and a Tonkinese cat. He has published many short stories in magazines and anthologies as well as three children's science books and a large number of academic and technical pieces in the fields of psychology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.He has published a number of sci-fi novels, in four series; Timesplash (three books), the Rik Sylver sci-fi thriller series (three books), the Canta Libre space opera trilogy. and the Deep Fracture trilogy. He has also published an augmented reality thriller, "Heaven is a Place on Earth", a sci-fi comedy novel, "Cargo Cult", a dark comedy time travel novel, "Time and Tyde", and an urban sci-fi thriller, "Mindrider."

Book preview

The Dissonance Factor

Book 3 of the Rik Sylver Series

by

Graham Storrs

Ebook Edition, Copyright © 2017, Graham Storrs

ISBN: 978-0-9945899-1-0

Published by Canta Libre

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorised, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the friends and readers who insisted I write it. In particular, Meryl Ferguson, a talented Australian writer herself, who still pressed me for a sequel, even though I killed off her favourite character in the last book, and my wife, Christine, who always knows what’s best for me, even when I don’t.

Chapter 1

Hello, Rik.

The voice had not come from his helmet speaker. It was coming through his cogplus implants in full stereo. It came from the frozen plain behind him. He turned his head to look, seeing only the dark interior of his helmet. Cursing his stupidity, he turned his whole body, moving clumsily in the bulky pressure suit.

Elvira Montgomery stood alone and unsuited on the dimly-lit ice field. The shock of finding he was not alone gave way to to the wonder of finding her there. She was impossibly beautiful in a light summer frock and sandals. Her skin was as clear of frost as it was of blemish. She strode towards him across the fractured wasteland of frozen methane as if she were walking across the lawn of a mansion in the Hamptons. She looked just as lovely as the day he'd first met her, almost three years ago.

She was an illusion, of course, a so-called lucid hallucination, or lucie, an augmented reality effect mediated through his own cogplus hardware.

You're messing with my head, Ms Montgomery.

She smiled. I hope you'll forgive the liberty. And I hope you'll stop calling me 'Ms Montgomery.' I thought we were on first-name terms.

Rik studied the image of Elvira carefully. It had reacted so quickly to his comment that it was either an AI, operating from a device nearby – or even loaded into his implants – or it was really Elvira and she was somewhere on Enceladus with him, or...

You're on a ship in orbit, he said. She nodded once. And, since you were in the neighbourhood, you thought you'd say hello to your old friend, Rik.

Close. The truth is I flew here from Omega Point just to see you.

The trip from Earth's L4 Lagrangian point to Enceladus, was roughly 1.2 billion kilometres. On a fast fusion rocket from Jupiter – half that distance away – and with a favourable alignment, it had taken Rik almost a year to fly out to this tiny snowball at the ass end of the solar system. The idea that Elvira had made a two-year trip just to visit him was beyond ludicrous.

Well, I'm flattered. I didn't realise I'd made such a big impression.

She gave him another smile, only this one was a little tighter than the last. Obviously his endearing banter was not what she'd crossed half the system to hear.

It's kind of pretty here, she said, looking around. Like the Arctic, only flatter, and colder.

Rik shrugged – a pointless gesture in his spacesuit. It grows on you. Hike a few kilometres north of here and you can see one of the big curtain eruptions. It's quite something.

I need a favour, Rik.

A favour? That was new. He was used to Omega Point demanding rather than asking.

A big one, actually.

Did Lanham send you? Again? Because, honestly, after my last encounter with your beloved führer, I'm seriously thinking of crossing him off my Christmas card list.

Rik studied Elvira's expression. To his mind, Martin Lanham was a heartless, devious, manipulative bastard who would feed his own mother to the sharks if he held shares in a shark meat factory. On the two occasions Rik had had any dealings with Lanham, people had died, lots of people, some of them Rik's friends. Yet, somehow, this lovely, personable woman, considered Lanham her friend and was willing to support him.

There's been a murder, Rik.

"A murder?'

At Omega Point.

One of the humans? A surprising number of humans worked at the infamous space station, mostly engineering teams working on the station's endless upgrades and expansions, but there was also a small staff to look after human dignitaries visiting from Earth.

No, one of the uploads.

But... You're all dead anyway, was the first thought in his mind. What does it mean to kill an upload? How does that work?

Elvira didn't seem offended. We're basically just very large data structures, Rik, neural networks designed to perfectly mimic our human originals – plus a few other structures and processes that simulate our original endocrine systems, sensory-motor systems, digestive systems, brain chemistry, all kinds of things. Plus, you know, decades of modifications and extensions. If you want to kill one of us, you just need to delete all that information along with any backups that exist.

So someone's done that: deleted one of you? Despite himself, an old joke popped into his head. Question: What do you call a dead lawyer? Answer: A good start. Rik had known several uploads, a couple of them he considered friends. But the denizens of Omega Point were not just any transhumans. They were the richest, meanest, nastiest bunch of dead guys you were ever likely to meet.

Sounds easy, doesn't it, but I assure you it isn't. We are each backed up in all kinds of places, in all kinds of ways. You could blow up Omega Point, all the auxiliary and support stations, our facilities in Earth orbit and on the Moon, and several other secret, remote storage sites, and we'd still be able to rebuild from a dozen, highly-distributed holographic data clouds, embedded in networks all over SolSystem. Even I didn't know half of the precautions Martin had taken until this happened.

Rik still couldn't quite understand why Elvira was there. So you need a detective to solve the crime, right? Sounds to me like you need a computer geek, not a flatfoot.

We've got plenty of geeks on the payroll, Rik. They're busy scratching their heads as we speak. Even if they manage to work out how it was done, there's no guarantee they'll find out who did it, or why. She paused, took a step closer. There has never been a murder in Omega Point, Rik. Not one the victim couldn't recover from. People are scared. We thought we were immortal, invulnerable. What's worse, no-one can see a reason for this killing. Danny was a nice enough guy. I knew him well. He didn't have enemies – not like some. People are worried that Danny wasn't targeted for any good reason at all. They're saying he was just a test run and, now the technique has been perfected, whoever did this will start picking off the rest of us.

It sounded like paranoia but the reality was that there were plenty of humans who would gladly exterminate each and every upload – those in Omega Point in particular. Some had religious reasons, some had business reasons, some just felt aggrieved that rich and powerful people got to escape to an orbiting paradise when they died, instead of rotting in the ground like the rest of humanity.

It still doesn't explain why you're here, Rik insisted. The world's full of private dicks. I employ plenty myself. Go see my Managing Director and he'll set you up with the best that money can buy. Rik's London-based detective agency was still doing extremely well, the last he'd heard of it. In fact, without him sitting in the big office, it had doubled in size during the past three years. But it wasn't the biggest or most prestigious agency by a long shot. With the resources Omega Point had at its disposal, they could buy every detective agency on Earth and have them all working full time on the case.

I think you're selling yourself short, Rik. You've done remarkable things for us in the past.

Yeah, both times with Lanham's gun at my head.

Maybe so, but we've got to know you and trust you. And you've got to know us, too. We don't want to have to start fresh with some new guy.

At least she hadn't insulted him by offering massive amounts of money. Even so, he felt his temper building. Are you going to tell me the real reason you're here, or shall we just say goodbye now?

Elvira paused. She stopped smiling. It's the victim, Rik. It was your grandfather, Daniel Silberman.

My grandfather's d– But, of course, everyone in Omega Point was dead. He stared at Elvira dumbly for a long time as something slow and heavy clicked over in his mind.

I've got a shuttle waiting just over that rise. Elvira's image pointed across the fractured white plain. In fact, I'm sitting inside it in an actual body, waiting to fly you up to the ship.

If I go with you, there'll be a hell of a penalty to pay to Titan Engineering for breaking my contract. Not that he gave a stuff about Titan Engineering.

Once you say yes, we'll cover all your expenses. Plus whatever you want as a fee. OK?

Sure. Lead on.

The beautiful woman in the summer frock turned and strode off across the frozen moon. Rik followed behind in his bulky spacesuit, taking ten-metre hops. You're gonna regret this, he told himself. But, lately, he’d been thinking that three years away from his life was enough. It was time to go home. This was as good a way as any to do it.

-oOo-

Fariba Freymann pushed a strand of her long black hair off her face and tried to poke it into the rubber cap that was struggling to hold the rest of her hair back. It was awkward, with the piece of white gauze she had across her face also tucked into the cap, to fool any facial recognition systems that might happen to be pointing her way. She might have had her hair cut short that morning if she'd thought for a minute she'd end up sneaking around a US Government research lab by nightfall. The tinfoil inside the cap rustled against her ears like a handful of gravel shaken in a saucepan. Inside the diver's drysuit she was wearing, she imagined herself reddening like a cooked lobster. The suit was heavily insulated – a feeble attempt to cut down her infra-red emissions in case there were detectors in the lab. The tinfoil was another improvised security measure – this time to reduce the radio emissions from her neural implants. Again, just in case the lab was fitted with detectors. She had tinfoil wrapped all around her chest too – most of the equipment that drove a neural implant was actually implanted in a person's chest. For all her makeshift precautions, she must be leaking IR and radio like a sieve and, despite everything, if the lab had motion detectors, or even a security guard with good hearing, she was sunk. She felt exposed and she felt ridiculous. If they did catch her, the embarrassment would be worse than the espionage trial.

Yet her source had been insistent that exposing Project Silent Whisper would be worth any risk.

On the other hand, her source was a disgraced civil servant awaiting trial on child pornography charges, who looked like he slept in his car and would have sold his sister into the sex trade for a fix of whatever he was using.

Why didn't you go to the news feeds with this? she'd asked at their last meeting.

They own the fucking feeds, that's why.

The FBI then?

Christ, what planet are you from, lady? I can't trust anybody in the government with this. It's got to be an outsider, someone they can't get to. An outsider like Fariba Freymann, an MI6 field agent working out of the British Consulate General in New York. That was why he'd walked in off the street one day and insisted on seeing one of your James Bond types.

What's so important about this project?

You'll see. It's all there in the documentation.

She'd looked down at the packet of security cards, codes, maps and photos he'd just handed her. All of it was on paper. Why should I trust you?

He'd rolled his head, grimacing as if she'd physically hurt him. Jesus! That again? I thought we were past that. Look, lady, do it or don't do it. I don't give a fuck any more. I got this. He patted the pocket in which he'd put the money she'd given him. Paper money. He'd insisted on it. I'm leaving New York and I ain't ever coming back. He'd tipped an imaginary hat, said, "Sayonara," and left.

The trouble was, she believed him. Something very big was happening at this lab. So, when her boss absolutely and categorically vetoed any suggestion she might break into a secret government laboratory belonging to one of the UK's major allies, she decided she'd just have to do it on her own.

Fariba lifted her eyes above the level of the desk and made a quick scan of the room. It was a large, open-plan office without partitions. Desks were clustered in groups of three or four, their chairs abandoned at various angles of neglect, their surfaces cluttered with pictures, soft toys, electronic devices, and sensor field projectors. It was dark, no lights on at all except in the corridors. Fariba's low-light spectacles made it seem like bright daylight.

OK, she told herself. Now or never.

She crossed the room fast, weaving between desks and benches, to a door with a plastic plate screwed to it saying, Special Projects L5. It was just where her informant had said it would be. She put her finger to the contact plate and passed the code she'd memorised into the lock. A green light came on and the lock opened with a click. Quickly, she pushed through and closed the door behind her.

It's on the hard drive of the computer by the far wall, her source had said. She remembered him sitting in Carson's office at the Consulate. He'd looked half-way sane at that time. You've got to get to it in person. That room has no net connection and the whole place is shielded.

She had been alone with him. Carson, a middle rank embassy staffer, having made the introduction, had discretely bowed out. I'm sorry, Mr....

No names!

All right, no names. But you're going to have to give me more than this to justify me breaking into a US government laboratory. The FBI frowns on that kind of thing, as I'm sure you're aware.

It's big, was all he would say. It concerns the future security of this country and of the whole world. It's a terrorist plot being hatched right at the heart of our democracy by people in very, very high places. She'd returned his intense gaze and tried to decide if he was crazy or just crazy with fear. It's called Silent Whisper. Just get to those files and you'll see. This is bigger than anything you can imagine.

And you're part of this project?

You're not listening to me. I'm just an administrator. I issue clearances for the staff, get them hooked up to the systems, give them passwords and monitor usage. That kind of thing. Sometimes I get curious. I use someone's ID to take a look at what's going on. He had looked away, as if scanning the room for an escape route. I wish to God I hadn't taken a look at this shit.

So there she was, in Special Projects L5, in a building in an obscure business park on the outskirts of Chicago, wondering how much she was going to regret taking a look at this shit, too.

She stood in front of the computer. It had a physical screen attached by wires to a little white box. More wires came from the box to a physical keyboard. There was a data cube reader also attached to the box and a power cord that disappeared behind the desk. It was the first time she'd seen a physical computer since her childhood. It was the first time she'd seen anything with so many wires attached. What the hell do I do with this? she asked herself, feeling anxiety knotting in her stomach. She didn't like this room. It had no windows, just the one door, and nowhere to hide. And now, this computer from the Jurassic.

She took a breath and focused. She looked at the little white box. There was a power switch on the back. She reached out a finger to press it but stopped herself. Her source had written instructions for every step. She had those memorised. But all he'd written was, Log in to the computer with the following username and password. He hadn't mentioned that the damned thing was an antique that looked completely dead. She looked at the screen, at the back and the edges, and found another power switch. She pressed this one and the screen lit up, blinding her for a second before her specs adjusted. She glanced behind her at the door, imagining how much light was spilling out from around the door frame.

A logo was spinning on the display behind a little rectangle that had fields labelled Username and Password. She was so relieved to see it, the thought of deriding the obsolete technology didn't even cross her mind. Typing clumsily on the clunky old input device, she gained access to the computer and its file system and was soon chasing down hierarchies of project documents looking for something worth copying.

She scrolled through personnel records, budgets, requisitions, expense claims, diaries, all kinds of junk that could have belonged to any government project. She needed to see something that looked like it was worth having before she copied a single byte. Being caught in the building was one thing. Being caught with stolen documents on her person was another. Fariba was the cautious type who liked to minimise the jail time she was setting herself up for.

A folder name made her pull up short. Persuasion Technology, it said. She opened it. There were sub-folders labelled, Cognitive Interface Virus, Message Design, Targeting Strategies, Ernst Winkler Papers, Neural Pattern Access, and a dozen others. She reached for the data cube in her belt pouch. If this wasn't the nub of the project, she didn't know an evil scheme for world domination when she saw one.

A click from behind her made her spin around, heart racing. The door swung open and a security guard stepped through. She was a middle-aged woman, in an ill-fitting uniform and a peaked cap. She had the air of someone who was just poking her head in to check everything was in order, the way shed done it ten times a night every night since she started working there. And then she saw Fariba. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped into a big O. For a second she was frozen in the same pose, one hand on the door, one foot forward, head back, eyes bulging. Then she scrabbled to reach the gun she carried in a holster at her waist. The holster had a strap on it with a press-stud to keep the gun from falling out but her trembling fingers seemed to find it hopelessly complicated. She dropped her flashlight, shadows dancing wildly around her as it fell and bounced, and tried using both hands.

As she finally pulled her weapon loose, Fariba reached her, running hard, and hit her squarely in the midriff with her shoulder. The guard went down and the gun went clattering across the floor. Fariba rolled clear and into a crouch. The guard was dazed and gasping for breath. Fariba grabbed a little metal disc from her belt pouch and sprang at the guard. The woman managed to raise an arm to fend her off but Fariba knocked it aside and landed on the woman's chest, pinning her briefly as she pressed the little disc against her opponent's temple. Instantly, the guard went limp, the neural dampener Fariba had applied, scrambling the woman's brain and rendering her unconscious. She'd stay that way until the battery ran out or someone removed it.

Fariba rose, shakily, to her feet, cursing her luck. She looked over at the computer. It wouldn't take long to copy those files but she'd dropped her data cube and couldn't see it. Did she have time to search the floor for it? Time to go through the outer office and find another one? How long before someone noticed the guard was missing, or that she wasn't moving? Had her implants already sent an alert because she was unconscious?

With a groan of frustration, Fariba turned to the door and ran.

-oOo-

This new incarnation of The Phenomenon of Man was very different to the one Rik had travelled aboard five years ago. It looked like no other ship he had ever seen and yet it was vaguely familiar. Almost all modern ships were, essentially, flying saucers. The habitation areas were built onto one surface of a broad disc while the fusion engines and fuel sacks were on the other side. It was a configuration designed to provide maximum space and comfort while the ship accelerated and decelerated plus plenty of flexibility for expanding your fuel load. This ship, however, was a short cylinder with a doughnut wrapped around its middle.

I've seen something like this, somewhere, he told Elvira as their shuttle slowly glided towards one end of the cylinder. In a movie, maybe.

More likely a newscast. She sat beside him, watching their approach through the forward display. No-one was piloting the shuttle. It was under the control of the Phenomenon's on-board artificial mind. "It's got a spacewarp engine – like the Starseeker."

Of course, the Starseeker! Rik had never seen the famous starship that had been built to carry a crew of uploads and AIs on humanity's first ever journey to Proxima Centauri. His friend, Veb, had worked on its construction atop Alltheway, the Moon's tethered space city. But Veb had been dead almost three years now and the Starseeker had never flown. The consortium that built it had gone bust and the ship had been sold to a fast food chain which billed it as the Solar System's most exclusive restaurant.

Yet the Starseeker had been a graceful, elegant ship. This new Phenomenon of Man was a far more functional-looking machine – and a lot smaller.

Lanham said you're only allowed on board if you promise not to blow this one up.

I'm making no promises I can't keep. Anyway, you might remind him that, if I hadn't blown it up, Omega Point might have been fighting a war with Earth by now.

Elvira grinned. I'm sure he knows. But I don't think he'll ever admit you saved his hide.

They matched orbits with the painful slowness and infinite care that artificial minds liked to exercise and a docking hatch lit up. Rik tried not to think about how small that hatch was and how many tonnes the shuttle must mass. One little mistake...

So he knows you've invited me? he asked, just to distract himself.

Martin Lanham knows everything that goes on in Omega Point, trust me. When I told him we needed outside help, he looked like he could chew bulkheads and spit rivets, but he came round in the end. I think what bothers him most is that the murder was done in such a way that he can't find any trace of the killer in our systems.

Rik snorted. I can see why that would bother a man with so many enemies.

Elvira looked at him sideways. It's not like that in Omega Point. Lanham is seen as a great man, an inspirational leader. Yes, he wields a lot of power there, but the general view is that he runs the place well – wisely, even – and for the general good. For every person you hear complaining about Lanham, you'll hear a hundred defending him.

Rik scowled at the approaching hatch. Doesn't sound like the cold-hearted, calculating bastard I know.

Elvira said nothing and they waited in silence as the shuttle nudged gently up against the Phenomenon of Man. Rik felt a small but powerful surge as the docking latches pulled them snugly against the hull. Elvira unbuckled from her seat and pushed off towards the hatch. He noticed she was a little clumsy in micro-gee. Maybe she didn't get out much, or maybe she just wasn't used to the body she was wearing.

They passed through a short tunnel into a small chamber. Rik glanced around and pulled back in surprise as he saw a huge man standing on his right. It was another upload, a big, monochrome one in dark grey, watching him, still and silent.

Spare body, Elvira said.

He blinked and noticed the straps that held it against the bulkhead. Just an empty robot, waiting to be filled with a human mind. Its pale grey eyeballs stared back at him. It could have been Veb, that day, three years ago, when the sentience machine had killed his friend and left his lifeless robot body looking just like this. It was Martin Lanham, he reminded himself, who had set in motion the chain of events that led to Veb's death. Elvira had been there on that day, too,

Rik?

He turned to look at her. She was standing by another hatch, waiting for him to follow.

Am I going to need this any more? he asked, looking down at the bulky environment suit he was wearing.

No. We'll give you a lift back to Earth when this is over. You can stow it in here.

She went through and closed that hatch behind her. He clipped his helmet to the webbing on one wall and slowly began removing the pressure suit.

What are you doing here? he asked himself. You don't need the money. You don't give a damn if all the uploads in Omega Point murder each other. Lanham's a power-mad psychopathic killer and Elvira Montgomery, however charming, is his lackey. He stared again into the eyes of the lifeless robot body. It bothered him that he kept thinking how much it looked like his old friend. They all look the same. They come off a production line in Mumbai. You're not doing this for Veb. You're doing this because you're tired of trying to find yourself in the bloody wilderness and this ship is the quickest ticket back to Earth.

If that were true, his best tactic was to solve the case quickly and move on.

But it was mainly because Elvira had said the victim was Rik's grandfather. He'd known his mother's father – a tired old man who'd worked construction all his life and died of cancer two years after retiring – but his paternal grandfather was a mystery. He'd never met him. All his father, Pat, had ever said about him was, The old bastard's dead. And good riddance. Pat Sylver drank himself to death while Rik was still a boy. And that seemed like it was the end of the story.

My grandfather, an upload? He shook his head, pushing the mystery aside for the time being.

Beneath his pressure suit, Rik was wearing a light shipsuit that could have done with a wash – something that hadn't seemed to matter while he was living in a mining camp with fourteen similarly dishevelled guys. What the hell? If he smelled too bad, Elvira could turn off her olfactory receptors. He found a cupboard and stuffed the spacesuit into it. Something else Titan Engineering could bill Omega