STORM: The Infinity Code

Gaia had given only the name and dropped very few hints. Andrew wanted to reveal the details himself, she’d said, as they’d stood together in the school yard, after double astrophysics. But she’d known how to tempt Will. The very latest technology would be available. Any piece of kit that he might reasonably need would be his. His capacity for thinking of useful kit was pretty infinite, Will had told her. It would be no problem, she’d replied, her eyes shining.

Now Andrew led the way into his house. They passed through a darkly lit hallway. It was heavily wallpapered in embossed green. Greek busts sat illuminated in niches in the walls.

At the end of the hall, Andrew opened the door to a spacious drawing room. The first object Will noticed was a yellow chaise longue, angled toward the open fire. And then a skull, on an antique card table. Beside it was a photograph of the British astronaut Esmee Templeton, with the words To Andrew, keep reaching for the stars, Esmee scrawled in pen at the bottom. Prints of exotic birds and horses with hounds were hung in vast gilt frames on the walls.

Will blinked. The scene was lit by a thousand brilliant shards of light from an enormous crystal chandelier.

But Will had already crossed to the skull. Softly, he touched the rough edges of a hole about half an inch across, halfway back along the cranium. The bone was cold.

“Trepanned,” Andrew said, his back to the fire. Gaia was on the chaise longue, beside him. “He had a hole drilled into his head to release an evil spirit. That was before effective anesthesia. I imagine he must have needed rather a lot of evil spirit to help him cope with the pain.”

“But Gaia could tell you all about it.” Andrew turned and plucked a dusty book from the shelf beside the fireplace. Journey to the Bismarck Archipelago was printed on the spine in faded gold ink. “Dad used this one, didn’t he?” he said, waving it at her, a smile on his lips.

“No, really—Will, listen to this.” And Andrew flicked the book open to an apparently random page. “‘It was close to dusk when we arrived at the encampment. My legs ached, sweat burned in my eyes. There was a beauty in the half-light. But, barely a moment later, there was horror . . .’” Andrew peered at Gaia over his glasses. “What comes next?”

Andrew raised an eyebrow at Will, who was confused. “‘It was the scream of a man inhabited by demons. The scream of a man who, as we watched, had his scalp peeled back, and his skull spiked through.’”

Andrew beamed at Will, triumphant and proud. “The wonders of a photographic memory! My father’s a psychiatrist. He used this book to test her . . . Didn’t you know?”

But Andrew only smiled at her. “I don’t see how it can be a fault when I point out a strength. So, Will,” he said, and he replaced the book, “Gaia tells me you’re the best student in the class. That’s quite an achievement, given your company.”

“It is what it is,” Will said. He hadn’t meant to sound cryptic. Seeing no point in fake modesty, he added, “That’s true. Except for chemistry. No matter how hard I try, Gaia always beats me.”

Andrew placed a friendly hand on her shoulder. And Will watched with interest as she turned to the fire, apparently warming her hands, but at the same time shrugging Andrew off.

“Right,” Andrew said, and he pushed his glasses back up along the bridge of his nose. A nervous gesture, Will thought. “It’s been nice making your acquaintance. Give me a few minutes, then come down to the basement. I’m going to make sure everything’s set up. Caspian’s already down there.”

As soon as he had gone, Will checked out the room more thoroughly. Along with the antiques and the sinister curios, there was a lot of high-tech gadgetry. Nothing too innovative— all off-the-shelf. A forty-inch, flat-panel LCD TV, the latest Apple iBook, open on a spindly-legged writing desk. On the richly woven carpet were two halves of a wireless keyboard, which were designed to sit on each knee, to remotely control a computer.

Gaia looked surprised. “It’s Andrew who’s rich. Andrew Minkel—I thought you’d have heard of him. The software millionaire? He made his first million by the time he was ten. Now I think he’s up to about two hundred.”

She nodded. “He owns this house. His aunt lives here, but she’s on holiday somewhere in Scotland. She goes away all the time. Andrew prefers it. His parents are overseas.” Gaia glanced at the gold clock on the mantelpiece. “. . . We should really go down. The door’s in the kitchen.”

At once, his full attention was seized by the room below. It was cavernous, with black-painted walls. At the rear, Andrew was fiddling with something on a low table. Three plastic-molded chairs were arranged in a row, facing the table, their backs to the steps. In one corner of the room was a stainless-steel bench topped with kit. From the steps, Will recognized an electron microscope, equipment for DNA sequencing, even a gun whose spark could catalog the precise makeup of a sample of rock.

A tall, well-built boy with a loud, deep voice and a shock of black hair was standing near the table. He and Andrew appeared to be arguing.

“We must blame the solar cycle,” the boy was saying. “Radio emissions from the sun confirm that the peak of activity is approaching. The danger will increase—”

“Delacroix has the intelligence of a fetus. It is the failing of mankind. Without geniuses, where would humanity be? In the Stone Age! We are the ones who must carry life forward.”

“To perfection! We must mirror the objectivity, the efficiency of space. Think of the precise absence of the vacuum, the unthinking devastation of the supernova, the hunger of the all-consuming black hole! Why should humanity not have at least a taste of that perfection? We are of space. Our molecules belong to the universe. To pretend otherwise is to waste our time—” He seemed to check himself. “To pretend otherwise is to waste what we can be.”

Will thought for a moment. He’d never heard of an astrophysicist called Baraban, but he didn’t want to admit this to Gaia.

“Andrew’s known him for years. I don’t think they’re close friends. But they went to primary school together.”

Gaia shrugged. “I think he spends most of his time with his father—maybe that’s why. I only met Caspian a couple of weeks ago.” She hesitated. “There was only going to be the three of us, but then I told Andrew about you.”

Will almost smiled at her astonishment. “Not yet,” he conceded. He switched his gaze to the scene below. “Does Caspian know what’s going on?”

“I don’t know everything. When you know Andrew better, you’ll understand. This is important to him.”

“Caspian, meet Will,” Andrew said as they took their seats. “Will, Caspian is an astrophysicist. Caspian, Will is . . . well, apparently Will is an inventor.”

“Not only an astrophysicist,” Caspian announced. And Will felt Caspian’s cool, black eyes lock on to him. “I also have interests in quantum physics and nanotechnology.”

“In fact, only last month I was with my father in Cambridge. You will have heard of my father, of course—he pioneered research into strangelets—” And Caspian bit his tongue. Thoughts tumbled through his mind. Thoughts and fears. He could not let them out.

The lights dimmed. He pressed another switch and a cloud of mist descended from the ceiling. Will guessed what it was at once. For the first time that evening, he was impressed. He’d read the patent only the previous month. Sandwiched between two layers of flowing air, the fog became a screen.

“I got this last week,” Andrew was saying. “The company wants me to test it.” Then he composed himself.

Will sat back in his chair. All eyes were now on the skinny boy with bad clothes and more money than Will could even comprehend. Maybe now, at last, he would discover what STORM was all about.

He waved his hand toward the fog. Instantly, the hovering screen was illuminated. Pale light danced across the walls. Andrew pressed another button on the keypad and an image of a mushroom cloud appeared and rotated.

“The atomic bomb,” Andrew continued. “August 1945. It killed more than two hundred thousand men, women, and children.”

“Bhopal. 1984. An explosion in India. Poisonous fumes filled the air and more than fifteen thousand died.”

Another click. An emaciated man lying on parched ground, flies clustered around his mouth. A child, his belly distended, was crying nearby.

“The world is full of nightmares,” Andrew was saying. “The same world has money. We have science. We have international funding bodies. We have committees to do this and committees to do that. And yet malaria kills a child every thirty seconds. Megacorporations pollute the atmosphere. Global warming threatens us all. AIDS wipes out more than eight thousand people every single day.”

Andrew’s face was taut, his expression intense. He was behaving, Will thought, as if he were talking to a conference hall packed with prestigious diplomats rather than three other kids. Andrew must have been thinking about this day for some time. Caspian, Gaia, and him . . . Was Andrew pleased with his audience? Will wondered.

“We have a choice,” Andrew was saying. “We sit back, we wait, we hope that one day we can grow up to do something about the bad in the world. Or we act now.”

“STORM: Science and Technology to Over-Rule Misery. We might be young, but we are not impotent. We can act. We can change the world. The only real challenge is for us to believe it.”

He let his gaze focus on each of the three members of his audience. Andrew’s words had been drenched in belief. His blue eyes were alight with passion.

“My vision is this,” he continued. “That we come together, and we recruit others who have talents, and under the banner of STORM we work to tackle the problems in the world. Why not? We’re geniuses. We can take on HIV. We can take on global warming. We have the brains. I have the money. I say: Let’s do it!”

There was a stunned pause. After a few moments, Caspian Baraban began to clap. Gaia put her own hands together. Her head was bowed and nodding, apparently in deep agreement.

Will looked at them in disbelief. And his anger surprised him. Who did they think they were? It was typical, he thought—exactly the warped idea of reality all his classmates had. He hadn’t known what to expect from the evening, but he hadn’t expected this. It was all so worthy, he thought. And naive. Disappointment, and three months of frustration, rose to the surface.

“Don’t you think—” Will said loudly, and the clapping stopped. He stood up, and stepped toward Andrew. “Don’t you think you’re expecting a little too much? We haven’t even left school. You want to take on global warming when the best scientists in the world have been working on it for years? You actually think you can beat HIV?”

Will shook his head. “You’ve been successful and it’s done something to your head. You think because you can make money out of software you can solve the world’s problems? I can’t believe how arrogant you are.”

There was a tense silence. At last, Andrew nodded slowly. “And I can’t expect everyone to share my belief from the start. Most of us are so used to living within confinements, we can no longer even dream of what truly is possible. We accept, because we are taught not to expect.”

“What you’re talking about is a dream,” Will said. “That’s all. You want us to waste our time on things we can’t possibly achieve. I have better things to do.”

Will’s next sentence froze in his mouth. He glanced back at the three seats. Caspian was sneering at him. Gaia was looking at him intently, a slight frown on her face.

And Will instantly felt heat in his cheeks. Perhaps he should have kept his mouth shut. He could have left and simply not said a word.

He turned away from Gaia and strode up the stairs, out the door, and into the blackness of the night. He walked quickly, and he didn’t look back. His mind was racing. It was odd behavior for him. In the past few months, he’d learned to keep his own counsel. But what he realized was this: He’d been curious about STORM. He’d begun to think that Gaia might be all right. He’d let himself hope that something new could be about to change—even to improve—his life. And life as usual had let him down.

Will sighed and shook his head angrily. It was no good thinking that way. It would get him nowhere. What would his father have said?

Will swiped a hand across his damp cheek. The trace of moisture that remained was evaporated by the night breeze. It chilled his face. He wrapped his arms tighter around his chest. It wasn’t far to Natalia’s house.

A few minutes later, he was outside her gate. The first-floor window was lit. Her studio. Will could see the outline of her plump body at her desk. He could even see the fine brush in her hand. Natalia. His mother’s childhood best friend. Natalia would look after him, his mother had said, as she’d packed up her house and packed off her son.