The Machine

the Machine and bring it out.’ Semyonov struggled to his feet and stood gasping for breath. ‘I suppose I should feel gratitude. But these days, that emotion does not come easily to me. We must go,’ he said. ‘The clothes and make- up are itching and irritating. But not yet excruciating as they will be in a couple of hours. When we arrive at the crater, Virginia will explain what must be done. We may as well get on with it. Time is not exactly on my side.’

Finally, finally, Stone was beginning to see where Semyonov was coming from. He wasn’t an evil man — just obsessed. There are people who start a business, or take up a sport. They start off by giving it their all. Some people’s commitment tails off, but others plunge in and give it more than their all. There are millions of people who neglect their partners and kids for their work — not because they are bad people, but because their work takes over. It defines them, and they love it. They spend less and less time with their families and even when they do see their kids they’re thinking of their work. If things get in the way of that one thing in their lives, it frustrates them like hell.

Semyonov’s frustration must be a thousand times greater. For outside of his work, his programming, his achievements — he had nothing. No woman, no child, nothing to enjoy. He was in constant pain and he was going to die. He’d neglected everything — friends, relationships, now even his business empire at SearchIgnition. He'd let it all go. All he wanted was the Machine — to give it to the world and show how brilliant he was. He’d tried to do it in the US, but SearchIgnition’s lawyers had stopped him. So now he’d placed a copy deep below ground in China. And if he couldn’t get it out of there, everything his brilliant mind had ever done would have been for nothing.

Chapter 65–10:54pm 13 April — Flight, Ningbo to Sichuan, China

They had flown by helicopter to Ningbo, to be met by Semyonov’s personal airliner.

Semyonov’s Chinese-made MA600 airliner was painted matte black. Which suggested he only travelled at night. The plane had followed the silver banner of the Yangze westwards, past the brightly lit cities and towns, on past the Brocade City, and now they were over the black wilderness of Western Sichuan.

Stone, Virginia and Carslake sat up front, while Semyonov was on a gurney to the rear with a small medical team.

‘Underground nuclear tests? Shoot! I hope not,’ said Virginia. She was trying to explain the layout of the crater, without even having seen it herself. She’d listened to Semyonov and made notes on lined paper in her All-A student’s handwriting. Now she was relaying the information to Stone and Carslake.

‘The monks said there’d been nuclear tests,’ said Stone. ‘Why else would that huge circle of ground be barren?’

‘That would mean it’s dangerous, right?’ she said.

‘Er… yes,’ said Stone. Carslake rolled his eyes. He had to stop doing that with women.

‘I don’t think so. Steven would have told me,’ she said. ‘Let me tell you what Steven said, ‘The “anomaly”, he calls it.’ Then she read from the notes in front of her. ‘The anomaly is the result of an asteroid strike from seventy million years ago. The reason there were mines here, for iron and all manner of unusual metals, is that they were present in the asteroid. This asteroid created a gravitational and magnetic anomaly.’

Carslake’s eyebrows had shot up his forehead. It made Stone want to laugh. Virginia had just explained Carslake’s precious underground radar pictures. The whole mystery.

Virginia read on, ‘”Chinese miners discovered three percent fissile uranium isotopes deep underground during the Nineteen Sixties.”’ She stopped herself. ‘What the heck does that mean?’

‘It’s like finding enriched, reactor-grade uranium lying around in the ground’ said Stone. He wondered himself how he knew some of these things. A macabre interest in the technology of death, if he was honest. He went on, ‘What I think Semyonov means, is that three percent of the uranium they found was of the fissile isotope, Uranium 235.’ Stone felt his ears register a pressure increase. They would be landing soon. In the crater.

‘Fissile? As opposed to what?’ she asked.

‘The decayed Uranium 238,’ said Stone. ‘The Uranium 235 decays much more quickly, and that means it’s rare. In the four billion years the earth has been around, wherever you look on earth, the uranium had decayed to where it’s only 0.7 percent fissile. That’s why you have to enrich it to 2.7 percent to make nuclear fuel, and even more to make a weapon. I guess the three percent concentration here was because the uranium landed in the meteor.’

Virginia looked at him suspiciously. ‘Sometimes you sound like a real professor. It’s not a great look, Stone.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ he said. There was renewed activity at the back of the cabin, where the medical team in white suits and masks were preparing Semyonov for the landing with padded plastic straps.

Virginia continued, ‘You could be right though. This is what I wrote when Steven was telling me. I have to read Steven’s words verbatim, because I’ve no idea what it all means.’ She began to read. ‘“It was known that at three percent uranium 235, a natural nuclear reaction could occur in the ground. French scientists had identified the phenomenon at a site in Gabon, West Africa in the early Sixties. All that was needed was ground water, which would act as a neutron moderator.” I mean, what the hell? “It would also naturally control the reaction. As the water boiled off in the heat, and pressure increased, the fission would stop, and begin again when water re-entered the deposit.”’

Stone was gently clapping his hands. You had to hand it to Semyonov. ‘How fascinating is that? They discovered the reactor grade uranium, and realised that all they had to do was to force water into the ground, and they would have a permanent supply of nuclear energy, self-regulating, spouting right out of the ground. No wonder Lin Biao was interested.’

‘So what difference does any of this make?’ asked Carslake. ‘I mean, did they build the reactor or what?’

‘It looks like the discovery was reported to Lin Biao, and nothing was pursued after his death,’ said Stone. ‘Meanwhile, the spoil from the mine threw poisonous heavy metals around the crater and killed off all the trees and plants. That explains the barren crater. There was no nuclear test.’

‘Jeez,’ said Virginia. ‘No wonder they closed the place up. Anyhow, they blew up the workings in 1980 when they saw what damage the pollution had done.

‘What about the Machine?’ said Carslake. ‘Where is it? We have to go into a poisoned fucking mine?’

A grave, strained voice spoke from behind them. ‘The Machine is held in a cylinder, twenty inches in diameter.’ It was Semyonov. ‘As Virginia said, the mine is closed, the workings were blown in 1980. But the Machine and all its data are held in that cylinder. It’s five feet long and twenty inches in diameter. Half a mile below the ground.’

‘If the mine is blocked, how did it get in there?’

‘A shaft,’ said Semyonov. ‘We drilled a service shaft a half a mile deep and lowered the Machine into the deepest of the old workings. The shaft is barely twenty-two inches wide. That’s why the cylinder had to be so small.’

‘Hold on,’ said Carslake. ‘You’re talking about the whole of the information from the whole of the Internet here. Plus some incredible level of processing power to analyse it. How does it fit it something barely bigger than an office file server?’

‘Supercooled to minus two hundred. The most efficient, densest database ever built.’

‘It must eat the power,’ said Carslake. ‘How the hell do you supply that much power half a mile below ground? I didn’t see any power lines around the crater.’

‘I think we know the answer to that,’ said Stone. ‘There’s plenty of power down there already. It’s the reason he chose this mine, with it’s own nuke power source. Did you design all this, Semyonov? Or did…’

‘Correct,’ said Semyonov, voice still straining. They were coming in to land. ‘It designed itself. Even chose the location. Who knows what else it’s done in the weeks its been down there.’ There was a roar of the cool night air outside as the undercarriage deployed. ‘Carslake was right all along,’ said Semyonov. ‘There is an alien intelligence at the bottom of that hole. But I created it.’

It was still three hours before morning prayers when the black turboprop droned over the monastery.