Neurolink Read online

  “M. M. Buckner scores two major victories here. First, she proves that her remarkable debut novel, Hyperthought, was no fluke: The same brilliance is very much evident in Neurolink. And second, she ably demonstrates that cyberpunk is nowhere near dead. Buckner is the first clear-cut new star of twenty-first-century SF.”

  —Robert J. Sawyer,

  Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids

  MORE PRAISE FOR

  HYPERTHOUGHT

  “Quick as a cobra and just as wicked, Hyperthought is a smart, fast-paced SF thriller, and one of the best debut novels I've read in a long time. Don't miss it.”

  —Allen Steele

  “This is one successful adventure story and a neatly packed allegory on thought and future.”

  —Booklist

  “Hyperthought comes from out of nowhere to provide a much needed shake-up to the cyberpunk subgenre…what a debut this is! M. M. Buckner instantly vaults to the status of an author to keep an eye on and put at the top of the reading pile…a genuine lived-in near future with enough political and philosophical chops to rattle anyone’s brainstem… Buckner writes well… It is quite awhile since I have encountered such an appealing, self-deprecating main character…a great deal of page-turning fun… Buckner skillfully invents and imagines a fully realized world for us to live in via Jolie…few authors in any genre create a credible multicultural cast so effortlessly. Add to that Hyperthought’s theme of questioning the nature of reality, consciousness, and perception, and the result is unforgettable.”

  —SFRA Review

  “Hyperthought is cutting-edge science fiction that will appeal to fans of plenty of action.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  NEUROLlNK

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass market edition / August 2004

  Copyright © 2004 by M. M. Buckner.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Cover art by Getty Images/Stone Collection Photo by Millar/UHB Trust.

  Interior text design by Julie Rogers.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 0-441-01188-8

  ACE®

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the "A" design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my father and mother,

  William and Margaret Buckner

  Deepest gratitude goes to my life partner and spouse, Jack Lyle, who stands by me always. Heartfelt thanks also go to the many friends and colleagues who have encouraged me and critiqued my work, including in alpha order: William and Margaret Buckner, Mary Helen Clarke, Joe DeGross, Mary Bess Dunn, Laura Fowler, Phil Geusz, Mitchell Graham, Fred Grim, Cindy Kershner, Jack Lyle, Bonnie Parker, Nathan Parker, William Parker, Brian Relleva, Martha Rider, Allen Steele, Carole Stice and Ava Weiner. Special thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis. And everlasting appreciation to my editor, John Morgan.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1: SHORT POSITIONS

  CHAPTER 2: PAYABLE ON DEMAND

  CHAPTER 3: ARBITRAGE

  CHAPTER 4: MARGIN REQUIREMENT

  CHAPTER 5: FLOATING EXCHANGE

  CHAPTER 6: BEARER BOND

  CHAPTER 7: COST OF LIVING

  CHAPTER 8: SUPPLY AND DEMAND

  CHAPTER 9: LIQUIDITY

  CHAPTER 10: DEBENTURES

  CHAPTER 11: CONSUMABLES

  CHAPTER 12: MERCANTILE

  CHAPTER 13: USURY

  CHAPTER 14: DRAIN ON RESERVES

  CHAPTER 15: VOLATILITY

  CHAPTER 16: TURNAROUND

  CHAPTER 17: MARGIN CALL

  CHAPTER 18: RATE MOVEMENT

  CHAPTER 19: NONNEGOTIABLE

  CHAPTER 20: PRIVATE ENTERPRISE

  CHAPTER 21: CODICIL

  CHAPTER 22: CAPITAL PRESERVATION

  CHAPTER 23: ACCRUAL

  CHAPTER 24: WILL AND TESTAMENT

  CHAPTER 25: FUTURES

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  SHORT POSITIONS

  MY father is dying.

  The idea drifted through Dominic’s mind like an unfamiliar scent He crossed the granite lobby of ZahlenBank, eyeing the concessionaires and thinking of his father, crushed in an accident the day before. Light blazed through the glass dome overhead and bleached the scene around him. Ticket sellers, water vendors and hologram artists cluttered the rotunda with their cheap stalls, selling unlicensed goods under the very roof of ZahlenBank. Their sweat soured the air. Protes, all of them, Dominic thought. Lazy protected employees, living off subsidies, adding nothing of value to society. My father is dying.

  No one would mistake Dominic Jedes for a prote. He stood a meaty six-foot-five, wore hand-tailored suits and kept his sandy hair clipped short. For a large man, his movements were subdued, even quiet. He walked with a hushed balance as if ready to spring to the attack. Yet Dominic never lurched into violence. He was never known to raise his voice.

  Just then, he stopped midstride and frowned at a prote manicurist who’d set up her table directly in front of the executive elevator. He curled his fingers till the nails bit into his palms, and he spoke in an undertone, “Clear that out of my way.”

  The young woman clutched her paint bottles in both hands and kicked her table half a meter to the side. Dominic didn’t look at her face. Her insignia showed she worked for Scandia.Com. Yet here she was, squandering her rest period, chasing after illegal income. He stepped past her, into the elevator, and as he thumbed the ID pad, weariness overtook him. Monday. Tedium. He rubbed his eyes to wake up.

  As the elevator rose through the glass framework of ZahlenBank’s executive spire, Dominic peered out at the yellow Norwegian sky. All he could see was smog. Now in the year 2249, everyone lived under glass. The global greenhouse effect had turned the atmosphere steamy hot and unbreathable. Dominic glimpsed his reflection in the window.

  With his square open face and sea gray eyes, he would have been striking, but lines marked his forehead, and the flesh under his chin had just started to sag. At thirty, he was beginning to look like the oldest man at the bank. He rubbed his jaw. Most of his colleagues had gotten face work, but he just couldn’t bring himself to bother with it. He was beginning to feel that way about a lot of things. Nevertheless, as the elevator slowed to a stop, he straightened his collar and smoothed his hair out of habit. The door whooshed open, and he nearly tripped over his assistant, Karel Folger. The young man crawle
d on all fours in front of the elevator, gathering sheets of printout.

  “Good morning, sir. Sorry, urn, sorry.” Karel glanced up with his eager grin that showed too much pink gum above the tooth-line. “I have your brief ready for the meeting. I was just—Sorry, sir.”

  Dominic had a habit of puffing out his cheeks, then expelling the air all at once in an exasperated blow. Now he puffed that way, and Karel’s red-rimmed eyes loomed huge in his pinched, adolescent face. A string of black hair fell across his forehead, and he combed it back with his fingernails. He reminded Dominic of his own early days at the bank. Karel had been on the job less than a month.

  “I need caffie.” Dominic pretended to read the brief.

  “Yes, sir. Meeting starts in five, sir. Mr. Lorn wants to see you first. Should I bring your caffie there?”

  The mention of Klas Lorn made Dominic scowl. What did that old sycophant want now? He said, “No, I’ll be going straight to the conference room.”

  “Yes, sir.” Karel sprinted down the corridor, and Dominic watched him collide with a security guard.

  Again, a stray thought harassed Dominic’s mind: My father is dying. The broad bronze door to his father’s office lay directly across from the elevator. Dominic glanced at the plate on the door and felt his shoulders tighten. A couple of execs passed him in the hall. He barely noticed their greetings. More execs emerged from the elevator and hailed him. He stood like an automaton, staring at Richter Jedes’ door.

  “We’re the best kind of partners,” Richter used to say. “We think exactly alike.”

  Do we? Sometimes Dominic wished it were true. It would make things easier. Not long ago, he had been ZahlenBank’s brightest young deal maker, following Richter’s footsteps on a fast track for the presidency. Everything he knew, every feint, every gambit, every nuanced smile, he owed to his father. Richter taught him how to target clients like a heat-seeking missile, how to calculate advantages and weigh values, and when the time came for negotiation, how to choose his own ground.

  Dominic glanced down the hall where his colleagues were gathering in the conference room. Most often, that was the room Dominic chose for his deals. In that room, with his handheld remote, Dominic was master. He controlled the lighting, the view-screen, the state-of-the-art holographics, even the drapes that opened to reveal a commanding view of Trondheim. He joked that the U-shaped table was his altar of ritual bloodletting. It was no accident that the chairs were deep and enfolding and difficult to move. While the clients remained chair-bound, he strolled and talked and fanned their desires. By instinct, he could sense the exact moment they began to yield. He could smell it. Like old dollar bills.

  Then he would pitch his voice low and move steadily up through the U, thrusting his arguments forward, driving his point home. With a breath, a nod, a parting of lips, the clients would agree to his terms. And in that fleeting moment as he closed the deal, Dominic knew he was exactly the man his father wanted him to be.

  But those days seemed like another lifetime on this wretched Monday morning. He rolled his knotted shoulders. As he stood in the corridor gazing at nothing, forgetting why he had stopped, mousy little Elsa Bremen touched his shoulder. She ducked her head and tried to appear even smaller than she was. “Karel said I might have a word with you, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “That submarine. We received an image this morning.” Elsa opened her notebook.

  Dominic yawned. “Why do you bother me with this now, Elsa?” He was about to turn away when the holographic image in her notebook caught his attention. A curious bottle-shaped vessel shimmered just above Elsa’s screen. Its surface seemed to be crusted over with some kind of brown growth. Elsa moved her finger to rotate the miniature image, and Dominic saw it was mounted on belt-driven treads like a battle tank.

  “That’s the Benthica?” he asked.

  Elsa nodded. “Recorded by satellite this morning at the bottom of the Arctic Sea.”

  Dominic studied it. “Two thousand protes live in that?”

  “For a while.” Elsa sighed.

  A bleeding heart, that was his Elsa. Dominic liked her for it, and he pitied her. There she stood with her head bowed over the notebook, too shy to look at him. With all her brains, Elsa would never have broken out of junior management if he hadn’t helped her. He yawned again and halfheartedly covered his mouth with his hand. “Send it to my local node.”

  Elsa pressed the notebook to her chest and trundled off on her short legs. Dominic watched till she rounded a corner. Then he remembered he was standing in front of his father’s office. Why had he stopped here? The office would be vacant. Idly, Dominic read the engraved plate hanging on his father’s door.

  “Money defines value. It has no subtlety. It cannot deceive or equivocate. All transactions balance. All statements are true. Money is the immaculate computation of power.”

  My father, he thought again.

  Richter Jedes had smashed his racing aircar in the mountains above Trondheim. He banked too steeply, trying to cut off an opponent. Still, he emailed everyone to confirm this morning’s meeting. Dominic dreaded it.

  Without knowing why, he entered his father’s office, and at once, his glance fell on the gray box. The NP. It rested quietly on his father’s desk—harmless, inert, hardly bigger than two fists pressed together. Dominic felt an impulse to crush it. Instead, he turned his back and looked at the photographs. Richter with women. Richter with his race-car. Richter in full surface gear climbing a mountain in Asia. Richter standing with his son, seven-year-old Dominic, in the Alaskan courtroom of the World Trade Organization. That photo hung slightly off center, and the misalignment nagged at Dominic’s senses. He could almost smell the dusty carpet again and hear his father scolding him to stand still.

  “Where are they, Father?” Young Dominic couldn’t stop fidgeting that day in Alaska. He thought Richter had brought him to meet a real live Org.

  “Where are who?” Richter was testy and distracted.

  “Gig and Meninx and Phil and Sanja. I want to see what they look like.” Orgs were Dominic’s boyhood heroes. They were the superintelligent, quasi-biochemical computer brains that ran the World Trade Organization. Incorruptible. His young mind resonated to that idea.

  “You wanna see Orgs?” Richter clicked through a file.

  “Uh-huh. Will they talk? I mean, like people?”

  Stories about the Orgs filled the juvenile Net sites. Their semiorganic wetware had evolved in bold, mysterious directions, and they circled the Earth in stealth-clad satellites, defending free markets and preserving the rule of law. Dominic drew pictures in his notebook of colossal robotic guardians, streaming radiance.

  “Fuck the Orgs,” Richter said.

  Seven-year-old Dominic wasn’t sure what that meant. With a boy’s hope, he peered around the courtroom, searching for a hint of godlike presence, but he saw only mortals shuffling among the desks like clerks in a store.

  “Will they have faces,” he asked, “and teeth?”

  Richter grabbed Dominic’s arm and shook him hard. “Orgs are the enemy, son. God dammit, the Orgs wanna break up ZahlenBank!”

  That day, for the first time, Richter spoke to Dominic as if he were a grown man. “Only one bank controls the money and data in this hemisphere.” Richter made a tight fist. “ZahlenBank! The WTO wants to split us into a dozen separate operating units. That’s why I come here to these courtrooms every month. To fight their lawsuits. Damn the Orgs! I’ve been holding ’em off for decades!”

  Dominic held his bream and nodded.

  “Divestiture,” his father growled in his face. “You know what that word means? It means death, son. The death of ZahlenBank, We’ll never let that happen, will we?”

  “Never,” Dominic promised with a thumping heart.

  In the stale air of his father’s empty office, Dominic straightened the photo. Almost imperceptibly, he moved his lower jaw from side to side. Without looking again at the gray box, he squ
ared his shoulders, walked out and marched down the hall to the conference room. He pushed through the double doors and took his place at the left of the U-shaped table. Someone—Oscar Blein—was already making a report. The normal Monday group had convened. Eleven senior directors with their assistants. Business as usual.

  Karel placed a mug of hot caffie on the table for him, and only after taking a slow deliberate sip did Dominic glance at his father, the ZahlenBank Chairman and CEO. The old man’s injured body dangled within a complicated steel brace at the head of the table. Their glances met.

  For one surreal instant, the distance between them seemed to close, and they were alone, face-to-face. Partners again, in perfect understanding. As if no disagreements had ever separated them. Dominic stopped breathing. He felt suspended in time. As he and his father watched each other, he felt the old fear and hope—that he would win a prize he couldn’t quite define. But then his father squinted and turned away, and time resumed. Dominic discovered that his heart was pounding.

  Richter always piloted his own aircar in the Trondheim Sunday races. He was famous for it. Famous for many things. Even trussed up in a body brace, he still dominated the room. Everyone knew it was Richter whose vision had built ZahlenBank. The only bank in the northern hemisphere. The sole arbiter of money-data exchange. Richter built the bank’s all-seeing surveillance web and engineered its enormous data-warehouse—the Ark—that captured and stored every byte of information passing through the Net. Because of Richter’s foresight, ZahlenBank literally owned recorded history—by legal license. Dominic watched him with admiration.

  When Klas Lorn whispered in Richter’s ear, the old man flared up and shoved him away with a weak, bandaged arm.

  “The surgeons can wait!” Richter bellowed. “1 need to capture this meeting for my NP. Don’t you people understand!”

  Blein, who had been speaking, sat down without finishing his report.

  “Jesus Krishna Christ!” Richter croaked a laugh and tried to slap his chest, but when his arm fell limp in its sling, Dominic winced. Don’t let these jackals see your weakness, Father.