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Chapter 5: One Hundred Million Dollars

Chapter 5: One Hundred Million Dollars

Leon’s mother rejected forty million dollars before breakfast.

"No," she said, through a secure video link.

"You haven’t heard the structure."

"No."

"Are you ill?"

"No."

"Did you buy another island?"

"I have never bought an island."

"You inspected three."

"Inspection is not ownership."

His father took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, which was what he did instead of interrupting.

"How catastrophically stupid?" his mother asked.

"One hundred million dollars stupid."

"What did you buy?"

"Nothing yet."

"What are you going to buy?"

Leon considered the several dishonest answers available to him and used none of them.

"A machine," he said. "A very rare one."

"Does it fly?" his father asked.

"Not in the ordinary sense."

"Does it explode?"

"Everything explodes if handled without sufficient imagination."

"Leon."

He stopped smiling. "I have checked the evidence. I have not checked enough of it. I may still walk away. But if I don’t, I want you outside the consequences."

There was a silence with weather in it.

"Will you disappear?" his mother said.

"I don’t plan to."

"That was not my question."

"There is a risk."

His father shut his eyes for a moment. "Then don’t buy it."

"I might not."

All three of them knew he probably would.

At 10:18 the transfer cleared.

FALKNER FAMILY IRREVOCABLE TRUST: $40,000,000

Leon wrote a letter to accompany it, deleted the draft from his laptop, and left the sealed version in the trust archive with instructions that it be released after thirty days of unexplained absence and not one hour sooner.

Available liquid and near-liquid assets: $112,614,880.

The contract arrived that evening under the name WEISS AION. It ran to nine pages of liability exclusions, and Leon read all of them, which took the better part of the night and which he did not regret.

"That clause has no enforcement mechanism," he said in the morning.

"It has my phone number."

"Clause fifty-two excludes damage caused by extinct wildlife."

Marek looked at the capsule. "That one was mine."

"Why?"

He did not answer.

Leon looked at the sentence for a while, decided that a man who wrote it as a joke would have smiled while being asked about it, and put his thumb down anyway.

PURCHASE PRICE: $100,000,000

TRANSFER COMPLETE.

Available liquid and near-liquid assets: $12,614,880.

Marek took a small steel key off his own ring and put it on the table. "Service access. There is no master credential. There never was one. He built the shell around something that does not accept authority, and I want you to understand that sentence before you own it."

"Understood."

"You do not understand it. You have agreed to it. Those are different." He pushed a sealed case across. "Notebooks. Photographs. The translated control index. Two of the pages are annotated in a hand that is not his and I have never identified it."

"There’s a warning on the case."

"DO NOT OPEN NEAR THE CORE. Yes."

Rosenwald lay seventy kilometres away in the foothills, behind woodland and stone walls. Leon had bought it two years ago for the privacy and then visited four times. The previous owner had collected military vehicles, which meant the hill already contained a hall with an eleven-metre ceiling and a floor rated for things much heavier than a capsule.

Moving eleven and a half tonnes of shielded equipment out of a turbine hall without informing anybody took nine days, a specialist rigging contractor who believed he was relocating an industrial autoclave, and one million nine hundred and eighty-six thousand four hundred and twenty dollars.

The convoy left Kaltenbruck after midnight.

At the gate Marek stood in the rain with the cane and did not get into any of the vehicles.

"You’re not coming to Rosenwald."

"It’s your problem now."

"You sold me more than equipment," Leon said. "You sold me incomplete knowledge. That obliges you to answer the telephone."

Marek considered this with what appeared to be genuine effort.

"Sometimes," he said, and turned toward his car.

"Marek."

The other man stopped.

"If your grandfather is alive," Leon said, "what do you want me to tell him?"

Marek’s face gave away nothing at all. He got into the car and drove away, and Leon stood in the rain working out that the answer had been nothing, and then working out that it had not.

The capsule came down onto its skid in the Rosenwald hall at 04:50 with a settling noise like a building deciding to accept a tenant.

For six days Leon did nothing but instrument it.

Twelve cameras, none of them pointed directly into the open passenger chamber, because Elias’s notes contained one line on the subject and no explanation. Magnetometers. Thermal. Acoustic. An isolated logging network with no route to anything else on the property. He powered the human systems and left the core alone, and the core did nothing whatsoever, and on the seventh evening the seamless black interface brightened by itself while he was eating.

He put the fork down and did not move for a full minute.

Then he opened Elias’s translated control index and worked through it line by line.

CALENDAR SYSTEM. DESTINATION DATE. EXISTING-SELF SYNCHRONISATION. PHYSICAL TRANSFER. BIOLOGICAL COMPATIBILITY.

Beneath the human calendar options there were other classifications.

Beneath them: TRIASSIC. JURASSIC. CRETACEOUS.

Leon read that three times, wrote why does a machine built for last Tuesday have a geological menu in his notebook, and scrolled further.

A final line appeared beneath categories he did not recognise.

THE SYNCHRONOZOIC ERA.

He wrote it down exactly as displayed. Unknown geological classification. Possible grandfather terminology. Corrupted translation. Internal simulation mode.

The interface pulsed once.

The Synchronozoic line turned pale blue.

Leon had not selected it. His hand was on the notebook. He moved it further away, deliberately, and put both palms flat on the table where the cameras could see them.

The line stayed highlighted for eleven seconds.

Then it went out.

Leon wrote down the time, the temperature, the magnetic reading and the exact sequence. Underneath he added one question, and then sat looking at it until the hall lights went to their night setting.

What destination remembers being chosen?