“Sir? You’ve got a video call waiting. Mr. Antonio Campos. He says it’s important. Should I put him through? He insists on extra encryption for the call.”
The index entry pops and I’m reminded of the Brazilian robber baron turned philanthropist turned presidential candidate and our past dealings with him. What on Earth does he urgently need from us? His environmental cleanup work has everything it needs from a technical standpoint. We already told him we won’t do anything beyond our original nanotech licensing deal to help him win the presidency of his country, and with the election four months away I can’t imagine he has a lot else on his mind right now.
“Sure, Alan. Send him to my desk.”
Interesting that he doesn’t feel like the standard encryption we’ve used when we’ve talked before is enough for this call. I check my appearance before enabling the extra encryption measures and turning on the camera. I’m looking as good as possible in one of the new shirts Lin gave me. I hit the button and the video call connects. Antonio’s handsome face and perfect dark hair with silver highlights fill my screen.
“There you are, my young American friend!” He’s as charming as always with his accent just thick enough to decorate his words. I didn’t love the way we were introduced, with Dorothy using him to fund the development of our stolen intellectual property, but my notes in his index entry remind me how pleasant he is to deal with directly. “I was afraid you would be too busy to speak with your favorite customer.”
Still my only customer, as far as licensing our family’s nanotech is concerned, but I don’t mention it. “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Campos.”
“Antonio, please!”
“Of course. Antonio.” I make a note in his index entry so I’ll address him that way next time. “How’s the solution we set up for you working out? I heard good things about your Amazon basin cleanup efforts.”
“So good! So good!” His smile reveals blindingly white teeth. “We did so well, we’re actually moving our crews on to some new projects over in the Atlantic. The ocean water in the Caribbean needs the, ah, washing. Just like you and I did in the Pacific, no?”
I smile back, suppressing a chuckle. To compare his efforts to ours in solving the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more than a little disingenuous, since his crews all combined accomplished less than a tenth of what Andrea, Evan and I got done, but I’ll let him have it. He did contribute to solving the problem, and he’s done even better environmental work since he got a nanotech baseline from us that’s not complete junk.
“Sounds like a noble effort,” I tell him. “And one that will probably give you some nice PR for your presidential campaign.” He gives me a grin and a nod at that. “You’ll have to let me know how it goes. Did you need anything from us? I would think the software and firmware packages you have now should work just fine for another ocean cleanup project.”
“No, no, nothing like that. My call today, it is entirely for your benefit.”
“Oh?”
“First, I am going to tell you a thing. A little while back, when I first started doing business with that terrible woman whose name I do not need to mention,” he begins. He didn’t seem to think Dorothy was terrible back when he was working with her, but I appreciate that he’s changed his tune on her without even knowing how low she had sunk before I killed her. “It was before anyone in the world knows that she and I were to do any work together. Or so I think. But I was approached by a very unusual fellow who seemed very interested in the sort of thing that woman and your father worked on. The little robots.”
“How was that unusual? A lot of people are interested in nanotech.”
“Yes, yes. Of course I know that. But the people that are interested, they are mostly the ones that want to make it. Or sometimes the ones that want to make it illegal. But this man, this very strange man, he wanted something else. He offered me ten billion of your US dollars to make a… how do you say it? A small disaster. With the nanorobots.”
I perk up. This is much more interesting than the conversation I thought I would be having when this call started. “What kind of disaster? Did he say?”
“Oh, he was very specific. It needed to look like that big disaster from the history books. The one with your father, when the first little robots had their big problem. It needed to be so big, so that so many people would see it. It needed to kill so many people, but to not be so big that it would not stop before it would kill the whole world. Better that it be on an island, far from everyone. But it needed to have a lot of the news cameras and such. And so on and so on and so on. It was a very strange thing this man wanted.”
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A limited Gray Goo event? Why would anyone want that? “What did this man look like?”
“He looked like he was from somewhere in Asia, but he spoke very well in my language, the português brasileiro. Not so tall. Not so short. A little older.”
Do I dare to hope?
“Any chance he gave you his name?”
“Oh, it was years ago, and I have trouble remembering. He only gave his last name, and it was something short. I remember that. Wei or Lu or—”
“Wu?”
“Ah, yes. That was it. Wu. He call himself Senhor Wu. Did he come to speak to you as well?”
To Evan: Got a lead on Mr. Wu! My office! Now!!
I force my face to remain calm. “In a manner of speaking. We may have run into the same man when we were on one of our trips last year.”
“Ah, yes, the cleaning of that great river. So sorry again for the loss of your brother. What a terrible accident that was.”
“But I take it you turned down this man’s offer?”
“Of course, of course! I had plenty of money, and if something like that were to be traced back to me? How could I ever recover from that?”
He puts his hands up in a gesture of helplessness. No mention of the lives lost or potential for things to go wrong and trigger complete global destruction. For all his charm, Antonio might be more sociopathic than I am, and he comes by it completely naturally.
“I’m sure it would have been very difficult, Antonio,” I respond, not sure what else to say. Maybe a little flattery. “You and I would never have had the chance to do all our good work together. And your political career? Forget about it.”
Evan comes running through my open office door, panting to catch his breath.
To Evan: Come around. You’ll want to hear this.
He quiets his breathing as he comes to my side of the desk, where he can see the screen but is still off camera.
“Yes. Yes. You understand. So.” Antonio cocks his head. “I send this man away. This very strange man. But I think this is not the end of this man and me. So I have men very good at, how do you say it? The watching of people. The spying. And I find out a little bit more about this man.”
Well that’s better than we ever did, but it probably helped a lot that Mr. Wu was alive to follow around and all of that.
“Can you tell us what you know about him?” I try not to sound as eager as I am.
“As I say, it was just a little bit that I come to know. He works for a group they call themself the Center for Progress and Peace. He seems to be in charge of finding where they discover new things, new technologies, and then he makes them not be new things.”
That answer doesn’t make any sense, but finally, we have a real name for the illuminati!
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let me give you one example my men find out about. This was back maybe ten years ago. A university professor in Columbia comes up with a new way to process crude petroleum. A way that makes it so you don’t need one of the big, smelly refineries. You just do this thing right where you pump the oil, it makes a nice clean fuel and then the stuff, you know, the stuff they make into plastic. I don’t know the name in English. Nafta? You understand what I tell you?”
I consult the chemistry section of my digital brain for the crude oil distillation byproduct that gets made into plastic.
“Naphtha. Yes, I’m following you.”
“So it would be a big change, this new thing the professor invents. A big good thing to make less pollution, to make it so more people get fuel, to make you not need so many big ships to carry the oil to the refinery then the fuel away from the refinery. To make things not cost so much. But for the men who own the refinery? Maybe not so good. So much money they spend to make the refinery, and now it makes them no money at all.”
From Evan: I see where this is going. It all makes perfect sense now.
He’s doing better than I am. I don’t understand what any of this has to do with our family’s tech or why they would want to trigger another Gray Goo event.
“So this man, this Senhor Wu, he comes to the university where this professor works. He offers him money. Lots of money. He wants to buy the new technique. The professor, he no wants to sell. He just wants to make the world more good. And then, this professor is gone. No one knows where he goes to. No one can find his work. His research, his papers, his computers? All gone.”
“Center for Progress and Peace, huh?
“Yes. It is funny how sometimes they put the name on the thing that is not what the thing will do.”
“So refineries pay these guys to make sure that new technology won’t disrupt the oil industry?”
“No. Well, yes. But no. The oil. The refinery. This is a small thing. The everything else, that is the big thing. When I have my company and make my fortune, mine was a big company, but not so big. Small so that it was just in my country, just owned by me. But the big companies, the ones that are so big they are in all the world, those are so big so that my company looks tiny. They are great whales in the ocean, and my company is a tiny little fish. And they want to make sure they stay big and powerful. So they each give just a little money to this Center for Progress and Peace. I say a little money, because it is a little to them. It would be very much to even me. But they pay to make it so that all the new things, the things that can really change the way the money goes, they only can come to the world if they make the big companies bigger.”
Which puts us right in their crosshairs. Father’s plan would eventually make global megacorporations as extinct as the dinosaurs.