Host, p.1
Host, page 1
HOST
Peter James
Praise for Peter James
‘Peter James has found his own literary niche, somewhere between Stephen King and Michael Crichton’
Mail on Sunday
‘Gripping … plotting is ingenious … in its evocation of how a glossy cocoon of worldly success can be unravelled by one bad decision it reminds me of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities’
The Times
‘Probably James’s finest novel to date. I have not read a work so focused and intense in its depiction of the classic Orwellian nightmare’
Shivers
‘A thought-provoking menacer that’s completely technological and genuinely frightening about the power of future communications
Time Out
‘James has been compared with Stephen King, but in many ways he’s better’
Daily Express
‘An awesome talent … one of the few writers working in the genre today whose work is always a pleasure to read and a disappointment to finish’
Starburst
‘A well-paced thriller that delivers maximum emotional tor ture’
Chicago Tribune
‘This compulsive story is a tale of the search for immortality … I cannot remember when I last read a novel I enjoyed so much’
Sunday Telegraph
By Peter James
Dead Letter Drop
Atom Bomb Angel
Billionaire
Possession
Dreamer
Sweet Heart
Twilight
Prophecy
Alchemist
Host
The Truth
Denial
Faith
Dead Simple
Looking Good Dead
Not Dead Enough
Dead Man’s Footsteps
Dead Tomorrow
CHILDREN’S NOVEL
Getting Wired!
Peter James was educated at Charterhouse and then at film school. He lived in North America for a number of years, working as a screenwriter and film producer returning to England. His novels, including the number-one bestseller Possession, have been translated into thirty languages and three have been filmed. All his novels reflect his deep interest in the world of the police, with whom he does in-depth research, as well as science, medicine, and the paranormal. He has recently produced several films, including the The Merchant Of Venice, starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes. He also co-created the hit Channel 4 series Bedsitcom, which was nominated for a Rose d’Or. He is currently, as coproducer, developing his Roy Grace novels for television with ITV Productions. Peter James won the Krimi-Blitz 2005 Crime Writer of the Year award in Germany, and Dead Simple won both the 2006 Prix Polar International award and the 2007 Prix Coeur Noir award in France. Looking Good Dead was shortlisted for the 2007 Richard and Judy Crime Thriller of the Year award, France’s SNCF and Le Grand Prix de Littérature award. Not Dead Enough was shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Thriller of the Year award and the ITV3 Crime Thriller Of The Year award. He divides his time between his homes in Notting Hill, London and near Brighton in Sussex. Visit his website at www.peterjames.com.
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Victor Gollancz
This ebook first published in 2010 by Orion Books
Copyright © Peter James/Really Scary Books Ltd 1993
The moral right of Peter James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781409132998
This ebook produced by Jouve, France
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
To my Aunt Lilly,
who made the world a better place.
And her memory always will.
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Praise for Peter James
By Peter James
About the Author
Author’s Foreword
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Epilogue
‘I believe no one currently under the age of fifty will ever have to die.’
Ralph Wheelan, Director,
Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 1993
‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality by not dying.’
Woody Allen, 1990
‘Anyone who thinks 100 is long enough doesn’t deserve to live longer.’
Professor Marvin Minsky,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993
‘Man will not fly for 1000 years.’
Wilbur Wright, 1901
‘Death is no longer necessary.’
Professor Willi Messenger, Toronto 1979
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Although Host is mostly set in the present time, I have taken licence in making some of the computer technology and cryonics science more advanced than they currently are.
From my own research, and backed by the views of many (but by no means all!) of the medics and scientists who have so generously helped me, I believe it is only a question of time before the technological possibilities I have described become real. And probably within the lifetimes of some of us. By then, society will be no more able to understand or cope with what its scientists have achieved than we are now.
In order to give the story a feeling of authenticity and to make it accessible, I have decided, with one exception, not to set it in a future at which all of us can only guess, but in the present, which we know.
Peter James
1993:–)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This has been a monster of a book to research and yet for me it has been both terrific fun and a real voyage of discovery. I’ve met some truly great people along the way, who responded to my requests for help with a level of enthusiasm and thoroughness that has staggered me. To all of the names listed below, I owe a big debt. Thank you.
Singling out individuals is dangerous, because I do not wish to leave anyone out, but without the happy chance meetings with Blaine Price of the Human Cognition Research Laboratory of the Open University in a pub in Milton Keynes, and Michelle Cooperman of the ICRF on a platform at Victoria Station, I might still be struggling with my research right now. And I don’t know how I would have got the book written without the tireless coaching in computer science from Dr Bruce Katz of Sussex University; in chemistry from Richard Blacklock in Los Angeles; and in cryonics fr om the members of Alcor in both the US and the UK. And I have to single out also Matthew Elton and Andy Holyer (andyh@pavilion.co.uk) at Sussex University who never flagged or got hacked off with my endless bombardment of questions, and made enormous contributions in both time and ideas. And Sue Ansell who gave me so much help during the writing of the first draft.
A huge thank you also to the following who either in person, down a phone line or through their work, contributed in so many ways: Mr Andrews of James Parsons; Dr Fara Arshad, Leeds University; Kathryn Bailey; John Bieber; Dr Margaret Boden; Dr Herman Borden, St John’s Hospital, Santa Monica; Mr Geoffrey Briant, Senior Consultant, A & E-Royal Sussex County Hospital; Andy Clarke, Sussex University; C. Scott Carrier, LA Department of Coroner; Dave Cliff, Sussex University; Andrew Clifford, Alcor UK; Phil Corsi; Professor Adam Curtis, Glasgow University; Dr Daniel Dennett; Dudley Dean; Robert Ettinger and the Cryonics Institute; Tim Evans; Dr Gregory M. Fahy; Ray Fibbit; Patricia Friedal; Harold Holyer; Dudley and Pippa Hooley (promoted from Bovine to Aviation); The Immortalist Society; Dr Joseph Kates; Louis Kates; Mike and Veronica Keen; Dr Gerry Kelleher, Leeds University; Carole King; Dr Nigel Kirkham; Peter Lahaise; Robert Martis; Jane McNevin, A & E Royal Sussex County Hospital; Dr Ralph Merkle; Professor Hans Moravec; Professor Marvin Minsky; Mark Morris; Ian Mullen; Dr Simon Nightingale; Dr David Pegg; Nick Perkins; Margaret Potter; Mike Price, Alcor UK; Marie-Claude Pullen; Alan Sinclair, Alcor UK; Garet Smyth, Alcor UK; Dr Duncan Stewart; Lynn Squires, Imperial Cancer Research Fund; Dr Peter Ward, Leeds University; Ralph Wheelan, Alcor Life Extension Foundation; Russell Whittaker; Ian Wilson; David Wiltshire; Jennifer Zehethofer.
I am indebted also to the hard work and support of my agent Jon Thurley and his assistant, Patricia Preece, my commissioning editor Richard Evans, and editor Liza Reeves who spared a few of my little ‘darlings’. And to the saintly patience of the Gollancz team of Elizabeth Dobson and Katrina Whone. And above all to the endless support of my wife, Georgina, who must at times during her vigil of the past year have wondered if I had downloaded myself into my own computer.
Peter James
(peterj@pavilion.co.uk)
PROLOGUE
May 1974. Los Angeles.
Blips of light chased each other silently across the screen on the monitor above the young woman’s bed. The peaks and troughs of their spiky green wakes were becoming less frequent by the hour. There wasn’t cause for panic, yet; but equally there was nothing to give rise to optimism.
Nurse Dunwoody paused to stare out through the sealed windows at the gauze of light that veiled night-time Los Angeles. The ghost of her own face stared back from the dark glass, surrounded by eerie, disembodied reflections of the dials and monitors of the Intensive Care ward.
Her eyes were drawn again to the bracelet on the table beside the young woman in bed number 4. Temperature: 102.5, she wrote on the woman’s hourly log. The bracelet was stainless steel, cheap-looking and tinged green by the reflected glow of the ECG monitor. There was a small red staff and entwined serpent on it, the standard MedicAlert symbol. Blood oxygen: 80 mm Hg. The level had dropped a fraction. The woman’s pulse was also down, and her blood pressure, but the rate of drop was still unchanged.
The woman was twenty-four, pretty, with long darkish hair that had become matted and greasy from perspiration; strands lay like frayed wires across the marbled skin of her forehead. She was stable but slipping steadily. The red digits on the blood-oxygen monitor that shared the shelf with the ECG had started the night at 90.
Ten days ago she had come into Casualty complaining of a vaginal irritation. Now she was close to death. Gram-negative septicaemia. Her body had turned against itself, battering her system with its own toxins. Her blood had been changed three times and she had been bombarded with drugs until her system could take no more. Dr Whitman, the head of the ICU, told the staff at yesterday morning’s briefing that the woman had a seventy per cent chance of dying.
Statistics, thought Nurse Dunwoody as she moved to her other charge, in bed number 3, a man of sixty who was only hours out of theatre after a triple coronary-artery bypass. Statistics. The mortality rate in here was twenty per cent. One in five.
She checked the man’s saline drip and his ventilator, adjusted the tape of one of the sensor pads on his bare chest, and logged his pulse, blood oxygen, blood pressure and temperature. One in five. The thought lodged in her mind like an old tune. It was a statistic that was as uncannily accurate as it was remorseless. One in every five patients would go from here to the mortuary; there was never any variation, no change in the three years she had been here. One in five would be wheeled out, taken down seven floors in the wide service lift to the small mortuary with its damp floor and its smell of disinfectant, tagged with a label attached by string to the big toe of their left foot, a yellow label only if they were going straight to an undertaker, a buff one as well if they were to have an autopsy first; then they’d be wrapped in a plastic shroud and slid into the bank of refrigerators to await collection by an undertaker’s unmarked van.
After that the final journey to the crematorium or the grave. Or – she glanced again uneasily at the metal bracelet that lay on the table beside the young woman; the reflected green light made it glow as if it had a life of its own; as if it alone were detached from the grim reality of this place. Something from another planet, another world. A symbol of immortality. It spooked Nurse Dunwoody.
Somewhere outside, the wail of a siren disturbed the predawn air, shook it the way an angry mother shakes a child, and something shook inside her, too, like a flurry of snow in a gust. Something did not feel right and she did not know what.
She would have liked to talk to the patient about that bracelet, with its universal medical symbol, to have found out more about her. But the woman had been unconscious most of the time, and when she did wake she was delirious and repeatedly mumbled a name that was incomprehensible. She had no visitors, no one had rung to ask after her, and there was little information about her background. A scar on her abdomen indicated surgery some time in the past, possibly a Caesarean section, but she had marked only a name in England as next-of-kin on her admission form, and by the word ‘Children’ had written: None.
Probably one of the thousands of hopefuls who dumped their pasts and came to Hollywood in search of fame, too many of whom ended up in this place after overdoses. Nurse Dunwoody stared back at the bracelet again. It seemed even hotter in here than usual tonight; she listened to the steady hiss from the ducts, the sharp clunk-puff … clunk-puff of the ventilator by the next bed. The air moved sluggishly around the ward, like the blood through her own veins. 3.30 a.m.
She glanced round wearily, watching other nurses who were filling in logs, or moving around past slumbering patients, past vacant, disoriented eyes and forests of saline drips, their bodies temporarily blotting out from her view the blips and spikes of monitors, the winking lights, the wavering dials. She found this place unnerving sometimes, late at night, like now, a strange hi-tech no-man’s-land between life and death.
At regular intervals the young houseman appeared from his office and padded around the ward, glancing routinely at the patients, their charts, their drips and monitors, his white pyjamas rustling softly, his rubber-soled shoes silent on the carpeted floor.
Nurse Dunwoody’s mind was occupied by the bracelet, and the sharp beeps failed to penetrate her thoughts for a brief moment. She saw the agitated face of the houseman as he sprinted past her, before it registered that the spikes on the electrocardiograph above the woman’s head had dropped into a single unflickering line.
‘Heart massage!’ The houseman’s face was tight with panic, like his voice. He pulled open the front of the woman’s gown, interlocked his hands and compressed her chest, paused, then pressed them down again. As he did so he looked up at the monitor as if willing it to register. He grabbed the nurse’s hands, pressed them down in place of his. ‘Don’t stop,’ he said.
