Free Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) by Neal Asher

‘We should have entered the technological singularity by now?’
    He shook his head. ‘Difficult to know where we are on the exponential curve, when you don’t know what the exponents are. No, I’m simply stating that, by subjecting the best
minds in the world to the strongest political control, the Committee shut down free thought, hampered creativity and suppressed anything outside the box.’ He began heading to the door, then
paused and turned back. ‘Do you want to come?’
    He’d done it again. When he entered her laboratory, all she had wanted was sleep. Now she knew she had to go with him. She stripped off her lab jacket and tossed it over the back of a
nearby chair.
    ‘So you’re saying that what Rhine is doing is creative . . . outside the box?’ she asked.
    ‘No, on the surface he is doing precisely the opposite.’
    ‘If you could elaborate?’
    The spidergun rose up onto its legs and exited ahead of him. He stepped out too, and Hannah hurried to catch up.
    ‘At the start of the twenty-first century, the whole issue of zero-point energy was hijacked by pseudo-scientists,’ he lectured. ‘Like electricity and magnetism of two
centuries before, it was associated with the supernatural, the miraculous. General scientific opinion gradually hardened against it and then, with the rise of the Committee, the whole issue
petrified. There’s been very little real research into zero-point energy for over a hundred years.’
    ‘Which hardly explains Jasper Rhine’s function here, does it?’
    ‘Messina,’ explained Saul, stabbing a finger upwards, in the general direction of Robotics. ‘Just as with those androids the Saberhagens are working on, Jasper Rhine’s
so-called research was another pet project of Messina’s. Rhine was instructed to investigate the interaction of the zero-point field with the human energy field. To put that into simpler
terms: there have always been those who fear death so much they want to believe that something exists beyond it.’
    Hannah suddenly got it. ‘Messina wanted proof that the human soul exists?’
    ‘On the button.’
    ‘So you’re visiting Jasper to tell him he’ll henceforth be working in Hydroponics?’
    ‘Certainly not.’
    Jasper Rhine stood just inside the door to his huge laboratory. Thin and exceedingly tall, he had developed a constant stoop to make himself look smaller. His hair was blond
and ragged, as if he had impatiently taken the scissors to it himself within recent days. His eyes were like black buttons and his narrow face bore the wrinkles of one who had suffered a great deal
of pain. Just noticeable on his face and the backs of his hands was a web-work of narrow white scars.
    Computers packed this place, jury-rigged in ways Hannah, during her few brief visits here, had been unable to fathom. Various experiments were also running. A complex tangle of glass tubes,
through which clear fluid flowed, emitted bluish glows from within its midst. A framework supported a torus five metres across, this wrapped in electromagnets to which heavy cables snaked across
the floor. Other machines here, within enclosed booths, Hannah knew to contain the tools for chip-etching and nano-machining. It seemed such a waste to have all this stuff here for the research of
nonsense. What on earth did Saul intend?
    Rhine looked terrified, and well he might, for here was someone who would be able to see through all his bullshit. He could babble all he liked about sono-luminescence, vacuum fluctuations and
the ground state of hydrogen, and Saul would be baffled by none of it. However, Hannah remembered that he had looked terrified when last she saw him, and others who had met him had commented on
this too. It seemed he spent his life in a constant state of fear.
    ‘You received my instructions precisely two weeks ago,’ Saul stated.
    Rhine gave a sharp nod, and shivered. Hannah noticed that he seemed more tired and somewhat less clean than he had appeared