unmarked grave, with my fingerprints and teeth removed so that there’s no way of identifying me.
I don’t blame them if that’s what they really want to do, if that’s where I’m headed. I would do the same thing, we all have to live our lives as effectively as we can, and who can blame people for wanting what’s after all just a little bit of security and safety. Oh, and by the way, the sex with Sylvia was still awesome, not that it’s your business, but people always ask, why are you still so close to her, why are you all over each other, and the reason is that we both enjoy it and we’re both mature enough to admit that. Sylvia, I do miss you, and I am determined, if I ever get myself out of this mess, to find you again, wherever you are, I’m sure you are somewhere. I will show you that I’ve changed and that I can be someone different, I can fill that void with something approaching light and then maybe we’ll sail off and find that island we talked about and have the most beautiful children. Ha! But look at me, what am I doing. I know, and you certainly know, that’s completely impossible.
Sylvia came round that afternoon, funnily enough, to find me sitting in my living room surrounded by high end technology. All she did was raise an eyebrow but was enough to tell me that she’d worked it out. Yes, I know, I shouldn’t have told her about the VDE, so sue me. We had still been married at the time, when we first kicked off the project, I thought it may capture her imagination and I had wanted to brag about my new-found importance. Besides, how else to explain the sudden increase in my salary? That afternoon, in any case, she said I should take the stuff back. What did I expect to happen, she asked? No clues on the CCTV, no alarms, nothing to suggest they had been stolen, it could only have been an inside job, management would conclude. Everyone under suspicion, innocent people dismissed, with a black mark on their CV and unlikely therefore to ever find meaningful work again. I did try to point out that I wouldn’t classify working as a sales rep for a large American technology firm as meaningful, but she told me I was missing the point, as always; who was I to judge others, and at least they had something they were passionate about, I’m not sure she meant it as a dig about me but I took it as such. But what could I do? Stealing things is one thing but returning them? When I thought about the risk that I had taken, when I thought about what had happened to Jared, when I thought about what would happen to me, it made no sense at all and it was absolutely not going to happen. I mean, maybe if she had said put it back and I will fall back into your arms with unwavering love, well then, maybe I would have considered it. As it was, I preferred to think of it as a successful dry run of my spying mission for Louise, and then I was hardly going to admit that to Sylvia, was I?
The last thing that Sylvia said to me that afternoon was God, Sylvain, you’re such an idiot, which of course is completely true, though I would have preferred something else; even something like God, Sylvain, you’re such an idiot but I do still love you would have been way preferable to the look of disdain that still sits in my mind; it wasn’t even said in a sweet, lovable rogue kind of way, it was said in a throwaway, off-hand way, a tiny example of everything that was wrong with our relationship. And in a truly mature response, I drank half a bottle of whisky and decided to follow Mark that very night as if that would give me some kind of redemption.
The VDE was a complex device and required care when being used. Just to initiate it needed precision; the batteries were thinner than a silk scarf (as our CEO used to say) and jerking them around when you had had a few drinks was not a sensible plan. I had used them and charged them numerous times, so I knew what I was doing – but it is very hard to move things precisely and minutely when your hands are shaking, and even harder when you’re not aware that your hands are shaking. I’m still not entirely sure what I did that evening, or how I did it, but at 10:31pm, wearing what I imagined to be a fully functioning VDE, I stepped out of my house and into the dark street. Forgetting to wait for Louise’s signal that Mark had actually left the house being my second mistake, albeit in itself not a catastrophic one. You’re probably one of those people who say that there’s no such thing as coincidence, you’re doubtless completely rationally minded. I hasten to say that I am rationally minded, but I do believe in coincidence – I’ve seen it too many times. I just stumbled out to follow Mark because it hadn’t occurred to me not to, and I walked unsteadily until I got to their house, and stood, waiting, on the opposite side of the street. Let it be known that I can take my drink, but half a bottle of whisky is enough to affect any man who still has a functioning liver and isn’t an alcoholic, and in some corner of my mind I registered that the street shouldn’t have been swaying half as much as it was, if it should have been swaying at all. I was lucky, actually, that it was a long time until the door opened and Mark stepped out into the night, and the exercise and cold night air had brought me back to a manageable level of sobriety; nonetheless, I felt a shiver of anticipation as I braced myself to follow him and discover what dark deeds he committed under cover of night, whilst safe in the assumed knowledge that his wife lay comatose under the influence of extreme drugs.
He stepped out onto the street and scanned it up and down. I had no need to hide, being protected by the VDE and so I watched him intently. Did I mention (perhaps not) that we had also ingeniously built in night vision glasses into the VDE’s framework, which automatically detected the amount of light in the air and adjusted the vision automatically, giving me a perfect view of Mark, albeit in that greenish hue that is almost impossible to avoid, and that turned his dark, Mediterranean features into a ghostly shadow. He stared in my direction, and I froze instinctively, then his brow furrowed, he looked inquisitive and then he turned away. Impossible that he could have seen anything, I thought, as I followed him, a good thirty feet behind, because one thing the VDE couldn’t do quite as well as we hoped – yet – was muffle any noise, and the street was quiet at that time of the night.
A line of text appeared in front of me. Message from Louise –
He’s just left. Sorry to let you know late but if you hurry you could just catch him. Let me know. Lou xx
My heart jumped a little at those two little crosses at the end of the sentence; was she coming on to me? How should I respond? She was lovely, in a way, Lou. Before anything else, I have to say, first, I know that I pushed her away a number of times, so why am I raising this now. I am also conscious of everything that I said about Sylvia, and that I probably appear as a typically shallow man, unable to have an emotionally mature thought for more than 30 seconds. However, I would say in my defence that firstly, my relationship with Louise was complicated, as I have clearly explained earlier, and secondly, my relationship with Sylvia was complicated, as I have clearly explained earlier. There. Let’s move on. I got the text from Louise, a little late, and replied that I was already on my way (or words to that effect). The in-built screen technology of the VDE is one of its simplest, yet most awesome features (and I do not use that word lightly), with its thought recognition communication that enables you to send text messages by thinking the words you want to say.
Admittedly, this still has a little way to go, both from a technology and a thinking point of view. You need to be very focused. Trying to reply to a text when you have had a lot to drink and when you are confused about exactly how to reply can, in some cases, cause certain issues, and whilst I’m still not one hundred percent aware of the exact words of my reply to Louise, I don’t think she appreciated everything that I wrote. Thought recognition, whilst we’re on the subject, is another of those top-secret projects that are being pursued currently. There is, apparently, a part of the brain that determines the right answer up to 99% faster than is possible when you actually consciously think about it. The logic is processed, the maths is done, the pros and cons are weighed up, and the solution is presented there, on a silver platter, as perfect a solution as possible, into the conscious mind. What happens then is that all of the crap that swills around most of our minds for most of the day starts to get involved, and lot
s and lots of tedious, irrelevant details, start to get in the way – what if this happens, what if that happens, what if the world ends, what if it rains tomorrow, what if I get wet – and the perfect, blissful answer gets lost in the falling debris and takes far, far longer to surface to the beautiful earth, or, more likely, is buried under a cloud of shite – to speak utterly plainly.
I know this because it was explained to me by Carl Alfred Thomasson, an extremely clever man and without any doubt the most brilliant man that I know. He knows because he devoted over twenty-five years of his life to researching this subject, after having joined MSI as fresh faced graduate from Cambridge, Harvard and MIT. I wonder whether you know what MSI is, I wonder whether you may actually work for them (I can’t really say us anymore), but in case you don’t, MSI is the Ministry for Secret Information, and I don’t really need to say much more about it, do I. Externally it is known as the Ministry for Rural Affairs – are you raising your eyebrows now – which of course is a Ministry so lacking in