No, I hadn’t known that, either.
‘It’s actually an outgrowth of a really wonderful medical technology, an automated doser for different crisis situations – antivenins for people in remote areas that have seriously toxic wildlife, that kind of thing. But that’s not really commercial, so the designers licensed it to the prison people and it’s really attractive to police forces. I mean, why wouldn’t it be? Imagine if you could just turn off a brawl or a riot from your phone.’ She mimes zapping me with a touchscreen.
‘There are dozens of these ideas floating around. And the thing about them is that none of them is actually evil, they’re only sinister if you see them in one particular direction. Imagine that instead of prison you could resocialise someone, put them in a human environment and yet protect that environment from their lapses. Occupational therapy, impulse control, an awareness of place and connectedness. By many readings it’s the optimal reform environment – the only thing it needs is a positive context to grow in, a place where people can respect you, which is much easier if they know you can’t hurt them. Recidivism rates could be slashed. Except that, I mean: hey. It’s putting control chips in people. Why not go the whole way and run a wire into a given bit of the brain, stimulate a given response directly when you need to? Pavlovian reconditioning – for medical purposes only, of course. Maybe for rapists and so on. I mean, that’s protecting society, right? It’s never just that, of course, and sooner or later you’ve got a chipped human population which is an appreciable fraction of the whole. So very, very not cool. Except that it’s so much better than just locking them up to make ash trays. Except that it’s worse. Or is it?’
Annie sighed. I wasn’t sure any more. I knew what my instinct was, but I have the healthy distrust of instinct that comes when hormones are less pressing and experience is glum. My granddaughter went on, practised and impassioned.
‘We have to think about this stuff now, before we build it, otherwise we’ll just find it happening around us. If it’s a bad thing and it’s already invested, money and power on the line, it’s much harder to roll something back. For example: we’re working on distributed voting here. We thought: Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we just polled people all the time? How about if we had something where you could, in theory, poll a huge number of people at any given time on a given issue: how democratic would that be? What if every afternoon you voted on a bunch of things and that actually governed how the country worked? So we built it. We have a system that could do that now.
‘It’s harder than you might think: distributed real time voting. Infrastructurally it’s hard. You want to have the vote and the record of the vote without being able to tie the vote back to a particular person, because that would be problematic. Secrecy is supposed to be part of the democratic process, so that you can always vote how you really want to without external interference. Oh, and at the other end of serious: you have to be sure that they haven’t just pocket-dialled the system. You do not want people arse-voting to halve the schools budget or something.
‘Most people think the hardest thing would be voter security. They think there’d be fraud. The weird thing is that we have almost no voter security now. It’s not like anyone asks you for your passport at the polling booth. And it works fine. You’d think there’d be lots of cheating, but actually there isn’t. Maybe there will be one day, so sure: trust but verify. You don’t build the system to be vulnerable, of course. But as a reason not to do it? No.
‘Anyway … we have that system. It exists. And suddenly we thought: Wait. What are we saying here? What have we made? Have we made the most democratic network in the world, or have we just reduced law and government to the level of a talent show? And: what if someone were able to get around our privacy safeguards? What would that data be worth, and how could you use it? Almost all the good secondary value you can get out of mass polling requires to some extent that you know who voted for what, and a lot of people would be fine with that because it’s only the disempowered who need to be able to hide themselves.
‘We actually had this really alarming run-in with some kind of spook outfit that wanted to acquire us, right off the bat. As soon as we published some demos, they just turned up one morning and offered us a lot of money. We called everyone, all the shareholders and so on, and put it to the vote and they said no. Actually, they said “hell no”, which made me smile. I mean, that could have gone somewhere really dark.
‘And I got to thinking: what if you built a whole country this way? Around this. Around these devices, these possibilities. If we just decided that privacy on that level wasn’t as important – a lot of the US guys do feel that way, they have this weird anti-statist freedom thing that somehow creates a superstate in private hands and they don’t see the issue because it’s not guvmint. But that was what I wondered: what if it was? What if surveillance was the government? What would that nation feel like? Would it work? For most people, for most of the time, it would probably be great. But it would have a capacity for monstrousness. And there’d be, inevitably, these opaque places where something could go so very wrong. A real nightmare … And it went from there. What if we made a world around that?’
So that was it, Annie said. The idea had exploded inside her head and she could see it, could feel how it should work: a game environment that would be utterly compelling and new and strange, and would at the same time publicise and roll out a bunch of new ideas and technologies that actually existed and encourage people to think about them practically and morally. And kick some arse, of course, because that’s always fun.
‘In this environment, there’s simply no such thing as privacy any more. Every action is visible to the System, and it can call you in, demand an accounting. In the midst of a perfect world, where power is in a way truly held by the people and government has almost entirely gone away, there’s a thin strand of horror, of interrogation machines mandated by the majority and algorithms that see everything you do and want to know why you did it, that understand your actions according to an actuarial chart and analyse you as an aspect of behavioural economics. The system applies numbers and probabilities to your life and knows what you will do, what you might do, even what you would-do-if-only, before it has ever occurred to you. Perhaps you have a latent streak of revolution in consequence of your unhappy upbringing. One day you do something that has just a hint of that rebellion in it – so then you’re brought in and adjusted to make you better before you can break the rules. And in the centre of this maze: a monster.’
‘What monster?’ I said.
She grinned, and I realised that was what I was supposed to say. I was supposed to want to know. That was the hook, the thing to make me play and play on until I found out.
She waved the question away for later, then glanced at her watch. ‘Let me show you something quickly. It’s not ours, it’s one of the big games that’s already out there.’
She turned to one of those enormous screens, white and geometric, and tapped and fiddled. When she ushered me into the chair – the screen, clear as glacier ice on the surface of a lake, filled my vision – I saw a tiny homunculus standing on a wide red plain. It looked like Arizona somewhere, or perhaps, though I have never been, the Australian outback. All manner of traffic and fantasy was swarming around the man, but Annie quickly took him away from that and up a hill, so that very shortly he was alone on the summit, facing west. She sat him down, and pulled up a chair next to me, and we sat watching the sun set on this faraway place called the Barrens. The sky was rich and deep, the distant mountains blue, an oasis lush to the south. Birds flapped by, and then bats, as the sun gave way to early night, and when, a little later, the moon rose and it began to rain, I realised we had been watching without speaking for nearly half an hour. Colson appeared with more tea, and Annie turned off the machine.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said. It had not occurred to me that games could be beautiful, or indeed, that anyone would care if they were. I hesitated. ‘Can you …
tell me more about yours?’
‘Project Gnomon,’ Colson said.
‘Colson’ – Annie rolled her eyes – ‘wants everything to have a secret identity. In case someone gets hold of our plan and – I’m not sure – steals the name and leaves the rest? A rogue branding agency?’
‘You build security in from minute one,’ Colson replied, unrepentant. ‘It’s too late when you realise you should have had it and you didn’t. Plus I like the name: something that sticks out, that doesn’t match everything else.’
‘Witnessed,’ Annie said firmly. ‘Our project is called Witnessed. It has huge backing already. Our investors love it. The game engine is going to be amazing. But I have a problem.’ She glanced over at me. ‘I need it to look like nothing anyone’s seen before. I need someone brilliant to design it. Someone with a completely unexpected take. Someone I can trust who has real artistic chops. And ideally, someone with a name in the art world, so that when I announce it there will be discussion, anticipation. Because everything that does that makes my job easier.’
God, I thought, what a task. You’d have to be an idiot to take it on and a genius to pull it off. But what a challenge. What fun!
She must want a referral, of course. And so I began wondering who I knew who could do something like that. You’d need to think about architecture and society, about history and mayhem. Ideally, then, someone who’d seen some history rather than just read about it. It would be all too easy to create a sort of off-the-shelf fascist playpen for her game, and that would look fine but it would ultimately go stale. It wouldn’t convey nearly enough of what she had said. The game must be organic, each aspect of the look driven by the deep shadows of the concept, and the look would have to weave in and out of what was happening in the story, tonally and thematically. You’d have to imagine it in every time of day, in different weather conditions, and each of them should somehow have an uncanny feel: hard, inhuman edges and misapplications of scale; uncompromising anti-architecture. There was a building I knew in the centre of town that had a little of what I wanted, a white concrete thing all shelves and angles that, in the right combination of rain and wind, gouted sudden torrents of water on to people below. It could feel like being assaulted if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the owners had had to apply for permission for a sort of bus-shelter awning all along the pavement, so now the whole front of the building at ground-floor level was dark most of the year and stifling in the sun. Yes. That, only more, so much more. That for the soul.
This was a real effort, a staggering work: what sort of artist would have the time, would be willing to put aside whatever he or she was already doing? Someone who wasn’t working was almost certainly by definition someone you wouldn’t want, and someone who was working wouldn’t want you. You’d need someone old, brilliant, and mostly retired. Someone like me, but—
She was smiling.
There was no but. This was her pitch. Not someone like me: me.
‘I don’t know anything about computers.’
‘You don’t need to. You design. We’ll build. But you’ll pick stuff up! I solemnly swear,’ she raised her hand, ‘that by the end of this process you will be fluent in the magic of email, Google and YouTube. You will speak the tongues of Adobe. After that, everything else is incremental. The fear goes away because you’re doing stuff. Doing is learning. And Dad will be in awe.’
‘How big is your world?’
‘The environment? About the size of London, at a resolution roughly equivalent to the human eye.’
A whole city. Impossible. ‘That would take … decades.’ She could not mean to hire me a team of thousands. Not even with whatever magical finance she had in place.
She shook her head. ‘We have a construction algorithm that is adducive-iterative. It could, in theory, take its aesthetic from one drawing, although I’d prefer to get a bit more than that. It’s … well, let me show you.’
She produced one of those small computers from under the table and opened it up. Immediately I saw a door.
‘Go through it,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘Touch it.’
I did. The door opened and I saw a room. She dragged her finger across the screen, and it was like turning my head. ‘This isn’t how the gameplay works. This is just for our convenience. Go on, have a look around.’
I tapped and dragged. More doors, more rooms, all that rather ugly modern rental beige that estate agents seem to believe is ‘neutral’ but which to me bespeaks an absence of humanity and the presence of a lifestyle photographer. Tables, chairs, scattered personal items. I kept going. More rooms. More views from the windows. Everything the same. I looked at Annie.
‘The engine is fractal,’ she said. ‘The deeper you go, the more it makes for you to find. When you started out, there was only one room. Now there are ten. It gets rather boring, though, because it’s got nothing to work with.’
‘It can … guess … what I’d do from a single sketch?’
‘No. Not really. It just takes a cue, based on a complex but ultimately pretty sterile algorithm. If you were to say yes, you’d have to create a small body of work and then patrol the output a bit, select what was good and ditch what wasn’t in line with your vision. It would learn to be more and more in tune with you.’
I wondered whether, if I spent long enough with it, the machine would distil the essence of my work out of me the way I had never quite managed for myself. And if it could, was that a perfect artistic tool or the violent intervention of technology into my most human heart? How would I feel if it worked, and the machine’s version of my work was better than mine?
‘What makes you think I can do it?’
‘I’ve seen your work from back then, and I know you now. You’re my grandfather – but you’re also Berihun Bekele. You painted The Earth in Flames. You painted The Lion in Space.’ She stopped, suddenly concerned. ‘Can you do it? I mean, can you still paint? Did you burn out?’
An intimate question from a professional colleague. A daring one from a granddaughter. A good one.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I faded away.’
Colson offered to take me home in the self-driving car, but in the end I got in a taxi because I needed very much to collect myself and get sensible. Annie had quite adroitly doubled my oblique family repair work back upon me in a style of manipulation that I recognised as my own and Michael’s mixed. I didn’t want to default on grandfatherly assistance or fatherly amends, so I had at least to think it over, even if my first reaction was to run a mile from such a strange, enormous undertaking. In the event, I couldn’t think at all on the journey, because it seemed to me that the ride was swooping and abrupt. All the drivers around me must be mad or drunk, and the motion of my own taxi seemed saner only by a narrow margin. Instead of going all the way, I let myself out in Islington. I bought a sketchbook from a supply shop, along with some Caran d’Ache pencils, and walked to a tea shop. It was a fine place with a mezzanine looking over the room and a chandelier made of grey Murano glass.
I lost my art by degrees, starting in the autumn of the year I moved to London. Day by day by week by month, a little more of whatever had made me capable of painting ebbed away. For all my recent life, my mind had been filled – overfilled, it seemed quite often – with wild imaginings: terrible landscapes, alien gods and sex, all taking their cue from the lines of the real, so that a child with a dog became a mighty starship between binary suns, and then the suns became the eyes of an overwhelming state. I had seen life as fantasy, and painted it in my fivefold way. I had lived somewhere between worlds. And now all that was fading to grey.
I waited, at first impatiently and then with a kind of calm I had never known before, a calm which showed in my last works. I met Michael’s mother, and she approved of this monkish hibernation. My gallerist … was not sanguine, but accepted the interregnum and its justification, for a time.
For a time it worked. I found a sort of simplicity. I sk
etched in charcoal, in little notebooks. For the first time in a long while, I sketched what was in front of me, and I wondered whether this was not, after all, a species of apocatastasis: a new primordial beginning. I had been celebrated as the transnational man, the Ethiopian who painted the industrial north-west. I was a post-primitivist riposte to Warhol, a neo-modern Irrealist dabbling in political anger. I knew this because it had been written in magazines. Perhaps more than anything, to the public and to the musicians and celebrities with whom I spent my time, I was the man who spoke to aliens – and yet, now the aliens had apparently stopped visiting, perhaps I might just be an artist. And if that meant I didn’t get invited to the upscale parties any more, maybe that too would be a survivable catastrophe.
I drew the Hawksmoor churches, the Old Bailey and Trafalgar Square. It was soothing, and I allowed myself to be soothed, and then to feel content, and then, content, I stopped, because I was not discovering a new landscape inside myself, I was just winding down. The urge to paint was gone. Why would I bother? I had money, to a point. I could set myself up in business, live well enough. If I had no desire to carry on, why should I?
Between six and seven in the evening on a Thursday, I felt the last of it turn to dust inside me. My art dried up and blew away in the backdraught of a London taxi. I was not unhappy. I was barely anything at all, and that pleased me.
Well, there it is: I didn’t choose to stop painting, long ago. I simply stopped, in the same mysterious way that as a small boy I started. I still had the skill, but the drive to do it went out of me when I went out of Addis Ababa, and with the drive that specialness that made my work interesting to anyone, including myself. In Ma Madden’s Teas and Biscuits, therefore, with Annie’s commission in my head, I expected the conversation she had begun inside me to come to an end. I gazed at the chandelier as I opened the book, held the Payne’s grey pencil in my fingers, and waited for nothing to happen.