‘If I rejected GNOMON, right now, and asked for a new random term, what would I get?’
– As of this moment, another tier three word: RICERCAR – ree-TCHAIR-cahr – the term used in seventeenth century musical scoring to denote a fugue of the sort not generally appreciated purely for its tonal qualities but rather, by those with a close understanding of the cultural significance of what was known contemporarily as ‘learned counterpoint’, for its artifice and deft accomplishment. Involuted puzzles were frequently included within the music; in one famous case the composer J. S. Bach titled a ricercar ‘Regis Iussu Cantio et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta’ – which means ‘the theme given by the King’s command, with additions, resolved according to the canonic style’, but is obviously a self-describing acrostic. Within the work were several biblical references injuncting the listener to ‘seek’. The original meaning of ‘ricercare’ being ‘to seek’, this quest was a precondition of discovering the references. This raises a tangential point: the modern period’s obsession with art that comments upon its own artificiality and undermines its inherited gravitas by commentary is itself undermined by that inheritance. Also implicit is an early form of the Deep Blue Question: if one seeks with sufficient ingenuity in any sample, one can create a cryptographic rationale for any output text – therefore in any investigation the key problem is not how to begin, but where to stop. Would you like to change the name?
She considers, and then says no. Let it stay, to remind her to be suspicious.
Hunter and Lönnrot, though. That connection, at least, is established.
‘Get me two constables. Have them meet me here. We’re going back to Hunter’s house.’
– I will detail them for first shift this morning.
Four hours away.
She gets her breathing under control, then runs through the dream check. She halfway expects to fail. It is a staple of nightmares to be watching and participating at the same time.
The ping pong ball rattles. The hand torch flickers for a moment, then holds. She shines it up at the text on the wall and reads: ‘I am the combination to a door …’
The last words sit heavy on her tongue. She works her way back to the beginning, line by line. The text is what it is.
She has the Witness examine the data from her medical chart, then takes her pulse and allows the machine to guide her through a self-diagnostic set for hidden concussion complications.
– No. Your mentation is clear and undeluded.
‘Then I’m not waiting four hours. Get them here as soon as you can.’
But first, there’s something else, something important yet to come. She can feel it as a compelling soreness in her mind, like the loosening of a first tooth. The segment is unfinished.
interrogation humour
I READ ONCE that the first time they put an escapologist in a tank of water, he or she will have one of two reactions, and which one determines the course of their life.
The first sort of escapologist is an ordinary person who has come to the trade organically, by whatever curious sequence of opportunity and happenstance – and that sort will panic. There is very little that is more appallingly unnatural or frightening than being lowered, bound, into a confined space containing an atmosphere you cannot breathe. It doesn’t matter how much preparation you may have done, the moment your elbows hit the perspex, the moment you hear the dull noise they make as the sound is transmitted not through a gas but through a liquid: that’s the moment you understand your own mortality in a way you never have before, and you lose control. A training crew will know that, and they’ll wait for the moment and then get you out and talk you down, and then you can try again – or not. Some people just never go back in the tank. They do other illusions, they shift their focus. A pair of handcuffs, a few feathers and a risqué joke, and then close-up magic and narrative tricks. Thanks very much and good night. Some get right back in and they master their fear and they go on to be as good as their skill allows. These last are most compelling to watch.
The second sort of escapologist is the sort that doesn’t panic. They touch the water and relax, as if just now realising where they truly want to be. They never feel afraid, even when perhaps they should, and when they do escape they wait just a moment below the surface of the water, saying goodbye. This sort of escapologist tends not to be very successful commercially, because their contentedness in the tank disturbs the audience. The whole premise of escapology as a show is that death is something to be scared of, and the rush you get from watching is about survival and life. There’s a small but noticeable statistical hike in pregnancies after a high-profile escapology act comes to town. The second sort of escapologist doesn’t provide that rush. Instead, he or she invites a placid contemplation of mortality that is nowhere on the razzle-dazzle shopping list and which will certainly not get you laid. Audiences come out of the theatre sober and chilled, and a little while later they make life changes and spend more time with the people they love. It doesn’t sell.
Before the interrogation begins, it is clear that I am the first sort of escapologist. The anaesthesia communicates itself to me not as rest or a moment of calm, but as the encroachment into my living experience of simple biological ending. I buck against the restraints – unevenly, because my arm has already lost function, and briefly because the cold is so very, very quick to spread.
But then, when I’ve lost the battle and I’m alone with the absence of my senses, and everything that is, is just my thoughts, it turns out that I am the second sort of escapologist after all.
*
Let me ask you this:
In a small town at the foot of the mountains there is a village, and in the village there is a barber’s shop and the barber shaves all the men in the village who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself, or not?
While you give your answer some thought, I’ll do the same. That I am awake at all tells me something. I should be unconscious while they probe my mind and mess around with my private interior. Not that they acknowledge privacy as a concept any more. The European Union had it as a baseline right, once upon a time, but the American perception was that free speech was infinitely more important in every case. All this technology flowed in its earliest days from America. With it came the political and social assumptions of a small number of engineers and entrepreneurs, predominantly male and white. This unexamined muddle of privileged anarchism and academic idealism. Security of the person was one thing – and safeguarded by the right to bear arms and the prohibition on unreasonable search – but ownership of one’s own data-wake was dangerous and antisocial. ‘Free’ came to mean not ‘unchained’ but ‘unpaid’ – a conflation that no doubt delighted authoritarians across the globe.
And yes, over there, in the daylight, they are reading the upper layers of my cognition and rifling through my mind’s underwear drawers seeking prurient secrets. I cannot imagine what they expect to find. Some torrid late romance with a charismatic terrorist, perhaps. Well, they can whistle for it.
No one beats the machine, not in the end. People have tried and failed – psychologists, psychometricians, psychopaths; mentalists and hypnotists, experts in deception, spies and spymasters, even schizophrenics and paranoids. The only person who came close was a madwoman. That was what the paperwork said: a mind turned inward upon itself, bouncing off its interior walls. Too much information in too wild a flow between the hemispheres of the brain. Radical intervention was prescribed – and in the end she was wide open to the machine, as if it had sliced her head into pages and turned the leaves on her spine. She was put back in the world afterwards with a proper right-thinking brain and she had to make a completely new life as a new person. Not one of her previous relationships survived the compulsory healing. How could they? None of them made any sense now that she was ordinary. Not that she was ordinary. She was just differently strange. Poor pale Anna was ripped apart. I liked her. Of all the things, I wish that hadn’t happened.
<
br /> No, once you’re in the chamber, there are no walls you can build that are high enough to keep the machine out. If necessary it becomes your substrate, carries the burden of beating your heart and filling your lungs. The machine will kill you and keep you alive while it fixes you. That’s the way it is.
Unless.
But there is no ‘unless’. The machine cannot be beaten from within.
Still, for the sake of argument, what if I think it can? What if I have cobbled together my odd little list of skills and built a rickety, ad hoc notion, the sort of plan that no one could foresee because you’d have to be desperate to come up with it and insane to believe it could be done?
It’s absurd to consider. The Witness is not some cartoonish lair of wickedness with a big red button on a pedestal marked DO NOT PUSH. It is a network, infinitely nested and protected, millions of lines of code resting on millions of lines of code, the ecosystem of interrogation and surveillance almost perfectly adapted to absorb what is wanted and keep out what is not. There is no way anyone could devise a defence, any more than you can wave off an army or a neutron bomb.
But what if I have?
Then I’m either a lunatic or an idiot. Perhaps, when they’re finished with me, they’ll be kind enough to adjust my self-image a little so I can pick dragons small enough for me to slay.
No one beats the machine, they say.
But what they mean is that no one ever has.
*
How are you doing on the village barber? Nothing? Well, here’s something more practical to wonder about: it seems, since my interrogators can’t hear me and I do seem to be awake and alive – and able at least somewhat to listen to them – that I’m now thinking in a hidden neural pattern, a kind of mental priest hole that uses a different structure of connections in the brain. Brains are complex. Slice yours in a given direction, you’ll find one memory, one behaviour. Slice it in another, and you get something else arranged across the same cells. Only, obviously, don’t slice them at all. It’s not a good idea.
Neural good practice aside: that ability to be more than one thing at one time means I can hide across my brain, arranged as it were at right angles to the rest of me. In essence, I’m steganographically hidden in my own thoughts. I’ve torn myself apart in order to remain whole. If they want to know what I know, they’ll have to put me back together first.
(Steganography is the practice of concealing meaningful information in another bit of data called a covertext. The first steganographic messages were stone tablets with military orders written on them which were then covered with wax on which a different set of instructions had been carved. To get the real message you had to boil the tablet and remove the wax. Steganography is not encryption, but camouflage, and cryptographers look down their noses at it because once you start searching for steganographically transmitted information you will readily find it.
So I have to be very quiet. I don’t want them to find me, not yet.)
Wait a minute, though. Let me ask you candidly whether that last bit still sounds like me, like a woman who lives in a house without machines and teaches local children about card indexing to vex the authorities? Like a librarian engaged in a revolution of one? The way I think of myself – this me, here and now, this fragment – I generally spend my time telling stories to five-year-olds. I don’t do manifestos, I’m just ornery. I definitely don’t do logic puzzles or talk about escapologists and modes of data occultation.
Or perhaps that’s normal. It’s not inconceivable that making up a secret persona is a psychological defence mechanism, the way we deal with the helplessness of an interrogation determined to uncover truths that do not exist. So perhaps I really am an ordinary woman in a coma dreaming I’m a remarkable woman somehow fighting the Man. Just ordinary me, ordinary …
Oh. I’ve forgotten my name.
It’s less dramatic than it sounds. It doesn’t feel like a terrifying chasm in my awareness. It doesn’t hurt. The words are on the tip of my tongue. It’s still there, I just can’t bring it to mind right now, like when you come up with a really brilliant thing to say when someone else is talking and by the time they stop it’s gone but you can feel the thread of it, the place where it ought to be, and if you could just follow the clew again you’d have it. This kind of thing is to be expected when you’re conscious while someone messes around in your brain.
Did I know my name when they started? I’m pretty sure I did, unless it was a fake name I was just using because I’m a dangerous and secret spy. More likely they screwed up and made a hole in the bit of my head that knows who I am. Or it could be deliberate: they may have isolated my knowledge of myself from my cognition in order to speed the process of self-revelation. If I’m consciously controlling this process there might be a rationale for that. On the other hand, frankly, if I can’t remember who I am they’ve rather effectively hidden what they want to know from themselves, and if I can’t remember how I’m doing this or how to stop, they can hardly force me to do so. They’d be much better off collapsing my narratives into one another and forcing a consilient consciousness. This approach seems needlessly blunt. A child could do better.
If the child knew about psychology, symbolology, complex nanosurgery and neurointrusive interrogation.
(I really don’t think that sounds like me.)
Is there someone else in here? Or is that just an echo?
Echo? Echo? Echo?
I think this is just sensory deprivation and cognitive distancing brought on by the drugs. I think. Might be me going mad. I’ll try not to. If you think I’m going mad, put your hands over your eyes and make noises like a chicken.
See that? Interrogation humour.
Out there in the sunlight, I can hear them talking.
My interrogators are frustrated, because so far they are not getting the information that they want. They’re not getting my life, my secret inner self all fraught with rage against the machine. They’re getting the lives of Constantine Kyriakos, Athenais Karthagonensis and Berihun Bekele. They don’t like that, and they don’t know why it is happening, which they like even less. They’re keeping the non-native narrative feeds open – that’s what they’re calling my characters – each on a whole screen all its own, so that they can play them over and over again. What do they mean? If I could see right now through my eyes, I’d see them looking down at me, the ghost soldiers buried in my brain, fighting to keep the real me alive.
I can’t see, but I can hear, and mostly that means the grim professional chit-chat of the people who are killing my surface self.
The little one, to whom I will do very bad things if the opportunity arises, is saying that I have a rare form of dissociative identity disorder. A part of me believes it is someone else – several someones, in fact – and these others have a life inside me that is neurologically real. Constantine Kyriakos actually exists as a separate person in my brain. Athenais, if she could be transplanted into another head, would flourish and grow. Bekele’s talent might be real. The wrinkle, Shorty says, is that I must have done a lot of research, at least about Kyriakos, because there actually was a fellow by that name and nothing they’ve found in my mind has yet proven to be inaccurate, although history does not record the business with the shark obsession, which he says is probably just some kind of Freudian baggage they don’t need to worry about. He posits confidently – this is evidently common in female refusenik psychology – that I’m afraid of my own vagina.
Very. Bad. Things.
Well, no use being offended by the idiocy of someone I was counting on to be something of an idiot. Not every composer is a Bach or a von Bingen, not every swordsman a Musashi. I relied upon a measure of mediocrity to get to where I am. But now there’s someone else, someone who is frankly much closer to my level. He has a soft voice. I think, if I could see him, I would know his name, but I can tell where he’s standing by the sound of his leather soles. Even though I’m unconscious, he’s still not entering the space where I
might catch a glimpse of him. An excess of caution, you might think.
He’s intelligent, this fellow, and therefore I suppose about twice as evil. The soft voice says that my resistance is very much more interesting and more complex than an ordinary dissociative state, even a layered one. He thinks my condition has been engineered, even constructed in situ, quite painstakingly.
I find that word aggravating. It means that one makes considerable effort – takes pains, indeed – to achieve something; but when I was a child, I misunderstood it. I parsed it as meaning that one gambled with pain as the stake. I do not like to be wrong – and anyway, my meaning is better, and a more important truth. One must stake pain. I have staked mine.
Soft Voice thinks Kyriakos and the others are a strategy. He calls it a recursive narrative firewall rather than a Scheherazade, and he says he’s been looking into it as a possibility for some time. I, he suggests, am blocking the machine from seeing my real life by giving it a full-bandwidth fiction of someone else’s, and when that one starts to wear thin I loop into a fresh story and start again. What’s unexpected here is that the multiple narratives loop back on one another, creating a recursion that is potentially infinite, or rather, will last as long as my brain is functioning in any recognisably human way. He smiles. ‘Hello in there,’ he says, directly to me. ‘This is very impressive.’
I like him even less than his snot-nosed misogynist friend.
But I really start to hate him when he points out that the events in – for example – the life of Athenais almost certainly appealed to me because they can work to some degree as a standin for my own. For me to be able to mask myself in Athenais, he says, pieces of her must resonate with me. From that supposition, they can work on a response, a counter-narrative that puts all the pieces of me back in one place and discards the unnecessary fragments: a kind of story like the ones I am telling, but one that is also a surgical tool.