She compromises by taking a shower, and finds that all she wants is to stay under the hot water. The pleasant impact of the jet on her back is like a friendly hand scratching. There has been a dearth of such hands in her life recently, and she is no more immune to physical loneliness than anyone else.
She recalls her dog-walker: the unexaggerated triangle of his upper body in his coat. She imagines he has elegant hands. She does not like fat fingers, blunt thumbs. She likes hands that speak of a missed calling with a violin, with the strength of a sculptor. On this principle she has experimented with both violinists and sculptors, but without enduring success.
She allows herself to know his first name – Jonathan. Good. Baroque and unusual names excite in her, in what she imagines is an inevitable reaction to the Finnish–Egyptian splicing of her own, a kind of fatigue. But Jonathan is fine. No middle name, and last name Jones, which is gratifyingly tedious. Jonathan Jones is, semiotically speaking, a man among many men. His uniqueness must arise from himself, not from parlour tricks with words. Good again. She considers searching out an image of his hands, but does not. If they are ordinary she will put herself off, and if they are not she will raise her own expectations. No.
She allows her mind to drift, lazily recalling the strong profile, but after a moment, to her amazement, she finds her mind asking slyly whether Oliver Smith gives good massages. He’s compact, not tall, but there is a bodily avarice in him that is undeniable. He has well-kept nails. How old is he really? Is his body as carefully timeless as his face?
The question is so dazzlingly inappropriate that she steps out of the shower cubicle and stares at it as if the spout and taps are somehow responsible for putting the idea in her head. With the door open to the corridor, a stream of colder air washes around her legs, raising goosebumps.
Massages?
Smith?
Shivering, she begins to interrogate herself. Does she find this man attractive? Not physically, no. Does she desire him? No. In fact she has no real desire to touch him. No particular hunger. Nor does she feel comfortable at the idea of his presence. Yet the idea of him is lodged in her mind.
Is there a cognitive attraction, then? Some unity of intellect that’s pressing down on her more basic desires? She doesn’t think so. No. The way he presents himself, the sense he gives of who he is, is utterly uninteresting to her. His way of being in the world is indicative of a casual ease with the exercise of authority that borders in her mind on wicked – and yet she somehow feels he’s attentive, a good conversationalist, that there’s something below the surface of him that she could like. He’s helpful. She wants to see more of him.
It feels wrong in her thoughts, more awkward than Hunter’s borrowed mentation. Although he wrote the serendipity flag. That’s rather brilliant. Perhaps he has written other tools she uses.
Thinking how funny it would be, how absurdly typical of this case, she wraps herself in a towel and goes into the other room. At the desk, she calls up the authorship of the Witness kinesic assistant. A joint project in permanent development. She looks at the current project managers and sees his name.
In the event, it turns out not to be funny at all.
Son of a bitch.
He wasn’t talking to her at their meeting, and he certainly wasn’t being interviewed. All the time he was talking to the algorithm, playing it like a cheap fiddle, and it in turn was telling her everything he wanted it to.
But more than that: he was using it on her. He was playing her right back. Perfect timing, perfect body language. Perfect cooperation. If he hadn’t slightly overcooked it – if his arrogance, she suspects, hadn’t pushed the deceit too far and tried to make her like him, even admire him, she would probably never have noticed.
Son of a bitch.
She marches into the living room and brings up the crime wall, and adds Smith’s name to the list of persons of interest, realising belatedly that the Turnpike Trust, for which he works, appears in Hunter’s narratives as well. She must be addled. Is it the beating or the sheer volume and variety of information? And whichever, or both: is that the whole point? To hide a leaf among the trees? Or – far more annoying, but less interesting – was he simply using the kinesic assistant because he wanted to get her into bed? Is that why he built it in the first place?
Son of a bitch.
If Smith is involved – if Hunter’s narratives are not after all merely camouflage, but the whole point, the message as much as the medium, then she needs to have the whole of it as soon as possible. She sits down at the desk and closes her eyes, touches the terminals to her bruises to trigger more of the interview in her head.
The transition is immediate and somehow inverted, as if she has jumped into a cold swimming pool to cool off and landed with a jolt on the diving board, hot and dry and marooned. It feels wrong, tastes wrong. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Hunter, but not Hunter, and her heart is beating too fast and now she can’t let go of the dream, can’t step out.
Wrong. Can’t.
Wrong.
*
‘It’s going wrong—’
‘No it fucking isn’t just let her settle oh fuck maybe—’
‘It’s going wrong—’
‘Diana? Can you hear me?’
‘Of course she can’t hear you she’s fucking unconscious—’
‘How would you know what she can hear you’re about as much use as a—’
What the actual fuck is going on?
On the wall in front of me I see words: QUID IPSA ACTUALIS FORNICATIO GERITUR?
Where am I?
UBI SUM?
QUAM EGO HUC?
CUM EX HAC MENSA EXSÚRGAM, O MISERUM NOTHI, TIBI FACIAMQUE NOVUM ANUM. ADHUC NOVACULA MEAM PORTO.
Latin? Why am I seeing Latin, and bad Latin at that? The technicians don’t like it either, not at all. One of them says I’m dying. My brain is shutting down. They’ve given me an overdose, probably, though it may be that there is some sort of interference pattern being generated in my mind, or possibly I’m having a stroke. I want to tell them it’s not a fucking stroke, it’s the jinn in my head, the bloody damned impossible monstrous thing that took Scipio, that ate him.
That’s not right, is it?
I get the feeling this is breaking new ground. Certainly, no one has ever died under the machine before, that we know of, although that may be a bit of a lie because they seem to have a protocol. There’s a crash cart coming now. It’s as if a magic door has opened in the world and all the doctors who have ever existed are coming to save me.
I think I’m thinking in parallel. Everything happens twice, once to her and once to me. On an old black-and-white television screen I see Richard Feynman. He is talking about counting in your head. Do you see numbers, or do you hear them? But at the same time, I see the jinn, Gnomon, emerging from the panels of the Chamber of Isis like a crab from a hole—
SCIO TE, SPIRITUM. SCIO TE, DE MILLE OCULOS. SCIO TE.
The alarm howls. The doctors come. It would be nice if they’d felt as strongly about my mind as they do about my body. But apparently they don’t. I’ve spent a certain amount of time thinking about this recently, and I have concluded that a doctor who attends the victim of a torture chamber and does not object to the torture is a wanker. More than that, he or she has no intellectual or ethical integrity. There’s only one fundamental human right, and that is the right to security of person, be it physical or mental. Everything else is contingent on the level of society in which you exist – food, shelter, broadband digital access: all these come later. The only right that cannot be debated – if you acknowledge any kind of right at all – is the one that asserts a boundary at the skin, and says that anything within its boundary is the business of that person and no one else. The right to avoid self-incrimination, the right to die, the right to live, the right to freedom from slavery, freedom of conscience and religion, of opinion, and the right not to be tortured − all these exist as subheadings of that one, simple statemen
t: I am me and I am not yours. No one who believes in rights at all can deny this right. It is the first. Without it, there are no others.
Which is why these doctors who are going to save my life are a bunch of pusillanimous, equivocating shitheels and I will show them how much I hate them if I get the chance.
What, are you surprised? Do I seem a bit angry to you? A bit shrill? Would you prefer I moderate my tone? Perhaps we should hug it out. Perhaps I should take the time to explain my perspective, educate them about what it feels like to be me.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
You try being drugged on a table while a group of people fuck your brain with metal and suck your dreams from your skull and if they find anything they don’t like they will fix you and make it all better so that you are free and just like them. You try being me.
EGO ME, NON EGO ISTE TUUS.
‘Jesus, more fucking Latin? Is that some crazy aphasic thing?’
The Witness is there for your protection. Agents of the Witness will always respect you and your needs. It’s in the manual.
‘Don’t know, never seen it before,’ but then someone new comes in.
‘Both of you, shut up. It doesn’t matter. Prep a clot bypass chip. Her brain’s not communicating properly with itself.’
If I could move, I’d communicate just fine. I’m Athenais Karthagonensis. I know how to deal with your sort of shitheel just fine.
Hang on, that’s not my name, is it?
Oh, shit. I think – I think –
I think not.
Someone says: ‘Flatline.’
‘Can you hear me? Mrs Hunter, can you hear me? Diana?’
Do I know you?
‘No, I shouldn’t think so. The System assures me that you do not.’
System. Hah.
‘Yes, I’m aware that you don’t approve. On the other hand, you’re alive. I will say, you had us all just a little bit worried there. We really don’t hold with people departing this life while in our care. We take it amiss. The nurses, in particular, would have been rather vexed with you. Anyway, hello. I’ve taken over your treatment today.’
Treatment, bollocks.
‘Yes, well. Be that as it may.’
S’a trick.
‘Yes, your pattern recognition is running rather too high. Almost conspiratorially so. How do you feel about the moon landings?’
Funny man not funny.
‘You find humour inappropriate? Perhaps you’re right. Let me just adjust this – there. Now. Do you still think we know one another?’
Oh … No. Silly.
‘Not at all. A biological error. I’m afraid your brain is dysfunctional at the moment. We’re working on it. We’ll have you shipshape in no time – but you need to try to help us, from within. Put yourself back together. The schizoid nature of your cognition is reflecting itself in your brain, you see. You understand what I’m saying?’
Yes. Biology broken. You do heavy lifting, I do DIY, all good. Bit sleepy, sleep now, DIY later.
‘No, I’m afraid you need to spend a little awake time now. You’ve got some work to do. At the moment, the system is compensating for a transient ischaemic attack. That’s a sort of almost-stroke, the key difference being that word “transient”, which is more an article of faith in this instance than an absolute diagnosis. We’ve routed around it for you, and there’s now a clever little device relaying information between two living parts of your brain, but it needs you to do plenty of thinking, and we’ve found it’s better if you’re awake. Later, if we’re fortunate, we can repair the damage and coax the original tissue back into its original role.’
Trick. Interrogation trick.
‘Oh dear. Yes, I did understand that you were rather confrontational. Don’t worry, you can go back to sleep quite soon. Just a little more, first. The technicians tell me you were speaking Latin when you went under. Can you speak it now?’
No. Now, no. Learned it at school. Not since.
‘Yes, I thought that might be the case. Not unheard of, in the literature. Quite interesting. I gather the Latin was colourful and creative but not one hundred per cent accurate, historically. No, don’t speak any more, just see if you can lift your arms. No? Mm. All right, we’ll work on that.’
Paralysed?
‘No, no. Just rusty. Your brain’s relearning everything. A week, maybe a little more. A few months before you’re good at ping pong again.
Stupid game.
‘Come now. Not at all?’
Skiing.
‘Well, that’s very good. Think of skiing, let’s get those legs wriggling. We’ll have you up and about in no time.’
Interrogation finished.
‘Ah. No. That is the bad news. I’m afraid the probe will continue, now that you’re stable. They’ll begin shortly. I wish there was something I could do about that.’
Can’t figure you out. Good or bad. S’pose most likely bad.
‘I’m like you, Diana. I’m just doing what I think is best. Now, before I let you sleep, one last try with those arms, hm? Plant your pole for the turn – or do we not do that anymore, with the parabolic skis?’
But something is happening to me – or happening again. I can see the words coming out of his mouth, see them written but not hear them. ‘Parabolic’ comes with diagrams, mathematics intimately experienced as touch. I feel it, I understand trigonometry the way you understand the smell of cooked meat. I don’t need a pencil. I can do sums with my tongue, impossible complexity. Impossible. It hurts like opening your mouth as wide as you can, the corners bleeding as you stretch. Please, no one say ‘universe’. I don’t want to—
Oh drat.
‘Universe’ is a very big word. There’s too much of it to hold in my head, in my mouth. I have to let it out, and I am speaking, but I am speaking the language of God, a long line of syllables I cannot choke back. Prophecy, or indelible, ineluctable truth: FA LA GA PA NA MA DA DI DO NO SHO MO ME MY THY LO FA FO FA FA FO GO GI GI GO. It is a spell, it is alchemy and it will transform the world. It is the apocatastasis, and it brings darkness to everything, brings Erebus to the land of men and sharks swim in it and in my blood and I am thousands and I am FA LA FA RO JO JI JO.
The good doctor, who is a bastard, says something profane, and that too has footnotes, hanging in the night.
FA LA RO JO JI. Glossolalia, and more, and all inside a bottle too small to contain it. And then, mercifully, the world is transformed.
*
The universe shrinks to a tiny spot, just large enough to see, and I brush it off my sleeve and look around at the garden. There are bees in the azaleas, but they make no noise. In fact, they don’t move until I do, as if we’re synced together on a reel of old cinematic film. Forward, back. Forward, back. I’m in a memory.
The place was called Burton, or that’s what we called it, because we had to call it something. There’s an English expression ‘gone for a burton’ which means something has fallen over and broken, or been dropped. No one knows why it means that. The expression just appears in the middle of the twentieth century. It’s never explained. No one knows why it’s suddenly on everyone’s lips. There’s no Usage Zero, no Elbridge Gerry. One day it’s meaningless, the next it’s in the dictionary. And you mostly don’t hear it any more: like ‘copacetic’ and ‘runcible’, it exists only because we say it does, for as long as we say it does. Like Burton itself.
They started us on Richard Feynman, the mathematician. Feynman noticed – among his many more startling insights – that different people counted silently in different ways. Some, apparently, whispered to themselves but never spoke, while others saw numbers. The ones who whispered could be distracted by words, and most especially by shouted sums, but the ones who visualised could not. They could carry on a conversation and still keep count.
We began by mastering whichever one we could not do. Then we were required to follow two separate streams of numbers, and then we learned to count using other senses: touch, taste, scen
t and even balance. What does 55 feel like? How does it smell? I know the answers, but you wouldn’t begin to understand them.
When we could keep track of five sets of numbers all at once, we did the really extreme stuff: waking-state lucid dreaming and elective multiple identity architecture: IEDs for the mind. We lived symbols, puzzles, philosophical loops and psychological paradoxes. We learned that to lie to a machine, you don’t need to be a perfect liar: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power.
That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world.
The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control?