“But!” Colegrave beamed, raising just one blade of a finger. “Given that artificial intelligence and world governments are unlikely in the extreme, this would seem to be a dead end, wouldn’t it? So we do nothing. We are futurists. We look forward. Here is the revelation, Dearden. We had almost exactly such a thing, a long time ago. Back in the days when our worlds were smaller and crossing them was a lifetime’s work. We had single units of governance that guided and controlled our lives with absolute power. Until we went mad, and the madness crawled through the structures of the world and brought us to our current lunatic impasse. The future, Dearden, is in fact a return to feudal monarchy. Proper hierarchical governance. An archaic revival, on the unassailable basis that democracy turns everything to shit and our accretion of freedoms has been entirely worthless if not completely toxic to our happiness and well-being. We need a Restoration.”
“A restoration of what? There are still monarchies.”
“Pale ghosts of what they were. Look. Monarchies and aristocracies worked for a very, very long time. The weight of the evidence of history is with them, not with the project of democracy or even communism, which commits the same sin of being by definition a government of the ‘people.’ The last five hundred years constitute a horror story wherein the villains of the piece stole power from a stable governance system in order to cast the population of the world into an ongoing lab experiment with no plan or boundary. A dismal science. Can you even imagine the way we live now being tolerated in city-states and kingdoms of the past? God, no. The near future is the resurgence of deep history. It is very beautiful.”
Colegrave grinned. His gums were bleeding.
“I don’t really want outsiders asking me awkward questions, either.”
PART THREE
After so long trapped in the micro-home with Colegrave, leaving the capsule felt like being ejected into space. Asher had conveniently vanished, so Adam was left without a copilot for the fall back to the main compound.
Adam didn’t feel in great shape. The lengthy inquisition by Colegrave had burned through his deposits of useful body chemicals and sugars, it felt. It had, he admitted to himself, often been an entertaining experience, but now his tanks were empty and he needed either fuel or airplane mode. Being slumped in a seat, unable to communicate and watching the world rush by through a window, sounded very good to him.
Adam took some steps away from the micro-home and looked around, both to confirm his bearings and to take in the woodland, which was becoming more beautiful to him. Even the smells. He tended to personally dismiss “nature” as stuff that mostly rots and leaks, even as he made the right noises and faces to environmentalists and geoengineers. Maybe, he thought, everything was just cleaner out here, and so he could more easily detect the pure notes of forest scent. Maybe this was what they were talking about, all along.
Adam stood there and wondered what it would be like to live at Normal Head forever, like Colegrave. Would it feel like being trapped? Or would it feel like being free? There was a lot of space. There was a forest. There was so much silence. The quiet felt like a huge new country that he could wander around within for years without ever meeting its coastlines. A silence the size of the sky. If he stayed here long enough, he’d eventually be sent to Staging, and he’d have one of these simple, clever micro-homes to live and work in. There would be internet, and books, and music. He could think, and be, and hold the world at a distance in order to see it properly. Nothing would ever hurt or frighten him again. The micro-home of his very own could be his hermit’s cave. He could be a wise man of the woods, spoken of in whispers, his words and thoughts becoming spooky action at a distance in the world beyond. A secret wizard of the future.
Adam was pleased by the idea. He was pleased that he could be pleased by something again. He found an old smile from some deep dark pocket, and put it on. He took a deep breath of the treeline air. There was human sweat in it, sharp and acid.
There was a figure behind the treeline, just east of Colegrave’s house.
An Indian woman, barefoot, hair tied back with a long weed-vine freshly yanked out of the ground. Her skin was smeared in moss, and her feet were caked in mud. She wore a sports bra that may historically have been white and the ugliest knee-length shorts in the world. She fixed him with a gaze that said that she had looked into the void and that she was really not impressed with it.
Adam sketched a pathetic little wave that he regretted attempting even as he was doing it.
“We are Jasmin Bulat,” she said. “What are you?”
“Adam Dearden.”
She cocked her head in an unusual way that seemed to Adam as if she was trying to help something else inside her skull get a look at him through her eyes.
“We know that name.”
Adam walked around, trying to get a better angle on her and whoever was accompanying her.
There didn’t seem to be anybody with her.
“How do you know my name?”
“We’re not sure,” Bulat said, picking a clump of moss off the side of her shorts. “It will come to us. Why were you talking to Colegrave?”
“Does it matter?”
“Very much so,” she said, popping the piece of moss into her mouth and chewing meditatively. “Colegrave is quite, quite mad. Walk with us.”
Adam remembered something Clough had said. Colegrave and Bulat. Adam summoned up whatever fumes were left in his tank and decided that, having already experienced Colegrave, he might as well collect the set. He followed her, and she turned and strolled back into the forest.
“Colegrave will never leave Normal Head,” she said. “Not for the reasons he told you, of course. We doubt anyone with two brain cells to rub together is genuinely frightened of his berserk political fantasies. In some ways, he’s very clever, but his understanding of the way the world really works—or, perhaps, just his perception of it—is hopelessly damaged. It’s a pity. And we mean ‘pity’ on several different levels, because it’s also quite pathetic. Adam Dearden. We do know that name.”
Adam was enjoying the soft crunch of the forest floor underfoot, that few millimeters of travel it had as he took each step.
“We,” Bulat said, “are the senior unit in Staging.”
“Colegrave told me he was the senior figure.”
“We have the higher qualifications in the outside world. Also, Colegrave is a foresight strategist, as you are. We are a strategic forecaster. As you once were. This is a natural advantage. Hence, we are the senior figure.”
Adam considered the possibility that shoelessness was a sign of rank in Staging. “Colegrave told me that the demarcation doesn’t exist in Staging.”
In the next moment, he realized she had remembered his name.
“Demarcations exist everywhere. Does Colegrave know you crossed the aisle?”
She looked over her shoulder at him. He didn’t feel like lying to the woman with the blazing eyes.
“He does,” Adam said, “but he doesn’t know all the details.”
“We are very good at storing memories,” Bulat said, patting her stomach as if to indicate that she kept extra memory there.
“What do you know about me?”
“We remember a private presentation or two about psyops. We imagine the business overnight with that Mansfield was very interesting to you, as it was to many on our side of the aisle.”
Adam jogged to catch up with her. Somehow she always remained three steps ahead of him. “Why do you keep saying ‘we’?”
“Because there is more than one sapient entity within this skin, of course. Are you an idiot?”
“No.”
“We think you might be. We think you have never really listened to your internal voices. How can you never have heard their call? Only idiots are so insensible to the true sound of the body. Your voices are likely starved, anyway.” She looked him up and down, critically. “You don’t spend much time in nature.”
“I can operate shoes,?
?? Adam said. “And I may be messed up right now, but I’m not hearing voices in my head, nor am I eating lichen.”
She stopped, pivoted stickily on one heel, and confronted him. She pointed to her belly once more. “Not in your head. In here. You’re just like the others. You cannot hear the biome.”
All at once, Adam knew exactly why Jasmin Bulat was at Normal Head.
“You say ‘we,’” Adam said, “because you count your gut microbiota as a second person inside you.”
“The Buoylent is terrible for us. We have to augment our diet in the forest, because materials in that laboratory slurry kill parts of us. And the biome is really much, much more than just a voice. What if we told you that the biome is speaking to you now?”
Adam just smiled, closemouthed, to communicate that he was trying to be polite.
Bulat cast her eyes around the forest floor, and delightedly alighted upon an ant climbing a stalk of weed.
“The ant,” she said. “Particularly susceptible to a species of mushroom called Cordyceps. It will grow in the brain of an ant. It will, in fact, induce an ant to scale a plant and keep it there like a tiny, triumphant mountaineer until it dies. After death, the mushroom will expand, push through and explode the ant’s head. At this increased altitude, the mushroom can cast its spores a far greater distance than on the ground. The mushroom speaks to the ant. It has been doing so for almost fifty million years. And then, and for the last five hundred years or more, the Cordyceps is harvested, processed, and introduced into human bodies for medicinal purposes and, more recently, athletic enhancement. A voice that makes us climb faster.”
“That’s a far cry from telling me your gut bacteria talks to you.”
“Some ninety percent of this body is bacteria. Yours, too. Gut biome connects directly to the enteric nervous system, which runs a hundred million neurons that connect directly to the central nervous system, and controls most of the body’s supply of serotonin, the neurotransmitter that operates memory and learning. And all this is commanded by the biome. The gut records. The gut knows. Gut instinct? We always understood. We always knew that we just had to listen to the biome.”
Adam watched the ant crest the top of the weed, and begin crawling back down the other side.
“Listen to your gut, Adam Dearden. What do you think happened last night?”
Adam looked around, mostly just to make sure he still knew where he was in relation to the main building, but also to buy himself a moment to decide what to say. To decide how much to trust this woman who was out in the forest trying to be a better host for her intestinal flora.
“I think it was a prank,” he said. “Or it was a psychological operation.”
“Tell me how you came to this.”
“Nothing else makes a lot of sense to me. It’s too … detailed. Too tailored. A couple of hundred pounds of bugs swapped for a man in the middle of the night? That’s some seriously bored long-term patients. Or some seriously neurodivergent people on the wrong meds. It’s something that crazy people might do. Not beyond the realm of possibility, right?”
“Or?”
“Or Normal Head has been targeted for a massively destabilizing psyop targeted specifically for the nature and condition of the audience. Depending on where your head is at, it’s either a ridiculous thing that speaks to the ease with which someone can bypass security here, or it’s a hallucinatory image designed to freak out fragile and paranoid people. The question there is why. A stunt’s only intent is to amuse the instigators. And piss off a bunch of your fellow inmates, I suppose. A psyop needs a reason. Somebody would have to benefit from destabilizing a rest home full of sick futurists.”
“‘The audience.’ You are one of us, aren’t you?”
Adam had slipped. “The Audience” was how people working in psyops habitually referred to the witnesses and targets of operations.
She smiled at him for the first time. “Your secret is safe with us. Walk with us some more. We had a deal of engagement with psyops, back when we were outside, but it wasn’t really our particular field. Aah. Back when we were outside.”
“You sound like you miss it.”
“Is that surprising?”
“Maybe a little. Colegrave obviously likes it here.”
“We think we mentioned to you that Colegrave is mad.”
“I don’t want to be rude, but you’re in Staging, and the way you behave kind of indicates that you have no great urge to leave.”
Bulat smiled again, but it was sadder this time. “We do. It’s just that we can’t. We hope we might, someday. But, you see, the connection between the meat brain and the gut brain that we have worked so hard to open is still imperfect. The biome also regulates things like anxiety, you see, and the more traffic we put through the connection, the more disruption occurs to our system as a side effect.”
“You get depressed.”
“We get depressed. We gaze into our own internal abyss, and we see only struggle and pain and the barest hope of a perfect solution in our future. Just like everybody else here. We’re often no different, in Staging. For a lot of us, Staging is as much of the outside world as we dare to engage with. If we leave now, we run the risk of not functioning in situations that are not safe. Have you ever been to Kazakhstan?”
“I did a conference in Astana once,” Adam said.
“You should have traveled,” Bulat said, quietly. “Our mother is from Mumbai, but our father is Kazakh, from Almaty. The landscapes are incredible. Steppe and grassland, snowy mountains and deep canyons, deltas and forest. The Oregon forest sometimes reminds us of the taiga, a little bit. All the fir trees. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is in Kazakhstan. Russia leases the land, but you can go there, if you know the right people. Where Yuri Gagarin was launched into space. They still call the launchpad he was fired from ‘Gagarin’s Start.’ Valentina Tereshkova. The Mir space station. We saw things hurled into space from there and thought that space was the future. By the end of our time in the outside world, we were trying to convince militaries and states to grow spacecraft, with thick walls of rich ecologies, to support our gut biomes. Otherwise, space was pointless. We couldn’t maintain our operating partners on probiotic yogurt and food paste. We cannot go to space and continue to hear our inner voice. We were trapped in the world long before we were taken to Normal Head.”
Bulat blinked heavily a few times, and then just said, in a low voice, “You should have seen more of the countryside.” She took a deep, shaky breath, and added, “What do you think will happen when the investigators get here?”
“I think,” Adam said, “that I will be the first person they question.”
“Because you arrived the day before it happened. Colegrave must have commented on that.”
“He did, but he didn’t seriously entertain the idea that I was involved. He said that I was the best person to start a drive to look at the thing ourselves, because I’ve worked on both sides.”
“Colegrave didn’t suggest that you might have an especial reason to want to solve the problem yourself?”
Adam took a new look at her. She was a lot more engaged than she’d seemed to him on first meeting, and that may have been due more to an unfair reading of the woman on his part than any fault of hers. “He didn’t get that far. But you’re thinking that I might have reasons to not want to be closely questioned by outside investigators.”
“We think you might want to get ahead of whatever happens next. We also think that Normal Head is our home for the foreseeable future and we would prefer it not become part of the global combat theater. If there is anywhere in the world that should not be just another trench in the permanent condition of pervasive low-level warfare, it should be here.”
“I don’t think this place has any more right to peace than, say, a hospital. Which it pretty much is.”
“It is a hospital, but it has only one kind of patient. People who have tried to look into the future in order to try to save the world and have been driven i
nsane by it. The worst kind of insanity, Adam Dearden. We’ve all been sent mad by grief.”
Special pleading for crazy futurists. Adam worked hard to keep his opinion from showing on his face. Looking up and away because he didn’t trust himself to meet Bulat’s eyes and not laugh, he found that she had led them around to the treeline again, fifty yards down from the point where he’d entered the forest. He could see the side entrance to the main building.
“There,” she said. “Home again. We are going back into the forest for a few more hours, to replenish ourselves and listen to the biome of the woods. You should go to work. Before people come to ask you questions that you really don’t want to answer.”
Jasmin Bulat squelched back into the cool, welcoming shade of the forest, leaving him to face the concrete and glass.
* * *
Adam almost twisted his ankle on the way through the door, by trying not to tread on some fat weevil thing, which was also the point where Adam admitted to himself that he knew pretty much nothing about nature because he was taxonomizing insects as “weevil thing.” Which gave him some cause for concern that he was more like Colegrave than like Bulat, whom he found far warmer and more human even though she thought she was in a symbiotic relationship with her gut bacteria. Though it was a further cause for concern that both of them seemingly did work that was sent from and transmitted to the outside world, where it was presumably used for real things that could affect people.
Work that was now disrupted because the internet connection in Staging was switched off.
The thought stopped him in the corridor as it came into focus. He was getting foggy enough that he didn’t know if he’d fully understood the idea before, but it was there now, as clear as the fat weevil that had tried to kill him by predating on his wish not to crush fat weevils that didn’t deserve crushing.
What if it was an operation intended to cut Normal Head off and subject it to a higher than normal level of scrutiny? Obviously there was a protocol in place for anomalous events, and the Director enacted it. Decapitating the place from the body of the world, which means that work no longer flowed into or out from Staging. Something that would have occurred very early on to brains less addled than his. Which was partly because, Adam also had to admit to himself, he was more concerned by being forced to answer questions asked by complete strangers with an investigational remit, questions and answers that wouldn’t be covered under doctor/patient privilege.