Beck almost forgot to ask his former colleague,
‘Would you have an all-access pass?’
Geraldine scrambled for one on her desk, ignoring all the normal protocols.
‘Thank you,’ he offered as he took it from her. Beck let his party through the inner door. ‘And it is lovely to see you again.’
Chapter 32 – A World Fit for Humans
Beck’s control of the situation would last just as long as their journey to the prize. And even then he felt he ought to work on it in the meantime, saying back over his shoulder to Eris,
‘Though not entirely the same.’
‘I knew it!’ declared Eris, who clearly had a keen interest in the subject. ‘I knew men and women were different.’
‘And there is a real female response,’ remarked Beck. ‘For don’t women like to feel themselves as something finer than the rough material of common humanity?’
They entered a corridor and passed half-a-dozen classrooms. Behind each door Sergeant Forrest heard the burbling of teachers’ voices, and through the windows in the doors saw whiteboard diagrams that made his eyes hurt – thank God, he thought, that he’d found a career free of teachers at whiteboards.
Beck went on,
‘First of all there is no single “male” or “female” way, but different aspects in all of us. And anyway the differences are fractional, nothing like the gulf between the sexes some assume. After all, we all sense, think, feel, watch movies, eat meals in restaurants. How different could the genders be?’
Beck swung around a corner, still giving the others no notice of their destination, all the while talking,
‘The only thing we knew was that girls are formed from birth, while boys have extra work done on their brains in the early weeks. The conclusion being that girls are the standard human, while boys have to be built.’
‘How very masculine,’ observed Eris. ‘But “built” in what way?’
Beck pondered, ‘Of course, whatever we identify with ourselves, we all have an innate feel for male and female – the difference is so obvious that we rarely question it. There has always been talk of women being more “nurturing” and men more “systematic”. But oddly enough, these are rather vague concepts to slot into a system. And our model of the artif brain had so few variables, that there wasn’t very much that we could change even if we wanted to.
‘But Schmidt and I watched a science show about children and their toys. And the little girls went straight for dolls, even little female monkeys did the same. And someone on the show said, “They’re going for the toys with faces.”
‘Now, as I mentioned earlier, we already had a part of our new mind’s pattern-recognition software dedicated to picking out faces. And so, when thinking of a “female” mind, we increased that facility, to the point where there was more of the mind looking out for faces than for anything else.’
Beck led them through another turn, and past another row of classrooms.
‘And in our simulations, this did the trick. Here was a strand of humanity concentrating on people. And in practice, well, the effects were amazing. Once we had a person seeing like this, then their first instinct was to think, “People are kind, so let’s be kind. People are horribly harmable, so let’s make the world safe for them.” A world fit for humans. Now doesn’t that sound nice?’
‘And boys?’
‘Well, the little boys went for toys with moving parts – the little male monkeys too. And this suggests that the part of our brain not looking for faces is seeing the world as objects. And what we love about objects is speed, movement, energy. This seems to be universal.
‘So, if this is what men are spending more time seeing, then this leaves the masculine part of the brain with the urge to have to leave the home, to go and find these things and to create them for himself. This questing would also be the root of male insecurities and pressure.’
At this, Beck looked to Sergeant Forrest, who gave a confirming nod.
‘And this difference reminded me of another riddle.’
‘Oh yes?’ asked Eris, as she swerved to follow Beck down a dark staircase.
‘Well, the concept of beauty. Both have it, but only women seem able to embody it. While men seem to be to be outside of beauty, and have to strive for it – therefore his urge to pursue women. Meanwhile for a lot of women, having their beauty recognised seems to be their greatest pleasure – man the lover, woman the loved. So,’ he concluded, ‘maybe beauty is nature, or humanity? And that is all that men want to get back to?’
Beck backed his way through a set of unsecured double-doors. Now on a lower level, the floors were no longer carpeted, and there were no security cameras. Sergeant Forrest began to notice this last fact, and wondered if his superior had also.
But she was asking,
‘And so what do women want from men?’
‘To be a dynamic object.’
‘How obvious,’ she thought aloud.
Beck summarised, ‘So, there it is. The necessary schism – masculine and feminine – one half of us to deal with the world, one half of us to deal with us. And these levels mixed throughout society and through every human.
‘When we talk of beauty we talk of women. Women embody all the beauty of the world, the forms and patterns of nature, in themselves and in their actions. While men appear to be a stripped-back, simplified form of humanity, purposely singular and dedicated. Perhaps we need both?’
He thought aloud, ‘So yes, for the purposes of our experiment, sixty-forty weighted toward faces for the female artifs, and forty-sixty for the males. And you know, it seemed to work. Did we get it right? Who knows. I’m no anthropologist. You’d have to do a study of a thousand artifs to decide.’
‘Sounds like an army,’ gasped Eris.
‘Not my intention.’
‘But you say all this with so much certainty,’ she noted. ‘No one knows these things, so how can you?’
He answered, ‘I don’t know these things either. I just know we tried to replicate them. I may be deluded even thinking there’s an answer. But we had to have a working theory to proceed. Do you know that no one knows how an aeroplane’s wing works? Not even Boeing? But they know it does work, and so they keep making it.’
Eris snapped, ‘So the brain, that’s your aeroplane’s wing? And what of love? Do Boeing make that?’
Beck didn’t know if she was asking or simply being scathing. But he was on a roll, and giddy, and nearing the motherlode, so just kept going, as much as in distraction as in anything else,
‘Think about our model for a moment. I’m talking about men being souls adrift in a world of objects. Wouldn’t women want to bring these pitiable creatures in from the cold?’
He babbled on, though his mind was already on a dozen other things,
‘Perhaps women don’t love men, they love people, and men are a particular form of creature?’
‘Aren’t they just.’
He went on, ‘But, you ask of love? What can a scientist know of love? What do I know of it myself? That we love someone for what we are not. We love them for their bravery to be soft or strong, hard or brittle – which are really the same thing if you think of glass, each as able to be shattered.’
‘Gah,’ she called. ‘More riddles. Stop now, I’ve heard too much.’ Before, a moment later, ‘Tell me again about beauty,’ asked Eris, who was indeed very beautiful, as Beck was well aware. He wanted to play this aspect up for her; but he was already distracted, for they had reached their destination.
Chapter 33 – This is the End
Even as Beck was wrapping up his thoughts he was slowing up his walking, and casting his eyes back and forth along a stretch of whitewashed corridor-wall.
‘Is this it?’ asked Eris.
But Beck only asked, ‘Sergeant Forrest, you’ve had physical training?’
‘You’d better believe it.’
Beck pointed to an utterly anonymous stretch of the wall,
‘Then a hard boot right here, please.’
‘What am I kicking?’
‘This wall wasn’t here eight years ago, but this floor was. See the stiletto marks on the tiles of people walking through the wall?’
All looked down and saw the marks. Beck explained,
‘Before we knew the end of the project was coming, there were plans to use some of the profits of the Industrial Design scheme to renovate this building. You’ll notice the work was completed?’ He gestured with his arms along the smoothly plastered walls. ‘They kept our money, even as they kicked us out.
‘Here was the door to an old storeroom. It wasn’t very large or much use to anyone, and was going to be sealed up in the renovations. The handle was removed, and the doorframe had been smoothed down to be skimmed over. At our busiest though, Schmidt and I needed every space we could get our hands on. Using a screwdriver as a handle we could still get in there, and so we used it as a store.’
‘You had a secret stash!’ stormed Eris. ‘We tore this building apart.’
‘You tore apart the bits you thought we worked in.’
‘And you didn’t tell us about it?’
‘Do you think I was going to help your predecessor, with the way he handled me? You should take it as a compliment that I’m showing you instead, Miss. Sergeant, please?’
‘If this is brick, you know I’ll break my back?’
‘Trust the heel marks.’
Which Forrest did. With the others stepping back, the Sergeant raised a boot, and swung it at the wall.
Thankfully for him, the sound that resonated was not the useless thud of boot on masonry, but instead the splintering of wood. The plaster cracked in an oblong, and a large piece fell past the Sergeant’s leg and onto the floor in a powder of dust like icing sugar.
Together, the two men began pulling the other pieces of plaster and support materials away, leaving the door a messy version of what it had been when in use.
‘There’s the hole where the handle was,’ said Beck. He asked the Sergeant, ‘Do you have a knife?’
The Sergeant did have, and prising it in the hole stuffed with rolled-up paper, he lifted and pushed open the door. As if it were the entrance to a Mummy’s tomb, more dust fell as the door opened, to reveal a dark and untended space. Beck gulped, then spoke,
‘As I say, it’s pretty small, so only room for one. Would you mind?’
The others stepped aside, and Beck hoped they wouldn’t clock on to the fact that there was dim light coming from the other end of the narrow space.
He had moments. Inside the doorway there was barely room for himself and the Meccano-style storage-frame full of boxes. This suited Beck, as it hid him behind the door and the boxes.
Out of view, he tried to recall the order of packing from eight years before, but remembered nothing. He rustled one box, and a human-like hand fell out, its fingers curling all wrong. Creepy, but not creepy enough.
Another box was full of eyes with USB cables trailing from their backs; while nearby was a bundle of filthy paper wrapped around something like a heart off a butcher’s slab.
Then, in another box, his prize.
‘There you are, my little beauty,’ he whispered. ‘Have you ever let me down?’
‘What are you saying in there?’ called Eris from the corridor.
‘Nothing,’ he lied.
Beck breathed one last time. With his free hand he gently shook the Meccano storage-frame. As he remembered, it wasn’t fastened to the wall.
It was now or never. He called to her,
‘Miss Eris. Did you want to come in and see this?’
‘At last,’ she answered as she squeezed in beside him. ‘What have you... Aghh! Aghh! Aghh!’
Into her arms Beck had gently tossed that faithful old cat’s head. Its unpowered muscles were not moving, but its effect could be relied upon.
Stuck in the knuckle of the doorway, Eris’s arms involuntarily spasmed in front of her, holding the item to her body. Its folding ears touched her bare wrists, its lifelessly fur pressed against her chest, its glass eyes looked up into hers.
As her body shook so the object jostled, jiggled. But she couldn’t gather her hands to do her bidding and rid it from her presence.
‘What’s going on in there?’ called Forrest. But his superior was blocking the doorway to the storeroom. Meanwhile, Beck had pulled at the storage-frame, causing it to fall with all of its contents and lodge diagonally across the room. He then squeezed to the far wall and forced open the tiny window he had always known was there. He clambered out onto a concrete ledge.
The ledge was actually the bottom of a trench. It was neck-height below the level of the building’s carpark, and was just wide enough to offer light to the basement windows. It was covered in standing rain and grimy leaves, which Beck slithered over as he got up on to his feet. He ran, head down, as quickly as he could to the far end of the trench. That way he avoided the driver, still sitting in the Jaguar at the front of the building.
Beck knew there’d have to be a way out eventually, and spotted maintenance steps that got him up onto the level of the carpark itself. Now was the scariest part – a dash across the open country of tarmac. He muttered paranoiacally,
‘If Forrest catches me here, he’ll kill me before he knows what he’s doing.’
But Beck also knew that he had escaped only seconds ago. Meanwhile Sergeant Forrest would take minutes either to calm Eris and clear the blocked room, or else go all the way back through the building – if he could even remember the way.
Beck ran, and wouldn’t look back until he was at the main gates. There he blew a kiss back to his old friend the receptionist, ‘To Geraldine, dear woman,’ who was still somewhere inside and wouldn’t have seen any of the drama. And then he turned, and was quickly lost to the melting sea of London and its traffic under the midday sun.
Day 2, Part 2 – Escape
Chapter 34 – Danny’s Quest
Danny had gotten over the shock of the explosion and of all that had happened to him. Now he was moving quickly through the long grass. With his bad arm bundled up and tucked into his shirt, he made good time across the valley. He navigated by memory, which he had always found easy.
A consequence of the collapsed mine being located in a designated area of Outstanding Natural Beauty was that little new was allowed to be built there. This now meant that the only house for miles was the cottage of the foreman of the mining operations. There he lived alone, on a hillside, surrounded by natural splendour. He had brought a wife there, but the isolation had proved too much for her. And so now he directed the operations of his men by day, and brooded on his lot by night.
It was from that cottage that Danny and his colleagues had set off the day before on their fateful operation. Now two of that team were dead, and the other missing. Also stranded at the scene had been the Land Rover the trio had arrived in. This had been useless for Danny though – as he wouldn’t have been able to both steer and use a stick-shift with one hand. But he recalled that his foreman had recently bought a new company station wagon, with a fancy semi-automatic transmission. Danny would be able to just put it into Drive, and then concentrate on steering. It was the only other car he knew of for miles, and the only way he could think of of getting back to civilisation.
Yet something wasn’t right.
After getting out of the mine and up the hillside, he had then been on charge for almost twenty-four hours. Since then he had only been on foot a few hours more. Yet already he sensed again his least-vital and most familiar of alarms, that of low battery... he knew that something was wrong.
Danny paused and lay down on the grass – he needed to be quite still for charging – it was something to do with drawing too much current from the battery. Pulling too much power from his cells while charging could burn out the circuit.
In his bag – thankfully not lost in the explosion – were his secret weapons. Three years ago a company had released a device
for motorists, a tiny high-capacity power cell which could start a flat car without the need for jump-cables.
Danny had quickly snapped up three of these. He could simply leave them to charge overnight from a household socket, and they were so small he could carry them with him. He then had them in reserve whenever he needed them and wherever he was – they freed him of a dependency on power-points to recharge.
Danny now felt the warm grass beneath him and the sun on his face. He hadn’t wanted to stop, but now that he had done then this was heaven. Yet it also gave him time to face up to what was happening...
In the initial moments after the explosion, Danny had begun to scan the myriad alarms coursing through his broken body: to break them down into different parts of his frame, and deduce which were critical and which were merely inconveniencing. Most had come from parts he could see were damaged, but not all. Some had been internal, unseeable, not deducible without a full examination. Yet Danny had had neither the tools nor the time for this activity – it would have been like a human opening up their own chestplate to give their heart a once-over.
And so, in the case of these internal alarms, he had made the best judgement he could. The fact that he was still conscious and operating had been all he could have asked for, and he had had to be satisfied with that. Yet this swift running down of power meant that there was something wrong somewhere, and he would need to get it looked at. And for that he wouldn’t merely need his brother Christopher, he would need his creators.
For years now, the pocket-sized chargers had allowed him to leave civilisation behind for days at a time, and so be free to pursue the natural life he longed for. Already this began to feel like a dream that was over.
Chapter 35 – The Call at Reception
At the front desk, Ellie tried to gather her thoughts. Angela, with all her helpfulness and ‘life experience’, was thankfully absent for the time being – it had all been too much, however well-intentioned. And Ellie needed to think – what was she to do about Victor? He was no longer on the periphery, he had staked his claim, and she had rejected it. She asked herself: how were they to go on?