‘We built you with an epidermal layer beneath the skin, full of narrow vessels, through which were pumped warm water. This came from a reservoir held in your chest, tucked in above your metal core. In fact, that water cooled your core, so it was already warm.’
‘And then was cooled again as it flowed around the body,’ added Chris. ‘An elegant solution, Doctor. And pumped at the rate of a heartbeat; a heartbeat that even quickened at times of exertion.’
‘Well,’ reasoned the Doctor, ‘at such times the core needed more cooling anyway, so two birds with one stone. And you haven’t had any cooling problems since it stopped working?’ asked Beck.
To which the artif shook his head, ‘You over-engineered us,’ he said, and smiled.
‘And as for breath,’ continued Beck. ‘Well, as Isaac Asimov said, it’s not too difficult to put in systems to feign human actions. A small air valve on a loop, slowing and quickening with the “heartbeat”.’
At this Chris paused, and wondered aloud,
‘Artificial heart, synthetic breath. The very signs of human life are for us affectations.’
‘Chris.’
But Chris raised a hand in understanding, ‘I only mean that you built me magnificently. And what damage I carry I am well able to bear.’
But Beck wasn’t really listening, his head was full of blueprints,
‘So, that’s two systems in your chest that were knocked out. Any more?’
‘No. I can say I got out of that calamity otherwise unscathed.’
‘There must have been some visible damage.’
‘Nothing I couldn’t repair.’
‘But for you to need to risk stealing that puncture-kit, it must have been something.’
Here Chris clammed up, holding his arms across his chest as if Beck was about to start pulling his shirt open,
‘As I say, Doctor. It was nothing that I couldn’t take care of myself.’
And there Beck let it lie, instead changing the subject,
‘Chris, we need to plan.’
‘I’ve been on it since this morning,’ said the artif. Now that the topic had moved on, he felt comfortable enough to take off his jacket and lift the hem of his shirt to plug in a car battery. He carried it over to perch on the glass table beside his armchair, and continued, ‘But there’s nothing we can do until the others get in touch. And the small hours are a terrible time to make a decision anyway. Try and get some rest.’
‘But I can’t sleep,’ said Beck.
‘You haven’t tried.’
‘My mind’s too busy. Read my mind, Chris. You were always good at that. Talk to me.’
And Chris knew he had no choice,
‘Be careful, Doctor,’ he began. ‘Someone overhearing you saying those words might think you had achieved the triumph of giving me the skill of thought-transference. Of course, that’s still a year or two away, even with the right equipment.’
Beck let his mouth hang open, though Christopher didn’t qualify his revelation beyond adding,
‘Of course, I haven’t really had the time to think about it, and with hardly any tools. But for now, let’s look at you. Let’s see what I can garner with my existing skills:
‘You’re an early-middle-aged man, a wedding ring on your finger, and the clothes of one who has someone who takes care of your appearance. So, you’re still with Sarah? Well done.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ve course I knew that, I’ve kept tabs. She stood by you when your first career came crashing down – quite a woman. It’s not easy for a spouse to take risks when there are children involved.’
‘So, tell me what you don’t know.’
‘Shall I read the lines on your face like the leaves in a teacup, do you mean? Are you sure you’re ready?’
Beck nodded.
‘I see a man who hasn’t been happy in eight years. Whose greatest pleasure became his greatest shame. His greatest pride, his greatest pain. His greatest achievement, his greatest secret. And an achievement so large that the secret of it threatened to overwhelm him.
‘And yet, this is a man who puts a face on for the world, to show that everything is well; and perhaps also to convince those who may still be watching him that he is nowhere near cracking. For who knows what measures they may have to take then?
‘Your wife, your children. They know a man already broken behind a smile.’
A tear broke on Beck’s cheek. Christopher continued,
‘You would give up everything you are just to be honest to their faces. And there I tell you what you already know yourself, deep down, in some part hidden from the rest of you.’
‘I’ve missed you, Christopher.’
‘And I you, Doctor. I won’t burden you with sympathy, I know you’d hate that.’
‘Though you’re wrong about one thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Sarah has seen behind the smile.’
‘Evidently. Otherwise that fine woman wouldn’t still be standing by you. No marriage could survive that secret, and you’d only come to hate each other.’
‘So why report that bit wrong?’
‘I had to over-egg my analysis to bring you to the point of crisis. Because I thought that tears were what you needed, and were the reason that you asked me to “read your mind”. It is an odd feature of the Western Male that he needs tears like the Western Female does, but needs another to bring them out in him. I offered you that service out of friendship, dear Doctor. It was a gift I wished to give.’
‘Do you cry, Christopher?’
‘Not generally.’
‘Though you can, you know?’
‘I know. But they only came the once.’
‘The bus?’
‘Yes, the bus.’
Day 3 – Part-Reunification
Chapter 51 – West Country Preparations
Still some hours before daybreak, after an evening of talking and pledging their allegiance, Ellie and Victor were discussing the impending future.
‘There’s been so much going on,’ she said. ‘I haven’t been thinking straight.’
‘Well, I’m sorry for distracting you,’ he joked. To which she nudged him in the ribs,
‘Well don’t go distracting me anymore. At least not yet.’
She got up and looked out of the window, as she had been earlier. Though less morosely now, instead more intently, and saying,
‘You know; we really have been lucky. Those men outside my flat must have been normal security guards, paid to watch over things while the pros got to work inside. They must not have noted your registration number when you swooped by to pick me up – otherwise someone would have been here long ago.’
She continued, ‘Meanwhile, that blowhard former boss of ours couldn’t have mentioned to the police about you chasing off after me. They must have left the office disappointed for missing me, and letting their disappointment get in the way of proper fact-finding and cross-checking. What do you reckon?’
But Victor was in a daze of admiration,
‘No wonder you were always good at spreadsheets. Listen to you at full tilt. Lord, I don’t think I could have distracted you very much at all.’
‘Don’t worry, I was really very distracted,’ she smiled. ‘But I’m still amazed there’s no one here.’ Again she looked out of the window. ‘And there really is no one – there’s too much random normalness going on outside for it to be a secret lockdown – midnight joggers, newspaper deliveries, dogs being walked.’
‘So what do we do?’ asked Victor. ‘It might have been dumb luck that we haven’t been caught so far, but we can’t keep playing on that.’
‘Spoken like a true professional,’ she beamed. ‘Well, I’m hoping that your phone has the Internet?’ (He nodded.) ‘And that your car has the petrol to get a long way away from here before the sun’s up?’ (He confirmed this also.) ‘Then, no time for any more distractions. Let’s get to work.’
Chapter 52 – An Audience with the Phi
losopher General
‘This way, please,’ instructed a receptionist in white wraparound dress. She rose from her desk to guide the dark-suited Miss Eris from the elevator. Eris had already come up forty-one floors, as instructed by a similarly dressed receptionist on the building’s ground floor, and so knew she was near the top of this most famous of buildings.
The top-floor receptionist led Eris to double-doors, but paused before entering.
‘Please don’t speak until I’ve introduced you,’ she whispered, ‘and then only when directly questioned. And remember, he doesn’t bite.’
Eris followed the receptionist through the softly sliding doors, into a high glass-dome that formed the top of the building that had fascinated Londoners and visitors alike since its construction a few short years earlier. The interior was as minimally ‘cool’ as the rest of the building. Within the vast unpartitioned space were sofas, desks, ornaments, and a spiral staircase leading up to a thin transparent viewing platform that ran just within the glass wall.
‘He’s in the “study” right now,’ said the receptionist. The pair waited in the centre of the room, in a space where five men could have lay end-to-end in any direction. Beneath their feet was an exquisite Persian rug fifteen feet square, which offered one of the few points of colour in the space.
Eventually there was movement, with the sight of two besuited men coming down the spiral staircase. Eris thought she recognised one of them from the news, and the other from a financial discussion show she sometimes watched when unable to sleep. The men promptly bid them both ‘Good Morning,’ and left the way the women had just come.
After them, pausing half-way down the staircase, was the Prime Minister. He wore grey canvas slacks and a darker polo shirt.
‘This is Miss Eris, Prime Minister,’ called the receptionist. ‘You asked...’
‘Yes, yes,’ he remembered, in that distracted way of his that so beguiled and confounded his people, but left them feeling that deep down he must be really quite clever. Hence his newspaper nickname, “The Philosopher General”, coined half in mockery and half in admiration.
‘Miss Eris, won’t you come up?’
Following him as prompted, she climbed the staircase up into the body of the transparent dome, to see the whole of London spread out before her.
‘It’s like the London Eye,’ she remembered of her trip up in the glass eggs of that carousel. The view was accompanied by sounds of wind and water, as a high breeze blew rain against the membrane.
‘The Eye was the inspiration,’ confirmed the leader of the world’s fifth largest economy. ‘Before earning my current political office, I visited this building as a Trade Minister, and could see in my mind’s eye its potential as a place to think, and to observe, and to contemplate.’
‘Well, the views are wonderful.’
‘I don’t like a visitor to come all the way up and not see them. Won’t you sit down?’ There were two transparent chairs on the transparent platform, which they promptly took. Between them was a transparent table to make the set, scattered with papers that were not transparent, though they might as well have been as no reference was made to them. He began,
‘You’re up early.’
‘So are you.’
‘I hardly sleep. Breakfast?’
‘I’ve eaten, thank you.’
The Prime Minister announced, ‘Miss Eris. At this moment you are probably the most important person in Britain.’
‘Why, thank you.’
‘What we’re chasing here are the efforts of a secret enterprise to create a new species. Think that to yourself for a moment: a new species. Not merely to discover one, which is special enough, but to create one. Of course, others all over the world are splicing genes to make new breeds of blight-resistant corn, or glowing mice, or the longer-lasting tomato. There are many different drives in the direction of creation, but nothing of quite this flavour, I’m sure you’d agree.
‘Schmidt, for all his idiosyncrasies – or perhaps because of them – managed something quite incredible. Yet the results of that are now running free and without any rules to guide them, as we have ourselves.
‘I’m an atheist, Miss Eris. I’m not sure if I’m still not supposed to say that out loud, or whether the people of even a secular nation like our own expect their Prime Minister to give lip-service to The Man Upstairs.’
‘No, Prime Minister,’ she answered, though his words had probably been rhetorical. She continued, ‘You were the first to be honest about such things, and it’s that honesty that people find refreshing. I think it may even have taken them by surprise, as no one had offered it them before. Like the parent or teacher who opens up to a teenager, and suddenly finds that teenager on-side.’
Hell, she listened to herself babble on. It was like when she met David Hasselhoff at a Bournemouth Radio One Roadshow aged fifteen. Why hadn’t she just had a T-shirt made up with the slogan ‘FANGIRL’?
But she needn’t have worried, and the PM accepted the compliment,
‘Well, thank you, Miss Eris. That “honesty” is simply how I am, and was never a tactic to win votes...’ (Like hell! she thought.) ‘...yet it brings a glow to my heart to think I might have made some small movement in the direction of de-cluttering public life of cant and cliché.
‘But your kindness has – happily – diverted me from my point. Which is that, as a man without faith, then I see goodness not as something God-given but as something innate. And so you might think that I would be as happy dealing with an artif as a human, believing everybody equal under the sun. But in fact it brings me another dilemma; for just because goodness is innate in us, it may not mean it is innate in them...
‘Oh, listen to me,’ the Prime Minister again digressed from his narrative. ‘How easily I slip into the language of “us” and “them”. I might as well be a member of the National Front.’
‘Sir, it was just a verbal slip, and not even a bad one...’
‘But am I not expected to be absolute? I, of all of us?’
‘Sir, you’re a human, not a robot.’
And there Eris put a verbal foot in a bucket of her own; but one which seemed to calm the Philosopher General, and even brought a flicker of cruelty onto his lips, unless Eris was imagining it in her moment of acute embarrassment.
Yet she sensed that he expected her to keep on talking, which she did not feel like doing, so said simply,
‘It must be exhausting, sir.’
‘Oh, it is, Eris. It is. And doubly so; as for the good non-judgemental libertarian like myself then there is but one person they can freely criticise, and that is their own person; and one nation they can damn, and that is their own nation; and one race they can curse, and that is their own race.’
Eris was confused. Was her superior after comfort here? Was he being self-piteous? He sure as hell wasn’t talking about the artifs anymore. And he hadn’t been very nice to her only moments earlier. Yet, sat up there with him in his transparent kingdom, surrounded by vertiginous skies, alone with the person who had only the monarch above him, then what could she say, but,
‘But surely, Prime Minister – and please tell me if I’m talking out of turn here –’
At that moment a seagull flew into the glass dome, causing a loud echoed bang, and then a clatter as it scrambled to get its bearings back in time to save it falling all the way down to the busy morning streets of London. This shook Eris even further, but left the Philosopher General unmoved, as though having heard it happen many thousand times before, which perhaps he had? She suddenly had the impression that her host was insane, or at least deeply troubled in a personal sense.
He gestured for her to continue, she offering,
‘But where in your philosophy is self-forgiveness?’
‘And do I have the right to that?’
‘Doesn’t anyone?’ she asked. ‘Are we only on this earth to punish ourselves?’
He said nothing, leaving her the space to continue. Yet the w
ords wouldn’t come to her,
‘I... I...’
She admitted defeat; the situation had confounded her. He was unreadable. Before her was the face of a man whose thoughts and actions were discussed across the nation, were the stuff of national news, but who she now couldn’t hope to fathom.
Chapter 53 – Contact of the Artifs (Morning at Chris’s Flat)
‘Wakey, wakey, Doctor Beck, rise and shine. If sleep is for the righteous, then you have been a very good boy.’
‘You drugged me?’
Chris smiled, ‘No. You went out of your own accord.’
‘I never sleep that well.’
‘Well, when was the last time you lived a day like yesterday? Your bodies have a very clever system of internal chemical stimulants and sedatives – uppers to help you run from sabre-toothed tigers, and downers to send you to the bliss of repose as soon as things are safe. You pushed that system to the limit yesterday, my friend. You’ve been spark-out. I was even worried you wouldn’t be awake in time.’
‘Which is?’
‘It’s seven now, we leave in half-an-hour.’
‘In rush-hour?’
‘Yes, surrounded by a million other cars. Though we’re headed out of town, not into.’
‘So where are we going?’
‘I’ll tell you after you’ve eaten – I’ve bought food in.’
And Beck could already smell his breakfast.
But later as he ate, he needed to ask,
‘So how would you contact the others, if you needed to?’
Christopher took his morning newspaper from where he’d just placed it on his desk, to show the notebook beneath. It was hard-backed, and its spine was cracked – Beck wondered: how did everything Christopher own seem old?
The artif brought the book over to the table where Beck was eating. Within it were a series of paragraphs separated by blank lines, and headed with a name and date. Turning to the most recent pages, its author handed the book to Beck before reciting from memory,
‘Beneath my heading, “Eliza”. “Taking a break from the old job for a holiday on the moors – very relaxing, even if a bit of sunburn. But holidays are over too soon aren’t they? Back to the desk!”’