Normal

by Warren Ellis

  Dickson hove into view, a great galleon of a man sailing with peculiar grace through the archipelago of plastic islands between them. He arrived alongside their table with a puff of air. His eyes were rheumy and jittering.

  “Mr. Dearden? I have to take you to your session with the doctor now. Are you ready?”

  “I suppose,” Adam said. “I guess I didn’t know I was going to have one today?”

  “Everybody’s getting five minutes with a doctor at some point today. Come on up, sir. I’ll walk you over.”

  Adam, standing up, went to say something to Lela, but she was looking away, robotically picking at the label on the bottle. Adam looked to Dickson helplessly, not knowing how to frame the question he thought he wanted to ask. Something about keeping an eye on her, giving her some help … something. He didn’t know. He wanted to do something. Dickson nodded his head toward the doors, and Adam went with him instead.

  “Must be a busy day for you,” Adam offered.

  “Yeah. None of us really got much sleep.”

  “You do look a bit tired.”

  “I am. Well, I was. Thank God they let us into the Adderall stocks. I could jog from here to Canada right now.”

  * * *

  Dr. Murgu looked no better than Dickson, but she found a big smile for Adam. The clipboard in her lap had a few sheets of paper and a small pad clamped to it today. “Sit down, Adam. This is only going to take a minute, I swear. We’re just checking in with everybody after the events during the night. Making sure it didn’t do any damage, set anything off, that sort of thing. And I’m told you were actually there when Mr. Mansfield’s door was forced open?”

  A tiny spider was loitering with intent in the corner of the window. A spider with a Napoleon complex, not deigning to spin a web but hanging around on the insect street waiting to prove that he could beat the shit out of a fly with his bare palps.

  “Yes.”

  “That must have been pretty awful.”

  “It was weird. I know the Director is sequestering information, and I don’t know what else you’ve been told, so I don’t know if I should really be talking about it.”

  Dr. Murgu studied her clipboard, with another smile, one that Adam couldn’t clearly decipher. “That,” she said, “was very operational-sounding. I think I’ve heard detectives on television shows say things like that. Makes it all a bit more dramatic and spooky, I suppose.”

  “I suppose. Maybe I heard it off the television.”

  “Maybe you did. So it didn’t bother you unduly? Aside from, well, the strangeness of the thing itself? You don’t necessarily feel better or worse today?”

  It took her saying it for Adam to discover that he might actually have felt better today. “No, neither one nor the other,” he said. “Aside from the strangeness of it all.”

  She made a note on her clipboard paper. Her smile went away. “I see. I’d like to ask you some more questions, but I have an awful lot of people to talk to today. We’re going to adjust your meds a tiny bit, as your responses aren’t quite where I’d like them yet. So, just relax today, and tomorrow we’ll talk about the last week or two of your life in more detail. There are some gaps I’d like to fill. Okay?”

  It wasn’t okay. “Okay,” he said. She scribbled something on the pad, tore the top leaf off, and handed it to him.

  “Off you go, then. Take this. If you just step outside, Dickson will collect you, and if you give him that, he’ll trot you off to the dispensary. Get some air, keep drinking the juices, and try a meal tonight. See you tomorrow.”

  Adam took it and stepped outside as directed. He felt like something had gone very, very badly wrong in the last couple of minutes.

  Dickson trotted up, saw the script sheet, and took him to the dispensary window, where he watched Adam be served and take a plastic cup of capsules and tablets and a paper cone of water to wash them down with.

  Another patient meandered over to them while Adam took his meds, with a sly gait. He was a well-lunched man in his thirties, plump and shiny like a British pork sausage, in port-colored corduroy trousers and the most appalling knitted sweater and pointed Nordic-style knitted hat Adam had seen since his last trip to Helsinki.

  “Hello,” he lied. Or, at least, that’s how it sounded to Adam. “My name is Benedict Asher. You’re Adam Dearden, yes?”

  “Yes,” Adam said, looking to Dickson, who was at this point chatting with the dispensary assistant about how they should be given Adderall every day because it was great apart from the tremors and the twitches and the teeth-grinding and the burning piss.

  “Colegrave would like to speak to you. Over in Staging.”

  Adam discovered he was actually curious about Staging.

  “Dickson,” Adam said, “this guy wants to show me something over at Staging. Is that okay?”

  “Hello, Ben,” Dickson said, noticing the man in the stupid hat. “That’s fine, but you’ll need to bring Adam back, too. He doesn’t know the layout of the place yet. I’m relying on you to do that, okay? We’re a bit overstretched today, and it’ll be difficult to send someone over there to collect Adam. Do we have a deal?”

  “Sure,” Asher lied.

  “All right, then,” Dickson said, clapping Adam on the shoulder, “have fun and be careful.” And, with that, he jogged off to the next job, leaving Adam with Asher. Asher had a twisty smile that Adam believed he could quite quickly learn to hate.

  They walked through the main building together in silence, leaving by an exit Adam hadn’t seen before. He was tracing the route in his head. He was pretty good with direction and space, generally. It helped when he was working on the street, particularly when things got bad. He was coping pretty well in Windhoek when …

  Adam shook it out of his head and concentrated on walking and tracking.

  The exit produced them into the open air, a few hundred feet from the edge of the woodland that seemed to wrap around Normal. On the treeline were clusters and stands of the micro-homes he’d seen on the way in, little bonsai houses with sloped roofs and plastic sidings, sitting on thick raised wooden decks.

  As they angled toward one farther away and just inside the woods, Adam got glimpses through the buildings’ tall windows. Tiny offices, enough for two or three people, cleverly compact kitchens, suspended stairs leading to upper sleeping areas. He spotted rainwater collection systems and tiny gray-water treatment plants. They were very self-contained.

  There was still dew on the grass, which had been mowed a month or two back. He saw a few random dotted skeins of stepping stones, spotted mossy concrete discs set into the dirt, but the trampled lines of grass seemed to be the more popular footpaths.

  They reached their target micro-home. It seemed like it might have been there longer than the others. Its sides were turning green, with thistles and blackberry vines tangling in evil possessiveness around the decking.

  Asher stepped up and tapped on the glass door. Over his shoulder, Adam could discern the black shape of a figure draped in an office chair whose back was so tall that it might as well be a throne.

  “Come,” a voice intoned from within.

  Asher popped the door and ushered Adam inside.

  A man with the thinnest face Adam had ever seen said, “I am Colegrave.”

  Fingers as slim and curved as Turkish knives gestured at an empty smaller and lower chair across from the leather throne, which Adam took. The man wore an old black suit, quite well looked after, a crisp white shirt, and a flat black bow tie with the upper points tucked under the collars. And no shoes. After sitting, Adam put his heels to the floor and pushed his chair another six or seven inches away from Colegrave, until he bumped up against a wall. The man had a bitter fragrance that seemed to drape around him like a thick blanket, and Adam wanted extra distance from the contamination zone.

  Colegrave pursed his lips. Perhaps he was offended. “Beginnings,” he said. “Beginnings are very important. First impressions, foundations, and basic tenets. I am
the longest-serving patient in Staging. I have been here for fifteen years. Do not display human facial expressions intended to denote sympathy. Fifteen years is nothing to me. I have lived for over a millennium, and, in all honesty, the food has never been better. I am the senior figure over here in Staging. This is a different world. This is important. You have crossed into an alternative continuum where the artificial separation between foresight strategy and strategic forecast does not exist. We are neither one nor the other. Here, we are simply Staging. Are you following me so far, Adam Dearden?”

  Adam briefly wrestled with the pros and cons of asking for clarity on the thousand-year-old-man bit. Measuring his own energy for it, he decided to let it ride. Some things weren’t worth wasting the braincycles on.

  “I’m with you so far, Mr. Colegrave.”

  “Just Colegrave, please,” he said, raising his talons. “Basic honorifics will cease to be in the future that awaits us, and I have discarded them in preparation for that awful and glorious time to come.”

  “I see.”

  “Indeed. The crisis in time will be resolved. The project of democracy shall be undone, even unto the Magna Carta. It’s no accident that the Petition of Right and the final usurpation of power by the English Parliament were contiguous with the assumption of ‘gentleman’ as a thing people could be and the word ‘master’ being taken away from men of expertise and given to anybody. ‘Master’ became ‘mister’ and now we are all tainted by the negation of correct civilization.”

  “Fifteen years in Staging, you say?”

  Colegrave folded his hands over his dead knot of a knee. “They will never release me. The work I do in Staging is very valuable. And they know that if I were to escape into the outside world I would end it. It doesn’t matter. It will end anyway. The pressure of time is inexorable. You’ve been here a day, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you are both insane and unlucky. Or insane and a hapless instigator.”

  Adam bristled without quite knowing why. “Instigator? Really?”

  “You were the only new patient to arrive yesterday. Mansfield was taken last night. I’d be a damned fool to not consider the possibility that you had some involvement. He arrived two days before you, and, from what we can glean, had a meteoric career path in defense intelligence forecasting over the last two years. It certainly wasn’t a rescue, since it was his own employers who sent him here, and would constitute a rather baroque suicide that spoke to an imagination he likely didn’t possess.”

  Adam flexed his fingers. “Are you leading the investigation?”

  Colegrave had a sudden harsh laugh like a fighting-dog’s bark. Adam jumped from it.

  “They would never even think to have me lead the investigation. The Director’s an idiot. He was an idiot even before he was damaged. Any sane civilization would have terminated him humanely and processed his body for mineral reclamation a couple of years ago. Humanely, mind. I’m not a monster. They say I’m a monster, but I’m not. I’d use one of those bolt capture guns they use on cows. Very efficient. Instant death. The bolt immediately destroys the brain, you see, which is precisely the instruction given to police snipers in terror situations. Destroy the brain. It’s quite the fascinating thing to think about, here in a compound in a forest where people with destroyed brains live. I imagine most of us will be put to death, when the world returns to its correct course.”

  Colegrave’s voice had drifted off, become wistful, and he was stroking his own left temple with one fingertip, making it tender for the euthanizing metal bolt of the future.

  Adam rocked on the back legs of the chair. It gave him a small nostalgic pleasure to do it. Memories of daydreamily pretending to be a stunt rider popping a wheelie while sitting in class during endless dull afternoons that seemed to be a bureaucratic conspiracy to steal the young years from him. “Colegrave,” he said, “I had nothing to do with it. I just saw the aftermath. So did Clough. I don’t see Clough in here.”

  “Clough is an economist, and therefore permanently mentally compromised long before he set foot in Normal Head. Also, obviously, the man is both an imbecile and demented, as well as a jackal at the feet of … anyway.” Colegrave had come back somewhat from his execution fantasies and realized that he was losing Adam. “The Director has summoned an investigative team, but that will take time to assemble and transport. Time that we cannot allow to drip away. We, ourselves, must investigate this event.”

  “I agree,” Adam said.

  “Of course you do,” Colegrave smiled. “You are a man of both sides of the aisle, as it were. I looked you up when you arrived yesterday. When I still had internet. You’re missing from a few of the usual lists and databases. I had to make some special queries. The Stoop Model is only the tip of your particular iceberg. There are a lot of people in Normal who were put here by paranoia and fear over the modern surveillance state, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want questions about how deep your connection with it runs to be asked in the open air. Whatever happened to you in Windhoek must have been quite singular, given your work history.”

  Adam was very still.

  “That said,” Colegrave continued, “sometimes it is simply a case of one thin straw breaking an overstressed camel’s back, isn’t it? My point is simply this. There are three strains of human in Normal Head. Strategic forecast, foresight strategy, and Staging. It is therefore, apparently, a happy accident that we have one person able to speak to all three phyla of Normal Head patient. You.”

  Adam was listening, but only with one part of his brain. Another was constructing a list of lies and pleas to deploy on Colegrave to buy his silence. And another was looking for weapons. His blocks of training and discipline, variously incomplete and specialized, were a gang of bastards ranged around the back of his skull and shouting orders over each other.

  “I don’t know anyone here,” Adam said. “Only Clough and Lela Charron. And I don’t really know even them, it’s just that they’re the only people who’ve talked to me.”

  “Have you had a proper look around yet? Taken a pass at recognizing or engaging anyone?”

  “No. I got here yesterday, they doped me and put me to bed, I was woken by the staff banging on Mansfield’s door, everything’s happened at fucking once.”

  “Then you need to go for a walk. See who you can see. Gather allies. Fellow detectives. You have all the resources, Dearden. You shall be our agent in Normal. Do you accept?”

  All the voices in Adam’s head went silent. The walls warped a little, and his perception of perspective got a little dented. The strain of the interview may have been burning his meds faster, he supposed. But he’d said it. He’d had that instinct that something was wrong beyond the details of the abduction himself, and that something needed to be done. He couldn’t lie to himself again. Lying to himself had probably taken him halfway to needing to be sent to Normal.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  Colegrave clapped his hands together. They made a noise like dry timbers. “Bravo. Now. Tell me everything you remember about the aftermath of the abduction that you saw. Every detail. Asher! Bring us two bottles of chilled Buoylent. The Carrot and Apple Surprise flavor, if you can.” Colegrave raised one eyebrow at Adam. “The Surprise is that it’s never seen a carrot or an apple in its brief laboratory life. I happen to like the flavor because it is precisely the kind of cheap chemical slurry that will sustain the existence of the peasant class in the world to come. It’s strange, Dearden. We live in such a debased time, and yet we can quite literally taste the future. You have to admit that that’s kind of wonderful.”

  Colegrave was beaming. His teeth were tiny and square with precisely even spacing between them and all the hues of rust and moss that an abandoned shack in the woods could attain, a grotesque display of nature’s comedy dentistry assembled at micrometer tolerances.

  They became almost companionable over their bottles of fluorescent orange Buoylent mix—of a shade, Colegrave noted approvingly,
that did not occur in nature—and the recitation of the night’s events. Colegrave asked intelligent questions, and Adam became aware that he was in fact in the presence of an intellect, no matter how corroded on its surface. Colegrave seemed to enjoy having a novel problem to solve, and worked without a notebook or other aide-mémoire. Adam would sometimes see Colegrave’s eyeballs jitter around in his head as if he were in REM sleep with his lids up, and decided that the older man was meticulously arranging the components of Adam’s report upon the shelves and in the trunks of a vast and doubtlessly richly Gothic memory palace.

  When they were done—and focusing on details had allowed Adam to mentally even out a little, into something like comfort—Adam felt emboldened enough to ask Colegrave about the future he kept alluding to, hoping to learn something about the man’s work.

  Colegrave wriggled in his chair with pleasure. “Ah. The great epiphany, Dearden. Let me start here. Would you agree that all the major societies of this Earth are broken? Those things that we call civilizations? Are they all busted and terrible systems?”

  “It’s hard to argue with,” Adam said.

  “Yes, it is. And so many people in our field start looking for forward escape. Pushing through the current terrors and into a place where things start working again. This is why a lot of us devolved to singularitarianism, the notion of a technological critical mass that would produce artificial superintelligences that would, in a nutshell, fix everything. That notion in itself leads to what’s called a singleton condition: the entirety of the world under a single command structure that is utterly impervious to any form of threat. A singleton could also be attained by a totalitarian human global government with flawless fine-grained surveillance methods and perfected psychological combat affordance.