by Steven Hall
The old man announced–to family, to friends and to several newspapers–that he had decided not to die, not from this illness, not from anything, not ever. He claimed he didn’t have the time for death and would instead ‘unshackle himself from the multitudinous failings of the corporeal harness and progress forward ad infinitum’. He then locked himself in his study for the best part of a year, refusing to comment further or speak to anyone much at all.
The old man’s death the following spring was marked only by a number of small obituaries and a few pithy editorials (one of which compared him to King Canute). Within a few months, interest in Mycroft Ward had grumbled itself away into the aether. The planet smirked, and moved on.
What the planet didn’t hear about, what only a select group of people have ever known, is this: Ward succeeded in his plan. At least, he succeeded after a fashion.
His original technique is lost now, but there seems to have been nothing magical or spiritual or even overly scientific about what Ward did. The system he devised was so down-to-earth and logical an accountant might have invented it. First, through the use of thousands of questions and tests, Ward succeeded in reproducing a very rough copy of his personality on paper. Then, through ‘the applied arts of mesmerism and suggestion’ Ward successfully imprinted this personality onto another person.
Now, though the future might come to think differently, Ward was not a bad man. He may have been unbearably pompous and self-righteous, but in planning and carrying out his strange scheme he seems always to have acted honourably and fairly. His private journals, which still survive both on a high-security website and in a deep and fortified bank vault, refer to the transferring of his personality as ‘the arrangement’, and that’s exactly what it was.
Ward spent a great deal of time and money selecting what he hoped would become his new body, eventually opening negotiations with a young doctor named Thomas Quinn. Quinn had been devastated by the loss of his wife a year earlier, letting his small town practice fall into ruin as he lived listlessly on his dwindling savings. Quinn was very much taken with Ward’s technique (partly, we might suppose, because of the nature of his own tragic loss). He believed the old man to be on the verge of a discovery greater than anything achieved by Newton or Darwin and saw in ‘the arrangement’ a chance to “at last turn away from sorrow and give what little I have remaining to the furtherment of science”. Quinn, being the romantic he clearly was, must have fancied himself as the first martyr of the scientific age.
And so, as Ward lay on his deathbed, Quinn underwent a very secret process and a small team of lawyers transferred all assets and monies to the old man’s ‘young and recently discovered great nephew’.
‘The arrangement’ was a greater success than Ward could ever have hoped for. Members of the Ward family initially challenged the validity of this young man who had appeared from nowhere, claimed to be a distant relative and walked away with everything the old man owned. But on meeting ‘Mycroft Ward the Younger’, even the most stubborn and money-fixated of the cousins conceded that the two men must be related–while there was little physical resemblance, their mannerisms, attitudes and opinions were so similar there could be no doubt of a blood connection. Mycroft Ward’s self had successfully survived the death of his body. He was young again at the dawn of a new century.
It’s hard to say why the new Ward didn’t go public with the success of his technique, especially when one considers how he’d declared his intentions to the world. Maybe he worried that his family would find a way to take his estate away from him if they discovered his new body did not share a single drop of blood with the old; maybe he wanted to work on the technique further before announcing what he’d done; or maybe he’d just moved on; with horizons broader than any man had ever seen before, there were certainly bigger fish available for frying. What we do know is that by the outbreak of the First World War–stubborn and indomitable as ever–Ward had found himself a place as an officer in the army. But the Great War wasn’t like anything that had gone before it. The era of the Light Brigade was long gone, stripped of its pride and brass and poems and paintings. War was industrialised now, the whole world split into two great funding machines for the daily grinding of a million human bodies.
As I have said, Ward wasn’t a bad man. The decision he came to, once peace was declared, was nothing if not understandable given his particular resources and circumstances. But then, the worst things don’t always grow from the worst intentions.
War-scarred despite all his bluster and bravado, Mycroft Ward developed an obsession with the one great hole in his scheme; for all the immortality his self could achieve through repeated use of ‘the arrangement’, he could–like anybody else–still be shot dead on some future battlefield and wiped clean from the face of the earth forever. In tackling this new anxiety, Ward’s chosen course of action was as practical and as monumental as it had been thirty years earlier. He decided one body was simply not enough to guarantee his survival. This is not to say he aimed to create another Mycroft Ward. Another Ward wouldn’t have been a solution, just a divergence; two people grown from a common source. No, his great plan was this–there would be just one Mycroft Ward, a single self inhabiting two bodies.
Throughout the early half of the 1920s, Ward modified the original personality recording template significantly. He added new systems and techniques to refine the collected personality data, developed tests which would capture newly acquired knowledge and opinion, and created an all important procedure whereby knowledge could be gathered from two minds, standardised with minimum loss of information, then transferred back, realigning both minds into a single unified self.
Ward also amended his new personality recorder to instil an increased desire for self-preservation. And it was with this one single action, as sensible as it may have seemed to him in the bloody aftermath of World War One, that Ward doomed himself and cast a long, black shadow over all of our futures.
In winter, 1927, ‘the second arrangement’ took place. Ward and an unnamed associate underwent the new procedure and, fourteen days later, Mycroft Ward became the first single entity ever to exist across two bodies.
Like its predecessor, the revised system wasn’t as complex or mystical as its outcome might imply. For six days of the week, both Wards attended to business as usual but on the seventh day, every Saturday, they underwent the standardising process; collating the week’s information from each of them, making it uniform, and transferring the amalgamation back into both heads. The process took between twelve and sixteen hours every week, but Ward didn’t miss that time at all. Existing as a single self in two bodies (albeit imperfectly) had an extra, very unusual benefit he hadn’t previously considered; for this new, two-bodied Ward, each day was forty-eight hours long, every week–even with Saturday completely taken up standardising–was twelve days and every year for us, almost two years to him. Something fundamental in the relationship between time and Mycroft Ward changed.
The strong self-preservation urge Ward had built into his new system also began to have an effect he hadn’t foreseen, a terrible effect; the every-Saturday repetition of the standardising process turned Ward’s preservation command into a feedback loop. Every week, the system would deliver the preservation urge into Ward, who, with this urge in him increased, would amend the system accordingly, just slightly, in line with what he now thought to be a wise and suitable survival precaution. The now increased urge would feed back into him again the following week, making him increase its presence in the system again. Once it had begun, there was no way to stop the loop gathering momentum. As the weeks passed, Ward became a slave to his own machine. In the face of his ever growing all-devouring urge to survive, Ward made more and more amendments to his system and blindly stripped away his own humanity one piece at a time.
By the 1950s there were six bodies, by the 1970s, sixteen; by the 1980s, thirty-four. The irresistible urge to survive led to an equally irresistible urge to grow. As
a result, the system received constant modification, incorporating new technologies to make the standardising process quicker and more effective, absorbing anything beneficial to the spread of the thing that had once been Mycroft Ward. It applied ‘the arrangement’ to bankers, heads of corporations and politicians, incorporating the useful parts of their minds and knowledge into its increasingly massive self. With thirty-four bodies, it gathered over a month’s experience each day. It learned about stock markets, bought oilfields, developed psychological techniques and drugs, invested in new technologies and sciences. Every passing hour gave it three days’ research time, and always it researched new ways to spread. What had once been a single human personality became a vastly intelligent mind-machine focused only on survival, on growing bigger and bigger and bigger with no regard for anything else at all.
By the late 1990s the Ward-thing had become a huge online database of self with dozens of permanently connected node bodies protecting against system damage and outside attack. The mind itself was now a gigantic over-thing, too massive for any one head to contain, managing its various bodies online with standardising downloads and information-gathering uploads. One of the Ward-thing’s thousands of research projects developed software capable of targeting suitable individuals and imposing ‘the arrangement’ via the internet.
Four years ago it had over six hundred bodies gathering more than two years’ experience every day. This was around the time it found Scout.
The new stick of pallet wood leaked a fine cotton of smoke, black burn growing up around its edges. All three of us watched the fire, Ian’s sleepy half-closed eyes going into wide open pull-focus as the new wood popped with a little starburst of embers then he settled back down into a full-bellied dreamy stare.
“How did it happen?”
Scout stayed tuned to the flames. “One night I was at home, my parents’ home, playing around on the internet. It was at the start of that summer between college and university and I was scanning around for something to do. I found this site–some sort of IQ test. I must have decided to take a look at it and the next thing I remember it’s five minutes later and I’m sick, dizzy and staring at the SIGNAL LOST message onscreen.”
“Just like that?”
She nodded. “I ran into the bathroom and threw up. Turned out Polly, my little sister, had pulled the cable to use the phone and interrupted ‘the arrangement’ programme.”
“Wow.”
“I know. She was always doing it. We used to fight about it.”
“Did you know something was wrong?”
“Oh yeah. You can feel it. I can think my way around it now,” she looked up, concentrating on something internal, “this dead area in my mind where its information’s stored, but at the time, they thought I’d had some kind of seizure or stroke or something. There were doctors, the whole works.”
“What did the doctors think?”
“I got passed around, sent to a specialist. Only, the person they sent me to turned out not to be the specialist, or at least it wasn’t the specialist by the time I got there.”
“Ward?”
“Yeah. The last thing it wanted was me walking around only half processed. I think it pumped some heavy resources into finishing what it started. It’s still looking for me now, probably always will be. So here I am.”
“What happened with the specialist?”
“I ran away. I’ve never been one of those people who can just accept what they’re being told–” a sad-happy smile, “it’s a fault. Anyway, I didn’t like the sound of his assessment techniques,” she tapped Nobody’s computer still strapped to her backpack, “but I did get his laptop.”
“You stole a doctor’s laptop, what, out of a hospital?”
“Yeah, well. It’s easy when you know how.”
“Scout,” I said, trying not to sound too impressed, “what exactly did Ward want you for?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Good looks? Personality? Quick wit?”–cough–“Oxford entrance exam results”–cough.
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought it might be something like that. Or maybe because you’d had some sort of MI5 training.”
“I wasn’t going. Oxford, not MI5. I just wanted to see if I could get in.”
“You got a place at Oxford, but you weren’t going?”
“I told you, it’s a fault. Look, anyway, I was going to university, I just decided not to go there. Can we get off my rash decision-making now please?”
“Sorry. We were up to you running away?”
She nodded. “I spent the summer travelling around, trying to keep my head down. The specialist’s laptop came with me and it told me some of what I needed to know, but I didn’t understand the software. All the poking around triggered a lock-off and the whole thing shut down for good, but it did give me a start. I spent a lot of time in libraries, looking into Mycroft Ward and piecing together the story I just told you. My money was running out fast, but then this nice but kind of odd librarian gave me a few hours’ work a day down in the archives. And that’s how I found my way into un-space.”
We sat in silence for a little while.
“Something I don’t get. I can see why he would want you, but why does Ward want me?”
“It, say it. It doesn’t really want you at all. It wants the shark.”
“Nobody said that, but I wasn’t sure–”
“The big limiting factor on Ward’s spreading is the standardising process. Even now there’s a pretty severe cap on how many bodies it can standardise as the same self; there’s just too much information and the system is imperfect so it’s stuck around the thousand mark. Ward thinks understanding the different fish, especially the Ludovician, could be the key to a perfect standardising process, where any number of bodies could be updated with new knowledge instantaneously.” Scout thought. “Not that it’d ever risk coming near a loose shark itself.”
“Ah.”
“You know,” she said, giving the fire a poke, “you’re sort of taking all of this in your stride.”
“All what?”
She looked at me and I smiled.
“It is a big deal,” she said. “It’s a really big fucking deal.”
“I know. It’s just–maybe it’s like you said, I am in a constant collapse. Maybe this is as bad as I get with things. Even really big things.”
“I’m sorry I said that.”
“It’s okay, you were right. Anyway, I’m the last person who’s going to be bothered by what you have or haven’t got in your head.”
“Hmmm…”
“Ah. Cross that off my list of chat-up lines?”
She laughed. “I know what you meant, and thank you. I really mean that. Thank you.”
“I just love it that you’re around,” I said poking the fire with my own poking stick.
“Yeah,” she said, poking her side. “Me too.”
“Erm,” I said after a couple of big fat seconds.
Scout giggled. “Erm.”
We both poked at the fire.
Some time passed.
“So. How long have you been down here?”
“Four years.”
“God, that’s a long time.”
“Nah. Not when you think about how long I will be down here.”
“You must really miss them.”
“Who? My family? Yeah, I do, I miss everything–friends, secrets, gossip, all that stuff, the really cool bars; the ones where you know everybody. I had a university place, music, clothes–I had some really nice clothes by the way–and, God, hair-care products. I had a favourite drink and a favourite meal, a favourite TV programme. All of that stuff, just normal person stuff, you know? A Dad who used to make me see ageing rock bands with him and a mascara and White Lightning little sister who annoyed the shit out of me. It’s all gone.” She thought for a moment. “Only, it’s not all gone, is it? I’m the one who’s gone. The rest of it, it just all carries on up there without me.”
I turned to ch
eck on Ian. He was asleep on my rucksack, chin tucked into his paws.
“I feel like I fell off the world,” Scout said. “You ever get that?”
I shook my head. “For me, it’s more like everyone else fell and left me and Ian on our own.”
Scout nodded gently, looking into the fire without saying anything back. I imagined six billion people slowly pinwheeling through space, all those little stars in the wake of an almost empty planet. A vapour trail of ghosts.
21
Erm…
I lay on my back, looking up.
The night sky drifted cloudy above the film reel windows in the roof. The fire had burned down to a bright orange heap and I pulled the sleeping bag up under my nose.
According to Scout’s predictions, tomorrow would be my last day of grace. By the day after, the Ludovician would have had enough time to find its way back from the stream-tangling smash of her letter bomb. Then, I’d have to retreat behind the Mark Richardson personality, set up the Dictaphones again. Today Eric Sanderson had broken the reservoir surface like the rooftops and spires of an old sunken village in a midsummer drought, but after tomorrow, there could only be the flatline of undisturbed waters. I didn’t want to be that again, the empty horizon. I thought about what Nobody had said–Just let go, let yourself sink down with the crabs. Was that what I’d been doing? Had I been sinking away behind my clever mask without even realising it? Tomorrow, Scout said, we’d find Dr Fidorous. Watching the clouds, I hoped finding him might bring something, some way of changing things for good.
“Hey.”