Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  Truth is, I’m not even sure why I’m studying psychology. It’s all come to seem like a prolonged extension of a scam Freud came up with to make money out of the problems of a few rich Jews in pre-war Vienna. But I’m no big fan of modern neuroscience, either. All those pretty three-dee models of the brain, and they still haven’t got a proper handle on consciousness, or isolated a single, significant mental disease. These conclusions, and a lucky bursary, and perhaps an innate lack of personal drive, have somehow led me to Edinburgh and the orbit of Professor Comyn, who’s well known for her unfashionably reductive approach. What counts, she argues, almost like the behavioural psychologists of the 1960s, is to cut through all the speculative crap and concentrate on what can be provably, externally, repeatably and reliably observed. Think of the brain as a black box, concentrate on input and output, and all the rest will take care of itself. It’s certainly hard, sitting here in her Spartan campus office, to have any idea of what’s going on inside the confines of her considerable mind.

  I’ve been in Edinburgh for a couple of terms by now, and have occasionally helped her out with one of those seemingly minor, unfunded projects that most academics like to have going on under the radar. She’s amassed data from a series of online tests where people are invited to make quick, hunch-like guesses on seemingly random subjects. As well as taking part in the survey myself, I’ve done some of the donkey work of systems and web-maintenance using the skills from a previous degree, although she’s kept the actual results very much under wraps.

  It’s long been known that the seemingly random guesses of large groups can be surprisingly accurate. At the start of the twentieth century, the great statistician Francis Galton noted that the average of all the entries in “guess the weight of a bull” competitions which were then popular at rural fairs were far more accurate than the estimates of the supposed agricultural experts. Plato, who was also in on this, called this odd phenomena The Wisdom of Crowds.

  All of this I already know as Bea Comyn sits me down in her office. I also know that she’s recently asked me to close down all the sites linked to this area of research, and encrypt the data so it can’t be accessed by anyone other than herself. I’ve even heard it said that this is because she’s drawn what would be for her an uncharacteristic blank. But what she begins to tell me that first afternoon—for the process is typically cautious and gradual—is startling. Not only has she been able to amass more information on this subject than any previous project, but she’s also managed to grind that data down to something important and new.

  Sure, mass-conjectures have a statistically significant level of accuracy, but that simply means they’re marginally more right than wrong—a small, dark, clump in the fizzing white noise of chance. But it turns out that some people are significantly better than others at doing this kind of thing. Not once, but repeatedly—guess after guess and time after time. This isn’t a matter of specialist knowledge. In fact, the opposite, just as Galton and many other researchers have observed. Nor is it a question of IQ. In fact, Bea Comyn freely admits to me as she sits there in her office with the door closed and some weird, wailing music playing in the background, she still has no idea what the true source of this phenomena is. But it exists, right? Something clear, measurable and verifiable is occurring. Which, at the end of the day, and beyond all the surmise and bullshit, is exactly what matters. Data being data, and results always being results. Especially, in this case, where those results can be refined and re-used as a basis for further, deeper and far more significant research.

  So what would happen if the participants were filtered down to those whose hunches had consistently higher-than-average levels of accuracy? And then, after further tests and refinements, that group was quietly narrowed down even more. Now, and especially when these so-called super-predictors are allowed a few moments of collaboration, it turns out that the white noise of chance disappears almost entirely. Their wild stabs-in-the-dark on matters as obtuse as the annual fish harvest in the Bearing Straits or the number of people passing hourly through Times Square are amazingly, consistently, accurate. Even when the group-conclusions initially seem to be incorrect, it generally turns out that it’s the base-figures themselves that are wrong. Not only that, Samuel, Bea Comyn adds, but these group-guesses have a stochastic element. They can tell not only how things are, but how they will be, at least over a short timescale. In case you’re wondering, she adds with one of her famous non-smiles, I’m a super-predictor myself. So—which is why I’m sharing this—are you.

  Not so much a small, under-the-radar project, but a big and surprisingly ambitious one which she’s been using the dumb donkey work of postgrads like me to provide a plausible camouflage for. Looking at things as they are now, I can’t help but wonder if my late arrival into the core group Bea had already created and primed wasn’t a bad omen, but at the time I simply felt as if I was being invited to join something special, exciting and rare.

  The secrecy, the sense of feeling chosen, not to mention encrypting the new data so the University security guardians didn’t pick up on it, and borrowing stray bits of equipment and bandwidth, and throwing out false leads and dealing with the increasingly complex issues of financing this project, all added to the fun. Bea had already set up beta-versions of what ended up as our smartcubes using a variety of commercially available virtual gaming and pornography hardware and software. The system sensed patterns of eye movement, minute changes of breath, posture and skin resistance, so that we in the group, when confronted with some data, didn’t even need to consciously think about it, let alone physically converse. Subliminal dialectical bootstrapping being Bea’s technical term for this form of interaction, and the general hunch, the combined seat-of-the-pants surmise—the feeling you don’t even know you’re actually feeling until after you’ve felt it—being all.

  Of course, in those early days we used to meet up occasionally and in person at a variety of discreet locations in order to work out the many practical issues, and discuss who was supposed to be doing what. But, outside of the gestalt, we made an ill-assorted bunch, a bickering baker’s dozen of ages, races and attitudes, scattered across languages, cultures and continents. We might be intuitively loyal to the group, and fiercely protective of all that it’s brought us, but that doesn’t mean that, as separate people, we ever had anything else in common, or cared for each other, or even got on.

  I crawl out of bed with what feels less like a hangover than a vast, existential and physiological malaise. Luke looks beautiful, though, carved out of innocent and sleep, as I unblank the windows and grey morning pours in.

  My head is roaring, and so is the river. Steam from the coffee-maker fills the kitchen. There’s frost and mist outside amid the trees. I break the habit of almost a lifetime and stir several spoonfuls of sugar into my cup. Then, seeing as Luke isn’t yet conscious, and probably won’t be for several hours, I buzz the can-opener and hold my breath as I spoon out slabs of glistening offal for the drooling dogs. Time, then to do my—the group’s—regular, daily thing.

  I step into my cube. Snap the glass into smart mode, so that where I am fizzes away. No sign, yet, of any of the others. But that’s okay. We span time zones, chaos states, pogrom democracies and righteous caliphates, here in this modern world where the only true international currency is greed. Marlene in Estonia, in her autistic white box of a home, and Omar in what’s now called Constantinople again. And dull Vicktoria in Siberia, who still seems to have no idea of what to do with all her money, but wants it nevertheless. We all do.

  Money, after all, was what our group needed to establish itself. Money was the oil which could be laid over all kinds of troubled waters, and a simple and reliable measure of our success. Yui in Tokyo had some useful skills as an investment analyst, it’s true, which helped us to work out to spread and disguise our profits across a wide range of markets. And Mia out in Sydney, Australia, being a communication specialist, did a great job in creating a multiple-redundanc
y network. And I had a bit of a background in web-engineering, and course Bea knows almost everything that’s ever been known. But expertise, conscious knowledge, opinion, has never been what our group is about. Not for Hilda in Jerusalem with her near psychotic intolerances, or Maxim in Ukraine, with his background in people-smuggling. What counts isn’t I, but us.

  My fingers and my scalp tingle as the data rains in. Yes. And yes again. The smartcube, filled with all of Bea’s clever sensors and codes, knows me far better than I do myself. But still no sign of any of the others, here at the future’s raw edge. I occupy myself with calling up the latest feeds. There’s a new sports enhancement product which could rewrite the NBA and the English Premier League, or turn out to have disastrous side-effects and be worth nothing at all. You never know. And here’s a performance artist who’s crowd-funding her own crucifixion, and a bad storm is causing problems in the South China Sea. All the usual blah, and what I, individually, know and think about these things is worthless, and I’m still waiting to feel any connection from the rest of the group. So I tunnel down through further layers of opinion and catastrophe until I find—what’s this?—news at least two hours stale out of Kinshasa, which used to be called Leopoldville, in the not particularly Democratic Republic of the Congo. What’s left of Learnmore Wallace has been found hanging from a lamppost in a cloud of flies, and the dripping meat of his corpse looks like what Joe, Adolph and Mao had for breakfast.

  Our prediction was correct. Of course it was. No doubt with the backing of some external power-broker, his forces attempted to take the Congolese mining hills and lay some copper-bottomed dollars across the country’s ruinous spreadsheet before the whole thing fizzled out into bloody chaos. But it was a group decision, right? I may have pushed a little harder than some of the others, and of course a few were against increasing our stake in Canco, or wanted to sell, but that’s exactly how the gestalt works. We’ll recoup. Of course we will. After all, and when we’ve already made so much money, and so consistently, a loss of four hundred million dollars scarcely counts. So why do I feel this strong need to explain myself? And why am I still alone?

  I kill the smartcube. Pull back and out. But I still feel as if I’m in a hissing field of pure white emptiness. Of course, it’s just the cascading river, the steam, the frost, the mist, but my skin prickles, my testicles withdraw. They’re out there somewhere, the group, and I’m not with them, and I’ve never felt so lost and alone. Something flashes amid the far trees, perhaps a sniper’s scope. I cringe. Duck. But this is getting ridiculous, and I’m running much too far ahead of whatever this really is.

  Back in the kitchen, Adolph, who’s always been the most sensitive of my little pack, backs off from me and gives a growling, fang-revealing, bark. Joe and Mao soon join in and the sound is enough to wake the dead. Although not, of course, Luke. I make myself some more coffee. I check the feeds again, but Learnmore Wallace and his ragged little army are still as dead as the price of Canco shares.

  I check the time. By now, the group will have convened, decided, parted, moved on. And now I’m on the outside. Part of the dumb, unknowing world which these modern oracles see beyond. Should I be expecting condolences? Flowers? Messages of support? Of course, no one’s died, but the pack, the heard, the group, has always walked away from the old, the stupid, the lame. Left them for the predators and the flies to take care of, just like poor old Learnmore Wallace. This is exactly how nature has always worked.

  I have to do something. I can’t just wait. So I call up a screen, and call Bea. Without preliminaries or hesitation—as if, in fact, she’s been expecting me to do exactly this at this precise moment—her grey face looms up at me from above the kitchen counter.

  “You cut me out.”

  “It seemed like the best thing to do. At least, for now.”

  “All because of one bad investment, which I’m sure we’ll recoup.”

  “I’m sure we will. But it isn’t that alone.”

  “What the hell is it, then?”

  “At the end of the day, Samuel, it’s the very thing our group is about. It’s a gestalt hunch. Something that, by its very nature, and its stochastic dimensions, can’t be explained in linear, synchronic, probabilistic terms.”

  “Cut the college crap, Bea.”

  She gives me a deeply disappointed smile. “The rapid loss we made with the Canco shares may be a symptom, but there appears to be a deeper abnormality. You agreed you felt it when we talked last night. And it’s confirmed by the data. There was a brief, atypical waveform just before you broke connection with us. A loss of… mutual synchronicity, I think, might be the closest term.”

  “Meaning what? That I’m not to be trusted?”

  “Not that, either, I don’t think. I don’t like using the word premonition, Samuel, but I’m not sure our language in this field has yet advanced sufficiently for there to be a better one. So we, the group, surmised this morning that you need to exercise caution. Consider what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it with. Don’t take any risks.”

  “You’re saying you think I’m in danger?”

  “Put simply, yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “You know the gestalt only has a short-term temporally predictive field of significant accuracy. A day or two at most.”

  “And after that?”

  “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  “But you were in the group when you went over this half an hour ago. You must have some better idea of what this is.”

  She sighs. “If I knew more, don’t you think I’d tell you?”

  “You know what—I don’t think you fucking would!”

  I kill the screen, and Bea’s face fades, an ugly Cheshire cat, leaving nothing but a faint, sour whiff of cigar smoke.

  The dogs are still stirred up, prowling the kitchen, claws clicking the hardwood floor. I grab some fresh steak from the fridge in the hope that it will distract them, chopping it up into chunks and tossing it into their bowls, but of course it only agitates them even more.

  My thoughts are prowling as well. After all, this isn’t the first time we’ve had problems in the group, going all the way back to the basic question of what, exactly we were for. Money, yes, money, not only to set this thing up and give us the lives we wanted, but to provide the necessary levels of secrecy and generate the backstories to explain our new wealth. From the start, it was evident that our combined hunches, guesses, only had a short-term viability, and that binary yes/no decisions were manageable, whereas more complex, multi-pathway choices soon dissolved back into that dreaded statistical noise. Hence our trading in stocks and shares, seeing as outright gambling was far too blatant, and none of us could think of another reliable way to make our investments work.

  But there had to be something else, something more, that we could do with our powers, if only to prove to ourselves that we weren’t just greedy bastards in it for nothing but the dough. Predicting trainwrecks and natural disasters, for instance. Giorgio Magarelli, I remember, a lapsed Catholic from southern Italy whose grandparents had died in an earthquake, was particularly strong on this point. So we agreed that we would incorporate some geological data into our regular trading floor feeds, and see what transpired. Less than a month later we were able to intuit that something was imminent in the Sichuan province in Southwest China. Of course, we’re not gods. We can’t hold back the tides or wrestle the chains of the earth. Neither could we expose ourselves by issuing a public warning, even if such a thing would be believed. But Mia in Sydney was able to hack into the portals of the worldwide seismic monitoring system, and insert some unequivocal pre-tremor data to warn the authorities to take immediate steps. We, Giorgio especially, were more than pleased. But there were no announcements, no evacuations, and upwards of five thousand people died in the earthquake that followed less than twenty four hours later. Along, as the feeds soon reported, with the twelve members of the seismological monitoring team at nearby Chengdu University, who we
re summarily shot.

  Maybe there was a lesson there. That was what we tried to tell Giorgio. Better to stick to finance, eh? That way no one gets hurt. But Giorgio grew withdrawn and morose, and—just as we were starting to wonder what on earth to do with him—was found by his housekeeper in his Tuscan palace with his wrists slit in his Carrara marble bath. And so our baker’s dozen became an apostolic twelve.

  Other problems? Well, not that many, really. After all, we’re a group. There was an accountant in São Paulo who’d acted as a staging post for some of our early dealings, and was somehow able to pick up on what we were up to. He insisted he didn’t want our money, and that this wasn’t blackmail. All he wanted was to join us. A simple request, but of course impossible to accede to, seeing as he lacked our oh-so-special skills. Bea agreed to handle the matter, and travelled to Brazil, where I believe she arranged for the man to be discreetly killed.

  Now it’s me they don’t trust, and are afraid of. Which means I should be mistrustful and afraid of them. Something’s gone wrong, something’s messed with my prescience, and I’m pretty sure I know who and what it is. Maybe it’s still just a hunch, or maybe he’s worked things out like that accountant using fancy probability curves. Or perhaps he’s from that other group of super-predictors we’ve always feared is out there, or a some government agency or underworld cabal.

  I run back over how Luke and I first met. The easy affinity. The even easier sex. Come live with me in the Cascade Mountains? Yes, why not? With, handily, no other commitments, and no real questions, let alone answers, as to what else he was planning to do with his time. And then all the cooking, and the housekeeping, the no-questions-asked acceptance. Which only a fool would take for affection. Let alone love.

  If only I had something more solid. If only I could shake myself free of the present and find out what lies beyond. They’d have me back then, wouldn’t they, my group, the deed done, the point proved, the bad thing happened, the prophecy fulfilled, with open arms?