Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

‘Shanks? I’m sorry… do you have his full name and rank?’

  ‘Oh. Detective, Senior Detective, probably—I don’t know his first name.’

  Janet said, ‘You don’t know his first name?’

  ‘No.’

  The officer said, ‘Shanks. I don’t know if there’s anyone here…’ He looked through a Rolodex.

  Kenneth said, ‘Damn you! Shanks—he’s—’

  ‘Could you keep calm?’

  ‘He’s in Intelligence.’

  ‘There’s no one called Shanks.’

  ‘I’ve had meetings with him in this building!’

  ‘There’s no one. Where was his desk?’

  ‘We always met in a separate room.’

  ‘It might have helped if I’d known what part of the building his desk was in, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Hold on.’ The officer leaned and called back through an open door. ‘Anyone know a Shanks?’ Various voiced denials came back. ‘Nope. I’m sorry, I really don’t think there’s anyone here by that name.’

  ‘He’s in Intelligence. Could I talk to someone in Intelligence?’

  ‘If you’ve got a specific name?’

  ‘Shanks. No other names… ’

  ‘I’m sorry. Is there something you want to report?’

  A pause. What could he say? A death? There had been a number of officers at the scene.

  On the way out: ‘That officer knew who I was.’

  Janet said, ‘He seemed genuine enough to me?’

  ‘Oh, whatever he knew or didn’t—this is, I don’t know. I’ve been cut off. He must know Shanks. I’ve come here before to meet him.’

  ‘What a mess.’ Then: ‘Who killed Pen?’

  ‘I don’t think it would have been Shanks. I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Was Kenneth still harbouring suspicions that he himself might have had an unwitting hand in Pen’s death? If so, from his NEW PERSPECTIVE he no longer had any reason for guilt—instead, a deepening drive to disentangle things, to find a point from which he could clear himself. And, was there, as part of that disentangling, a perspective on his life, his upbringing and background as a whole? How thorough was Kenneth’s re-examination of himself?

  At some point later, he said to Janet, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Is there no one else you can ask? You are the one with the contacts… ?’

  ‘I was meaning, I don’t know what work I can do. I’ve been in the Service since I left university.’

  Janet was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘You’re thinking about yourself.’

  ‘Yes. But not only. I need to contribute to society.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, you can stay at the house for a while. That’s no problem.’

  ‘I need to be working. I can’t just drift. It’s hard for me to feel like I’m depending on people.’

  ‘How are Yvonne and the children?’

  ‘She’s angry. I don’t think she wants me back.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  ‘I miss the boys. I’ve asked to see them. I think she’ll let me.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked down. ‘God. I miss her.’ Then he looked up at her, as if through a veil defined by the set of his eyes and tilt forward of his head. What was that look? Was there some suggestiveness in it? Their sex hung about them in various unspoken ways. He said, ‘I’ve never just sat around during weekday afternoons like this.’

  ‘I need to get the kids soon.’

  ‘Where’s Lilly?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s my turn to pick them up. I guess she’s out with Sarah somewhere.’

  ‘I suppose Yvonne… I suppose this is a bit like her life.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘Being at home.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where is everyone else?’

  ‘They’ve got jobs to go to. Sandra’s studying, and Leonard, who knows where he is?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She sighed. ‘No. I mean we should be weeding anyway—the garden’s a mess. And I’m not going to fuck you again.’

  ‘Oh. I, um.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘No, me neither. Not at all.’

  She laughed and stood up. ‘Was that what your “defection” was about? More sex for Kenneth?’

  ‘Are we—I mean, never?’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy it. But the circumstances weren’t the best. It probably wasn’t the best idea, was it?’

  ‘It brought me here. It’s why I’m here.’

  ‘Ha! Does that mean it was a good idea?’

  ‘It’s why I’ve been cut off from Shanks. I’m a risk.’

  ‘He knows?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘He’s like you—someone who knows things.’

  ‘I still want it though. When I think about being with you in—’

  ‘Stop. I don’t want to hear about it! I mean, sex sex sex, right? Fuck. It sure comes in and fucks things up. Nothing wrong with that, I enjoy everything being fucked up, or I don’t mind it. But it doesn’t mean I’m going to be your new wife, to have on call when you want it. So who knows? Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘You really think sex always… ?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It does have that tendency though. It’s not like we were exactly under control.’

  ‘That’s what I liked.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Could we smoke some cannabis?’

  She laughed and looked down at him. ‘Now? I have to pick up the kids in about twenty minutes.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes.’

  ‘We need to go get you some bell bottoms, maybe a tie-dyed shirt… ?’

  ‘Should I grow a beard?’

  ‘Yes! A big bushy one. Grow me some hair, too.’

  He sat back now, looked up with a smile. How often did that happen? His arms were out on either side of him, as if the sofa were his property, his legs folded. He looked, all of a sudden, comfortable. She leant down, left a kiss on his forehead.

  ‘We’re not sure of Kenneth Grey’s movements during the days and weeks he left the SIS. They are difficult to establish with any exactness, but we think we remained in contact with one of the former Fedorovians known as Cosmonaut.’

  ‘What was he trying to find out?’

  ‘He was trying to understand the circumstances that led to his life unravelling.’

  ‘He left his wife after having an affair?’

  ‘It’s not so simple. In any case, he did return to his marriage later.’

  Surveillance apparatus used by Kenneth Grey

  ‘He didn’t return to intelligence work?’

  ‘He was employed as an overseer of security at the Bank of New Zealand.’

  ‘How did making contact with the Fedorovians help him cope with the conditions of his life?’

  ‘There were suspicions in the intelligence community that he was becoming too sympathetic to the opinions held by enemies of the state.’

  ‘Did he want to clear his name?’

  ‘His name was not publicly in need of clearing. Perhaps he wanted to know, for himself, what he was becoming sympathetic to.’

  ‘He was trying to establish which side was in the right?’

  ‘We can only speculate, as he never put his motivations on record.’

  ‘You sure you should still be doing this?’

  ‘I know I’m on to something. That woman I spoke to—she was interesting.’

  ‘You can’t know all that much about the future. I’ve seen a lot of people look for answers out of it, and it’s pretty hard to find them.’

  ‘I’m so close to something!’

  ‘Yes. I know, and that’s a very common feeling.’

  Marcus paused for a second. It had been a few times—quite a few times, in ever quicker succession. He did have to worry about addiction,
even if he was sceptical of the very idea. What did he say to his patients? There was nothing to say, only the possibility of looking deeper at the conditions of a life, finding out what, around a person, might be causing the difficulty. In his case, it was all too easy to understand. But why should this, this travelling, have anything to do with Pen? He wasn’t in any real sense following his friend. But something drove Pen, something made him come here. Was Marcus driven by the same thing? Was he seeking, not Pen himself, but the same vague solution to things that Pen himself had sought? Maybe the man was right, in that case. It could be that Marcus was following nothing so much as Pen’s own addiction. But then, Pen had not, had he, travelled so often—and his travelling had led him to be killed. That made it, quite possibly, more dangerous; but it also made it a matter of some more profound reality. What was Pen killed for?

  ‘What do you know about the future? You travel?’

  ‘Yeah. Not so much these days. It’s more of a business now.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘No more than anyone.’

  ‘Pen was searching for something.’

  ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘I mean, I don’t know. I suppose so.’ The man turned his back to him. He was doing something at the bench. Writing? Yes. He held up a note: I can’t talk. The note silenced Marcus too, as had the last note, before his previous trip.

  Marcus took the pencil: Why?

  The man wrote, Please don’t ask me any more.

  Marcus wrote, Could we talk somewhere else?

  The man paused, then wrote, No. He looked at Marcus pleadingly. Then he said out loud, ‘All right.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Let’s give you another trip.’

  ‘Oh.’ Even if it was just the man’s way to avoid talking to him, why not? This once.

  ‘I can send you to the centre of it all.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The computers, the information, it’s all concentrated on certain places. I can’t take you right to the biggest centres because they’re in America—in the Soviet Union too, no doubt, I don’t know. They’re not here, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been to them, to the local one. Places where the computers all meet. There are people who like to visit them but I just hear the reports. I don’t know how much you’ll learn from it. But people go back to them. They say they can feel stuff there.’

  ‘Did Pen?’

  A long pause. ‘Yeah, once or twice. Once maybe. He didn’t go back.’

  ‘What did he say about it?’

  Another pause, and an impatient gesture. ‘He didn’t talk about it.’

  Addiction was, in any case, the least of Marcus’s worries. If the man was veering between putting him off travelling and hurrying him into it, it was because there was something he didn’t want to talk to Marcus about. Even then, though, Marcus recognised the signs of conflict in him: facial and bodily mannerisms at odds with his words. The man was not really concerned for Marcus—or at least, not concerned that he was travelling too much. It had been another token in the man’s structure of fear. Was the threat external or internal—an imaginary or a real danger?

  ‘Fuck it. Okay.’

  ‘Good.’

  The man set about adjusting the lensing orientation while Marcus took down the fluid in its vial and drew it out into a syringe.

  ‘You’re an old hand at this.’

  Once the fluid was injected there was nothing else for it. The wait, then, was no time to reconsider, but a time of adjustment, as always; the descent into a state of passive receptiveness akin to meditation. Did Marcus in fact consider meditating? He hadn’t practised for years. Pen had thought of it as intrinsically bourgeois, even a proto-military consciousness, the empty mind being the perfect mind for acting on others’ orders—and this had put Marcus off somewhat. Now, though, he semi-thoughtlessly changed into the jumpsuit and waited, then when the time came he entered the chamber. He was aware of following his muscles, his body in general, through the motions and stasis and motions again before he was sealed in, closed in darkness. Muscles and body during the transition? Were there questions in his mind as to whether he was, during his future travels, actually bodily there? The lens-fluid matrix deposited the body with such precision and snatched it, equally precisely, away, unable to bring anything back, leaving even the air in the lungs, so that there must have been some moment of gasping either way before the oxygen of the next age could be breathed. Or was enough brought through by proximity in the intricate maze of bronchioli and alveoli—? The lens-tunnel enveloped him even while he was present there. Touch was possible nonetheless, but possibly then negated by the body’s withdrawal—? The experience rendered the body strange and non-bodily, reduced it to idea—. The future was a time when ideas moved objects so that objects were made ideal—. Substance drained into screen—. His muscles and sinews too—? What when brain, ideasponge, was made idea—? Thought through the tunnel as if time ratcheted thoughtcogs—? This always, physics at the level of idea, ideaphysics but that wasn’t how things—. A muscle and sinew idea this. What was. Reduction to, oh, but still physics and stays. Only a drugged difficulty thinking but no. More. Less. Or the reduction of thought also enlarges its object—. In proportion. Brainmuscle through into sign and. Slip. Signslip so that muscle isn’t. Nothing nothink outsign noslip nono slipout outand throughthrough so. Each. New. Throughthought notthought notnot not‘not’. Effort. Nottry notlet notnot andnot knot so knotted into the following thought: very strange. Marcus? Yes? Hello. Nice to. To. And the fallfall not fall nomovement nostasis notstasis waitingstasis the falling fall and out. As if. The body’s fall while not moving. The brain’s equivalent action. Thought eclipsed by its physics? Nosuchtheory. Nosuch thoroughfall. Pure thought thinking about its thinking but stops and winds in cogs of itself. Not altogether unpleasant. Forget what is written. Writtensinew, writtenthought forgotten. Thanks. Hum. As he appears. The lights? Who turned them on? Lightson and sudden. Here he is. Why not? Thoughtlight illuminating thought. No. Actual lights. Actual Marcus. What is he thinking? Who can say? Does he think about the lights? They seem to have come on of their own accord. Is someone else in the room? There doesn’t seem to be.

  He wonders where he is. There is a low hum, a whirring around him on multiple subtly different notes. He is in a narrow corridor between stacks of metal cages; overhead a panelled ceiling set with lit sections. He stands perfectly still. There is nothing here to engage with. Is it pure strangeness? Inside the cages are stacks of machines—squat boxes with small lights on them on metal shelves. A click somewhere and the room is dark again. Now the machines’ lights, blinking at irregular intervals, cast their dim greenish glow from either side onto the space between the cages. The result is faint, a half glimpsed constellation and aura. When he moves his head to register its contours the overhead panels flick on again, making him blink. He stops still again, and sure enough, after a moment they go out again. There is something about the darkened room that he likes. Is it that it seems easier to forget his own presence, become mere empty consciousness situated there amidst winking starlight? His non-presence the truth of ‘travelling’—no travelling after all but merely the annulment of himself and all his relationships, his family, everything under the experience of an incomprehensible future. Are the lights legible as a kind of code? No one, surely, can read them. They are only the trace of some minuscule activity. So many, stacked and ranked cage after cage, and in other aisles too? How far does the room extend? It is cold. The man (Marcus must remember to ask his name) talked of this as a centre—and so, is some truth available here? The truth that there was nothing to be found in the future except an escape from the past? It reminds him of the legendary stories about the beginnings of TCF: the view of a pure, anonymous cosmos; the truth of the universe. He has never given that kind of thought much time, preferring instead to locate meaning somewhere earthly, in and among people’
s lives. Now here he is plucked from it. This place has something to do with computers—it is, he supposes, some kind of brain, some computing facility, some convergence of machine calculation and thought. Does it know he is here? Is his empty conscious body registered by it? It is mute, however—dumb matter. Then the room’s lights click on again. Has he moved? No, there is another sound—a door and footsteps.

  A woman’s voice: ‘Oh. Another one.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You know the rules.’ She is already turning to go.

  ‘The rules?’

  ‘Just don’t touch anything.’

  ‘But… ’

  He moves to follow her. She is out of sight past the end of the aisle, and he hears the door shut again. Should he go out after her? He’s shy, however—shy! It is an effect of the place, the darkness (which presently returns after he stops moving again), the effacing of himself. He wants the dissolution of his body that this seems to promise. There is a sweet sadness to it—the sadness that registers the impossibility of contact, of love, in such a state. Dani, Sarah, Lilly—all are present in that sadness, in the absence of body. Janet and Peter too. Has Peter been okay? What is with his leg? He has seemed okay lately. And what is with Marcus?

  He keeps still, keeps the lights off, to keep away the full sight of the surfaces when they blaze into view in all their ordinariness. Here in darkness there is a centre of that future lightness, the insubstantiality he felt on his last trips, the possibility of the world drained of inertia. A sense of floating among the lights. No, merging with them. Their dissonant visual chorus pulling him apart in thought. No. No! No, no, no. There is seduction in it, a downward pull, a cold nothingness. A nihilistic centre. What was the man doing sending him here? All at once, the ideality of the place is a version of hell, distant and abstract and deadly. A place for a murder. No. A place to leave the body behind, to kill it, to leave it slumped and anonymous between aisles, stumbled upon eventually by the indifferent administrator of the place. No. He recalls that in his experiments with meditation the mind can take sudden turns down into despair when the removal from daily cares becomes a kind of end point, a lesson in nothingness. The man sent him deliberately into such a lesson? Who does he think he is? Or, more importantly, who does Marcus think the man is—since it is impossible to manipulate someone who does not also manipulate themselves, making a small imperfect representation of the relationship inside one’s head. Here then, stock-still in darkness, Marcus has the opportunity to reflect on that internal world. Here? Why didn’t Marcus insist on seeing the woman again (names!), the social scientist with her computer, instead of being sent here? What role is the man playing? He is something of a cipher, a quiet presence with invisible agendas, a controlling agent… ? Marcus does not want to descend into paranoia. What of the written notes, the man’s own sense of being surveilled? There is to be sure something wider going on, something to do with Pen, and the man is becoming anxious. Again Marcus has a sense of deathliness here amid the dim winking lights, and a palpable intuition that Pen died here. Here! It seems unlikely. But here, more broadly—here, in the future. Was that possible? Nothing would prevent it, though Marcus has never heard of such a case. The dangers of TCF—inexpert injection and embolisms being the least of them, he guesses—must lead to casualties? And what would it mean? The body, dead or alive a physical object, returned lifeless to the chamber. He can’t trust his reflections, and he knows it. He moves, brings the lights on, just to reduce the darkness that itself might have influenced his half-developed thoughts. He has given the man money for this. No! Well, money is nothing, but he has hidden all of this from his family, his wider elective family too, from everyone he loves, from his colleagues. This place now in the light comes across as squalid. It’s clean enough. There are computer screens and electric typewriters there on some of the shelves—is he supposed to be turning them on and finding something out? The man gave him no instructions. He wouldn’t know what to do. He knows in any case that there’s little time left. He walks slowly now along the aisles. Bundles of wires lead upwards above the cages and run, grouped and tied along metal frames. Frames, wires. Sure enough. He is beginning to know the timing and the early signs. In fact for the first time he has a sense of dread coming into the transition. He will need to—. He wants it—. He wants it over. No he. No sense; lights out. What use can be made of dissolution? Use implies subject thereof. Frames wires frames. Wires and yes yes no yes no no yes noyesnonoyesyesno and can’t think it. Why this yet again? Isn’t it already. Alreedy. Alrrrr. Rr (trace it listen). Too quick slow dow—. As if distributed letterwise, the letters and data of thought no different from matterandenergy. True. True… false. True true false false false true false. Wireframe, framewire, colour bundled on dull silver palpable as matter (bye). No colour no silver no frame no wire no fram no wir nofram no yes no no noupnodown. Too much no. No no no no no no no. NONONO. N. O. Nnnnnnn. Nnn. oN. o, {o}, {o,{o}}, {o,{o},{o,{o}}… So everything but infinitesimals. If only I knew what on Earth you (I) were talking about. I? Earth? I, {I} etc. In what. {}, {{}}, etc. So. ‘‘, ‘‘‘‘.