Another Now

by Yanis Varoufakis

The next three days were Thomas’s happiest. Having sworn him to secrecy, Costa swiftly admitted Thomas into HALPEVAM’s inner sanctum. There he felt cocooned in Costa’s strange world, among the tangle of machinery that occupied the vast, brightly lit lab. It was the first place to hold his attention more effectively than the fantasy worlds he inhabited when gaming. That no one other than Costa had ever entered the lab before made him feel special.

  Costa worked methodically, rapidly but unrushed, with a dignified sense of purpose. Thomas watched intently as the master moved from station to station, attaching new devices to existing ones, occasionally pausing to exchange Morse-coded messages with Kosti. Careful not to disturb him, Thomas bided his time and waited until Costa went to his coffee machine for a refill before asking, ‘So, what exactly is the plan?’

  ‘As the great Mike Tyson once put it,’ Costa replied with a grin, ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. That is, I’m sure, what HALPEVAM is thinking about my plan as I manipulate its entrails.’

  Thomas envied Costa as much as he revered him. Gaming allowed Thomas the solitude he craved, but afforded him neither kudos nor self-esteem. Playing in someone else’s universe was not the same as creating one. HALPEVAM was the laudable product of Costa’s pristine seclusion. Just as it had been impossible for the Apostle John to feel lonely while manically writing the Book of Revelation in his Patmian cave, so Costa’s lab work shielded him from the loneliness constantly afflicting Thomas.

  Over his cup of coffee, Costa sought to temper the youth’s admiration by sharing some of his darker thoughts. There were times, he confessed, when he feared that only a thin grey line separated him from the crazed adolescent locked up in his parents’ garage planning the next high school massacre. During the years he had spent designing and building HALPEVAM in his self-made technological prison, to avert losing his mind he would spend four weeks every summer floating off the southern coast of Crete on a small wooden boat, offline, reading nothing but poetry.

  ‘Why poetry?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘Because it’s all we have to prevent our dreams turning into nightmares,’ Costa replied.

  A futurist since he had read Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto at a tender age, Costa’s faith in the future started receding in 1976 the year he heard his beloved Sex Pistols singing ‘there’s no future’. Since then he had walked a hopeful tightrope over an abyss filled with dreams of emancipation shattered by the alienating power of his technologies. HALPEVAM was to be his redemption, his special gift to humanity.

  ‘Now look at me. I live in terror that it will fall into the hands of humanity’s worst enemies. Even if we restore the wormhole,’ he told Thomas emphatically, ‘we must destroy the whole damned thing within a week.’

  Sharing as much technical detail as Thomas could digest, Costa described the accident that had created the wormhole. He explained how HALPEVAM relied on CREST, the wake of quanta from our lived experiences that Iris had called a river of life, and how he had built Cerberus to prevent big tech from tapping into it. But when he tested Cerberus’ capacity to scramble tiny strands of CREST, the wormhole had appeared unexpectedly.

  Never before had the young man felt a stronger sense of purpose. ‘So, how do you plan to restore it now?’ he asked.

  Costa explained that to keep the wormhole open and relatively stable, a similar process would be needed but that it would have to be incredibly delicate and coordinated with precisely the same process at Kosti’s end. He and Kosti had scheduled it to take place at 11 a.m. that Wednesday.

  Iris was due to fly back to England the following day, but Eva’s plans were vaguer.

  ‘What’s up with your mum? Do you know what her plans are?’ Costa asked casually.

  ‘She was pressurizing me to spend Thanksgiving with her and her mum in New York and got pretty upset when I told her I’m going back to my dad’s before that. I didn’t dare ask what her plans are now.’

  Having no idea whether the wormhole restoration experiment would work, or maybe turn his building into a hole in the ground, Costa decided not to go out of his way to remind Iris and Eva about it. So when they mentioned going out on Wednesday morning, only the second time they would have left the building since they arrived in San Francisco, he encouraged them. Thomas agreed they should be told nothing until after the experiment. If the wormhole got an extra lease of life, there would still be time to offer his mother and Iris one last opportunity to communicate with Siris and Eve.

  ‘And I think you better stay well clear of the building too,’ said Costa. ‘It would be best if you went out with them. And try to keep them away for as long as possible. Suggest lunch. They’ll never say no to you.’

  Thomas was disappointed but understood: there was no knowing what havoc the experiment might wreak.

  And so, that Wednesday, at just after one in the afternoon, having spent an awkward morning walking along the waterfront with his mother and Iris before ending up at a restaurant, Thomas made his excuses to rush back, leaving the two of them to enjoy their lunch. He was immediately relieved to see that the building was still standing. Hurriedly he made his way upstairs to the lab.

  From the mess hall, everything looked normal. So normal that he feared the experiment had not worked. He called Costa via the intercom, not daring to enter the lab uninvited. Costa eventually appeared, his face ashen.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Thomas breathlessly.

  ‘Too damned well,’ said Costa, sitting down slowly on the bench. He leaned back and gazed at the ceiling, smiling faintly. ‘Too damned well,’ he said again, with a distinctly Cretan gesture of amazement.

  Coming?

  ‘What do you mean you crossed over?’ Eva demanded to know incredulously.

  It was as undeniable as it was unbelievable. Throughout the preceding weeks, Costa had shielded them from the technicalities involved. While Iris and Eva had to be within the vicinity of HALPEVAM in order to communicate with their other selves, Costa had taken care of the actual exchange of information, providing them with printed copies of incoming dispatches and converting their missives into an appropriate form for sending. They had no idea of the almost undetectable orifice appearing as a tiny blue dot on the wall behind HALPEVAM’s transmuter array. And he had seen no reason to tell them that their dispatches were sent and received by pointing a microwave antenna at that minuscule blue point of light on that nondescript wall. Now, Costa had no option but to let them see for themselves what had replaced the blue dot.

  At first sight, it was as if an artist had painted on the wall an uneven oval-shaped patch of black, about three metres across. Until you got closer and tried to touch it. Iris was reminded of a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, which used a perfectly black convex form to create the illusion of a black surface that one’s hand would pass straight through if you tried to touch it. Thomas was the first to dare try; it was as if the wall weren’t there. Frightened to see his finger disappearing, he pulled it straight back.

  ‘Can you guess what’s on the other side?’ Costa asked expressionlessly.

  They could. It was a portal to the Other Now.

  ‘So, are you coming?’ he pressed them. ‘You have a little less than an hour to decide before it collapses for good. It’s perfectly safe,’ he added as casually as if he were suggesting a trip to the pub.

  ‘How on earth do you know?’ asked Eva.

  ‘That’s what I’m telling you: I’ve been through it. And as you can see, I came back. In one piece. But it won’t stay open for much longer. So, make your minds up.’

  Where to?

  They sat around the dinner table for the last time, mugs of coffee in hand, struggling to absorb the news. In a mood better than any he had been in for years, Costa broke with tradition and put some music on. Iris noticed he had chosen Roxy Music’s ‘Both Ends Burning’. She would soon know why.

  ‘Our coordinate
d attempt to stabilize the wormhole this morning,’ Costa said good-humouredly, ‘was, not to put too fine a point on it, a qualified disaster.’ The trick, he explained, was to use Cerberus’ technology at both ends simultaneously. The concept was sound and it worked. The wormhole was stabilized. Except, having nothing to base their input-output computations on, he and Kosti had miscalculated the aggregate energy release by a ridiculous factor. ‘Both ends burning,’ he admitted, ‘my tiny blue wormhole grew into a black tunnel three metres wide.’

  So, the wormhole had been made stable and expanded into a wormtunnel – but only for a very short while. The result was the brief window of opportunity that they now faced: to step through into the Other Now, if they wished, and live the rest of their lives there, or to choose Our Now, knowing that no such opportunity would ever arise again.

  ‘Did you really cross over? Where did you end up? Did you speak to anyone?’ Thomas asked hungrily.

  Costa explained that he had spent a little less than an hour with Kosti in his lab. ‘The tricky part was not going but getting back.’ His passage to the Other Now was made possible by the presence of his own DNA at the other end – in the form of Kosti. How to make the return trip when they were both in the same place? ‘To make sure I would end up back here, I left behind some of my DNA to function as a homing beacon.’ Mistaking the expressions of amazement and shock on their faces for interest in the technicalities, he went on. ‘If you must know, it was a jar of cotton buds soaked in my saliva.’ Their expressions were not to be mistaken this time: he immediately realized he had overdone it.

  ‘But how was it?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘A little like meeting a long-lost twin,’ he said in an emotionally charged voice. But he hadn’t met Eve or Siris, for the simple reason that Kosti had kept them well away that morning, just as he had Eva and Iris. But both of them would be there now, following Kosti’s summons and the astonishing news of Costa’s surprise visit. Their presence in Kosti’s lab meant that if Eva and Iris were to jump through the black hole in the wall, they would end up there too.

  ‘What about me?’ asked Thomas, his mind racing. ‘Is my doppelgänger also at Kosti’s lab?’

  Iris stole a glance at Eva, whose strained expression spoke volumes. Costa decided to explain the situation himself. Time was scarce, and what had to be said had to be said quickly. He broke the news calmly. ‘No, Thomas,’ he said. ‘There is no you at Kosti’s lab. In fact, there is no you in the Other Now at all, I’m afraid.’

  Thomas looked dazed, trying to grasp the meaning of this information – and its implications.

  ‘Eve chose a different path from me,’ Eva said quietly. ‘She has a daughter, Agnes.’

  ‘So does that mean I can’t go to the Other Now?’ said Thomas urgently. ‘What would happen if I just stepped into the wormhole?’ Apparently, the news that he had never been born in the Other Now and that he had a sister of sorts mattered less to him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eva turning to Costa with similar urgency, the realization dawning. ‘What would happen?’

  ‘Well’, replied Costa ‘if any living creature lacking a DNA counterpart at the other end were to step into the wormhole, then in theory Cerberus would detect a breach of security and destroy CREST, destroy HALPEVAM and presumably…destroy that person.’

  Thomas went pale.

  ‘Relax,’ Costa continued, looking at Thomas reassuringly. ‘Even though you lack a DNA counterpart, were you to cross over holding tightly on to someone with a DNA counterpart on the other side, you will end up safely there, your companion’s DNA granting safe passage to both.’

  ‘Isn’t it a little irresponsible to be hypothesizing like this, with no evidence?’ asked Eva anxiously.

  ‘I have all the evidence we need, Eva,’ replied Costa nonchalantly. ‘We tested it with Baloo, Kosti’s dog. On my way back I stepped first into the wormtunnel, followed by Kosti, who held Baloo in his arms to test our theory. Lo and behold, both made it here intact, Cerberus treating the Labrador simply as additional information. Then Kosti stepped right back into the wormtunnel, still holding Baloo. Both made it home safely, courtesy of a pile of DNA swabs he had left behind.’

  Thomas’s eyes lit up. ‘Which means that I can come with you, Costa, right?’ he asked, glancing at his mother.

  The sovereignty of good

  Iris intervened. ‘Let me tell you a story from your past, Thomas. You were only ten at the time,’ she said in her warmest voice, ‘but it has remained with me ever since. And I think, before any of us make any big decisions, it would be worth recounting now.’

  Unsurpassed in the art of diverting a conversation, Iris had captured her companions’ full attention.

  ‘One evening back in Brighton, your mother came round in something of a state and asked me to look after you for a few hours so that she could go out by herself and clear her head. She seemed frazzled, almost despairing. When I asked what the trouble was she said that when she picked you up earlier that day from school, she had seen you punching a younger boy and then taking a toy car from him. She explained how she had tried to reprimand you for doing so but you had doggedly defended what you’d done. You told her there was nothing wrong with your behaviour, except that you’d been careless enough to get caught. All of your mum’s attempts to convince you otherwise had come to nothing. She had tried to persuade you that, for their own sake, smart people renounce violence towards others, that it was in your own best interests to do so if you wanted to live a successful life. But her arguments had all crashed on the shoals of your brilliantly precocious reasoning. She was at her wits’ end.

  ‘I agreed to look after you,’ Iris went on, ‘and so your mother went out and you spent the evening with me. I probed a little, asking what had happened, and you explained your point of view. I must say,’ she said, glancing at Thomas, ‘that for a ten-year-old bully you were terribly impressive – and frightening! You rejected the idea that a successful life demands renouncing the right to be violent to others, to coerce them to do what suits you. You had a better idea, you claimed: learn how to appear as if you have renounced violence, so as to get others to relax around you, but be ready to pounce on them, to bully them, the moment it suits you – as long, of course, as you can do this without getting caught. In other words, to be successful learn the art of pretending to be good, strategically. Do you remember how I responded?’

  Thomas admitted he hadn’t the faintest memory of any of it.

  ‘I told you the story of Odysseus and the Sirens – the mythical island-dwelling creatures whose mesmerizing song lured passing sailors to a beach, where they invariably butchered them. Like every enterprising man, Odysseus wanted to have his cake and eat it: to satisfy his burning desire to hear the Sirens’ song but also to avoid being lured by it to his death. So he instructed his ship’s crew to plug their ears with wax so they could not hear a sound then sail close to the island’s shore but, first, tie him tightly to the ship’s mast so that he could not succumb to temptation and join the Sirens. I remember you were intrigued by the story but, understandably, unclear what relevance Odysseus’ story had to your quarrel with your mum. The answer I gave you then is the one I give you now: a good life requires that we find, like Odysseus, a strong mast to which to tie ourselves when it matters, lest we remain slaves to our every whim. This mast must be good and it must be self-chosen, but crucially it cannot simply be another, higher or more powerful desire. It must be something separate from and independent of our self. Lashing ourselves to it is the only way of ensuring the true freedom and autonomy that we crave.’

  Costa suddenly understood what Iris was up to. This was her roundabout way of breaking to her friends the news that she was not planning to join them in the Other Now. And what better way to do this than via a rendition of her favourite theme: the sovereignty of good – her conviction that great art cannot be willed into existence by the calculus of an arti
st’s desires; that, similarly, exquisite music and brilliant mathematical proofs emerge for their own sake, not because of a musician’s or a mathematician’s self-interested scheming. By lecturing Thomas on how freedom can only be built on rational self-restraint, she was working her way to announcing that she was staying put. A convoluted train of thought, but one that Costa saw through.

  ‘Do you know what you asked me, Thomas, all those years ago?’ Iris went on. ‘You asked: how can my mast be made of something I don’t want? It is the most important question of all. If one’s mast is not to be made of one’s own desires, then what is it to be made of? And my answer is this: it must be made of a capacity to do what is right, and to do it for no reason at all – except that it is right and good.’

  ‘But how can it be reasonable to do something for no reason?’ Thomas now asked. His unexpected comebacks always gave Eva a small thrill, who enjoyed being reminded of quite how smart her usually withdrawn son could sound.

  ‘Animals and computers always have practical reasons for doing things,’ retorted Iris. ‘This is why they never do great things! To achieve true greatness, genuine freedom, you must be like the sculptor who sets aside her ego before chiselling a statue, surrendering fully to the feeling that she will go berserk unless she gives it form. Not being a bully is like a great work of art that you sweat long and hard to produce for no reason other than that you must. Just as art is, and can only be, an end in itself, so good things happen only for their own sake, for the hell of it – not because our desires drive them but only after we restrain those desires. Ironically, it is only then that our desires can be satisfied, as a by-product of our success in not being their slaves.’

  For Iris, doing something for nothing was not merely possible but the prerequisite for a good life. Her subversive belief that reciprocity sucks, that life should not be lived on the basis of one quid pro quo after the next, was the reason she had been so moved by Esmeralda’s Soho Address – and so devastated by the news of her violent death. For Esmeralda’s words were a paean to the seditious idea that had motivated Iris since she was a girl: that love, happiness and freedom meant losing one’s self in another, not merely exchanging or transacting with another.