by George Mann
It was all going to end with Elaine, because somehow it all began with her. I wondered what it would be like, seeing her again. She’d climbed through the world, become someone important. I’d burned through a couple of marriages and ended in a deadend job. She’d experimented unethically on human brains through an unregulated foreign clinic and released a known pedophile into the wild as part of an experiment. She’d had the most beautiful mouth.
There were a thousand ways it could go. I could call her; tell her that I knew, that I had Fifth Layer over the barrel. She could beg me to keep it quiet, and I could relent, and we could strike up our affair where it had ended half a lifetime before. I could say it was wrong, and that I was going to see it published, and she could send out a clean up squad to disappear me. Or buy me off. Or laugh at me for thinking I mattered. My fingers hovered above the keyboard, waiting for me to hack off some limb of the decision tree.
I had all the data I needed to connect the Mexican clinic to the early R and D staff of Fifth Layer. I had the notes from my meetings with Eric Swanson and Jude Hammer. I had an idea what it was all about.
A quote. I’d tell her I was looking for a quote. Then we’d see what happened. Play it by ear. Get it done before anyone else could. Write it up, swallow some downers, and get to sleep before my brain turned to slag.
My fingers descended. I requested the connection. Every means of contact I had bounced back. Nothing worked. The Elaine Salvati I’d known wasn’t there anymore.
No ONE FROM Fifth Layer returned my messages. I thought about cutting out the amphetamines. But at this point, I’d be sleeping for three days once I came down. I had to get it done before the crash. Before someone else saw the file and put it together.
I SPENT HALF of my savings to get a new suit. Black businesswear, pinstripes with RFID chameleoning that would automatically coordinate the colors with whatever shirt and tie I wore. A tailoring neural net more advanced than Herself’s dress and complex enough to have its own sense of beauty.
I sat at the bar, alternating soda water with alcohol, keeping one eye on the door and another on the chemical hum in my bloodstream. Investigative reporting was a younger man’s game. It wasn’t the work I couldn’t handle. It was the drugs. Toothless corporate jazz soothed and numbed the air around me. The servistas kept their distance from me. The murmur of conversations between the rich and powerful rose and fell like the tide.
I waited.
She came in Thursday night, Safwan Cádir on her arm. I could tell from the way they stood that they were lovers. She didn’t see me, or if she did, she didn’t recognize me. If I was right, it was more than time and age that would have changed my appearance.
I waited until they were seated, then until their drinks came. And then their food. I finished my drink, picked up my system, and headed over.
Safwan Cádir looked up at me. He was younger than I expected. His eyebrows rose in a polite query. Can I help you? I ignored him. Elaine saw Cádir react, followed his gaze, considered me for a moment with nothing behind her eyes. Then, a few seconds later than I expected, her mouth opened a millimeter, her cheeks flushed, her eyes grew wider. There was something odd about it, though. I had the eerie feeling that the movements were stage managed to appear normal, the product of consideration instead of emotion.
“Jimmy?” she asked. “Is that you?”
“Elaine,” I said, and something in the way I spoke her name killed the pleasure at seeing me.
“What are you doing these days?” she asked.
“Investigative reporting,” I said.
Cádir stiffened, but Elaine relaxed, rocking back in her seat.
“I know what you did,” I said. “I know the secret of Fifth Layer’s success.”
Cádir’s frown could have chipped glass. Elaine chuckled, warm and soft. Familiar and strange. She gestured to an empty chair.
“Join us?”
How DO PEOPLE recognize beauty? What makes one face compelling and another forgettable? Why does one actor flash a smile that makes the world swoon, while a thousand others struggle to be noticed? Why will a baby stare at the picture of one face instead of another?
Why will people of all ethnicities, all backgrounds, all nations, come to the same conclusions when asked to rank people according to their attractiveness? What is the nature of beauty itself?
All the studies say it’s symmetry.
“IT’S SUPPOSED TO be a measure of genetic fitness,” I continued. “Whoever grows up with the fewest illnesses, the lowest parasite load, all that. They wind up closest to perfect symmetry. Back in the Pleistocene, we didn’t have cosmetic surgery or makeup, so it was a pretty good match. And so our brains got wired for it. We love it.”
“That’s been established for decades,” Cádir said.
“It generalizes, though, doesn’t it?” I said. “We like symmetrical flowers, but we’re not trying to mate with them. We like our artistic compositions to be balanced, because it fits that same ideal. It got selected because of genetic fitness, but it affects how we see everything. People. Dance performances.”
They were silent. Cádir’s steak was getting cold. Elaine’s pasta was congealing.
“Physics,” I said.
Safwan Cádir muttered something obscene, rose, and stalked away. Elaine watched him go. There was something odd in her reaction. Something insectile.
“Poor bunny,” she said. “He hates it when I win.”
“When you win?”
“Go on,” she said. “I’m listening.”
Her eyes were on me, her mouth a gentle smile.
The romantic visions I’d conjured were gone. The memories of my time with this woman, with the body there before me, seemed like a story I’d told myself too many times. My skin had a crawling sensation that might have been speed and alcohol in physical battle or else my simple, drug-scrubbed primate mind reacting to something wrong in the way she held herself, the way she smiled.
“The Mexico research,” I said. “You were trying to dampen sexual responses, but instead you killed the preference for symmetry. Swanson, after he went through the process, he was still experiencing beauty. He was doing things with his choreography that excited him so much he barely slept. But no one in the audience had gone through the procedure, so they literally weren’t seeing what he was seeing. It was lost on them.”
“I’ve watched the recordings of it,” she said. “It was brilliant work.”
“And the others. Jude Hammer. The pedophile. He was still attracted to children. But the profile of his victims changed. It’s because he doesn’t react to symmetry anymore. The Fifth Layer Look. Everyone knows it’s there. It’s an artifact of looking at an asymmetric design with a brain that isn’t wired to like it.”
“You have to have beauty,” Elaine said, as if she was agreeing. “If you get rid of the default, you find something else. A different way to choose between logically equivalent possibilities. Symmetry blinds us. Leads us down the same paths over and over. There are so many other avenues of inquiry that could be explored, and we overlooked them because our brains were trying to pick the best monkey to fuck.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
Her laughter took a second too long to come.
“Yes, Jimmy. Feel free. I’m sure it won’t be the only thing I’m condemned for when you publish this.”
She took a bite of her pasta, chewed thoughtfully, then pushed her plate away. I folded my arms. The suit shifted to release the strain at my elbows.
“You aren’t upset,” I said. “He is, but you aren’t.”
“He’s trying to protect me,” Elaine said, nodding in the direction that Cádir had gone. “When this all comes out, I will be the villain. You can count on that. He thinks it will bother me. But it has to be done.”
“Why?”
A moment later, she smiled.
“You can quote me on this too. It has to be done because unless Fifth Layer loses its competitive advantage, th
e corporation won’t be pressed to the next level. There are any number of other ways in which the human mind can be manipulated to appreciate pattern. There’s no way to guess what we still have to discover once we can make ourselves into the appropriate investigative tools. For the sake of the future, our monopoly must expire. End quote. I’ll probably be fired for that.”
Questions clashed in my mind, each pushing to be the next one out of my mouth. Is Fifth Layer really willing to bonsai people’s minds to keep a competitive edge in research? How much of this have you done to yourself already? Did you get drunk that night in order to get careless and have this leak out? Who are you?
But I knew all the answers that mattered.
It doesn’t matter where it comes from, just if it works.
And maybe
You want to see the limits of human excellence? Then pull out the stops and see what happens, It’d be a hell of a show.
“Does it hurt?” I asked. “Do you miss anything?”
That odd, inhuman pause, and then:
“There are tradeoffs.”
I nodded, reached into my pocket, and turned off the recorder. Elaine nodded when she saw it, as if confirming something she’d guessed.
“Thanks,” I said. “It was good seeing you again.”
“You were always a rotten liar, Jimmy.”
THE ROSWELL HYPOTHESIS, I wrote, says the successes of Fifth Layer stem from their access to alien intelligences. That’s not entirely wrong.
AY-lee-un in-TELL-uh-jen-sez. en-TIRE-lee RONG.
The train hummed beneath me. The beginnings of a headache haunted the space behind my eyes; the first sign of the coming amphetamine crash. I almost welcomed it. Outside, the moon set over the dark countryside. It was going to be a great story. It was going to move the site from accretor to source. It was going to change my job and Harriet’s. Herself would get the promotion she wanted. It was going to change the nature of humanity. Which was Elaine’s point.
You have to have beauty, I wrote. It’s basic. Even ants have it. Even good suits.
I was going to need hours of solid sleep. Days. I didn’t want to think about how I would feel when I got home. When I woke up. I couldn’t guess at the damage a speed jag like this would do to a body as old as mine. My liver might not be the problem. My heart might be the thing to go first. And still, it had gotten the job done. You had to say that for it. I worked for a while on the last line before I was happy with it.
It may be that any sufficiently advanced modification is indistinguishable from speciation.
in-dis-TIN-gwish-ah-bull. spee-cee-AY-shun.
I checked it all over once, sent a copy to Herself, and deleted all Elaine’s old contact information from my lists. And then her new information too. She wasn’t there anyway.
I lay back in my seat, closed my eyes, and tried like hell to sleep.
Long Stay
Ian Watson
THE LUTON-STANSTED LONG Stay Car Park spans the twenty-six miles between those two airports, nominally of London.
Twenty-six miles as the crow flies, a natural consequence of those airports expanding in capacity. On a map, the car park cuts a serpentine swathe five miles wide across the countryside, avoiding significant towns, although hundreds of villages were erased, their inhabitants mostly choosing resettlement along the Costas of the south of Spain where the huge and highly efficient desalination plants constantly convert the Mediterranean into water for taps, car washes, golf courses, and seas of vegetables under plastic.
Due to the car park’s serpentine shape, perhaps not exactly as crows fly. But anyway.
When the automated shuttle bus let Rob Taverner off at zone S46, he knew he had a fair distance to wheel his suitcase to his car. When he’d found a parking space a fortnight earlier in lane 47, it had taken Rob—what, fifteen minutes?—on foot to reach the shuttle stop. So he hoped that the fine mizzle wouldn’t turn into heavier rain before he reached his car. If so, he did have an umbrella.
Another passenger, an attractive young auburn-haired woman, had also descended at the same stop as himself, a compact antirape-taser looped around her wrist; but she quickly headed off into the far distance of serried vehicles in a different direction from the northwesterly bearing which Rob must follow.
Lane 47 was Rob’s own age plus three, which was easy to remember, just as the forty-six in S46 was his age plus two, while S was the single letter of the alphabet between Rob and Taverner. R, S, T, one, two, three, easy-peasy. Of course, he had also typed S46/L47 into the memo of his phone as well as scribbling the same on the parking ticket residing in his wallet.
The yard-wide rows of vegetables that divided lines of parked cars—hereabouts, carrots—offset the carbon caused by cars coming and going, and the carrots looked about ready for harvest. Since the comings and goings of cars were one-off low-pollution events, the car park vegetables were almost organic. Maybe the veg even offset a percentage of aircraft exhaust, although out here in S46 Rob was too far from Stansted’s four runways—an hour and a half away in the shuttle bus—to see any planes climbing or circling, even if the sky had been clear; in which case he would only have seen high crisscrossing contrails. Some crows were circling instead of flying in straight lines.
Actually, those weren’t crows. They were rooks. Rooks are sociable; crows are solitary. Old country saying: If you’m see a rook, thar’s a crow; if you’m see crows, them’s rooks.
Pulling his aluminum suitcase at a brisk pace over the somewhat weedy asphalt, Rob hummed “The Ride of the Valkyries” because that piece had been playing on the plane’s compilation of classic soundtracks as they landed. By now he’d lost sight of the red-berried pyracantha hedges surrounding S46, providing razor-barb security of a sort. The greater security for parked vehicles was actually down to sheer numbers—statistically no harm was likely to happen to any individual car—plus of course the considerable distance from habitations. Really, you’d need to drop in by microlite to do any robbing.
Consequently, Rob was surprised to pass a trashed Hyundai, yet he quickly rationalized: better yours than mine. Nevertheless, he’d spotted no such sight during his earlier walk to the shuttle pick-up point. Either the trashing had taken place during the past two weeks, while he was in the south of Spain, or else he was off course.
Distant signs saying 43 and 44 reassured Rob. Not far now. Prickly-leaved courgettes with yellow trumpet-flowers and what were almost marrows lying on the soil underneath replaced the much lower and feathery carrots. Some of the courgettes were seriously overdue for plucking, but that’s a problem with courgettes; they supersize so quickly. Turbulence in the drizzle appeared to be midges.
He passed a broken-into Saab 8000, the windscreen shattered. As Rob paused, a magpie hopped out and took wing. Hastily Rob scanned around for another magpie, remembering his mother’s rhyme, “One for sorrow, two for joy.” He had learned a lot about nature from his mother, now retired on the Costa de Almeria. Sparrows and squabbling starlings were the only other birds visible—the rooks had departed. Zone S46 wouldn’t reopen for newcomers until oldcomers returning from abroad had extracted enough cars. Still, it would have been nice to see something moving, such as a farmer doing his rounds, steering a trailer-train carrying immigrant pickers. A farmer, of course, by using a zapper, could enter the car park through special gates set at three-mile intervals along the north and south fences. Woe betide any parking person who tried to follow a farm vehicle out on to a lane, unauthorized. Signs in ten languages promised a fine of £5,000 or €8,000.
Without the enormous airport car parks to store, at any one time, ten to twenty percent of Britain’s vehicles, what would the nation’s roads be like? Probably at a standstill. The problem, Rob reflected, lay in Britain being an island. From the nearer countries of continental Europe, cars past their prime could easily migrate overland into Eastern Europe. Elderly Eastern European cars could in turn migrate to Turkey or Ukraine or wherever. Eventually clapped-out cars would
reach the scrapyards of India, their materials to be recycled back to manufacturers in a reincarnation cycle.
Presently Rob reached lane 47, and looked left and right for his red Lexus Q-9000. Since he’d be driving homeward in a northwesterly direction, it would have been neater to emerge from the Luton end of the megapark, but he knew that his ticket would only let him exit from the Stansted end by which he’d first entered. People had run out of petrol making that error!
For the emergency services to bring a can of petrol would cost £418, assuming that the improvident, or unlucky, stranded motorist could alert them. On impulse Rob took out his mobile and noted that the signal was alternating between one bar and none.
Nor could you caper and mime before a CCTV camera on a high pole, since there were none, all available experienced watchers being needed for the intense CCTV surveillance of inhabited areas. Hereabouts was, and in a sense still remained, agricultural land, leased from farmers who retained cultivation rights, as witness the carrots and courgettes. Should every field of cabbages or cows be watched? An impossible task.
Where was the red Lexus Q-9000? The nine-thousandth car in the queue, as Rob sometimes thought of it, when he was stuck on a motorway for a few hours. God bless the airport car parks—vast oases of tranquility and, yes, privacy—otherwise his vehicle might be the ten-thousandth car stuck in the queue.
His LexQ was nowhere to be seen, to right or left, ahead or behind.
Could it be that his Lex had been hot-wired and stolen? Or officially towed away because he’d parked across the ghost of a white line scarcely visible anymore?
Or might it be that he hadn’t parked in S46/47 but in S47/46 instead, just for instance?