The End of Mr. Y

by Scarlett Thomas

"Oh. Anything I can help with?"

  "I don't know." I frown, and look down at the brown carpet. "I think it might be hopeless, actually. But..." I sigh, and run my fingers through my hair again. "Well, you know how Saul's computer is going into storage later on today?"

  "Yes?"

  "Well it's got a document on it that I need, and I don't know how to get it. I don't think I can. Saul's not here, and I don't have the password anymore. I used to have it, of course, but I've forgotten it and ... Oh. How can I explain this? Basically there's this anthology that someone at Warwick's putting together, and I was supposed to finish the, er, bibliography for Saul and e-mail the document over to them. It doesn't have to be there for another month, which is why I wasn't too worried about it. But I was just starting to pack the things away for storage, like you asked, and then it just came to me." I shrug. "I suppose I really need some sort of miracle or something. I don't suppose you'd know how to get a document from a computer with no password, would you? I mean, you're not by any chance an experienced hacker in your spare time?" I laugh. As if any of us would ever hack into a computer.

  Yvonne sips her tea. "Well, you have got a problem, haven't you?"

  "I know. I think I was just putting the whole thing off until I could just get in touch with Saul. I thought maybe he'd get in contact nearer the deadline, but of course he won't know that his computer's going to go into storage and ... God. Sorry to bother you with this, but I thought if anyone would know what to do it would be you."

  I'm being careful not to mention the word "password" too much. I have a feeling that if I make this the problem it will sound a lot more dodgy than simply "I need a document and I don't know how to get it." And I think joking about hacking helps, but it is a risk.

  "Have you tried Computing Services?" she asks.

  "Not yet. I just thought they'd basically tell me to go away. I mean to them I could be anybody. And it is a bit of a weird thing to ask for. I mean, obviously you understand, but I'm not sure they would."

  "Do you want me to give them a call?"

  "Oh, would you? Thanks so much, Yvonne."

  "I'll authorize the new password request and get one of them over to sort it all out for you. When Professor Burlem comes back he'll need to set a new password, but his old one will have expired, anyway. I don't know when they'll be able to get over to you, but do you want to let me know when they've been and we'll come and do the desks then?"

  By twelve o'clock the technician still hasn't come and I'm beginning to feel hungry. If I could get hold of a bread roll I could make a chocolate sandwich (which wouldn't be the worst lunch I've ever had) but who knows if the canteen is even open. I try to open the university Web site so I can log on to the Intranet and see which of the various restaurants and cafeterias are open, but all I get is an Error 404 message instead of the front page. No wonder no one's here. Anyone who'd logged on to the university site to see whether it was open again would surely have feared the worst from this. I sigh. Even chocolate on its own wouldn't be the worst lunch I've ever had—in fact, it's practically gourmet—but some bread to go with it would be great, and the rolls in the canteen are only ten pence. I write a note for my door and pin it up. BACK IN FIVE MINUTES. I just hope he doesn't come and go away again.

  The Russell Building is, like the Stevenson Building on the west of the campus, built in the shape of a four-petalled cyber-flower with a small set of cloisters in the middle. I haven't spent much time in the Stevenson Building, because the students all say that it is exactly the same as the Russell Building but "the other way around," which sounds impossibly confusing, especially considering that the Russell Building is confusing enough on its own. I only seem to get lost in the Russell Building at the beginning of the academic year, when all the new students are around and everybody seems confused, and it's as if the confusion leaks out of everyone's minds and infects everyone else.

  Now I go out of the English Building through the side door, and under the walkway that leads to one of the Russell side doors. I go up some concrete steps, and then down some more, until I come to the mouth of a long, white corridor with a worn tiled floor and whitewashed walls. When the students are around this space seems almost normal but now it feels like the medical wing of an abandoned 1960s space station, or someone's idea of one. They keep broken university furniture in one of the rooms along here. I can hear my footsteps as I walk, and for the first time ever I get the sensation that there could be no one in the whole building apart from me.

  The tables in the dining hall are laid out in a geometric pattern that seems accidental until you go up to the Senior Common Room and look down. From up there you realize that the long tables all point towards the cathedral, which is itself framed in the large windows at the back of the hall. It all makes sense, from up there, the whole thing, and you feel as if you are part of one picture, and nothing on the perfect line joining you with the cathedral really exists. You're in the dark, and the cathedral is framed in a rectangle of light. One time I had to go into this dingy room off Reception to search the slide projectors for a transparency I'd left behind after a seminar, because this librarian was basically going to kneecap me if I didn't get it back. As well as my slide (The Runner by Vittorio Corona) I found another one in the box: It showed the cover of Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End. On the way down to the canteen I held it up in the only light available: the window at the back of the hall, and that's when I saw what it was. The slide was all melted on the back but not the image: The image was perfect. But when I tried to pick out some of the detail I realized I was looking at the cathedral through the slide, and the two images became one. After that I fell in love with the slide and took it back to my office and tried to find a way of projecting it onto my wall. But I couldn't work it out and I don't know where the slide is now. I read more Baudrillard after that.

  Today the tables are there in their usual formation but there are no jugs of water and no people and the whole thing is, as I had feared, closed. I could go to one of the other buildings but it seems pointless for a bread roll, so I walk back to my room and eat two bars of chocolate on their own. Then I have a coffee and a cigarette and settle down to wait for the technician. I try not to feel sad that this is possibly my last day alone in my office, but it is difficult. I suppose I won't be able to talk to myself in here anymore, or smoke out of the window, or fall asleep under the second desk. Will the new people want the blind set at a different angle? Will they want to bring potted plants? It's all too much to think about.

  To pass the time, I open up the Internet browser on my machine and do a search for the word Troposphere. I don't expect anything to come up but then I find out that it does exist. It's a part of Earth's atmosphere: the place where most weather takes place. Could Lumas have missed that? I assumed the word was made up. I do the search on the OED instead, and find that the earliest use of the word was in 1914. So Lumas invented it first, but no one took any notice. But then why would they? It's only a novel, after all. After I've read the whole entry I do a search for The End of Mr. Y, just to see if there's any information online that I haven't seen before.

  When you search for The End of Mr Y on the Internet, you usually get three links. One is an old abstract of the paper Burlem gave at the Greenwich conference. Another is a thread from a discussion board on a rare books site, where someone has left a request for the book and no one has replied. The third is a little more mysterious. It's basically a fan site, with a black background and some Gothic flourishes, and as far as I know it used to have quite a lot of information on the book. There was a page on the curse, and another page speculating about why there are almost no copies left in the world. The author of the Web site seemed to have concocted a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government had tracked down and destroyed all the known copies, including the one in the German bank vault (which, according to this guy, had once belonged to Hitler). He didn't say why this would be so, but hinted at some powerful secret that no one knew. I
think the real story is simply that there were not very many copies of the book printed in the first place, and when a book has over a hundred years to fall into obscurity, it's pretty easy for it to simply disappear. Anyway, about six months ago, or maybe a bit more, the Web site closed down. I check it today and it's the same as it was last time I looked at it. There's no error message or anything, but the front page simply says, "They shut me up and I went away."

  Today I am intrigued to see that there's a fourth link to a page containing a reference to The End of Mr. Y. It's a blog called "Some Days of My Life," and when I click on the link I am taken to a pink and white screen with various journal entries. I scan up and down but can't see the reference. I use Find instead and then I see it. It's the entry for last Friday.

  Had to work in the bookshop again today (thanks a lot, Sam) despite humungous hangover. Spent the day dusting books which was oddly therapeutic. Had no customers apart from this student who came in and paid fifty quid for a book called "The End of Mr. Y," which I've never heard of but must be pretty rare. Maybe I'll go into the secondhand book business. How about it, Sam? We could be partners and give up crappy college and make fortunes out of people who are prepared to pay £££ for old books. How hard can it be?

  There's a knock at the door and I immediately close down the browser.

  It's the technician. "Ariel Manto?" he says, looking at a piece of paper.

  "Yes," I say.

  "Come to set a new password," he says.

  "Oh, yes. Great," I say. "It's this machine over here."

  I try to absorb myself in something else while he tinkers around with the system, thinking that the less fuss I make about it the less suspicious the whole thing will seem. So I don't try to explain or justify why I need the new password on the machine; I just let him get on with his job while I make a start typing up my notes on Mr. Y. Ideally, I'd like to write a whole chapter on The End of Mr. Y for my thesis. It would be easy enough to write, considering my obsession with the book, but it would also make a great article or conference paper on its own. The only problem is that I'm not sure in what way I could argue that it is a thought experiment.

  Thought experiments or, in German, gedankenexperiments, are experiments that, for whatever reason, cannot be physically carried out, but must instead be conducted internally, via logic and reasoning, in the mind. There have been ethical and philosophical thought experiments for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but it was when people began using these experiments in a scientific context that they were first given the title "thought experiment," a literal translation of gedankenexperiment, although Lumas had always referred to them as "experiments of the mind." The luminiferous ether is the result of a thought experiment of sorts, which postulated that, if light is a wave, then it has to be a wave in something. You can't have a wave in water with no water—so where was light's "fluid"? So people invented the luminiferous ether as an answer, only to discard it again when the Michelson Morley experiment proved that, sadly, there was no ether.

  Edgar Allan Poe used the principles of the thought experiment to solve the Olbers's Paradox, and, some people believe, to more or less invent big bang theory a good hundred years before anyone else. His "prose poem" "Eureka" sets out his various scientific and cosmological thoughts, but Poe was no experimental scientist and so these theories came in the form of thought experiments, or, perhaps, something close to the way he described infinity, as the "thought of a thought." His Olbers's Paradox solution is one of the most elegant thought experiments in history. In 1823, Wilhelm Olbers wondered why we see stars the way we do in the night sky. At the time, most people believed the universe to be infinite and eternal. So if the sky was infinite, surely it would contain an infinite number of stars? And if there were an infinite number of stars, then our night sky should be white, not black. Olbers thought it was all down to dust clouds, and wrote, "How fortunate that the Earth does not receive starlight from every point of the celestial vault!" Edgar Allan Poe thought this through and decided that a simpler and more plausible solution for the "voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions" was that some of the stars were simply so far away that the light hadn't had time to reach us yet.

  Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in history is when Einstein wondered what would happen if he could catch up with a beam of light. Einstein worked out that if he could travel at the speed of light then, logically, he would see the beam of light as if it were motionless, just as if you are in a train going at the same speed as another train moving alongside you, you see the people inside it as if they are not moving. So, what would light look like if it seemed to be at rest? Would it look like a frozen yellow wave? A paint spatter of particles? And what if you could look at yourself in the mirror while travelling at the speed of light? You'd seem invisible. Maybe you'd even be invisible. Einstein realized that there could be no such thing as an electromagnetic field that stood still. Maxwell's equations, which seemed to imply that you could, in theory, catch up with a beam of light, also showed that light was not something that could be stationary. So one of those points had to be wrong. It would be interesting if it was the other one, and you could catch up to light and see it frozen, but, for various reasons that I need more physics lectures to understand, it isn't. Einstein's theory of special relativity states that no matter how fast you go, light is always travelling relative to you at c, the speed of light. It doesn't matter if you're travelling at one mile an hour or a thousand miles an hour. The light you see around you is always going faster than you, and it's always going at c. If you were travelling at half the speed of light, it wouldn't seem to you that light going in your direction was therefore travelling half as fast. It would still appear to be going at the speed of light, c, relative to you.

  "Let us suppose our old friend the railway carriage to be travelling along the rails with a constant velocity, v," says Einstein in his book Relativity. He then goes on to explain that if you walked along the carriage in the direction of travel, you'd be going not at the speed of the train, nor at the speed you were walking, but at the sum of the two. If the train was going at one hundred miles an hour, and you were going at one mile an hour, you'd actually be moving forwards at a velocity of one hundred and one miles per hour, relative to the embankment you were passing. Similarly, if I were to drive on the motorway alongside the railway line at, say, eighty-five miles per hour and this train passed me, it would appear to me to be going at fifteen miles per hour relative to me; and you, walking inside it, would seem to be going at sixteen miles per hour. If you looked out of the train and saw me driving along, I would appear to be going backwards. All this is Newtonian relative velocity and it does not apply to light.

  Einstein's equations, the end result of his original thought experiments, show that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing, and that if you tried to approach the speed of light you'd just become heavier the closer you got as your energy converted to mass. He also showed that space and time are essentially the same. For Lumas, the fourth dimension was a space containing beings, or, at least, thought. For H. G. Wells it was a greenish otherworld containing spirits. For Zollner it was a place full of phantoms who seemed to like nothing better than helping out magicians. But for Einstein, it wasn't a place at all. But it wasn't simply time, either. It was the fourth dimension of space-time: not just the clock, but the clock ticking on your wall, relative to you.

  The technician clears his throat. "Almost there," he says.

  "Great. Thanks," I say back.

  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be Einstein, sitting in a stuffy patent office looking out at the trains and the railway track. There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be. I briefly look up from my notes and out of my big, steel-framed window. Something comes to me, suddenly, some weird Lumas connection, and I look back down at my notes. I write:

  Metaphor (as in Lumas preface)...Trope...(Tropo
sphere!—weird) Ways of thinking about the world. You can't use trains as metaphors if there are no trains. Cf. différance. Can a thought exist without the language with which to have the thought? How does language (or metaphor) influence the thought? Cf. Poetics. If there was no evening no one would think it was like old age.

  "All right," says the technician. "All set. If you just want to come over here and type in the new password..."

  He gets up and moves to the other side of the room while I sit there and try to think of something. I should just use my own password; that would be simple. A few possible words go through my mind. But something makes me calmly type hacker into the box. It comes up as six little stars and I hit OK and then tell the technician I'm done. He comes over and does a couple more things and then restarts the machine.

  "All done," he says, and leaves.

  I have moved the mouse about a millimeter across the desktop when the phone rings. It's Yvonne.

  "Has that technician been yet?" she asks.

  "Yeah," I say. "He's just gone."

  "You got your document all right then?"

  "Er ... No. Not yet. I've literally only just logged in."

  "All right, well, you sort it out and I'll be down in ten minutes to do the desks. Roger's here now, but I'll just give him a cup of tea and we'll hang on for a bit. You're all right to wait ten minutes or so, aren't you, Roger?" I can hear a muffled "Yeah, if there's a biscuit as well" in the background. "OK, Ariel, see you soon."

  Ten minutes. Shit. I'm not going to be able to investigate Burlem's machine in ten minutes. OK: plan B. I take my iPod out of my bag and connect it to the back of Burlem's machine. I pray (to what? to whom?) that it won't reject the connection, and in a couple of seconds it's appeared as the F Drive. Fantastic. Now all I need to do is transfer the contents of Burlem's "My Documents" folder over and ... There. That took about twenty seconds. Would he have hidden any information anywhere else on the machine? I metaphorically poke around for a bit but a few clicks on folders tells me that he doesn't use anything apart from "My Documents" for his files. I'm not completely satisfied, but that will have to do. I double-check that the files have copied OK; then I unplug my iPod and shut the machine down just before a knock on my door tells me that Yvonne has arrived.