“You forget yourself, O First One,” said Ham, grimly. “You forget who you are to the people, and who you are to Detroit.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” said Abe.
“No?” said Ham, picking up a pewter mug from a nearby nightstand and examining it closely. “I think you have. You have forgotten what it means to be the mayor. You are our leader. The only one we’ve known. You are the First, the Eldest of the Ancients, the Greatest and Eldest of us all. You are He Who Bends the City to His Will. And you have forgotten that our world is mere putty in your hands; that it will change itself to protect you — rewrite its own history to see that your will is done. The laws of time and space? Pah! These are but words in an unfinished book — a book that Abe the First can rewrite to suit his needs, and those of his people. You have forgotten that the city councillors exist not to govern Detroit, but to remind you of what you are. You have forgotten,” said Ham, who paused dramatically on what felt like the verge of a profound remark, and suddenly cocked his arm and heaved the pewter mug, as hard as he could, directly at the back of Abe’s head.
The dove landed gently on Abe’s shoulder.
Try as he might, Ham couldn’t remember why he had felt the urge to throw a bird at the mayor.
It had always been a bird, since the moment of its creation. It had hatched two years ago, and came equipped with two years’ worth of vivid, birdish memories packed away in its tiny mind. Somewhere in the nearby forest was a nest that it had built, as well as a pair of eggs it expected to hatch any day now.
It had always been a bird. But only for the last four seconds.
Five seconds ago it had been a mug.
The dove cooed, stretched its wings, and flew out over the forest.
And for the 24,384th time, Abe uttered a silent prayer of thanks for Ham.
* * *
42That is, places without Ham.
Chapter 22
You’re probably wondering about Isaac’s pills. They were mentioned, somewhat cryptically, at the end of Chapter 9. But since then, nothing.
They’re important.
Isaac presently eyed a pair of the pills. They were blue and perched nonchalantly on a corner of his desk. He wasn’t supposed to know what they did. The City Solicitor told him, centuries earlier, that the pills treated a manifestation defect that inhibited cognitive function.
This was a lie. You could tell it was a lie because the City Solicitor’s lips were moving when he said it.
Isaac knew it was a lie.
Isaac knew what the pills did.
Even more intriguing is the fact that the City Solicitor knew that Isaac knew. And as you might expect, given what you know about Isaac, Isaac knew that the City Solicitor knew that Isaac knew, which the City Solicitor knew in turn, etc., etc., etc.
Immortals are better than average at infinite regression.
The City Solicitor had commissioned the blue pills on the day that Isaac had joined his staff. They eliminated ambition. Isaac took two every day, and therefore never worried about the fact that his life didn’t resemble his dreams, that his capacities exceeded his achievements, that he spent his days fussing about such matters as office management and filing systems instead of Fundamental Questions, or that — not to put too fine a point on it — he was cleverer than his boss.
That last part wasn’t exactly true. Isaac’s brain had more raw power than the Solicitor’s, but only in the sense that an atom bomb has more raw power than sarin gas. Both could wipe out a city, but where the atom bomb could reduce the city to rubble with earth-shattering, sky-searing, retina-boiling explosions that would instantly drain a summer blockbuster’s special effects budget, sarin gas arrived invisibly and left all of the loot intact.
Isaac understood this difference.
Isaac took the blue pills daily because he’d decided that, on balance, a mere deficit of ambition was a tiny price to pay in exchange for keeping the City Solicitor happy. The alternative — an unhappy City Solicitor — would be more dangerous than a poorly packed parachute or a line dance in a minefield. An unhappy City Solicitor would be dangerous for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the philosophically minded assassin on his payroll.
At present, Isaac’s atom bomb of a mind was troubled. It was troubled because Isaac was having an uncharacteristically difficult time finishing off a memorandum that the Solicitor had requested four days earlier. Isaac stared at the stubbornly incomplete document on the screen of his datalink. It stared back at him. Smugly, if Isaac was any judge.
The first offending passage read as follows:
Scholium
Hitherto I have set out, in mathematical form, all relevant data and hypotheses pertaining to the aforementioned paradoxes, viz., (1) the Book, herein designated the “Omega Missive” (or “OM” owing to the stylized Ω and M inscribed on the frontispiece), and (2) the anomalous exothermic reaction (to wit, the Explosion) initiated upon tactile interface between Socrates (designated herein as subject S) and the subject TC, the DDH guide named Tonto Choudhury. In this scholium I summarize related phenomena and conjectures not readily amenable to computational analysis.
“Not readily amenable to computational analysis,” thought Isaac, grimacing. Those keystrokes had pained him. The very idea of something that wasn’t “amenable to computational analysis” gave him the vapours. Isaac had always been able to turn things into equations in order to make them simpler: to convert them into digestible bits of arithmetic precision that slotted comfortably into an elegant world of graceful computations. So far, the two paradoxes described in Isaac’s memorandum had eluded clear mathematical expression. The paradoxes had proven to be, well . . . paradoxical.
Isaac’s gaze returned to the memo. The next bit read as follows:
First Paradox, The OM. Restorative efforts on the text reveal several legible passages. Linguistic analysis of these fragments has, at the time of writing, proved fruitless, suggesting that the recovered text may be devoid of sensible connotation, or perhaps inscribed in a cipher that I have thus far failed to penetrate. There are overt references to the notion of multiple lives of varying quality, possibly indicating (as you surmise) the author’s acceptance (or feigned acceptance) of beforelife mythology. (For a summary of such mythology refer to memorandum I.N. 23581, “Beforelife Delusion — Shared Symptoms and Variant Psychoses Observed in Acquired Subjects,” link appended below.) The OM’s references to focused meditation and manifesting your wishes, which you have declared to be of urgent interest [note to draft: why of interest to CS? Consider possible relationship to cataclysmic prophecies] appear to be nothing more than pseudo-psychological drivel common to self-help periodicals widely consumed by vulgar and untutored elements of the populace. (For further examples of such literature, see Appendix I.N. 2L3, “Suggested Sharing Room Curriculum,” acquired by subject S from the files of Mistress Oan, Caring Nurturer, Detroit Mercy Hospice, Central Detroit.) More data is required in support of further analysis.
Isaac leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why was the City Solicitor so interested in the contents of this book? They were meaningless. The memorandum’s reference to some undiscovered cipher that Isaac had thus far “failed to penetrate” was present out of deference to the Solicitor, who was certain that the contents of the OM were important. But the notion of a code that Isaac couldn’t readily break gave the memo, Isaac felt, an overall air of implausibility.
No, Isaac was certain that the contents of the Omega Missive were insignificant. What mattered were the volume’s physical properties, discussed in the next stubbornly unfinished section of the memo, which read as follows:
More troubling is the temporal anomaly associated with the OM. Repeated scanning and temporal analysis (verified through independent instrumentation, the schematics of which are appended in addendum I.N. 34b of volume 1 of this memorandum) suggests two distinct and verifiab
le ages for the OM, defying all accepted hypotheses concerning the linear, stable, and unidirectional nature of time. The Omega Missive appears, as previously indicated, to be both (a) four weeks old (designated as reading OM1) and (b) twenty years old (designated as reading OM2): instrumentation proves conclusively that the book has existed for only four weeks, but also that the book has existed for twenty years. This anomaly is compounded by the subsequent discovery of similar results pertaining to two living subjects, viz, the aforementioned subjects S and TC. Subject S is both 2,431.9 years old (designated as reading S1) and no more than 612 years old (designated as reading S2). Subject TC, by contrast
Here the cursor blinked, derisively.
Subject TC. Tonto Choudhury. Isaac leaned forward and set his brow to position three, full furrow. Of all of the puzzles presently ruining his morning, “subject TC” bothered him most. She was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma packed in an eye-popping, pulse-quickening, jaw-slackening figure that made Isaac’s Adam’s apple dance a bolero. She defied every attempt at explanation. It wasn’t that Isaac hadn’t applied his mind to the task. Far from it. In pursuit of an explanation of Tonto’s properties, Isaac had offhandedly generated the theory of morphic resonance, devised a theorem for calculating the gravitational influence of dark matter, constructed an equitable tax system, invented twelve-dimensional algebraic inductions, and determined why it is that cheese and yogurt are sold with expiry dates. Yet he was no closer to understanding Tonto than he had been at the beginning. Tonto Choudhury remained a mystery.
Take her credentials. According to city records, Tonto had acquired advanced degrees in history, geography, and cultural studies from Detroit University. She’d published papers on subjects ranging from “Cultural Variations Observed in the Seven Regions of Central Detroit” to “Venomous Serpents of the Wild: Early Detection and Avoidance.” She would have been a credible candidate for the Chair of Municipal Studies at DU, and yet she had, according to her official records, held only two noteworthy positions: a glamour model and a DDH guide. She’d been a pin-up girl and a city-sponsored tour guide for the newly manifested. “Overqualified” didn’t begin to cover it.
Tonto’s records also revealed that she had lettered in track and field, won prizes in fourteen amateur sports, and had earned virtually every merit badge offered by Detroit’s Non-Gender-Specific Scouting Society (including specialist designations in auto mechanics, home economics, advanced computing, orienteering, physical fitness, and topiary).
But all of this was beside the point. What pushed Isaac over the edge was Tonto’s age. Reliable photographs and documentary evidence confirmed that Tonto had manifested as a late adolescent in June of 18,158, just over twenty-five years before the present day. Soon thereafter she had enrolled at DU. University records, news reports, and successive curricula vitae all provided a consistent series of dates that painted a picture of a life that had, since Tonto’s manifestation, spanned just over twenty-five years.
So why did on-board scanners found in Socrates’ intracranial implant state that Tonto was four weeks old?
She had to be more than four weeks old. Isaac’s memory bore this out. The moment Isaac had seen Tonto’s unmistakable face and figure through Socrates’ on-board scanners, he’d recognized Tonto from a billboard he had seen some six years earlier.
It was an especially lovely billboard.
When he’d first noticed the billboard he’d become intensely interested in discovering the name of the woman who’d adorned it, too beautiful to be explained by mere airbrushing or digital manipulation, too exquisite to be the product of some advertising hack’s imagination. Strong as Isaac’s attraction to the billboard woman had been, it hadn’t lasted. After an intense three-hour obsession with the Vision of the Billboard, Isaac had been distracted by a new mathematical theorem describing the formation of air bubbles in ice cubes, and had shoved all memory of the Vision into a dark and neglected corner of his subconscious.
It wasn’t that Isaac didn’t experience all of the usual, primal urges. He was as human as the next man. He’d even tried his hand at sex, so to speak. It was just that he found mathematics, quantum mechanics, and natural science to be satisfyingly uncomplicated in comparison to the mysteries of romance. Math and science were easy. They were intuitive. And they never hogged the remote, complained about one’s personal habits, or insisted on spending an evening talking about their feelings. This singular worldview had left Isaac free of romantic entanglement, and therefore able to focus on his work instead of stalking social networking services in pursuit of new photographs of old flames. This made him virtually unique.
In any event, Isaac had seen Tonto’s billboard. He remembered it in libido-churning detail. It advertised the history program at Detroit University. He had seen it six years earlier.
Yet Socrates’ intracranial implant — a device that Isaac had designed, tested, programmed, and calibrated himself — proved conclusively that Tonto was four weeks old.
How could Tonto be four weeks old when Isaac vividly remembered seeing her billboard six years earlier? And more importantly, why was her recent temporal reading — T2, as it would be designated in Isaac’s memorandum — precisely the same as OM1, one of the readings given for the Omega Missive? Not “roughly” the same, not “virtually the same, give or take a millisecond,” but the same, down to the smallest unit of time that could be measured using state-of-the-art technology.
That couldn’t be a coincidence. Well, it could be a coincidence, Isaac admitted to himself, but the odds were against it. Isaac calculated a 99.732 per cent likelihood that Tonto and the Omega Missive were related.
This relationship, in turn, seemed to confirm that Tonto lay at the core of each of the puzzles currently thwarting Isaac’s efforts to finish his memo. Tonto was related to the OM. She exhibited the dual-age phenomenon — a phenomenon that had led Isaac to vandalize his memo with marginal notes along the lines of Revisit the nature of time and Retheorize causality. And when Tonto and Socrates had come into contact, the result had been the so-called “second paradox” of the memo — the one that Isaac referred to as the “Anomalous Exothermic Event,” but that anyone else would have called “The Explosion.”
The explosion was the topic of the final unfinished part of the memorandum. This part was short. It began with equations calculating the scope and intensity of the explosion based on data retrieved from Socrates’ cranial implant. After these equations had been wrestled into submission, the memo concluded with two bullet points. The first one said, Additional data to be retrieved when subject S regains consciousness. The second one, added two days after the first, read as follows: Why won’t Socrates wake up?
The coma had, thus far, persisted for three days. Socrates had teleported to City Hall at the moment of the explosion, his on-board IPT having transported him automatically to Home Beacon at the moment of neural collapse. That had been a shock for Isaac. It isn’t every day that an unconscious, naked assassin teleports into your workshop.
But apart from Socrates’ failure to wake up, and a serious, festering burn on his right hand —a burn that, mysteriously, wasn’t healing — Socrates didn’t appear to be harmed in any way.
Isaac didn’t understand. He wished that he did. He wished that he had the power to peer into Socrates’ mind. Or the power to order underlings to comb Detroit Mercy and its environs for any clues that might shed light upon these mysteries. Or the power to order a vivisection of Socrates (he’d get better) in pursuit of additional data. Any data. Isaac needed greater authority. He wanted authority to set off in pursuit of Tonto, to bring her here, to City Hall, for further analysis. He wanted the unfettered right to set his own research agenda, to dictate the extent of his own inquiries and the methods he used to pursue them. He wished that the interfering, domineering, autocratic City Solicitor hadn’t placed such tight restrictions on the ambit of his research. He wished he had the
power to force the City Solicitor to —
Isaac’s eyes shot open in shock.
He’d never been this distracted by his work. He’d certainly never been so distracted that he’d forgotten to take his pills.
The pills still sat on a corner of Isaac’s desk, resolutely unswallowed, peeping up at him from under a dog-eared leaf of paper.
Isaac was suddenly struck by a line of thought that had, for unknown reasons, never occurred to him before. Isaac wondered, very briefly, whether some puzzles were more easily solved with a touch of ambition. He wondered if some types of solution were revealed through drive and purpose, rather than through the dispassionate investigation of data. He wondered whether ambition, directed carefully, would allow him to untangle these seemingly unsolvable mysteries and finally file the blasted memo.
Perhaps desire fuelled creativity, Isaac reflected. Perhaps ambition fed the mind. Perhaps envisioning one’s desires could help to further one’s objectives. Perhaps, Isaac reasoned, the act of giving voice to one’s desires was the key to insoluble puzzles, or even the key to — what was the phrase — manifesting your wishes?
Isaac’s gaze darted toward the Omega Missive, perched non-threateningly on a shelf beside his desk.
A chill tap-danced its way down Isaac’s spine.
Insidious, he decided. He shook his head in hopes of derailing this unscheduled train of thought.
He’d been working too hard. That was it. A cup of tea, a bit of a lie-down, and everything would return to normal. He’d finish the memo this evening.
Isaac pocketed his pills and headed for bed. He’d swallow the pills in his bedroom, after he’d brewed a cup of tea.
Beforelife Page 25