Side Life

by Steve Toutonghi

  While he reviewed her documents, looking for a way to wake Nerdean, Vin’s respect for her work grew, outstripping his envy until he felt a true reverence—a sensation so intense it could cause brief moments of physical pain—a fluttering ache in his chest. After two almost sleepless weeks spent learning about the crèche, he understood Nerdean to be an epoch-altering genius, apparently capable of anything she imagined. As he daydreamed through spans of near exhaustion, he found himself longing to ask her questions and hear her answers. And as for his quiet doubts (was he being a fool, seduced by things he didn’t understand?), he chose to ignore them and they withered.

  Fully trusting Nerdean would mean using the device. On a crisp, late summer morning, he opened the interface that controlled the duration of an upcoming immersion, a simple text file containing two colons followed by the number 24 and the word hours, the default and minimum period for immersion. Once he was in the casket, the file would lock. He closed it without changing the number.

  He swallowed the recommended sedative with bottled water that he found under the desk, and undressed. He climbed into one of the empty caskets and stretched out against the supporting, cushioned struts. The heavy door lowered over him and he heard bolts shoot home and lock in place with smooth precision. He struggled to calm a lurking panic, defeating it by repeatedly reminding himself that he was trusting Nerdean. He smelled ionized air as the chilled broth began to wash into the casket and cover his feet and the backs of his bare limbs.

  As he wafted toward unconsciousness, a needle-like pressure stippled his skin in multiple places. The crèche had deployed its strangely lifelike bots to wriggle over him like a host of robot spiders, measuring his body and adhering to critical points. The system would not apply its breathing apparatus or fully submerge him in broth until its monitors determined that he was unconscious. There was the simultaneous pinch and snap of the initial wire leads clamping down in sixty-four places across his body, and then nothing. Until he woke as someone else.

  PART II

  TOURISM

  CHAPTER 4

  Ambition

  His jaw and lips clamp down on a cigar and his cheeks fill with sweet, acidic smoke. The fingers of his hand are unexpected—oddly short and pale. His body folds over itself in novel ways. He’s in warm water, his back, buttocks and thighs pressing against the smooth sides of a bathtub. In one hand he holds a sheaf of papers. Beyond the papers is a familiar room, leather and brass, dark and sparkling.

  Vin has no memory between blacking out in the crèche and finding himself here. This must be a lucid dream. It pulls at his awareness, requiring attention the way that driving tired does. He’s confused and trying to remember who he is. He says to himself, “My name is Vin Walsh.” His dream responds with mysterious certainty: “I am Winston Churchill.”

  He can’t turn, can’t shift his gaze, can’t affect his muscles. Before his free hand rises, he feels an impulse to move it, like being tickled by a thought. Then feels the grit of his own hair against the tip of a finger as well as the movement of that finger on his scalp.

  As for the papers in his hand, it isn’t him exactly who’s reading them. Unfamiliar thoughts and feelings are moving near and through him, overlapping him. He tires of holding himself separate and relaxes into them, like lowering himself into warm water. He becomes the person whose mind he seems to be inhabiting.

  “Stalemate and slaughter.” Winston Churchill is practicing phrases for a meeting. “In war we must recognize both opportunity and the potential for disaster. Mindless repetition leads to calamity, but in Europe today we ask our troops to endure the same horrific hours they have endured since the war began. Those who believe in this strategy call it attrition, and pledge themselves to its principle, that we are willing to pay more in blood than our enemy. I put it to you that this is not a way forward. We are in need of bold and surprising initiatives, of innovation, of imaginative machines and of sudden momentum on unexpected fronts. Surprise and invention will end the slaughter on the continent and win the war.”

  Another mouthful of sweet smoke. Words rise from the papers and become part of him.

  “. . . (C.) Reduction of defences at the Narrows, Chanak.

  “(D.) Clear passage through minefield, advancing through Narrows, reducing forts above Narrows, and final advance to Marmora.”

  Vin understands that these sentences are on a telegram and that the author of the telegram, someone called Vice Admiral Carden, is supplying new and critical intelligence. But intelligence for what, and who is Carden? As he asks himself the question, he sees that Carden’s face, relaxed, slim—an admirable Anglo-Saxon profile—eyes thoughtfully hooded, head bent in consideration of a problem. Carden is sharp as a hawk, his full beard and mustache swept back. He is a clear-eyed and cautious hunter, and he knows the Aegean Sea as well as anyone.

  There is a strange separation between Vin and the person he is dreaming himself to be, Winston Churchill. In part, the strangeness comes from the accuracy of the dream’s rendering of time. Vin can feel each second as it passes, unlike other dreams in which a year might pass with a single taste of claret. And the physical world is also vividly present—this doesn’t feel like a dream house; one that might, for example, suddenly transform itself into a crypt. In fact, the dream almost feels like the waking world, but Vin sees and feels things with a fluctuating overlay of unexpected emotion and sometimes even commentary, and he cannot alter his perspective.

  Without any prompting from Vin, Winston levers himself up from the bath, towels dry and dons soft underclothes and striped woolen trousers. He sips his watered spirits, savoring the scent of char, peat and alcohol and the weight of the glass.

  Winston is thinking that today’s meeting will be a turning point. Once again, he will be that young man that his Clemmie married. He shrugs into a starched shirt and then Vin follows the intricate motions of his body as he assembles the public image of Winston Churchill, His Majesty’s First Lord of the Admiralty, the hero whose foresight saved the Great Fleet at the start of this conflict, and who is now poised to save the world. Which top hat will best protect the realm?

  OUTSIDE, CHILL AIR SWEEPS AWAY the comfort of his warm home. Churchill is in London, where sunlight is always measured, especially in mid-January. The scent of rot and tannins chases away the windborne ghosts of river swells. The world of air has degrees of clarity and its sudden changes can communicate every fact worth knowing; a bright winter morning carries the crisp weight of truth.

  Deference from the gloved driver (Thomas is his name), eyes averted as he opens the car door. A smart, horse-drawn hansom rattles past in the road beyond. Winston returns to practicing sentences.

  “To capture the great city of Constantinople, I propose a surprise as historic as the gambit of the Trojan Horse. This is a strategy to break the nerve of the Turk in a single stroke, to retire his armies from the board, reopen the Black Sea to shipments of Russian grain, and bring the neutral states to our side of the conflict in anticipation of carving up the Ottoman Empire. And all of this can be accomplished almost solely with naval power, without diverting a single battalion from the deadlock in France.”

  The ground war in France is a butchery that feeds on the virtue of soldiers. There has to be a choice other than that slaughter. (And if not, then what is the purpose of empire?)

  From Vin’s perspective, the Winston in his dream has a design problem. That’s the right way to conceptualize it. The tools and processes of war need updating. In the hypnotic way that thoughts can glow in dreams, Vin can see that however crushing and horrible war itself might be, the Empire still needs it. Therefore, new approaches are essential. Vin finds this perspective fascinating. It requires the kind of systems thinking that he, personally, excels at.

  But other issues linger. Winston has an acute, unarticulated feeling in his lower gut, a concern—or perhaps a fear—that is almost threatening to consume him, and somewhere between that feeling and the chaos of ideas that Vin e
ncounters in his mind there flickers an image, a decorated Colonel in a neatly pressed uniform who is sitting with his back against a stone, a slate of medals shining on his dress jacket; his head and the top of the stone are missing.

  AS THE CAR PULLS TO a stop outside Number 10, Winston is pleased to see the lanky profile of Arthur Balfour. Balfour, who would never appear to be waiting for anyone or anything, is simply taking air, but he and Winston speak briefly and enter together. For Winston, Balfour’s remoteness is a calming intoxicant. There were years when Balfour was a mentor and champion of Winston’s career.

  “Beware a fetishistic pleasure in the exercise of power beyond one’s comprehension,” Balfour had once said to him. “The most frightening thing in the world is a man who from the depths of congenital, benighted ignorance cheerfully decides the fate of life on earth.” But it is Balfour’s pretense of airy disinterest that is his true gift and greatest lesson.

  As the cabinet members find their seats, the First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, greets Winston and Balfour with a masculine warmth that lifts Winston’s spirits. With his cropped ivory mane, Jackie is fearsome and blunt, Arthur’s dispositional antipode. He is as explosive as the muzzle-loading cannon that ruled the waves when his career began and he is Winston’s bulwark against naval professionals who distrust their First Lord’s youth and inexperience. Together, Jackie and Winston speak for the Empire’s Navy with a single voice. Winston’s.

  THE MEETING BEGINS WITH TALK of Russia. Vin can follow the sense of what is said, but the details waver in proportion to his willingness to relax into the dream of being Winston Churchill. If he pays attention to himself—to being Vin—he loses the sense of the discussion and even accents become difficult to follow. If he forgets himself and listens as if he is Winston Churchill, he has no problem understanding.

  For the first time in the dream, Vin is glad he can’t affect Winston’s body. The men in the room are sedately discussing topics that entangle millions or tens of millions of lives. There are moments, such as when they detail the casualties of the last six months, when he wants the dream to stop. He wants to groan or stand up and shout in appalled disbelief, but he can’t. Everyone at the table is similarly unmoving.

  As they debate deployments for new volunteers, new men to go to the continent and chew barbed wire, there is a moment when Vin realizes that Winston is amused and is no longer tracking the discussion. Lord Kitchener and Lord French are sitting across the table, though not beside each other. Winston expects the two of them to oppose each other on most issues. French’s drooping mustache quivers over his heavy jaw, whereas Kitchener’s is waxed to curve up at its ends in a surrogate smile. These two men regularly disagree and Winston imagines a dramatic conflict between their mustaches. He sees the mustaches standing huge and faceless at either end of the table, brandishing sabers made of gray whiskers: moulinet, parry-riposte, counter parry-riposte, touché, salute, en garde, point thrust, inquartata, touché, etc. Lord French, the frowning optimist, wins on points; his rakish mustache with its hair saber bends in a courtly and well-groomed salute.

  With well-calibrated sangfroid, French is saying, “This situation clearly explains France’s invitation to the Japanese to field a European army.”

  His comment draws an audible huff of annoyance from Kitchener, whose mustache trembles with frustration. Kitchener views the invitation to Japan as a vote against his own leadership. Although some might not wish to see an army of yellow men in Europe, Winston has no objection. Ultimately, as Balfour has said, the thing in war is to win.

  The topic changes. At last, Winston stands before the wall map and sets forth his case for action in the Dardanelles, their only real choice beyond fighting in the trenches. He begins by describing risks, the mines at sea and forts on the heights. He lists the rewards of success and painstakingly reviews his and Lord Carden’s plan to neutralize each risk. He concludes by repeating his central point. “From twelve thousand yards, the big guns of a Lord Nelson–class battleship are three times more likely to strike their targets than an equivalently sized howitzer, and one hit disables the target. Our naval guns are so accurate and our naval gunnery so precise that not only will we hit the forts from safe ranges, but we shall hit, in succession, each and every emplacement. By acting quickly, before the enemy fully comprehends his peril, we will win clear passage to Constantinople.”

  Winston has been gauging the room while he speaks and believes he may have won over Lloyd George, but Lord Kitchener and Lord Asquith are unreadable. He introduces his coup de grace. “Only yesterday,” he says, “Admiral Fisher provided new information that, to my mind, decides the matter. Jackie?”

  Fisher makes a small nod, then fires off a rapid series of assertions, ending, “As you know, the Queen Elizabeth is our first super dreadnought, and is our fastest large ship. She is irresistible! Rigged with an unprecedented battery of fifteen-inch guns with an effective range of over twenty thousand yards. Moving with celerity to join the fleet, she may be leading in the bombardment at its outset. Rather than test her new guns with meaningless target practice, we shall limber them up by ending these Turkish forts!” His open palm slams down on the resonant cabinet table.

  The other men in the room are chuckling and casting sidelong glances at each other. Winston is agitated. Fisher’s energetic performance seemed overly deliberate, even by his flamboyant standards. Within the room, however, Winston glows with satisfaction.

  A quiet overtakes the assembled warlords. If it were possible, then using naval power alone to change the game would be an unqualified win, and participation by the Queen Elizabeth is a new fact. The Empire’s heroes display their conspicuous approval. There is agreeable muttering and a few palms even thump the tabletop as reserve tips toward acceptance and acceptance falls to guarded enthusiasm. Vin feels an inward thrill of triumph.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Other Resident

  Vin was himself again, lying in the crèche. The dream of being Winston Churchill was over and he understood the meaning of the device as he remembered a passage from Nerdean’s notebook.

  The dream experience had unlocked something in him. In a single day, he had gained a whole life as the kind of man he always knew he could be. He remembered the feel and smell of it, the embrace of the supple leather chair, the sweet cigar smoke in his throat and the complexity of the claret chasing it, and the stimulation—the electric, thought-broadening, gut-loosening, muscle-freeing intensity of all that power.

  Feeling light, unburdened, he put a shaky hand on the edge of the open casket. He might jump to the ceiling in a single motion. Could it be that every home in the city (in the country? in the world?) contained a secret like this?

  Nerdean had called it lucid dreaming, but Vin knew a man named Jackie Fisher now, remembered arguing with him into early morning hours, debating the logistics of an amphibious attack on U-boat pens at Zeebrugge, Jackie endlessly certain of his contradictory assertions, his blue eyes flaming, spit flying from his thick lips.

  Equally surprising, Vin knew what Zeebrugge was, and where it was. He rocked out of the crèche and logged-in to the middle computer system and typed the strange place name into a search form. A map of the Belgian port filled the screen. It was where he expected it to be.

  He pulled on his fallen jeans and dragged his T-shirt on over his damp hair, then sat again and searched for the term “dardanelles strait 1915.” He read a Wikipedia article titled “Naval Operations in the Dardanelles Campaign” with a sliding sense of déjà vu.

  Over the next few hours, he read many articles. The people in his dream—Jackie Fisher, Vice Admiral Carden, and the others—were all real. After that meeting, Fisher had renounced Churchill’s plan and resigned from the government. The swift attack using only naval power had become a ten-month land campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula that caused close to four hundred thousand casualties. Vin’s eyes passed over the number multiple times before digesting its sense. He had a faint recollection of watc
hing an old World War I movie named Gallipoli, about incompetence and carnage.

  When he was too tired to read more, he leaned back in the eggshell chair. Nerdean’s machine did more than induce lucid dreaming. It must have both invigorated his imagination and returned endless buried memories—details from the movie, maybe comments captured from school lessons that he could never have recalled on his own, passages of books he’d read and forgotten, knowledge he would never have suspected that he still possessed. It had used all of that to shape a dream that was a fulfillment of Vin’s deepest ambitions. To influence the fate of hundreds of millions. To help move the world forward.

  And everything had felt real. The shine on the table that the warlords circled, the subtleties of gestures and postures that were readable the way the bodies of living people are. Those details must have come from Vin’s imagination, but they were perfectly integrated with the facts from his memories.

  His dream explained why Nerdean had researched subjective experience during suspended animation and it also clarified the full scope of her project, which was even more daring and impressive than he could have guessed. The crèche had connected disparate circuits in his mind, generating new cognitive capabilities that were able to build a seamless combination of eidetic recall and creative virtuosity. It had allowed him to imagine a new reality. Nerdean had built a device that induced creative genius. She might have even used the ideas behind the machine to enhance her own abilities, in order to build the full device. If Vin was right—and he was sure that he was—then the crèche was an almost unfathomable revelation, and so much more than he had hoped for.

  HE WANTED TURTLE SOUP BUT didn’t have any idea where he might get it. He had left a pizza in the refrigerator though, in case he was hungry after twenty-four hours in the crèche. He carried the box to the card table, flipped it open and eased into one of the folding chairs. The chair felt too light, flimsy and stiff against his skin, almost unreal compared to the soft warmth of the furniture in his dream.