by Unknown
A drab little structure built to look like a broccoli farmer’s shed came up on the right. I pulled into the driveway. This was the entrance to the transcription facility. I drove past the plainclothes sentry into the shed. The door closed behind me. I felt the car drop about an inch with the usual abruptness as the floor locks released.
A safety cage rose in the narrow space between the car and the walls. I strained to hear the lift start up. After a few moments I felt the heavy, low-frequency hum of the mechanism in the pit of my stomach, and I started to descend. The shaft spiraled downward and right at an angle of sixty degrees. As my face bathed in the flashing yellow light of the warning lamps along the walls, I considered Catherine Shepard. It’s about our little matter. That was how the doctor had put it to his visitor. Meeting Shepard might help me find out what Ackroyd and his guest had been discussing, perhaps even who the guest was.
Gravity pressed me into my seat. The lift stopped. Beyond the steel door with its royal coat of arms, flanked by the lion and the unicorn, was the parking garage.
“You must be Catherine Shepard.”
I extended my hand. We were in the access lobby, observed from behind a large bulletproof window by soldiers with submachine guns.
She looked to be in her early thirties—no, twenty-eight or twenty-nine. A stunning brunette, yet the roots were blonde. She must have colored her hair to look professional. Perhaps she felt blonde hair would be a career millstone for an intelligent, capable woman. Personally, I was disappointed; blondes can be so fetching. Then again, I wasn’t averse to brunettes. The most important thing is whether or not the woman is beautiful, and whether or not there are hard feelings afterward. Women are at their best when complications are kept to a minimum. This makes married women ideal. But I digress.
“I’ve always wondered what you’d be like,” she said. She looked me up and down about as carefully as I had done with her. Perhaps “scanned me” would be more accurate.
“You can address me as Commander, at least while we’re here. Did you see me on the transcription table with my eyes popping out of my head?” I smiled and she finally shook my hand.
“Yes. My job is to monitor the stability of your streaming data.”
“Meaning into my brain?”
“Yes, from storage to your preformatted subconscious.”
“I’d like to try streaming into you sometime.” This was just the kind of comment she would expect. She smiled with pleasure.
“I feel as if I’m looking at your data, Commander.”
“Are you always watching my thoughts?”
“Just your latencies. The data in storage, not what we’ve deployed to you. It’s what I do. Shall we go to my office?”
She led the way down a maze of corridors that might have been designed by an obsessive-compulsive with a fear of being followed. The gloomy furnishings were apparently unchanged since the 1970s. Here and there asbestos insulation had been stripped away and air ducts and wiring had been replaced, but the gloomy, decaying smell of Cold War and old hospital clung stubbornly to every surface. Greenish-blue tile and exposed concrete. A cross between a fallout shelter and Bedlam.
“Not the most cheerful working environment,” I ventured.
“It’s just like you.”
“Come again?”
“A relic of the past. Green tiles. The institutional smell. The exposed concrete. All of this is in your DNA. You are a product of systematized paranoia, a child of the Cold War.”
She suddenly stopped at a door with a tiny window that looked straight out of a psych ward.
“Here we are.” She opened the door and gestured. I stepped inside. It looked like an examination room. “Now what was it you wanted to talk about?”
She shut the door and took the psychiatrist’s position behind her desk. I was feeling increasingly like a patient.
“You called Dr. Ackroyd the evening before he died.”
“That’s true.”
“Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”
“Other than you? No, not before this.”
“I’m not surprised. No one was paying attention.”
She shrugged. “To what?”
“To the fact that you called Ackroyd. What were you planning to tell him the next morning if he hadn’t flown off the motorway?”
“I don’t understand. Wasn’t that an accident?”
I pulled out my mobile phone and played the enhanced audio of the call. She looked uneasy. If she felt uneasy now, she was going to be more so very shortly.
“You and the doctor. This was recorded on our secure line. It seems this was Ackroyd’s last communication.”
“But what does this have to do with the accident?”
“You can answer that yourself. You wanted to tell Ackroyd something. He was discussing the same topic with someone there in his study. The question is, what were you going to tell him?”
“It must have been a colleague. Perhaps one of his senior scientists was visiting.”
“The only person who visited Ackroyd that evening was a courier delivering a package. He was in and out of Pangbourne Estates in under five minutes. You know the place, I presume? Fenced in, with round-the-clock security? The guards are ex-military. Gracious living behind the razor wire. Cameras everywhere. The courier was tracked the entire time he was inside. All he did was make his delivery and leave.”
“Then the doctor was alone in the house.”
“You heard the playback. It was clear enough. Ackroyd had his hand over the receiver, but you heard him talking to someone. Someone else, not the courier, was with him that night. Someone who could enter the house without being seen by security, even without being caught by one of the cameras.”
She began trembling visibly. “Then who was it?”
“A professional. Someone in my line of business.”
Silence. The noise from the air duct was suddenly noticeable. My country, a nation of ducts. Not only underground, but everywhere you looked, as common as walls and roads. One could hardly escape the muffled booms from the depths and the occasional bonging of flexed metal, like sound effects for avant-garde cinema.
“It’s just … Well, I’m not sure if you should hear this,” she said finally. The hollow booming from the duct seemed to fill the room.
“The Director has authorized me to access whatever information is required for this investigation. You’re free to tell me everything.” I grinned.
“I didn’t mean that. What I meant was … it’s about you.”
“But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re responsible for maintaining and operating everything connected with me. Doing the research. It’s not surprising. Quite honestly, I’d rather not picture you and the doctor discussing anything unrelated to work.”
I smiled, but my little jest didn’t have the intended effect. Shepard seemed not to want to look at me. Her gaze kept flitting nervously around the room, anywhere except toward me. Finally she seemed to tire even of this and met my eyes.
“Have you ever noticed yourself blacking out, Commander?”
I frowned. What was this about?
“We saw indications of it after the second transcription. ‘Two’ wasn’t aware of it, but there were major gaps in his returns. Noticeable inconsistencies, and more than a few obvious fabrications. At first my predecessors suspected he was covering something up. Perhaps the KGB flipped him and he’d gone double. The investigation turned up nothing, but with Angleton and his paranoia about moles in the CIA, we had a rough time of it.”
“That was in the seventies. James Angleton couldn’t tell an enemy from his best friend. He was paralyzed with suspicion.”
“Some of the committee wanted to shut down the program until we could understand why you were having these attacks of amnesia.”
“Amnesia? Hold on, I
don’t remember any amnesia attacks. You know what I mean.”
“Yes, we carefully edited the data and reestablished consistency. What we realized was that each transcription was making the problem worse. But we also realized that they weren’t amnesia attacks at all.”
“Then what were they?”
She was silent again. I waited for the wheels to turn.
“Dr. Ackroyd had developed … a hypothesis. A theory about what was happening in your brain to cause the attacks. Or should I say, what wasn’t happening.”
“You’re out of my depth.” I could feel the initiative passing out of my hands. I was no longer in control of the situation.
Far back in my mind, alarm bells were ringing. It was dangerous to hear any more. My heart was hammering in my chest. I felt my forehead, wondering whether I’d find cold sweat. No worries. Fear hadn’t shown its hand—yet. But I had to hear more.
“My research and responsibilities cover data streaming, as I told you. Dr. Ackroyd asked me to compare the data we streamed in the past and look for discrepancies. In other words, to see if there had been any corruption or dropouts in your data. As time goes on, you do have new experiences. Therefore the data we hold keeps growing. It never occurred to us that the sheer volume of the transcription might override certain basic neural functions.”
“So you wrote a program to find out. You mentioned it when you called Ackroyd.”
“Yes, that’s the task Dr. Ackroyd set for me. We call it a differential data scraper. It’s a software agent that trawls your data embodiment, searching for text we know should be there, but isn’t. Like a pig that sniffs for signs that truffles are missing, instead of for truffles themselves. It took more than a month to run its course after we released it into the data.”
“What did it find? Which part of me was missing? Don’t say patriotism or a sense of humor.”
She forced a smile. “Your consciousness.”
“My consciousness?” This was surrealistic. I laughed in her face. But she didn’t share my sentiments. She just kept peering at me rather sadly.
She was not joking.
“I don’t understand. My consciousness is here, now. I’m aware of my surroundings. I’m thinking how nice it would be to sleep with you if circumstances were different. I’m conscious, and I’m standing up!”
I shouted and jumped spontaneously out of my chair. Shepard’s cheeks twitched and her eyes brimmed with tears.
“Oh, dear. I knew I shouldn’t have told you. What am I going to do?”
I paced the room nervously. “Just keep talking. I need to hear the rest of this ridiculous story.” I brought my face about eight inches from her lips. I could smell the perfume she had used that morning rising faintly from her neck. I was conscious of it. I was conscious of the blush she’d applied over her cheekbones.
“You’ve gone too far to stop now. I’m here, I exist, I’m conscious. Finish your idiotic explanation of why I have no consciousness.”
“Well, yes, you see, it started with Libet. Did you ever hear of his experiments?”
“No.”
“Dr. Benjamin Libet. An American neurophysiologist. I’ll try to explain. He put electrodes on his subject’s heads and simultaneously tested them for three distinct neural events. First he identified the moment when the subject decided to move some body part. It doesn’t really matter, but let’s say a finger.”
“What was the second event?”
“The moment when the subject’s brain prepares to initiate the movement. We call it readiness potential. The third event is when the muscles that move the finger are finally activated. But when Libet analyzed the results, he found something that turned the world upside down.”
“It still seems rather right side up to me.”
“That’s because no one wants to accept the implications. You see, the subject’s brain was preparing to move his finger before he decided to move it.”
“Come again?”
“It was undeniable. You would expect the subject to will the movement, then for neurons and muscles to implement the decision. But before you decide to move your finger, your brain is already preparing to do just that.”
“What a load of nonsense.”
“Unfortunately it was verified many times in the seventies and eighties. The results are quite indisputable, though the interpretations differ. Some say it proves free will is an illusion. Another interpretation is that the ‘will’ simply permits or vetoes what the brain proposes. Some argue that the experiment is too narrow, that the workings of the human will are too complicated to be measured by such a simple procedure.”
“But if the brain acts before the conscious mind decides, how can we not notice what’s going on?”
“Well, suppose I slap your face. You feel pain, but the sensation isn’t instantaneous. It takes about half a second—it depends on the part of the body, of course—for a pain stimulus to transit the nerves and reach the brain. But it seems as if you feel pain at the precise instant your cheek is slapped. You ‘feel’ that the slap and the pain occur simultaneously. But that’s only because your brain is editing the timeline, so you perceive the slap only after your brain registers the pain. The brain synchronizes the awareness of one moment to another awareness of a different moment. That means the ‘present’ we perceive is not the present at all. The brain processes vision, taste, touch, pain all at different speeds. Just like a computer, the brain requires finite amounts of time to create a unified awareness out of the sensations impinging on us from moment to moment. It takes these disjointed inputs and creates the illusion of ‘now,’ the illusion of the present moment. This function is an aspect of what we call consciousness.”
“Then consciousness is simply a dream? What we experience is just the movements of a body being manipulated like a puppet?”
“No, of course not. Consciousness can make judgments and control behavior. But quite a bit of what we do requires no consciousness at all. Human beings aren’t aware of everything they do. A finger striking a keyboard. Each footstep along a road. These are just examples, but a lot of research is going into studying complex activities that aren’t completely mediated by conscious awareness, like playing a musical instrument.”
“Then what about this? Penetrating the KGB or a criminal organization. Making contact with a double agent. Stealing a load of important secrets from your enemy. Don’t all of these complicated maneuvers require conscious awareness?”
“No. They don’t.” She looked so conscience-stricken I had to laugh. A very dry, brutal laugh.
“Especially in your case—”
I cut her off. “My case?”
“You died. You were transcribed. You’ve experienced the same situations repeatedly. Not only do you have a God-given gift for espionage, you’ve honed it for decades. The more you experience—the more data we have that captures your behavior—the more your brain can operate without conscious awareness. The brain is parsimonious. Consciousness is costly. The brain is focused on survival and has little need for consciousness of behaviors that can be automated. In other words, by living your life over and over again, you’ve become too much yourself.”
“Too much myself …”
“In a sense. Your consciousness is less and less necessary for the behaviors that make you, you. You can order a martini shaken, not stirred, and not need to be aware of it. Each time we transcribe you, your brain automates more of your behavior. Gradually, your brain is reducing the scope of your mind. That was Ackroyd’s hypothesis—the cause of your amnesia attacks.”
The more they purified me, the less I needed me. That was Ackroyd’s conclusion. A perfected self has no use for consciousness.
The bottom had dropped out of my world.
My legs felt about to fold up under me. Don’t play me for a fool. The job of bone and sinew is to keep me standing. The gr
ound under my feet may be cut away, but I won’t submit to fear. It was a struggle, but I stayed on my feet facing Shepard.
“Why did you call Ackroyd?”
“I was going to tell him that we had the data to prove his hypothesis. Though really, I think he was expecting it.”
always have an escape plan
An epitaph carved on a tombstone. The tombstone of a man who was once my friend.
“I’m afraid.”
I couldn’t have said this to anyone but him, and even then, only because he was in his grave. Had he been alive, not even the threat of death could have driven me to utter those words, though I knew that one day death would come to collect me.
“I’m not afraid to die. Others will follow me. I’m afraid that I’m already dead, that the man standing here confessing to you is an empty shell. I seem alive, but I’m not.”
A friend of mine, a man in the French service, once told me, “You Englishmen are a strange lot, like those trick boxes one can’t begin to know how to open.” At the time, I—the Original—had just finished an assignment and had found myself pondering the transience of the world, the difficulty of distinguishing right from wrong, and the nature of my occupation. When I mentioned this to him, the Frenchman took an interest and began probing me for details. I still remember the last thing he said to me. “Don’t be human. It’s better to be a machine.”
It’s hard to be philosophical when you’re losing your very soul. My French friend was right. Machines have no soul.
“The fact is”—Caroline Shepard had told me—”there’s no way for us to be certain you are conscious just by looking at you. Perhaps if we put you into an fMRI machine and monitored you night and day we could be more certain. But in this room, or out on the street, as long as your actions are characteristic of you, as long as your body keeps outputting your typical behavior, there’s no way for us to know whether or not you have a consciousness.”