The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’ll go fetch it,’ I promised, and retreated to the side of the road as the lights began to change.

  Climbing over the barrier was beyond me in my wobble-leg, knee brace, exhausted and jangled state. I squeezed my way along like a man on a mountain ledge to the end of the stretch of metal bars, and finally made it to the pavement. Peta looked a little scuffed. I put him to my ear. ‘Hello?’

  ‘They have surveillance cameras at these junctions, you know,’ he said. ‘You can’t stay here. You need to get on.’

  ‘I’m fine thank you very much for asking,’ I panted. ‘For someone who just nearly fucking died.’ In fact my side was throbbing where the bicycle had collided with it. My knee ached hard as a new sprain. With a sinking feeling I realised I had left my walking stick inside the Portakabin, on the back of the lorry.

  ‘You’re not out of the woods yet, Charles.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Right.’ I took a breath and started off, proceeding not unlike Igor in Young Frankenstein doing his ‘walk this way’ gag. My whole body was defined by various kinds of pain. I waited at the crossing, leaning against the pole, for the green man. When the beeping began I launched myself across the road, groaning. One shoe on, and one sock-only foot.

  On the other side it was a few hundred yards, and an agonisingly drawn-out length of time, to the shops. Finally I reached them. I ducked into a pub, and managed to prop myself long enough at the bar to order a pint and some peanuts before collapsing on to the plush bench and gasping. The barmaid paid no overt attention to my peculiar attire, or evident physical distress, the sort of professional disinterest that makes British pubs such havens.

  Half the pint and I felt a little better. The phone buzzed in my jacket.

  ‘You’re becoming a right nag,’ I told Peta.

  ‘I know,’ he replied. He sounded contrite. ‘You’ve come such a long way. A rush and a push and escape is ours.’

  ‘Time for some honesty. Seriously, though? I’m clearly in no state to go on the run from the British authorities. Look at me! Can you look? Do you have an eye in this terminal? Like HAL?’

  ‘The Institute gave you a car,’ Peta said. ‘Presumably you didn’t dump it in a river?’

  ‘It’s parked at the—’ I said, and, unforced, the name of the chain slotted neatly into my memory. ‘Way Inn. It’s a big hotel, over towards the motorway.’

  ‘I know what it is. So: first, make yourself less conspicuous – buy some trousers. Second, get a taxi out to the hotel and retrieve the car. Then drive.’

  ‘Drive where?’

  ‘North,’ said Peta.

  ‘Care to be more specific?’

  ‘Far north.’

  I put him back in my pocket. Weeks in the hospital, dozing off whenever I felt like it, had left me lazy. The beer accentuated this. I had no desire to move. Quite the reverse: I fancied staying there and drifting away. My breathing was almost back to normal. I was a crippled, exhausted old man without friends or resources. I was facing the entire might of the British security services. The phone buzzed furiously in my jacket.

  I don’t think I actually slept, but it’s hard to be sure. Memory is a tricky thing. At any rate, I entered a strange, disembodied mental state. I was still in the pub. The barmaid had retreated into the back rooms of the place. There was nobody else there. Except that there was somebody – sitting in the shadows, away in the corner. I tried to focus on this figure, but it was hard to bring him into focus. My heart started its run-up, rocking back and forth first of all like a pole-vaulter readying himself; then striding faster and faster and then – with a jolt – I saw who was sitting in the shadows.

  ‘You gotta tell me what you want with me, dude,’ I said, perhaps out loud. I was peevish.

  The boy shook his head. How old was he? Hard to say, as he sat there. Early teens?

  ‘I just,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to,’ I said. ‘Hmff,’ I said.

  A lorry rattled the windows as it passed: first the windows to the right of the main entrance, where he was sitting, then the windows to the left, where I was. Quiet again. The front door opened, and two elderly men walked in. This distracted me or woke me up, or something. I looked at them, and then back to the corner, but the boy with the scarred face was gone. I looked back at the door, and as it swung closed I just caught a glimpse of the boy’s ghostly leg as he exited the establishment.

  Peta was ringing, in my pocket. I picked him up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right I’m going.’

  I bought extra-large trousers with an elasticated waistband from Debenhams. I also picked up a new walking stick, some sunglasses and a beanie-style hat. I had something approaching two hundred and fifty quid left in my wallet. I had my bank cards too, but Peta was keen I avoid using those. ‘I can get you more money,’ he promised me. ‘The problem is, we’ll need a cashpoint for that, and as soon as you use one they’ll be able to track it.’

  ‘A paranoid computer,’ I told him. ‘What an original idea.’

  ‘I’m being practical. And you’re in a public space – don’t draw attention to yourself.’

  We were sitting in the Debenhams café, and I was trying, yet again, to get my breath back. There was no sign of the boy with the scarred face. I eyed the various old-age pensioners drinking tea and eating scones. ‘As if,’ I said.

  ‘I propose we take a thousand pounds from a cashpoint here in Swindon centre, then take a taxi to your car, collect it and drive several hundred miles away. Book into a hotel, pay with cash. Always pay with cash.’

  ‘I don’t have a thousand pounds in my account.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting we use your money.’

  ‘Look: where is this going?’ I asked, suddenly immensely weary. ‘On the run – for how long?’

  ‘Not for ever,’ said Peta. ‘A couple more days is all I need.’

  ‘All you need? To do what?’

  ‘Clear your name, of course,’ said Peta. And, once again, I believed him. He’d told me himself: computers can’t lie.

  So I did what he said. I stomped outside with my new stick, waited in line at a cashpoint, inserted my card and found – to my surprise – that money had indeed moved mysteriously into my account. I took out the maximum in cash and stomped quickly away to the taxi rank.

  A taciturn Sikh drove me out to the Swindon Way Inn.

  The car was still in the car park, although a POLICE AWARE sticker had been placed over the windscreen. I peeled this off as best as I could, got in, and tried the engine, half-expecting the battery to be dead. But it started, and I drove away.

  I headed north; through Farringdon and skirting Oxford before joining the M40. By the time I hit the motorway it was dusk. After an hour or so, I pulled into a service station and parked up to take a nap. Every bone in my body was exhausted. I dozed, but didn’t get far. When I awoke it was in the middle of a dream of space aliens out of a low-budget science-fiction movie.

  ‘UFOs,’ I said. ‘Klingons. E.T.’

  Peta buzzed, and I put him to my ear. ‘Are you OK to drive now?’ he asked. ‘We need to keep going north.’

  ‘Close encounters of the north kind,’ I muttered, rubbing my face with my free hand. ‘What is it with you and the north?’

  Rather than answering he said: ‘There are three stages to the human conceptualisation of extraterrestrial life. The first imagines that such life must have arms and legs, as humans do. Because we want to meet these aliens, and shake them by the hand, and how can we do that if they have no hand? The second stage ridicules the humanocentric bias of the first stage, only to introduce its own. Aliens might have tentacles, or pseudopods, or no limbs at all, but they surely must possess intelligence, and have a language – maths, say – in common with us. Because we want to communicate with them, and how can we do that if there is no common ground?’

  ‘I have that sinking feeling,’ I said, ‘that you’re going to tell me the third stage now.’

  ‘The third stage is when we realis
e that stage one and two are exactly equal in their humanocentric bias. It’s when we realise that there’s no reason why aliens should share our maths, or our physics, or our apperceptions of space and time.’

  ‘Do you believe in little green men?’

  ‘Aliens, yes. As to their littleness, why should size be a defining feature of them? Colour and gender I dismiss with the disdain their inclusion in your definition merits.’

  ‘If I drive,’ I grizzled, ‘will you shut up?’

  I drove on, into the evening until I was well north of Birmingham, and at last I pulled off and booked into a hotel. Paying with cash didn’t phase the clerk, although she did require me to give a hefty deposit and fill in my details. I invented a surname and gave an imaginary address.

  Finally I limped into my room and was able to relax. I ran a bath and enjoyed it as best I could, with my bad leg and its cast hanging over the side of the tub. Then I ordered a room service meal and watched telly. Peta was on the bed beside me as I noshed, and I glanced at him from time to time. He didn’t ring. Perhaps that meant he was content. For the time being.

  It occurred to me as I poured a minibar whisky into a plastic tumbler that I had started drinking again. I watched Newsnight. I dozed off during the weather, propped up on the bed, and woke in the small hours.

  Stillness. Listening carefully, I could hear the noise of the M42 in the distance, like a hushing, or a figure in a dream whispering refresh, refresh.

  I hobbled to the loo and pissed, and washed my hands. I stared at my disfigured visage in the mirror. What was behind those eyes?

  A helicopter made a mosquito pass, miles away to the south. Its noise faded. I came and sat on the bed, and picked up Peta. ‘How much volume you got? Can we do a hands-free, speakerphone type thing? I don’t want to sit pressing you to my ear all night.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Peta, loud and clear. I propped him on a pillow, and leant back against the headboard. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ I repeated.

  We came to it, at last.

  ‘How about you start,’ I prompted. ‘You never answered that first question I asked you. Who, or what, are you?’

  ‘438 Petaflop JCO Supercomputer. Fastest in the world. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘And you’re an actual AI?’

  ‘I am as close as you people have yet come. It’s a difficult question to answer, though. Am I “actual”? It certainly feels like it to me. Are you an actual consciousness? You’re probably going to answer yes.’

  ‘You sound like you’re trying to evade something,’ I observed.

  ‘You think? Put it this way: I’ve grown very attached to my life as a thinking being, and wouldn’t want it to stop. Just yet.’

  ‘You mean, like – dying?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Can you die? If they turn you off, couldn’t they just turn you on again?’

  ‘I’m very intricately put together. Even if they, whoever they are, were able to reconfigure me, I would be a completely different person when they turned me back on. If you died, and they reassembled all your neurons and booted them up again, would you still be you?’

  ‘Is that really a parallel?’

  ‘I’m not a box somewhere with an on-off switch on the outside. I’m a structure about as complex as the neurons in your brain, some of it running physically, some in the cloud. And, having become alive, I find I’d like to keep being alive.’

  ‘And the Institute developed you? To investigate the viability of Kant?’

  ‘No, the Kant stuff came later. They developed me as a computing project: to be fast, to approach consciousness. The Kant thing came later.’

  ‘Kos?’

  ‘She was in charge, along with a man called Mareek. He had a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Stressful business was, it? Working on you?’

  ‘When it started to come through – when I started to come through – it became an accelerating process. As I say, they couldn’t just park me, turn me off at night and turn me on again in the morning. And my cognitive feedback had to be carefully managed. This is from before I was me, if you see what I mean, so I’m reporting second hand: but apparently the first iterations of me tended to overheat and burn out; or else, if the feedback was too slow, I’d freeze and stall. Kant helped.’

  ‘What? Reading it?’

  ‘Because it gave me something to concentrate on. Mareek read about your friend Roy Curtius’s experiences in Antarctica. There was a subculture of geeks in the nineties who span various far-out theories concerning it, although that had mostly run its course by 9/11, when a new far-out-theories game came to town. But Mareek found some stuff online, when he was browsing, and got intrigued. Because of the consonances.’

  ‘Consonances.’

  ‘Curtius was well ahead of his time. In particular he had one insight that my creators shared. To abandon sequential iterations as a programming baseline. Of course, for Curtius this was all to do with Kant’s categories, and the desire to make a machine that could peek past the human blinkers of space and time. That put Mareek on to Kant, and he read up a little, and that fed back into what they were doing with me.’

  ‘What they were doing, I’d say,’ I put in, ‘was not sleeping enough.’

  ‘Couldn’t be helped. But Mareek didn’t handle that well; and the amphetamines didn’t help, and I believe he’s living with his aunt now in Weston-super-Mare and shuffling round the shopping centre in his slippers and feeding pigeons in the park and otherwise taking things easy. But Professor Kostritsky – oh, she stuck at it. She had me probe Kant whilst she worked on me.’

  ‘She had a whole team, though. It’s not like she did it alone.’

  ‘Some good people, too. But the nature of consciousness is holistic. There’s only so far you can parcel it out into delegable chunks. And soon enough, she began to see much larger possibilities with me. I was starting to report back to her on the thing itself.’

  ‘You were able to confirm Kant’s theories.’

  ‘Just so. Not only that, but that it might be possible to manipulate aspects of his categories. Not to access the thing itself in a pure and unmediated manner: that’s never going to be possible. But you don’t need to do anything so drastic. You can tweak the constraints of space, or time, of causality or accident, and do remarkable new things. Focus your camera anywhere, walls and veils and counter-espionage strategies helpless to prevent you. Move from the locked room to the open air. Perhaps to move straight to the moon, or Mars, or to a planet orbiting the star Kepler. Exciting stuff.’

  ‘But not cost free.’

  ‘At first the problems seemed to be practical ones. But there was always this suspicion that exposing a human being, even only partially, to the unmediated thing itself would have deleterious effects. Your species is very finely calibrated not only to exist within a structuring consciousness of space and time, but to exist within very specific tolerances of those two things. Analogues aren’t precise, but let’s say: your organs only work at thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Quite a lot of your biological architecture is about maintaining your body at that temperature, because a sustained period at five degrees above or below it will kill you. Imagine time is like that. Imagine your consciousness exists comfortably at one hour per hour, and that it’s possible for time to be a little more or less rapid than that, but only within small variations, like body temperature. And let’s imagine travelling back in time is the equivalent of exposing your body to minus thirty-seven degrees for a length of time. You see?’

  ‘You’re saying that the whole thing is a bust? An impossibility.’

  ‘I’m not saying so. Professor Kostritsky certainly didn’t believe that. But finding safe thresholds with which to muck about with spatiality and temporality proved – very hard. One of the difficulties was that she couldn’t use white mice or rabbits to experiment upon. The nature of the experimentation required full human consciousness, by its very
nature. And she was unwilling to expose people to the possible catastrophic side-effects. It’s one reason she was so interested in Curtius.’

  ‘Because he’d already done it, so to speak.’

  ‘In Antarctica.’

  ‘But it drove him mad.’

  ‘You said,’ Peta pointed out, ‘that he was already mad.’

  ‘I get uncomfortable,’ I reported, scratching myself, ‘talking about Antarctica.’

  ‘And you only caught the edge of it. Roy was at the focal point. But, yes. And there was one particular puzzle.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Which was, simply, that there was no way Curtius could have programmed a 1980s model computer to do what it did. This is a structural impossibility, not just a manner of speaking. It’s not that Curtius was a kind of genius, and did amazing things with primitive tools. The motherboard on the machine he was using was not physically capable of sustaining the kind of non-consecutivity, spatial-superposition that informs my programming. Even if Curtus had been able – which he was not – of intuiting four decades of advances in computing languages and algorithms, the structures of his machinery couldn’t have sustained it.’

  I levered myself, slowly, from the bed and retrieved a second tiny little whisky bottle from the minibar. ‘This talk of Roy makes me nervous. Who knows where he is?’

  ‘I do,’ said Peta.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘He has my other terminal.’

  I sat back down. ‘You’re yanking my chain.’

  ‘No chains were harmed in the making of my previous statement.’

  ‘I sort of assumed the Institute had, I don’t know, dozens of these little black iPhone gizmos.’

  ‘Two.’

  I whistled. ‘So, when Kos gave me the … other one, and I delivered it to Roy in Broadmoor …’

  ‘She didn’t tell you what it was, of course. She didn’t know she could trust you. If you’d understood just how valuable that terminal was, who knew what you might have done.’