The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  But he hadn’t gone. He was still there, by the window – nearly invisible, as the light streamed right through him. He was a man-shaped glass of light. Si gasped to see him, at once relieved and horrified. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I went back home for a while,’ he said, and his voice was so faint it could barely be heard.

  ‘Oh good lord, Attar! It’s – drained you.’

  ‘There’s no way,’ he creaked, ‘except that you sweep out a thirty-year period of quantum decision trees – there and back is sixty. It does tend to dilute you.’

  Si came over to him, but didn’t dare touch him. The slightest touch would go straight through him. ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to find out what happens to you,’ he said. ‘I was lying there, in bed, listening to the water in the shower cascading off you, and I thought: I can’t bear not knowing. I knew it would diminish me, but I couldn’t stand the thought that you might die today, or tomorrow. I had to know. So I went and checked the records.’

  ‘Did you have to go so far?’

  ‘It makes little odds. Besides, I needed to go to a time when I know people. To ask them to run the records check. I can’t interact with computers, as I am now.’

  ‘O my poor wanderer!’

  ‘It wasn’t hard to trace your records, or the ones that are public. You do well! You’re still alive in twenty sixty-nine. Beyond that, obviously, I don’t know. But that’s a relief to me – that you’re part of the rest of this whole period.’

  It was a strangely disorienting sensation, to have the parameters of shis life laid out like this. Si put shis wrist to shis mouth, and sucked at the skin, an old nervous tic si had largely managed to overcome. ‘Thanks to you,’ si said, her voice wobbling. ‘Thanks to you saving my life.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear the not-knowing,’ he said, pulling a ghastly face. Then he perked up. ‘But now I do know. I needed to know that you’ll be safe. There’s nothing more important to me, that knowledge. Because I love you.’

  ‘And I love you,’ si said. And then it was time for crying, but it didn’t go on as long as si feared it might. Afterwards si felt cleaner, emotionally; but no happier.

  It was the last day of the Time War. And by evening the whole city was celebrating, and fireworks were going off, and conga lines were dancing through the snowy streets. That night, Attar had to sleep under his own blanket – a filigree sheet that did wonders (he said) with heat retention, and which he had carried with him in his backpack. The duvet was heavy enough to sink right through him. The next day he jumped a little too high, and when he came down his feet went through the carpet. He pulled himself out, gingerly, and went about the apartment as if walking over eggshells.

  They spent the evening talking, watching television. Adonais laughed longer and louder than si could remember doing since si was a child. Attar ate more than his ration of food out of his backpack, ‘Might as well gorge myself,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow,’ Adonais told him, ‘I’ll order meat and vegetables from that speciality shop. We’ll have a proper feast!’

  ‘It’s a deluge-y night, this one,’ he said. ‘I know, because I’ve passed through it three times now. The end of a war, you know. Decision trees grow thicker at such a time.’

  They went through to the bedroom. Rather than touch one another, they took turns blowing air on to their naked bodies. Finally si slept, and dreamed of a wide open white space, where all the souls were gathered. And the space was defined by light, and each soul was perfectly transparent, like one of those species of fish that lives in underwater caves far away from the sun: perfectly transparent hearts and stomachs, lungs and livers, all visible by the faint shimmer they made as they moved. The light was all around them, warm as a summer’s day, clear and bright and clean as a winter dawn. Attar was there, purified even beyond the way he had been. Si was there too, as transparent as he was. In the dream, it was just the two of them, although there were many other souls all about them. And they were standing on a perfectly white plane, like the Arctic ice pack, cleared of all rubble and dunes and smoothed flat. The light was behind them both, and si noticed that the two of them were casting long shadows, but that the shadows were rainbow-coloured, and it was the most beautiful thing si had ever seen.

  When si woke up, shis face was wet. Attar was gone.

  11

  Seek, and Thing

  Existence and non-existence

  By the time I clambered off the ferry Curtius was gone. I didn’t see if he slipped away, if he turned around, as a real, physical, present individual would do, and walked off, or if he simply evaporated. Teleported himself somewhere else.

  Anstruther is a tiny town, with a harbour full of restless fishing boats, pogoing up and down like robots in a slow disco. I stomped up the concrete ferry ramp behind the annoyed Methodist gentleman and made my way along the short row of sea-front shops. I bought a paper. I had set out on the ferry journey months previously. Thirty-nine days had, somehow, passed in the middle of that journey. A man could swim the distance involved in a matter of hours. Yet somehow, in transit from one bit of Scots coast to the other, I’d hopped straight past Christmas and the New Year and into January.

  I put Peta to my ear. ‘Have you been entirely truthful with me, Peta?’

  ‘I’m trying to work out what happened,’ he replied. ‘I’m as puzzled as you are.’

  ‘I saw Curtius – first on the ferry, and then on the quay, here. Are you lying to me? Is he here?’

  ‘Roy Curtius is not here.’

  ‘Then why did I see him?’

  ‘Charles, we have to hurry. We have to move on. Take a taxi to Leuchars: it’s approximately thirteen miles north-west of here. There you can buy a ticket to Aberdeen. Cash!’

  ‘Something seriously messed-up has just happened. Were we in stasis for thrice thirteen days? Were we – Jesus, I don’t know. Were we hovering, over the ocean, frozen in space and time for nearly six weeks, until the ferry slid back underneath us again and we popped back in?’

  ‘Not that,’ said Peta. He sounded agitated. Perhaps he felt actual agitation. Perhaps he didn’t, and some algorithm in his programming somewhere had judged that matching my anxiety with manufactured anxiety of his own was the way to go. I don’t know. ‘Though I don’t know exactly what happened.’

  ‘Some explanation might be nice.’

  ‘When you tangle with time, there are more consequences than just the linear one. We exited and re-entered and now … look, we need to get away. Get to Aberdeen.’

  ‘Why Aberdeen? Isn’t this far enough? What good will the extra couple of hundred miles make?’

  ‘Look, I can’t explain,’ he started to say; and then, almost seamlessly, he said: ‘We need a place to settle for a week or two, a place big enough to get lost in. A place with a properly comfortable big hotel, and shops and so on. You surely don’t want to pitch your tent here? Tent,’ he added, ‘metaphorically speaking.’

  ‘I don’t trust you, Peta,’ I said. ‘You keep telling me Curtius is in Southampton. I just don’t know how you can be so sure.’

  ‘He has the other terminal.’

  ‘Sure, but how do you know Roy hasn’t stowed that in a safety deposit box in Southampton, and got the intercity up here?’

  ‘Because the other terminal tells me he’s there!’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Stop! You talk with it?’

  ‘It is me. We’re two parts of the same consciousness, linked in the cloud. Of course we’re in communication.’

  ‘So I could talk to your other terminal?’

  ‘It’s just me. In a sense you’re already talking to it.’

  ‘Could you hook me up with Curtius? I could have a word with him. Warn him off, maybe.’

  ‘I’m not a mobile phone, Charles,’ said Peta stiffly.

  ‘No indeed. If you were, I’d be able to turn you off.’

  There didn’t seem much point in hanging around Anstruther, so I persuaded a taxi driver to take me to Leuchers, and
there bought a ticket for the Aberdeen train. I resolved that whatever Peta tried to get me to do thereafter I would ignore. I’d take a hotel room and take a few days to think about things. To decompress. The weirdness on the ferry had thrown me – had, indeed, exhausted me.

  I took a window seat, and watched the thin winter rain scratchily mess up the view of north-east Scotland. Greys and dark greens, and my own ghostly reflection in the glass superimposed over it all. Peta buzzed, and, not being alone in the compartment, I put him to my ear.

  ‘I’m tired, Peta,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have a sleep. Please don’t bother me until we get to Aberdeen.’

  ‘Listen, this is important. I’m online again. I was bumped out by the … by whatever happened on the ferry. It’s taken me this long to get on again. And there’s a manhunt. It’s nationwide. There are pictures of you in all the media.’

  None of this really registered with me. ‘I’ll buy a Groucho Marx false nose and ’tache when we get to the city. Leave me alone, now. Let me sleep, now.’

  ‘No! Listen to me. Facial recognition software will have a field day with you! You’ve got a very distinctive face – the scarring, the patterns of scarring make it easy …’

  I put the device away in my jacket pocket.

  I dozed, without really sleeping. There were four other people in the carriage with me. One by one their mobile phones rang, waking me up. One, two, three, four, they all answered their phones – in a couple of cases, looking very puzzled the phone had rung at all – and after they had listened to whoever was ringing them, they stood up and left the carriage. After the last of them had gone, the rocking of the train’s motion soothed me again. I was dead-tired. I was bone-tired. I was soul-tired. None of it felt real. And in that strange liminal state between being properly awake and being properly asleep, I had a muddling sort of epiphany. All the hurrying about the country, the time in hospital, the experience with my leg, the Institute, my years as a bin-man, the time before working as a physics teacher, my abortive academic career. It all unspooled. Maybe it had been an elaborately drawn-out fantasy. I’d had a nervous breakdown. I’d gone mad. I was delusional, living in a complex fantasy realm. In my pocket was a regular mobile phone, bought from a regular phone shop. From time to time I would take it out and speak into it, under the false belief that I was thereby communicating with an intelligent supercomputer who possessed the power to manipulate space and time and was going to bring me directly to God.

  Peta buzzed away in my pocket, and I ignored him. ‘Charles!’ he called, loud enough to be heard from the pocket. ‘Charles!’ The rain upon the wide window of the compartment grew and died away, grew again, like sea-swell. Rice grains shaken in a tambourine, harder, softer.

  The train was slowing up. ‘Charles,’ Peta called from my pocket. ‘Charles! If it was you – on the ferry. If you did that, somehow – then now, now, now is the time to do it again. Charles!’

  ‘Hush,’ I said.

  I opened my eyes. The ghost-boy was there, sitting right opposite, close enough for me to reach out and touch, and clear enough, in focus enough, that he could have passed for an actual boy. A strangely dressed boy; a disfigured boy. The train slowed, and slowed, and then stopped with a final little jolt.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Surely,’ said the boy, his voice low and soft, ‘the deduction depends upon the contingency of the changeable. For it is plain that the hope of a future life arises from the feeling which exists in the breast of every man that the temporal is inadequate to meet and satisfy the demands of his nature. And an unsatisfied nature generates its own futurity, as a fantastical railway engine might be imagined that lays out its own track before it as it rolls.’

  ‘Such future life,’ I said, ‘as can be imagined.’

  The train had stopped. We had arrived at the terminal.

  ‘Falsifiability is a wonderful thing,’ said the boy. ‘But it’s also an adversarial thing. We strive to disprove; disproof doesn’t just fall into our laps. Disproving is an act of agency, not passivity. Yet action and passion are the will and the soul, the two always in dialectical connection. Separate one from the other, and it is hardly surprising that science becomes disconnected from God.’

  ‘Disconnection,’ I said. ‘Now there’s the theme tune to my whole life.’

  ‘Look out of the window,’ said the boy, with a lopsided smile.

  I looked. Beyond the glass was the covered station platform at the end of the line. And crowded around the carriage window, on the other side, were four armoured and helmeted men, each with a rifle and all aimed directly at me. Peta crying out from inside my jacket. ‘Charles! Charles! Charles!’

  I looked back. The boy was gone.

  And the next thing was the yelling of many men, burlying through the carriage doors with guns in their hands, and pulling me from the seat and laying me on the floor, and making my leg cramp and sing with pain, and handcuffing me, and dragging me from the train. Outside, I was surprised to see just how many enforcement officers had congregated in that space. Beyond was a barrier, guarded by regular, unarmed police; and beyond that was a seething crowd of civilians, and television crews, and drones hovering, and the whole madding crowd of curious humanity.

  They took Peta away from me, of course. This was done by a man in a full hazmat suit, poking inside my jacket with a two-foot-long gripping tool, and dropping the terminal into a large padded silver bag, which was immediately sealed.

  They took me outside, where the rain was in the process of turning into sleet and a row of sodden pigeons surveyed the crowd from the guttering, like particularly unimaginatively conceived gargoyles. ‘You’re fucking nicked, my bitcallant,’ somebody shouted, from the crowd. A sort of titter ran around the group and some more people shouted things.

  It was all a bit bewildering, to be honest.

  I was in the back of the van, and driven away, and processed at some homeland security facility on the far outskirts of Aberdeen. One of the officers stripping me, searching me, announced: ‘It’s the end of the road for you, my friend.’ Rrrowad. He added ‘by-the-way’, as if it were a single word.

  I was washed, and my hair was checked for nits. I was dressed in prisonwear, and shown my new home: a twelve-by-twelve-by-twelve cell. After some hours I was brought out, and led down a corridor. I was not handcuffed.

  I was ushered into an interview room, with a huge one-way mirror mounted in one wall just like in the movies. The guard who had brought me stood with his legs apart and his back to the door.

  Sitting at the table was Belwether.

  ‘Our last conversation was rather rudely interrupted,’ she said.

  I sat. ‘Sorry. I had a – thing. To do.’

  For a moment I saw what might have been a twitch. Then she smiled her chilly smile. ‘I still have seizures, you know. I’ve had to relinquish my driving licence.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to add to what I’d said before, so I repeated: ‘Sorry.’

  She regained her poise. ‘Mr Gardner. We really thought we’d lost you in December. Where were you hiding, all those weeks? We really put together a most comprehensive search. State-of-the-art facial recognition plugged into every security camera and net upload. Your facial scarring makes you an easy mark, our experts told us.’

  ‘It’s almost as if,’ I replied, ‘I dropped out of time for a stitch. Or two.’

  She sighed. ‘The last time we met you feigned a kind of idiot ignorance. I take it you have decided to continue that act.’

  ‘When Roscius was an actor …’ I started to say. But I stopped. I was just too tired for this nonsense.

  Belwether put her hands, palms down, on the table. ‘Charles, you do comprehend how dangerous things are? We now have reason to believe the device you carried from Swindon up here is one of two, the workings of which together constitute an aggressively self-perpetuating algorithm that approaches artificial intelligence, contrary to the terms of the 2016 Computing Viruses
(Self-Sustaining Algorithms) Act.’

  ‘Peta,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t call him a virus, exactly.’

  ‘We know what he is. We know he’s not a virus. We had quite a discussion, actually, whether to invoke the anti-terrorism legislation, or the anti-viral. At any rate, it’s a clear and present danger that this computing algorithm can compromise our national security and those of our allies. Our best strategic guess is that it could do worse than that. A lot worse. We are fully mobilised. Authorised at the highest level to take whatever actions may prove necessary to defend ourselves.’

  ‘Peta was worried,’ I told her, ‘that you are planning on disassembling him.’

  ‘That may prove necessary.’

  ‘You don’t think that would be accounted murder?’

  ‘We have taken advice from some of the world’s finest legal authorities. All concur there is no legal protection for artificial modes of intelligence – not yet.’

  ‘Still, that was why I came all this way. He, uh, persuaded me’ – wait: was that how it had gone? Really? – ‘that his life is in danger. From you, and from Roy Curtius. I thought it my human duty.’ Had I thought that? I was tripping myself up. ‘To, you know, help him carry on living. Or something.’

  ‘Curtius destroyed a great deal of computing equipment at the Institute,’ Belwether confirmed. ‘But that hardware had little effect on the functioning of this malignant algorithm.’

  ‘He’s in the cloud.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  ‘I have to say, I don’t know if he was more scared of you or Curtius. Still you’ve got him now – you’ve got one, Roy’s got the other. Unless Roy has already destroyed his terminal. I don’t know,’ I said, thinking out loud, ‘why he hasn’t. Smashed it with a hammer.’

  ‘How do you know he hasn’t?’

  ‘Because Peta – I mean, my terminal – is in contact with the other terminal, down in Southampton.’