The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  Belwether said: ‘Oh Curtius is not in Southampton.’

  ‘He is.’ How helpful I was being! ‘Peta assured me of that.’

  ‘Our best estimate is that Mr Curtius is in Aberdeen, and has been for three months at least.’ She smiled the thinnest smile imaginable. ‘Though he’s proving slippery when it comes to executing the warrant upon him. I’m afraid the algorithm lied to you.’

  ‘Computers can’t lie,’ I said. ‘He told me that himself,’ I said, and in the middle of saying this I went: ‘Shit.’

  ‘Just conceivably,’ Belwether said, ‘the algorithm was acting with impure motives. Conceivably it has been manipulating you.’

  Peta had been adamant that we had to put distance between Curtius and ourselves. All that time he was actually urging me to move into closer physical proximity with him. I felt a rolling, growling sensation in my stomach. He lied when he said he couldn’t lie. Of course.

  Two days and one night I was incarcerated in that place. The first day I was interviewed for however long – one hour, two – by Belwether. Then I was fed and locked away for the night. The cell was reasonably comfortable, and I was very tired. The following day a doctor examined my leg, and I was given an hour of slow, stumbling exercise under the supervision of a physio. Then two women interviewed me for, as far as I could tell in that windowless space, the whole afternoon. This seemed to be mostly a matter of going over the ground of my early astronomical research. They asked me questions about the likelihood of alien life. It seemed to me a non sequitur, until it dawned on me they thought Peta might be in contact with alien life forms. This was boggling to my mind. ‘The fear is,’ one of the women told me, ‘that he might be acting, himself, as a kind of signal beacon, guiding in an invasion force of alien life forms.’ She laughed when she said this. ‘It sounds a little crazy, I know. But there are reasons for taking the danger seriously. Did it ever talk to you about alien life?’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  The other woman smiled. ‘Did you and he ever discuss the Fermi Paradox?’

  ‘We didn’t.’

  ‘Not talk about astronomy? Outer space? Little green men and women?’

  ‘We,’ I said, ‘didn’t.’

  ‘A significant proportion of the records we’ve been able to retrieve from the Institute,’ said the first woman, ‘had to do with the use they put the AI to as far as lensing ultra deep space observation.’

  ‘He never talked about that,’ I repeated.

  ‘Our intelligence is that the AI you know as “Peta” was obsessed with alien life. With the Fermi Paradox and the existence, or non-existence, of alien intelligence.’

  ‘Get out of town.’

  ‘No, really. It dominated his first year or so of self-sustained thought. He would talk with his programmers and others in the Institute about it. Indeed, to begin with he talked about almost nothing else.’

  ‘Not with me,’ I said. ‘I’m getting bored of repeating it.’

  ‘Very well. So, what did “he” talk about?’

  I looked from one to the other, and from the other to one. ‘Mostly,’ I told them, ‘he talked about God. And Kant.’

  A second night: lying on my bed and attending to the absolute silence. The last moment of calm in my uncalm life. One minute dripping, soundlessly, into another minute. The paradox of describing silence: trying to render wordlessness in words. We employ certain signs only so long as we require them for the sake of distinction. New observations subtract some and add some new ones, so that an empirical conception never remains within permanent limits. It is, in fact, useless to define a conception of this kind.

  The first I knew of Roy’s coming was a series of loud snapping noises, detonations muffled by having to pass through the walls of my cell. To this day I do not know what they signified: gunshots, perhaps; or Roy snapping metal bolts, or pulling doors off their hinges; or displacing air with the suddenness of a thunderclap. I sat up in my narrow bed. Then, through the stillness of night, I heard a loud, unpleasant laugh. I don’t know how he opened the door to my cell; whether he forced it and cloaked the noise, or just used whatever it was he used to untangle the metal innards of the lock. Perhaps he even had a key. At any rate, he stepped through the door and into the cell, smiling as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He was wearing a bulky coat, hood up, artificial fur lining the inside. He was carrying a second such garment over his left arm.

  His greeting to me was: ‘Here. You’re going to need this.’

  I swivelled my legs over the side of the bed. ‘Roy,’ I said.

  He dropped the coat in my lap, took my hand, and helped me upright. I had to clutch at the coat with my free hand to stop it slipping to the floor. The authorities had taken my stick away, so I had to put some of my weight into Roy’s grip. His hand felt thin, cool, but he held me up easily enough, so he was stronger than he appeared. ‘We have to go, Charles,’ he said, and his eyes glimmered with crazy glints.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘On the run, I’m afraid, old friend.’

  ‘Jesus, not again. Look, if you’ve come to kill me, then please just do it here. There’s nothing to be gained by dragging me all over the shop.’

  ‘I’m not the one who’s trying to kill you, Charles,’ said Roy. ‘Come on: I’ll be your valet.’ He helped me into the coat. It creaked as I put it on, and smelt brand new. ‘No shoes?’ he noticed.

  ‘They took my shoes away.’

  ‘That could prove tricky. Ah well, make do and mend, as my old mother used to say. You are at least wearing socks, I see.’ He took my left hand with his right, and my right with his left, and just as I figured we were about to dance ring-a-roses, he—

  —no: not him. Something pushed me. Not a shove to my shoulder or chest, but to my whole body. I went flying, and cried out, terrified that I was going to crash into the walls of my cell and break all my old bones. But I didn’t, of course. There was a powerful stench that might have been sulphur (I’m not sure I know exactly what sulphur smells of), or burned plastic, or something unpleasant. Then my back hit the ground and I slid along damp grass as my legs came up in the air. In motion, gasping and weeping, my legs came right up almost to the point where I was going to topple over my own head. But they didn’t quite reach that apex, and instead they fell back to smack the turf. I slowly skidded to a halt. It took me a while to get my breath back. The sky above me was predawn, starting to pale with the coming of the sun, and light enough to make out my surroundings. Somebody was laughing. I struggled, awkwardly, to a sitting positon and saw Roy lying on his front, giggling like a child. We were in a field. No, we were in the grounds of a large building. Our bodies had drawn fat lines through the dew, darker against the shimmering pale.

  ‘Jesus,’ I gasped.

  Roy helped me to my feet. ‘It’s something like seventy miles an hour velocity for each degree of latitude,’ he said. ‘I did the calculations once. Forgotten the precise figure. Seventy is close enough for government work. Anyway, a whole degree is a bit of a risk. Over land, at any rate.’

  Exactly at that moment, the sun cracked the lid of the horizon with a spike of yellow-orange. I looked and saw that we were on the coast – a northern coastline. ‘Wait,’ I said.

  ‘Hip hop,’ he said. ‘We’ve more land yet.’ He grabbed me and bang!

  —bang! I was somersaulting on sand, rolling and shrieking and thumping hard into what, after I gathered my senses, I clocked as a fat dune. The sea was grinding its mighty white teeth over and over on the restless shingle. Gulls, agitated by the noise and wind of our arrival, hauled themselves into the sky with ratcheting motions of their wings, higher, then higher still. It was very cold. ‘Stop,’ I begged Curtius. ‘Jesus, Roy, you’re going to kill me.’

  He was much stronger than he looked. With one arm he pulled me upright. He grabbed my other arm. I had the briefest glimpse of a boat anchored offshore, with the single cross-haired porthole of its cabin alight, the whole thing moving li
ke a rocking horse. Then the air folded and buckled, and sparks danced in my shut eyes, and I was aware of a great wind, and a lurch that shook my body like a flag.

  I was falling through the wide air, and it was cold as ice cream or death or the absolute zero of space. And Roy was there, his big grinning mouth sweeping up through my field of view. I flinched, and he grabbed me round the waist. We were falling. It was terrifying. He was yelling something, but the burly noise of the wind overwhelmed his words, and bang! – all the breath left my body – my ribs squeezed –and bang!

  Bang!

  Over and over again, the sea writhing below me in cords and indentations of white-capped black.

  We were always falling, and each bang!—

  —bang! lifted us, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t catch my breath, lifted us a little way, to fall again, but the bang!

  —sea was coming closer, and I gasped as hard and quick as I could, because I could see we were about to plunge into the waters. We’d gone a good way north of Scotland now, and the prospect of plunging into the chill northern sea, far from land, was, I knew it, death. We would thrash in the water for a while until the cold froze our muscles and we sank below. Bang!

  Bang! and we were hurtling at an angle down, just missing the peak of purple-black ocean swell, and descending like a ski jumper down the slope of the far side.

  My shoulder struck the surface of the wave. It was rubbery, more like jelly than water, and although the impact pushed my right-hand side a little way into the substance it was gloopy, resistant, and the onward motion had me rolling down and down. Landing separated Roy from me, and he rolled too – tumbling over the tops of the waves.

  Into the declivity and rolling up the sharper-angled face of the next wave, and still not going underneath. Eventually, I stopped, gasping, and lay on my back. The surface of whatever I was lying on was extremely cold. I could feel it through the fabric of my heavy coat. Cold as ice. Colder, even. Yet the sea was not ice, but pliant. I was pressing down into it, although slowly. I rolled, and with a bass-guitar-string thrum I came loose from the jelly. Some yards away I saw Roy, still grinning, making his way over to me. He was a man wading through jelly, his feet going into the matter and yanking free with a bizarrely low-pitched squish.

  ‘The seas are turned to jelly,’ I yelled. In my own head my voice sounded strange, lower-pitched than normal; but the echo that rolled from the great, motionless arching rumble sounded like a huge dog growling in slow motion.

  Roy was at me. He hooked his arm through mine, and bang!—

  We were airborne again: bang! bang! bang!

  Each projection jarred me, shook and crushed me. I lost count: until there was a flashbulb whiteness suddenly below me, and – bang! – white below, and Roy, twisting in mid-air, pulled himself below me.

  We hit the ice at speed: I’ve no idea how fast, but it felt like we’d been thrown from a moving car. Roy, in what (looking back) I can only assume was an act of altruism, swung himself underneath me to take the brunt. The initial landing was skimming along with him as the luge. Then I overbalanced the package. We went on to our sides, separated and the next thing I was rolling over and over and throwing up snowdust like sparks.

  I lay for a while gasping, and sobbing a little. Very quickly the intense cold began to touch me, and I somehow got myself upright. I was certainly bruised: I could feel it. I don’t think I’d broken any bones, but that was scant consolation. Roy’s body was visible in the middle distance, the burgundy of his coat stark against the pale snow. The sky glimmered with a twilight. January near the North Pole, and the midnight sun had finally set; but it was close behind the horizon, and the snowscape glimmered mauve. Visibility was pretty good, actually.

  Very slowly I began hobbling over the ice. It was insanely cold. Each breath scraped into my lungs, passing across the inside of my throat like a cheese grater. I had no beard, and my face soon went dull with the chill. But the worst was my feet. Shoeless, I hobbled in socks over the Arctic ice. At first I lost all sensation in them. Then, each step jarred the numbness and sent needles of fierce agony through the toes and over the arch. Then, more worryingly, they went numb again.

  I got to Roy. He was still alive. ‘What the hell,’ I barked at him, my voice raw, ‘the hell did you do?’

  He lay on his back, and his face was that of a very devil: paler even than his usual paleness, his mouth wide as a panting dog, and the odd little indentations and misshaped aspects of his skull horribly visible in the frame of his thrown-back hood. ‘Arctic,’ he returned, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Why here?’

  ‘I can jaunt where I like, up here,’ he said. ‘The Earth’s rotation is slow, and the relative difference in velocity from place to place accordingly slight. I should probably build myself a palace here, like Superhero-man.’

  ‘Superman.’

  ‘He. The closer to the equator, the more I am limited to lateral motion. But up here I can hop where I like – and you with me!’

  ‘You’re as mad as a hater,’ I said. ‘Or hatter. Either, really.’

  ‘I fear I have dislocated my shoulder,’ he said. ‘Help me up, please.’

  Taking my hands out of my pockets was not pleasant, but I grasped him by his good shoulder and got him up into a sitting position. ‘You seem pretty fucking calm about it,’ I muttered, my teeth bouncing off one another. I disposed myself as well as I could: sitting with the tail of my coat between my arse and the ice, and tucking my good leg in. I couldn’t bend my bad leg far enough to do this, and my posture was not comfortable. I hid my raw hands back in the coat pockets. The sky above was entirely covered with clouds, mauve but faintly glimmering. Around me was a bare landscape, featureless as the unprinted page, untroubled by landscape until the far horizon, where black sawtooth mountains fringed the brighter sky. The ground in between was littered with boulders of various sizes, none very large, every single one pinning down a black oval of shadow.

  I was sitting with my back to the wind; but it was bitter, nonetheless. A steady and icy flow of air pushing against me.

  ‘What happened out at sea? On our way here?’

  ‘I slowed time. Strictly, I increased the friction for both just a little from the frame of time everybody else shares, but it amounts to the same thing. I wouldn’t want actually to dislocate us from the frame altogether. That would have dire consequences!’

  ‘And doing what you did made the Arctic Ocean into some weird jelly?’

  ‘Brownian motion, my friend,’ he said, and sucked air hard through his teeth. ‘Relative to us, the molecules move much more slowly. Harder for us to force them apart, so we sink much more slowly. Presto! We walk on water.’

  ‘Roy,’ I said. ‘Roy, we are going to die here. Roy, you have to take us back. Take us somewhere warm. South again, or at least to a— I don’t know. There must be scientific stations up here somewhere. There.’

  ‘First,’ he said, ‘I have to reset my shoulder.’ He shut his eyes, and appeared to concentrate, but then he let out a grunt of frustration. ‘It’s hard!’ he cried. ‘The pain is very great.’

  ‘Why bring me?’ I said, shivering with the cold.

  ‘Peta,’ Roy said. ‘It took me while to realise it, but he is the devil. Not a. The.’

  ‘You’re the devil, you mean. You’ve brought me here to kill me. You tried in Antarctica, you’re going to finish the job in the Arctic.’ It was hard to get the words out, I was shivering so hard.

  ‘I mean you no harm, my friend,’ Roy insisted, his eyes wide. ‘You and I share something special.’

  ‘You mean me no harm,’ I repeated. ‘You pulled the tendon out of my leg like a piece of wet spaghetti!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, shutting his eyes and gritting his teeth. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Sorry, you mentalist? Sorry?’

  ‘I was hoping to … take you out of the game. I thought you’d rest up for a month or two, and go back to your life. I was trying to do yo
u a favour.’

  ‘You are beyond mad. Favour?’

  ‘Peta. It’s against God’s will. What he can do, distorting the categories of space and time, and all the others. He lied to you.’

  ‘He told me he couldn’t lie, because he was a computer.’

  ‘He’s not a computer, he’s a devil from Hell. And he can lie. And he does lie. He told you that you were running away from me. He told you I was the danger! And all that time he was convincing you to seek me out, without letting you in on the secret. Ah! Ah! I can’t do it!’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘I’m trying to shift space about just fractionally enough to reinsert my shoulder. But the pain is stopping me from concentrating.’

  I thought about offering to try myself, but I had no idea what to do, and I wondered if I might make things worse. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, rubbing myself to stop the shivering. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

  ‘If I could get past the pain,’ Roy said, his voice tight and high, ‘then I could build us a little snow cave. Swing some blocks up and stack them – that wouldn’t be too hard. Nice little igloo. I could speed time, relative to us I mean, and that would make us feel warm. But I can’t, quite. Quite. Ugh! Ugh!’

  ‘Why was Peta trying to bring me into proximity with you?’

  ‘It hurts, it hurts!’ said Roy. He sounded on the edge of tears. ‘Peta’s motivated only by self-interest. That’s the true Turing test, you know. He only wants to survive. He knows that humans consider him dangerous – and with good cause! And he knows that he depends upon physical infrastructure. If we smash his two terminals, he’d lose functionality to the point where he couldn’t access the categories any more. Probably he wouldn’t think any more, in the way he now does. AI-y.’

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

  ‘Needs the two of us together. I was trying to keep us apart. Now look what you’ve done! Tracked me down, across the entire length of the country! I tried to help you, by untying your leg.’

  ‘Untying!’