by Simon Ings
I tell him, ‘It seems to me there’s still a lot of rain left to fall before civilisation gives out.’
‘The flooding isn’t going to bring things down. I’m not talking about disasters.’
‘No?’
Michel shoots me a look. ‘Since when did disasters have anything to do with the collapse of civilisations? There’s always a flood, a drought, a plague of something. Civilisations deal with catastrophes. It’s why we commit to them.’
‘So why choose this moment to go play Noah in the woods? Christ’s sake, Michel, Agnes—’
‘Thank you for reminding me.’
‘Michel.’
‘I know I have a daughter. Why do you think I’m doing this?’
I push my plate away. ‘Try telling me, Mick. I’ve been a long time in the real world. It’s hard to think my way back into your bullshit.’
‘When civilisations collapse, it’s because they fall out of joint. They deafen on their own feedback. They can no longer imagine themselves.’
This is an insight Michel has wisely – or at any rate cynically – omitted from his commercial fiction.
He says to me, ‘Have you seen what Ralf is doing?’
This I don’t expect. But of course, Michel is still writing, and his writing is still grist to Bryon Vaux’s production mill. Of course Michel will know what Ralf is up to.
‘Broadcast AR.’
Michel’s smile is predatory. ‘Be careful how you blink.’
‘It won’t catch on.’
‘It won’t?’ He leans forward. ‘How will you know?’
It’s not something I want to think about. But it’s another reason, perhaps, why Michel and Hanna have been having such a bad time of it recently. Michel, sneaking off to construct his long-planned redoubt. Hanna with her outpatient’s appointment, her simple procedure, her permanently AR-enabled eyes.
On the way back to Poppy’s house we detour by the river. Or we try to.
‘Where is it?’
Though Michel knows the town better than I do, he’s as startled as I am by this change. ‘Fucked if I know.’
It’s not in flood. It’s not in spate. It’s not even here. It’s been paved over. Canalised. There is no millrace, and no bridge crossing the millrace, just a horseshoe of low stairs and a concrete ramp for prams and wheelchairs, and – where the river used to be – a bicycle lane winds through landscaped parkland. The underbrush and low trees that used to conceal the water have been cleared away and lime-green exercise machines put in their place. It’s nothing like I remember. It’s devastating. In a way I can’t put into words, it’s almost the opposite of what I remember, and as we walk, I can feel the memories of my youth begin to fizz and react in the solvent of this new real. I stare at my feet, afraid of how much of myself I am losing.
The same high, forbidding fence runs around the hotel garden. The lawn is the same but the beds have matured out of all recognition. They stand like eruptions of wildwood in all that close-cropped green. On the lawn, teams of young executives in branded T-shirts and sloppy pants are attempting to build a bridge from one flowerbed to another without stepping on the lawn. There are wooden poles, large, brightly coloured foam cushions, ropes and buckets. It is some sort of team-building exercise, and it seems to be working. At least, there is a lot of laughter.
‘Conrad?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Come on, Conrad,’ Michel says. ‘Let’s go home.’
Up in Poppy’s loft there’s light of sorts – a weak, dusty bulb shining from a socket screwed to a joist. Really the light from the bulb does little more than blend everything into everything else: cardboard, wood, roofing felt. Even the shadows are the colour of dried meat.
Light rises in white columns from the holes Michel has made. These shafts of dusty light do nothing to dispel the darkness; if anything, they make it more intense. I’m trying to orientate myself, but it seems to me that the holes are far too close together. If this is a hole in the living room ceiling, how can that be a hole in the dining room? The bungalow has always felt small, but this is ridiculous. Up here, you can move from room to room in a single stride.
Because the boxes are so heavy, Michel has been decanting their contents, balancing boxes and plastic-wrapped bundles on the rafters.
There’s a box full of toys. A metal dumper truck, heavy as a bastard. A pair of binoculars in a leather case – I suppose they must have been his father’s. In a plastic carrier bag I find an old film camera – Michel’s, confiscated by his mum when the school discovered him taking photographs of his elderly clients. Bit by bit I bring the stuff down. I try to interest Mick in keeping some of the toys and bits and pieces for Agnes. Agnes. Agnes this and Agnes that. I cannot help myself. I am afraid for her. Michel’s redoubt is for her – a bolt-hole for her when the world falls down. The thing is, the Fall will not declare itself. One day, Michel will simply draw a line in the sand and bear her off. ‘Does Hanna know what you’re planning?’
He says, ‘Why don’t you keep these at your place for when Agnes visits? We’ve got enough junk in the house.’
‘Michel.’
‘What?’
‘Does Hanna know?’
He pulls over another box and cuts it open with a knife. ‘You would think so by now.’
‘What does she say?’
Michel picks at the contents of the box. There’s all sorts of stuff in here. Old cigarette cards from the 1950s. Snow domes. Scarves.
‘She told me to fuck off, Connie, if you must know.’
I teeter from rafter to rafter, between boxes and tea chests, to where Michel has put his foot through the kitchen ceiling.
Given the wreck it has made of the room, the hole Michel’s foot has made is smaller than I expected. He’s stamped directly into the light, dislodging and breaking it. To see anything through the hole, though, I have to balance on the joists on my hands and knees. I peer around the metal light housing. It is still just about attached to the ceiling.
Particles of loft insulation are making my eyes smart, but looking through the gap, I see the kitchen laid out below me. The stainless-steel kitchen sink stands directly in front of the window, reflecting light entering from the garden. To the left of the sink is the fridge, and on top of the fridge is a radio. The fridge is next to the back door. The left-hand side of the door frame sits flush with the wall of the pantry.
I thread my way under a support, steadying myself against the A-frame. I kick a hole in the ceiling where the lavatory should be. My foot comes through short of the door, and too much to the left. I’m off by at least a yard.
I move again, hunker down against the frame, and dig through the loft insulation with the toe of my shoe. I find the ceiling and press, steadily and gently. The plasterboard does not crack; instead it crumbles against the retaining pins. The bathroom ceiling gives on one side, and grit and dust falls through the gap. That sound again: a rain of sand.
Light fans obliquely through the loft.
I toe the ceiling again and the whole thing gives way. Michel climbs up the ladder and comes over and together we stare into the bathroom. The ceiling has come down in one piece, shattering against the cabinet, the sink, the bathtub, and the windowsill.
Soon the ceilings are completely destroyed, smothering everything in filth and felt, particles and plaster. We climb down the ladder and explore. Every room looks like every other now – impossible to make out which room is which, or what each room is for. They aren’t even rooms any more, just spaces marked out by walls whose tops are just too high for us to touch – the walls of a maze.
Movement is hard because of the amount of felt, plaster and filth we’ve brought down. We pick our way between the larger pieces and stir the rest with our feet, seeking the familiar terra firma of carpet, floor tile and floorboard. But the mind cannot retain vanished geographies, and we find ourselves adapting to this new terrain. We crush the wood and plaster we’ve brought down to create narrow paths of p
ulverised stuff, and bit by bit, as our paths sink below the level of the wreckage, they come to represent a convention as incontrovertible, in its way, as the convention formerly established by walls and doors.
We take off our shoes. We take off our socks. In theory we have the freedom of all the space we have imagineered. Still, we stick obediently to the interlocking trails of our ephemeral redoubt.
We take off our clothes.
We find Poppy’s bed and we use it.
On and on like this. We are committed now.
NINETEEN
A year later.
Picture it: in the hills outside the capital, Ralf is eating çig köfte with Bryon Vaux.
Picture it: their favourite eating house. The walls of the dining room are decorated with antique blue tiles depicting water mills and mosques. The table candle casts a greasy sheen over Vaux’s almost-convincing eyes.
A while ago, with his purchase and restructuring of Loophole, Vaux threw Ralf a ball. It is doubtful that Vaux has had any idea, until this evening, of just how far Ralf has run with it.
Ralf is mid-pitch, deep in his argument for massively increased funding. He wants Vaux to help him bring to birth the next stage in the evolution of Augmented Reality. He says, ‘What makes a sense? What makes sight “sight”, smell “smell”?’
He might have handed his employer a package of pornography, the way Vaux’s mouth has set. The tension finds its way even to his fingertips; Ralf watches in dismay as Bryon Vaux bends and dents the photographs. Blind dogs, their eye-sockets fibre-opticked into satellite TV. Monkeys flayed and grafted to a newsfeed. Dolphins whose only water is the shipping news.
Entrepreneur, billionaire, icon of the new world order, Vaux has been diversifying his portfolio. He no longer devotes his energies solely to the entertainment business. Entertainment is a spent force, or so he reckons. Enwrapment – that’s the next thing. Captivation. Rapture.
Ralf is his pilot through the coming media storm. A good choice – Ralf has always had his eyes on the big picture. (‘I have lots of ideas,’ he once confessed to me. ‘I just don’t know how to rate them.’ I’d lay money he is not so naive any more.)
‘Briefly,’ Ralf begins, ‘there are three components to any sensory perception. First, a physical phenomenon – electromagnetic radiation, say. Second, a responsive organ, in this case an eye.
‘Of course,’ he continues, warming to his theme, ‘evolution has been pretty parsimonious about what she lets us see of the world. And every sighted animal, according to its specific survival needs, accesses a different portion of the spectrum. None of us – no species – gets the full picture.’
Evolution by natural selection, by Ralf’s measure, scrapes barely a couple of stars. Design’s the thing. Genius beats genetics hands-down, every time. With Vaux’s money at his back and a travel budget that has had him rub shoulders with the best and brightest splicers on the circuit, Ralf has been winning notoriety – the Da Vinci of vivisection.
There is something curious about Ralf’s style of delivery tonight – and no wonder, since his late-won eloquence is pulled daily from self-help manuals and crash-courses in public speaking. His pedantry has a saving, surreal quality. ‘Every sighted animal’ is very good.
But Vaux’s plastic eyes give nothing away. ‘You said three elements.’
‘The third component of sensory perception is the brain. Dedicated areas of the brain take the data received by the organ of sense, and search it for pattern and order. From that comes the model.’
‘The model?’
‘Your model, my model, of what the world is like. We only have models, Mr Vaux. From the little data granted us, we extrapolate a model of the world. This we call “reality”.’
Vaux picks up the photographs again. He imagines, perhaps, that Ralf’s explanations may have normalised them. Vain hope – he paws clumsily through the glossies and comes up with a German Shepherd, its eyes wired to a university mainframe.
‘We wired him as a pup,’ says Ralf, ‘before his eyes could see. Dogs are born blind. We gave him other eyes, and he grew into them.’
‘The dog adapted to the feed?’
‘Quite well.’
‘Quite well?’
Ralf shrugs. ‘We feed it raw data from the National Weather Centre. Whenever he feels a big storm on the way he starts barking.’
Vaux shakes his head – whether from wonder or confusion or dismay, Ralf (being Ralf) cannot tell. ‘A kludge, I admit,’ Ralf persists, nervous now. ‘The new neuroplastics give better results. With them, we can build new centres in the brain. New optic lobes, for different kinds of eyes.’
Vaux knows nothing of the thefts from Ralf’s home, from his car, and from the atelier he maintains in a piece of family property just across the road from Loophole’s old club.
Nor is he ever likely to. The thefts are a serious embarrassment for Ralf. That he ever borrowed such valuable and commercially sensitive kit for his own use is obviously a sackable offence. That he left it lying around unsecured for any passing street-thief or housebreaker to steal could well have Vaux suing Ralf for everything he has ever paid him, ‘Chief Imagineer’ or not.
It is Ralf’s own fault. Ever the tinkerer, he has never quite shaken off the feeling that he can achieve more by himself than he can while sitting in state in the bosom of some well-appointed science palace belonging to Vaux.
The thefts were not subtle affairs. Ralf surely guesses that the thieves knew what they were looking for. He surely suspects us – but he does not let on.
Meanwhile Michel and I find our own uses for Ralf’s aerosolised AR.
We hit the pharmacy without warning: surgical, bloodless and fast.
Wherever the night manager moves, walls tilt, floors vanish, ceilings fall. She comes to rest at last in the corner of the dispensary, barely moaning now, her vestibular system folding up under our psychoelectric assault.
Nausea has overcome her fear. She heaves miserably, spittle dribbling from her chin. She has nothing left to bring up. She has her eyes squeezed shut, but this is no defence against the images being hammered, seventy taps a second, directly against her visual cortex.
And what a cornucopia is here! Medicines and unguents enough to tide us and our loved ones through the Fall. We wander at leisure among the stacks. Pethidine and methadone. Methylphenidate and fentanyl. Oxycodone. While Michel fills the rucksack, I go keep watch by the window. I’ve repelled one unexpected visitor already. After a few minutes’ farcical dancing, trying to open a door that was not there, and falling, repeatedly, through a wall he kept trying to lean upon, our visitor has pretty much given up on reality. He’s kneeling now on the lawn outside the clinic, mouth drawn in a scream he will never utter, because it is possible, even at this remove, for me to paralyse precise channels in his vagus nerve. It is daunting that, after years of more or less constructive effort, I should once again be reduced to playing toy soldiers. Making them march. Making them fall. I might be back at the hotel, watching Dad’s soldiers picking their way across the back lawn.
Talking of which.
I weave my fingers in the air, tapping unreal keys, extending my field of influence. The authorities cannot be far away; better that I immobilise them while they are still out of pot-shotting range.
We change number plates twice before attempting to leave the city. We encounter no obstacles. The traffic is light. On the motorway, we listen to the radio. There is still no government. Compromise after compromise, pact after pact has collapsed before the region’s escalating economic and environmental problems. Tensions are running high and foreign interference is making the problem worse. Last night a dozen election observers found themselves trapped in their hotel by a placard-waving mob.
Still, Michel’s millennial interpretations of these events feel excessive to me. For thousands of years, civilisations have dealt with floods and droughts, failed harvests and pests and plagues. Am I so naive to hope that our world might, after all, s
ave itself from itself?
Michel says that collapses happen all at once, and suddenly. I believe this. It does not take long for people to starve.
But when do we start to prepare for the Fall, and how? Michel says we have to become the very thing we fear. That preparing for the Fall brings on the Fall. ‘To survive,’ he says, ‘we may have to hate ourselves.’ The boot of our car is a measure of his seriousness. Packed in party bags of ice: paromomycin, ertapenem. Tamiflu. Meropenem, combivir, cefprozil, ceftobiprole. Every stripe of penicillin, polypeptides, quinolones.
I turn us off the motorway, west, towards Michel’s redoubt. Soon enough the road dwindles to a single lane over which high hedges impend, the canopies of trees touching here and there to make green tunnels.
The road disappears under pools of standing water. The steering wheel pulls oddly as I gun us through. I find a patch of hard-standing in lee of a barn and park up. ‘It’s deeper now.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll have to walk from here.’
We change our footwear, pull on galoshes and tug thick jumpers over our Ts. While Michel packs stolen medicines into my rucksack, I go around securing the car. Steering lock. Wheel clamp. I check the padlock securing the petrol cap. None of this would deter a determined thief, but hardly anyone lives around here any more and anyway, the fuel crisis is not yet so intense.
It’s been raining, and we’re still in cloud shadow, though coins of greenish light spin and glimmer over hillsides on the other side of the valley. After ten minutes we come to a home-made barrier – a string of orange plastic tape and a hardboard sign propped against an upturned bucket.
FLOOD
Michel holds the string up for me to duck under. The road lies under six inches of water. A wall has come down and there are stones all over the road.
Turning a corner, everything before us is silver – an inland sea. Birds zig-zag over the vanished land. Otherwise nothing disturbs the stillness. There are no people, no animals, no signs of damage or distress, no abandoned vehicles, no machines listing in the mud. The farmers here are used to floods. They have their routines to save their work and their livestock from the water.