by Adam Roberts
Marie said: ‘It’s a bug, so there’s an antidote. Do you have the antidote.’
My head was swimming. ‘You haven’t understood! I haven’t put it over. It is an antidote. It is its own antidote. How do you think human consciousness and intellect started? How do you think we stepped up from the apes? How else but a fever. First we got brain-sick, and the residue was a new mode of thinking. It’s the same. It’s the new evolution. It’s the magic beans from the James book. It’s the begetting of Homo superior.’
I’d talked too much. Had they given me something, to make me talk so much?
People were googling, and checking, and there was a palpable buzz in the room. This information was going out all across the Schäferhund NMA, right now ‘What if it’s King Kong and we give it a mind?’ I said, to nobody in particular. ‘What if it’s fucking Godzilla. Eh? How about a smart, speaking Godzilla?’
A Schäferhund was standing in front of me, holding something with both hands. ‘Did you say God?’ he asked, puzzled, in German.
‘Certainly, yes,’ I replied, in his own language. ‘Why not? My father was from Friesia. I am half-German, according to the old way of figuring it.’ Mein Vater war von Friesia. Was that good German? Ich bin, durch die alte Berechnung, Hälfte-Deutsch. Was that? I don’t know why I mentioned my father, at that moment. But having done so, the thought of him abruptly knocked painfully against the membrane of my memory. This is what his son had come to: physically broken, tied to a chair, surrounded by enemies. He would be grieved to discover what became of me. Perhaps there was something, in the depths of the vexed innards of my mind, that linked the notion of my father and his son to the idea of what was coming, the new-minted giants fashioned of the old NMAs - the way children veer in directions parents did not anticipate and did not desire. But maybe I was thinking nothing so connected.
At any rate the look of puzzlement on the Schäferhund’s face deepened. So perhaps I had not spoken good German.
What he was holding with both hands was a hood, and he lifted this and slid it easily over my head, drawing the string tight it around my neck. Everything went dark. The musty smell of cloth filled my scorched nostrils. Perhaps this hood had been in a cupboard or storage place for a very long time. Perhaps it was a little mouldy, spores caught in the warp and weft.
I could still hear, of course. Around me voices were speaking German very rapidly, and I had to clear my mind to be able to hear. ‘We should shoot him,’ one voice said.
‘No,’ said another. ‘It’ll be a while before we can prioritize a vote on this.’
And somebody else, in a tone that suggested they were reading aloud from a webpage: ‘phenomenal mental states integrate otherwise independent neural activities and the processing of information, although it is unclear which types of information are integrated in the case of selfaware consciousness . . .’
I was not alone, inside the hood. Key-boy was there with me, somehow. He somehow wriggled such that his head tucked in under the drawstring and was there. Or perhaps it was simply that the space under that hood was much larger than I at first realized. It was capacious as a tent. It was a big top. It was the O2 arena, in which, in my time, I have seen U2, and Bangkok, and the Holographic Beatles - those towering spectral shapes repeating the Shea Stadium setlist, giants of pop rendered literally gigantic. It was a vast space beneath the hood. He brought his face close to mine, blue as cigarette smoke, beautiful, perfect, and I looked into his eyes, and the tip of the key tickled my brow.
‘Hello,’ he says.
Keyboy has a pleasant, well-spoken voice; rather deeper than I might have guessed from his slender edge-of-puberty frame.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Do you want to play?’
‘I’m actually a little tied-up here—’ I start to say, because the truth is I’ve always been a little awkward around kids. Being an only child, you see; no kids of my own, few friends with kids. But that’s truly a poor excuse. Perhaps you don’t have children of your own, but you surely were a child, once upon a time. So I pull myself up short. My captors might be about to slam a bullet into the back of my head at any moment. Why not play? ‘What do you want to play?’ I ask.
‘Soldiers,’ says the boy.
This gives me an itch inside my stomach. There he is, with the key-shaped piece of shrapnel locked into his skull. ‘Why don’t we play something else?’
‘I like soldiers.’
‘You don’t want to like soldiers,’ I say. I know he means the game, soldiers, but I say this anyway. ‘Soldiers aren’t actually that nice.’ Then, because it’s the elephant in the room (the elephant inside the bag) I add; ‘It was soldiers who - did that to your head.’
He raises a finger and touches it, lightly, to the end of the key. ‘You’re a soldier,’ he points out.
‘I was. But I wasn’t playing.’ At this, with that eerie capacity children have for suddenly adopting adult expressions, the boy throws me a knowing look, and I have the sense that I’ve said something very foolish.
‘I think you were playing,’ he said.
The lance goes through my soul at this. This is something terribly profound that he has said, and it sets up tingles of nascent apprehension in my scalp and at the back of my neck, and in my stomach. ‘Playing,’ I repeat, in a low voice.
‘Why did you want to be a soldier?’
I think about this.
‘War,’ I tell him, ‘is a living.
‘But what do you mean, a living?’ Repeated back at me in a child’s voice everything I say, even the simplest expression, seems to acquire some unsettling profundity. What do I mean, a living?
‘I mean just what I say,’ I try to explain. ‘I mean, war is a way of living. I concede that it’s not a very healthy way of living, but nonetheless.’
The boy nods. ‘Smoking is bad for you too,’ he says. ‘Drinking too much booze.’ I remember his house; the wine bottle broken on the kitchen floor.
‘That’s true,’ I say, motivated - obscurely - by the desire to ward off this boy’s disapproval. ‘Of course, drinking harms only yourself. In war, you harm others.’
‘You must have very some very well behaved drunks,’ he says, gravely. ‘Where you come from.’
It is a salutary business, having to explain the world and its ethics to a child.
‘You’re right, you know,’ I say. ‘I understand what you mean, you’re saying that killing people is bad. You’re right, too. That’s a good general principle. But what about killing the person who is trying to kill you? The person who is trying to kill you, or worse, to kill the people and place you love? Isn’t it right, sometimes, to kill - if that’s what’s happening?’
‘It’s all right,’ says the boy, in his fluting voice. ‘I know that you’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle.’
‘I am trying to put the genie back in the bottle.’
‘Trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.’
‘Trying, at least,’ I say.
Then I’m barged and I and the chair I am in almost tip over. I am handled, pulled upright, and though my legs don’t work very well I have to struggle along somehow. Outside the hood I’m being made to climb something; a short stairway, but whether inside or outside I couldn’t tell you. The weave of the fabric out of which the hood is made is so close to my eyes it looks as though the individual threads are cables, a net large enough to hold Nelson on his column, or the Presidential heads at Rushmore. I can hear people outside speaking. It doesn’t sound like German, but it probably is. It sounds more like Dutch, or Swedish. I don’t know what they’re saying. Somebody grabs my wrists and undoes the plastic shackle. But they’re not freeing me: I’m shoved down on to a chair, and as I sit they - whoever they are - pull my hands back and round and restrap them with the plastic cuff behind me.
Key-boy is, I suppose, sitting on my lap; or perhaps he is behind me and leaning over my shoulder. I’m not entirely sure how he is managing to keep his head
inside the bag. You will think, but he’s only a figment of your imagination, and I know what you mean. Of course. But he isn’t only imaginary. He’s realer than I am, for instance.
He’s the one with the key, after all.
I wait for the hood to be pulled off, but nothing happens. I wait for the blow - a fist, a baton, a bullet - but none comes.
‘Can we play?’ says key-boy, in a bored voice.
‘A little hard for me to get free.’
‘Shall I unlock you?’
I smile. ‘That’s a nice thought,’ I say. ‘You think your key works that way?’
By way of answer he leans his face in towards me, like he’s kissing me goodnight (sleep-tight; and of course I’m aware that the last goodnight could be, for me, only moments away). The tip of his key touches the skin of my forehead, and then, with hardly any pressure, it breaks the skin - the dermis opens like the mirror in Alice or The Matrix, like mercury. And the shaft of the key slides in. It moves little pre-shaped nodules of brain like the tumbrels of a lock. His cold forehead is pressed against my hot one. His eyes very close to mine. A twinkle in them. He turns his head, the way a puzzled dog does.
The lock swivels, the bolt falls. I can see. I am fucking Kurtz. It’s all there.
This is Homo sapiens, on the small scale, from the earliest times: eating and sleeping; fucking and fighting. Under ‘eating’ we can bracket all the activities associated with fetching food, all the hunting and the gathering. Under ‘sleeping’ we can bracket all the forms of resting, lounging in the sun, staring at the trees, or the walls of our cave. Otherwise what we do, as monkeys, or hominids, or Neanderthals, or early man, in the savannahs or forests, is fuck and fight. Two things that have more in common than just their alliteration. The big change is not fire, or the wheel, or language. The big change is play. Play grows into something new. Because, of course, most animals play a little, from time to time. But what makes human beings human is the way we filter everything we do through play. Fucking, inflected via play, parses not only into more elaborate and all-year-round fucking and role-play fucking and all that: it parses into dancing, and music; into art and culture and science. Fighting inflected via play parses into sport, and into politics, and religion. And soon enough we reach a time when it is impossible simply to fuck, or fight - impossible, even, simply to eat or sleep. Play, in its spiralling recherché, rococo forms, shapes everything we do. We are always playing; whether we are talking about work or leisure, about being alone or being with others, we are addicted to play, play is our complete horizon. What have I been doing, if not playing at soldiers? Playing at killing and breaking? Why else would I have enjoyed it so much, if there had been no play involved? The mistake we make, I suppose, is in thinking that playful is in some sense opposed to serious. Play owns seriousness, wholly.
There’s nothing more serious than play.
There is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
We are present at the birth - attended, naturally, by a certain amount of blood and screaming - of a new form of life. The giants were now going to be part of the fauna of the world; not to be undone any more than nuclear weapons or rifles or knives could be un-invented. And the secret at the heart of their giant souls, which honest-to-god I did not realize until that very moment, is that they are playful beings. Lumbering, and clumsy, and liable to tread upon your house or kick through your church, or lie down to sleep upon a whole population: but playful.
This is the answer to the question. Why do men make war? Because it’s fun. Because they like doing it, Because it’s the most immersive and intense form of grown-up play. That is what’s visible in the middle of the abyss. This is what Kurtz should have said: The fun! The fun! You think fighting isn’t fun? You think horror isn’t fun?
When was I happiest? When Simic and I concentrated our fire and blew the lid off that armoured car. When we stood shoulder to shoulder, and took on fifty enemy combatants with nothing but a bus-stop adshell for cover. When that enemy soldier peered, bewildered, out of the broken-off chassis of his tank and Simic put that holy red spot right in the middle of his brow from forty yards away. And the enemy soldier sat down again. Christ, it was fun. What’s wrong with my present, injured state is not the injuries, or the discomfort, or the reduced lifespan, or any of that. What’s wrong with it is that it seriously gets in the way of my having fun.
What is so valuable about being in love? Same reason.
No virus could unpick the giants. The giants are here to stay, and they will turn the whole of Europe into one giant playground. My talent for secrecy was actually just the necessary reticence of illness. The furtive conversations with the programmer - not that he especially cared about giants; but he wanted to see his new fire of AI consciousness spread to a network that would be receptive to it. I told him I had met him before, in the middle of a firefight, and he looked puzzled. I don’t think so, he said. But maybe it was somebody else. And instead of the conventionally destructive virus the US want loaded into my neural cy-bio network, he loads the tweaked form: the illness that brings self-awareness. I’m not the hero of this story, but I have my part to play in waking the hero up.
The whole world, soon enough. If the game is too rough for you - well, I’m sorry. Change is coming, and true change is always disruptive.
The choice, it seems, is between tyrannies that bring war upon the people, and democracies that bring war upon the people. And the key difference - except that democracy is rather better at making war than tyranny - is only this: that in the latter case, at least the people are not slaves.
That counts for something.
Key-boy has gone. I’m alone inside the hood. There I am, strapped by my wrists to a chair, in the dark, alone.
I sat there for a long time. I don’t know how long. Light was coming through the weave of the cloth, but I could not say whether it was daylight or an electric light.
Eventually the hood was removed, and I blinked and winked, and my surroundings became clear to me. I was in a kitchen. Somebody was releasing my wrists, and I stretched and loosened my arms. A man - it took me a moment to recognize Benni - was holding a glass of milk. ‘You are not lactose intolerant,’ he said.
‘Just thirsty,’ I said.
I took the glass between my two scorched hands and drank the milk.
There were two Schäferhunden in that room, both standing looking down upon me. ‘How is Strasbourg?’ I ask. ‘Still there?’
‘There has been fighting, in the city and around the city,’ said Benni.
‘That’s a shame. It was a good-looking town.’
‘I believe,’ said Benni, folding his arms, and with a more severe expression on his face, ‘that the people of Alsace, who hired us, have the right to decide their own future. I believe it is their town. It is not yours.’ He said this as a challenge.
That line of conversation didn’t seem to me to hold out much prospect of fun, so I shook my head. ‘You guys feeling all right?’ I asked.
Benni translated this into German for his comrade, who scowled. ‘We will ask you more questions now,’ Benni said, the corners of his mouth downturned. ‘You will tell us how your virus goes?’
I didn’t get up from my chair. I wasn’t shackled any more, and I could have stood. But I stayed put. The most I did was reach forward to put my empty glass down on the breakfast bar, and I only did that because it was in easy reach.
‘We’re all Europeans,’ I said, to Benni. There was no point in talking to the other one. I don’t think he spoke English. ‘The thing is, not to try and undo the NMA, but to force it through to its logical conclusion. You see? Fight a blaze with more fire. It will be a new kind of thought, a new mode of consciousness.’
‘We need,’ said Benni, ‘specifics.’
Some noise started up, outside. I could hear a new wild rumpus beginning. The snip-snap of rifle fire, the punchy sounds of explosive detonation. A firefight. Benni and the other guy snapped their heads round, like dogs
sensing a squirrel. They could stay talking to me, or they could go see what the noise was all about. It was no contest. It was clear which would be more fun. ‘You stay there,’ said Benni, to me. He said something to his fellow in German, which - more or less - I followed: if we have to move him, then we’d better get some help. And his comrade replied: it must be an advance party, they cannot have come in strength.
‘Stay there please,’ said Benni, and the two ducked through the back door to see what was happening.
I was content to stay where I was. I sat there, on that chair, and tried to look through the window, but all I could see was light and whiteness. I pondered likely events. Maybe in a moment, Benni and his comrade would return, and grab me to take me away. Or maybe in a moment, soldiers - probably US soldiers, conceivably EU soldiers - would come bashing and crashing into the house to grab me and take me back to their camp. Kicking down a doorway, piling into a room with your guns out - shouting, and going through the series of ballet-motions that has been trained into you - and getting hold of your objective, and pulling back. Playing the particular small element of the game as well as you can. How is that not fun?