Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  Macbeth tried to scream, but nothing came from his mouth. He tried to get out of the bed, but was completely paralyzed. I can’t move, he thought.

  “You can’t move,” said Astor.

  I can’t breathe, thought Macbeth.

  “You can’t breathe,” said Astor, who smiled a too-wide smile, a one-hundred-tooth smile, and bent his head down towards the helpless, paralyzed, silently screaming Macbeth.

  He woke up. The room was bright, filled with natural, not electric light. It was morning.

  Macbeth gathered his thoughts. A hallucination. A hypnopompic hallucination, created in that place, that state of consciousness, between sleep and wakefulness. False awakenings, vivid hallucination, sleep paralysis – all were common features of the hypnopompic state; and hypnopompic states almost always followed lucid dreams, where the dreamer was aware of dreaming.

  Nothing more than a hiccup in the reticular activating system, he told himself: the connection between brainstem and cortex that regulates states of wakefulness.

  He knew all of that; had learned it in his psychiatric training. Yet he still took a moment to check the bedroom for shadow people in the corners.

  *

  Casey was up and preparing breakfast for them both.

  Macbeth had gotten up early, mainly to separate himself from the environment of the dream, but also because he was keen to find out what had happened overnight. He and Casey had stayed up until just after 2 a.m., watching the news and discussing its consequences. Casey had made frantic calls and sent SMS messages to all of his colleagues; similarly, whenever he put his cellphone down it would ring, with one or other of his fellow MIT physicists checking he was all right. By the end of the night, six co-workers were unaccounted for.

  “Any more news?” Macbeth asked as he walked into the kitchen.

  “Not much,” Casey said over his shoulder while pouring a coffee for Macbeth. “What there is is bad enough. The death toll could be as high as a couple of hundred. They still haven’t located Gillman. I just can’t believe this, John.”

  “I really wish you’d reconsider Oxford,” said Macbeth as he sat at the kitchen table. “That’s got to be a prime target for these lunatics.” Before retiring to bed, Macbeth had beseeched his brother not to make the trip to Oxford, but Casey insisted he had to go. Another reason for Macbeth’s early rise was to try again to dissuade his brother from the trip.

  “The Prometheus symposium is just too important,” Casey said. “Too important for my career, and I’m not going to let a bunch of anti-science crazies scare me off. And I still think it may cast light on everything that’s been happening.”

  “You still think there’s a connection between the hallucination phenomenon and Blackwell’s work? I really can’t see how there could be any credible scientific link.”

  “Like I said, when you work in quantum physics you see things differently … Michio Kaku once said that we’re like radio or TV sets, tuned in permanently to one channel. But as well as the reality we’re tuned into, there are countless other realities occupying the same space and time – other stations broadcasting in the same location but on different wavelengths.”

  “And you think maybe something’s messing with the remote, is that it?” said Macbeth.

  Casey shrugged. “All I know is that we’ve got these mass hallucinatory episodes taking place for no reason and now, on top of that, religious nuts targeting facilities devoted to neuroscience and physics – the two fields that could hold the answer. Speaking of targets, I take it you’re not going into the Schilder Institute again?”

  “The place is already like Fort Knox,” said Macbeth. “But no … I won’t be back there before I leave. I am going into McLean this morning though, to see a patient of Pete Corbin’s. By the way, I’m off early tomorrow morning … no need for me to disturb you. But I’ll see you tonight.”

  The phone on the kitchen wall rang and Casey answered it.

  “Sure. He’s here …” He held the receiver out to Macbeth.

  “Hi, Dr Macbeth? It’s Brian Newcombe here. Terrible thing that happened last night.”

  “It certainly was,” said Macbeth. “We were just saying that it is a good thing that the Schilder has such tight security.”

  “Sure, sure. Listen, there have been other developments … I really need to talk to you before you go back to Denmark. I’m sorry to press you, but this is very important.”

  “I’m afraid I really don’t have much time …” Macbeth felt annoyed at the intrusion: he was going to spend his last evening in Boston with Casey, not talking shop with Newcombe. “I’m going out to McLean this morning – any chance we could meet there later, maybe after lunch? I can’t give you a specific time, but—”

  “Belmont’s fine,” Newcombe cut him off. “I can combine a visit I need to make at the Neuroimaging Center. I’ll give you my cell number and you can ring me when you’re through.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you there.”

  43

  JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON

  The Starers began to be called Dreamers.

  Like everybody else, Macbeth was getting used to the sight of people standing stock-still, focused on something not there. Mostly, it would be an individual in the middle of a busy street or in a park, but increasingly it would be a group of connected or unconnected people: sometimes a handful, sometimes a hundred, all locked out of the time and space they had occupied until just a second before and into a new reality. The worst was when it happened to someone behind the wheel of a vehicle. The morning after the MIT bombings, there was more bad news on the radio: a truck driver had ploughed his eighteen-wheeler through commuter traffic on the Adamski Memorial Highway, crushing everything in his path. Fifteen dead.

  The official advice was that no one was to drive alone, and all speed limits were temporarily reduced. That unique human ability to adapt – to adjust to a differing reality and to normalize the abnormal – was already taking hold.

  And on the streets there were more Dreamers.

  The Massachusetts Department of Public Health had set up THS Response Teams – THS standing for Temporary Hallucinatory Syndrome. Teams of two EMS technicians, or a technician and a BPD cop, would move the affected person out of harm’s way. If it was a brief seizure they would stay with the patient; prolonged cases were taken to one of the hundred shelters that had been set up citywide.

  As well as the THS Response Teams, there were more cops on the street. The neurogenic immobility that accompanied the hallucinations was a godsend to criminals. Pickpockets and perverts accosted the temporarily insensible; apartments and homes were ransacked while the occupier was physically at home but mentally occupying some other, distant place.

  Macbeth took a taxi out to Belmont. The driver behind the wheel explained the fare would be double the usual. Macbeth found the city-authorized increase reasonable, given that, for safety, there were now two drivers sitting in front of him through the Plexiglas.

  There was no chat this trip. No one said to Macbeth anymore that they thought they’d seen him before. Feelings of inexplicable reminiscence were something you no longer acknowledged, in case they brought on a feeling of déjà vu.

  As he sat in the back of the cab, Macbeth slipped from his briefcase the titanium sliver of technology that Casey had lent him, unfolded it and checked his email. Four from Georg Poulsen. There had been at least two emails from his boss every day he had been in Boston, and usually a couple more from members of Macbeth’s research team, obviously under pressure from Poulsen in Macbeth’s absence.

  It was getting that Macbeth couldn’t stand the man.

  The Project hadn’t been long started before everyone on the hand-picked team became aware that Dr Georg Poulsen, the short, unassuming-looking Dane heading the Project, was a very driven man.

  With funding of two billion euros, double the European Union grant to the Düsseldorf project, the Copenhagen team’s aim was to build a fully functioning analog of a human
brain, allowing the scientists involved to short-cut the testing times for neurological drug treatments and to take exponential leaps in understanding human cognitive function. But breakthroughs in brain–computer interfaces were also sought and Poulsen had taken personal charge of the Interface Team. He seemed obsessed with the quest to find better ways for humans to interact with computer technology and it hadn’t taken long for the Interface Team members to protest about Poulsen’s unreasonable expectations, others complaining about the disproportionate emphasis placed on interface research.

  Suspecting some personal motive, Macbeth had made an effort to get to know his Danish boss. The descriptions given by Poulsen’s former colleagues – of a typically relaxed and easygoing Dane with a good sense of humor who enjoyed the social aspects of academic life as much as its intellectual challenges – jarred with his own experience of the man. Macbeth found his boss remote and businesslike to the point of hostility. No one knew what went on in Poulsen’s private life, and no one asked.

  Macbeth read through the emails: the usual demands for immediate answers to questions that could easily wait until he got back to Copenhagen. Macbeth decided that was exactly what they would do and he quit out of his email.

  He was just about to close over the lid of the laptop when he noticed something sitting on the screen’s desktop.

  “Son of a bitch …” he muttered, as he clicked on the folder that had appeared out of nowhere. Just as it had on his old computer, the icon refused to yield to his clicking. Macbeth frowned: Casey knew his stuff when it came to computers, and it worried him that whatever was causing this ghost folder was smarter than his brother. Closing the laptop, he slipped it back into his case, sat back in the taxi’s seat and watched Massachusetts slide by.

  It can be the smallest of things that bring the seriousness of a situation home to you, thought Macbeth, as they pulled up at traffic lights in Belmont. The lights changed to green but the queue of traffic didn’t move. The usual blasting of horns was less emphatic than usual and the queue of cars, in a quiet and orderly fashion, pulled out and passed the station wagon that sat immobile, three cars’ lengths from the lights. As the taxi passed, Macbeth saw the woman driver in profile as she sat perfectly still, hands on the wheel, mouth slightly agape and her gaze through the windshield unfixed.

  Macbeth leaned forward and asked through the small window in the Plexiglas: “Shouldn’t we stop and help?”

  The second driver turned. “Sorry, pal … there’s so many of them these days. We see two, maybe three each fare. If we stopped for every one we’d never get anywhere.”

  Macbeth didn’t protest but sat back again in the taxi. Despite his efforts to put them out of his mind, the emails from Poulsen nagged at him. He took out his cellphone and called the airline. The female Customer Services voice answered his question with a public-affairs prepared script.

  “As you know, sir, there are always two pilots on every flight, as well as a flight engineer. But, to ensure your complete safety and peace of mind, all of our transatlantic flights will have a complete backup crew and a medical officer on board until such times as public concern has abated.”

  Macbeth thanked her and hung up. He didn’t ask what happened if everyone on the plane had the same hallucination at the same time; how multiplicity could possibly be a precaution against a syndrome that was known to affect hundreds of people simultaneously.

  He keyed a second number: an international call. After a while he was put through to the person he had asked for in Danish.

  “I’m glad you’ll be back tomorrow,” said Georg Poulsen. “All teams, except yours, are ahead of milestone delivery targets. You have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Professor Poulsen, I’m forced to remind you once more that I am not here on vacation, but representing the Project. On your behalf. And you may be aware that there has been a lot happening over here since I arrived.”

  “I heard,” Poulsen said without emotion or expansion. “Can you attend a meeting in the Project briefing room tomorrow at, say, three-fifteen p.m.?”

  “No, I can’t. I don’t get into Copenhagen until the small hours and, not even allowing for jetlag, I wouldn’t be ready for a meeting in the afternoon. And anyway, I’m not sure that I should be flying back at all. There have been major transportation accidents caused by this outbreak or whatever it is.”

  “I’m aware of that. As, I imagine, are the airlines. I’m sure they have taken all appropriate safety measures.” There was a pause. When Poulsen spoke again, the imperiousness was gone from his tone. “John, I’m sorry that I push so much. It’s just that we are so, so close to a breakthrough. I need you here … Can you try to make it?”

  Macbeth sighed. “I’ll be there. If the pilot doesn’t hallucinate that he’s captaining a submarine.”

  He hung up just as the taxi reached the main entrance to the hospital, but was stopped at a roadblock improvised with two police cruisers. It was only after Macbeth’s ID was checked, and the young female cop had called the hospital to confirm his appointment, that the taxi was allowed through.

  *

  Unlike the last visit, the skies over the parkland grounds of McLean Hospital were leaden. After the taxi dropped him off outside the main administration building, it turned and headed back down the drive. He watched it go and felt strangely abandoned. A man in his thirties, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, stood at the foot of the steps and slightly to one side, watching him. Macbeth’s attention was drawn to him because of the strange intensity of the man’s gaze. Disinhibited frankness, Macbeth had learned over the years, was something that came with a whole range of mental disorders. The man was clearly a patient and not a visitor or staff.

  Macbeth smiled as he walked past him but was halted by his grip on Macbeth’s arm.

  “Is this the substrate?” The man leaned into Macbeth and whispered conspiratorially.

  “What?”

  “Is this the substrate reality? I’ve gotten confused.” Looking into the distance, he frowned. He turned back to Macbeth with the smile. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back. I didn’t think you’d risk it …”

  “Well, I’m back now …” Macbeth smiled at the man. It was such a forgettable face that he could have been a patient during Macbeth’s time at McLean, but it was more likely that he was just spieling his delusion.

  “I didn’t know what to do …” The patient, anxious again, furrowed his brow. Macbeth looked around for an orderly. “It has started. It has started. It has started. It has started and I don’t know what to do because you haven’t told me what to do. You went away and didn’t tell me what I’d to do when it started like you said it would. We all need you to tell us what we have to do; what you need us to do. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “It’s all right,” Macbeth said soothingly, easing the man’s grip from his arm. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

  “No, I know who you are. I know exactly who you are. You have to tell me what to do, Mr Astor …”

  An orderly appeared from nowhere and gently but firmly guided the patient away before Macbeth could answer. As he was led away, the patient called out urgently over his shoulder.

  “Don’t forget, Mr Astor. Don’t forget about Clarke’s Third Law.”

  *

  Corbin was in the main reception area when Macbeth came in. An unusual quiet and restraint hung over the McLean psychiatrist the same way the clouds hung over the hospital.

  “Brian Newcombe asked me to remind you that he’s here to talk with you whenever you’re free,” Corbin said as he led Macbeth into the meeting room.

  “Sure … Everyone wants a piece of me today.”

  As they entered the room, Macbeth was taken aback by the physical presence of the tall, dark-haired and brutal-looking man waiting for them.

  “This is Sergeant Walt Ramirez, of the Californian Highway Patrol,” Corbin explained.

  Macbeth shook hands with Ramirez.
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  “We spoke on the phone.” Macbeth recognized the quiet baritone. Ramirez was wearing a dark suit with the unconvinced discomfort of someone who spent most of his time in uniform. “Thanks for making time to meet me.”

  “Anything I can do to get to the bottom of what happened to Melissa, although you do understand that you’ll have to stop the interview if Dr Corbin says so. Deborah’s treatment and rights as a patient override all other considerations.”

  “I understand that Dr Corbin’s already gone through the ground rules. Are you sitting in on this?”

  “If you don’t mind …”

  “Fine by me.” Ramirez shrugged huge shoulders. “Dr Corbin tells me you’re something of an expert in this field.”

  “So he keeps telling me.”

  “How’s Casey?” said Corbin. “I take it he’s all right?”

  Macbeth nodded. “But he’s shaken up by the whole thing.” He turned and explained to Ramirez, “My brother is a physicist at MIT.”

  “I see …” said Ramirez. “That was a terrible thing. That and the thing at Caltech.”

  “Caltech?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Corbin frowned. “During the night three bombs exploded in the Annenberg Center. The target was a research project.”

  “What kind of research project?”

  “Computing. Information technology,” the Californian cop answered. “Something to do with artificial intelligence research. And those people who threw themselves off the bridge worked with that kind of stuff. I know it was gaming, but it was pretty far-out-there stuff, as far as I can see.”

  “You think there’s a link between the mass suicide of gaming researchers and these attacks on science establishments? I can’t see the connection.”

  “There’s a lot of things that don’t seem to be connected, but are. After I’m through here I’m flying to New York. Did you read, a couple of months or so back, about a guy who starved himself to death at home in a swanky New York apartment building? Until recently Tennant was involved with Melissa Collins.”