Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  It had been a worrying time for all, not just the bereaved Macbeth.

  He had always viewed the world as if from outside: he knew his emotional responses were not the same as other people’s, yet had always understood the power of emotion. During his time as a clinical psychiatrist, he’d seen real passions at work: titanic, elemental forces tearing at the minds of his patients. That he could understand, but as an abstract; and he viewed the emotional incontinence of popular culture, the on-tap tears of reality stars and talk-show guests, with confusion and bemusement.

  That was perhaps why he had not been equipped for the grief. It had been as if the bomb that killed Casey had exploded inside Macbeth. Yet, like all emotional responses, it had loitered somewhere hidden before revealing itself. In the meantime, he had been able to go through the formalities of bereavement with an almost dispassionate objectivity.

  While in Oxford, he’d made a formal identification of Casey’s body. It had taken less than thirty seconds. Thirty seconds that filled a space in his mind bigger than any other memory. The image of his brother’s broken body had barged into his brain, pushing out other gentler recollections of Casey. Macbeth, whose memory had always been his most fallible asset, knew that the image of Casey’s face, perfect on one side, eyeless and crushed on the other, would remain indelible in his recall until the day he died.

  When the red tape-bound English police finally released Casey’s body, Macbeth had flown back to Boston with it. Macbeth arranged a Humanist ceremony, knowing it would have been Casey’s wish, before the interment at Mount Hope. At the far end of the massive cemetery, Casey’s grave was close to the path that looped around it. Beyond the path a rank of oak trees, a strip of grass and a wrought-iron fence marked the cemetery’s boundary; beyond that a narrow, barely used road lay edged with the blank faces of industrial units, their corrugated flanks spray-painted with graffiti. For some reason, it irked Macbeth that his brother’s remains would be in such a dull spot. He didn’t know why: it wasn’t going to matter to Casey.

  There was no Casey any more.

  *

  Macbeth hadn’t been back to Boston since.

  It had been during the weeks after he returned to Copenhagen that it had hit him: intolerable grief so strong he felt it physically. Days were spent in his apartment, at the window, trying to focus on the world outside but torn apart by feelings inside. He had known few close, sustainable relationships in his life and the bond he had felt with his brother had been a fixing point for him. And now he was adrift. He took two weeks’ leave and sank into a dark, empty place. The strangest thing had been the duality of his grieving: Melissa’s death, even their long-past breakup, suddenly became real and tangible things, as if Casey had led her out from the same hidden corner of Macbeth’s consciousness.

  But it was more than his grief that haunted him. Returning to the Project, he’d made an effort to re-find his chosen groove of life. The epidemic of hallucinations was over; he kept telling himself that, reminded himself of it every day.

  He had to. Because every day since Casey’s death, John Macbeth had seen things that could not possibly have been there.

  *

  The first thing Macbeth did each day was to check if there were any reports of Boston Syndrome-type hallucinations anywhere in the world. When there were none, and when he failed to see any Dreamers in the streets, he felt oddly disappointed.

  The first vision had been on the S-train.

  It had been the smallest of things and could so easily have been missed. In fact, had it been the only hallucination he experienced, he might have put it down to a simple misremembering. The woman opposite him had sat engrossed in a glossy-covered biography of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, only raising her eyes from the book as she realized the train was approaching her destination. Macbeth remembered feeling vaguely sorry for the female passenger: around thirty, plain in feature and styleless in dress. There seemed to be something sad about someone so homely vicariously living the life of the glamorous. First inserting a bright yellow bookmark, she closed the book, placed it in her shoulder bag, stood up from her seat and left Macbeth in his preferred solitude.

  When the S-train resumed its journey, Macbeth watched Copenhagen slide by beyond the glass. He never worked or studied notes while in transit: the time between events, between places, was for him time to reflect. The problem was that these treasured moments had become dominated by reflections and rememberings of Casey. For some reason, Macbeth had been thinking about their childhood games on the beach out at the Cape when the bright red flash and thunder-rumble of an S-train passing from the opposite direction startled him back to the here and now. He could see they were pulling into Østerport station, which surprised him because he was sure they had already made that stop. He turned to see the plain female passenger opposite look up once more from her immersion in someone else’s, infinitely more glamorous life. Again, she inserted the bright yellow bookmark, this time several chapters further on, before carefully placing the book in her shoulder bag, standing up and preparing to disembark at her stop.

  Macbeth had felt confusion more than panic. He was sure he’d seen the female passenger disembark before, just as he had been sure the S-train had already stopped at Østerport. The same thing was happening again. Except it wasn’t quite the same thing: she had put the bookmark in a different page; her clothes were slightly different. He had thought about saying something, but he realized he would sound insane, instead watching her leave the train once more. Afterwards, when he thought it through, he realized that it had been a hallucination, but he couldn’t, for the life of him, work out which disembarkation had been the real one.

  After that first episode, every day was punctuated by some small absurdity. Sometimes it was the same strange looping of time; other times Macbeth felt as if the world around him was overlaid with another, filmy, near-transparent reality. It would last for only a moment, glassy outlines of people or buildings or land forms or even passing clouds sliding over the world around him. It would last only a moment, then it would be gone.

  Macbeth realized that there was something wrong. Normally, as a psychiatrist, he would have recognized the need for treatment with antipsychotics. But nothing over the last two and a half years had been normal and hallucination had moved from uncommon to common experience. But he decided that, if it got worse, he would ask a clinician colleague to write him up some clozapine – or trifluoperazin if the hallucinations got worse.

  In the meantime, he told no one about the episodes.

  *

  Macbeth had good reason to keep his mental glitches to himself. His appointment as Director of the Copenhagen Project, despite its tragic circumstances, had been the single beacon guiding him through the dysthymic gloom of the last twelve months and he was determined to hang on to the post. He had poured all of himself into the task and had achieved greater success in his brief tenure than the obsessively driven Poulsen had managed throughout his leadership.

  It had become very clear to everyone why Poulsen had been so driven: resolving the brain–computer interface issue had been at the same time a professional crusade and a personal race. A race he had lost.

  Only a few of the team, those who had worked with Poulsen previously, had known he’d had a wife injured in a traffic accident; none knew that Margarethe Poulsen had been on permanent life support, suffering from locked-in syndrome.

  The same day the bomb exploded in Oxford, Poulsen failed to turn up for work. Because of the spate of attacks on the scientific community, when there was still no word from him the second day, Poulsen’s deputy, Dalgaard, contacted the police.

  They found him in his house.

  It emerged over the next few days that, in response to a call from the hospital, Poulsen had only just made it to his wife’s bedside before she died. Her heart, he had been told, had simply given out. According to Dr Larssen and other members of staff, Poulsen had seemed resigned; accepting the news and even nodding when it had
been suggested that it was probably better for his wife to have been released from the prison of her body.

  From the time the coroner gave for Poulsen’s death, it was clear that he must have killed himself shortly after getting home, taking only time enough to write out detailed instructions about the future of the Project, including his choice of successor as Project Director. The police found him hanging from a belt fastened to a light fitting in the living room, facing the picture windows that looked out over the fjord. Poulsen had, apparently in an effort to quicken his death, weighted his pockets with books.

  Macbeth had already been in Oxford at the time Poulsen’s suicide was discovered. The British police investigating the bombing that killed his brother seemed not to have any clues about how Blind Faith, which was clearly at the top of their suspect list, had managed to get such a large explosive device into the lecture hall. The detective in charge of the investigation, Owens – a dull, heavy-set man with a shaven head and the slow leaden eyes of a bureaucrat – had not inspired in Macbeth any confidence that the perpetrators would be found any time soon. The detective had answered his questions politely, comprehensively, professionally – and completely without emotion. Macbeth guessed that Owens’s compassion fatigue probably derived from having to give the same answers to members of one hundred and seventy grief-stricken families from all over the world.

  By the time Macbeth felt recovered enough to return to work, the pressure was off him to join Newcombe’s team. The hallucination outbreak was still an epidemiological mystery, and the WHO team was still trying to establish its etiology, to isolate a virus, contaminant or physical stimulus that could have caused the visions. But the urgency of the quest had eased with the reduction in reported cases and Newcombe had reluctantly accepted that Macbeth had more pressing concerns.

  When he returned to Copenhagen, Macbeth had been as surprised as everybody else that Georg Poulsen had recommended him to take over as Director, the automatic choice as successor being Dalgaard, Poulsen’s deputy. The judgment of a mind disturbed to the point of suicide had of course been questioned; but after several lengthy board meetings, and with Dalgaard’s clear support, it was decided that Macbeth should take over, just as Poulsen had wanted.

  Little by little, Macbeth had eased back into his day-to-day routine, wearing it like armor against the barbs of grief that found him in quiet moments. Like now, as he looked out of his shorefront apartment window at the pale sky and thin rain of a Danish spring.

  He welcomed the ringing of the phone.

  “Dr Macbeth? My name is Mora Ackerman …” The voice of a young woman speaking in Danish-accented English. “I’ve been trying to reach you at your office, but I seem to always miss you. And my emails … Didn’t you get my emails?”

  Macbeth was temporarily wrong-footed. He remembered the name in his oft-neglected inbox.

  “Ah, yes … Dr Ackerman …” He pulled himself together. “I’m afraid I’ve been rather busy.” Macbeth paused, frowning as a thought struck him. “How did you get this number?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you at home –” she ignored his question “– but I really do need to speak to you. It’s very important we talk.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it on the phone. Could we meet?”

  Macbeth laughed. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little less mysterious, Dr Ackerman. What’s this all about?”

  There was a silence.

  “It’s about your brother …”

  The mention of Casey stung Macbeth. “What about him?”

  “Do you know the Ørstedsparken? Near the university?”

  “Listen—”

  “There’s a café there by the pond. Meet me there tomorrow at two-thirty.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Macbeth laughed. “If you work at the university, I suggest that instead of sounding like some bad spy movie, you arrange a proper appointment.”

  “What happened to your brother … The visions last year … It’s all going to happen again, but worse this time. We have to stop it now, before it’s too late. I really would appreciate it if you could come tomorrow,” she said and hung up.

  52

  PROJECT ONE. COPENHAGEN

  There was a spike.

  Turov didn’t see it in real time – it lasted for only a fraction of a second and too quick for Turov’s human brain to have registered it, but the observer computer, which examined Project One’s mainframe without connecting to it, alerted him that the spike had taken place. He reran the observer computer’s data log. After the spike, nothing had changed. There was no further neural activity; it was as if nothing had happened. The synthetic architecture of Project One remained just that: empty architecture. Unoccupied, unused, inactive. But Turov knew something had happened.

  He sat staring blankly at the screen, for a moment removed from the here and now as his mind engaged the significance of what he had seen. There was no one else with him and he sat in the silence and dim light of the soundproofed, windowless room. Project One was housed in a remarkably small space: the Copenhagen Project team occupied the whole third floor of the University’s Niels Bohr Institute, on Blegdamsvej, but Project One was confined to a suite of three rooms entered by a single keypad access. One room, almost perpetually locked, held the virtual machine-based mainframe. The next room housed a second, independent backup that uploaded all data to secure off-site storage, a protection against loss of data through fire or terrorist act. Only Lars Dalgaard and John Macbeth knew the location of the off-site storage. The third room was the one in which Turov now sat: the Project One Control Center. And at the moment, it felt to the small, balding Russian like the loneliest but most exciting place on Earth.

  He had the monitor computer rerun the event; slow it down, analyze it. It confirmed what he had thought. Project One’s neural network had tested itself with something that looked to Turov like a global flash of ephaptic coupling, followed by a five-millisecond-long action potential – the kind of thing you would see in a human brain when a muscle was flexed. Except, in this case, the amplitude had been immense, as had the scale of the event: every circuit had been pulsed, every interneuron engaged. Ephaptic coupling only happened in physically connected neurons, and Turov could see the event had been followed immediately by a similar global activation of synapses: billions of simulated electrical and chemical messages flashing through the network.

  Then nothing.

  The monitor computer’s data log confirmed to Turov that the event had lasted less than one hundredth of a second.

  The Russian felt an excitement close to panic. No one had initiated the spike – neither Turov nor anyone else had programmed it in or pushed a button. At least no one on the team. It had happened spontaneously, independently.

  Project One had done it itself.

  He reached for the phone and called first Macbeth, then Dalgaard.

  53

  JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN

  Macbeth had spent the whole morning in conference with Dalgaard and Turov and his team. The spike clearly represented the first flickerings of an independent cognitive system and everyone was stunned by it, despite it being exactly what they’d all spent three years working to achieve. They examined and reexamined the data, talked about it, around it, through it, until there was nothing more to say. This was, after all, science and all they could do now was to go back to the discipline and routine of scientific method. But everyone did so in a mood of excited expectation.

  The last thing Macbeth wanted to do was to listen to whatever crackpot theories Ackerman had and the news from Germany almost made him call the meeting off: more bomb explosions targeting scientific establishments in Karlsruhe and Heidelberg. After the reports, Macbeth checked for a Mora Ackerman on the University’s staff database. She was there: an archeologist working out of the SAXO Institute, over in the University’s Faculty of Humanities. There was no photograph with which to identify her and, rema
ining uneasy, he told Lars Dalgaard whom he was meeting and where.

  *

  She was waiting for him, sitting at an outside table that offered a view over the small, tree-fringed lake at the park’s center. It was one of those disconcertingly natural spaces that made you forget you were in the heart of a busy city. Macbeth often wondered at what point the concept of a park – simulating a natural environment within a man-made one – had first occurred to mankind.

  Whatever he had expected a Danish archeologist to look like, Mora Ackerman wasn’t it. She was very attractive, around thirty with dark-blonde hair, dressed in a dark T-shirt and jeans, her jacket and bag slung over the back of her chair. She pushed to the top of her head the sunglasses she had been wearing and, as they shook hands, Macbeth noticed that her eyes were strikingly blue.

  He had intended to be brusque, to demand to know what she had meant by bringing his brother’s death into whatever crazy theory she was peddling. But, as they sat down, Macbeth felt his tension ease. He knew he was attracted to Ackerman, but there was also an intelligence about her and he found it difficult to conceive of her as a conspiracy nut or religious maniac. And there was something else: from the moment he had seen her, even at a distance, he had the profoundest feeling that he knew her from somewhere, sometime before.

  Macbeth noticed that she already had a coffee and a bottle of water sitting in front of her on the table and, beckoning to the waiter, he ordered the same.

  “It’s nice here,” he said, looking around at the park.

  “What brought you to Copenhagen, Dr Macbeth?” she asked. A perfunctory question accompanied with a perfunctory smile. He could tell she wanted the small talk she had to dance through to be a quickstep rather than a waltz.