“I see. So nothing to do with me.”
“I didn’t exactly say that, Dr Macbeth. I think you may have a friend in common. Mora Ackerman.”
“Dr Ackerman? I don’t really know her at all.”
“But you met with her?” “I don’t see—” Macbeth started to protest. Bundy held up a hand.
“I just wanted you to know that Mora Ackerman is a known contact of someone I would very much like to speak to. I just thought she may have mentioned him to you.”
“What FBI office do you work out of?” asked Macbeth.
“I have what you could call a roving brief. Which is why I’m here. Has Mora Ackerman mentioned an American friend here in Copenhagen.”
“No,” said Macbeth, aware of Bundy’s strange eyes studying his face, his expression, intently. “Like I said, we have only met once and that was brief.”
“And why did you two meet? How did she get in touch with you?”
“It was a blind date,” Macbeth lied. “Set up by friends.”
“I see.” Bundy smiled and replaced his sunglasses. “Well, if Dr Ackerman does mention or introduce you to any stray Americans, I would appreciate a call.” He pushed a card across the table to Macbeth, who pointedly let it lie there.
“Listen, Dr Macbeth, as a psychiatrist, I don’t need to tell you that people aren’t always who or what they seem. Dr Ackerman, for example.”
“Oh … and what about you, Agent Bundy?”
“Me?”
“Sergeant Ramirez of the California Highway Patrol has never heard of you, despite your supposed common interest in the Golden Gate suicide investigation. And according to the regional office he contacted, there is no Agent Bundy in the FBI.”
“As I said, I have a roving brief. Much of my work falls into the ‘need to know’ classification. Sergeant Ramirez doesn’t qualify as someone who needs to know. But maybe I’m a case in point, after all. You have noticed my eye color?”
“Your central heterochromia? Yes, I have.”
“I have two eye colors because I am two people.”
“You’re a tetragametic chimera?”
Bundy nodded. “I wasn’t diagnosed till I was an adult. It was quite a shock, and it took quite a bit of explaining to me. I was told that two sperm had fertilized two separate ova and two fetuses formed – non-identical twins – then one twin overwhelmed the other, absorbing his DNA. The result is me – parts of me have one set of DNA, other parts the other set. And my eyes have the color of both twins. When I found out, it changed the way I view other people. You see, everybody – Mora Ackerman, me, even you, Dr Macbeth – can be more than the one person at the same time.” He stood up. “Well, thanks for your time. Enjoy your lunch. And if Mora Ackerman should get in touch again …”
Macbeth watched Bundy merge into the crowd of Copenhagen shoppers and office workers. He tried to imagine a past and a future for him, but found he couldn’t.
59
EVERYWHERE, EVERYONE
Two days later, the world and all in it became heavier.
It happened to everyone and it happened everywhere. During the day and night before it happened, there had been a surprising calm around the world. Every man and woman, every child, everywhere on the planet, shared the sensation. For the first time in recorded history, Mankind was united by a uniform, common experience.
It came simultaneously in two forms: a profound lethargy caused by a feeling of inexplicably increased gravity, and a complete detachment from the world. To begin with, each individual thought it was just he or she who was experiencing the feeling of enervated dullness, of being at one remove from their environments, from each other. But then, as people began to talk, to share their experience, the scale of the problem became clear.
Ironically, the depersonalization that accompanied the feeling bore with it a dividend: peace. All passions were dulled and in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, guns fell silent, ideological and ethnic conflict suddenly irrelevant. Even the heat of religious fervor, previously fueled by the hallucinations, cooled. As the day dawned across time zones, the rush was taken out of rush hours around the globe: no one bustled their way onto the Tokyo subway, crammed into Manhattan elevators; Rio de Janeiro, Singapore, Mumbai, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London all watched the sun rise with leaden indifference.
The world took a day off.
In Paris, as she went through the daily rituals of observance she had followed sedulously since her vision of St Joan’s immolation at the hands of callous heretics, Marie Thoulouze felt an extra burden in every step and movement, at the same time feeling detached from all that happened around her, as if she were looking at the world through glass. In San Francisco, Walt Ramirez felt it too as he sat listlessly in his cruiser watching the unusually sparse traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Fabian Bartelma felt it as he walked home from a learningless, companionless day at school. Mary Dechaud put the feeling down to her age as she stood at her kitchen window, looking out at the road that ribboned between tree-bristled humps of Vermont landscape, trying to remember who it was she was expecting, and planning what she would cook Joe for dinner. Deborah Canning was disinterestedly, vaguely aware of it as she sat at the window of her hospital room, her pale hand resting unusually heavily on the book of trompe l’œil on the table. In New York, Jack Hudson felt it as he ran through another documentary pitch – this time to a new fresh and shiny face. In Liquan, Zhang Xushou felt the brush weigh heavy in her hand as she swept back her red-gold hair with tired pride. In Boston, Karen Robertson felt it as she sat at a table in a near-deserted café, watching impassively as a small spider made its way across the aluminum tabletop towards her hand. In Stuttgart, bent over his history books, Markus Schwab paused from his studies to rub the weariness away from the nape of his neck. He felt leaden, dull and strangely dislocated, but pressed on with his Holocaust project, now more than an academic exercise for him. In Military Police Corps Confinement Base 394 in Tzrifin, Ari Livnat also felt the heaviness and sense of unreality as he lay languidly on the bunk of the cell he shared with Gershon Shalev.
And in Oxford, Emma Boyd felt it as she sat in the darkness of her apartment, unaware that she had forgotten to pull the window shades. She too felt a strange sense of unreality, but she had become used to the unreal. She had been assured that the visual hallucinations she had endured since the explosion that rendered her totally and suddenly blind were not uncommon. Charles Bonnet Syndrome was not, her doctors had explained, a psychiatric issue but merely the brain simulating visual input because actual stimulus had been lost. The miniature people and animals, often with grotesque faces, were a commonly reported feature of the Syndrome. But this was different. She felt at one remove from every sensation and sound around her and the feeling of being weighed down had stopped her from venturing out that day.
Even Macbeth felt it. Feelings of detachment had been a regular feature of his life, but today he knew something was very wrong with him, with the world, with the people around him.
Not that there were many. He had spent the morning at the university, but less than half of the team had made it in. Throughout the morning, Macbeth had felt enervated and weak. Everything seemed to weigh more: his lightweight suit feeling like sodden, heavy wool on his shoulders; his limbs seeming filled with sand and his movements slow and clumsy. But there was more than the physical sensation. He had had the same feeling of unreality since the day he met Mora Ackerman, the day Project One had become self-aware; but now it was intensified. And the déjà vu was no longer a sudden feeling, but a lingering sense of everything repeating itself, of an eternal Hofstadter-strange-loop of simultaneous prescience and remembrance.
It was just before lunchtime when, exhausted by the effort of dragging his flesh through the morning, Macbeth got home to his apartment and showered in an attempt to wash the lead out of his body, but even the jets of water from the showerhead seemed to bite with more force, rippling and dimpling his skin. He was tired, so tire
d.
He was getting dressed when Mora Ackerman called. “This thing today … the gravity thing … You feel it too?” he asked.
“Everyone does,” she said. “All around the world, according to the news. We’re experiencing causality. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s your project that’s causing it – just like the Prometheus Project caused what happened last year.”
Macbeth wanted to protest, but he no longer knew what he believed and, in any case, he simply couldn’t summon the energy.
“I’ll meet your friend,” he said. “But, like I told you, I want it to be in a public place. What’s his name?”
“I can’t say over the phone. You’ll understand when you meet him. Do you know the Diamond?”
“I know it.”
“Can you be there in an hour?”
Macbeth paused. This was insane. Completely insane. And perhaps even dangerous.
“I’ll be there.”
60
JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
The Diamond was an architectural premonition. Just as some buildings were styled to recall the past, the Diamond had been designed to presage the future, even to influence its shape.
Whereas every century that preceded it had been founded on stone, the twenty-first century was being shaped from polymers, glass and steel. Macbeth knew that new materials were being developed all the time: lighter, stronger; making possible what had previously been architectural fantasy. In mainly lowrise Copenhagen, the architects hadn’t been driven by the capitalist phallicism of London, New York or Frankfurt, but by environmentalism, modernism and a culture committed to societal progress. They had used the latest developments here: palladium-infused superglass, the extra plasticity of which made it as strong as steel. Glass was no longer just a medium for light, but a structural material. And the Diamond seemed to be all glass: a building to look into, look out of, look through.
As its name suggested, its shape was that of a multifacet-cut gem, with angles projecting outward and upper stories larger in floor space than the base. The palladium-infused glass meant that the architects had been able to design the top floor of the Diamond with one aim in mind: to take breath away. This floor housed a restaurant, nightclub and the cocktail bar in which Macbeth stood. The elevators came up into the center of the story and everything around him was walled with glass as much as was practicable, the idea being that wherever you stood, you felt suspended in the sky, with views out across the whole of Copenhagen. Even the lighting and the reflectivity of the outer glass walls had been engineered to ensure the effect wasn’t spoiled by the mirrored ghosts of diners.
Macbeth would have been awestruck by the building and its views, had it not been for the feeling of detachment and leadlimbed exhaustion that dragged at him as it had everyone else. But there was something about the Diamond that tugged at the frayed edges of his memory. He seemed to remember, long ago, reading a book about a building like a diamond where everybody lived out the same scene from their lives over and over – or was it that they lived in buildings made of glass in a crystal city where everyone watched everyone else? He tried to remember but even his thoughts seemed to weigh too much, and he gave up.
The bar and restaurant, which usually demanded long-advanced booking, was almost empty and even the simulated bonhomie of the black-shirted bar staff lacked its usual forced exuberance. Generic Scandinavian jazz tinkled blandly in the background but only seemed to add to the bleakness of the setting.
“We’re closing early,” the bartender explained dully as he poured Macbeth a whiskey, using both hands to steady the bottle. “All the bookings for the restaurant have been cancelled.”
Macbeth nodded. “I’m meeting someone. We won’t be long.”
“We close in an hour,” the bartender said and turned away.
Macbeth found himself wishing that Mora hadn’t suggested the Diamond as a meeting place. The sense of being suspended above the city did not at all sit well with the sensation of intensified gravity.
The only customer in the bar, Macbeth had his choice of tables and sank into a leather couch. The only objects that appeared to have any opacity in the building were the floors and furniture and all around him Copenhagen glittered as if nothing had changed in the world. The only indication of something wrong was the absence of the firefly sparkle of headlights through the city’s streets. People around the world were staying at home.
Everything was all messed up. But Macbeth didn’t know how much of the messed-upness lay in the world around him and how much inside his head. He wanted to sleep, to succumb to the extra gravity pulling at his eyelids. Maybe they won’t turn up, he thought hopefully. Then I can go home and sleep.
Through three layers of glass, he saw them arrive in the elevator. Mora waved, her movements sluggish, like everyone else’s that day. As they approached, he could see the man she was with. When Ackerman had talked about her ‘friend’, Macbeth had imagined someone younger, about her own age, but the man with Mora Ackerman was older, in his fifties, and casually but expensively dressed.
“Hi, John,” said Mora when they came over to where Macbeth sat in the cocktail bar. “This is the friend I told you about.”
Macbeth hoisted himself from the leather couch.
“Hello,” the man said in English as they shook hands. He smiled but looked weary. He looked like he’d been weary for a very long time.
“You’re American?” Macbeth asked.
“Yes, Dr Macbeth. I’m American. My name is Steven Gillman.”
The name stung Macbeth through his exhaustion. “Gillman? You’re Professor Gillman?”
“Yes. I worked with Gabriel Rees … and I knew your brother Casey. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Yes …” said Macbeth, his tone hard. “Casey’s dead, and you’re quite obviously not. If you are who you claim to be, that is.”
“That’s easy to check. My picture’s on the University and Modeling Project websites.” He paused. “In fact, it’s been all over the news. And yes, I am alive when almost everyone thinks I’m dead. But there’s a good reason for that. Listen, do you mind if I sit down?”
“But the bomb attacks …” Macbeth said as they sat.
“I had just left the lab but hadn’t left the building,” explained Gillman. “I was on my way to the Pierce’s main lobby when the bombs went off. I hadn’t checked out at security and everyone assumed I was still in the lab. As soon as I heard the explosions I knew what had happened and slipped out in the confusion. I was happy for Blind Faith to think I’d been killed in the blasts – destroying the Gillman Quantum Modeling Project was no good if they hadn’t destroyed the Gillman behind it.”
“How do I know it wasn’t you who planted the bombs, who killed all of those people? If what Mora told me is true, and Blackwell murdered everyone at the Prometheus symposium, how do I know that you didn’t do exactly the same with your own team? After all, your modeling project was a key part of the Prometheus Answer … and now you and she are trying to convince me to destroy the Copenhagen Project.”
“That’s all true.” It was Mora Ackerman who answered. “But what we’re trying to do is save lives, not take them. The British police confirmed what I told you?”
“No. But they didn’t deny it either.”
“Listen John,” said Gillman. “Whatever your suspicions may be, I assure you that I remain a man of science. Reason is everything to me, as I know it is to you. And the religious lunatics who killed my colleagues, and who I believe provided Professor Blackwell with the explosives he needed to kill your brother and the others … believe me, they would be out to kill me if they knew I was still alive and could find me.”
“Why didn’t you go to the authorities? Get protection?”
“You’re not that naïve, Dr Macbeth. You know as well as I do that no terrorist organization exists in isolation. All have political wings and collaborators in positions of influence. In the case of Blind Faith, there’s a history of reli
gious fundamentalism that goes back as long as the US has existed. They have activists, sympathizers, friends and fellow travelers in the highest places. Some say in the highest of all places: our own beloved President. If I handed myself over to the authorities, how long do you think I’d last?”
“But you’re no stranger to fringe groups yourself, are you?” said Macbeth. “I’m right in thinking you and Dr Ackerman are both Simulists?”
“No. Or at least not any more,” said Gillman. “But we do share many of their beliefs – and before you jump to conclusions, there’s nothing religious about the original Simulists. They were all scientists, technologists and philosophers of science.”
“If that’s the case, and you’ve nothing to do with the MIT bombings, then why is an FBI agent called Bundy, who’s investigating the Simulists, so keen to find you?”
“Bundy doesn’t work for the FBI,” said Gillman. “He reports directly to President Yates and he’s here to make sure I end up the same way as your colleague, Professor Josh Hoberman. If you’re really looking for someone with a connection to a cult, then you should take a long look at our friend with the strange eyes and his employer, President Yates – and at their connection to Blind Faith. Not me and the Simulists.”
“If the Simulists aren’t a cult,” said Macbeth, “then why are its members behaving like cult members? Mass suicides and esoteric slogans?”
“As you’re about to find out, science has taken a very spiritual turn … spiritual but not religious or superstitious. Your friend Melissa Collins, as well as her colleagues, were Simulists, as was Gabriel Rees. Like all beliefs – religious, political or scientific – there are some who’ve become lost in it. Lost sight of the shore, if you like.”
Macbeth thought of Melissa; how impossible it was to imagine her becoming lost in any belief system. “So what exactly do they believe?”
“The Simulists are basically extreme Transhumanists,” said Mora Ackerman. “They believe that Man faces only two possible futures: a massive evolutionary change or extinction. The trigger for either will be the Technological Singularity, when artificial intelligence and technology overtakes human intelligence and capabilities. Like I said about the Upper Paleolithic Revolution, I believe that we are undergoing some kind of leap in neurological evolution – that over the last century we suddenly became smarter and we’ve taken a leap towards the Singularity. Transhumanists believe we’ve got to take charge of the next stage in our evolution by using science – cybernetics, genetics, neurotechnology – to enhance ourselves. The Simulists take it one stage farther – that we should evolve ourselves into another reality.”
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