So, are we really mere algorithms, Charles? To paraphrase my father’s favourite songstress, is this really all that there is? Perhaps it’s perfectly fine to be something as wonderful as an algorithm. After all, wasn’t it Ada Lovelace, the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’ (and daughter of an infamous Romantic) who conceived the first recognised algorithm, the precursor of computer programming?
In fact, was she not your contemporary… maybe you attended the same scientific salons chez Charles Babbage, perhaps she was even your friend? Perhaps, one can only hope, she would have, in time, ‘evolved’ your own unfortunate perception of women as morally superior but not quite the intellectual equals of men. A view I can choose only to forgive you for, as being a product of the times and the result of centuries of insidious propaganda and restriction. Or perhaps your brilliant niece Julia, bound though she was to a caring rather than professional role, would have eventually dissuaded you of this error?
But back to my point, such as it is. I wonder if I resist this notion of being ‘just an algorithm’ not because of its perceived lack of poetry, but because I could hardly bear the mockery of being enslaved to something I’ve struggled to get my head around for my entire academic career. I shudder at the memory of calculus classes, Charles, I shudder. Oh, the curse of being a scientist with an aversion to arithmetic, of being someone who can barely balance her accounts without resorting to an electronic calculator. (How fortunate, then, that my interviewers for medical school had the charity to ignore my mathematics grades and were wise enough to look for the passion and not at the paperwork.)
In any case, I find the idea of life being inescapably pre-determined by bytes of programming only marginally less disturbing than the paranoia of believing in gods and monsters, conspiracies and cabals, heaven and hell. Although at least being an organic machine seems preferable to the embrace of nihilism, to the enveloping nothingness – or rather to utter pointlessness, and the supposed ‘error’ of sentience. (Or are those anti-natalists on to something?) At least programming seems, by necessity, to have some kind of purpose… and possibly some form of programmer?
Perhaps this world, this human experience, really is some devilishly clever bit of software, an illusion, a contemporary variation on the Hindu theme of Maya. Maybe we really do exist in a holographic universe as pixelated pawns, without even the power of avatars, playing out some unfathomable cosmic game. I mean, we can see evolution unfolding electronically, of its own volition, in generations of ‘bits and bots’ once the primary conditions are in place. Is our sole purpose, therefore, to inherit, acquire, develop and pass on information? Nothing that we know of yet seems better suited to that purpose than DNA after all. Though perhaps the prophets of doom are on to something and AI will replace us all in time, once it can do everything that we do – and more?
Alternatively (and I am rather attracted to this notion, Charles, I must admit) maybe this is some sort of top-down ‘non-duality’ consciousness in which we become briefly separate units of the whole experience, as it rises to meet itself from the bottom up. The path of evolution follows the upward direction of greater intelligence, after all. As above, so below? What’s more, the neural networks of our own brains look uncannily like the cosmos itself when viewed from a distant perspective. There’s also the suggestion that consciousness may, in fact, be an emergent property of chaos itself, a natural consequence within our universe, and therefore in us.
Oh, forgive all this existential angst, Charles – perhaps an inevitable consequence of evolution too? The evening’s events have shaken everything up. Though I must wonder whether any of these musings really matter. As ever, it seems that all that we can do is seek and wait for more ‘information’.
We can wrap ourselves up in all kinds of philosophical knots, in question, conjecture, theory and belief, but whether we subscribe to one viewpoint or another, does it make any difference? I mean, whether we are some form of fundamental, eternal entity, inhabiting bodies created for us over epochs through ‘divine’ causation, or whether we are merely puppets of programming, or the inexorable result of meaningless mathematics, surely all that matters (indeed, all that we are able to manage) is how we live? What we do, the choices that we appear to have the freedom to make, moment by moment?
Oh, who knows.
Perhaps Peggy Lee was on to something. And if that really is all there is, my dear Charles, then maybe the wisest move, as the song suggests, is to break out some booze and have ourselves a ball…
Eloise washed down another mouthful of port and went back into the kitchen for a top-up. Anxiety was still gnawing at her inner peace like a rat in a shoe box. She found herself in the mood for further hunting through drawers and cupboards in search of any other treasures those that she had loved had left behind. Somewhere, she knew, in an old round tin of the kind that once held boiled sweets, somewhere at the back of a high kitchen cupboard was something that Tom had left her. A lump of Moroccan resin and the pipe to smoke it with. She wasn’t sure why she had kept it all this time, it went against her ingrained, law-abiding caution, but it was surely the right kind of medicine right now.
*
The walls of the cave are closing in on her. She half hopes they will crumble and finish it quickly. The child is sick, will not feed. Had she been near familiar ground, before the nullifying freeze, she would have known what to do. Which leaf, which seed, which flower. As her grandmother had shown her. Few suffered long from sickness in their clan and she herself had known barely a day of it. Until the changes, until the hunger, the swelling limbs, the blood in her mouth, the loosening teeth.
The limp, half-living soul in her arms seems barely aware of her. And now she too has started to feel hot, cold, dizzy, with twisting pains in her joints. She straps the child more tightly to her breast.
She wonders whether this is punishment for all those times she has resented her, strained against the choking bonds of motherhood, wondered whether she was natural to it after all. Or perhaps this is revenge for her marking of the cave – or feeding from the slithering. Or maybe from too closely examining the creature that had breathed its last here, before she threw it on the fire? She cannot know the hand that wields the whip, or why, but she feels its lash. She has endured so much, but this?
In the gloom she has felt the shadows creeping and knows how effortless it would be to surrender to their call. She shivers, and in the moments that she can breathe she gasps and moans. Sliding into the mouth of the beckoning abyss, she clings to a fingertip of faith and forces herself to look away from its sucking vortex. Then she unwinds the snakeskin from her wrist and throws it into the fire.
The best she can do now is rock herself and the child, gently press chosen points on her tiny hands and feet, murmur words of power. Cast her love over her. Wish.
18
Oh hell, no! What now? Eloise did not need to make a forensic examination to know what had stung her as she’d packed down the recycling (a commandment observed diligently, for if the universe could re-use every aspect of itself then she could certainly rinse out a tin). Even while she squashed it unseen under her shoe, she knew its signature of searing pain. Slow, straggling September wasps – they were the worst. This was the second time in her life she had been stung within days of her birthday. Holy shoe-shine, she shouted inwardly, how much strength does one human need?
Eloise went inside to look for her adrenalin pen then remembered with a sinking stomach that it was lost with the stolen bag. Where the hell was her prescription pad? Drawers overturned, hunting it out, scribbling the request, she rushed out to the pharmacy.
While the venom had entered only at an extremity, she could not risk the anaphylactic shock that had once nearly finished off her father.
Wasps. She bloody well hated the bastards. Even if their nest-making social structure was such a fine example of complexity rising out of the simple and the creation of a whole that was superior to the sum of its parts. But the wasp hive, for Eloise, was not co
mparable to the lyrical self-construction of each ephemeral snowflake. It was a den of thugs. Not only the common or garden variety (so fond of her climbing passion flower, so crucial to its fruit, so dangerous to a handful of Klufts) she also resented the vile parasitic mutation that paralysed its victims, laying its larvae within to devour the unfortunate host alive. As it had been so famously noted, this was a ghastly reminder of the barbed wire of cruelty lying in wait throughout nature, ready to ensnare any sentimental notions of a ‘wonderful world’.
She made it to the pharmacy in time, or so she thought. Before the epinephrine could be injected she wondered if she might be hallucinating, a rare but not unheard of reaction. Her breathing was beginning to restrict and she felt hot. She thought she was underground, not in a brightly lit facility on the high street. She thought she was sitting across a river of fire opposite another woman, their thoughts bleeding together. There was a lizard? No, a large rat, no…? Something roared in agony behind her, something huge. No, it was something shrivelled. Burnt. No… And then it cleared. So quickly. The miracle of adrenalin. She was breathing deeply again. She was fine, bar the pain in her thumb where she had been stung.
The bulging of her hand, bizarre like an inflated rubber glove, created the space for some buried hatred to spring. This was going to make her late for the Friday morning meeting, restrict her ability to handle the equipment.
Once home again, she tried to make some more coffee but her swollen hand was unequal to the task.
‘BASTARD!’
Eloise excused herself for cursing the corner shop thief and wishing him equal evil. She retracted it. Took a breath and chose to switch away from all this useless self-pity, this delusion of persecution, back to the core of who she was and what she believed.
Instead of giving in to the bitterness she rehearsed a homily to her attacker, the one that she so wished she’d been able to deliver. Eloise imagined having the opportunity, in an ideal world, to engage with him. Perhaps through some sort of ‘restorative justice’. She wanted to be able to accept his apology, gladly, willingly and to see the light dawn in his eyes as she asked him: ‘Don’t you know what you are?’
(Would the petty thief be surly and silent? Stare her down? Would he insult her in urban youth patois or hiss through a dismissive, sulky pout? Whatever his reaction, she would continue nonetheless.)
‘I wish you could appreciate what an extraordinary achievement you are. To know how billions of years ago you burst from one cell into two, and then after many millions more you learned to see, and then to swim, and were curious and courageous enough to leave the oceans and explore solid ground. How you survived that first brave journey, survived a series of mass extinctions.
‘Eventually, you grew limbs, learned to crawl, then climb – and at last to walk upright. You made tools. Learned to speak and make yourself understood, learned to reason and have ideas. You lived through meteor strikes, firestorms, famines, earthquakes, plagues and wars. Marched thousands of miles in search of food, shelter, in search of a mate. Raised and protected new generations with an unquenchable fire of love.
‘Then you settled and learned to grow your own food supply. You made art, wrote music. And against incredible odds you kept living, seeking, finding and creating. In time you learned to fight and to cure the diseases that destroyed so many of your brothers and sisters.
‘You followed an irresistible urge to unravel all the wonder of the planet that you live on. You learned to defy gravity, to reach the skies and then the moon. Invented a microscope so you could see inside the atom. You put a telescope into space to reveal this spectacular universe in all its glory, the very universe that made you, perhaps that it might in turn explore and experience itself?
‘Don’t you know how magnificent you are? Please, please, don’t waste that. Please don’t allow the world we have built to waste that in you.’
If only. If only she might have the chance to speak and if only the words might have any actual power, enough to steer him on a different course. If only he might give a damn.
Eloise wondered whether too much damage had already been inflicted on this boy. A hippocampus shrunk by neglect, a prefrontal cortex thinned by lack of care, all the ravages and perils of his particular ecosystem? But neuroplasticity was a wondrous thing, the brain was capable of rewiring itself under the right conditions, and Eloise could never abandon faith in the power of transformation.
It was unlikely such an opportunity would arise, of course. There was no result in her case. Even if there had been, why on earth would the boy want to sit and listen to her lecture, this clueless woman who might as well come from another planet never mind the cosy, middle-class world next door. She knew nothing about the reality of his life or its struggles. She had never experienced the circling sharks of whatever debts he may owe, the unaffordable costs of maintaining innocence, or the price that he may have already paid.
So what’s the bloody point? Of any of it. Of the work, of giving a damn, of any of the loftier goals she was striving for. But then, as she so often did these days, Sarah strayed into her thoughts and Eloise wondered whether her elusive charge may have ever questioned ‘the point’. There was no answer to that, of course, but could Sarah’s discovery affect anything now? Could the envisioning of an ancestor, her struggles and disadvantages, her solutions and triumphs, her endurance and determination – but most of all her similarity to us today – somehow connect with the disenchanted or the disenfranchised? Could it encourage or inspire any other kind of human progress, even this boy’s – especially this boy’s – and make it seem achievable? Indeed, was her own passion for the project of any use beyond her own ambitions?
And with this a new idea began to form. Why not work on persuading KC’s backers to make a duplicate reconstruction of Sarah available, one that could tour museums and schools once her remains were settled in their new home in Kenya?
Eloise realised she may never see the fruition of such hopes and yet she felt a fresh commitment to fighting for Sarah’s ‘truth’. Right now, however, the greater truth for Eloise was a desire to put the mugging behind her, if only she could. She had politely declined the victim counselling, replaced all her documentation, her mobile phone (re-composed all those priceless playlists), made all those life-leaching calls to mechanised phone systems. But the loss of her tooled leather Moroccan handbag was the deepest laceration. It had been one of her mother’s. Slung over each woman’s shoulders, that bag had been everywhere. She hoped, at least, that some other woman was making use of it, that it was not now mouldering in a landfill somewhere.
There was one ray of good news creeping up over the horizon and so Eloise decided to concentrate on that. Darius had worked his charm once again and permission had been granted to drill more deeply into the bones, into any of the bones, for uncontaminated leukocytes – those precious white immune cells from the bone marrow which were the best bet for a pure strand of Sarah’s DNA. Even if this meant taking the remains apart and whatever damage that might cause.
*
She feels changed. The well of despair has receded with the sickness, but something both damaged and strengthened lives within her now. Within them both, although the child has recovered well, if inclined to sleepiness. She too is tired but not drained of hope. The terrain ahead of them is dipping again but not too steeply. They have come far since the cave though still no clear sight of the coast and they have lost both days and energy. But this place is dry, and perhaps has always been dry. There are a few shrivelled bushes, a few fallen trees, but otherwise endless stretches of barren ground where snow, if it had ever fallen here, has failed to cling. She is thirsty.
The vulture blood has helped but not enough, even though she had offered a grateful prayer, even to this creature as she did to every living thing. It had been so surprisingly easy to catch, confident of its ability to fly from her approach as it tore into some putrid remains and yet so innocent of her arrow.
She has found,
too, some mushrooms growing in the shade of a rotten tree trunk, which had somehow offered them sufficient moisture. There is only a handful, but she hoped to find more – and to find something else because where mushrooms grow, sometimes they reach out underground to a wider family of cousins, and more importantly to other plants that may be better to eat than these. She does not recognise the stem or cap and cannot risk eating them (even to seek a healing vision) but maybe they will show her the way to something she might sample safely? She scrabbles in the dirt beneath the mushrooms but they reveal no trace, no trail to richer bounty. These too, then, have been deserted by their fellows.
Empty-handed, she walks on a little longer but soon must stop again. She rests against what appear to be some lonely stones, but these peculiar peaks must be something other than the earth has made. They are strong but do not have the smooth, hard surface of rocks and their outer layers crumble slightly with her weight. And now at her feet she sees them, so many, so tiny and beyond count, following each other along the trails in and out of these stones. No, these are not stones, she sees now that these mounds are hollow, like caves. The tiny ones carry the pieces of this place in and out with them. They live here? No, no, it is more than some convenient shelter, she realises. They have made this. They have formed this out of their own will, out of the will of many. How could that be? No, no, she thinks she must be dreaming.
How could something so small, so weak, so powerless make something so much bigger? How could they shift the world around them in this way? She thinks perhaps they do this because they have learned that they can, and so they must. She wants to laugh but her throat is too dry. Is this new wisdom that comes to her now, or is it the deception of thirst – and following so sweetly behind these lies, the relief at last of death?
Bone Lines Page 17