Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  Robert picked up his hat and placed it on his head. A silver machine lay on the coffee table where the hat had sat. It looked like a Swiss army knife that had been opened up and then stripped of anything that wasn’t a blade. It looked sharp, lean, and evil.

  “Herb. I thought you were intelligent. If you thought about the problem, you’d realize how the Environment Agency could defeat the Enemy Domain. A greater intelligence will always defeat a lesser one. It can be done with this.”

  He pointed to the silver device that lay on the table.

  “Victory is certain,” he whispered, then sat back with a smile. “Well, pretty certain. Nothing is ever one hundred percent.”

  eva 3: 2051

  The orange plastic chairs in the lounge had been roughly arranged in two rows in front of the viewing screen. Katie was sitting alone in the second row, watching the news, when Eva walked in carrying a book that Alison had lent her. Katie swiveled to see who had just entered, and a look of relief crossed her moon face when she saw that it was Eva. She flashed a quick, nervous smile and turned back to her program.

  “Hello, Katie; what are you watching?”

  Eva slid into the next but one chair, glancing at Katie’s face in profile. It did look familiar, but she still couldn’t place it.

  Katie blushed and began to breathe quickly.

  “It’s the news,” she said. She panted a little, then continued in a staccato burst of words. “They’ve just revealed something new. They say it will change the world.”

  Eva looked at the screen. It didn’t seem very interesting: just an endless stream of scrolling symbols.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Katie broke into a huge smile. “It’s a mathematical expression that describes itself.”

  Eva nodded slowly. “I’ve heard about that. I thought it was supposed to be impossible.”

  “No. Why should it be? Your cells carry their own description written within themselves. It’s how they make new cells.”

  Katie’s voice had grown less staccato. She seemed livelier, more animated.

  “Oh, of course.” Eva looked thoughtful.

  “They’re saying that now they have cracked that problem, they’re a step closer to building a human-scale Von Neumann Machine.”

  “A Von Neumann Machine?”

  “Yes. A machine that can make copies of itself. Named after John Von Neumann, the man who postulated the idea.”

  Eva stared at the screen. She had read of the concept before, now she came to think about it. Back in her South Street days, back in the days of warm steamy rooms and yellow light and sitting on her own during the night reading about the rest of the world. Three weeks and another life ago. Katie was talking again.

  “There’s some controversy about the whole thing, actually. They’re saying that Kay Lovegrove, the man who claims to have formulated the expression, couldn’t possibly have done it.”

  “Ah. Professional jealousy?”

  Katie looked confused for a moment. “No. I don’t think so.” She frowned for a moment. “No. The point is, they’re saying he wasn’t from the right field. He just wasn’t studying the right areas to put together that expression. When questioned, he either refuses to, or cannot explain how the final answer came about. It’s all very strange.”

  “Maybe he stole it.”

  “That’s already been suggested, but no one else credible has come forward to claim the work as their own. Oh, there are plenty of cranks, but none of them can explain the expression’s origin, any more than Lovegrove can. It’s as if it just appeared on his computer overnight.”

  Katie’s eyes were glowing. She was gripping each side of the plastic chair, making her look like a little girl. It was like the real Katie suddenly shining through from the tiny place where she had hidden herself, deep within her own body.

  Eva spoke. “So do you think that Lovegrove formulated the expression, Katie?”

  Katie smiled and shook her head. “No.”

  Eva said nothing. Katie’s smile widened. She wanted to tell Eva everything, and in the middle of her shy, pinched little life, she had found the window to do so. She leaned a little closer and Eva smelled spearmint on her breath.

  Katie spoke in a whisper. “It’s too perfect. It’s too tight. We’ve already built machines that reproduce. The factory robots they landed on Mars make copies of themselves, but they need millions of lines of code to achieve the result. This sums up the essential idea in a few thousand bits. It’s too neat. It can’t have come from a human’s mind.”

  She lowered her voice a little. “You know, it wouldn’t be the first time that society had been given a little prod in the right direction.”

  Eva leaned a little closer. “What do you mean?”

  Katie shook her head. She nodded toward the window, out toward the mist-dissolved circle of limes and beyond them the woods.

  “She’s talking about the Watcher,” said the voice.

  I know.

  Katie looked thoughtful. “Did you just hear the voice?” she asked.

  “Yes,” replied Eva. She felt a little shocked. “How did you know?”

  “Your body seemed to relax. Now that’s interesting.”

  “What’s interesting?”

  Alison had just walked into the room. Katie retreated back inside herself instantly. She gazed down at her fingers, twisting and turning around themselves in her lap.

  “Hello, Alison. Where have you been?” asked Eva.

  Alison looked a mess. Her eyes were ringed with dark shadows; her hair was lank and lifeless. She wore a grey hairy sweater over her tartan flannel pajamas, the corner of a white tissue poking from one sleeve. She shambled across to one of the padded chairs and slumped into it.

  “Sleeping. What else is there to do?”

  Eva looked at Katie, but Katie was concentrating again on the program on the viewing screen. Pictures of sheep being funneled through a gap in a hedge were replaced by a shower of chocolate buttons falling into a pool of chocolate. The image flicked to a cartoon group of eight mice eating rice from little bowls.

  “We were just watching a program about an expression that defines itself, weren’t we, Katie?” said Eva brightly.

  “Have you seen Nicolas? Do you know where he is?” asked Alison, deliberately changing the subject.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s in his room.”

  “I hope so. I’m not in the mood to be stared at.”

  Eva said nothing. Alison brought her knees up underneath her chin and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs.

  “Doesn’t he creep you out? The way he’s constantly staring at your tits?”

  “I thought he was your friend.”

  “You don’t have any friends in this place, Eva. Remember that.”

  “Ignore her. She’s always like this when she’s down.” Katie’s words came in a flurry, her eyes still fixed firmly on the screen.

  Eva turned to get a better view of Alison, twisting on one leg of the chair, feeling it flex beneath her weight as she turned.

  “Would you like a hot drink, Alison?”

  “No. And don’t change the subject. You’re not telling me that you don’t find it offensive, the way Nicolas stares at your tits?”

  “I don’t like it, no. But then again, he’s not in this place because he’s normal, is he? Nor are we. Let’s show him some tolerance. It never seemed to bother you that much before.”

  “It didn’t,” said Katie. “Ignore her.”

  “Shut up Katie. I wasn’t speaking to you. Watch your bloody program.”

  Eva looked on, aghast. Yesterday they had been plotting together, brothers in arms, today…From the adjoining chair, Alison picked up a paperback someone had apparently dropped in a bath. It was swollen to twice its normal size, the pages curling up and around themselves. She flicked through it for a moment or two, before crossly hurling it to the floor.

  “Bloody Nicolas!” she shouted, then turned to glare at Eva. �
��Do you know why he’s in here?”

  Eva shook her head. Alison’s mood swings were disconcerting.

  “I don’t know why. He seems lacking in confidence.”

  “Too bloody true. I’ll tell you what, one good fuck would sort him out. I’ll tell you what else, I’m not going to be the one to provide it.”

  She glared across the room. “What about you, Katie? Would you do it? That would put a smile on both of your faces, wouldn’t it?”

  “This conversation diminishes us all, Alison. Please go back to your room until you’re feeling better.”

  Eva and Alison stared in shock at Katie’s response, but she remained glued to the screen.

  Alison breathed in deeply, trying to regain her composure. “I was talking about Nicolas. He’s got a massive inferiority complex. He also thinks he’s the most important person in here. In the world.”

  “That sounds like a contradiction,” Eva said hesitantly. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to speak to Alison when she was behaving like this.

  Alison gave a bitter laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a classic pattern for loonies. Most of the people in here are the same. You certainly are.”

  Eva kept silent.

  “Look at you with your delusions of grandeur, the way you believe you should have got that promotion, and yet you also think that you’re stupid and of no consequence. You’ve got no friends, and yet you know you deserve lots—”

  “Alison.” Katie spoke again without looking up from the screen. Alison paused, brushed lank hair away from her eyes, but then continued.

  “Nicolas. He told me something once, about how he started a pension when he began work. Doesn’t that tell you something about the man? What sort of twenty-year-old is bothered about a pension?” She laughed again. “Anyway, he got back the details telling him what he could expect when he retired. Gave him his projected earnings based on the job they thought he’d be doing then, taking into account his intelligence and personality quotient and so on. He wasn’t happy. He thought he’d be doing far better.”

  Eva nodded. “I can see that being upsetting. Nobody likes to be told they are a loser, especially at that age.”

  “That’s not all. It wasn’t a huge step from there to finding his life expectancy. You know what it was? Sixty-eight. You know what that means?”

  Eva was uncomfortable on the hard plastic chair. She got up and and sat down next to Alison, accidentally knocking over a half-full cup of coffee someone had abandoned by the leg of the chair. Eva swore as brown liquid splashed across the vinyl floor.

  “Leave it,” said Alison. “Listen. Nicolas was told that he would die at sixty-eight. Well below the average. That means low social class.” She gave a bitter laugh. “It will be even lower now. Knock another ten years off for being in here.”

  Eva waved dismissively.

  “So what? It’s only an average. It’s not a prediction.”

  “It’s still a judgment. And a pretty accurate one nowadays. It changes day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Haven’t you ever called up your details on a screen? Watched those numbers after the decimal point whizz up and down? Picked up a gin and tonic and watched your life expectancy drop by a few seconds? Hah!”

  She smiled entirely without humor.

  “You know what, Nicolas is addicted to that stuff. He got his family tree from the Mormons’ database. Ran a simulated medical history on it back two hundred years. He figured out the likelihood of him dying of everything from AIDS to Huntington’s chorea. How about that for a pleasant way to spend the evening? Watch him at three o’clock in the afternoon. That’s a laugh.”

  She shook her head and smiled.

  “It’s all there, mapped, mirrored, and striped by data-banks the world over. Everything about you, and me, and Nicolas. They know us better than we know ourselves. They send us ads for products we didn’t even know existed. The drinking water tastes funny one day and two years later you find out by chance that you’d been dosed with the cure for an incipient embolism you had no idea ever existed.”

  “Yeah?” Eva laughed bitterly. “Tell me about it. You know how I got here.”

  Alison sighed angrily. “No, you still don’t get it. We talk about Social Care and we think of them watching our every move. And then we think about the Watcher, and we think that it’s like Social Care except more so, but that’s wrong. We fall into the trap of thinking that it’s simply something that watches us get undressed before we get in the bath, or listens in when you call your mother, but it’s worse than that. It’s looking right inside you. It sees every heartbeat, it knows your every thought; it knows you better than you know yourself.”

  Her pupils dilated as she spoke. It was as if a tap had been turned in her heart, and all the feelings and emotions were flooding slowly upward, gurgling and lapping up inside her body to fill her up to the brim.

  “No wonder poor Nicolas is the way he is,” she said softly. “He only has to look at a girl and he knows that the Watcher is there, analyzing his every thought and guilty emotion. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old boy inside him who has never had the chance to grow up.”

  Katie had flicked the viewing screen off. She moved up silently behind the pair of them.

  “We shouldn’t be talking about this in here,” Katie said suddenly in Eva’s ear.

  “Ah, who cares, Katie? This room is pretty secure; they don’t monitor the Center like they do outside. Anyway, the plan probably hasn’t got that much chance of working, has it? Not when the Watcher can read our every thought.”

  “No, it can’t,” stuttered Katie. She paused a moment, then, “Anyway, the plan will work.”

  “If you say so,” Alison said. She stood up quickly. “I’m going back to my room.” She stalked away.

  Katie glanced at Eva, then ran after her friend. Eva was left alone in the lounge. The grey mist outside turned to gentle rain and Eva stared out at the blurred green limes.

  “Look over in the corner, Eva,” said the voice. “Look over behind the viewing screen.”

  “Hello again, voice,” said Eva. “What do you want now?”

  “I told you. Look behind the viewing screen. Didn’t you notice it when you came in?”

  Eva got up and walked across the room, the plastic soles of her sneakers sticky against the vinyl floor. Behind the viewing screen was an old intercom. A small white rectangular box with a grille facing. Two grubby white wires trailed down the wall to vanish into the floor.

  “It heard you,” said the voice. “It could hear you speaking.”

  “It’s just an old box, left over from when they first built this place. It isn’t connected to anything.”

  “How do you know? If I were the Watcher, I would be listening to all the old equipment. My ears would be pressed to every forgotten intercom, every CCTV camera, every pneumatic tube.”

  “Every pneumatic tube? You’re making this up as you go along.”

  “And you are arguing with me now. You’re not trying to pretend that I don’t exist anymore. Eva, be careful. You’re not escaping; you’re being led into a trap. The Watcher is cleverer than you. Cleverer than both of us.”

  There was a huge rattle outside the room. The skies had finally opened fully and were emptying their load in vast grey sheets of rain that splashed and sluiced down the glass. Eva looked out of the window onto nothing but shades of grey. A gust of wind sent a grey wave bursting across the panes.

  “Who are you?” she called above the noise of the rain. “How do you know all this? How are we going to be trapped?”

  Her shouting alerted Peter, one of the orderlies, who appeared in the doorway to the lounge wearing a gentle smile. He relaxed a little when he saw who it was.

  “Easy now, Eva. What’s the matter?” he said in his surprisingly soft voice.

  Eva suddenly realized she had been shouting. She looked down at the floor, flustered and embarrassed.

  “It’s okay,”
she said. “I was just…just…”

  “This place isn’t a trap,” soothed Peter. “You know we’re only here to help you?”

  “I know. But I wasn’t…”

  He put his hand on her arm and led her back to her own room. “Come on. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

  Eva lay on her bed gazing at the ceiling. The rain had lost some of its earlier violence, but it still poured down in a steady stream that streaked and blurred the view from her window. She wondered if it rained harder out here in the middle of the countryside than it used to in the city. She remembered South Street rain as being either a tired and miserable mist, or huge fat drops that left sooty, greasy stains where they fell. There was none of this cold violence, this clear division between the inside and the outside. Eva had never felt so isolated in all her life, trapped in the cocoon of the Center, floating away on a grey sea, the rest of the world left far behind. But isn’t that what I wanted? she thought. Isn’t that what I aimed for?

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” called Eva, but the door was already being pushed open. Alison walked in, closely followed by Nicolas. Eva could see Katie hovering in the background.

  “I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” said Alison.

  “What for?” asked Eva.

  “Being so silly earlier on. I nearly blew the plan. I shouldn’t have spoken about it in the lounge.”

  “That’s okay,” said Eva. She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Should you be talking about it in here?”

  Nicolas gave a grin. “Safest place, probably. They wouldn’t dare tap our rooms unless they could prove it to be in our best interests, and then they’d have to let us know. They could be sued for malpractice.”

  Eva sat up on her bed to make space for the others.

  Alison sat down next to her. “Go and get yourself a seat from the lounge, Nicolas,” Alison said.

  “Okay.” He walked happily from the room to fetch the chair.

  “Don’t you want to sit down, Katie?” invited Eva.