Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

“Katie will stay standing,” said Alison. She had washed her hair since that morning and changed into a pair of jeans and a cotton top. She stared at Eva. “I’m not being mean or bossy. I just know that Katie would prefer to stay standing, wouldn’t you, Katie?”

  Katie nodded. She reached into a pocket of her jacket, pulled out a bottle, and handed it to Alison.

  “We bought this in the village last week. Vanilla whisky. Some new thing they’re trying to put on the market. Alcoholic and incredibly sweet. I can’t imagine it ever taking off. Still, it makes you feel nice and warm, and there’s nothing else to do on a wet afternoon like this except drink and tell stories.”

  Nicolas carried a chair from the lounge into the room, knocking it on the doorframe as he did so. He placed it in the middle of the room and sat down on it. Katie went to the window and looked out. Alison unscrewed the top of the bottle and looked around her.

  “Cups,” she said.

  “Here,” said Eva. There was a stack of disposable cups by her bed. She shook them apart and handed them out.

  Alison poured them each a measure of vanilla whisky. The clear liquid smelled sickly sweet, and seemed to want to stay stuck to the plastic sides of the cup. The four conspirators looked around at each other. Alison wriggled back on the bed so that she leaned against the wall, her bottom on Eva’s pillow, her feet stretched out across the duvet. Nicolas sat in his chair in the middle of the room, sipping at his whisky, grinning at the two women on the bed and thinking heaven knows what. Katie lurked by the doorway—keeping watch, Eva realized.

  Alison spoke first. “We’re escaping first thing tomorrow.”

  “How?” Eva asked. “Where are we going?”

  “We don’t know. We’ll toss coins to decide. It’s the only way we can be sure that we’re not being second-guessed by the Watcher.”

  “You must have some plan.”

  “Several excellent ones. All so perfect they can’t be ours. So we’re going to extemporize.” Alison smiled.

  “Extemporize?”

  “Make it up as we go along.” Alison wriggled again suddenly and messed up the duvet. She kicked her tiny feet up and down on the bed.

  “Oh, I feel so much better than this morning. It’s amazing what a hot bath can do.” She flashed Nicolas a dirty look. “Or a shower, eh, Nicolas?”

  “Oh yes,” said Nicolas. He looked at his feet, confused.

  “Have you ever thought about what it must be like for the Watcher?” Alison said, glancing at Nicolas with a suppressed smile. “It can access all that information. It knows everything, and yet it’s impotent. What can it do?” She wriggled a little more on the bed, shifting her breasts beneath her cotton top. Eva noticed how closely Nicolas watched them.

  “She does it deliberately, doesn’t she?” said the voice. “That’s how she keeps him following her around, like a pet.”

  “I thought that was obvious,” Eva muttered.

  “She’s doing it again,” said Katie from her position by the door. “Did you see her, how she relaxed and went all blank?”

  “I did, Katie,” said Alison. She gazed at Eva. “You just heard the voice, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Eva said uncomfortably.

  “What did it say?”

  Eva hesitated a moment.

  “It thought you were right about the Watcher,” she lied.

  “Too true,” said Alison. “Katie thinks it’s evolved in all those databases, all those computer networks and so on. It has become aware. Now it wants to stretch its wings, it wants to do things. But how? It’s far more intelligent than we are. It must be; it knows far more than we do. What if our machines and our senses are no longer enough for it? What is it going to do if it wants more powerful eyes and arms?”

  “Build its own, I suppose,” replied Eva. “Oh. That thing on the news earlier today…”

  “A mathematical expression that describes itself,” Katie said from the doorway.

  Alison interrupted her. “And no one knows for sure where it came from. It just turned up on a computer.”

  “Maybe that man; what was his name…?”

  “Kay Lovegrove,” Katie said.

  “Isn’t it possible that Kay Lovegrove wrote it?”

  “It was the Watcher,” said Nicolas. “It’s beginning to shape the world into a fashion that suits itself. What does that tell you about us? About humans? What is it going to do to us?”

  Alison stared at him. Outside the rain rattled against the windows and Eva stared out at the limes. She heard the voice.

  “He’s right. What is the Watcher going to do to you? It’s watching you at the moment, you know. It can see you.”

  “Eva! Speak to us, Eva!”

  Suddenly, Alison was kneeling in front of the bed, gazing up at her. Eva didn’t remember her moving there.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Eva, confused.

  “I thought you were going to black out that time. What did it say?”

  “It said the Watcher was looking at us now. It said it could see us.”

  Katie was jumping up and down by the doorway. She seemed very excited.

  “What is it, Katie?” Nicolas called.

  Katie was having trouble speaking. Nicolas moved up beside her and put one hand on her arm. “Deep breaths, Katie. Deep breaths.”

  “I think I understand!” Katie gasped. “Eva. Get off the bed. Go and stand over there.”

  Katie was fighting for breath, such was her excitement. She pointed toward the opposite corner of the room.

  Eva looked at Alison.

  “Do it,” she said. Hesitantly, Eva obeyed. She moved across to the space by the tiny desk. Two magazines, bought for her at the village by one of the helpers, sat by her elbow. She looked at their glossy covers, embarrassed and confused.

  “Ask the voice to speak,” said Katie, excitedly.

  Eva nodded and coughed a little.

  “Er, hello? Are you there?” she said. Nothing.

  “I can’t hear anything,” she said.

  “I know. We can tell,” said Alison.

  “Now move back to the bed,” said Katie. Eva walked back to the bed.

  “Look out the window.”

  The voice spoke. “Katie has worked it out. I think I understand myself, now. I never knew before.”

  Eva turned pale. She spun slowly around to face the room. The other three looked eagerly at her. “It says Katie has worked it out,” she said.

  Alison and Nicolas looked at Katie. She gave a huge beam and spoke. “It’s the limes. She hears the voice every time she looks at the limes.”

  Eva was shivering with fear. Alison and Nicolas jumped up from the bed and went to look through the window.

  “It’s difficult to see anything through this rain,” said Nicolas. “One gust and they vanish again.”

  “Why can’t we hear anything?” Alison asked.

  “I don’t know,” Katie said.

  “What is it then?” asked Nicolas.

  “I don’t know that, either.” Katie was losing her shyness again, Eva noticed, now that she had something to concentrate on.

  “Why don’t you ask the voice?” Alison interjected.

  “Oh yes, that’s a good idea.” Katie and Nicolas turned to gaze at Eva. She shivered again.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “It frightens me.”

  “Don’t be so silly. Turn and face the window.”

  Katie was so uncharacteristically brusque, it took Eva quite aback. Hesitantly, she obeyed. She turned and looked out of the window.

  “Who are you? Are you the Watcher?” she asked.

  “No. I’m…I think I’m…I think I was your brother.”

  “My brother?”

  Katie began hugging herself with delight.

  “Yes! I should have guessed. I’ve read about this. It’s your addiction. It’s the MTPH! You’re having flashbacks!”

  “Flashbacks? No. It’s not my brother. He didn’t sound like that. Anyway,
he would know me…”

  Alison was impatient. “Why? You’re not taking the drug anymore, are you? It isn’t constantly regenerating the personality in your mind. But that doesn’t mean that you haven’t worn the habit of him into the paths of your brain.”

  “Permanently altered the chemistry,” Katie interrupted.

  “Whatever. Something in the sight of the limes out there is reminding you of him. Now what could it be?”

  “I watched the limes as I waited for him to die,” Eva said softly. She felt strangely calm. She ought to be upset, but there was nothing.

  “It’s your brother’s ghost,” said Nicolas.

  “Oh, Nicolas. Have some tact!”

  “No,” said the voice. “He’s right. Ghost is a good description. I’m not the man I used to be.”

  Katie was grinning. “This is excellent. This is better than we could have hoped for.”

  Eva turned to her in disgust. “Why?”

  “Because this is something that the Watcher can’t measure. It may even be something that the Watcher doesn’t even know about. This can only aid us.”

  Eva lost her temper. “No. I’m fed up with this. I’ve heard enough. I’m not playing along anymore. There is no Watcher, and if there were, there would be no way of escaping it. How would we do that? Four poor loonies, all trapped in a mental hospital in Wales, without a penny to their names.”

  Her voice faltered as she saw Nicolas and Alison begin to smile at her.

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  Nicolas was looking at Alison and smiling, waiting for her to tell Eva the big joke.

  “Speak to me. What’s the matter?” said Eva. She was becoming angrier. Katie was blushing with embarrassment. She seemed to be retreating back inside herself, the real Katie withdrawing from the room and leaving nothing but the body behind.

  “Tell me what you’re laughing at!” demanded Eva.

  Alison spoke first. She pointed at her friend.

  “You don’t recognize her, do you? You don’t know who she is! That’s Katie Kirkham!”

  “Katie Kirkham?” said Eva weakly. “It can’t be.”

  But it was. No wonder Eva had thought she recognized her. No wonder they were laughing at her.

  “Katie Kirkham.” Nicolas laughed. “The Poor Little Rich Girl.”

  Katie Kirkham’s mother had written the Console Operating System. Practically every mobile phone in the world now used it. She had made her fortune by giving it away for free. All those useful functions: from health monitoring and global positioning, down to the address book and calculator, were available to users for nothing. The only charge she made was a fraction of a credit for interfacing the phone to the COSnet, a charge that was minuscule compared to the cost of the call itself. Virtually nothing. It was a good deal for everyone. Good for the customers, who got the COS for nothing, good for the telecom companies, who were saved the expense of development, and good for Henrietta Kirkham, who just sat back and waited for all those fractions of a credit to come rolling in.

  Eva had seen Henrietta Kirkham many times on the viewing screen in the past. That was how she had recognized Katie. Katie had her mother’s features, but twisted and exaggerated. Henrietta was an attractive woman, in an unusual sort of way. DeForest had thought so; Eva had teased him about it.

  “So you fancy her more than me?” she would press, watching DeForest twist uncomfortably on the sofa. But Henrietta was attractive; she had a calm poise and confidence that stood her in good stead when interviewed. You didn’t become one of the richest and most powerful people in the world and expect people not to feel jealous. And yet, with her tiny, delicate frame, her shy smile, and her little-girl-lost eyes, people were almost sympathetic to her. Almost. Nobody could feel real sympathy for the woman who had it all.

  Then there was poor Katie: the manufactured child. Henrietta was supposed to have written an algorithm that scoured the world’s sperm banks looking for the perfect genetic material that would match her own and produce the perfect child. And if anyone had told her that there were too many variables to be sure of the result, she had ignored them just as surely as she ignored the messages she got from the fanatics telling her that she was meddling with forces she didn’t understand.

  Henrietta had been determined to have a child that inherited all her best features, and that child was Katie. And Katie had indeed inherited all her mother’s best features, but exaggerated and magnified to the point of the grotesque. She was more intelligent than her mother, but also more obsessive, more nervous, more shy. Her mother’s natural caution had been replaced by paranoia, her analytic nature by something that divided the world into pieces so small that its soul was lost on the way.

  Even her physical body was an exaggeration: she was thinner, her eyes smaller, her skin paler.

  As Katie had grown up, the media had followed her, revealing each new character flaw to the world, and the child who had once been the golden girl, the symbol of the new technological age, had become a symbol of the perils of meddling with nature.

  Then, one day, Katie had disappeared from public view, as only the very rich or very poor can manage. Henrietta had faded back into the foreground, drawing the camera onto herself and her latest ventures and very firmly away from her daughter.

  No one discussed Katie now, only the occasional story of doubtful provenance leaking into the news of how she had gone mad, or back into therapy, or how her twisted genius had invented a box and they had put a cat inside it and then opened it up and the cat was gone and then they closed it again and when they reopened it the cat had come back but it was dead, twisted inside out…

  Katie had become a legend in her own lifetime. A poor little rich girl who allowed the real poor and unfortunate to draw a little comfort from their sad, lonely lives.

  And now, here she was, standing face-to-face with Eva. A slightly shabby, smaller-than-life woman in a rain-washed mental hospital, trapped in the middle of a grey Sunday afternoon.

  Alison shrugged at Eva.

  “I know. It’s the last place you’d expect to find her. But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”

  Outside the window, the rain had finally stopped. The room was still dull and grey, the outside world sodden and empty. They sat in silence for some time, saying nothing. Eventually it was Alison who spoke.

  “You’re the last piece, Eva. The Watcher may have sent you, but we could spend the rest of our lives turning down opportunities on that basis. You complement us; you give us the chance to do the unexpected. We’re going to move fast and try to second-guess the Watcher. We leave tomorrow, four o’clock in the morning. That’s when people are at their lowest ebb. We will walk out of the gate and then toss a coin to see which way to go. Heads we go left, tails right. We have supplies from Katie: stealth phones and untraceable credit. The sort of thing that only the army is capable of getting hold of.”

  “Or the Watcher. Be careful, Eva, something doesn’t seem right here.”

  Alison looked hard at Eva as the voice spoke.

  “What did it say?” she asked.

  “Say nothing,” said the voice. “I don’t like this. You’re going to leave me behind. I’m trapped in these limes. The moment you’ve found me, you’re walking away.”

  Eva looked around the room in confusion. “You’re saying I should stay?” she whispered.

  Alison reached out and took hold of her hand. “What’s the matter, Eva? Are you all right?”

  Eva nodded dumbly. She was waiting for her brother’s answer. The one person she could really trust.

  He spoke slowly, haltingly. “No…No. I think you should go with them. Yes. They’re right. I’m an unexpected ally. It may help fool the Watcher. But Eva, be careful. There is something not right here. I can’t see it.”

  Alison could hear none of this; she was speaking quickly, eagerly.

  “Are you sure, Eva? Will you be ready tonight? We can’t afford to delay. We’ve waited too long already.
The Watcher may already be suspicious.”

  “We could wait,” Nicolas said uncertainly.

  “No. It’s okay. I’m ready,” said Eva. “You’re right. We can’t delay.”

  “Think of me,” said the voice.

  “I am. I will. Maybe I don’t actually need to see the trees now I know you’re there.”

  She looked up at Katie.

  “What do you think, Katie?” she asked.

  Katie had been watching her; she knew what she was thinking, why she had said what she just said. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t know,” she said. “It might work.”

  Alison nodded vigorously. “Yes. It might work. We have to take the chance. We can’t remain here for much longer. Are you with us, Eva?”

  Eva looked around to them all in turn and slowly nodded her head.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m with you. We leave tonight.”

  constantine 3: 2119

  Three o’clock in the morning and Constantine lay awake in bed, one of the night’s forgotten insomniacs. Red, Blue, and White were sleeping; Grey had lapsed into its habitual silence, ignoring any of Constantine’s attempts to question it about what had happened the day before.

  Constantine was trying to see through the haze that surrounded his memories of the meeting. Grey had done something in order to prevent him revealing…what? The memories were second-hand: a little gift-wrapped parcel waiting for him to open once Grey had handed control of the body back over to him. Had they set the project in motion? He couldn’t remember. He could still see the vague shape of the meeting room, but as if it were encased in thick ice. Blurred shapes moved within, but he could not see what they were doing or hear what they said.

  He could vaguely recall the end of the meeting, of being marched into the elevator that rode up through the deadly red sea of VNMs and out onto the duckboards. The memories gained more detail at this point, as if the ice was melting. He remembered how it had felt to stand in the hot sun for what seemed an eternity until he saw the faint speck of the approaching flier on the horizon, the definition of his memories increasing as he regained control of his life. Only when the flier dipped down to hover by him had Grey finally let go. Constantine’s life came back into sharp focus as he settled himself into the air-conditioned compartment of the flier, a cool glass of water awaiting him. Red, Blue, and White were clamoring for his attention.