Isle of Noise

by Rachel Tonks Hill

  “Dammit,” she muttered in a small voice.

  * * * *

  In the late afternoon, Chandra was disturbed by a phone call from her mother, asking no end of questions about “The Institute of Evil”. Chandra responded to them all with “I don’t know,” which was mostly true. Outside of work hours, Chandra knew frightfully little about what she did for The Institute. Her mother knew that. Chandra knew that she knew. At this point, they were only going through the motions, but it made Chandra feel all the more guilty about the memory lock.

  It was irrational, of course. Chandra knew she’d done some truly awful things when The Institute had called for it. She justified this to herself by only harming people when it was absolutely necessary. It didn’t make her a good person, but if she didn’t do it then someone else would. And unlike those people, she at least had some ethics.

  Once she was sure Edwin would be awake, she picked up her phone, and pointed it at the photo of her dark, square-jawed co-worker. It took a while to connect. Psy-Wi interference was strong today.

  Eventually a smooth male voice answered: “Chandra, hello.”

  “Are you at work, Ed?” She knew he would be. He did all his work during the day to avoid interacting with people.

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “I need the address code and ID number for my last head.”

  They only ever referred to the subjects of their experiments as a ‘head’. It was best not to think of them as people. They were just a head to be opened, a head of the population.

  “Okay... Why?”

  “I screwed up,” she said quickly. “I forgot to turn off the memory-lock.”

  “And?”

  “And the memory lock is still active. They can’t lay down memories.”

  “Doesn’t matter, memory locks are expendable.”

  Chandra thought of retorting ‘Well people aren’t.’ but she could already anticipate his response. They were heads, and of course they were expendable.

  “Listen Ed, this is my fault, and I can’t let it slide. So could you please just get me that address code?”

  “Address codes are confidential, and all calls from The Institute are monitored. But you knew that.”

  “I knew.”

  “So I’m afraid I can’t help you. Bit of a shame really because you could have told me you needed that information for your case report, and I’d have been none the wiser. I know your ethical concerns are important to you, but-”

  “I’m not going to lie to you.”

  “Well of course you won’t. You’re Chivalrous Chandra. But it’s like I said when we hired you. You need to be more opaque when you’re working for The Big I. Sometimes you’re too transparent for your own good, especially with shifty guys like me. Remember?”

  Of course she remembered that. Edwin had been on the panel that hired her, when they administered the lie detector test. They had found out some of her deepest secrets that way. She even confessed that she’d initially wanted to join The Institute to satisfy her curiosity. Then The Institute scanned her entire mind just to make sure. It was the standard procedure.

  “Well here’s a good lie. If you do this favour for me, I’ll make up for it by taking you out to dinner.”

  They chuckled innocently, so as not to give away the fact that it was not funny, and that Chandra’s innocuous little joke was actually code for ‘Use the secret method we discussed earlier.’

  Edwin ended the call, and scooted his chair a few metres over to Chandra’s control pad. Obtaining the ID and address code would be easy, but smuggling the information out of The Institute would not be. Every form of external communication was monitored. And it would certainly be wiped from his memory when he left the premises. The guards checked rigorously for anything like sticky notes hidden in clothing, yet he’d never seen them checking under anyone’s shoes before.

  Though they were underground, the room around him was as bright as daylight. There was no privacy here. The open-plan layout of the office allowed anyone to see what anyone else was doing. But since most people here worked night shift, it was not too likely that someone was looking over his shoulder. The H-HD cameras could pick out every one of the greasy hairs on his head, but Edwin had learned from a few years of experience that no one really monitored the cameras. The managers had a much better way to watch over their subordinates.

  Every 60 seconds, the security systems enacted a ‘loyalty check’ on all staff members, scanning their heads with the psychic wireless to make sure they weren’t doing anything suspicious.

  If a child had been allowed down there, they may have complained about there being a high-pitched ringing noise every minute. That was the interference wave generated by the signal of the loyalty checks. Not many people keep their ultrasonic hearing range well past childhood. Edwin was one of those people. He had been absent-mindedly tapping his pen on the desk, listening out for the loyalty check. Once he heard it, he would have about 55 seconds to get the information for Chandra.

  EEEEEEEEEEEEEH

  There it was. He pulled up his chair to the control panel, tapped on the screen to wake it, and clicked on a list of recently accessed heads. The folder was locked. So he pushed his phone up to the microphone and played a voice recording of Chandra saying the password, which he made just in case he needed it for times like this. Paranoia did have its advantages. To complete the illusion, he moved his lips as if he was saying it as well. It was enough to fool the speech recognition, and he was in.

  Then he saw something that he didn’t expect. The head at the top of the list appeared over 20 times. They weren’t identical copies though. They had the same ID number, but different address codes. This wasn’t even supposed to be possible, unless for some reason they were different minds sharing the same head, but that was absurd.

  Less than 30 seconds to go now. He had to choose one, quickly. Edwin picked one at random, and wrote the ID number on the sole of his left shoe. 0010420...Someone was coming...3515682.

  He began to copy the address code onto his right sole. M937F...The footsteps were getting closer...WJ28V...He pretended to tie up his shoelace while the man walked past, which seemed to take forever. Edwin was really running out of time now...V8K3Y...He accidentally wrote the wrong letter, and had to cross it out...7CV9J...He was running out of space on the shoe...MG73C. With seconds to spare, Edwin capped the pen, and went back to tapping it on the desk as if nothing had happened.

  He would check his shoes afterwards. Chandra would remind him.

  * * * *

  Chandra awoke in the early evening, having slept for a mere three hours, and called Edwin as soon as she could be sure he’d left the premises.

  “Ed, are you home?”

  “Yeah,” said Edwin, his voice sounding a little more gravelly.

  “Have you thought of polishing your shoes?”

  “What?”

  “Have you thought-”

  “You don’t have to be so vague. This line is encrypted.”

  “Just check your shoes.”

  Edwin examined the undersides of his Venetian style shoes, and found what looked like an address code and a head’s ID number written in his own handwriting.

  “You probably told me this already,” said Edwin. “But what do you need this for?”

  Chandra thought of what Edwin said earlier about transparency, and came up with an excuse to appeal to his cynical nature.

  “I forgot to use a memory lock in that head. I could get fired if they re-investigate.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Just give me the address code. I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it before they do,” she said blithely.

  “Let me help you. It could be days before you get free time on The Apparatus. What if you’re caught before then?”

  “Err...” She tried to think of a convincing way to decline his offer.

  “At least let me give you the chance to use mine.”

  “No really, I... Your what?�
�

  “I got my own Apparatus, not technically a legal one.”

  It was a very difficult one to turn down. To have free reign on a machine for exploring people’s minds was something she’d wanted for a while. But it was illegal. Unlicensed Apparatuses were frequently used to provide cover for criminals, or worse. But it didn't have to be unethical. She thought of the potential good that could be done with it, things that The Institute would never let her do. And Chandra’s curiosity got the better of her.

  “Okay...”

  Edwin climbed the stairs two at a time to retrieve his Apparatus from the spare bedroom, where he kept it behind a secret panel at the back of the wardrobe. That panel was difficult to see in the dark, but if he moved some of the hanging shirts he could see it better in the fading light from the window.

  He laid them out on the floor carefully to avoid creasing them, finishing with a pinstripe shirt that hadn’t been worn in over a year, not since the day he'd been demoted. As he brushed it longingly, he saw some black backwards writing that certainly hadn’t been there before. Edwin was intrigued. Could it be slow-reveal invisible ink? He turned the shirt inside out, and saw a rather lengthy message in his own handwriting.

  MESSAGE FROM YOURSELF

  Before your imminent memory wipe, you were a consultant for the Split Personality Care Commission - a depraved offshoot project of The Institute - focused on eradicating multiples, which really do exist - the common belief that multiplicity is a myth is itself a myth perpetuated by The Institute - TI believes them to be their own accidental creations - so they tried to cover their tracks - SPCC is more active, and is aggressively forcing them to ‘integrate’.

  But I found evidence against TI’s hypothesis - reports of ‘more than one person in the same body’ dating back to the 22nd century or earlier - bastards destroyed them - I was so close - if I publicly disclosed the existence of multiplicity, TI would be forced to come clean about the Wöller case - most importantly it would mean the end of that old wretch Webley’s career.

  Finish what I started

  Love from,

  MR BUBBLE

  There was no doubt that Edwin himself had written it. It had his secret alias and everything. And the fact that it was important enough to warrant ruining one of his best shirts just raised further questions. As a lifelong sceptic, it was difficult for Edwin to believe in something as silly as multiplicity, but it was hard to deny it when he saw it written in his own words. Edwin began to wonder what else The Institute was hiding from him, but he stopped the train of thought there, as he had to be careful about the way he remembered this.

  He was using a crafty trick to get around the security system by imagining himself in Greenland, where he’d been on holiday last year. If he made the mental image as vivid as possible, it would appear to the machines as a holiday memory, and not be deleted along with his work ones. He could almost feel the cool arctic wind on his face as he zoomed downhill on blade skis, on a slope that ran alongside an intense blue river, when he saw a crumpled garment by the edge of the ski run. Yes, that would work. Stirring up the fresh powder snow, he stopped to pick up the shirt, not far from where the slope dropped off to the raging waters, reading the message on it again and again, considering its implications.

  It defied common sense. Everyone knew it was impossible for a head to contain more than one mind. Every so often, there would be cases of people claiming to have ‘head-mates’, but they were mentally ill. What they thought of as head-mates were really just the shattered pieces of a human mind, compartmentalised and deluded into thinking they were separate people. He would believe in multiplicity when he saw it.

  Edwin emerged from his daydream, and returned to the Apparatus. He took the sleek, black cylinder from its hiding place and put it on a table in the centre of the room. When he turned it on, an array of ports lit up on the rear of the device. Edwin swivelled it around and plugged in a backup power supply, an array of amplifiers, and his phone. Excitedly, he dialled in the ID number and the 25-digit address code on the phone’s touchscreen. He selected Chandra from his contacts list, before pressing the big black ‘ENTER’ button. Then he lay back down on the chaise longue and closed his eyes. The psychic wireless would do the rest.

  * * * *

  Chandra was staring from her balcony. What was taking Edwin so long? It had been over five minutes. Then she felt it, a voice in the back of her head. Though she couldn’t hear it, she knew exactly what it was saying.

  User ‘Edwin Harris’ is requesting level 4 immersion via app ‘Apparatus’. Do you consent?

  Yes, she consented. But entering head-space required something more secure than a password. Chandra had to think about three photographs of personal significance. There was a square photo of Holly and Lyman at a company picnic, a school portrait of her deceased sister, and a picture of a smiling man who she never had the courage to talk to. Those three people formed a unique pattern of thoughts that could not be replicated by anyone, even if they were thinking about the same photos.

  At last, Chandra’s entire consciousness was pulled away from her body. She was drifting, yet hurtling through an array of human minds, engraved with the infinite intricate patterns of consciousness, connected by fragile strands that were constantly breaking and reforming. She couldn’t see a thing, yet she sensed it intrinsically. One of them was growing closer and closer and closer.

  She had been through this process many times, but it had never felt any less strange. This time, she remembered to brace for impact, as somewhere in the darkness, two minds collided with a third, and they were successfully transported into its head-space.

  Two figures stood on the imaginary ground of a vast, rocky desert. The sky was black, but the ground emanated a warm yellow glow of its own. Just below the horizon were the twisted silhouettes of some dark stone spires.

  The newcomers looked somewhat different from their real world appearances. Edwin was taller, clean-shaven, stronger. Chandra had blue hair. All the basic tools for navigating head-space were built into their imaginary bodies. And each of them wore a golden band around their waists which, if broken, would immediately send them back to the real world.

  Edwin looked around. “Well, whoever this is, their head looks pretty empty.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, most people create something like forests or houses or airships in their head-space. This one just looks like a desert.”

  “Either that or it’s just very large and we haven’t seen all of it,” said Chandra, never one to judge people by first impressions, even when she was inside their head.

  “So you remember any of this from before?”

  “No, just a guess.”

  “Looks like we’ll be doing some exploring then.”

  “Sure. Just let me just check that we’re on a planet.”

  In a perfect demonstration of her head-space training, Chandra bent her knees and soared into the air. She rose up, imagining herself as weightless, until she saw the curvature of the horizon, which bent the opposite way to a normal horizon.

  When she touched down beside Edwin, she told him: “We’re on a concave planet.”

  “Don’t you mean we’re in a concave planet?” he replied flippantly.

  They went to one of the rock formations first, because Edwin suggested there might be a memory bank hidden inside. If there was however, then the memory lock was somewhere else, as Chandra had scanned the area with a device embedded in her hand. All the while, she took care not to let Edwin see her do this, because she had lied to him about the memory lock. Oh, why had she done that?

  The spire was made of a black obsidian-like material, formed into delicate spiral shapes. They examined all the cracks and crevices with lights in their fingertips, but couldn’t find any memories.

  Before they could move on to somewhere else, they were approached by a strange woman with black eyes, whiskers and huge pointed ears. Her golden hair matched the colour of the ground.


  “Hello there, you must be new head-mates,” she said, waving shyly.

  “Oh, don’t mind us,” said Edwin. “We’re just visitors.”

  She stared at Edwin, and then at Chandra.

  “I haven’t met you before by any chance?” she said.

  For a moment, Chandra thought she had already given herself away by her facial expression.

  “Nope,” said Edwin.

  “It’s just that... I can’t remember. Our memory hasn’t been working properly since yesterday.”

  “What, so you can’t remember anything since then?” asked Edwin.

  “Not really.”

  Chandra managed to hide the guilty look on her face. “That’s awful,” she said.

  “Wait, what was that thing you said we were?” asked Edwin.

  “Head-mates. It means you’re one of us.”

  “I see,” said Chandra. “Like subconscious projections?”

  “Is that what you think we are? Oh, we are so much more than that. A head mate is a member of a multiple system, where many separate people share mental space and have the same body. Now, not to be rude or anything, but how in Andromeda did you not know that?”

  “We... must have forgotten,” said Chandra. “Our memory is damaged too.”

  “I see. Well then I’d love to tell you more about us, but then you’ll probably forget it again. Oh dear!”

  “Can you at least tell me your name?”

  “My name’s Zerda, but the system’s name is Andromeda. What’s yours?”

  “It’s Chandra,” said Chandra.

  “And you?”

  “Call me Ishmael,” said Edwin, who knew better than to use his real name.

  “Pleased to meet you, Chandra and Ishmael,” said Zerda. “I can’t wait to introduce you to the rest of us.”

  “Are they all furries?” quipped Edwin.