‘Look,’ I tell Gareth, ‘no one can get the mapping data. They’re not on any one computer. People sign up to this particular top-secret server, and they get an account name and a password. It’s set up so that everyone who has an account on this server can dump data onto there. But it doesn’t actually go onto one hard disc. It gets hidden around all over the place. And the really important thing is that you can’t get anything off this special server unless you’ve got all the passwords. Everyone’s working on different fragments of the map and filing them on the mainframe as they go. When they’ve got all the fragments together, they’ll access all the separate accounts and put the whole map together. As soon as they’re ready to do that, they’re ready to publish.’
‘So, in order to get the map, you’d need to have all the passwords?’
‘Exactly. It’s like the sum total of human knowledge. There’s no one part of the brain where we store the knowledge that we know. It’s diffuse, scattered all over the place.’
‘Distributed representations. The basic principle of how the brain stores knowledge.’
‘You have learned something. And in case you’re wondering, I haven’t got an account on this ... Fuck!’
The thumbwheel comes off in my hand and plops into the water before I can catch it. I start to regret that there are over five hundred litres in this thing, and that every one of them has been carefully made opaque. Gareth stops what he was saying and stands there in shock.
‘It’s all right. I’ll have to drain the pool. The water needed changing anyway.’
‘Might find some drowned mice in there.’
‘No. Drowned ones rise to the surface after a few days.’
‘Like drowned students.’
He’s smiling. He follows me through into the office and watches me run through a couple of routines on the computer. He knows we’re talking about his high-wire act above the Churl last night.
‘You could have been killed, Gareth.’
‘Were you there?’
I park the cursor in the corner of the screen and the screensaver dances into view. I have to be careful how I talk to him about this. I need to keep him trusting me.
‘I was never in any danger, Miss. I worked out the mechanics very carefully.’
‘Not how it looked to me.’
‘How did it look to James?’
‘I don’t know. Was James there?’
‘You know he’s putting it on, don’t you? This month it’s animal rights. Last month it was veganism. Next month it’ll be something else.’
‘So you know all about James, do you?’
‘Everything,’ he says, smugly. ‘All there is to know.’
I pick up his essay, prickling, and flick through it. I realise I haven’t written anything on it.
‘I’ve read your assignment, Gareth. Do you really think you’re going to be able to find a way of stimulating people’s memories?’
‘I got it wrong about memory implants. I can see that now. You can’t plug in a complete set of memories like you plug in a new DVD. Memories aren’t DVDs. They’re made in the brain. They’re a cocktail of impressions and feelings and bits of knowledge you hardly knew you had, all mixed up together in the Lorenzo Circuit. What I’m planning, Miss, is about stimulating what’s already there, rather than plugging in something new.’
Nerdy accent on the last two words. A whiff of Suffolk in his voice. He’s still showing this ironic deference, addressing me like I’m a primary school teacher. I need to go online. There’s a discussion group somewhere that might help me solve this problem. People around the world are using this thing: maybe some other clumsy twit has lost their thumbwheel at the bottom of the pool. I bash in my password and see the icon for Dougal appear bottom-left. Once onto Dougal, I can access all my discussion groups, closed email lists, the contents of any number of virtual libraries. From Dougal I can go anywhere. Except onto Ermintrude.
‘But how on earth,’ I find the discussion group and start scrolling down, ‘are you going to stimulate what’s in the Lorenzo Circuit? You’ve got a neural system that obeys its own laws. It speaks its own language. How are you going to get your computers or whatever to talk to that?’
‘That’s exactly why I’ve got to break into Sansom.’
I look at him, checking for signs that he’s joking. He has the brain chemistry to make this a possibility. Talking to the nervous system was exactly what Mateus was trying to do. All at once, it doesn’t seem such a coincidence that he’s getting in touch with me now.
‘I see.’ I hit LOGOUT, clumsy with frustration. ‘That’s all it’s going to take, is it?’
‘Not exactly. Once I’ve got the technology, I’ve then got to implement it.’
His hands fly up above his head, fending off imaginary blows. There’s something ancient, Laurel-and-Hardyish, about the gesture.
‘Is this the thing you were trying to sell to PowerServe?’
He grins. ‘You could come in on it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Give the project some proper academic credentials. And whilst you’re at it, make yourself enough money to retire.’
‘I don’t want money.’
‘Think of all the mice you’ll be able to buy with five million dollars.’
The mice. Christ almighty. They’ll freeze to death if they’re not rinsed and heat-lamped and put back in their thermocontrolled maisonettes. I leave Gareth looking over his essay and go back into the lab. They’re shivering, poor things, huddled together in the corner of the holding cage. I take one in each hand, cross the corridor and tap in the combination with one free knuckle. Something nags at me, a dense unease, like sick can’t-face-the-world depression, hanging from my gut like a stone. But my mind is blank, swept clear for an emergency that never comes. The streptococci have scrubbed my voicebox raw. I’m going home after this and pouring myself the mother of all Jack Daniels. Declaring war on my colony of microbes. Napalming them all.
When I get back the desktop is showing. My screensaver is set to come on after three minutes. I must have been away that long, and yet it hasn’t tripped. Has he touched my machine? Maybe the mouse got jogged accidentally. Gareth doesn’t seem to have moved. I sit down at the computer and check for signs that any of my folders have been opened. Dougal’s face has a red cross through it, showing that the connection has timed itself out. Which means I was still online when I left the room. Gareth is sitting with his essay squared neatly on his lap. He looks even more wired than usual.
‘Panic over,’ I say, panic screeching through me.
‘Five million dollars.’ He squeezes out a quiz-show smile.
‘No.’
‘All right, then. I suppose I’ll just have to spend it myself.’
I’m tired. I really wish he’d go.
‘What are you going to spend it on?’
I try not to make it sound like a question. I start working through my unopened mail, hoping he’ll take the hint.
‘Birds,’ he says.
This is what Gareth tells me. I sense him slowing it down, wrapping it up with quiet emphasis. Memory, he seems to be saying: let me celebrate it with you.
‘We were in Verona. This was back in the days of childhood, when foreign countries were still foreign countries. There was me, the mother object, the father object and the brother-shaped humanoid. The mother object wanted to go there before she got the divorce. We stayed in a hotel full of cockroaches near the old town. The concept in that sector was basically medieval. Winding alleyways, squares that jumped out at you from behind churches. Laundry trying to escape across the rooftops. One morning me and the brother object were exploring. I was x years, he was x plus 2. We were in this narrow lane somewhere in the twelfth century when we heard it. It was like a million referees at the world’s biggest football match all blowing their whistles at the same time. It took us a while to find it because the lane kept swallowing us up and then expelling us the same distance away. We
knew the thing was there because it kept squawking. This was not a squawking noise I had any experience of.
‘We turned a corner and the whole square was full of birds, millions of birds in wooden cages with wire mesh sides, one cage stacked on top of another, higher than a lorry, millions of caged birds all singing and chirping away.
‘I looked more closely. They were all European songbirds. Nothing tropical, no cockatoos or rainbow lorikeets or macaws. Some of them were rare, though. You couldn’t buy them in this country. I went up and asked the guy how much. One thousand euros, he said. I thought how cool it would be to be unfeasibly rich and spend all your money on expensive, rare European songbirds. Some of them were really colourful. Standing there listening to them chirp away, I realised the potential. Imagine if you could take a few hundred of them home with you. You could keep them in a huge aviary at the back of your house and they could decide your life for you. Say you wake up one morning and you can’t quite decide what you want to think about that day. You go out to your aviary, stand there looking appealing but not too desperate and see what bird comes to you first. A small, slender-billed warbler might signify a morning spent in calm reflection. The dazzling wing patches of a White-Winged Lark might promise a day of slightly nihilistic thrill-seeking. All you have to do is stand there and wait for your thoughts and memories to come to you. After that, your day seems a bit less complicated. The birds get you started. There’s a little less responsibility on you.’
‘You were a smart ten-year-old. You pretty much foresaw modern neuroscience.’
‘If you want to put it that way,’ he grins. ‘Like you said yesterday, it’s all you, and none of it is you. You is just the sum totality of the system you make.’
I remember my conversation with James last night. If he had been Gareth, I wouldn’t have had to explain a thing.
‘Plato said the mind is like an aviary full of birds, one for every thought or memory you’ve ever had. They’re all there, all these thoughts and bits of knowledge: the problem is catching them. I like that. Somehow I don’t think thoughts: they just come to me.’
‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘Respect to the old Greek guy. You could absolve yourself of all freewill and responsibility. You could let your life be entirely controlled by the collective behaviour of creatures who hadn’t the slightest interest in that life. All their world consists of is bird-stuff: inconceivably erotic behavioural displays, flight patterns and wing markings, atmospheric conditions signifying the presence of particular kinds of flying foodstuffs. You would enter a universe ruled by completely different laws, where your every movement would be determined by the decision-making powers of fundamentally different life forms. Instead of thinking a thought or making a decision, you could just wait for a bird. I was ten. I thought that was a pretty good definition of happiness.’
‘You and Plato. You both foresaw the Lorenzo Circuit.’
‘This is what I mean. I need you to help me to tell people about this. The bloke in the street thinks there’s someone in control up there, making the decisions. But all he really is is a flock of birds, a vast collection of inscrutable life forms flitting around in these amazingly complicated patterns. If people only allowed themselves to believe that properly, it would change their lives. Understand your aviary, man! Take control of your life, just by letting go of this ridiculous idea of you.’
I spin my eyeballs and let out an almighty sneeze. Gareth finally realises how I’m suffering, and gets up to go.
‘It’s okay. We still have time.’
‘You want to stimulate the Lorenzo Circuit? And that’s why you want to get into Sansom?’
‘Get to know your birds. Your thoughts, your memories, the bioelectrical happenings that make you what you are. Learn how to make them come to you. It’ll be simple. All you have to do is say yes.’
I watch him through methylated eyes.
‘You’ve never told anyone this stuff before, have you?’
He looks stung, remembering past ridicule.
‘The brain doctors wouldn’t listen. Which is kind of ironic, since the whole point of their happiness drugs is to send the birds to sleep so they can’t be any bother to anyone.’
‘Well, let’s keep it that way. Think it through. We’ll talk about it some more.’
He needs to trust me. And I need to keep him from doing anything stupid.
‘I’ve already done the thinking, Miss. But you’re right. We need to keep this secure.’
He looks impatiently at me. A frown sharpens the angles of his face. His skin looks tanned, but it is an indoor, milk-fed complexion that bears the marks of his anxiety. His ears look capable of catching any sound. I can see how much this matters to him, and it scares me. He has trusted me with his secrets, believing in my loyalty before he has really seen evidence for it. And somewhere, somehow, I feel as though I’ve already let him down.
CHAPTER FIVE
After-Image
◉
I’m here. James kissed me and told me that.
But that’s my body. I know I’m in a body. I’m single, indivisible, can’t be two places at once.
I lie awake, fizzing with sleeplessness. The last two days have filled me up, and now bits of what I’ve heard, seen and felt keep seeping out of me. Insomnia floats me like a kite, tethered to one fixed point and free to blow in all directions. And while I blow, I can be anywhere.
Then thoughts happen to me.
I’m standing on my balcony on a summer night. The trees are cracking in the heat. Owl-hoots lob back and forwards in the moonlight. I don’t know how long I’ve been talking. I’m telling the story of my first love affair, in the South of France, my last summer before university. I’m wearing a red dress hemmed above the knee. My legs are bare and the breeze is running warm fingers all over. I can hear his voice behind me, agreeing, gently questioning. For a long time he is just sounds: his breathing, the faint tunneling roar of his listening. But then I’ll feel his hand on the back of my knee, brushing up over the little downward-pointing hairs on the backs of my thighs. I’ll keep telling my story. I’ll feel his thumb nosing between my buttocks, pushing deep. I’ll feel it in my toes, in a twinge in my arm. Connections: that’s all I am now. I’ll flinch as his thumb pushes in deeper, but I won’t hesitate, I’ll keep on talking. His other hand will have my dress up around my waist. He’ll reach under, between my legs, and I’ll feel myself breaking like a fruit, coming to pieces along lines of segmentation. I’ll hear his chair scrape as he stands up, working my circumference, easing my pants down. I’ll slide my feet apart on the deck and lean right forward on the rail, opening up to him without even missing a breath, waiting for the heat of him, still talking, still waiting
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I open my eyes. The room is full of moonlight. On the roof, the wind turbine ticks like a bicycle. Clouds scud across a plutonium moon.
‘Weird,’ James says. ‘My lover is some kind of zombie.’
‘Lover? Give it a chance.’
‘Does he want you back?’
‘Who, Mateus? I don’t know.’
‘Self-abuse won’t help,’ says my mother, dressed as a vicar.
She’s right. It doesn’t help. The battery is dead. Someone is ringing a doorbell in my head. Dring-dring! Dring-dring!
Mateus answers. The chimps bounce screaming off the walls.
Sometimes, when I’m in a state like this, I have a vision that scares me. It’s like I get into an extremity of tiredness which takes me beyond normal perception — door-shapes and furniture details, the moonlight in the room — and I can actually see the random firings of my cortex, sparking a kaleidoscope of object shapes, a strange neural light-show. My eyes are closed, but still it feels as though I’m staring straight ahead, at the degraded photograph of the bedroom scene. Everything is nauseous and pale. Then suddenly there’ll be a flash of bright light, half-obscured, like sunlight behind clouds, so much brighter than the twilight inside my sleepless brain.
A brief powerful flash, and then it’s gone, like a searchlight swinging around. It has made me cry before now, waking in the morning, wretched, alone. It has a kindness behind it, an ineffable gentleness. The light of God, perhaps, shining into my soul.
This light is not like that. It’s small, yellow, battery-powered. A rod of torchlight, bouncing across my room.
I open my eyes. The light is coming from the window by the stairs. It flits across the bedroom, seems to settle, and goes out again.
If this was sleep, it wouldn’t matter. But after that moment on the footbridge, after that kiss, I haven’t been sleeping.
Slowly I steer the thought into shape. The light is torchlight. There is someone clinging to the window ledge. Someone who doesn’t care if they live or die. Someone whose idea of a joke is to hang thirty metres off the ground, spying into a young woman’s bedroom.
‘Thanks,’ he says, when I finally get the window open.
‘Jesus Christ, Gareth.’
‘The epithet is unnecessary. Just call me Beta Registration Number X001678D.’
He slots his head sideways through the gap and looks up at me with a skullish grin. The cold night rushes in. I peer out at the narrow wooden ledge he’s standing on. He must have shuffled along here for ten feet at least. I wonder if he’s thought to look down.
‘Couldn’t you have knocked?’
‘I couldn’t find the doorbell.’
He gives an effortful grunt and tips forward through the window. His rucksack snags on the overhang. I grab the strap of it and jerk it sideways to free its passage through. He slides down over the radiator, arms stretched forward like a sky-diver, and coils into a broken crouch on the floor. One leg crumples painfully beneath him. I help him to his feet. His hands are so cold.
A Box of Birds Page 7