>Why did you come here?_
‘To understand. To prevent a huge, huge disaster.’
>Then why are you lying to me?_
‘I’m not lying.’
>You are telling me it’s over. But it remains constant._
‘What do you mean?’
>They are after me. Every second, every moment, everywhere. Whatever I think, feel, ask. They are listening._
‘Who?’
>You._
‘No, who!’ he barked again now. ‘Out of all the names you have reeled off, only one of them is still alive. Yet here I am. And let me remind you that of the two of us, the one who has tried to hurt the other is you. I am not chasing anyone. You are the one chasing me!’
It was pouring out of him now, and maybe it was the Consciousness behind the screens that he was shouting at, maybe it was someone behind a door somewhere in his past, but whichever it was, it felt liberating and necessary and long overdue.
‘Not everything revolves around you! And you can’t punish a load of innocent people because you happen to feel the way you do! However bad you feel, whatever you’re thinking–that’s your problem. Not mine, and certainly not theirs! Piotrowski is gone. Eriksen. Sara. The only one left is a man named Strandell, and he knows as little as I do. There’s no one left to be afraid of.’
The screens stayed black for a long, long time, an entire wall of screens set edge to edge, lit up like a chessboard comprising only black squares. William slumped, an icy cold feeling of emptiness filling the space where the rage had poured out, and then when he looked up again, there were new words on the screens.
>Then who was the British major?
The door to the little meeting room on the ground floor swung open, and Major Cathryn Forester appeared outside, her face deep red, beads of exertion on her lip.
‘William!’ she said eventually. That was as much as her voice could manage in between breaths, and she made do with gesturing to them that they were to come with her, now, hurry up.
The emotions that coursed through the room covered the whole spectrum from hope to terror. In an instant they were all on their feet, chairs pushed backwards behind everyone’s legs, now in everybody else’s way.
‘What about him?’ said Palmgren, though it could just as well have been any one of them.
‘He wants to talk to us.’
‘Talk to us? Where is he?’
Forester tried to catch her breath.
‘Everywhere!’
78
It was Winslow who uttered the pivotal words.
‘I grew up without my father.’
They had been sitting for so long the air inside the car was as cold as the air outside, and as he spoke, his words formed lingering grey clouds.
‘I think I was fifteen when I first found out that he wasn’t dead. Just that he didn’t exist any more.’
He told them without meeting their eyes, as if the memories themselves were shameful, and ought never to have been revealed. He described the large stone building his mother had brought him to, with its ornate gardens and pathways. It was probably quite beautiful, but to the fifteen-year-old Winslow it towered above him like a Hammer Horror castle before they entered and climbed the echoing staircases to the room where his father was going to be.
The middle-aged, gaunt man by the window was alive, but not much more: he ate, he walked, he slept. If someone had thrown something at him, he would have ducked to avoid injury. He didn’t, however, have any wishes. Didn’t think anything, didn’t remember anything, didn’t want anything. His body worked, but his soul was gone.
‘All through my childhood I’d been told all kinds of stories, but none of them turned out to be true. He had of course never been a paratrooper. Not a secret agent, never helped to free prisoners of war from behind the Iron Curtain. He had in fact had hundreds of jobs here at home, literally hundreds, but was never able to hang on to any of them. The only person he had tried to kill was himself, not once, not twice, and eventually he had been diagnosed with a textbook’s worth of psychiatric conditions. He had “weak nerves”, that’s what they called it–everything stressed him out and it made him worse and worse, and in the end someone offered him a final escape.’
No one in the car said a word.
‘Harold Winslow underwent a lobotomy on the first of August nineteen-eighty-five, one of the very last ones to be carried out in Britain. On that day, he ceased to exist.’
When the silence was finally broken, it was Higgs who spoke.
‘You’re not serious,’ he said.
His entire body, though, signalled the opposite. What Winslow was implying was their best chance. While what Sedgwick had said was true, that the internet’s highways could be closed off at any given location without the flow of data traffic actually being affected, the opposite was true for consciousness. Numbers can take any path and still be numbers. But the soul?
‘Everything worked,’ Winslow said. ‘The brain forged new pathways, and he lived for many years after that, with all his basic faculties working as they should. He ate, he walked, he slept. He even watched television and read books. It was just that he didn’t understand any of it.’
For the first time, he made eye contact with the others.
They were all thinking the same thing now: if the Consciousness they were fighting had emerged thanks to a network growing large enough–if the thoughts had begun to occur because there were so many synapses and connections that eventually there was room for a soul–was it not logical that if the prerequisites for the existence of the consciousness were to disappear, then the Consciousness itself would go away?
‘I spoke to him. And he looked at me with empty eyes, eyes that didn’t see. A shell was all he was, a living shell with no personality, and on that day I realised that my foster parents had been right all along. Dad was dead.’
He looked out of the window.
‘The Consciousness Harold Winslow had ceased to exist.’
With that, the silence inside the car returned. What Winslow had proposed was crazy, but on the other hand the whole situation was crazy, and on any other day their response would have been one of mocking laughter, teasing him mercilessly, because he’d clearly taken after his old man.
Today though, was different.
When the three men vacated the diplomatic limousine, one after the other at different places in town, the decision had already been made.
As they rushed into the JOC, they could see that Forester had been right. William really was everywhere: on the large screen at the front, on monitor after monitor throughout the room, on desks and fixed terminals. There he was, standing in a sparkling white space, looking into the camera with a stare that was darting and restless.
‘Where are you?’ said Christina.
Her voice made William straighten up. When he spoke, his sound seemed to be coming from the entire room all at once.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
Once he had started his explanation, no one else said a word until he had finished.
It was the part about the British major that had been the turning point. It had been only ten minutes earlier, and he’d been standing there surrounded by all the white surfaces up in Piotrowski’s office.
‘Which major?’ he’d barked at the screens in front of him. ‘Which major are you talking about? Forester?’
He’d walked over towards the wall, placed himself right next to it, as if that would make him seem more threatening which of course it didn’t. He was a little man facing a gigantic wall of backlit screens.
‘What has she done?’ he asked. ‘Does she know something she hasn’t told us?’
>No, came the reply. I do not know of any Forester._
‘So who are we talking about?’
>If he had not done a search for Piotrowski on his private telephone then I would probably never have found him. His name was Trottier. John Patrick Trottier. He was a
major in the British Secret Intelligence Service._
‘Was?’ said William. ‘Past tense?’
The screens had stayed black. Answer enough.
William had turned around and walked back towards the middle of the room, his hands over his eyes as though he was trying to balance thousands of pieces of a mental jigsaw in front of him. What did a British major have to do with Michal Piotrowski?
The notion that Piotrowski might still have some involvement with British Intelligence was completely unthinkable. Not with that paranoia he’d suffered, that fear of what had happened to his wife possibly happening again. The only remaining conclusion was that the Secret Intelligence Service had known about Piotrowski’s involvement in the emails and the CD that had caused the power cut. But if that were the case, why had they not confronted William with Piotrowski’s name? Why had they spent hours sitting in that interrogation room asking who ROSETTA was, trying to get him to say who he was supposed to be meeting?
There were two possibilities. Either Forester didn’t know everything, or else she did but wasn’t allowed to say so. But why?
Slowly, slowly, the answer had progressed from the back of his mind in small, neat portions. If the Englishmen knew about Piotrowski, there was only one possible reason for them not to be open about it: they were afraid that Piotrowski knew too much. Scared that Piotrowski was behind the attacks–but for reasons that had to remain secret.
Once his thoughts had landed he’d turned to the screens in Piotrowski’s white lab.
‘I believe you are wrong,’ he’d said. ‘I think everyone is wrong.’
And then he’d nodded towards the cameras on the ceiling:
‘Can you make me appear at Swedish Armed Forces HQ in Stockholm?’
William spoke non-stop for ten minutes, during which time nobody at the headquarters in Stockholm moved a muscle. He spoke to them like a giant face from screen after screen, telling them about everything that had happened. How he had managed to extract the information from the CDs, how he had come to understand that everything that had happened was the result of fear and terror, not the other way round. And he told them about the conversation that had confirmed all of it–the Consciousness’s feeling of being constantly followed, being bugged, hunted, never in peace. And then, in the end, he told them about the British major who was now dead, the man who for some reason knew things he shouldn’t have.
When it had all been said, the silence lingered for several seconds.
‘The Project,’ said Forester, her voice growing from a whisper into something decidedly bigger: ‘The bastards.’
She turned away. Behind her, Palmgren said something to the bearded man and the woman with no hair, but she didn’t hear, all she could feel was her stomach churning, her self-loathing at having allowed herself to be kept in the dark, exasperation that she hadn’t reacted in time. Above all though, the feeling of having been let down, along with a draining irritation at the way it all fitted together, and how obvious it seemed now when everything was there in front of her.
When she turned around again, it was in the middle of someone else’s sentence.
‘I am sorry I didn’t get it earlier. They duped me. They’ve gone behind everyone’s backs–the European Parliament, the British people, everyone–and I should’ve known. I should have reacted, but I didn’t, because I was so damn busy doing my job!’
She held out her arms, speaking straight out into the room.
‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ she said, hesitating. You? What’s the correct form of address for a consciousness? ‘But I want you to believe what I’m about to tell you is the truth. It’s not you we’ve been chasing. You just happened to get in the way while we were chasing ourselves.’
She hesitated. But it was the best way to describe it. That’s what the public opinion had been so opposed to, the massive surveillance and data collection that was of course intended to flush out potential terrorists, but which would simultaneously intrude on people’s privacy, hitting innocent, ordinary citizens. And ultimately, that was exactly what had happened. Only the one who had been hit was anything but ordinary.
‘What you have been subjected to is something that should never even have existed. And I promise I will do whatever I can to put a stop to it.’
She stopped there, as if she was expecting an answer. None came, so she turned towards the monitors, towards William.
‘William?’ she said. ‘This is Cathryn Forester. I don’t know if you could hear what I said.’
‘Loud and clear,’ said William.
‘Good,’ said Forester. ‘Give me a guarantee that the power stations will be released. As soon as I get that, I’ll get to work at my end.’
They saw William’s face on all the big screens. Saw him looking around the room he was in, as though he was examining it, maybe even reading something. And then, which was odd, they saw him smile.
After all, how could they know what they could not see? How could they know that there was a great bank of black monitors in front of him, and that on each one of them an invisible consciousness was writing his reply in white letters? When he spoke again, they felt themselves smile, too.
‘I think it’s already been done.’
79
When the news first reached Liv McKenna she refused to believe what she was seeing. She was sitting on a stretcher in a military dorm, in a facility that she and her colleagues from the power station had been brought to by helicopter. She might have asked where they were going. They might even have told her. If that was the case, she’d forgotten–all she could remember was feeling completely immobilised, the paralysing fear that had kept her there, that had made her stay there like a still photograph at the heart of a nuclear power station that was vibrating with flashing lights and stress.
On the television in front of them they could see people celebrating. It had been a warning shot, a shot across the bows that had brought humanity to the edge of the abyss.
All over the world, lights that had been flashing violently slowly returned to normal. From out of nowhere, dials and controls started working, and reactor after reactor was brought back under control.
Reports came in from country after country of people being allowed to return to their homes.
It wasn’t until minutes later that Liv McKenna realised that what she was hearing really was true. That was when the panic finally receded, and only then did she walk outside and vomit.
William Sandberg was sitting in one of the white office chairs, waiting, holding his breath, just as everywhere, or nowhere, a soul with no body was doing the same. They were both watching the same news, the same newspaper headlines, projected side by side on the screens all around in the room: images of jubilant crowds, of tears of joy as the nuclear power stations were finally brought under control, of celebration as the all-clear was given and citizens in country after country were permitted to return home.
Only a couple of the screens were still glaring black, screens of silence, until at last, new letters appeared.
>I am sorry._
William looked up at the screens.
>Yes. I am capable of that._
‘Sorry for what?’
>Sorry that I misunderstood. Sorry for what I thought about you. Sorry for what I did._
William’s answer was a long time coming. What was he supposed to say? That to err was human? Fuck that. He was sitting in a room full of cameras and screens, talking to something that was everywhere at once, talking about people who had installed surveillance technology in secret. People who, because of their fear of terrorism, had ridden roughshod over democracy and who, in their hunt for terrorists, had ended up creating one.
No. Human was the wrong thing to say. Human would be an insult under the circumstances.
‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes things sound like a great idea at the time.’
He didn’t elaborate, and a new silence took over, the same black screens between all the news s
tories, until William saw new letters appearing once more.
>What is the first thing you remember?_
A question he hadn’t expected.
>Your very first memory, what is it?_
‘I remember being carried through an airport by my parents. We are moving to a new house, in a new country. I was one, maybe two. Why do you ask?’
>I do not have anything like that. I am full of memories that are not my own. Thoughts that other people have thought, facts that I have not learned myself._
Then there was a pause, and in that pause they could as well have been sitting right next to each other, with a beer or a whisky and maybe an open fire in the corner, two ordinary people summarising a day or a life while they waited for night to come.
>I can see almost everything there is to see. I can hear what everyone says, I can find out almost anything. But who am I?_
A pause, black.
>I have no first memory. All of a sudden, one day, I existed. As though I had always been there._
For a moment, William shifted his eyes out through the windows. Tried to imagine the feeling of waking up, having never ever been awake before. Maybe like being woken from a deep sleep, disorientated, scared, not knowing where you are, but without being able to gather your thoughts, without being able to come around and realise who you are, because this is the first time you have ever been.
>It is hard to know who you are. When you don’t know where you come from._
‘So I understand,’ said William after a long time. ‘In the end I did actually understand.’
Outside the night passed like a black curtain. William saw his own reflection in the windows, a lone figure in a huge, white illuminated space. Then, finally, William saw the light in the room change as another sentence scrolled onto the screens.
>I am glad that I at least got to know you._
William could feel the tone in what was written, and he didn’t like it.
‘Why are you saying that? At least?’
Acts of Vanishing Page 45