Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  Of course I was bothered by what I had done. I am not a monster. But - and this is the really crucial thing, so I might ask you to pay attention - but I returned to that same hotel the following day, after the flickering violet passed over me; and that evening I introduced myself to Rosalee in the bar, and chatted to her, and she was not in the least traumatised or scared of me. It was a nice evening, actually. She and her colleagues and I had a good time. It was their last night at their sales conference, and the next day they were all going home - and did go home, I’m sure. And Rosalee, immaculate and unhurt, went back to her husband and lived, I’m sure, a very happy life. So where was the harm? I certainly didn’t make a habit of it. I don’t like to think of myself as a rapist. And in fact I’m not one - it happened, that one time, but in another world, when I was another person. I have passed through dozens and dozens of reality lines after that event, and in every single one I could have tracked Rosalee back to her hometown (I’m sure she told me what it was, though I can’t remember) and found her living blithely unconscious that any harm had ever been done her. If she doesn’t think anything bad has happened, then what evil did I do?

  And I’ll tell you something else. That particular event gave me a strange confidence. I approached women in a different way. I suppose it was a sense, on some subconscious level, that nothing could ultimately be denied to me. If there were a woman who attracted me, I could force her, and then simply walk away beyond the chance of consequences. Just knowing this was enough; I didn’t have to act it out. But it gave me a certain swagger, a confidence of approach, and if some women did not like this, rather more did. I continued to pay prostitutes, often the same girls (although they, of course, never knew who I was); but from time to time, and for the pure satisfaction of the successful pursuit, I sometimes persuaded women I met in bars to come back to my room, and no money changed hands.

  Perhaps this gives the impression that I put a lot of energy into sex. I didn’t, actually. Which is to say: I had to find something to do with my life. My life still went on, you see. And relatively little of my time was concerned with the erotic life.

  I felt no yen to travel. Since the world around me blanked my very existence from its collective mind every three days, I preferred staying in an environment I knew, whose resources I could appropriate, whose weaknesses and blind spots were clear. I did spend some mournful, or I should rather say self-pitying, days wondering what the rest of my life would look like - sitting in a pub, for instance, in the autumn evening, in the cooked red light of the setting sun. I would start reflecting that nobody could share my life; that I could never settle down, have a family, grow old in the conventional way. But these maudlin interludes never lasted long. I was in my twenties; the thought of settling down had never before occurred to me. Did I really want to - or, more forcefully: could I now bear to lose the perfect freedom I presently enjoyed? Of course not. And self-pity does disgust me. The whiny voice. The glass tadpole on your cheek. Nobody wants to see that.

  What did I do with my time? I walked around a good deal. This became, in fact, a kind of routine: my constitutionals, as I liked to think of them. I particularly liked walking early in the morning, before breakfast; stepping out under the still dim sky, strolling the pavements, where the jammed commuter traffic looked beaten black and blue. The clouds overhead like a tarpaulin sky. One tongue-red pillar box amongst all the grey. So much urgency and blank-eyed bustle, and none of it touching me. And then back to the hotel for a full breakfast (bacon, sausage, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, hash browns - no eggs), and the paper, and those little luxury indulgences that tasted sweeter now that I felt I had, in howsoever notional a fashion, earned them.

  Autumn replaced summer. Trees drizzled their leaves onto the black ground. Cars rattled their phlegm. Umbrellas sprouted all around me like fungi in the rain, although speaking personally I wasn’t in the least bothered about getting wet. I had no reason to stay dry. I enjoyed communing with the boisterous elements, as the wind trailed its invisible silk gown over the floor, and all the trees were ponderously head-banging to a tune only they could hear. But then, blink and it was winter, a hard sunlight smearing off the snow, giving the white fields an odd and scorched look.

  There’s no point in trying to evade this, or play it down. I might have hurt some people, but the next day they were not hurt, and had no memory of being assaulted - in literal fact never had been. I did not choose this state of affairs. I did not make it this way, but it is where I am thrown. It is the logic of the world. And after a full year of my new mode of being, freedom had soaked deep into my soul, and it was no longer possible to imagine another way of being. Who did I really harm? I stole the credit card and pin from J R FAIRBOROUGH and over the course of many months I suppose I decanted tens of thousands of pounds from his bank account to pay for accommodation and clothes, food and drink. But J R Fairborough the man only ever had to face, in any one reality, a few hundred misappropriated pounds (and I daresay the bank refunded him that money). So did I really rob him? Or Rosalee, poor Rosalee, mumbling and struggling in that hotel room - I’m sure that experience was not pleasant for her. But I passed through worlds in which hundreds of Rosalees lived happy lives. So as a proportion of her total spread of existence what harm did she suffer? Some minuscule fraction of an assault. We can go further and say: what if there is an infinite sheaf of alternate realities? Any real number divided by infinity is zero. In an infinite universe, any individual instance of suffering literally amounts to nothing. To nothing at all! You can’t argue with mathematics. Mathematics trumps ethics, my dear people. To kill the only cosmic iteration of Ken Mantel, in his ridiculous ill-fitting suit, would be a bad thing; but when you are faced with an infinite phalanx of Ken Mantels, standing in your way, calling the police on his mobile, waving his arm to stop you stealing the car from his shoddy little dealership - if you run him down he’s one of a rank of millions of pawns. You can’t tell me that means the same thing.

  I didn’t tell you about Ken? I decided, on a whim, I wanted a car. I could hardly buy one outright; Fairborough’s credit card hardly stretched that far. I thought I’d take one for a test drive and simply not return it, but Ken insisted on coming with me. That wasn’t going to work. So I decided simply to drive it away, until Ken, idiotic Ken, decided he would stand in my way. That’s not important. The important thing is this: afterwards I drove to a country hotel, for a change, and took a top-floor, five-star room. And that evening I stood on the balcony (for this room had its own balcony) and smoked a cigarette, and drank some brandy, and looked up at the sky. The moon was there, like a clipped toenail. The sky was bruise-black and flecked with stars all over it, and the air beautifully and crisply cold. The lawn was enormous, and was the darkest of purples in the moonlight. And this is what I thought: whatever you do is alright. This is what I thought: the moon looks no bigger from an upstairs window than a down. That’s what I thought.

  Let me put it another way. A tap is running. When you place your hand under it you are not sure, for the moment, whether it is very hot or very cold. This is how good and evil manifest, in the world, more often than not. It might be an act of courage and virtue to do something - to invade Iraq, for instance, as my country did. It might be an act of great wickedness. At first, you can’t be sure which it is. I went past that same dealership a few days later, and Ken was back up front, in his cheap suit, smiling at the passers-by.

  ~ * ~

  4

  Less than a year passed before I noticed that the interlude between transitions was shortening. I had grown so accustomed to the rhythms of my new life that this was almost as disorienting a discovery as the original passage. Mauve fire at noon on the third day crept, almost imperceptibly, but then more markedly, into mauve fire at late morning on the third day. I got used to this new state of affairs, of course. Human beings have a great talent for getting used to things. I carried on, as I had been carrying on; mostly just passing the time, amusing mys
elf, drinking, eating, only rarely hurting anybody. But once the space between transitions began to shrink, the rate of the shrinkage soon started to accelerate. For a number of months I experienced the purple flame late-morning, or mid-morning. Then, suddenly, it was happening at breakfast on the third day; and then in the middle of the night at the end of the second — such that I woke up wrapped in shreds of sheets in a strange bed, sometimes not alone. I took to getting up earlier and earlier, so as to be sure to be awake when the transition happened. But the time moved earlier and earlier. It happened at midnight. It happened the evening of day two - and a couple of months later I was down to two days, with the flame starting up again at midday.

  Of course I pondered where this new development was tending. There was nothing I could do about it, one way or another, so I didn’t fret unduly; but if it continued, it seemed to me clear that it would reach a limit in a matter of weeks - that the length of time between transitions would shrink from days to hours, from hours to moments, and then . . . what? I suppose I assumed there would be a purple fizz and flash, a sort of alternate-reality-shift short circuit; and then I would blink, and find myself locked once again into a single reality. I told myself that I could face this eventuality with equanimity. That I had lived that way before, and could do so again, that it would give me the chance for a normal existence; to marry and have children and all of that. But my uneasiness was deeper than self-reassurance could reach. I had grown accustomed to my rootless freedom and did not wish to give it up.

  I suppose, looking back, that I went on a kind of spree. Spree is not the wrong word. As the window of opportunity shrank I indulged myself more fully. I took great pleasure in smashing things up; in setting fire to things, for instance; ram-raiding shops, crashing and bashing. I derived an almost zen-like pleasure from - let’s say - throwing a dustbin so as to break the large plate glass storefront of Debenhams, timing the action immediately before the purply flames came about me such that I could look again to see the glass miraculously restored to the way it had been before. I became more and more reckless. I was not caught.

  Two days became one; and one day became half a day. The line approached its asymptote. I don’t need to draw this out longer than necessary. I found myself stepping from reality to reality hourly, and I strolled by the river, and took a drink, and watched the swans. It was early in the year, and the weather was that uncertain compromise between late winter and early spring. I folded my scarf around my neck more closely, and the mauve light sparkled all about my body, and I wandered on.

  The climax was coming. Half an hour passed between transitions; and then quarter of an hour; then seven minutes; then three. I stood in Gap, in front of one of their full-length mirrors; but even though I could see (from, as it were, the inside) the violet light flaring and licking about me, I could not see that same light enfolding my mirror-reflection. That puzzled me. Three minutes became a minute as I walked out onto the high street again. Thirty seconds later, there was another flash and dazzle. I counted fifteen and it happened again. A handful of seconds. A second. And—

  ~ * ~

  5

  It was a prolonged dazzle, and bright light-blue shimmer that totally swallowed me. If I expected it to stop, or burn out, and for me to find myself in the universe of consequences again . . . well, it didn’t. Or it didn’t immediately. Instead the shimmer increased in intensity, and I had to shut my eyes; but it was bright enough to penetrate my closed lids. I stood there.

  And then, just as I was starting to wonder whether I was now going to have to spend the rest of existence stuttering blindingly from reality to reality, the light stopped.

  I opened my eyes and found myself - well, here.

  You came to see me a certain time later. Naturally, I find it hard to calculate the passage of time in this place. The first thing you said to me, confusingly enough, was: You will have interactions with me, and you should think of me as your defence. You will not have interactions with your prosecutor. That is not the way we do things.’

  I understood only much later which idiom you were invoking (for my benefit I suppose). Legal. No courtroom, no judge, no cross-examination. But a prosecutor, nonetheless. An adversary.

  It was not until our third meeting that you explained my trajectory. Trajectory was your word. Some people think there is an infinite sheaf of alternate reality lines, you said. (You know what? I incline to that view myself.) You yourself, though, think that many of these lines cancel one another out, and that the multiverse resolves into only (‘only’) a very broad sheaf of hundreds of thousands of variants. Or millions of variants. Or - whatever. I suppose the number matters, but it’s hard for me to care.

  ‘You were deep in the sheaf, from the perspective of where we are now,’ you told me. ‘The initial extraction resulted in a weak oscillation, and you moved only slowly, to begin with, from line to line.’ And then you embarked upon a digression about how ‘slowly’ was the wrong sort of concept for this, which, frankly, you could have spared me. Then: ‘but the further out you passed, the closer you came, the more force, and the more rapid the oscillation.’ I swear to you that’s how you talk. It’s almost comical.

  I think of myself as tracing out an elegant parabola, from my launching point up and out and curling round until I achieve a sort of perfect orbit. Or an escape velocity. Or any of these sorts of distorting modes of speech to visualise what happened to me. ‘We apprehended you,’ you said. ‘We captured you.’

  ‘I don’t understand!’ I said. ‘What did I do wrong?’

  To be tried for crimes committed after I was arrested forces me to wonder what justified the arrest - or was it something that could only ever be justified after the event? Did you somehow know I was going to sin, even before I did it?

  I asked this absolutely genuinely, for my life - I mean, of course, my life before the initial dislodgement, had been as blameless as any person’s. Not perfectly blameless, I mean; but not so terrible or criminal as to merit. . . well, all this.

  You did that polo-mint eye thing you do, when your astonishment approaches its maximum intensity. ‘Wrong?’ you repeated. ‘The crimes - the killings, rape, theft?’

  ‘But that was after I was extracted from my original timeline!’ I protested.

  I made this point several times. Sometimes you would repeat ‘original timeline’ with such ponderous scorn as to make me doubt that there was ever a timeline rightly mine, whether I was some kind of reality cuckoo. But more often you would start some complicated lecture ... I suppose, you were trying to give me a clue, as far as your Byzantine rules and prohibitions permitted you, as to what the prosecutor, the adversary, would be saying about me. The lecture consisted of something arcane and, frankly, metaphysical about the way my ‘crimes’ (you’ll forgive the inverted commas) are projected across the continuum as a kind of permanent stain, or shadow, or something. That although they began ‘after’, in a manner of speaking, my initial apprehension, yet they reflect back ‘before’ that moment, in some existential sense. I don’t see it. You’d expect me to say so, but I really don’t. I didn’t ask to be dislodged from my reality. If you people had left me embedded there, I fully believe that I would have lived a blameless life.

  ‘Ah but you weren’t,’ you said, lugubriously. ‘Ah but you didn’t.’

  I’m hamstrung by not knowing the nature or jurisdiction of my adversary, or the nature of charges, or the possible consequences of a guilty verdict. And when I say ‘I didn’t ask to be dislodged from my initial reality!’ you look genuinely puzzled, as if a murderer were to say ‘But I didn’t ask to be born!’ by way of justifying his assassinations. But the case is hardly the same! Birth is just birth; where my extraction was the first step in an elaborate ‘police’ operation to drag me from the regular world to . . . well, to here.

  ‘It’s not the least bit like that,’ you say.

  Do you mean the comparison isn’t right? Or my account of the extraction is
n’t right? Nobody asks to be born - that’s true, though. To be dragged without consent into this arena where we are then judged with horrible severity, with heaven-and-hell severity, doesn’t seem altogether . . . Well, I was going to say ‘fair’, but that’s probably not a very sensible observation to make.

  And some of my questions might as well be in double-dutch for all the sense I get out of you. I asked, for instance, whether I had been extracted - following from this whole events-in-one-line-casting-shadows-over-the-whole idea - whether I had been extracted because ‘you’, or ‘they’, had spotted some genuinely monstrous crime in my future. I mean in the future of me in that original time line. (‘Original?’ you said, in that vastly muddled, sepulchral, I-don’t-follow voice you use). But this didn’t seem to be a question you could comprehend. When is the trial? does no better (‘ “trial”?’, followed after a slow interlude, and with greater expressive bewilderment, with ‘ “when”?’). So, to be honest, I’ve more or less given up on you for elucidation. I can’t believe the final illumination will be far off.

  Naturally I consider the possibility that I will be executed, or some equivalent. I hope not, but I don’t know. How could I know? And in that event, well, dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. Which is all very well. But there’s dust and there’s dust. Maybe we’re talking sand and ashes; but maybe, just maybe, we’re talking cocaine and gunpowder. Don’t you think?