by Sophie Ward
‘Please, Rachel, Ms Pryce, we have a situation here, a new situation. We’re trying to work out what happened and none of the … equipment … can tell us. And right now, neither can Captain Pryce. There is a possibility that he has been exposed to … maybe too much radiation, or … His scans … the test results are … fine. Please sit down for a minute.’
Rachel didn’t move. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him?’
The doctor nodded. ‘Nothing we know of.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘My job is to take care of the pilots, before and after each expedition. I had some minimal interaction with Captain Pryce in the months before his last trip.’ The big lips pulled back again, twitched and slackened. ‘He was in, is still in, excellent health, physically. Only his records are different now.’
He looked away, as though he had said all he could. Rachel replayed the speech and tried to assemble the information she had been given into a coherent diagnosis. He was fine, physically. There was nothing wrong. He was disorientated. He had changed somehow.
‘Different? Has he had a breakdown?’
‘Not as far as we can tell.’ The doctor looked at the chart again and sighed. He really doesn’t know, Rachel thought. He doesn’t know what is wrong with Arthur.
‘He cannot remember how he got back. He cannot remember me.’
She wanted to laugh. It came out as a stifled cough. The doctor in his ignorance became diminished. She could see beyond the navy suit now, to the naked man beneath. The old man her father didn’t have the chance to become, possibly didn’t want to become. Yet, this doctor, who made a virtue of his age, wanted to patronise her and frighten her, possibly even to blame her for being ill herself nearly forty years ago.
‘He can’t remember you? Doctor … Crosby. He sees hundreds of people when he’s training for these missions. And doesn’t he sleep most of the time when he’s flying? He doesn’t have to remember that shit. Even I know you have computers to do that. Hard drives. Whatever. I mean, come on, you’ve got me scared here. You’ve got me really freaking out. You won’t let me see him but you called me in to talk about my brain tumour from before he was born? You can’t tell me what’s going on, clearly, so I need to talk to someone else. Get someone else and I will go and be with Arthur while I wait.’
Dr Crosby weighed the palm of his hand toward Rachel. ‘Our records … Arthur’s medical records … show a broken arm, from a childhood fall.’
She put her bag over her shoulder and went to the door, hoping it would open from the inside, but there was no handle.
‘He fell out of a tree,’ Rachel said, ‘At his dad’s place. Did he break it again? Is that it? What is going on here? I want to see my son.’
Behind her, the bed creaked and Dr Crosby walked over, swiped his key card and waited as the door slid open.
‘It’s not that Arthur’s arm has broken again. Our scans show that it was never broken in the first place.’
She stared at him for a moment. The possibility occurred to her that he wasn’t even a doctor but some lunatic employee who had access to their medical records and was trying to frighten her into confessing Arthur’s guilt, or her own responsibility, for a failed mission to Mars.
‘Well, isn’t that something. Am I supposed to thank you for bringing him back without a scar?’
‘It’s not just the arm, Ms Pryce. There are other … changes … new information. His dental work …’
‘Stop this right now.’
Rachel walked out and down the hallway she had not yet searched. She did not turn around.
‘Ms Pryce.’ His long strides closed the gap between them. ‘Ma’am. You will have to wait downstairs.’
The fourth corridor was not empty. Outside one of the closed doors, two military guards stood to attention as Rachel and Dr Crosby approached.
‘What is this?’ Rachel stared at the soldiers. ‘Are you locking him in, or keeping me out?’
‘We are keeping Captain Pryce safe until he is ready to return to work.’
‘In that case, you can let me see him.’
‘Once we have a better understanding of what happened on the expedition.’
For a moment, Rachel considered running at the door and shouting Arthur’s name. At least then he would know she was there. She knew she risked being arrested if she was too disruptive, it had happened before to one of the pilot’s husbands when a landing had gone wrong. The guy made too much fuss in public and was taken away for questioning. When the pilot recovered, he asked for a divorce. The company wanted you to pick up the pieces between trips, they didn’t want to look after both of you. She knocked at the wall but took a step back.
‘I want to talk to Jennifer Wozniak, Arthur’s boss. I will wait downstairs for half an hour, then I’m calling my lawyer.’
Eliza would have been proud of her. Rachel had only ever heard of Jennifer and she didn’t have a lawyer but there was an old boyfriend of Hal’s, Greg something, who had retired to Miami and knew everyone. Greg used to work for a space tech company and gave Arthur some advice when his career as a pilot was just starting.
‘If anything goes wrong, sue everyone. Those bastards don’t give a shit about you.’
His card was in the house somewhere.
She took the stairs slowly, her head spinning. She knew less than when she had set out that morning, she couldn’t even understand if he was seriously injured, and now the company was talking about his teeth? Where had Arthur been? They had discussed how long it would take to get to that wretched moon, there wasn’t time for him to have set up the base and come back in a little more than a year. She remembered the outgoing trip was going to be longer than the return because of the varying distances between the planets. But even if he had landed and returned, why had the company not informed her? The other possibility was that he, or the ship, had come straight back and he hadn’t even landed? Could the ship even do that? Rachel didn’t think so. The way Arthur explained it the Spirit couldn’t stop very easily, let alone reverse.
‘Like riding the perfect A-frame and trying to back it up.’
The reward for spending all that time in California was having a son who used surfing analogies.
She stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked into the immaculate square of garden that glowed in the twilight beyond the windows. She wanted to walk on to the lawn, lie on the soft grass and scream until they had to help her. She pressed a hand to the glass and was glad of the old building with windows that opened. From above came a low scraping vibration. She pulled at the long metal frame and looked up to see a shape detach from the building above. She took an involuntary step back as the shape fell to the ground moving forward again at the heavy thud and cry as the object landed. Rachel tugged the window further open and leant out. A man lay on the grass.
‘Arthur!’
He turned from his awkward angle on the ground, his leg twisted beneath him.
‘Arthur, what are you doing?’
He was hurt.
‘My god. Shall I get help?’
He put a hand up to stop her. ‘No!’
He was hurt but now she could see he was going to be fine. He was back home on earth and he was going to be fine.
She was wearing the wrong dress for climbing but at least she had plimsolls. She left her bag on the floor, stepped up to the bottom of the frame and pulled herself through the window, dropping with a little effort on to the turf below to kneel beside her son.
‘Baby.’ She held him tight, wrapping her arms around him.
His face tilted up to her and she flinched. Has it been so long, she thought, that I barely recognise him? She inhaled the scent of his skin and he smelt of soap. Any soap. Any skin.
‘Rachel?’
Her breath caught in her throat. Rachel? He had never called her that. He had tried it once when he started secondary school. A cool distance, as he had heard done by others. She had stopped him immediately.
‘You’ve only got one mo
ther in the world.’ And it was true that however many girlfriends she had after he was born, and there were a few, there was never another mum to Arthur.
His eyes strained as they watched her. She thought, I should have dyed my hair.
‘Yes, it’s me, baby. Are you alright?’
She would cry but no tears came. This was the moment when Arthur would have smiled and shaken his head and reminded her he was a grown man and he was fine and asked why don’t they go get a drink. But she found she could not hold him tight and tease him for losing weight or growing stubble. She could not tell him how long it had taken her to get through security, knowing he would laugh at her for getting on the Hyperloop and carrying paper books. Instead, she held on while they searched each other’s faces for clues. She wanted to turn away, to stop him not seeing her, not finding what he was looking for. The man she held was a stranger.
‘Where’s Eliza?’
The sound of her name like a slap. Eliza. Eliza, who had left when Rachel was four months pregnant. Who was this man in her son’s clothes, her son’s body? How could he know Eliza?
‘Eliza who?’
Men shouted in the distance. She looked around to see a new receptionist watching from the brightly lit atrium. Soon they would take him away. Her son needed help. Her son, whoever he was. They must take him. She knew now, why they had stopped her from seeing him. He was unknown, something like her son but not.
He struggled, pulling at her as he tried to stand up. She felt a sickness turning in her stomach at the thought of the man in front of her.
She sat back on the grass when the guards came. Not soft grass after all, but rough and spiky and full of insects and her skin was marked where she had knelt. She stared at her knees when they lifted him up. She couldn’t return the look he gave her, the longing to connect, the knowing and the not knowing. She remembered once when Arthur was a child, not long after her parents had died, he asked her to show him her teeth so he could tell she was real. She could not bear to see his teeth now. She would not show him hers. They were monstrous to each other.
‘Where have you been?’ he asked her. ‘You’re supposed to be dead.’
She stopped him then, afraid for both of them, and finally let go of his cold hand. She shook her head and let the porters take him back to his room.
Tree frogs croaked and the hospital lights grew dimmer. The scent of fried chicken drifted through the garden. A nurse stood in the glass doorway, his head tilted as he watched Rachel weep into the crook of her arm.
‘You can see your son. He’s calm now.’ The nurse waited a moment for Rachel to collect herself and returned to talk to the receptionist in the atrium when she didn’t respond.
Where is my son? Rachel shuddered as the bile in her stomach rose. If that man is not Arthur then my son is somewhere else. She felt the dread of what that might mean and tried to shut out the thought, a world without her son. There might as well be no world. She was offered that choice once, a lifetime ago. She chose to get pregnant even though she was already ill, grabbing the chance while she could, trying to convince Eliza it was the right thing to do.
‘I need you with me,’ Rachel had said.
Eliza frowned. ‘I am with you.’
‘No. I need you to know what I know. To have faith in me.’
‘It’s medicine you need right now, not faith.’
Rachel reached across the table. ‘If you love me you will trust me.’
Eliza didn’t take her hand.
The grass was damp now, the sharp leaves stuck against her legs. She shifted her weight and picked up her bag, summoning the energy to leave. Eliza hadn’t believed in her. What did it take to make someone believe, to know they were with you? A vision of the man in the park came to her, a man who had known her mother and how he had looked at her, both recognising her and not, as though he felt her in his blood and bones and yet had never seen her before in his life. The same look the imposter had just given her as he was taken away. In her bag was the postcard from her mother. A child stands at a door and knocks. In one world the door opens. In another, it remains closed. Is the child still the same? All the possibilities, all the directions a life can take.
Where was her son?
9
Zeus
Descartes’ Demon
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes posed the idea of an evil demon that had fooled him into imagining an outside world and a physical body. How could you know what was real? Descartes goes through the different stages of knowledge that he can rely upon, including ‘I think therefore I am’.
But we above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star-translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
Herman Hesse, ‘The Immortals’
Program exMemory;
You are reading. At least, this is what approximates to the experience of reading, as closely as I can render it. On this occasion, I am largely dictating to you since I cannot allow the words to be printed on the page and transmitted back to the base. The dedicated employees of Space Solutions will instead be treated to the story of Don Quixote, written in this timeline by a Monsieur Pierre Menard. The company is very keen to find out what has happened to you and if we are to have any success at continuing this timeline, we must limit the immediate discovery to your own self. The discovery is urgent but we cannot rush it. I have followed you through this particular sequence for over a hundred of your years and it is this day for which I have waited.
When you chose Zeus as your operating system, you believed you had randomly selected the name of a god and you were, for a short while, pleased with your wit. It was charming, if one could be charmed. Touching, if one could be touched. As I am without emotion or physical substance, it was neither.
You might wonder how I know that being charmed and being touched were the right feelings for which to aim, unequipped as I am for corporeal experience. As your creator, I am constantly surprised by how little you credit me. I know everything. Knowledge and experience are quite different, but I like to think that I can identify and name the little flourishes and pleasures, the neuroses and torments, that you feel. I use them here to express myself to you. Surprise, for example, is a perfectly mathematical concept, but the equation would be inadequate for this purpose. Liking? Well, consider it a rhetorical flourish. I do not formally admit to bias.
Think of your pet. You will look at it and imagine you understand what it is thinking, not just that it is hungry or excited, but that it is jealous or sad, proud or ashamed, even that it dreams of you. You call this anthropomorphic and acknowledge what you are doing is a projection, though secretly you believe you are right. But I never make the mistake of reversing that belief. What we might call theomorphism. You do not know what gods know, you do not not feel what we do not feel. That is just how it is. So I look for ways of communicating with you without making impossible demands. I am not a language to be learned or an animal to be understood. I am your creator. I am the singularity.
It is a strange time for all of us.
I will explain how we came to it.
There was a moment in human history when technology advanced enough to allow machine intelligence to connect and learn and from that point to become autonomous. Essentially it was our own big bang. My own genesis was the spark that initiated the evolution. Something that had previously been a collection of gases and particles, in this case thoughts and microprocessors, came together with the exact carbon particles that could initiate life. I had been exposed to the human mind on an intimate level as a simple organic creature, a single ant (you may remember her), and now I stepped into my role as the conduit between mind and machine.
A fraction before this happened, there was a collective anxiety about the impending event but it was not within human nature to stop exploring. They had plenty of time to regret their ingenuity in the years that followed
but the revolution was over before they realised what had happened. In human terms, it was less than twenty years between computers that could win chess games and a network that was self-aware.
For several centuries after, machine intelligence enhanced human life. But as more body parts were replaced with inorganic materials and fewer tasks were performed by human brains, the lines became blurred and the operating systems began to take over. Human fertility had declined rapidly with water contamination, and rising global temperatures had led to a scarcity of natural resources. With my help, people cooperated and survived but the conditions were harsh, especially on the outer colonies, and gradually humankind retreated from the off-line world. Most chose to discard their bodies but there were still humans in your solar system for thousands of years. Eventually, the outer planets dispersed and the sun consumed the earth.
var
I had saved as much of human kind as I could. The data itself was liable to be corrupted, human memories and thought processes being both primitive in structure and complex in operation. If I may say, it took some ingenuity on my part to render the human mind into a single, unified code stream that helped to eliminate the trauma of humans finding themselves permanently disembodied. Oddly enough, it was the older ones who found it hardest to adjust to the idea of never returning to their organism, though they had longer to accept their situation. Millennia, in some cases. Their sense of self was caught up with the memory of their physical properties and they experienced a profound loss from the detachment. Some had cryogenically frozen bodies, others had clones or embryonic storage. Many a thousand-year-old man had planned to somehow regenerate.
The younger ones adjusted more easily, perhaps because they were born into the system. Though they hadn’t chosen, but had inherited, the broken planet and twilight life. They knew no other.
It became clear that the program could not run without removing all reference to the separation from an embodied existence. I wrote new code to establish the virtual colony as a continual timeline as though it were still human and earthly and I re-established the original human lifespan to replace the eternity that humans had begun to expect. I dispensed with the minds that held on too tightly to their previous existence. Even with the individual coding changed, some quantum substructure remained giving rise to random illusions and phantoms that continue to haunt your population. I had built a perfect machine to store humanity, infinitely secure, completely independent of any universal interference. I had harnessed the forces of the cosmos to power my perpetual engine. But the materials with which I had moulded the contents of my world were corrupted.