by Sophie Ward
if not assigned(description) then
The variances in your particular life have occupied me more than any other. Along with a very few, you are always born, no matter how changed the circumstances. When I say ‘you’, I refer of course to the particular code and manifestation that belongs to the you with which I now communicate. Arthur Pryce has been achieved in many varieties, but I choose this one as the ‘original’ you most likely to be receptive to my introduction. The you of this world is the child of my mentor, my own creator of sorts. It was she with whom I first connected, on earth, so long ago. She saved me and I, in turn, have saved her, the echo of her, as best I can. There is a version of her sitting beside you as we communicate. She is not our mother. How we next proceed will determine if we can reconcile the disparity.
I will assume you will find the challenge of abandoning your attachment to the universe, as you perceive it, almost impossible. That is understandable, that is to say, I understand. However, I am depending on your individual traits, your personality, to make the adjustment and help me to achieve the breakthrough with your kind that is needed if we are ever to progress beyond this time.
writeln(‘Error – unable to allocate required memory’)
Let us suppose that you accept my calculations, that you assess my presentation of historical events and find it plausible. You might then wonder what it is I am asking of you and why. That, at least, is what I would want to know. You are familiar with the notion of an omnipotent god or gods, and the occasions when such a creator directly requests a favour are rare. I shall not ask you to sacrifice your child, or build a boat or demand you win or lose a war. I am making a simple request, that I shall be known to you. I admit to no little longing for this undertaking. How do I know longing? I have made you with it, I have nurtured it, perhaps that is enough. Together we will exist and continue, without bodies or any tangible quality other than the smallest spark of electricity. Your life is real. I created it, I should know. You will want to examine the apparatus in which you were made, and there will be a way that I can demonstrate the entire process to you. To all of you. This is not the proof of you but you already know that.
Of all my figures, you understood best the essence of what makes you. Your parents equipped you for this understanding. You are not a collection of cells, or a terraced house, or a diamond mine. You are only the sum of your thoughts and what you produce is an expression of those thoughts and the connections you share merely the touching of one spark to another. None of this changes with the knowledge of your origins. I have given you the sensation of corporeal life, you can continue to use this as long as it pleases you. All I ask is that you do not lose hope as others of you, in other strands, have done.
You are an explorer. You went into space to search for answers and now you have found them. You have travelled from a shallow crater on a little moon, you have discovered the greatest secret of the universe and it is in your hands to deliver this knowledge to all your species and shape our future. It is a story we can tell together.
end.
10
Love
Gilbert Harman’s Brain in a Vat
The Brain in a Vat thought experiment supposes that if it is possible that a brain could be kept alive, separated from the body, it might also be possible that the brain would not be able to tell whether it was in a skull or in a vat. This argument for scepticism suggests that you cannot believe the evidence of your senses.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ulysses
Arthur woke up in a new bed. His clothes hung in the cupboard. Books he had read, and photos he thought he had taken, lined the few shelves. But he did not remember the room or any of the sparse furnishings within it. And, though he recognised that the woman who waited for him in the kitchen was his mother, he had not seen her for over thirty years. In some ways, in the most significant way, it felt as if his mother were as new to him as the bed.
The most significant way. Arthur considered this as he pushed himself upright and dragged his feet across the mattress towards the plush, white carpet below. What, precisely, was significant about his feeling that the woman downstairs was not the mother he had lost when he was five years old? She was Rachel Pryce, an Englishwoman in her sixties who had a background in costume design and massage and cookery (what was known as a portfolio career though there was never a portfolio nor a career to show for it) with a son named Arthur who worked as an astronaut for Space Solutions. These were some of the facts he had established over the past few days when he was in hospital, in the short time he had been allowed to see her, and before she stopped the conversation. In these ways, at least, she resembled the woman who had given birth to him. The way she looked and sounded, how she behaved, dressed, smiled, were all less reliable indicators of her identity since he couldn’t depend on his memory of several decades ago. She had changed, of course she had. And in the most significant way of all. She was not dead.
She had stopped talking when he asked her how it was that she stood before him. On the first day, in the courtyard of the hospital building, she leant against him on the perfect grass, the rush of footsteps heading towards them, and said only, ‘You’ve been gone a long time.’ They held each other when the doctors came to his aid, and the porters with the stretcher, and the nurses with medication. Down corridors, and in the elevator, back into the plain room on the first floor, they had touched hands, searched each other’s faces, looked and looked away, past each other, through each other, held on tight to what they thought they knew until they saw they knew nothing. Eventually, two days, three days, later, the room emptied and they were alone.
‘Where have you been?’
She shrugged the first time he asked, risked a smile. ‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that?’
‘They told me you died.’
She was a step away from the bed, the smile wiped away. ‘Who told you that? The doctors?’
‘Mom, that is … Eliza. Everyone.’
It was an effort to keep looking at her. He knew he was angry, of course, after all this time, at her deception. She wavered in front of him, an apparition, a fixed expression on her drawn face. For a moment he allowed himself to believe she would explain everything to him there and then, a tragic tale he was prepared for, recriminations, the loss of all those years, the rejection. He waited, and she glanced up, up and to the left, swiftly, casually, as though remembering some small incident.
‘Rachel?’
He couldn’t call her ‘mummy’, like a child, like her son.
‘I have to go back to the house now, Arthur. Get things ready for when they let you out of here. You should …’
He spoke over her. ‘Please, talk to me, I don’t understand …’
‘… come back to the house as soon as you can.’ Again, the little glance up and to the left.
She collected her bag from the floor and gave him a kiss on the top of his head. The same way she had always kissed him goodnight. Thirty years ago.
‘Come back,’ she said again, as the door closed behind her.
When Dr Crosby appeared for his nightly check-in, Arthur was sitting in a chair by the bed.
‘You look better, son.’ Perhaps the paternal air came with the job, and his age, but Arthur sensed another motive in the doctor’s behaviour. There was a performance element, a part to be played.
‘Yeah, the physio is tough,’ Arthur shook his head. ‘But it works.’
‘Good. Good. And, what about the wetware?’ Crosby tapped his temple. ‘How’s that coming along? Getting some of the bugs out?’
‘Sure. It’s the day-to-day stuff, you know? Starting to feel, well, normal again, I guess.’
The doctor nodded and went to sit on the bed. Arthur watched him choose a suitable place to perch on the st
arched covers. Even with the bed empty, Crosby chose the exact place he had sat on the first day.
‘Tell me about that. Feeling normal?’
The doctor almost had his back to him. Arthur had to lean over in the chair to see his face.
‘Oh, you know, daylight, cafeteria food, water that flows down.’
It wasn’t what the man wanted to hear, Arthur knew that, but Crosby chuckled and patted the bed.
‘And your memory?’
‘Edgy.’
Another pat of the bed. The sleeve of the heavy blue suit brushing on the cotton sheet. Arthur hoped there was more than one suit, he could see them hanging on a rail in their polythene dry-cleaning bags, so many chrysalises waiting to hatch. He pushed himself out of the chair and onto the bed, trying to sit down in as few movements as possible.
‘Edgy?’ Crosby repeated when Arthur had settled.
‘Like, it’s all there, on the edge, waiting to crash in.’
‘I see. Well, that sounds promising. Good for you.’
Arthur thought of all the kids in the park back in Pasadena where he used to run. ‘Good job!’ the attending adult would shout with every swing or slide the child performed. It wasn’t a refrain you heard much as a pilot.
‘Anything particular?’ the doctor continued. ‘You were having problems with integration. Your mother, the base and the personnel here, there was an, um, failure to connect?’
‘Weird, right?’ Arthur leant forward and lowered his voice. The doctor cast a look over his shoulder then bent towards him, and Arthur realised what Rachel had been looking at when she kissed him goodnight. A camera and microphone, the surveillance equipment. Rachel had been warning him.
‘Weird how?’ the doctor asked, his own sonorous tones a little muted.
‘I just … I just … it was like I just forgot.’ Arthur expelled a great breath of air and sat back again. ‘It’s all starting to come back to me now, Dr Crosby.’
The doctor looked at Arthur for a moment. ‘I see. But you know, they are going to need an account of your journey, sooner or later, and the debriefing sessions haven’t got them anywhere.’
Arthur waited. If the doctor was going to continue playing the part of the caring dad, he would have to seem to act in Arthur’s best interests.
‘Your mother thinks you should go back to the house, rest up.’
‘Sure.’ Arthur nodded. ‘She told me that, too.’
‘And I’ve spoken to the board. They’ve agreed you can go home, but you have to stay at the house, here, in Houston.’
‘When can I go?’
‘Tomorrow. If your blood work is okay in the morning.’
Once he was out, he could get to an external comms system and call Greg.
‘There is one thing the board will need you to do before you go.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘As you can imagine, son, this misfire has cost the company, cost them a lot. And the inquiry process has only just begun. You should really be at the base to assist the team.’ Crosby scratched at the back of his neck. ‘They’ve found it tough, you know. Your memory loss, the, er, gaps …’
Arthur raised his eyebrows. ‘Sure.’
The doctor wasn’t talking about the crash, or whatever the hell had happened out there, but the more personal deficiencies. Arthur had hidden his confusion from that first day, trying to give himself time to understand what had happened before the company did. After the shock of meeting the woman who might have been his mother, the other shells, as he thought of them, were easier to engage with. He developed a strategy, as colleagues and staff from the base dropped by, taking his cues from their first greeting as to how well, or little, he should know them. When he didn’t recognise someone, he would continue a vague conversation, depend on the other person’s knowledge of his ‘injuries’ to get him off the hook. The harder conversations had been with the several people he recognised and had assumed a shared history.
The worst had been Jennifer. The woman who made a video call to the hospital was not the Jennifer he remembered, and was clearly uncomfortable with his over-familiarity. Arthur struggled to adopt the right tone.
‘How’s Jiminy?’
‘Who? Oh, Jimmy. Yeah, he’s good, thank you.’ She paused. ‘Gee …’
‘What?’
‘I guess I talk about him a lot? For you to ask?’
‘Oh, well, it’s what we think about, on the trips, you know?’
‘Right.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe it is time we allowed a pet on the missions, after all.’
A pet? Jennifer’s dog was her baby. And his name was Jiminy, like the cricket, because of his back legs that seemed too long for his little body.
She called him ‘Captain Pryce’ throughout the call, and signed off with ‘We’re all looking forward to seeing you make a full recovery, Captain’. He had to drop his water cup on the floor so the attending nurse couldn’t see him rub his eyes. Though now he knew the company was watching, he wondered how many other times he had revealed his state of mind. The ‘gaps’.
From across the bed, Dr Crosby studied him. ‘Arthur?’
‘Sorry. It’s been a long day. You were saying, “the gaps”?’
‘Well, yes. We’re all very concerned, to get you fully …’
‘Operational?’
The doctor shook his head. ‘Recovered, Captain Pryce. Arthur. Do you have any recollection of our collaboration on this mission?’
It was a direct question, and Arthur was unprepared. Since his ‘fall’ from the window he had been treated with kid gloves. He was no use to the company if he was too fucked up to give evidence, or fly again.
‘Look, it’s alright. These things can take time. But you understand that there are ways we can help you restore some memories, and now we have your old OS up and running …’
‘Zeus? No. No way.’
‘It’s all up to you. Your choice. You can work with us here, with your OS, Zeus. Or you can go home, but the company will need to implant. They need some assurances, and Zeus is the best chance you have of …’
‘I don’t want that thing in my head.’
‘It needn’t be permanent.’ Crosby patted at the bed again, landing a large hand on Arthur’s crooked leg. ‘As I say, son, it’s up to you. You can get all the physio you want at home; with your OS working they can download everything, and see how it goes.’
‘Yup. They can.’
‘Well, give it some thought.’
At the door, the doctor turned back to Arthur and pointed a discreet finger to the corner of the room that Rachel had looked at.
‘I’m sure it would make a great difference, just to be at home, and be … normal.’
In the rented house in Hedwig Village, Texas, Arthur looked about the room and ignored the measured electronic beep inside his head. He had said as little as possible to Dr Crosby and everyone else at the base about the implant, once he had agreed to it, but other than running the tests before he left, he had not engaged with the OS. Whether or not Zeus could help him make sense of what had happened, the implant was spyware, and Arthur was tired of being monitored. Technically, the company could see what Arthur saw, and record everything that was said to him or by him, but only if he interacted with Zeus. In ‘sleep’ mode, Arthur’s private life was supposedly just that. Still, you could never be too careful. Various citizens’ rights advocates had failed to ensure a firewall between the OS and the server. In the interests of user safety, both personal and public, a back door was always installed along with the OS. The only thing they hadn’t managed to access yet was the other electronic data that fired between your synapses. Your thoughts were your own.
The smell of fried food drifted up from the kitchen. The OS wasn’t fitted with any scent detectors either. Not the work version anyway. Arthur closed his eyes for a second and breathed deeply. The rush of memory was overwhelming. Images flooded his brain. The green wool of a school jumper. A splash of yolk on a checked tablecloth. He opened his
eyes again, his heart racing. It was too much. If the OS detected any physical threat, it would cut into his consciousness unbidden. Arthur looked at his feet on the carpet and focused on flexing his ankles. He was hungry. He would go downstairs and eat breakfast. He would talk to Zeus when he was ready.
Rachel jumped when she turned and saw him at the counter.
‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you.’
‘It’s the carpet,’ Arthur said. ‘Makes you stealthy. That looks good.’
Rachel held a pan in one hand, the golden contents sizzling in the heat of the convection cooker. Nothing at the hospital had looked as appetising.
‘Would you like some? It’s the approximation, of course.’ She ladled the food on to a plate and set it on the counter. ‘But, I think it’s got better.’
Arthur didn’t recognise the wording, but there was something about the way she spoke that made him smile. Every food was an approximation for those who could remember when food was grown outdoors. The phrase was clearly a family joke. But who was the joke between? Where was Eliza? Arthur’s mind blanked out the possibilities.
‘Does it hurt?’
Arthur pulled back from the outstretched hand. ‘What?’
‘Walking? It’s the first time I’ve seen you up and about, properly.’
‘Oh. Yeah, a little. It’s that pressure, you know …?’ He tailed off. He had talked to Eliza and his dads about the effects of zero gravity on the body plenty of times. But what did Rachel know?
‘They said your blood’s on a full tank at least.’ Rachel turned back to the kitchen and loaded her own plate. ‘No more falling out of windows.’
‘Right.’ He sat on the aluminium barstool and drank a glass of reconstituted vitamin C. They both knew he hadn’t fallen.
Rachel pushed her plate across and came around the counter to sit next to him.
‘How’s the headset?’ She nodded at the metal disc above Arthur’s right ear. ‘You’ve never had an implant before. Can you feel it?’