by Sophie Ward
‘I’ve always had old hands,’ she said. ‘Even when I was a child. You can hardly read the thumbprints, so many wrinkles. What about you?’
‘Me?’
‘Your hands. Have they aged? In space?’
‘Space aged?’ Arthur smiled.
He stared at her teeth when she smiled back at him. Rachel’s teeth. He knew them. She was not an alien, or a monster inside his mother’s skin.
‘Willowbend’ the Tannoy announced.
‘This is us,’ Rachel said.
The concrete honeycomb of the office block towered over the street. Colourful banners lined the entranceway. Rachel and Arthur stood in the reception area and scanned the first floor. A giant hologram of the solar system loomed over the study area, each planet rendered in geographical detail. Arthur could see the dark masses of Phobos and Deimos against the red planet. He felt the back of his throat tighten and he swallowed hard. The dimpled speck of Deimos pulsed at him from across the room.
‘Can I help you?’
An older woman with a complicated external OS smiled up at them from the front desk.
Rachel touched Arthur’s shoulder.
‘Arthur? You wanted to see something?’
‘What? Oh, yes,’ he looked at the librarian. ‘A book. Um … The Quixote?’
There was a pause while the woman stared at the information projected in front of her. She pressed on the console at her ear.
‘Captain Pryce?’
Arthur swallowed again. ‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘The book is located in Aisle 2H. I can send the information to your OS.’
‘No, that’s okay. I have it. Thank you.’
He turned back to the room and stood next to Rachel.
‘Lucky they had what you wanted.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’re going to need a landline. Like they have in the old payphones.’
‘Only in hospitals and shelters …’
‘Right. Like that. You need to call Hal, and Greg, and we need to get underground, and …’
‘Greg?’
Arthur headed into the room, looking for Aisle 2H. There were dozens of aisles and the library extended to the upper floors. The more information that became available electronically, the busier the libraries had become. They were destinations for objects no longer stored at home or in a shop. Books and music, films and audio files, free to every visitor.
‘Arthur?’
‘Plot a route to the nearest phone.’
In the aisle, he searched for Pierre Menard. There was one book, a copy of The Quixote. Arthur had never heard of the book or the author though he remembered a novel called Don Quixote. He took it to the study area and sat next to Rachel, who was staring at the screen on a hand-held OS.
‘You can’t use that,’ Arthur said. ‘You’ll need to do it by memory, and think of somewhere you can get to on foot.’
He looked at the book on the long table in front of him. The hard cover was charcoal black with white lettering in an elaborate handwritten style. The spine appeared unbroken. Arthur glanced around the room. Apart from the librarian there were five other people visible by the shelves, stooping to collect or browse the books. Two readers sat on the opposite corner of the table, their heads bowed toward heavy textbooks. Nobody paid him any attention. The background hum in his head was quieter. He opened the book and read the first page.
Arthur could not tell how long he had been holding the book. The hot panic he had felt since he returned to earth had cooled. In its place was a recognition of the day and all that had led to that moment in the library, on this other earth, with Rachel by his side. He saw his life, all life, with a clarity he had not known since childhood. He had been asleep, lulled into an existence that flowed quite easily along the troughs and gullies that had come before him. There was no fault with the collective dream that kept the tides turning. But now he was awake.
He turned another page.
He was aware of the paper, the muffled crunch of it between his fingers like a boot through powdered snow. He was alive to the heat of the air around him, the buzz from a chainsaw in the park outside, the ache in his throat as he swallowed. Could all this sensation be an illusion? An echo of a life once lived? He brought himself back to the voice that had led him here, to the words that had coursed through him as he sat in the library and read, to the being that had created them.
New Zeus. He tried to visualise such an entity and all he could see were lightning connections, a vast network of electricity stretching to infinity. Perhaps that was enough. He could see all the points of contact, the entanglement, the ebb and flow of energy. Tiny points of light, like stars on a cloudless night, pulsed in his mind’s eye. He saw worlds caught in electric rays, the life he had lived and the many he had not. He saw the flickering universe and with a slice of pain as fine and bright as a paper cut to raw skin, he felt the agony of all life lived moment by moment. As quick as it had flared, the horror of the physical world receded leaving a residue of hope for another world, another future. He saw Rachel, not the Rachel beside him, but his mother when he was young. He looked up at her face and remembered the shadow of the ant that looked back at him. The ant that was with her in her last moments. The ant that was with him now. New Zeus.
‘Rachel?’
She turned to him, the soft fabric of her dress rising and settling again as she moved.
‘Are you okay? Arthur?’
He saw the point of light that was the woman in front of him and he knew what he must do. He remembered telling Greg one time when he was being carried home that you could never know the end of the story. What story had that been? The one with bears. Goldilocks. There was no happy-ever-after for Goldilocks, who ran back into the woods and was never heard from again. It had been helpful to Arthur, the lack of an ending. That was how he had thought of his mother, she had run off, but she was alive somewhere that was right for her. And now he had found her.
‘Arthur?’
He remembered what he had asked her to do. Had she left him and come back?
‘The phone call?’
She frowned. ‘You said you didn’t need it any more. About an hour ago. You said we were safe.’
‘I’m so sorry. You’ve been waiting all this time.’
She shook her head and held up a paperback novel with a picture of a Victorian family on the cover. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘We have your albums at the house. Your photographs and memories?’
‘The scrapbooks? Yes.’
‘Do you really think we could go through them? Together.’
‘You feel ready?’ Rachel raised her hand slightly, as though she would reach over and take his own.
‘I think so.’
She smoothed her skirt with the raised hand, her head bowed. After a moment she took a deep breath and looked up at him.
‘Will you explain it to me?’
‘Everything,’ he said.
They travelled in silence back to the house. The sun was on the other side of the Skater now, shadows striping the offices and apartments as the transport glided past. He watched the stick figures of the people below and recognised the streets and buildings for the first time. The scent of Texas Lilac filled the carriage, reminding Arthur of hot afternoons in the exercise yard at the base. He was tired, his limbs heavy and aching, but his breath came a little easier. He rested his head against the window.
The electronic hum had returned.
‘Captain Pryce?’ Arthur was aware of the automated tones of Old Zeus.
‘Yes, Zed. What can I do for you?’
‘I have a message from base. They wish to see you tomorrow. A car will collect you at 9 a.m. Is that satisfactory?’
‘It is. Tell them my memory is returning. I should have some information for them.’
‘Thank you, Captain. That is good news.’
‘Yeah, it is. Though maybe not so much for your programming, Zed.’
‘I am aware.’
<
br /> The steady hum returned. He would go to the base prepared. At the library, New Zeus had communicated all that he needed to say. All that he needed to know.
Arthur looked over at Rachel.
‘I have to go in tomorrow, tell them what I’ve remembered.’
Rachel nodded and her eyes glistened as she looked back at him. He saw her then, a soft shimmer relaxing the outer lines of her silhouette. He could see her with the memories of the other Arthur, the man who had grown up with her as his mother, and he knew her as he knew himself.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, baby?’
‘It’s going to be okay.’
At the house, Rachel made coffee and got the scrapbooks and they sat together in the kitchen with the sounds of the world outside, children returning from school, the electronic whirr of cars, music from a neighbour’s open window. Arthur thought of all he would find in the scrapbook. A childhood he could only know through the memories of the other Arthur. And he thought of all that he wouldn’t find. Eliza gone before he was born, the absent Greg, Hal far away. There was a thread that held them together but that thread had frayed and separated. He put his hand on the book and closed his eyes.
The energy of the memories danced beneath his palm, connections reaching back further and further. Images and understanding coursed through his mind. He saw Rachel’s parents, his grandparents, in their garden on the Brazilian coast. He saw them as he remembered them, lurching unapologetically towards a chaotic old age, and he saw them disappear from this world, an early death in a drunken car crash. He turned to Rachel, but more images surged up, pulling him further back in time.
More threads, more timelines. A century ago now, Arthur could feel the link between himself and the people in his visions. He saw a boy in the sea, struggling to reach the shore. He saw the boy’s head bob beneath the water not to surface, and at the same time he saw the boy swim both alone and with a friend. He traced the lines, to a funeral, a wedding and a chance encounter. This last he half-recognised, his young grandmother, and she was on the beach with the boy, now grown. The couple touch, his mother is conceived. The Rachel of the other world.
And this Rachel? Her line extended from the boy who did not swim alone to the shore. That boy grew up to marry his childhood sweetheart, and the couple met her mother on holiday. Arthur saw the three friends laughing on a sunny terrace, and later, under greyer skies, a little older and still laughing. His grandfather now at the head of the table, holding court with a glass in his hand. And upstairs, the young Rachel sleeps, and dreams of fields of wheat.
His thoughts returned to the boy in the sea, to the first vision, as the final wave swept the small body under the swell one last time. A funeral. A family freighted with grief. He saw the boy’s three stories dividing from the same thread and he saw the threads twisting and dividing further and further back, through all the points of light he had envisaged in the library. A vast web of interwoven strands, separating and binding forever and bringing him to this place, to this knowing.
He opened his eyes and Rachel placed her hand next to his on the book. Her skin was golden, creased with time, a few larger veins roped around the base of her fingers. She wore no rings, but for a moment Arthur thought he saw the thin indentation on her wedding finger where Eliza had once placed a silver band. But that was the other Rachel, the one he would not find in the torn pages before him.
He was here, now, some part of him. The essential part of him, a little light in the fabric of time. This life was waiting for him, now that he knew what this life was. And maybe he had always known, a child in search of his mother in space. There had been other versions of him, many others, ones who didn’t know, who hadn’t travelled through this particular weft and weave to meet their maker. Their maker, a being who had shared his mother’s body and gone on to rule the world. The Zeus that he would share with Rachel.
There was still another Eliza and Hal and Greg to meet. They were at the edges of Rachel’s life, friends and exes, but they were in this place somewhere. He could know them again. Back on the other earth, his alter-Arthur would be doing the same thing. But as that Arthur came to understand the nature of the universe, the world he inhabited would start to unravel. Eventually, that place would cease to exist. Somewhere in his body he already felt the loss. He wanted his Eliza, longed to share everything he knew with her as well. There was only hope for now, that he, Arthur, could live this life with the knowledge of what it was, and that he would not be alone. He could learn this world, take part in it with his new understanding. The books in front of him were a start. Sharing them with Rachel was another way of finding her. He scooped Rachel’s fingers with his own and held them tight.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready,’ she answered.
Together, they turned the first page of the scrapbook and began to save the world.
‘I’m an unusual shade of blue,’ said Rachel. ‘Warm and dark and I smell of coriander.’
‘Perfect,’ said Eliza.
‘But all the colours …’
‘Yes?’
‘They’re just in my head. They don’t really exist.’
‘And yet you can see them.’
‘Yes. I can.’
‘And I can see you.’
‘So I’m not missing, after all.’
‘Not any more,’ said Eliza. ‘We found you.’
Epigraph sources and books mentioned (by chapter)
William Blake Milton: A Poem in Two Books, in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (London: Penguin Classics, 1977), p. 586
Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 80
Daniel Dennett ‘In Defense of AI’, Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists by Peter Baumgartner and Sabine Payr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) p.259
Chapter 1
Blaise Pascal Pensées, introduction by T. S. Eliot, tr. W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1958), p. 30
Chapter 2
John von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, 1947, mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of ‘Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945– 1947’, Communications of the ACM, vol. 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694
Chapter 3
Thomas Nagel ‘What is It Like to be a Bat?’ in The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (1974), pp. 435–50
E. M. Forster Howard’s End (London: Penguin, 1992)
Anthony Trollope Can You Forgive Her? (London: Penguin Books, 1993)
Chapter 4
David J. Chalmers The Conscious Mind: In Search of A Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 94
Chapter 5
Frank Jackson Philosophy Bites, ‘What Mary Knew’, hosted by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton https://philosophybites.com/2011/08/frank-jackson-on-what-mary-knew.html
Rachel Cusk A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (London: Faber, 2008)
Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin Books, 2012)
Kate Greenaway Mother Goose, or, the Old Nursery Rhymes (London: Frederick Warne, 1962)
Olivia Manning The Balkan Trilogy (London: Penguin, 1981)
George Meredith The Egoist (London: Penguin, 1968)
Chapter 6
John Searle ‘The Chinese Room’, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999)
Elhanan Motzkin, reply by John Searle, in New York Review of Books, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Chinese Room: An Exchange’ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/02/16/artificial-intelligence-and-the-chinese-room-an-ex/
Chapter 7
Hilary Putnam ‘The meaning of meaning’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7, Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. Keith Gunderson (Minne
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), p. 140
Roald Dahl James and the Giant Peach (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967)
J. K. Rowling The complete Harry Potter collection (London: Bloomsbury, 2010)
Lemony Snicket A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Complete Wreck (London: Harper Collins, 2006)
Robert Southey The Three Bears (London: Oxford University Press, 1940)
Chapter 8
Heraclitus Fragments, tr. Brooks Haxton (London: Penguin Classics, 2001) Fragment 41, p. 27
Jules Verne Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea tr. H. Frith, ed. P. Costello (London: Everyman, 1993)
Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff (London: Jonathan Cape, 1979)
Chapter 9
René Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 15; Herman Hesse ‘The Immortals’, Steppenwolf, tr. Basil Creighton (London: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 182
Miguel Cervantes Don Quixote, tr. John Rutherford (London: Penguin Classics, 2003)
Jorge Luis Borges ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ in Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London: Penguin Classics, 2000)
Chapter 10
Gilbert Harman Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 5
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ulysses (Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 162
Further reading
Daniel Dennett Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin Books, 1993)
— Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013)
— From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017)
Homer The Odyssey, tr. Stephen Mitchell (London: Phoenix, 2014)
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Frank Jackson There’s Something About Mary, ed. Peter Ludlow,
Yujin Nagasawa and Daniel Stoljar (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2004)
James Joyce, ‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper’, Finnegans Wake (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), pp. 414–18
Nora Nadjarian, Ledra Street (Nicosia, Cyprus: Armida Publications, 2006)