Hashtag

by David Wake

  “But that’s schizophrenia.”

  “Hmm, according to the…” – he frowned, clearly noodling, but Oliver let it go – “er… Schneiderian classification. Yes, yes, there are parallels. Indeed, hmm…” Those symptoms sound like an iBrow advertisement. How amusing.

  “I heard voices in my head and there was no–one in the room.”

  “The thoughts may seem louder, like voices perhaps, because you only following a few people like a… er…”

  “A voice in an empty room versus a voice in a crowd.”

  “Yes, a nice metaphor.”

  “But I’m not following anyone yet.”

  You are receiving my thoughts?

  Yes, Oliver thought slowly, but only because I’ve recognised you.

  Oh, you’re in the haunted bed.

  The what!?

  There’s a pipe, Doctor Trantor thought and he pointed to the wall. Sure enough, there was a ventilation duct. It funnels the signal from downstairs, distorted, but thoughts come through. The psychiatric ward is one down. You’ve probably heard the voices of a real schizophrenic.

  This is a lunatic asylum?

  Of course. Not being able to think is a psychiatric condition.

  Oliver let out a breath: Jeez.

  I wonder if a lot more people had schizophrenia before the invention of thought, Doctor Trantor mused.

  What makes you think that?

  People used to have an internal monologue, didn’t they?

  Thinking without thinking.

  I suppose.

  My Inspector has been teaching me that.

  A meditation technique: I don’t really recommend all that Chinese mysticism baloney. And there was the voice of reason, that’s another, and the voice of conscience – Jiminy Cricket – and so on. Nowadays our minds are so full of other people’s thoughts that we don’t hear our ‘small voices’.

  And schizophrenics do?

  Oh no, they can’t tell thoughts from delusions – quite different.

  How can you tell?

  One’s committed downstairs, the other is free to walk around in public.

  Can I have other people’s thoughts yet?

  No, take two of these.

  Oliver did so, filling a glass from his water jug nearby. It tasted tepid.

  Let’s leave it another day, Doctor Trantor added, let the brain cells have another night’s rest to settle down.

  If you say so.

  I do say so.

  And with that thought the Doctor left.

  Oliver felt sleepy immediately, which he supposed was a placebo effect. Was it? He could look it up. How long did the pills take to knock him out? He could check, if he’d known what they were, though he’d forgotten to ask the Doctor if he could use Noodle.

  I’m a voice in your head, I’m a voice in your head.

  No, you’re not, Oliver thought emphatically. You’re a patient downstairs.

  Is that what you think?

  You don’t just hear voices from no–one.

  At Ollie, hello Oliver.

  Oliver slept, unsure where the haunted bed left off and the dreams began, but in both some thoughts mithered away.

  At Ollie, hello Oliver.

  Much later, Jellicoe arrived looking like he was treading germs into the linoleum from his scuffed shoes and flapping diseases from his crumpled mackintosh. He carried a brown paper bag.

  “I ate them,” he said, putting it down beside Oliver’s jug of water. “Perhaps there’s something in this five a day.”

  “Thanks,” said Oliver.

  “You OK.” It was a statement, Jellicoe clearly didn’t want to discuss any symptoms or – God forbid – feelings.

  “I’m fine,” said Oliver.

  “It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Oliver. “My recognition code has been changed.”

  “Right… I wondered for a moment if I’d got the wrong bed.”

  “No, it’s me.”

  Jellicoe found a plastic chair and screeched it across the floor, so he could sit by the bed. He sank down, lower than a comfortable eye–line.

  “You’re not thinking,” Jellicoe said.

  “The advice is to avoid drawing attention to yourself in case the trolls work out your new identity, so I’m not – you know – connecting to anyone I know.”

  “Anyone you don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “So…?”

  “Very… like drunk.”

  Jellicoe shifted so that Oliver could see into his coat. He had his hip flask there.

  “No… thanks.”

  “So…”

  Oliver realised that Jellicoe had no idea what to say. “Nice of you to visit.”

  Jellicoe shrugged.

  Oliver wondered what the man was thinking. He could follow and find out, unless he’d already partaken of his hip flask.

  “I hate hospitals,” said Jellicoe. “All those tests I’ve had – waste of time. My lipoprotein levels feel fine.”

  The Inspector seemed angry, flushed, so Oliver decided to take charge of the conversation. “The Doctor’s going to see me again tomorrow. They’ll probably discharge me.”

  “Back to mine?”

  “I guess or perhaps a motel, let the heat die down before I pick up any threads of my old life.”

  “Old life?”

  “You’re supposed to feel born again, euphoric, or have some sort of epiphany.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Why are people supposed to feel that?”

  “I guess,” said Oliver, “a man is the sum of his memories. To know someone’s worth, to really understand them, you must noodle their entire experience. Could that experience be used to recreate someone, a thinking machine, or a cloned body, that thought in exactly the same way with the same responses and even the same capacity to change and grow? Would that person be the same person? Would the soul, temporarily stored in heaven or hell, re–enter the new form, reincarnate, and if you multiplied them a hundred–fold would you have numerous souls. Would those people be alive?”

  “No.”

  “But how would you know? If you noodled them both, followed them, then they’d be the same.”

  “They’d start to veer apart… like twins.”

  “So you agree that they’d start the same?”

  “I suppose,” Jellicoe admitted.

  “Then the copy is alive.”

  “What’s this to do with being born again?”

  “I guess all my memories have been archived and restored to my iBrow, a fresh… I don’t know. What I am now is what I was, but my thoughts took one route back to my body and my… feelings, I guess, took another.”

  “Is that you talking or the drugs?”

  Oliver had no idea: he couldn’t parse back through his thoughts, but he suspected that his mouth had run away with itself. People must have talked such bollocks before thought.

  “Do you want to discuss the case?” Oliver asked.

  “Are you up to it?”

  “Sure…”

  Jellicoe let of a sigh of relief.

  “It’ll be something to take my mind off the nothingness. Perhaps we should go over the facts?” Oliver suggested.

  “Bugger all facts.”

  Oliver brought his hands together to count. “Victim–”

  “You thinking?”

  “No,” said Oliver. “They gave me a shot or something.”

  “Medical alcohol?”

  Oliver laughed: “Something like that.”

  “Go on.”

  “Victim: dead, murdered, identity unknown, but ought to be known. Matches no known missing person.” Having started on his little finger, Oliver had reached his thumb, so he started back the way he’d come. “Theories: none.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  Oliver looked at his hands as if trying to will his index finger to count another fact or find a theory amongst the lines. He was trembling
quite noticeably.

  “Withdrawal from addiction,” Jellicoe said. “Saw a chap smacked in the head by a baseball bat. He wasn’t that injured, but his brow shutdown. He started shaking, had a fit and then was howling by the end of the night.”

  “Oh thanks.”

  “Try not to think about it.”

  “I can’t think about it… medical alcohol, remember.”

  “Remember… we rely on the technology too much.”

  “Technology works in ninety–nine point nine, nine, nine percent of the cases.”

  “Won’t help Unknown 271 or Unknown 272. Or Jürgens for that matter.”

  “272?”

  “The scalped man.”

  “Maybe it’s the case we don’t solve.”

  “One of those is one too many.”

  “Why are there any?” Oliver said. “With full access to thoughts, everyone monitors everyone else, so everyone is supposed to be good.”

  “Hitler liked his dog.”

  “What?”

  “Hitler wanted to save Germany from the subjugation of the Versailles treaty and raise the Fatherland to greatness again,” said Jellicoe. “That’s a good thing. It is.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “And he was vegetarian and he liked his dog.”

  “So? He was a genocidal foil head.”

  “Except… the point is that in his own mind he was a hero, he thought he was doing good, he had a purity – really, I mean this – and a holier than thou attitude in his thoughts that enabled him to preach unspeakable horrors and perpetrate unbelievable brutality that was, by a definition, good. In his mind.”

  “In his mind, right.”

  “Nowadays, with everyone having free access to everyone’s thoughts, everyone has to think good thoughts. They don’t dare do otherwise. And yet our prisons are full of wife beaters, violent thugs, criminals of all manner of diverse and dreadful kinds, and all thinking wonderful thoughts.”

  “There’s no premeditated crime.”

  “Because they get caught before their category whatever planned sexual offence becomes anything worse. My point is that we all think we are virtuous, every one of us. Therefore, we can excuse any action. We must have meant well, they say, just noodle my thought process and see. Lift the lid, look inside the skull – no bad thoughts there.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And yet, we turn on our friends, dump our partners, betray confidences–”

  A nurse walked past, and Jellicoe waited until she’d gone.

  “Before thought, people monitored their own… thoughts – that word will have to do – and always saw their inner workings as virtuous. They were the heroes of their own stories despite any unfortunate actions they may take.”

  “Think good, do bad.”

  “Think ‘good’, do… whatever.”

  “Or back then,” Oliver said, “maybe it was think bad, do bad. There was no way to tell.”

  “But the choice, then and now, is in what you do.”

  “And that’s why Hitler was evil?”

  “Do you remember Noodle Bars?” Jellicoe asked.

  “I could noodle and remember.”

  “Very droll – noodle bars, where you noodled because they had high speed connections, probably served noodles as well. They were like internet cafés.”

  Oliver would have to noodle that one.

  “Every argument comes round to Hitler eventually,” said Jellicoe. “I think that was it.”

  “And everyone can, er… rationalise their actions because they believe they think good thoughts.”

  “These murderers,” Jellicoe continued, “they’ve found a way around the technology.”

  “They?”

  “He, she… more than one.”

  “A conspiracy?”

  Jellicoe looked him in the eye for the first time. “Got to be something.”

  Oliver looked away and bit his lip, gnawing. “Did we do it?”

  Jellicoe raised an eyebrow.

  “They were so certain,” Oliver continued, “so certain, that we killed her, until, in the end, I thought we’d… I thought I’d killed her. Maybe we faked the evidence, faked even our own thoughts. If you edit them, then… we’re the sum of our thoughts.”

  “No, son, you did good, but were only thought at bad.”

  “Even so, my thoughts have been shuffled around.”

  “They’re all stored on computers in several different places, backed up, archived, many different jurisdictions – too many.”

  “But what if?”

  “Don’t believe the trolls.”

  “But–”

  “They think they are right – virtuous – but they’re not.”

  It was sunny outside. Oliver enjoyed it for a moment. He felt peaceful, blank, as if he could do anything. Jellicoe sat quietly.

  “Thank you,” Oliver said, finally.

  “You’re welcome Braddon.”

  “Friends call me ‘Ollie’.”

  “Do you feel like an ‘Ollie’?”

  “No.”

  Jellicoe fidgeted.

  “You don’t have to stay the full time,” Oliver said.

  “Thanks.”

  Jellicoe stood, checked he hadn’t left anything, patted his pockets and then shuffled out.

  “See you at the station, Braddon,” Jellicoe said.

  “Yes. Thanks. Jellicoe.”

  Oliver wondered about sitting on his quivering hands and then he felt stomach cramps. He hugged his body, rocked and felt stupid, because he remembered that this was what heroin addicts did. He had pins and needles and felt on fire, but the overwhelming problem was the sensation of falling forward. It was if, with the weight of fourteen years of thoughts pushing on his forehead gone, he was mentally flinging himself forward. Everything appeared flatter somehow, the extra dimensions of knowledge gone, so that the world was just a faint projection over an abyss.

  He stared at it: nothing stared back.

  He didn’t feel virtuous.

  And it went on, all day.

  MONDAY

  When Oliver woke up, Doctor Trantor wasn’t there: At Ollie, how are you feeling today?

  Fine.

  At Ollie, can you follow me?

  Yes, I can follow you.

  At Ollie, I mean, ‘follow’ me.

  Oliver did so.

  …yes, thank you, coffee, Hasqueth Finest please.

  Something about coffee, Oliver thought.

  Oh, you got that… excellent. That all seems fine then.

  Thank you.

  And sugar, two. Do we have any of those biscuits, the cream ones? It’s too early in the morning to be doing rounds. I need a cup of coffee. I mean, what’s Doctor Sinden going on about, bloody typical of management.

  Doctor Trantor, when can I leave?

  Now, we need the bed. Go for a walk, get some fresh air and exercise, and be cautious in increasing your following, ease yourself into it.

  Thanks.

  My pleasure. At Mrs Whittle… Jordan, how are we today? Yes, but you have Alzheimer’s, so your Noodle results are going to be confusing…

  Oliver eased himself out of bed and drew the curtains. He found his clothes and got dressed. He fumbled and felt quite weak, but finally in his suit, now crumpled, he felt himself again. The bare grape stems that Jellicoe had brought were still there, and a surge of anger that Jasmine hadn’t visited coursed through him. Stupid, because Jasmine’s presence in the hospital might have given away his new iBrow identity – Jellicoe must have been drunk to visit. However, it was a strong emotion.

  A walk, Doctor Trantor had thought, and that seemed a good idea.

  The hospital was a maze and, despite the signage, he made several wrong turns.

  Outside, the fresh breeze blew through his hair and the new stream of thoughts lapping against his forehead. He took a deep breath: it was clear and clean, the atmosphere without dust or antiseptic smell, just as the world was empty of spam and irrelevancies, an
d therefore somehow purer. He was born again. This must be what religious experience was like, and Oliver didn’t want to sully the moment by noodling it up.

  He took another deep breath, trying to recapture the moment. The air was as good, but the exhilaration was less. Like an addict, he needed a bigger fix.

  He missed Mithering sitting on his shoulder as it were. He didn’t miss Jasmine’s friends. Behind him, Doctor Trantor continued his rounds, the repetition of his thoughts at each bedside becoming more and more obvious.

  He noodled his task list: it had been reset too, so he had nothing to do.

  So, for the first time in his life, he was up–to–date.

  His status was blank. He’d never come across a blank status before. Everyone was something. Jasmine was… he noodled: single.

  He followed her thoughts, feeling them flow into him.

  And then he remembered that she’d left him.

  What was his opinion on that, he wondered. Nothing. He had no thoughts on the subject. He had no thoughts on any subject he realised, once he’d noodled them. He had a few entries on schizophrenia, the hospital, but that was all.

  He felt… free. Free of her and all her friends, all that trivial nonsense that seemed so unimportant now. He felt lighter as if somehow the lack of that group’s thoughts in his head had reduced his iBrow’s weight and, liberated of the burden, he could tilt his head from the ground to look up. The sun was shining, there was a blue sky and a formation of birds crossed overhead.

  He was a blank page: the slate wiped clean.

  Right, he thought, and that added upon the tests in the hospital. He was only following Jasmine and Doctor Trantor. That would have to change, but, playfully, he wondered if he could simply unfollow them. Thus, he’d be effectively invisible – or was it blind – passing through crowds, or just sitting at home, and untouched.

  Oliver did: Jasmine was in some conversation with Cheryl and Doctor Trantor was still thinking about biscuits and now lunch, which held no interest. Oliver would have to refollow to find out about any out–patients appointments or maybe their booking system would send him a thought directly. Either way, for the time being he wanted peace and quiet. This must be what a baby was like, all clean, unsullied – innocent and virtuous.

  It was perverse: he needed people, but he liked this serenity and he felt blessed by this second chance.

  He made his way down Old Tollgate and came across the abandoned Chedding shopping centre. The door had been sealed, this time in steel.