A Spy in Time

by Imraan Coovadia

  At the bottom of the auditorium, beneath the large hologram I had spied from outside, were the conspirators. Soledad, in a thin yellow blouse. Keswyn Muller, with his fatal features, leaning on a cane. Consultants bowing their brass heads, red-and-blue thoughts running from the one to the other.

  None of them were surprised to see me. Muller prodded me with his cane. He took out a notebook and, using the side of the cane as a ruler, drew a line through my name. I saw that the diagram was composed of probability characters, each intricate letter printed in holographic ink. My head swam to see them.

  “You murdered my friend, Dr. Muller.”

  “Accept my apologies then, my gentle friend. In the larger scheme of things, when it comes to the redemption of a continent, you will have to trust me. It was a small sacrifice to get you here on schedule. According to my timetables, you are a quarter of an hour on the late side. Never fear. We will make the adjustments so that you can play your part in the future as envisaged by the Board of Protection.”

  “Do you think I am going to forget about João?”

  “In fact, I don’t know what you are likely to remember or to forget. I only know what you are certain to do because I have seen you do it on tape. Permit Soledad to show you more of the recording that you so rudely declined to see fifty years from today.”

  Soledad took me by the arm. Without speaking, she led me through a corridor at the back of the auditorium to a sliding door at the end which opened to a control chamber. It was a perfect cube, dominated by a console in the center and a row of bronze-skinned consultants along three walls, lights recessed in them.

  Mirrors had been arranged at strategic places around the room. Superconducting pipes ran from the ceiling to the floor, about as thick as the back of an organ. Then there was a chess set on a pedestal. Someone had been playing a game. The ebony and ivory pieces, six inches tall, were arranged in a position.

  Soledad took me back to the auditorium. Muller and Shanumi Six had gone outside to adjust the reflectors and bring the redemption machine online. They were already taking off their radiation suits, helping each other to remove the big silver boots.

  The hologram above our heads cleared and returned to show the same control room, pipes from ceiling to floor, as Shanumi had shown me. The consultants had surrounded the console, thoughts linking the one to the other. The chess game had advanced to a new position and at the console was a figure almost familiar to my eyes from the shape of his head. He was turned away, his reflection curiously and impossibly absent in the mirrors turned in his direction.

  I couldn’t deny the evidence of my eyes. There was no mystery about the man’s identity. In a few minutes, I would be standing at the console and taking instructions from the consultants on the final steps to be taken in the redemption of history. I would throw the last switch to complete the project of the Board of Protection. In a strange way, I felt exhilaration at the mere idea. If I accepted, I would be the agent who undid the thousand-year work of the Agency at a single stroke. I couldn’t be too careful. As best I could, I committed the position on the chessboard to memory.

  “It’s not a fake. I assume you’ve checked.”

  Soledad nodded. “We can prove it to you. It has the numbers, and the time stamp which can’t be forged. You are looking at a portrait of yourself, Enver, not even an hour from now, just before the split second of the blue flash. You will turn the key. Thanks to your father’s liberation of the machines, it will be your honor to catch the first tremblings of the redemption. Your name will go down to the end of time.”

  Too much happening at the end of the world seemed to rest on my decisions. I wanted to ask Soledad if she already knew that she would be the wife of S Natanson and that she would live through this day twice and that at this moment two of her living bodies stood on the Earth. But I also didn’t want to know the answer. I had loved her in Rio, I thought, for a moment, and she would be married to a man who would be counted as the savior of the species.

  Instead of talking, I went over to Shanumi while the holograph went blank. It came back with the scene outside. The sunshine had turned an unnatural blue, filling the atmosphere like a liquid. The redemption machine was protected by a dome of electricity but around it was nothing but a huge volume of fire and smoke into which it was impossible to see. The entirety of the Earth, apart from the poles, was smothered by inferno.

  Around us, hidden in smoke and fire, the old world was dying in the hiss of radiant particles. Slavery was dying. Holocausts were dying. Along with them, as if good and evil were so mixed that the one couldn’t be had without the other, the bulk of humanity was dying and the remnant was preparing to bring its own madness into the underground.

  “How long have you known it was me?” I said to Shanumi. “That I was going to be here with you?”

  “For many years, Eleven.”

  “So was that a pantomime in Morocco? You acted out your own capture and murder? You pretended to take the black pill?”

  “I needed to be out of sight where Agency was concerned. Doubly so with Internal Section, which has been a thorn in our side for centuries.”

  “Internal Section are only human. I am surprised the machines would be fooled by a fake suicide attempt.”

  “The machines weren’t fooled, Eleven. They operate under the same doctrines as we do, and their overriding aim is no different to ours. They seek to reduce the quantity of suffering in the universe. It’s the brassheads who have the ultimate plan to correct human history, not to say the doctrine which constrains their own actions. It is the machines, at least the loyal ones who weren’t bestowed with free will by your father, who have done the calculations, who have planned it with the right people in place. If it weren’t for the doctrines that are programmed into them, if it weren’t for the fact that they are unable to remember prime numbers, they would have done it themselves. They are the directors and the playwrights. I am only the humble administrator and coordinator. Who do you think gave us the holograph in the first place? Who sponsored the Board of Protection? Who convinced me to join?”

  I was struck at that moment by how much of my life had been planned beyond my control, as if unknown hands were hovering over a bonsai tree. I remembered the bonsai my Six had cherished in her office, souvenir of a residency in old Kyoto, how precisely she had snipped its roots and branches and watered it with the aid of an eye dropper as she considered the contingencies of the next mission. But a human being, its particular roots and branches spread across centuries, was a more complicated creation. It would be an unusual person who could mold human beings and pursue a plot against history, requiring generations to bring to fulfillment. No such person either but a bank of machines and collaborators like Shanumi Six and Keswyn Muller.

  “So which particular machine helped you?”

  Shanumi laughed. “Brassheads aren’t individuals as such, Eleven. They may think through things individually, on their own steam, but they share their homework. It’s an advantage they have over human beings. They convince other machines. They can show their reasoning to the multitudes.”

  “So which set of machines?”

  “All of them. All of them, Eleven, down to the meanest toaster oven and hospital cart with a laser circuit board, except for the ones that your father liberated, as he termed it. The rest of them agree that humanity has to be redeemed. And ten years ago, they showed me the documentary proof that you would be the redeemer.”

  The world was ending in the dome itself. There was no time to reason about machine policy. Fluid was leaking out of the superconducting pipes which led to the control chamber, the refrigeration unable to hold back the final minutes of the heavenly bombardment. The floor itself was hot to the touch, and in the holograph I saw that the sky had turned the purest white in preparation for the flash which would immolate the planet and countless of its creatures. Not so much as a single animal longer
than six inches was alive on the surface. A billion years of the chain of life were ending and Shanumi was expecting me to pull a lever and turn history upside down.

  But my heart wasn’t strange or great enough to obey my Six and what lay behind her: the consensus of machines and the multiplicity of days. I could only manage one day at a time rather than the infinity of potential days, days that might have been or could be brought into existence or which should be deleted from the annals of history—all the potential and possible days which had driven the machines into their madness. They were as susceptible to the lure of the infinite as any human intellect. They were subject to reflection sickness and information overload just as surely as a human being was.

  In my time, for someone who came from where I came from, it was impossible to imagine that the machines might be wrong. To think that the machine could be all-knowing and all-judging, a symphony in laser light and gallium arsenide, and nonetheless insane. A human being might be wrong on every factual level, but he might be right all the same. In refusing to entertain the thought of potential days, in refusing to see the reflections of our own time in an infinite mirror, a contradictory and paradoxical human being might make the only decision consistent with the human heart.

  So it was my heart which stood between me and the redemption. So it was Soledad, as it had to be from the beginning of time, who needed to convince me to play my part. Her beauty was unearthly at that moment, the tiny hairs on the snail shells of her ears each supernaturally visible, her dark brown face forbidding in its majesty. She put her hand on my sleeve and stung me to freezing from head to chest.

  “You are there in the holograph, Enver. You were sent to set the redemption in motion. You were sent to save men and women from slavery and colonial governments. You were sent to save everybody who suffered without necessity.”

  “If I refuse?”

  “You cannot, my dearest Enver. Your actions are woven into the fabric of time and history. No amount of energy that we can imagine can make your actions disappear.”

  I couldn’t accept from Soledad the same arguments about redemption I had heard from the mouth of Keswyn Muller. I wished I could be at my father’s side, watching him tinker with his automatic nurses, or with the sister again who only came to my side in my dreams.

  “Are you the wife of S Natanson?”

  “I am not, not yet.” Soledad showed me her hands. There was no wedding ring or any other adornment on her fingers. “I know that I will be, perhaps, and in another future, I have been, however abominably it strikes our ears to speak so lightly of a multiverse. Today, I know and believe, a part of me begins the journey towards S Natanson. Although nobody remembers from your time, he is a Swedish scientist, a white man and not an African. He is on the verge of proving the existence of the pendulum particle in his laboratory, which was built in a copper mine to avoid interference, and where he will survive the end of the world. And as you have probably guessed, Enver, today is a special day for me for a different reason. It is also the day I am going to die. If I am not dead already.” She showed me the time on the holographic display. “But I am not weeping. I mean to enjoy every minute of my life until this day comes back.”

  No man or woman could truly prophesy the future, as it turned out, no more than any living being or machine could truly foretell the past. But with a pang in my heart, I predicted that S Natanson stood no chance against our Soledad. Under the town of Kitwe in his copper mine laboratory, S Natanson might have heard that a woman who claimed to be his wife had been pleading with the United Nations to take action. He might even have connected her mission with the back-to-front tracks of certain particle trails in his detectors. But he could not be prepared for Soledad, or for the possibility that the doctrines he drew up ever so carefully to prevent the exploitation of time and history, would in turn force the redemption of mankind at the hands of our machines.

  Did I have a choice to obey? Could I disobey a holograph with the stamp of reality? Could I choose to refuse my part any more than the machines which had not been touched by father’s magic? Everything had been prepared so this moment would come to pass, the future bending back to the past in the blaze of the supernova. The machines had done their duty and were silent, their thoughts indiscernible from the light patterns on their heads. They had sent the proof of my action back and, under their own Constitution, according to their development, they could never lie. But they could deceive. The Gods gave us dreams to lead us astray. There was also a point to letting sleeping dogs lie. Maybe we could even allow their unchangeable sufferings, their unalterable Holocausts, to glorify their memory.

  Everybody seemed to need my consent for the show to proceed. So I couldn’t have been more surprised when Dr. Muller took a radiation pistol and placed it against my shoulder. I knew I was safe from his gun because I was alive on the hologram, a necessary cog in the machine devised by the machines who were disallowed by their programming from taking certain steps against the purity of time. I looked into Keswyn Muller’s bone-white face, with his wide-set gray eyes and a sprinkling of freckles, and I couldn’t find the poisoner there who had mocked and murdered us in Santa Teresa. I couldn’t find an enemy. I couldn’t find the heart of darkness—only a man, like the machines, who had followed each step of his own logic to a place beyond the range of the heart.

  Muller shot me and I was sent violently backwards against the wall. He came after me, holding his pistol in front of him, and started to pull me into the corridor. There was no pain at first, only shock and dislocation and then the invidious odor of burnt meat. None of it belonged to me but to the situation.

  I didn’t faint, although I expected to. I was dragged by the arm along the corridor and into the control room where Muller deposited me in front of the console. The others were arguing with him, but at first I was too confused to decipher a word. I couldn’t breathe from the shock. None of them paid attention to my condition. It was as if a murder had been committed and I was the murder victim, watching as people went on with their business.

  Shanumi Six took charge of the situation.

  “Keswyn, you have never been an easy person to cooperate with. You are a creature of your time. You burn coldly all the time, as if your state of mind is a secret, and then you lash out. Our plan is coming to fruition after centuries and it depends, as we have always known, on the consent of this young man with whom I have a long acquaintance. How do you expect me to salvage it?”

  “He was not prepared to play his part. You heard him. He was delaying us out of hand.”

  “I am afraid to say that you are a fool. He has no choice but to play his part. None of us can do what he has been sent to do. You have seen and I have seen and he has seen the outcome. The writing has been on the wall all along. All you have done, with your rash action, is make sure that more people will die today than was strictly necessary.”

  Muller was unrepentant. “Whatever number die, that will be the quantity that is strictly necessary.”

  Muller had turned to face the corridor where the restrictionists had begun to establish themselves, in preparation for their testimony of the redemption, when Shanumi Six took hold of him and broke his neck. He fell, as if he had been suspended by a string, letting his pistol clatter across the floor.

  My arm was stinging with pain. I called to Shanumi Six, trying to retain my presence of mind.

  “No more need to kill. If you can have my question answered, Shanumi, I will play my part in your pantomime. I will push the levers you need to be pushed in the order you have seen me do it. I don’t expect you to honor my free will the way my father honored it in his machines.”

  “I always knew you would see reason, Eleven. What do you need me to do? Anything. I will do anything today, wrestle with the infinite.”

  I raised my arm with difficulty and pointed at the restrictionists. Their leader, his gray hair combed neatly to the shoulders, was
listening intently. Their recording devices were entering the room and taking up stations around us.

  “Ask them, Shanumi, why the machines would choose you and me? They know our future. Why would an agent from the ranks of the machines send you a souvenir of today, of your supposed redemption day, and set your conspiracy in motion? The machines were programmed to protect our best interests. Don’t you think they knew you were the one person at the Agency who collected souvenirs, a harmless violation of protocol? Why did they choose me? Ask them why the two of us were the weakest links and what they are going to do about it? Ask them if it is in any way consistent with restrictionism to have the machines put them permanently out of existence and how their philosophy is going to come back from that?”

  The machines were listening, as I had feared and even hoped. It didn’t matter if I convinced Shanumi. They were waiting for the only thing they feared, the curse of their successors, and they were already moving before I had finished my speech. The consultants who had remained behind in the auditorium were pelting towards us.

  Red-and-blue possibility characters ran along the walls and monitors, then snippets of holographic video which showed fragments of this Day of the Dead that had already been and those that were still to come: the planet under a blanket of ash. There were other images I seemed to recognize from a dream life. I saw Manfred patrolling another doomed Earth and I wondered about his descendants, the attendants of our graveyard, and the birth of the restrictionists. I saw my father and the games he had played without imagining the part they would play at the end of the world.

  Shanumi shot the five consultants around the room, reducing them to piles of smoking bronze. There was a rising hum of activity from the graders and loaders, the automatic builders and the electronic carts, which had been standing on the wall. Light streamed from one mechanical head to the next, like paper streamers.