The Creative Sponge

by Andy Marlow

  Prologue

  1: At TGN

  Two weeks ago

  The last screen on the monitor went dead and Douglas Carswell banged his fist on the table before him. The door opened.

  “Everything alright, chief?” asked the cool voice of Albert Pieterson.

  Douglas looked up from his desk at his colleague. “Close the Wilson file, Pieterson,” he ordered. “It’s finished now.”

  Pieterson walked into the office to inspect the monitors Douglas had been watching.

  “What were you watching, chief?” he asked.

  “We sent three agents in to Cybertech undercover: Kathy Turner, Gregory Smith and Thomas Wilson. None of them made it out alive.”

  “I’m sorry, chief,” consoled Pieterson. He sounded anything but sorry, however. Pieterson was the type of person who had suppressed all emotion long ago and lived solely for his job.

  “No, no, don’t be, old chap. It always had to be this way. I just wish it didn’t.”

  Pieterson’s expression did not change. It remained fixed in its permanent frown which adorned his features whether he was happy or sad; tired or angry. Nevertheless, Douglas had been working with Pieterson for years. A subtle twitch of his left eyebrow let Douglas know that under his frozen surface, Pieterson was confused.

  “Cybertech’s machines can transport a person’s mind through time and space,” he explained. “Thomas never really was Thomas. All this time, he had been Gregory Smith, but unaware of it.”

  “I know that, chief,” said Pieterson.

  “Yes, but he became Thomas today. Unless we had sent Gregory on that mission, he would never have been captured and would never have become Thomas. We would then never have discovered what was going on in Cybertech.”

  “I thought Ruth Phillips had given us information?” queried Pieterson.

  “She did. It was enough to understand the science and technology behind the machines, but we needed a man- or several- on the inside to find out exactly how the organisation worked. The information from their contact lens cameras has given us all we need to know.”

  “For what, chief?”

  “For the destruction of Cybertech Industries. They live in perpetual fear of being exposed, of people realising what they are doing. We have enough information now to make this information public, and given that Cybertech are responsible for the disappearance of three Daily Herald journalists, I jolly well think we have at least one newspaper willing to print the story.”

  Douglas pressed a button on the computer console before him and removed a USB stick. He then handed it over to Pieterson.

  “Take this down to the Daily Herald’s offices. When they see this, they’ll know what to do.”

  2: In the basement

  Present day

  Doctor Jones has been in the basement for several hours now. His eyes have gradually become used to the gloom, but he wishes they hadn’t: being able to see the filth he is sitting in only makes his situation feel even worse.

  Presently Doctor Curtis comes to visit him. Jones’ back is facing the entrance to his cell, so the first he hears of Curtis’ arrival is the banging of the steel bars as Curtis tries to gain his attention.

  “Hello, old friend,” smiles Curtis. It is an empty smile, however, devoid of emotion or real feeling.

  Jones merely grunts. He is not interested in seeing anyone right now, least of all the man who shopped him in.

  “I’m sorry it had to be this way,” continues Curtis. “But you did dig your own grave.”

  “And,” he says, as he begins to pace up and down in front of Jones’ cell, “your efforts were in vain, were they not?”

  Jones turns his head sharply to shoot an accusing look at his visitor. “They were necessary,” he says simply.

  “Necessary, maybe. I understand all that stuff about paradoxes and making sure that what has already happened happens once more. But, I mean, nothing really came of your little sacrifice, did it?”

  Jones turns his back once more and grunts. This does not stop Curtis; in fact, he is rather enjoying the torment he is causing.

  “Your great hope, and that of TGN, was that by allowing Thomas to see that he was not really himself, word would get out about the ‘horrors’ of what we’re doing here and Cybertech Industries would start to collapse. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Curtis is smiling mockingly. Jones loathes this man right now.

  “There was the article,” interjects Jones reluctantly.

  “Ah, yes, that article! Front page of the Daily Herald two weeks ago… yes, I’ll give you that, it was embarrassing for us,” mutters Curtis absent-mindedly. “But you’re not getting it, are you? Sure, the police came in and tried to close us down, and the Cortical department is in the process of being shut down too, but Cybertech survived, didn’t it?”

  Curtis leans closer. “You may have had the victory today, but don’t you realise the power of your machines? As soon as the fuzz are done with us, we can simply recreate one of them, use your discovery to manipulate the collective mind and make everybody forget that we ever existed. This is only a temporary setback.”

  “And then…” begins Curtis excitedly, eyes growing wide and wild with glee. “And then… power! You yourself said it. If you can control what people are thinking, who people are- well, that’s the ultimate, isn’t it?”

  Curtis pauses. “You could have been in on it, too,” he shakes his head sadly. “You could have led us there. But instead you chose to betray us. Well, you deserve what’s coming to you.”

  Jones looks at his colleague sadly. He knows that Curtis is right. All this effort and sacrifice- for nothing. He is trying to justify what he did, to salvage some success from a steaming pile of failure, but in truth Cybertech Industries will soon be strong and profitable once more, and will return to conducting its experiments. Who knows- maybe you’re not really who you think you are?

  “There’s TGN,” points out Jones. “They stopped us this time. What makes you think they won’t do it again?”

  Curtis is disgusted by Jones’ question. He puts his face as close to the cell bars as he possibly can and almost spits on Jones. Although it remains wordless, Jones can read his facial expression: you make me sick. He shakes his head mockingly.

  “Face it,” Curtis concludes triumphantly. “Your noble, heroic self-sacrifice for the sake of your patients and your dead girlfriend was for nothing.”

  With that, he turns his back and walks out of the basement and into the gloom accompanied by two grinning security guards.

  3: Kathy’s story

  Three weeks ago

  Doctor Jones had not been lying. The procedure was largely painless, save for the small prick she felt in her arm as he administered the poison. It had not been pleasant to feel or watch as it proceeded along her blood vessels on its slow journey into her brain, but the sensation had not lasted long and soon she felt herself fading out of existence and leaving her body forever.

  She did not lose herself, however. Doctor Jones had made it so that the machine would transfer her mind into another body in a way that would keep her memories and identity intact. This would give her enough time to say what she needed to her past self before the inevitable happened. She could remember watching the stranger by the tree suddenly change personality when the men in suits pressed their button, and she knew that would happen to her.

  Vision and sound and touch and feeling vanished for a second and she became a mere being of energy floating in nothingness. She felt a brief sensation of oneness with everything in existence before plunging headlong into the head of another man.

  Sensation returned to her. She found herself blinking in the afternoon sunlight standing on the pavement of a busy London street. She was standing beside the reflective window of a famous clothing shop and looked into it to see who she had become. Her new body was exactly what she had expected: the pinstripe trousers, the walking stick, the bowler cap; yes, she had become the man she had me
t in the park.

  She sighed. Or rather, he sighed, for her voice had now become deep and manly. It was strange for her to be speaking with such a voice, so much so that she was almost startled by her own question when she asked a stranger for the best route to the park.

  It was but a five minute walk away. She put one foot in front of each other, wishing she could go somewhere else and spare her younger self the future she knew she would suffer. Yet that was not an option. It had happened this way, and so it must happen this way once more.

  Presently she reached the park. Younger Kathy was easy to find: the dishevelled redhead sitting beside a tree looking forlorn caught her eye immediately. She approached and stood next to her.

  It was comical seeing her younger self. She had obviously never had the opportunity to look at her body from the outside, and to be honest she was pretty pleased with what she saw. All the fat and imperfections which had obsessed her while she had occupied that body were now invisible and she realised that she had been stressing over nothing her whole life.

  Her younger self looked up, and she took the cue to sit down and join her.

  She found that she had nothing to say to her younger self. Yet that was untrue- there were so many things she did want to say, but knew she could not, for she was limited to saying and doing only that which she remembered seeing the stranger in the bowler hat saying and doing. To say anything else would distort the timeline.

  And so the pair sat in amused silence for many minutes. They soon broke into spontaneous, inexplicable laughter, and the two Kathys enjoyed each other’s company for a while. For her younger self, it was welcome relief from the recent trauma of finding out the world had forgotten her; for her current self, from the trauma of knowing that the end was nigh.

  “What’s your name?” her younger self suddenly asked.

  Kathy was thrown. She screwed her face up in thought- what should she say? Firstly, she did not know the name of the person whose body she was inhabiting. Secondly, she could not say “Kathy Turner”, for that would freak out her already frazzled younger self even more. As it happened, however, she need not have worried. She remembered watching the pinstriped stranger shrugging his shoulders and laughing at her question- and so she did the same.

  The laughter subsided after about ten minutes and the pair sat in silence for some time. She knew her younger self was reminiscing about university days now, and she decided to do the same. The comfort of familiar memories was welcome to her. Yet she could not hold her thoughts on the subject, and they soon turned to consider her younger self and the terrible events she had just experienced, and those she was about to experience. Kathy’s gaze became involuntarily fixed on her face: the face she had until recently worn so well, and which she had now lost forever.

  Younger Kathy suddenly noticed that her future self was looking at her. She looked back at the pinstriped stranger beside her, and the pair of them shared a deep moment. They looked into each other’s eyes and each saw an identical soul staring back. Of course, Kathy fully understood why this was, but her younger self appeared confused by the connection.

  She suddenly remembered that at this point the mind of her younger self had been occupied by worries about whether her life was fact or fiction and resolved to open her mouth to say the comforting words she remembered hearing so long ago from the stranger by the tree:

  “It is real. It is all real. It’s okay. I understand. I know everything that has happened to you today, and yesterday, and in the past few weeks and I can’t tell you how I know. You’ll have to trust me, and I know that’s difficult coming from a stranger who is only just now speaking to you for the first time, but this is important.”

  Her younger self stared back, mouth agape. Kathy’s borrowed mouth paused from talking, and her borrowed eyes began scanning her surroundings. She felt her stomach drop as she saw the inevitable: two suited men, casually strolling through the park. The end was close.

  “I don’t know how long I have left. They could be monitoring our - sorry, my - every move,” she said. She cursed herself for that slip of the tongue- ‘our’? Yet she forgave herself when she remembered that as her younger self, she had merely been confused by the stranger’s words.

  And who was this they, she pondered? Jones had thought it was TGN and that seemed likely. Yet it made no sense, for TGN had been the ones who had recruited her to infiltrate Cybertech, and that would never have happened if her younger self had been prevented from finding them. TGN… after all she had been through, they still made no sense to her.

  She glanced back at the suited men and realised she needed to hurry up. She was here for one reason only: to make sure her younger self was in the right place at the right time to find Thomas.

  “Go to Oxford Street. Find 16 Oxford Street, and be there at precisely thirteen minutes past nine tonight. It is vitally important,” she said urgently.

  Doubt entered her mind. Perhaps… perhaps she could save her younger self from the fate her older self had suffered? Had she made a mistake in giving her this instruction?

  Her thoughts came out as words, mumbling and not fully formed: “Actually, I…. I don’t know if that’s…”

  But she resolved herself mid-sentence. To not send her younger self to meet Thomas would create a paradox; besides, whether her younger self went or not, she would still be suffering as the victim of an evil experiment by Cybertech Industries. At least this way, she would find her best friend and find answers… even if such a quest would lead her to the terrible, terrible fate Kathy was now subjected to.

  “No, go. You must. We- sorry, you- have no choice,” she therefore said, contradicting her previous doubts. Yet her tone was not confident and her voice was faltering.

  “We can’t avoid it, anyway…” she continued, her voice growing weaker. She eyed the two suited men reaching for their remote control and knew her identity was beginning to fade, and that soon she would take on the memories and personality of the body she had stolen. “Sixteen Oxford Street, 9:13 p.m. Go.”

  The end was very near now. Tears welled up in her borrowed eyes and she gazed jealously at the face before her: her face, the face she had grown up in, the face which now lay on a bed one week in the future trapped and drugged and effectively dead. She wanted it back. She wished none of this had ever happened.

  Nevertheless, it had, and now there was nothing she could do to stop it. She allowed her head to hang loosely from her neck and accepted her fate. She fell into a trance-like state as her identity began slowly slipping away and she sat there, smiling like an idiot, enjoying her last moments on earth as Kathy Turner.

  The redhead beside her leaned over with a concerned look on her face.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. The pinstriped man looked back at her and, in all honesty, he did not know. He was sure he had known just a second ago, but now everything was foggy, forgotten. Memories flashed before him of a life lived by someone else: of editing the school newspaper; of representing the county at a swimming contest; of being a journalist for a major national paper and of the smell of a father that was not his own and of… of being a girl?

  He dismissed them immediately as odd hallucinations, the product of a diseased imagination. He found himself sitting by a tree next to a strange redhead. She looked unkempt, like she did not look after herself. She looked thoroughly like someone he did not want to associate with.

  And with that, Reginald Deer stood up and walked away.

  4: Thomas’ story

  A long, long time ago

  Thomas Wilson walked out of a London Tube station on a cold, winter’s night at the end of a long, tiring day at work. He had been assigned to write an article about a topic which really did not interest him. He sighed- he had been attracted to the Daily Herald by the lure of big headlines, grand scoops and uncovering major corruption and scandal. In reality, Harcroft was merely giving him little stories: interviews with people he had never heard of and local interest stor
ies; the kind of thing most purchasers of the Herald would immediately gloss over.

  Still, he was looking forward to getting home to his Docklands apartment and chilling out in comparative luxury. He could think of nothing better right now than collapsing on his sofa and watching a film on his widescreen TV. He was feeling a horror-comedy tonight: the kind of film where the five teenagers at the start of the movie die off one by one at the hands of some formulaic monster or ghost. Such films were meant to be scary, but simply made Thomas laugh.

  It was as he was thinking this that his body stopped. It was not voluntary; rather, it felt more like the connection between his body and mind was straining; like the signals from his brain were becoming ever weaker, less and less able to force his limbs into motion. Although he had never thought of it before, he suddenly realised how dependent he was upon this connection. His brow would have furrowed in confusion had his nervous system been responding to him. His will had always been king over his body. In the past, he had ordered his hands to move, and they had; he had willed his feet to walk, and they had; he had thought the words and demanded his mouth to speak them, and it had. Yet now his commands were being ignored by his body.

  In fact, it seemed as if his body was under the command of another being. His body lurched backwards into the arms of an annoyed commuter.

  This strange sensation extended into his mind. He had once read that in Hebrew mythology the soul is joined to the body by a string. Death is simply when that string is broken: the body collapses, the mind flies free. This is what Thomas was experiencing, except that as he felt his soul being snipped from his body he felt another one being indelicately tied onto it as replacement. Although he did not know it, the replacement soul was that of Gregory, who was now assuming not only Thomas’ body but also his personality and memories.

  Thomas felt his soul move down from his brain and into his throat. He still had some connection to this world and this body, but it was growing weaker, thinner, more strained. He did not feel panic- rather he felt joy, excitement, anticipation. Death, which he had always been taught to fear, now instinctively felt like something beautiful and wholesome. He began to feel the lightness of Being without a body and yearned for the last cord of the string still tying him to his body to be cut.

  Presently it was. This is where our story began, so many chapters ago. The astute reader will have realised that Thomas never was a character in this book; when we first met him, he was already possessed by Gregory’s mind. Yet it is no tragedy that Thomas died. For when that last cord was cut and Gregory was finally, completely sown into Thomas’ head, the soul or mind or cortical field- call if what you like- of Thomas was not killed. It was merely set free into the atmosphere.

  As he flew away into eternal bliss, human concepts became foreign to him. He could no longer understand identity or gender, race or politics; rather, he found a new concept: oneness. He flew together with all the souls who had ever died and felt himself merging with them into one.

  ###

  About the Author

  Hello! Welcome to the end of the book. I hope you liked it. If you haven’t read it yet and are just popping back here to see exactly who wrote it, then you’re in for a treat when you do get round to reading it. “The Creative Sponge” is a smashing thriller which will also get you thinking about deep philosophical questions of identity and reality along the way. If you have read it, I hope this story lived up to my ambitions.

  This is the first novel I’ve ever written. I once started one about mice leaving a forest, but gave up at page 80 when I realised the plot was going nowhere. It’s a bit of a gamble publishing this, because I have no idea if anyone will actually buy it. The fact that you’re reading this now tells me you did, so thank you! Rest assured I will continue writing. My head is abuzz with ideas for future stories: one idea is a title called “The Reasonable Man”, which would follow a stalker as he goes to court for harassment and ask whether he really had a choice about what he did. It may seem obvious that he did, but the point of “The Reasonable Man” will be to examine the idea of free will and ask whether any of us really have it, or whether it is mere illusion. Another idea would be called “The Archetype”, which would examine the unconscious dream world postulated by Carl Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious. Once again thank you for picking up this book, because now I can put finger to keyboard and pen these ideas onto virtual paper for your future enjoyment.

  Ah, but this section is meant to be all about me, right? Very well. First let me say hello. How are you? I’ve read that most purchasers of ebooks are American, so how are you over in sunny USA? (If you’re not from the States, don’t worry. You’re still brilliant. Personally I like your country better, but don’t tell that to the Americans.)

  As you can tell I am not American. I am, in fact, a twenty year old Law student at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. I enjoy writing, jogging, cycling, reading, playing my guitar and going for the occasional adventure abroad. Although I’m doing a Law degree, my great hope is that this writing thing will kick off and I can move to Paris or Berlin, get a flat and become a stereotypical arty creative type, never having to touch the law again. Personally the idea of working nine to five in an office has never appealed to me.

  So, that’s me. I hope to speak to you again when you read my next book, and maybe then I’ll have something more to say. If you want to keep in touch before then, you can follow me online via the links below. Until then, ta ta for now!

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