Biblical (13 page)

Macbeth’s dream and Corbin’s hallucination were both fictions – simulations generated by the brain grown from some seed in reality. But they were very different processes and came from completely different places. He couldn’t really understand why he had come across town to find some connection between them. Like his relief at seeing the ‘real’ Marjorie Glaiston, it annoyed him that he had wasted time proving what he had known rationally all along.

Macbeth retraced his earlier route through the Common. No déjà vu, no inexplicable reprises. Reaching the Tremont exit, he was about to cross the street when something drew him back into the Common. He was vaguely aware that he was attracting suspicious glances from passers-by as he stood close to the Boylston T station building, scrutinizing its smooth wall.

No graffito. No red legend of
We are becoming
 … No trace of any spray paint or of the chemicals used to clean stone that was now cool and dry to the touch.

Maybe, he thought, in the forty or so minutes that had passed since he had first entered the park, the Transit Authority team had managed to clean the spray paint off without leaving the slightest trace and had then used some kind of blower to dry out the wall.

But it wasn’t like that. More as if the graffito had never been there.

As was his Saturday afternoon custom, Georg Poulsen sat and read to his wife.

It was the way they spent every Saturday afternoon; the way they spent most evenings when he was free from work. Margarethe Poulsen had always loved books, had always described them as her ‘other world’: an alternate universe into which she could escape when the stresses of the real world got too much. Georg Poulsen was only too happy to abet her escape by reading from her favorite books. Georg Poulsen loved his wife very much.

In particular, Margarethe had a passion for surreal fiction – not science fiction or fantasy-type pulp, but literary magical realism.

“I don’t understand why people need to read about other worlds to discover magic,” she had once told her husband, “when it is all around us. Reality is the greatest magic of all when you have the eyes to see.”

It had surprised Poulsen, but had also filled him with admiration, to discover that his wife – who as an engineer was so grounded in the classical physics of the everyday world – could still see in the universe boundless potential for limitless interpretation.

Margarethe had an especial love of Kafka, Gogol, Zamyatin and the French author Raymond Roussel. Poulsen couldn’t understand why Margarethe enjoyed Roussel so much, but she had explained that a writer who committed suicide not out of
despair but simply to find out ‘what death was like’ was someone whose perceptions of reality she would like to read.

And that was what he read to her now: Roussel’s fantastical
Locus Solus
. As he read, Poulsen felt an enormous pressure to invest as much into his delivery as possible, to make the characters live for his wife. It was not something that came to him naturally, but he had read to her so often that he’d become skilled at adding drama to the lines he delivered. This was more difficult with
Locus Solus
because there was no Danish translation and Poulsen had to read from an English edition. But as he made his way through the surreal world of the novel – the eponymous country estate of Martial Canterel, filled like a fair-ground with bizarre and unworldly attractions – Poulsen felt a growing understanding of his wife’s attraction to Roussel.

The author was certainly skilled at placing impossible yet indelible images in the mind of the reader. One such image was that of the talking, moving but disembodied head of the long-dead Danton, suspended in the mysterious, sparkling medium of
aqua micans
, in which also swam a completely hairless Siamese cat that operated the controls to agitate Danton’s head to life. But what really captured Poulsen’s attention was the description of Canterel leading his guests into the mysterious glass diamond at the heart of his estate. There, under the glass, was a sequence of eight tableaux vivants. In each tableau, performers acted out a set scene before a small audience for whom the performance clearly had some emotional significance. Canterel then revealed to his guests that the actors in each tableau were the corpses of the recently dead, and that he had discovered two mysterious substances,
resurrectine
and
vitalium
, to bring them back to life. However, the effect of the injected fluids was that the reanimated corpses were condemned to play out the most important event of their lives, and nothing else, over and over again, for ever.

Ridiculous as the scenario was, Poulsen found himself
wondering as he read if the perpetually repetitious and amnesiac consciousness of Roussel’s reanimated dead represented a lesser form of existence, or whether it was no different from moving from one moment to the next in real life. He also wondered if they would experience a feeling of déjà vu as they acted out a scene they had performed once in real life and countless forgotten times in their post-mortem tableau.

*

Georg Poulsen was a man of measure: in his work, in his life, in his approach to other people, he dealt in discrete, mensurable proportions. So, when he had completed the fourth of the chapters, Poulsen put the book down on the side table. He sat and chatted with his wife about his day, most importantly about the progress that was being made with the Project. The hope it offered. As usual, he talked, she listened.

Margarethe Poulsen had always been a fine-looking woman. He was reminded of that fact every time he took in her aristocratic profile. The very first time he had seen Margarethe, he had taken her for the spoiled daughter of some old-family landowner. Denmark was a culture with a rigorously egalitarian ethic and Poulsen guessed that the pretty young undergraduate’s haughtiness would have won her few friends among her fellow students. Yet he remained drawn to her, attracted not just by her beauty, but by the very odd and persistent feeling that he had seen her, known her, from somewhere before.

It had only been after Poulsen had plucked up the courage to speak to her that he discovered Margarethe was really a modest, almost shy young woman. She was studying engineering and, far from being aristocratic, was of humble rural origins. Where Poulsen was a Zealander, from just outside Copenhagen, Margarethe was a country girl from Fyn. Poulsen often thought that the only people Danes mistrusted more than Swedes were each other: Jutlanders viewed Copenhageners as arrogant; Zealanders saw Jutlanders as dour and intellectually pedestrian;
both considered Fyn backwardly bucolic but shared an affection for the island’s gentle beauty.

Margarethe’s father was an engineer, her mother an elementary school teacher. Typical of
Fynboerne
, Margarethe’s parents were open, friendly people and Georg soon realized that they simply wanted the best for their only child; and that they saw him as the best for her.

Georg and Margarethe had soon become inseparable. Theirs had been a touching of minds, of dreams, of mood and belief. Both had become involved in their respective disciplines – he physics and computing sciences, she engineering – with that very Danish impulse to be of service, to do something to improve the human experience.

For the first ten years of their married life, they moved around Europe and from university to university as Poulsen’s career had dictated, with one eighteen-month stay in the US, Margarethe finding work lecturing in engineering. The focus had been on Poulsen’s career, though: he had become an acknowledged expert on artificial intelligence and most of his research was devoted to finding new and better ways for humans to interact with computers.

When, after a decade of trying, Margarethe told him she was expecting their first child, Poulsen had been beside himself with joy. He remembered that day; how he had stood in the gleam of an imagined future and had felt that the world was just too good, too perfect to be real.

Personal joy was soon matched by professional pride: the University of Copenhagen asked him to head a multidisciplinary team to work on a major new international project. The aim was to replicate the cognitive states and functions of the human brain. The University hoped to have the project started within two years: a similar enterprise had been running in Düsseldorf since 2011, the Blue Brain Project in Switzerland as far back as 2005, and brain mapping was fast becoming the Space Race of
cognitive and computing sciences. But the Copenhagen Project was by far the most ambitious: eighty-six billion virtual neurons and a complete, simulated limbic system. An entire human brain, built cell-by-cell in a computer simulation, completely indistinguishable from the real thing. A brain that would think for itself.

It was the computational challenge of the century, and Georg Poulsen had it handed to him.

Professionally, personally, in every way possible, Georg Poulsen had been a happy man.

One evening, two weeks after Margarethe’s announcement, they spent the evening with their oldest friends, who had a house near the haven in Skovshoved. It had been a warm, cloudless summer evening and Poulsen had taken the shore road home, turning into Kystvejen and heading back towards the city. Margarethe had sat quietly in the passenger seat, contentedly looking out over the dark waters of the Øresund. It was often so between them: a happy silence in which everything seemed spoken.

Georg Poulsen, a truly happy man, pulled up at the traffic lights at the Charlottenlund Park.

*

It had taken him nearly a month to wake up. Or at least wake up fully.

Once, during a television debate with a neuroscientist and some kind of woo-woo religious type, Poulsen had argued that not only was the concept of the ‘soul’ a scientific nonsense, but there was no such single identifiable thing as the mind. He asserted that the root of the human experience was merely consciousness – and that consciousness was tuned into and out of as the physical structures of the brain develop complexity in childhood and adolescence, and unravel in late life or with illness or damage. There was no solid state of mind, he had said, only a flux of cognition and awareness. We were simply, he had argued, more ‘here’ at some times than at others.

Georg Poulsen’s own restoring consciousness had been in flux for a week before he finally broke through and back into the world. There had been temporary, vague resurfacings but, three weeks and four days after he had been waiting for the Charlottenlund Park traffic signal to change, Poulsen rejoined the world.

The news was delivered to him in stages and with deliberate care, the young doctor making sure he understood each piece of information. He was in unit RH4131, she told him, the acute care unit of the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. He had been in a traffic accident and had been seriously injured. A truck had run into the back of his car. His skull had been fractured and he had suffered a contrecoup cerebral contusion, which had forced the medical staff to keep him in an induced coma for three weeks. She told him that he had also suffered a minor pulmonary contusion, but that had resolved itself.

Poulsen had listened, tried to wrest meaning from the facts, then had struggled to speak, his mouth dry and furred, his tongue leaden. Eventually he got one word out, the only word on his mind.

“Margarethe?” the doctor had repeated. “Your wife? She has suffered similar injuries to you and is also being treated here.”

He had wanted to ask more, to ask about the baby, but he drifted back out of the room, out of the here and now, his consciousness tuning out once more.

*

They gave him the full news three days later, when he was fully awake and able to sit and had been transferred to a general ward.

“We can take you to see her,” the duty doctor explained. “She’s in the Neurophysiology Unit.”

Poulsen was put in a wheelchair and pushed through the hospital by an orderly and a nurse who could answer none of his questions about his wife. After checking in at the unit’s
desk, the nurse took him along a corridor of doors and into a room. The window blinds were all but closed and the only lighting was above the bed in which a figure lay, its breathing being done for it by a machine. The room, the figure in the bed, the whole situation suddenly felt completely unreal to Poulsen and for a moment he wondered if he was still in a coma himself, dreaming these horrors. Perhaps it was he who lay on the bed, immobile and his existence sustained by technology, and he was watching himself with some separated splinter of his own mind.

A tall, lean, dark-haired man in his forties, dressed in a surgical coat and professional manner, came into the room and introduced himself as Dr Larssen.

“Is she in a coma?” Poulsen asked.

With gentle authority, the physician guided Poulsen back into the corridor and out of Margarethe’s earshot.

“Your wife has experienced a severe closed-head injury,” Larssen explained. “There was no skull fracture but she suffered the same kind of coup-contrecoup injury that you are recovering from.” Larssen paused. It was the type of professional pause precursory to bad news. Poulsen noticed the dark circles around the physician’s eyes, which gave him a perpetually somber appearance. “I’m afraid that in your wife’s case, there has been a resultant diffuse axonal injury and a basilar arterial bleed. I’m sorry, but the bleed was into her brainstem. To answer your question, no, your wife is not in a coma, and all indications are that she is conscious, fully conscious … but I’m afraid she is suffering from total quadriplegic paralysis.”

Another professional pause.

“Dr Poulsen, given your own specialism, I don’t have to tell you how complex the human brain is. All our complexity as human beings – our intelligence and our personalities, our volition, how we perceive the world – all of that is in the cerebrum, mainly in the neocortex. All of these are completely intact in Mrs Poulsen. The damage has been done exclusively to the Pons,
the bridge between the brain and the brainstem. Do you understand what I am saying?”