Biblical (33 page)

“How can you say that?” Hartz seemed genuinely shocked. “History has everything to do with every one of us. History is what makes us, what has shaped the world we experience.”

“The world is what the world is. I deal with that. We cannot live in the past. We can only live in the present.”

Hartz laughed. “Where does that leave me? I’m a historian. That’s not just my profession, it’s what I am. I am connected to the past.”

‘No you’re not …” Markus adjusted his tone and his expression. “Sorry, Herr Hartz, but with the greatest respect, you’re not. The past is a matter of record, not a place you can visit. It no longer exists. All that exists is the here and now. I read this book, not that long ago; the author was exploring reminiscence … the nature of remembrance. The main character in this book was in late middle age and has succeeded in life. He is happy and content. He meets a friend from his youth and it starts him thinking about the past. Before he knows it, he buys a song, downloads this track he hasn’t listened to since he was about my age. He puts on his headphones, closes his eyes and plays the song; then like Proust biting into a madeleine, he’s taken right back to that time in his life. For a moment he believes it is possible to travel back in time with your thoughts, to re-create the past in your head and relive it. So he listens to the song again, and again. Then he realizes that the track is now in the present, not the past. It’s not some scratchy vinyl record he plays on a turntable but a digital download on an MP3 player. He’s
listened to it so much that it no longer conjures up his teenage bedroom but the luxury apartment he lives in.” Markus shook his head. “When we go on a field trip like this, we look at old buildings and you describe them as sixteenth-century this or fifteenth-century that – they’re nothing of the sort, they’re twenty-first-century objects. They exist here and now, no matter when they were assembled. In a hundred years’ time they’ll be twenty-second-century objects. The past is the past, the dead are buried. There are no lessons to be learned from the long-ago, only the here and now.”

Hartz sat silently. There was no anger or animosity in his expression, just a faint sadness, as if lamenting some defect, some disability, in his pupil.

“All I can say,” he said at last, “is that I honestly believe you’re wrong. We have to remember the past. Learn from it. That’s what today is all about. What you say doesn’t just make me sad – it terrifies me.”

*

It took less than an hour and a half to get there from Ulm. Despite everything he had said to Hartz, despite everything he had promised himself, he did feel something like a chill when he first saw it.

What disturbed him was exactly what he had said to Hartz did not happen: something that should have been left in the past existed in the present. As the bus headed along Alte Römerstrasse, just before it turned into the road leading to the visitor center and car park, he saw it: something that he had only seen before in black-and-white representation, in an imperfect record of a past reality, but there it was in full living color, in solidity and presence. The wall that stretched along the side of the modern road was topped with barbed wire and broken by square-based, robust towers, each tower topped by wrap-around windows under an overlapping pyramid hip roof.

They got off the bus in the car park in front of the visitor
center. Hartz disappeared into the center and returned with an attractive, dark-haired woman who introduced herself to everybody as Anna and informed them that she would be their guide. Once she checked everybody was ready, she led them through the metal-gated arch of the Jourhaus and into the main compound.

In spite of his determination to remain untouched by the experience and his knowledge that the three words wrought in iron and set in the center of the gates were a 1960s replica of the original, Markus could not keep out the chill as he read them.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI

Markus, along with the others, maintained an appropriately dignified silence, listening to the young, pretty woman recite old, ugly facts.

They were guided around the only two barrack blocks standing. Except they weren’t the real barrack blocks at all, but exact replicas built in 1965. What, he thought, was the point of that? What happened here was so monstrous it should not be represented in simulation.

What Markus had found fascinating had been watching the others. The whole group had an earnestness about them that, he knew, was not always the case with school visits. Some of his classmates were genuinely interested, but in the same way they would be in an art gallery or museum. But others were clearly affected by what they saw and heard; he noticed that Imke Paulig had been quiet throughout the tour and her face had grown very pale when they had been shown the crematoria. Some people, he knew, claimed that they could still smell a hint of burning flesh and ash when standing near the ovens. Markus smelled nothing and thought how easily some people allowed themselves to be deceived by their own imaginations.

For Markus, this was simply a place where something very bad, unforgivably bad, had happened a long, long time ago. Something that was nothing to do with him. Whatever
Erbschuld
debt was owing, it had been paid by or was still owed by the generations before him, not him. Despite his seeming disdain for others, Markus was sensitive enough to care about wrongs, about inhumanity. The crimes that had been committed here had been terrible and abhorrent, and he felt bad about them, but in the same way he felt bad about crimes committed in Stalinist Russia, in Serbia, in Rwanda or in a dozen different places and times.

After the guided tour, the school party was told they could walk around the grounds themselves, to take time for personal reflection.

Markus chose, as always, to be alone, watching the others from a bench beneath a willow tree. Part of him wanted to be moved, to feel something resonate within him, but it didn’t.

This place belonged to the here and now. The events that had taken place here had been tragic; the place itself was not. All it was to Markus was a not unpleasant, if somewhat municipal environment. If anything, it was calming, peaceful.

Maybe it was the weather that was making him feel like that: it was difficult to equate a blue early summer sky and the sun on your face with a place of such suffering and death. But, he realized, the sun must have shone back then too.

Markus thought about plugging in to his MP3 player, but worrying that it might seem disrespectful, he simply leaned back and stretched his arms along the back of the bench, closing his eyes and tilting his face up to the sun.

Markus Schwab sat on the bench in the sun and suddenly experienced an odd sensation.

The best way he could describe it was a feeling like déjà vu.

Casey handed him a pearlescent sliver of titanium. Much slimmer and lighter than the laptop he’d been using, it looked to Macbeth like something too advanced for his time. He was just old enough to remember the world before the information technology revolution and just occasionally, like now, he felt he was living in the future.

“Your new toy – four times the memory and more than twice the speed of your old one. I’ve loaded all your essential stuff onto it.”

“No phantom folder?” asked Macbeth.

“No phantom folder. If you don’t mind, I’ll hang on to your old laptop for a while, see if I can debug whatever it is that’s causing the folder to appear. I’ll bring it over to Copenhagen when I come.”

“Sounds good. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. More coffee?”

Macbeth shook his head. They were in the kitchen, having spent the evening in Casey’s apartment, making arrangements for Macbeth’s departure and for their reunion in Copenhagen in a couple of weeks. After his lunch at McLean, Macbeth hadn’t felt very hungry and instead of going out for a meal, the two brothers sat at the table eating sandwiches and drinking coffee.

Macbeth was glad he’d moved in with Casey. On the streets, on the subway and in public spaces, there were more and more people to be seen trancelike, lost to this world, inhabiting
another visible only to them. Reports were coming in from around the world of visions, mass events. His brother’s apartment was a pleasant, calming refuge. During his time in Denmark, Macbeth had learned a word:
hygge
.
Hygge
was one of those foreign words that was a complete concept, a feeling: a single word that could not be translated into a single word.
Hygge
was the feeling you got, or the atmosphere you created, when you made your home cozy and relaxed in chosen company, loved ones or oldest friends. Staying with Casey was
hyggelig
.

In many ways, Macbeth and Casey were more like twins than brothers separated by four years. It was a strange thing that Macbeth sometimes felt jealous of his brother, of his success, of the clarity of his intellectual function; strange because it wasn’t envy of another person, it was envy of a better version of himself.

“If I can’t fix it myself, do you mind if I have a friend at MIT take a look at your laptop?” asked Casey. “He’s an expert.”

“Not at all.”

Casey pushed his coffee cup around the melamine for a second, something clearly on his mind.

“You okay?” asked Macbeth.

Casey shrugged. “I’m beginning to get a bad feeling about this Oxford symposium.”

“You are?” asked Macbeth, genuinely surprised. “What kind of bad feeling?”

“I don’t know. Something’s been bugging me – you know, the kind of gut feeling you can’t put your finger on – ever since whatever the hell that was that happened when we were in the restaurant.”

“I think everyone’s had that kind of feeling since then, to be honest, Casey.”

“I guess … but this is different, like I know something but I don’t know I know it yet.” Casey made a face. “Just sounds dumb.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said Macbeth. “Sometimes your unconscious puts things together but isn’t ready to let your conscious in on it. It’ll come to you. But it’s not surprising you’re uneasy with all this crap going on at the moment: Blind Faith, Islamic terrorists and every other kind of religious nut seem to be coming out of the woodwork to attack science.”

Casey thought about what his brother had said, then shook his head. “It’s more than that – maybe not even one thing but a lot of small things I just can’t connect.”

“Like?”

“Like when I asked around if Gabriel was involved with the Simulists, no one could say for sure. But they did say Professor Gillman is involved with them, apparently. Heavily involved. And there’s the Prometheus Project itself.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know.” Casey shook his head frustratedly. “I don’t even know for sure what it is. But I
do
know it’ll be a huge leap forward. Maybe a leap we’re not ready to take.”

“I don’t get you,” said Macbeth.

“Do you never think how odd it is that we’re alive right now? In our lifetimes we’ve seen the greatest technological advances in human history. Out of all the two hundred thousand years of human history, all our achievements have been squeezed into one century, and most of them into a couple of decades. And it’s speeding up.”

“Is that necessarily a bad thing?”

“It depends. It’s taking us to the brink of the Singularity, when technology and artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. Some say that’ll be the end of us, others that it’ll be the beginning – that human evolution will cease to be a natural process and become a planned one. Planned by us. We’re about to change who and what we are as a species. Every technology is accelerating and it’s impossible to predict what our lives will be like in only twenty or thirty years. And with
all of this going on we suddenly get an upswing of religious fundamentalism and obscurantism. It’s almost as if, without really understanding why, the religious fundamentalists and the anti-science crackpots are trying to save us from the Singularity. Maybe it’s an instinct in us as a species.”

“And that’s what’s been bothering you?”

“Maybe. Partly. Like I said, it’s a lot of other things. These hallucinations too.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I don’t just mean the events in themselves, I mean their nature. A hallucination is personally subjective and by definition false, something perceived to be real but which isn’t, right?”

“Right.”

“But you and I – and everyone else –
shared
the same hallucination. And the earthquake we experienced matched a historical event perfectly. Shouldn’t a hallucination be personal and subjective – and divorced from
all
realities, even a past one? Who ever heard of thousands of people sharing exactly the same hallucination at exactly the same time?”

“What’s your point?” asked Macbeth.

“What I do for a living – what Gabriel did – is to look into a universe so tiny that it defies understanding and where all the laws of ordinary physics are turned on their head. What we express through the abstract language of equations either sounds incomprehensible or delusional as soon as you try to express it in ordinary language or outside the scientific community. Physics began as a study of natural forces and now it’s about the nature of reality itself. And there is something wrong with reality right now.”

“You’re saying you think these hallucinations aren’t psychological, but something to do with external physics?”

“I’m saying they could be. It’s almost like windows in time opening up. I don’t know. I couldn’t even begin to formulate
a theory on why that should happen. All I know is that the Prometheus Project is the biggest leap we’ve made in a generation and it coincides with all of this weirdness.”

“You can’t seriously believe there’s a link?” asked Macbeth.

“Listen, without getting all technical, we don’t know what spin an electron has, what form it has, until we look at it. The thing is, the electron doesn’t take that form
until
we look at it. A photon only decides to be a wave or a particle when someone observes it. We are coming to the conclusion that the entire universe is without definite form until
we
look at it. It’s a super-simplification, but the fact is that everything is in every possible state and none of them at all until we look. What if Blackwell’s work has looked into a new and unknown part of reality? Maybe the simple act of looking has caused something to change, to take a definite form.” Casey paused. “Do you know what my definition of reality is? Each of us is wandering around in the pitch dark, each shining his or her own little flashlight, lighting up one small piece of the universe. All objective reality is, is when enough of us point our flashlights at the same spot. The people you treat, the delusionals and the schizoid … all that’s happening is that they’re illuminating some alternative reality.”