Biblical (35 page)

“What is it?” he asked his father.

“We’ve built a mind,” his father said, without taking his eyes off the substanceless universe sparkling and floating in the study’s air. “We are becoming gods because we’ve built a mind.”

The other man turned to the boy. Macbeth expected him to be the grown-up version of himself, but he wasn’t. He was someone else and something else: something dark and bad and gigantic compressed down into the shape of a man. Macbeth looked up into his face and as he did so, felt a warm trickle run down his leg. The man looked back at him but had no eyes, eyelids opening and closing as if there had been eyes where there were none. There was nothing in the eye sockets, Macbeth could see that: not that they were empty, but that they were filled with nothing: a gray-black void that stretched for ever.

“You want to know who I am, boy?” asked the man. His voice was a deep and cultured baritone, his accent difficult to place. Maybe New England, maybe British or Irish. His tone was at once neutral and hostile, as if he had no real interest in Macbeth yet wanted to do him great harm.

Macbeth didn’t answer; didn’t nod or shake his head, just stood in a pool of his own fear and urine.

“You know who I am. You know my name. You know what I am. What is my name?”

Macbeth said nothing, lost in the dark of the eye-socket voids.

“WHAT IS MY NAME?” the man bellowed, causing Macbeth to jump and drop his encyclopedia.

“You are John Astor,” said Macbeth, his voice shaking, leaning tight against his father’s body, squeezing his hand.

“It is a complete mind for us to explore,” said Macbeth’s father, oblivious to his son and the man. “Complete.”

“It’s the most wondrous thing,” said Marjorie Glaiston with
a Boston Brahmin drawl. “Most wondrous.” Macbeth noticed she was dressed formally and of the period she had lived in.

The Eyeless Man leaned over towards Macbeth, conspiratorially. He tilted his upper body and head, twisting the mouth he shielded with the flat blade of his hand, silent-movie-conspirator-style.

“Do you want to know something, young John?” he asked.

Macbeth nodded, scared to anger the man again.

“This mind. This thing we’ve made from nothing … it thinks it’s real. It’s the funniest thing, but it really believes in its own existence … that it lives in a real world.” Astor laughed, then whispered, “But I made it all up. It is a fiction that believes itself to be fact and I am its author.”

Macbeth started to cry. He looked down to where the encyclopedia lay, one corner of the glossy book jacket breaking the meniscus edge of the urine splash on the teak floorboards. “I want to stop,” he pleaded. “Please Mr Astor, I want to stop dreaming.”

The Eyeless Man leaned forward, levering his face down and into the terrified boy’s. Macbeth looked into Astor’s hollow eye sockets, a void so big yet so empty that it made his own eyes hurt.

“Everybody dreams,” Astor said in a maliciously quiet voice. “Everything is made of dreams. You love your books, don’t you? You hide away in them, finding answers to questions you haven’t asked yet, so you can fill your head with knowledge and truth, except that knowledge is deceit and truth is lies.” He paused, grabbed Macbeth by the shoulders, his bony fingers sinking painfully into young flesh, then screamed into the small boy’s face: “WAKE UP!”

*

Macbeth woke up. His heart pounding in his chest, he did an inventory of his surroundings. It was still dark, but he knew he was in Casey’s spare room, and he could see everything in
shades of shadow. He felt a moment of stark panic when he saw someone sitting in the corner, quietly watching him, then realized that it was just his jacket hanging on the back of the chair, with his suit pants neatly folded on the chair cushion.

He gave a small laugh at his own stupidity. A grown man, a psychiatrist and research scientist, a rationalist to the core, yet he was afraid of shadows. Despite acknowledging all of these truths, and despite wanting to will himself back to sleep, he reached over and switched on the bedside lamp, responding to the need to fill every corner with light.

He blinked in the brightness.

Astor stood hunched by the bed, looking down at Macbeth. Unlike in the dream, Astor was no longer compressed down into the size of a normal man; he was huge, perhaps fifteen feet tall, crammed into the room, his long legs bent, his shoulders hunched and pressed up against the ceiling. His head, twisted round on a crooked neck, was directly above the bed, looking down at Macbeth with his still hollow eyes filled with a dark gray void. Through his terror, Macbeth realized he knew what the void was, what it meant.

Macbeth tried to scream, but nothing came from his mouth. He tried to get out of the bed, but was completely paralyzed. I can’t move, he thought.

“You can’t move,” said Astor.

I can’t breathe, thought Macbeth.

“You can’t breathe,” said Astor, who smiled a too-wide smile, a one-hundred-tooth smile, and bent his head down towards the helpless, paralyzed, silently screaming Macbeth.

He woke up. The room was bright, filled with natural, not electric light. It was morning.

Macbeth gathered his thoughts. A hallucination. A hypnopompic hallucination, created in that place, that state of consciousness, between sleep and wakefulness. False awakenings,
vivid hallucination, sleep paralysis – all were common features of the hypnopompic state; and hypnopompic states almost always followed lucid dreams, where the dreamer was aware of dreaming.

Nothing more than a hiccup in the reticular activating system, he told himself: the connection between brainstem and cortex that regulates states of wakefulness.

He knew all of that; had learned it in his psychiatric training. Yet he still took a moment to check the bedroom for shadow people in the corners.

*

Casey was up and preparing breakfast for them both.

Macbeth had gotten up early, mainly to separate himself from the environment of the dream, but also because he was keen to find out what had happened overnight. He and Casey had stayed up until just after 2 a.m., watching the news and discussing its consequences. Casey had made frantic calls and sent SMS messages to all of his colleagues; similarly, whenever he put his cellphone down it would ring, with one or other of his fellow MIT physicists checking he was all right. By the end of the night, six co-workers were unaccounted for.

“Any more news?” Macbeth asked as he walked into the kitchen.

“Not much,” Casey said over his shoulder while pouring a coffee for Macbeth. “What there is is bad enough. The death toll could be as high as a couple of hundred. They still haven’t located Gillman. I just can’t believe this, John.”

“I really wish you’d reconsider Oxford,” said Macbeth as he sat at the kitchen table. “That’s got to be a prime target for these lunatics.” Before retiring to bed, Macbeth had beseeched his brother not to make the trip to Oxford, but Casey insisted he had to go. Another reason for Macbeth’s early rise was to try again to dissuade his brother from the trip.

“The Prometheus symposium is just too important,” Casey
said. “Too important for my career, and I’m not going to let a bunch of anti-science crazies scare me off. And I still think it may cast light on everything that’s been happening.”

“You still think there’s a connection between the hallucination phenomenon and Blackwell’s work? I really can’t see how there could be any credible scientific link.”

“Like I said, when you work in quantum physics you see things differently … Michio Kaku once said that we’re like radio or TV sets, tuned in permanently to one channel. But as well as the reality we’re tuned into, there are countless other realities occupying the same space and time – other stations broadcasting in the same location but on different wavelengths.”

“And you think maybe something’s messing with the remote, is that it?” said Macbeth.

Casey shrugged. “All I know is that we’ve got these mass hallucinatory episodes taking place for no reason and now, on top of that, religious nuts targeting facilities devoted to neuroscience and physics – the two fields that could hold the answer. Speaking of targets, I take it you’re not going into the Schilder Institute again?”

“The place is already like Fort Knox,” said Macbeth. “But no … I won’t be back there before I leave. I am going into McLean this morning though, to see a patient of Pete Corbin’s. By the way, I’m off early tomorrow morning … no need for me to disturb you. But I’ll see you tonight.”

The phone on the kitchen wall rang and Casey answered it.

“Sure. He’s here …” He held the receiver out to Macbeth.

“Hi, Dr Macbeth? It’s Brian Newcombe here. Terrible thing that happened last night.”

“It certainly was,” said Macbeth. “We were just saying that it is a good thing that the Schilder has such tight security.”

“Sure, sure. Listen, there have been other developments … I really need to talk to you before you go back to Denmark. I’m sorry to press you, but this is very important.”

“I’m afraid I really don’t have much time …” Macbeth felt annoyed at the intrusion: he was going to spend his last evening in Boston with Casey, not talking shop with Newcombe. “I’m going out to McLean this morning – any chance we could meet there later, maybe after lunch? I can’t give you a specific time, but—”

“Belmont’s fine,” Newcombe cut him off. “I can combine a visit I need to make at the Neuroimaging Center. I’ll give you my cell number and you can ring me when you’re through.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there.”

The Starers began to be called Dreamers.

Like everybody else, Macbeth was getting used to the sight of people standing stock-still, focused on something not there. Mostly, it would be an individual in the middle of a busy street or in a park, but increasingly it would be a group of connected or unconnected people: sometimes a handful, sometimes a hundred, all locked out of the time and space they had occupied until just a second before and into a new reality. The worst was when it happened to someone behind the wheel of a vehicle. The morning after the MIT bombings, there was more bad news on the radio: a truck driver had ploughed his eighteen-wheeler through commuter traffic on the Adamski Memorial Highway, crushing everything in his path. Fifteen dead.

The official advice was that no one was to drive alone, and all speed limits were temporarily reduced. That unique human ability to adapt – to adjust to a differing reality and to normalize the abnormal – was already taking hold.

And on the streets there were more Dreamers.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health had set up THS Response Teams – THS standing for Temporary Hallucinatory Syndrome. Teams of two EMS technicians, or a technician and a BPD cop, would move the affected person out of harm’s way. If it was a brief seizure they would stay with the patient; prolonged cases were taken to one of the hundred shelters that had been set up citywide.

As well as the THS Response Teams, there were more cops on the street. The neurogenic immobility that accompanied the hallucinations was a godsend to criminals. Pickpockets and perverts accosted the temporarily insensible; apartments and homes were ransacked while the occupier was physically at home but mentally occupying some other, distant place.

Macbeth took a taxi out to Belmont. The driver behind the wheel explained the fare would be double the usual. Macbeth found the city-authorized increase reasonable, given that, for safety, there were now two drivers sitting in front of him through the Plexiglas.

There was no chat this trip. No one said to Macbeth anymore that they thought they’d seen him before. Feelings of inexplicable reminiscence were something you no longer acknowledged, in case they brought on a feeling of déjà vu.

As he sat in the back of the cab, Macbeth slipped from his briefcase the titanium sliver of technology that Casey had lent him, unfolded it and checked his email. Four from Georg Poulsen. There had been at least two emails from his boss every day he had been in Boston, and usually a couple more from members of Macbeth’s research team, obviously under pressure from Poulsen in Macbeth’s absence.

It was getting that Macbeth couldn’t stand the man.

The Project hadn’t been long started before everyone on the hand-picked team became aware that Dr Georg Poulsen, the short, unassuming-looking Dane heading the Project, was a very driven man.

With funding of two billion euros, double the European Union grant to the Düsseldorf project, the Copenhagen team’s aim was to build a fully functioning analog of a human brain, allowing the scientists involved to short-cut the testing times for neurological drug treatments and to take exponential leaps in understanding human cognitive function. But breakthroughs in brain–computer interfaces were also sought and Poulsen had
taken personal charge of the Interface Team. He seemed obsessed with the quest to find better ways for humans to interact with computer technology and it hadn’t taken long for the Interface Team members to protest about Poulsen’s unreasonable expectations, others complaining about the disproportionate emphasis placed on interface research.

Suspecting some personal motive, Macbeth had made an effort to get to know his Danish boss. The descriptions given by Poulsen’s former colleagues – of a typically relaxed and easygoing Dane with a good sense of humor who enjoyed the social aspects of academic life as much as its intellectual challenges – jarred with his own experience of the man. Macbeth found his boss remote and businesslike to the point of hostility. No one knew what went on in Poulsen’s private life, and no one asked.

Macbeth read through the emails: the usual demands for immediate answers to questions that could easily wait until he got back to Copenhagen. Macbeth decided that was exactly what they would do and he quit out of his email.

He was just about to close over the lid of the laptop when he noticed something sitting on the screen’s desktop.

“Son of a bitch …” he muttered, as he clicked on the folder that had appeared out of nowhere. Just as it had on his old computer, the icon refused to yield to his clicking. Macbeth frowned: Casey knew his stuff when it came to computers, and it worried him that whatever was causing this ghost folder was smarter than his brother. Closing the laptop, he slipped it back into his case, sat back in the taxi’s seat and watched Massachusetts slide by.