The 2084 Precept (7 page)

Pleased to hear he's maintaining a modicum
of courtesy. It helps, if not a lot.

"None taken," I said. How much longer is
this going to go on for?

"Naturally, being borne along at all of
these speeds doesn't affect you, nor do you notice it any more than
you would if strolling down to the restaurant car on a train doing
200 kilometers per hour, or walking down the aisle on a plane
travelling at 800 kilometers per hour. So…everything is moving and
sometimes there is what we might call a crash. Your scientists have
recently noticed two galaxies colliding, VV 340 (North) and VV 340
(South), as you call them. These two galaxies collided 450 million
years ago. But 'colliding' is perhaps the wrong turn of phrase, as
very few of the stars actually crash into each other, the distances
between them being too great. And your galaxy, as it happens, is
also going to collide with another one, a much bigger one which you
call the Andromeda Nebula. Andromeda has around a trillion stars
and you can see it on a moonless night with the naked eye. However,
Andromeda is roughly 2.6 million light years away and, although you
are approaching each other at an accumulated speed of close to 1
million kilometers per hour, it will still take another 3 billion
years or so before the collision occurs. That is admittedly well
before the end of your sun's lifetime, but…in spite of that, it is
nothing to prevent you sleeping at night, obviously."

At this, he chuckled. Come to think of it, I
thought to myself, his face looks a bit like a moon as well. A
moon-faced madman, albeit an agreeable moon-faced madman. Agreeable
so far, anyway. An
apparently
agreeable moon-faced madman,
let’s say.

"No, Mr. O'Donoghue," he continued, "your
sleep would only be disturbed by the arrival of a large enough
asteroid, or by your species’ self-extermination, possibly by
nuclear suicide. These appear to be the mathematical favorites for
the not too distant future. By which I mean anything between 100
and 8,000 more orbits of your star."

"You are being very patient," he smiled,
"and I would like you to know that I very much appreciate that.
Now… if you wouldn't mind, just a couple of additional pieces of
information to complete the picture. Your Voyager 1 spacecraft, now
leaving your solar system at a speed of close to 20 kilometers per
second, will still need another 300,000 years to reach one of the
planetary systems closest to your own—such as, for example, the one
you call Gliese 581, which is only 20 light years away, or around
190 trillion kilometers. I am aware of the fact that even small
distances such as these are difficult for you to conceive—and this
is
a small distance, very small—even if you could envisage
being able to live for 2,600 consecutive lifetimes travelling at
Voyager's speed in order to get there."

"And for all you know," he continued, "there
might be nothing there for you to find anyway. However, and just
for your information, there
is
something there for you to
find. There is life on one of that star's planets, although to you
it would merely appear to be a colony of reddish swamp scum
surviving in an atmosphere of chemical components that would spell
death to you guys within a microsecond, mainly a mixture of
hydrogen, methane, helium and ammonia as well as some water in
evaporated form. And as for your closest galaxy, the one you call
Canis Major, well, that is 80,000 light years away, and if you were
travelling in Voyager I it would take you 10 million consecutive
lifetimes to get there."

Poor lunatic Jerry stopped his
window-gazing, walked over to the corner table, picked up a bottle
of Coke, raised his eyebrows at me to which I replied with a nod,
brought two bottles and a bottle-opener over to the table and sat
down again. He was regarding me with a seemingly bemused
expression, obviously aware of what I was probably thinking. He
opened both bottles, handed one to me, and started off again.

I have decided to give this one more hour,
maximum. Saturday evening is coming up, I have things to do.

"O.K.," he said, "that rounds off the
piecemeal picture I wanted to paint to assist you in understanding
some of the things involved. Obviously I couldn't travel here in
the way that you understand the word 'travel'. Your Einstein stated
that the maximum possible speed in the universe is the speed of
light, 300,000 kilometers per second, or over 1 billion kilometers
per hour as mentioned already, and part of his reasoning was that
the faster matter moves, the heavier it becomes, and at the speed
of light its weight would reach unbearable levels. On the other
side of the coin, some of your scientists have recently been
looking more closely at neutrinos, particles so small that they can
move through granite, indeed through your whole planet without any
trouble at all, and a few of these scientists actually believe that
these particles can move at a speed
faster
than light, and
perhaps by taking a short cut via an unknown dimension. Well, as
regards the speed for physical objects, they are wrong, and your
Einstein is right. But as regards an unknown dimension, they are
definitely right, although they don't know it yet. There is
unfortunately no way I could attempt to explain that dimension to
you, you will just have to take my word for it. By entering that
dimension, I have been able to arrive here on your planet. Not my
physical presence of course—that would be impossible—but my
brain."

"Just what kind of physical presence
do
you have, if you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Parker? I mean
what do you look like back home?" I asked. Still prepared to show
some interest, keep the game going for a while longer, then it's
along to the nearest pub at a high rate of knots, believe me.

"Well, we're not like you, Mr. O’Donoghue.
Everything in the universe is made up of matter, either solid or
gas. You, like your planet, are what one would call physically
solid, water being as far as we are concerned also a solid, and
constituting a large part of your bodily configuration. We, on the
other hand, are a form of gas, with a nucleus, similar to the
composition of, let's say, your sun or your planet Jupiter, and our
form is surrounded by a membrane. Just like you, you have a
membrane, you refer to it as skin. Can you imagine what would
happen to your protruding intestines and other organs without a
membrane? We are also much smaller than you, about a quarter of
your size. Difficult no doubt for you to conceive of an intelligent
life form as dwarfs in the form of a gas, but that's the way it is
and we'll just have to leave it at that. So…what happens is that a
copy of my brain is made and transmitted via what, for descriptive
convenience, you may choose to call the fifth dimension, to
wherever we want to send it to."

"The fifth dimension?"

"That's right. It is a dimension you are
unaware of. As I have said, I can't explain it to you in any way
that would be intelligible to you. Your scientists are currently
only aware of three dimensions, plus, if you will, an imaginary
fourth one to account for the imaginary direction in which matter
is supposed to extend in addition to the three dimensions of
Euclidean geometry."

"So…why do you look like a human being?"

"You mean, I suppose" said Jeremy, "why do I
look
and sound and behave
like a human being? Hmm…what would
be the best way for me to clarify that?"

He looked at me with one raised eyebrow,
drank some water, saw that I was not about to provide him with any
suggestions, and continued. "Let me try this—I assume you know what
a computer hacker is in your world?"

"Yes."

"A good one can enter into other people's
computers, private computers, big business computers, military
computers, virtually any computer, and manipulate the data, the
programs and the processes within those computers. He can directly
influence how the computers and their programs function. And if he
is particularly talented and malicious, he can also in some cases
copy the data or destroy all the data and the programs as well.
Eliminate them entirely. Without needing to be anywhere near the
computers themselves of course."

"Indeed, Mr. Parker. But I.T. disaster
recovery procedures usually include security methodologies to
counter attempts at data and program manipulation or elimination.
And in any case, everything is subject to continuous back-up
operations. I do agree, nevertheless, that it can cause temporary
chaos. And I also agree that the copying of sensitive data can have
dangerous consequences of course."

He looked at me with a polite but patient
stare, like someone attempting to teach in a kindergarten.

"Yes, well, there are no back-up
possibilities for your brains, Mr. O'Donoghue. I zeroed in on a
mentally handicapped patient, of which there are around 6,000 in
your U.K. hospitals. This was a sad, hopeless and incurable case.
And I installed the copy of my brain into his. In the same way as
you install chips into your computers or mobile phones, except that
my chip is not made out of physical material. I am walking around
in his body. I use the undamaged parts of his brain for the purpose
of all physical functions, which are controlled of course by my own
brain, which, in addition, has taken over the management and
operation of all the active mental functions. I speak your language
because that is the language stored in the patient's
memory—grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and so on. Just like your
computers, brains operate on electrical impulses and there is, for
us, nothing particularly complicated about this methodology."

My feelings were now becoming pretty mixed.
On the one hand I would like to get out of here. On the other hand
it is definitely fun, but then again, overall I am beginning to
feel quite sorry for the guy. He is obviously far gone, totally
zapped, away on another planet—great allegory—and here I am playing
games with him. Which I shouldn't be, I really shouldn't. But he's
totally crazy, deluded enough to be taking everything seriously,
and he might really have wired me the €100,000. Or not. Probably
not, but let me just push him along a little bit further, just for
the hell of it. Just for the fun.

"Mr. Parker," I said, "this is all very
interesting for me to hear and, as you will no doubt agree, equally
difficult for me to understand, let alone believe. Tell me please,
what documentation do you carry, how did you create or get hold of
these companies, where did all that money come from?"

It is a game I shouldn't be playing. But
let's see what else he can come up with.

"Simple," he said. "The patient was a man
called Jeremy Parker and under my auspicious direction he completed
a miraculous, comprehensive and undeniable recovery which left them
with no alternative but to eventually hand him his papers and
release him back into society. Jeremy was on his own. His only
remaining relation, his mother, had died some two years previously
and, of course, they wanted to keep me under regular observation,
to study me in fact. But I severed my contact with the community
care people almost immediately, and I have never been back to the
asylum and I don't believe they can force me to in any way."

"And the rest?" I asked.

He finished off the last of his Coke, smiled
that gracious moon-smile of his, and said, "Before I answer that, I
will need to demonstrate something. At this point in time, you
still don't believe a word of what I'm saying, that's evident, it's
natural and I don't blame you, any other attitude would be
irrational. You are not quite sure about the fraud angle, I would
guess, but you've determined with absolute certainty that I am a
lunatic, a raving one probably, out of my mind in a big way. But as
I said at the start of our meeting, I hope to be able to convince
you otherwise and my attempt at this will only take a few moments.
Would it be O.K. with you if we went down to the street for a
minute?"

"Sure it's O.K.," I said, "no problem."

Quite right it's no problem. On the
contrary, I am not coming back up again, superb way out, terminate
this afternoon's waste of time, well…weird bit of fun.

He led the way down, then around the corner,
and there he stopped. There were plenty of pedestrians and a few
people occupying outdoor tables at a café just down the street.
It's not cold, but it's not so warm either, I wouldn't be sitting
outside at this time of the day, but Brits are Brits. I checked my
watch, around 4 p.m.

"Think of me, if you don't mind," said
Jeremy, "as a computer hacker, and ask me to hack into one of these
people's minds and make him or her do something, something
innocuous, something that will cause nobody any harm. Go
ahead."

"Anything?"

"Yes, anything innocuous, anything at
all."

Well, well, well, well, is
this
going
to be intriguing, I don’t think.

"Well now, let me see…let's take that waiter
who has just appeared. Do you think you could you make him drop his
tray with everything on it?"

It happened within two seconds. The waiter
dropped his tray, and two bottles, two glasses, and a cup of coffee
smashed across the pavement. A confused and apologetic waiter,
briefly startled customers, and an incredulous, disbelieving
me.

I looked at Jeremy and he just held up his
hands and shrugged. "One more go?" he asked, raising his eyebrows
at me, completely relaxed, nothing unusual going on here as far as
he was concerned.
My
mind on the other hand was racing with
all kinds of ridiculous thoughts, as you may imagine, electrical
impulses flashing back and forth and around and around, and finally
arriving at the only conclusion their logic would allow, namely
that what had just happened could be—no, had to be—an extraordinary
coincidence of the mind-boggling kind. And having told me this, my
brain took the next logical step and told me to check this out,
test him again, and to make it something difficult this time, don't
mess around.