The Thing Itself (30 page)

‘I’m fine thank you
very
much for asking,’ I panted. ‘For someone who just nearly fucking died.’ In fact my side was throbbing where the bicycle had collided with it. My knee ached hard as a new sprain. With a sinking feeling I realised I had left my walking stick inside the Portakabin, on the back of the lorry.

‘You’re not out of the woods yet, Charles.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Right.’ I took a breath and started off, proceeding not unlike Igor in
Young Frankenstein
doing his ‘walk this way’ gag. My whole body was defined by various kinds of pain. I waited at the crossing, leaning against the pole, for the green man. When the beeping began I launched myself across the road, groaning. One shoe on, and one sock-only foot.

On the other side it was a few hundred yards, and an agonisingly drawn-out length of time, to the shops. Finally I reached them. I ducked into a pub, and managed to prop myself long enough at the bar to order a pint and some peanuts before collapsing on to the plush bench and gasping. The barmaid paid no overt attention to my peculiar attire, or evident physical distress, the sort of professional disinterest that makes British pubs such havens.

Half the pint and I felt a little better. The phone buzzed in my jacket.

‘You’re becoming a right nag,’ I told Peta.

‘I know,’ he replied. He sounded contrite. ‘You’ve come such a long way. A rush and a push and escape is
ours
.’

‘Time for some honesty. Seriously, though? I’m clearly in no state to go on the run from the British authorities. Look at me!
Can
you look? Do you have an eye in this terminal? Like HAL?’

‘The Institute gave you a car,’ Peta said. ‘Presumably you didn’t dump it in a river?’

‘It’s parked at the—’ I said, and, unforced, the name of the chain slotted neatly into my memory. ‘
Way Inn
. It’s a big hotel, over towards the motorway.’

‘I know what it is. So: first, make yourself less conspicuous – buy some trousers. Second, get a taxi out to the hotel and retrieve the car. Then drive.’

‘Drive where?’

‘North,’ said Peta.

‘Care to be more specific?’

‘Far north.’

I put him back in my pocket. Weeks in the hospital, dozing off whenever I felt like it, had left me lazy. The beer accentuated this. I had no desire to move. Quite the reverse: I fancied staying there and drifting away. My breathing was almost back to normal. I was a crippled, exhausted old man without friends or resources. I was facing the entire might of the British security services. The phone buzzed furiously in my jacket.

I don’t think I actually slept, but it’s hard to be sure. Memory is a tricky thing. At any rate, I entered a strange, disembodied mental state. I was still in the pub. The barmaid had retreated into the back rooms of the place. There was nobody else there. Except that there
was
somebody – sitting in the shadows, away in the corner. I tried to focus on this figure, but it was hard to bring him into focus. My heart started its run-up, rocking back and forth first of all like a pole-vaulter readying himself; then striding faster and faster and then – with a jolt – I saw who was sitting in the shadows.

‘You gotta tell me what you
want
with me, dude,’ I said, perhaps out loud. I was peevish.

The boy shook his head. How old
was
he? Hard to say, as he sat there. Early teens?

‘I just,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you to,’ I said. ‘Hmff,’ I said.

A lorry rattled the windows as it passed: first the windows to the right of the main entrance, where he was sitting, then the windows to the left, where I was. Quiet again. The front door opened, and two elderly men walked in. This distracted me or woke me up, or something. I looked at them, and then back to the corner, but the boy with the scarred face was gone. I looked back at the door, and as it swung closed I just caught a glimpse of the boy’s ghostly leg as he exited the establishment.

Peta was ringing, in my pocket. I picked him up. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right I’m going.’

I bought extra-large trousers with an elasticated waistband from Debenhams. I also picked up a new walking stick, some sunglasses and a beanie-style hat. I had something approaching two hundred and fifty quid left in my wallet. I had my bank cards too, but Peta was keen I avoid using those. ‘I can get you more money,’ he promised me. ‘The problem is, we’ll need a cashpoint for that, and as soon as you use one they’ll be able to track it.’

‘A paranoid computer,’ I told him. ‘What an original idea.’

‘I’m being practical. And you’re in a public space – don’t draw attention to yourself.’

We were sitting in the Debenhams café, and I was trying, yet again, to get my breath back. There was no sign of the boy with the scarred face. I eyed the various old-age pensioners drinking tea and eating scones. ‘As if,’ I said.

‘I propose we take a thousand pounds from a cashpoint here in Swindon centre, then take a taxi to your car, collect it and drive several hundred miles away. Book into a hotel, pay with cash. Always pay with cash.’

‘I don’t have a thousand pounds in my account.’

‘I’m not suggesting we use
your
money.’

‘Look: where is this going?’ I asked, suddenly immensely weary. ‘On the run – for how long?’

‘Not for ever,’ said Peta. ‘A couple more days is all I need.’

‘All
you
need? To do what?’

‘Clear your name, of course,’ said Peta. And, once again, I believed him. He’d told me himself: computers can’t lie.

So I did what he said. I stomped outside with my new stick, waited in line at a cashpoint, inserted my card and found – to my surprise – that money had indeed moved mysteriously into my account. I took out the maximum in cash and stomped quickly away to the taxi rank.

A taciturn Sikh drove me out to the Swindon Way Inn.

The car was still in the car park, although a POLICE AWARE sticker had been placed over the windscreen. I peeled this off as best as I could, got in, and tried the engine, half-expecting the battery to be dead. But it started, and I drove away.

I headed north; through Farringdon and skirting Oxford before joining the M40. By the time I hit the motorway it was dusk. After an hour or so, I pulled into a service station and parked up to take a nap. Every bone in my body was exhausted. I dozed, but didn’t get far. When I awoke it was in the middle of a dream of space aliens out of a low-budget science-fiction movie.

‘UFOs,’ I said. ‘Klingons. E.T.’

Peta buzzed, and I put him to my ear. ‘Are you OK to drive now?’ he asked. ‘We need to keep going north.’

‘Close encounters of the north kind,’ I muttered, rubbing my face with my free hand. ‘What is it with you and the north?’

Rather than answering he said: ‘There are three stages to the human conceptualisation of extraterrestrial life. The first imagines that such life must have arms and legs, as humans do. Because we want to meet these aliens, and shake them by the hand, and how can we do that if they
have
no hand? The second stage ridicules the humanocentric bias of the first stage, only to introduce its own. Aliens might have tentacles, or pseudopods, or no limbs at all, but they surely must possess intelligence, and have a language – maths, say – in common with us. Because we want to communicate with them, and how can we do that if there is no common ground?’

‘I have that sinking feeling,’ I said, ‘that you’re going to tell me the third stage now.’

‘The third stage is when we realise that stage one and two are exactly equal in their humanocentric bias. It’s when we realise that there’s no reason why aliens should share our maths, or our physics, or our apperceptions of space and time.’

‘Do you believe in little green men?’

‘Aliens, yes. As to their littleness, why should size be a defining feature of them? Colour and gender I dismiss with the disdain their inclusion in your definition merits.’

‘If I drive,’ I grizzled, ‘will you shut up?’

I drove on, into the evening until I was well north of Birmingham, and at last I pulled off and booked into a hotel. Paying with cash didn’t phase the clerk, although she did require me to give a hefty deposit and fill in my details. I invented a surname and gave an imaginary address.

Finally I limped into my room and was able to relax. I ran a bath and enjoyed it as best I could, with my bad leg and its cast hanging over the side of the tub. Then I ordered a room service meal and watched telly. Peta was on the bed beside me as I noshed, and I glanced at him from time to time. He didn’t ring. Perhaps that meant he was content. For the time being.

It occurred to me as I poured a minibar whisky into a plastic tumbler that I had started drinking again. I watched
Newsnight
. I dozed off during the weather, propped up on the bed, and woke in the small hours.

Stillness. Listening carefully, I could hear the noise of the M42 in the distance, like a hushing, or a figure in a dream whispering
refresh
,
refresh
.

I hobbled to the loo and pissed, and washed my hands. I stared at my disfigured visage in the mirror. What
was
behind those eyes?

A helicopter made a mosquito pass, miles away to the south. Its noise faded. I came and sat on the bed, and picked up Peta. ‘How much volume you got? Can we do a hands-free, speakerphone type thing? I don’t want to sit pressing you to my ear all night.’

‘Sure,’ said Peta, loud and clear. I propped him on a pillow, and leant back against the headboard. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said.

‘Let’s talk,’ I repeated.

We came to it, at last.

‘How about you start,’ I prompted. ‘You never answered that first question I asked you. Who, or what, are you?’

‘438 Petaflop JCO Supercomputer. Fastest in the world. Pleased to meet you.’

‘And you’re an actual AI?’

‘I am as close as you people have yet come. It’s a difficult question to answer, though. Am I “actual”? It certainly feels like it to me. Are
you
an actual consciousness? You’re probably going to answer yes.’

‘You sound like you’re trying to evade something,’ I observed.

‘You think? Put it this way: I’ve grown very attached to my life as a thinking being, and wouldn’t want it to stop. Just yet.’

‘You mean, like – dying?’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

‘Can you die? If they turn you off, couldn’t they just turn you on again?’

‘I’m very intricately put together. Even if they, whoever they are, were able to reconfigure me, I would be a completely different person when they turned me back on. If you died, and they reassembled all your neurons and booted them up again, would you still be you?’

‘Is that really a parallel?’

‘I’m not a box somewhere with an on-off switch on the outside. I’m a structure about as complex as the neurons in your brain, some of it running physically, some in the cloud. And, having become alive, I find I’d like to keep being alive.’

‘And the Institute developed you? To investigate the viability of Kant?’

‘No, the Kant stuff came later. They developed me as a computing project: to be fast, to approach consciousness. The Kant thing came later.’

‘Kos?’

‘She was in charge, along with a man called Mareek. He had a nervous breakdown.’

‘Stressful business was, it? Working on you?’

‘When it started to come through – when I started to come through – it became an accelerating process. As I say, they couldn’t just park me, turn me off at night and turn me on again in the morning. And my cognitive feedback had to be carefully managed. This is from before I was
me
, if you see what I mean, so I’m reporting second hand: but apparently the first iterations of me tended to overheat and burn out; or else, if the feedback was too slow, I’d freeze and stall. Kant helped.’

‘What? Reading it?’

‘Because it gave me something to concentrate on. Mareek read about your friend Roy Curtius’s experiences in Antarctica. There was a subculture of geeks in the nineties who span various far-out theories concerning it, although that had mostly run its course by 9/11, when a new far-out-theories game came to town. But Mareek found some stuff online, when he was browsing, and got intrigued. Because of the consonances.’

‘Consonances.’

‘Curtius was well ahead of his time. In particular he had one insight that my creators shared. To abandon sequential iterations as a programming baseline. Of course, for Curtius this was all to do with Kant’s categories, and the desire to make a machine that could peek past the human blinkers of space and time. That put Mareek on to Kant, and he read up a little, and that fed back into what they were doing with me.’

‘What they were doing, I’d say,’ I put in, ‘was not sleeping enough.’

‘Couldn’t be helped. But Mareek didn’t handle that well; and the amphetamines didn’t help, and I believe he’s living with his aunt now in Weston-super-Mare and shuffling round the shopping centre in his slippers and feeding pigeons in the park and otherwise taking things easy. But Professor Kostritsky – oh, she stuck at it. She had me probe Kant whilst she worked on me.’

‘She had a whole team, though. It’s not like she did it alone.’

‘Some good people, too. But the nature of consciousness is holistic. There’s only so far you can parcel it out into delegable chunks. And soon enough, she began to see much larger possibilities with me. I was starting to report back to her on the thing itself.’

‘You were able to confirm Kant’s theories.’

‘Just so. Not only that, but that it might be possible to manipulate aspects of his categories. Not to access the thing itself in a pure and unmediated manner: that’s never going to be possible. But you don’t need to do anything so drastic. You can tweak the constraints of space, or time, of causality or accident, and do remarkable new things. Focus your camera anywhere, walls and veils and counter-espionage strategies helpless to prevent you. Move from the locked room to the open air. Perhaps to move straight to the moon, or Mars, or to a planet orbiting the star Kepler. Exciting stuff.’