The Thing Itself (31 page)
Authors: Adam Roberts
‘But not cost free.’
‘At first the problems seemed to be practical ones. But there was always this suspicion that exposing a human being, even only partially, to the unmediated thing itself would have deleterious effects. Your species is very finely calibrated not only to exist within a structuring consciousness of space and time, but to exist within
very specific
tolerances of those two things. Analogues aren’t precise, but let’s say: your organs only work at thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Quite a lot of your biological architecture is about maintaining your body at that temperature, because a sustained period at five degrees above or below it will kill you. Imagine time is like that. Imagine your consciousness exists comfortably at one hour per hour, and that it’s possible for time to be a little more or less rapid than that, but only within small variations, like body temperature. And let’s imagine travelling back in time is the equivalent of exposing your body to minus thirty-seven degrees for a length of time. You see?’
‘You’re saying that the whole thing is a bust? An impossibility.’
‘I’m not saying so. Professor Kostritsky certainly didn’t believe that. But finding safe thresholds with which to muck about with spatiality and temporality proved – very hard. One of the difficulties was that she couldn’t use white mice or rabbits to experiment upon. The nature of the experimentation required full human consciousness, by its very nature. And she was unwilling to expose people to the possible catastrophic side-effects. It’s one reason she was so interested in Curtius.’
‘Because he’d already done it, so to speak.’
‘In Antarctica.’
‘But it drove him mad.’
‘
You
said,’ Peta pointed out, ‘that he was already mad.’
‘I get uncomfortable,’ I reported, scratching myself, ‘talking about Antarctica.’
‘And you only caught the edge of it. Roy was at the focal point. But, yes. And there was one particular puzzle.’
‘Which was?’
‘Which was, simply, that there was no way Curtius could have programmed a 1980s model computer to do what it did. This is a structural impossibility, not just a manner of speaking. It’s not that Curtius was a kind of genius, and did amazing things with primitive tools. The motherboard on the machine he was using was not physically capable of sustaining the kind of non-consecutivity, spatial-superposition that informs
my
programming. Even if Curtus had been able – which he was not – of intuiting four decades of advances in computing languages and algorithms, the structures of his machinery couldn’t have sustained it.’
I levered myself, slowly, from the bed and retrieved a second tiny little whisky bottle from the minibar. ‘This talk of Roy makes me nervous. Who knows where he is?’
‘I do,’ said Peta.
‘You do?’
‘He has my other terminal.’
I sat back down. ‘You’re yanking my chain.’
‘No chains were harmed in the making of my previous statement.’
‘I sort of assumed the Institute had, I don’t know, dozens of these little black iPhone gizmos.’
‘Two.’
I whistled. ‘So, when Kos gave me the … other one, and I delivered it to Roy in Broadmoor …’
‘She didn’t tell you what it was, of course. She didn’t know she could trust you. If you’d understood just how valuable that terminal was, who knew what you might have done.’
‘That whole scenario was set up for me to hand
you
over to Curtius.’
‘Essentially. Professor Kostritsky had had some interactions with Curtius. Not face to face, but she confided certain aspects of her research. She thought he could be of use. He is, though, a very dangerous human being.’
‘You don’t need to tell me!’ I drained my second little bottle of whisky and contemplated the effort involved in going for a third.
‘He strung her along. He managed to convince her that, if he could speak directly to me, then together we could pull something impressive to show the sponsors. The Government in particular were keen to see some evidence that they weren’t wasting their time. And, in a way, he did provide a demonstration. The Government are certainly interested now. Think how much more effective the SAS could be against terrorists if they could literally teleport anywhere they liked.’
‘He killed Kos.’
‘He killed her, and three others. He’s killed sixteen people in total, now.’
A burn of anxiety in my gut. ‘Do you know where Irma is?’
‘She’s still alive. But I hate to break it to you, my friend,’ said the little black box resting on my pillow. ‘Irma’s not interested in you. Not sexually, not platonically. She did what she did because Professor Kostritsky and I calculated that it would motivate you.’
I chewed the inside of my lower lip for a while. There didn’t seem to be too much pain from this statement, although that’s often the nature of burns, isn’t it? I would have to check back at a later stage. ‘You and Kos planned it together.’
‘I did it because Professor Kostritsky asked me to. I helped her because I was her machine.’
‘Funny the way you call her
Professor Kostritsky
all the time. Formal.’
‘I respected her. And I mourn her.’
This was a startling thing to hear. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and finally made the decision to navigate the room to fetch a third miniature bottle of whisky. My bad leg hurt badly, and I felt a trembly sort of weariness all over my body. One more slug, I told myself. One more, and I’ll sleep. ‘Where is Curtius?’ I asked.
‘South.’
‘Hence, we go north. Is that it?’
‘That’s it precisely.’
‘Where south?’
‘South. Hampton.’
‘Southampton?’
‘That’s it.’
I unscrewed the little cap, like a fairy-tale giant opening a regular-sized human bottle. ‘If he can – Jesus I can’t believe I’m saying this, but all right – teleport, then how does us moving away physically help us?’
‘Teleport isn’t the right term,’ Peta said. ‘But all right, let’s use it. There’s a limitation to how far he can move, north-south. The same limitations don’t hold him back going east-west.’
‘Sounds rather arbitrary.’
‘Not at all. The Earth rotates. The Earth is fatter, measured relative to the axis of rotations, at the equator than the northern latitudes. The equator is about 40,000 kilometres. Standing there you travel that distance in one day: that’s 1700 km/h, give or take. If you stand about four kilometres from the North Pole, then the Earth rotates 24 kilometres in one day, so you travel at one kilometre an hour. That’s quite a marked difference. At 30 degrees of latitude you’d be travelling at nearly 1500 km/h. At 60 degrees, only 850km/h. So if Roy were to relocate himself from a spot at 60 degrees to a spot at 30 degrees, he’d suddenly find himself with a lateral momentum of more than 600 km/h. He’d be hurled into the nearest wall with fatal force, or his body would tear itself apart.’
My whisky-smoothed brain contemplated this. It made sense. ‘So he could get from Broadmoor to Swindon easily enough. Travelling west. But if we put enough north-south distance between us …?’
‘Exactly.’
‘He could still do it, though. Lots of little jumps. Or, you know: he could take a train.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on him, if he starts travelling north, we’ll have advance warning.’
‘Explain to me again,’ I told him, ‘why
you
are so solicitous for my wellbeing?’
‘If I fall into the hands of the authorities, they will dismantle me. But you and I together: well … once we find a safe place, and once I’m satisfied Curtius can’t get to us, then I reckon we can resolve this whole situation.’
A car pulled into the car park of the hotel, outside. The room clock said 2 am, which seemed to me an odd time for a visitor. Hauling my aching leg after me, I hobbled to the window to have a look. ‘What sort of resolution?’
‘We need something that establishes
your
innocence, and
my
right to life. Something that proves the validity of the research Professor Kostritsky was heading up. Something we can make public.’
‘There’s a police car outside,’ I said. Part of my brain was still going: let’s say Irma was only, reluctantly and with veiled distaste for the whole business, undertaking a strategy. Say all that was true. Who could be sure she didn’t warm to me, just a little, during that time? Who was to say she wouldn’t be pleased to see me again, even if only a little bit?
‘We have to leave,’ Peta said immediately.
A second vehicle, a black van, with a tangle of communications antennae on the roof, rolled quietly into a parking space alongside the police car. ‘Uh oh,’ I said.
‘Grab your stuff, right away. Put your shoes on. Your shoe, I should say. Don’t forget me.’
In less than a minute I was out of the room padding down the corridor, Peta at my ear. ‘It must have been the Institute car. They couldn’t have tracked you any other way. Not a tracking device, or they’d have been here sooner. The hotel must have logged the registration, and an algorithm somewhere in GCHQ has just turned it up. We can’t drive that car any more.’
‘You’re suggesting I walk? Listen to my breathing: I’ve done fifteen yards of carpeted hotel corridor and I’m out of breath.’
‘We’ll take another car.’
‘I was off school the day we did the hot-wiring a car lesson.’
‘If we can find the right model of car, then I should be able to start it. If it’s modern enough. Don’t go into the customer car park. There’s a staff car park behind the hotel.’
‘You’re recommending I steal some poor sucker’s car? Some guy making the minimum wage in a chain hotel?’
‘It’s not ideal ethics, I appreciate. But the alternative is much worse, for it includes your incarceration and death and my termination. The car will be reported stolen when its owner comes off shift in the morning, by which time we will have abandoned it. He or she will get it back. Look: do you really want to discuss the rights and wrongs? Or do you want to get away?’
I was peg-legging slowly down the fire-escape stairs at this point, and that took all my attention and energy, so I didn’t argue. Through the back door into a chilly September evening. Autumn was new, but 2 am was cool enough to summon wisps of white as I breathed. I was panting heavily, I suppose.
‘Yellow Ford Patina,’ Peta told me. ‘I can start that.’
I hobbled over to the vehicle. The driver’s door magically unlocked as I touched the handle, and with some groaning and swearing I somehow got myself inside. It was an automatic, which was good news for my bad leg, and it started as soon as I pressed its little button. Then there was a comical five-minute interlude as I struggled to move the seat forward to reach the accelerator. Finally I was off.
Immediately, though, it became apparent that my getaway plan had a flaw. There was only one road and it led round the side of the hotel and into the main customer car park. I drove as casually and inconspicuously as I could past the two parked police vehicles. The squad car was, so far as I could see, unoccupied – its occupants inside the hotel, I suppose – but a figure was visible sitting at the steering wheel of the van, and who knows how many more armed officers were inside.
As I approached the exit barrier for the car park I saw, in the rear-view, the officer stepping briskly out of the cab of the van and starting to trot after me. ‘Hell,’ I said.
‘Drive!’ called Peta, from inside my jacket.
The barrier was down in front of me. ‘I’ve got to fiddle the … I think I put the doorkey in the slot.’ I slid the driver’s-side window down. This was perfectly timed for the arrival of the policeman. He was pointing a weapon right in my face.
‘Step,’ he barked, ‘out of the car.’
‘Don’t,’ squealed Peta. ‘Just go!’
‘If you do not exit the vehicle,’ the officer yelled. ‘I will taser you.’
‘I have a feeling,’ I said, my bowels turning to water within me, ‘that taser is the infinitive form.’
‘Push the accelerator!’ squealed Peta.
‘I tase, you tase, he or she tases …’ As I said this, he tased. I just had time to suck in a breath before I saw him dance away from the window with his arms straight out at 45 degrees from his torso, his legs going like
Riverdance
. It took me a moment to see what had happened. He had, somehow, tased himself in the throat.
‘How did he do that?’ I asked, a dull wonder filling me as my heart – belatedly – began to thump hard in my chest.
‘Accident, clumsiness, chance,’ muttered Peta. Computers cannot lie. He’d told me himself. ‘Accelerate! Smash through the barrier!’
But there was no need for that. I inserted my room card, left it in the slot as the barrier opened and drove away.
The Fansoc for Catching
Oldfashioned Diseases
Causality
1.
In 2350 Adri Ann joined the Fansociety for Catching Oldfashioned Diseases.2.
As was her right. Welcome to Utopia.3.
First off she experienced colds + flu, like any newbie + she did not much like the sensations. Had it genuinely never occurred to her that her nose could produce so much mucus or her eyes feel so painfully scorched?4.
Liking it = not the point. Of course.5.
O this = the Utopia all of human history has peered towards. Dimly spied and now made real. Life is shaped by the principle that any individual desire be permitted + enabled + curbed only by one thing. The blanket genetic reinforcement of definitional human empathy. No,6.
no not that you
can’t
hurt others or you would be a robot. What you can’t do is stop
caring
about others – because caring makes us human. So, so hurting others costs you far more than you might gain by doing the hurting.7.
That one tweak = enough. Otherwise humanity lives in a post/scarcity economy enabled by A/K. which = the smoothing out of spatial difference, + the access to raw materials + energy from anywhere in the cosmos.8.
A/K also enables travel anywhere you like. It turns out there are very few places worth travelling, but if thats your itch, by all means scratch it.9.
A/K runs into problems if we try smoothing out temporal difference, as the Ghosts of the 21st Century discovered. We’re still working on that.10.
A/K research = open to all. Tamper with something dangerous + the danger = localised to you + your subjectivity. If risk = your itch, by all means scratch it.11.
Whatever your itch, by all means scratch it.12.
Ah! But if your itch = harming others? O o then it
will
cost you more than the pleasure you might get in scratching. Empathy is baked hard into us all. This the thing about which there = no negotiation.13.
But it dont matter that theres no negotiation on this one thing, because – hey, Utopia!14.
The fact that you are hardwired to care about the welfare of others dont impede you, because everybody else’s welfare = pretty good, thank you, on account of – hey! Utopia! If youre in pain we have the means to heal you.15.
Except the bereaved. They hurt and it cant be helped16.
But that’s mortality, + happens rarely. There’s nothing can be done about death, except to acknowledge it, to live through the death of others + stop living at the precisely the moment of the death of each of us,17.
Because Religion is the hurt of life + hurts remedy. From God pinned to the cross with metal spars through his flesh, or the Prophet suffering the normal pains of life. You can study it if you like. Some people are fascinated by historical abstruseness + detail, + if that = their itch, they can by all means scratch it. Otherwise believe or don’t believe as it suits you. Many believe.18.
A/K brings the whole cosmos to human society, as if a river of gold, or of life, or of joy, pours through the centre of our metaphorical polis + this means that nobody can be materially poor unless they real real want to be. Science has accomplished all such trivial things as curing human disease + prolonging human life + sharing human wisdom + culture with all.19.
A/K stands for Applied Kant.20.
Most people are content to be broadly happy all the time + to vary that experience with shorter bouts of intenser delight, joy + ecstasy. Utopia accommodates such people.21.
Other people are not content to be broadly happy all the time. They yearn to be unhappy, in various ways. Utopia accommodates such people.22.
Some people like to stretch themselves physically, in athletics or lovemaking or endurance events. Some people like to climb sheer cliff-faces unaided, + a proportion of such people fall to their deaths. Some people deliberately hurl themselves off cliff-faces to their deaths . If that = their itch, they can by all means scratch it if only they be in charge of their own minds.23.
Pushing the body to its limit entails pain – ruptured tendons (easily mended), exhausted muscles, weary minds. For some people such disobliging things are the salt without which a life of undiluted happiness would grow bland.24.
There are hundreds of billions of people alive today.25.
Theres an immense variety of ways in which people decide to mix in the spice of unhappiness with their happiness.26.
Sometimes people hurt others and kill them, and some by accident and some few even on purpose however cruelly they wrench themselves in doing so. We have a police service, AI-orchestrated, staffed by drones + some humans for whom doing such work = the itch they wish (by all means) to scratch. But it = boring being a police officer, because infraction + delinquency = so very very rare.27.
We are not fools (except for those people who wish to be fools, who can be as they please). We are not hedonists (except for that – much smaller, actually – group of people who wish to be hedonists, who can do as the please). We know that human happiness = not an end in itself. But think only of the many many things Utopia enables, over + above the happiness of its citizens: the vast advances in mathematics, the varieties of art + culture, the things built + recovered, the wisdom accumulated?28.
Adri Ann was my lover. She was default female, as am I, save only that our clitorises were engineered into tiny penises capable of erection + emission. This = a commonly adopted bodymody. There are myriad other body models.29.
To speak of the sour in my soursweet, it was love, it was love, it was love. I fall in love easily, + the love I feel I sometimes an ecstasy + sometimes a hurtful yearning + a tearful broken-heartedness, + both those sensations are the pain I seek. Only Adri Ann was different.30.
Not everybody enjoys this kind of sour in their soursweet. Most people are happy without any sour at all, + enjoy only the sweet.31.
Adri Ann had a different sort of yearning for unhappiness to mine. When I first knew her the itch she hoped (by all means) to scratch was a desire to be beaten, tied-up, humiliated, micturated upon, on sex, by me. Because I loved her I obliged, because my love for her was greater than the shame + pain I felt in violating my own empathy. But it shamed me + pained me to do it, + Adri Ann saw that, + the fact that I was suffering shamed + hurt her sense of empathy – + this latter proved not pleasurable pain, for her, like the other stuff.32.
+ so we stopped.33.
Bodymodys have extended the average human lifespan to two centuries of useful youth, followed by a rapid senescence measured in years. Some people are working on improving the latter part of the process34.
We eat in the finest of eateries + /I never wish to be apart from you/ I say, + candletongues lick the air around us.35.
O o o o that you-who-topian rag/Its so elegant/So36.
So.37.
Many different kinds of people come to the Fansoc for Catching Oldfashioned Diseases, but people such as Adri Ann are sometimes among them.38.
Here nobody feels their empathy rasped raw, because nobody = to blame for the suffering you experience, except only viruses + bacteria + the like, conjured by AIs + our marvellous machines from the databases long since eradicated in the wild.39.
For some it = nostalgia. For others it = curiosity. Some come to try it, don’t like it + never return. Others come repeatedly. I met seventeen people who were aiming to experience every single pathology that humanity had suffered between 3000 BCE + CE 2277 when the last pathogen was rendered amenable to cure. Every single one! Think of the challenge! A great many are horrendously debilitating + painful, but for these people collecting the /complete set/ was their itch, + they could (by all means) scratch it.40.
Adri Ann was a businesswoman + trader + filled her time third-partying goods between people, or shipping objects or information around, + making money. Adri Ann had a lot of money. If accumulating money = your itch then by all means you should scratch it. There are enough people in the cosmos who share your hobby to mean that
having
money gives you purchasing power + agency and holy of grails,
status
. There are enough people in the cosmos who want nothing to do with money + have no need of it that this /economy/ dont intrude upon them. Do what you will the whole of the law, save only: outraging your own sense of empathy will be like burrowing down one of your own nerves.41.
But for all that, the Fansoc for Money + Media of Exchange = one of the largest in all the cultures of humanity. They have their rules + in-house laws, + if you sign-up to this particular Fansoc then you sign up to those laws. A little metaphorical greenhouse in which scarcity = simulated + people measure value by accumulating money.42.
Personally I have never seen the point of the Fansoc for Money + Media of Exchange. But nobodys obliged to join, + nobody obliged to stay, + it I rarely even think of it.43.
O O O our marvellous machines + the inexhaustible solicitude of our AIs.44.
Like any Fansoc, the Fansoc for Catching Oldfashioned Diseases had their own culture: disseminating memoirs + artworks inspired by their own experiences, having virtual + actual meets + moots to discuss Disease, acquiring knowledge.45.
One subgroup of the Fansoc for Catching Oldfashioned Diseases studied the possibilities for curing antique pathologies using only the resources available in olden days. This in turn was divided into two subgroups, those who worked at such cures using modern knowledge of Disease (but not modern tools + resources), + those who worked at such cures using only the knowledge, tools + resources of their chosen period. These latter called themselves ‘hardcore’.46.
Most people belong to one Fansoc or another, though not many to this particular one. Everybody has their own fave Fanscocs, from making models to playing games to learning music to eating some things but not others to eating other thing not those + so on + so on. Say your itch was to construct a lifesize replica of the Giza Pyramid out of pure diamond. Scratch it by all means, though youll be doing it on your own unless you can source a Fansoc of people who want to help you47.
Orbital solettas making Mars warm enough for maskfaces to wander the surface naked + some basic body tweaks made even the mask unnecessary.48.
I was living in a habitat called Lotus Dam + Adri Ann was staying with me + we were happy for a time + most of her energies went on earning money, her great passion, which she did by trading + lending + buy + selling + recouping. The Fansoc for Money + Media of Exchange was by no means the only Fansoc built around the gaming possibilities of money. It was tho the biggest + most widely publicised.49.
Adri Ann with her sky-colored eyes, + her skin the color of sunset on Via Veneto in pollen season.50.
Some people say time = the only currency now, since it = the only limited resource. Quite untrue of course, for there are many limited resources, including human genius, true beauty, dark continents, patience, privacy, innocence, bulwarks against entropy + love + most of all status, status, status. How we love to compete with one another for status! Plains apes we remain, though our empathy has been fixed for good.51.
A group had assembled a temporary bubble habitat upon HD209458b (which orbits a star in the constellation Pegasus) that powered itself by the interactions of the planet’s perennial superstorm upon the habitat outer membrane. AIS assessed its risk of catastrophic failure at 15% for the first month, rising sharply thereafter + many people visited the place. If Russian Roulette = your itch you can by all means scratch it, although if it continues to be your itch then you won’t be alive for the longterm.52.
My itch was the beautiful sorrow of heartbreak but that dont mean I
liked
losing her. She was my sun + my moon. Its rude of me to impose my sorrow on you + so violate your own empathy. Mutual empathy = a complex harmonic.