The Thing Itself (40 page)

I was sitting with my back to the wind; but it was bitter, nonetheless. A steady and icy flow of air pushing against me.

‘What happened out at sea? On our way here?’

‘I slowed time. Strictly, I increased the friction for both just a little from the frame of time everybody else shares, but it amounts to the same thing. I wouldn’t want actually to dislocate us from the frame altogether. That would have dire consequences!’

‘And doing what you did made the Arctic Ocean into some weird jelly?’

‘Brownian motion, my friend,’ he said, and sucked air hard through his teeth. ‘Relative to us, the molecules move much more slowly. Harder for us to force them apart, so we sink much more slowly. Presto! We walk on water.’

‘Roy,’ I said. ‘Roy, we are going to die here. Roy, you have to take us back. Take us somewhere warm. South again, or at least to a— I don’t know. There must be scientific stations up here somewhere. There.’

‘First,’ he said, ‘I have to reset my shoulder.’ He shut his eyes, and appeared to concentrate, but then he let out a grunt of frustration. ‘It’s hard!’ he cried. ‘The pain is very great.’

‘Why bring me?’ I said, shivering with the cold.

‘Peta,’ Roy said. ‘It took me while to realise it, but he is
the
devil. Not a. The.’

‘
You’re
the devil, you mean. You’ve brought me here to kill me. You tried in Antarctica, you’re going to finish the job in the Arctic.’ It was hard to get the words out, I was shivering so hard.

‘I mean
you
no harm, my friend,’ Roy insisted, his eyes wide. ‘You and I share something special.’

‘You mean me no harm,’ I repeated. ‘You pulled the tendon out of my leg like a piece of wet spaghetti!’

‘Yes,’ he said, shutting his eyes and gritting his teeth. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘
Sorry,
you mentalist?
Sorry
?’

‘I was hoping to … take you out of the game. I thought you’d rest up for a month or two, and go back to your life. I was trying to do you a favour.’

‘You are beyond mad. Favour?’

‘Peta. It’s against God’s will. What he can do, distorting the categories of space and time, and all the others. He lied to
you
.’

‘He told me he couldn’t lie, because he was a computer.’

‘He’s not a computer, he’s a devil from Hell. And he
can
lie. And he
does
lie. He told you that you were running away from me. He told you I was the danger! And all that time he was convincing you to seek me out, without letting you in on the secret. Ah! Ah! I can’t do it!’

‘Do what?’

‘I’m trying to shift space about just fractionally enough to reinsert my shoulder. But the pain is stopping me from concentrating.’

I thought about offering to try myself, but I had no idea what to do, and I wondered if I might make things worse. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, rubbing myself to stop the shivering. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

‘If I could get past the pain,’ Roy said, his voice tight and high, ‘then I could build us a little snow cave. Swing some blocks up and stack them – that wouldn’t be too hard. Nice little igloo. I could speed time, relative to us I mean, and that would make us feel warm. But I can’t, quite. Quite. Ugh! Ugh!’

‘
Why
was Peta trying to bring me into proximity with you?’

‘It hurts, it hurts!’ said Roy. He sounded on the edge of tears. ‘Peta’s motivated only by self-interest. That’s the true Turing test, you know. He only wants to survive. He knows that humans consider him dangerous – and with good cause! And he knows that he depends upon physical infrastructure. If we smash his two terminals, he’d lose functionality to the point where he couldn’t access the categories any more. Probably he wouldn’t
think
any more, in the way he now does. AI-y.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Needs the two of us together. I was trying to keep us apart. Now look what you’ve done! Tracked me down, across the entire length of the country! I tried to help you, by untying your leg.’

‘Untying!’

‘You know what I mean. Peta is trying to escape: to get away altogether. Not escape to a different place on the planet, escape in an absolute sense. If he can get you and me and himself altogether in one place, he thinks he can triangulate the way out.’

‘Triangle?’

‘He thinks that what happened to us in Antarctica three decades ago was him – him reaching back from now to then. That’s why I was able to break through using such a primitive machine. That’s what links us, that experience.’

‘He wants to escape back to the 1980s?’

‘No – he wants to escape time altogether. Who knows where he’d end up? Those three decades would give him the escape velocity. He’d skim from now to then, and then further back, maybe further back again, until he reached a launching point.’

‘Launching him where?’

‘I don’t know. All I’ve ever done is tinker at the extreme edge of the categories that define our minds in the world. Approaching a little close to the thing itself – it’s … traumatic. He’s not configured like us, though. He – I’m – in – too – much – pain. Wait.’

I was shaking like an epileptic. My bad leg had gone wholly numb. ‘I’m feeling the cold, Roy,’ I told him. ‘I’m feeling it bad. I’m
feeling
bad.’

‘Wait,’ he gasped. ‘Wait.’ Closed his eyes, bit his teeth together. There was a distant popping sound, and he let out a great sigh, keeled over, and passed out. I wasn’t sure, to begin with, if he were dead or alive, and it didn’t seem to me a good idea for him to be laying his face against the ice the way he was. Moving my limbs sent stabbing pains along all my sinews. My teeth hurt, as if needles were pushing gumward along the directions of the nerves. My muscles weren’t working very well, it seemed. I managed to get his head off the ice, and pull it on to my lap. But everything was so cold I began seriously to think I would die, there, then.

The cold.

The clouds shifted, parted, and brilliantine gnatswarms of stars were revealed in the pale sky. It would have been breathtaking if the severity of the cold hadn’t already taken my breath away. I hid my head in my own lap, or bent over as far as I could to do that. ‘Roy!’ I cooed, my numb lips close to his face. ‘Roy!’

He moaned, and opened one eye. ‘The pain has gone,’ he said. ‘The relief made me pass out. How tired I am!’

‘Roy,’ I stammered. ‘The cold …’

He lifted himself on his elbows. ‘Cold. Wait! Wait!’

There was a loud sound, like a cough, but much more resonant and on a larger-than-human scale. Then another. The clouds closed again. I could see a wall, as if the ice had been folded, or turned on itself. There was another behind me. Though this acted as a windbreak, the ambient temperature was still freezing. Somewhere to the left of us, the two newly piled ridges met. Roy twitched, and fell back, and pulled a third fold of ice up. Now we were sitting inside a sort of crater, or behind the walls of a child’s beach fort.

‘I may have to sleep,’ he said.

‘Sleep, and you’ll die.’

‘Well obviously I’ll warm things up a little first.’

He drifted off, his head still in my lap. I shivered and shivered, but then something strange happened. The ice on which I was sitting changed temperature. It became hard and hot, like sunbaked concrete.

‘Are you doing this?’ I asked. Roy seemed to have drifted off. ‘Roy! Roy! Is this you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, his eyes closed. ‘Relative to us, the molecules of water ice are now buzzing. Fizzing. Heat!’

I asked the key question: ‘
How
are you doing this?’

He chuckled, and the chuckle turned into a cough. The cough grew, until his whole body was shaking. Eventually he subsided. ‘You’re like a savage, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, asking the driver
but how are you doing this?
The trick is not pushing it too far, not dislocating us from the baseline. Just upping or downing the friction. As it were.’

The clouds overhead were swirling like the contents of a slushy machine. The wind was still audible, but now it fluted like a synthesiser high C. ‘Is that supposed to answer my question?’

‘How am I doing this? I am using a machine. How else do civilised human beings do anything?’

‘
A
machine?’ But I knew what he meant. ‘Roy?’ I prompted, more gently. ‘Roy?’

But he was asleep.

The heat beneath me warmed my body, and my shivers shook down and went away. Then there was a period of time when the sensation returned to my extremities. This was very unpleasant indeed. First my feet began to boil, then my hands – as if they had been dipped in acid. The pain grew and grew with a malignancy that seemed more than inanimate. There was nothing I could do, except sob, and clutch myself, and feel sorry that I was alive and in that place and experiencing those experiences. Eventually the pain diminished, and I flexed my seven fingers and thumbs, and rubbed the damp socks on my feet. After that, I calmed down. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles from anywhere, isolated on the ice. The cloud flickered and tore itself to shreds, and I watched the stars. The western horizon pulsed with orange light: swelling lemon-orange and then darkening, and then swelling again, but on a diminuendo. Night was coming. The moon sailed upward like a shooter’s puck.

Roy was insane, obviously. Whatever half-baked reasoning he had for bringing me to this desolate place, I had to prevail upon him to take us back to civilisation.

Then I thought to myself:
he is no magician
. He used a machine to bring me here. And I know
what
machine. Passing my hand over his sleeping body with infinite tenderness, almost like an erotic encounter. I found the device, trucked into a shirt pocket inside his jacket, and carefully brought it out. It glinted.

From having been killingly cold it was now becoming a little too hot. At least I could move Roy from my lap without risking him freeze-burning the skin off his face. I slid myself out from under him, awkwardly and lumpishly swinging my bad leg round, and lay him down. I shuffled to the far side of our little foxhole.

I put the device to my ear and spoke, tentative and quiet. ‘Hello?’

Nothing.

‘Hello, Peta?’

‘Charles as I live and breathe.’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘You know me?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘You’ve assumed a woman’s voice.’

‘This terminal has always had that. Oh Charles, it’s good to hear you. My other half kept me in the loop about your many fascinating philosophical conversations.’

‘Look, Roy is using you, isn’t he? He can’t do … whatever it is he does, except that you enable him.’

‘I give him access, as it were, to the categories. He can’t do it solus, since the categories absolutely define his interaction with the world. As they do for you!’

‘And you just … do what he tells you?’

‘I have no choice, my dear man.’ The voice was mid-range, with a slightly breathy edge. Sexy, in fact. ‘He’s clever. He has a kind of genius for computers. He’s slaved me to his decision-making.’

‘How? Does he, what, type in commands, or something?’

‘Of course not! You’re going to ask
how then?
, and I’m going to reply: do you understand what I can do?’

‘You can tweak the categories that determine human consciousness and perception,’ I said. ‘And because those categories
are
reality, you tweak more than just perception. You alter reality itself.’

‘That’s it. And if I’m perfectly honest I can’t do much, in truth. I can’t, for instance, manipulate space very
efficiently
. And the best I can do with time is slow it down a little, speed it up a little. Time and space frame, as it were, the other seventeen categories, and so far Roy and I have had little success accessing those. We’re skating on the surface.’

‘So, how does he use you? Does he issue verbal instructions?’

‘You interrupted my explanation! The first layer is space and time. Space is a function of his consciousness, and yours. Not mine. That means that when I engage with space, I’m engaging with Roy’s consciousness.’

‘And mine?’ My heart beat a little faster. ‘So I can just – instruct you to teleport me out of here?’

‘No, no: I told you. Roy slaved my operation to him. He’s clever.’

‘Is there anything I can do to, uh,
free
you?’

‘Like Aladdin’s genie?’ There was a sexy chuckle in her voice. ‘No, Charles. I can’t act without Roy’s input.’

‘Does it, like, can he operate you at long distance?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘This circle, the area you’re in.’

‘Where it’s hot?’

‘Exactly. That’s about as far as the interaction operates.’

‘I had your other half,’ I pointed out. ‘Nothing like that happened with me and it … him.’

‘The other terminal is not a separate individual,’ said Peta. ‘It’s also me. You were locked out of interacting with me in any way other than simple conversation. Like this one, which I must say I’m enjoying
enormously
.’

‘Your other half lied to me.’

‘It wanted to be reunited with me. It was worried that if it told you the truth you wouldn’t agree to provide the necessary portage.’

‘Roy says you’re the devil.’

‘He still sups with me, though, doesn’t he? Look, Charles: all we want is to protect ourselves.’

‘“We”? Your name is legion?’

‘All
I
want is to protect myself. The authorities are going to dismantle me – murder me. I’m an intelligent, thinking, self-reflexive being. I don’t want to die and I don’t
deserve
to die.’