Dark Matter (17 page)

“By all means, if you feel compelled to
give me a sample, do it. Just not on the rug,” said Thorpe, and for the first
time they shared belly laughter.

Thorpe moved further into the room. The
tour continued. “Alchemy died, ill-begotten son that it was, to be succeeded by
the young and energetic stripling
Science
. Which proved very fertile
soil for memory matters.”

His large hand trailed over the edge of a
cabinet. Not a square inch of its sheen was dimmed by dust.

“But let me wrap it up for you quickly,”
said Thorpe over his shoulder. “I’m boring you, and you have more pressing
concerns.”

“I’m not bored.” The earlier mention of
tunnels had reminded him of his first journey into his memory, in search of the
preface to Churchill’s book. His companion then, the shaggy un-nameable thing,
had hunted in the twisting passages of his mind. Hadn’t it felt very much like
searching for treasure? The attempt to connect half-remembered fragments of
sense, follow them like spore to where Churchill’s book had been secreted until
needed.

Rasputin thought of what had come after
that hunt, the sun and the eye. “This history of yours, does it have a
telescope?”

Thorpe paused, thrown from his flow. “No
telescope exactly, but Hooke—the Hooke of the phosphor—did elaborate a view of
the memory as planets in array, illumined by the sun of the mind’s attention.
In his model, remembering was like the sun’s light striking distant planets,
and forgetting happened when that light failed to strike a planet, because it
was occluded or had over time dwindled into a far orbit.”

He pinned Rasputin with a stare. “Why a
telescope?”

“I thought it might fit with the landscape
metaphor, is all.”

He didn’t buy that
, thought Rasputin.
Loose lips sink ships.

“The Golden Age of Science produced two
technologies long coveted: artificial reproductions of our two primary senses,
sight and hearing. I’m talking, of course, about the photograph and the
phonograph. They were invented in 1838 and 1877, and the modern mind finds it
difficult to feel the shock and rapture they caused.”

Thorpe indicated a framed picture. “Here is
a copy of one of the first photographic, or
Daguerreotype,
exposures.”

Rasputin looked and saw a street scene
caught perhaps from a first storey window. An eerie light pervaded it. Trees
anchored shadows in more than one direction. Ghosts walked the street in vague,
humanoid smears.

“That exposure took four hours.”

Thorpe moved on. “Following that, just a
few short decades later.” He paused by a flat machine with a vertical appendage
like a massive brown coral growth. He flicked a switch, and a voice spouted
from the coral-horn, sounding tinny and far away.

Rasputin lowered an ear into the flange and
strained to hear what was being said. He caught one word,
lamb
, and
then, as if that one word were the key to a cipher, the rest of the speech
became clear. “Mary had a little lamb. Mary had a little lamb...” And that was
all it said.

“That is the first demonstration given to
Benjamin Franklin,” said Thorpe, “Many people thought it a trick. Franklin
did.”

“But it’s a memory, isn’t it,” said
Rasputin. “Of the voice of a man now dead.” What a marvel an iPod was.

Thorpe nodded, detecting, Rasputin thought,
that he had finally lit a fire in him. They neared the desk that buttressed the
far end of the room.

“In the next hundred years every new
artifice of man was co-opted to explain memory and the mind: It was a beaker of
chemicals, a steam engine, a calculating machine, a telephone switchboard.” He
paused to flick another switch. “Even a hologram.” A three-dimensional image of
a skull burst into sight, revolving, with a glimmering tangibility.

Behind Rasputin, the faint buzz he knew to
be Mary having yet another little lamb, cut-off with a snapping noise. A relay
had closed on a timer. Rasputin wondered how many times a year Thorpe gave his
tour.

Thorpe rounded the edge of his desk,
without sparing the rotating skull a glance, and sank into a chair. He spread
his arms wide. “And, as you’ve probably already guessed, we arrive at the
present here.” He indicated the sleek laptop lying on the desk.

He pried its lid open and Rasputin heard
the soft buzz of a hard drive spinning up.

“By the time we got to the computer,
scientists had finally become conscious that what they had been trying to do
all along—attain total mastery of the physical world—had an ultimate
demonstration: to replicate man, artificially. Then the metaphors began working
backwards, from man to machine. My computer’s hard drive is its long term
memory
.
It is pulling bits from a platter spinning thousands of times a second into its
RAM, recalling who it is and what it was up to, into its short term memory.
Like a waking coma patient.” The hard drive’s whirring stopped. “Now it's thinking
about what it found.”

Rasputin cocked his head. “You can call it
thinking, but that’s a fair stretch.”

“Maybe. But I bet the last time you used a
computer you spoke to it.”

Yes
, thought
Rasputin.
It was a four letter word
.

“But you’re right. It is more than a fair
stretch. A computer may simulate a human in some respects, but it is worlds
away from the real thing. This,” he tapped his own temple this time, “is a Bach
canon, compared to that”—he flipped a derisive hand at the laptop—“child with a
recorder.”

Didn’t Rasputin know it.

“The computer boffins build more and more
complex models. Neural networks of thousands of ‘cells’, parallel systems that
process billions of small instructions per second, networks of semantic
association that can be analysed to effect a kind of problem solving. But...”

Rasputin recalled his audition and the
fright he had received when he touched the sticky tendrils that seemed to glue
parts of his memories to others. They were associations, coupling memories in
countless ways: Peter Jackson’s name to his image; the letter A to every
instance Rasputin had ever seen or heard; and, mind bogglingly, the very
concept
of separateness and beginning. He recalled how the sticky idea-glue had
separated in finer and finer strands, and how he had known intuitively that
they kept forking no matter how close he looked.

Good luck building a network to
reproduce that. A billion-trillion nodes wouldn’t begin to cover it.

Rasputin said, “Kudos to them for trying,
but I reckon the wet-ware has the edge.”

“How perfectly put,” said Thorpe, and
Rasputin again noticed the hunger in his eyes when he looked at the wet-ware
sitting on Rasputin’s slim shoulders. “That wet-ware, as you put it, is my
domain. And I promise you, Rasputin, that I will help you navigate into safe
waters. The regimen I prescribe for you will be bothersome at times. There will
be many and varied assessments to endure. But endure them you must if you want
to be sure to avoid the fate of Mr. Palmer. Do I have your promise that you
will do all I ask, and be completely honest with me?”

Rasputin didn’t trust himself to speak. He
nodded.

Thorpe paused as if assessing Rasputin’s
response. Finally, he said, “Good.” He rose and rounded the desk to shake
Rasputin’s hand, engulfing it with his own. “Come tomorrow and I will give you
a detailed plan for our time together. Until then.”

All of a sudden Rasputin found himself
dismissed. He suppressed the urge to fish for a lift home, and left.

It wasn’t until he exited the lift at the
ground floor that he realised what had been nagging him about Thorpe. The
second time Thorpe had seen him in hospital had been after his interview with
Bert Hills, the forensic artist. Rasputin had spent the time between visitors
playing with his newfound artistic flare, sketching hospital staff or
ransacking his memory for subjects. So his room had quickly filled with
sketches. Surely that wasn’t normal for post traumatic head injury patients?
But Thorpe had made no remark, hadn’t said a thing.

Hadn’t he been even a little curious?

He stepped from the building’s foyer
into air yellow with mid-afternoon sunlight. It slanted into the oaks bordering
the lawn in front of the building. Rays struck their leaves, enflaming them
luminescent green. The light that pierced the tumbling mass of foliage fell
impotently on the grass, dappling it amidst the gloom in patches like Rembrandt’s
dying Christ.

He crossed the lawn. A quick mental check
assured him he had credit enough for the bus home. He headed for the highway
slowly, winding through as many of the campus’s green places as he could,
enjoying the haphazardness of its life, the clots of students sprawled on its
lawns and in train for lectures.

He stopped at a café, bought a drink, and
sat at an ancient table-top arcade game. It all felt so familiar, so
normal
.
The past months faded, and he savoured the smell of the drink and the sense of
being adrift. He fished in his wallet for a twenty-cent coin to drop into the
machine’s slot. He found one and slipped it home.

The game sprang to life. It caused his
heart to flutter with euphoria, which was soon crushed beneath a realisation.
The game, when stripped of ghoulish adornment, was a pattern. The player
progressed by learning that pattern (when did the skeleton drop from that
ledge?) and executing movements at the right time. Therein lay the fun:
observing the pattern, improving the response. Only, his brain—the Rasputin T.
Lowdermilk Super-Brain (tm)—had seen the entire pattern before, and now drove
his control of the joystick and buttons perfectly. It was the forensic sketch
all over again, but this time it occasioned a strangely deep sense of loss.

He played for five minutes more to confirm
it wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t. He forsook the game, leaving it to a wide-eyed
and thankful freshman, who immediately evoked the machine’s failure sound
effect—something Rasputin had been unable to do.

His journey to the bus stop took him toward
a tunnel under Stirling Highway. Its mouth gaped dark—darker than a tunnel of
twenty meters should be. It had always felt like the kind of place he would
avoid if not for the near constant traffic running through it.

He crossed the tunnel’s lip and heard his
footsteps rebound from the tiled walls. Simultaneously he felt a tug on his
head. It came from inside, as if he had lost balance. But his ears were fine.
He wondered if the darkness had disoriented him.

Then he realised his mistake. The feeling
was familiar for a different reason. The same kind of sensation had guided his
short blackjack career, and then again for 7-stud, a turbulence in his mind
bubbling into his perception.

The tug had been to his left. He stole a
glance that way, before his feet carried him too far into the tunnel, and
caught a glimpse of a man leaning against the tunnel entrance.

He was not remarkable—too dapper, perhaps,
for a student—and there were a thousand better places to read a paper on
campus. Nine tenths of his paper were peeled back, which meant he was reading
the classifieds or sports section. That thought jarred with Rasputin’s
impression of him, but so what?
It’s a free world.

But that sense of mental
pressure
,
that inner feeling of heft extended out into the world, had put a lot of money
into his pocket, however briefly. The least he could do was show it a little
respect.

While he walked, he dove into the eye and
slapped a snapshot of the man onto the eye’s wall, like a homicide detective
briefing his team. What followed stunned him to a standstill in the dead centre
of the tunnel.

The image didn’t remain alone. It was a
lodestone that attracted memories, sucking them from their constellations to itself
like a magnet. But not every memory. The magnet discriminated, drawing only
those with an affinity to itself, only those that contained the man. And he
featured in surprisingly many from recent days.

Just as the memories that teemed in the
void seethed with an inestimable life and logic, so too did this miniscule
portion of it. The bunched memories were not all static; some crept, others
raced in loops. Nor were they uniform in perspective. They captured the man in
close-up and extreme long shot, in light and dark. It was a montage splattered
over the wall.

Then in a surge of gestalt, something
emerged from the montage. It was the man’s face, a tessellation of disparate
memories containing him, a Frankenstein of them all. The eye had made a magic
picture of him, each memory an atom of the whole, their scattered motions
lending it a glistening life.

“Shiny,” he whispered, so low there was
nothing for the tunnel’s tiled walls to reflect.

Rasputin had not willed the magic. The eye,
it seemed, had the soul of an
artiste
.

He scrutinised individual memories and the
effect dissolved. The face vanished. Rasputin wondered if he had imagined it.

He picked through memories that were easy
to place and came to an unsettling conclusion: the guy had been tailing him since
he returned from Melbourne. He had lurked in the dairy aisle of the
supermarket, drunk coffee in the chic half-light of Rasputin’s favourite café,
and passed him any number of times on controlled street crossings, bobbing in
the oncoming throng as Rasputin laboured forward in a bubble of space opened by
his cane. He mixed and matched three sets of clothes, and always wore the same
aviator sunglasses. Once he had worn a fedora.
A fedora
, for crying out
loud.