Dark Matter (23 page)

“I guess they’re of a cosmopolitan bent. My
mum always has her head in fashion magazines, art magazines. She loves Europe,
in particular, as the throbbing heart of all that. And I think Dad is quite
happy, in parallel, to conduct a gastronomic experiment on a grand scale. The
man just loves croissants.”

“When did they begin this...lifestyle?”

“The symptoms appeared while I was in
primary school, and exploded into full blown contagion about five years ago.”

“When was your last contact?”

“A little while back, after my accident.”

 
Lloyd’s silence invited Rasputin to continue.
When he didn’t, Lloyd said, “What did you talk about?”

“We didn’t talk. It was a letter. My mum
wished me a speedy recovery. Told me to put betadine on my scratch and eat some
chicken soup.”

Lloyd’s bent arms formed a square with his
shoulders as he leaned forward. Rasputin had the distinct feeling Lloyd had
found a lever and was about to lean on it.

“How did that make you feel?”

“You cried?” said Jordy.

Rasputin nodded and busied himself making a
cup of soup.

“Wow,” said Jordy quietly. He slotted a
frozen meal into the microwave and pressed instant cook. The kitchen filled
with the noise of the oven’s decrepit fan as the food spun and its plastic
sheath ballooned with heat.

“Maybe there is something to what Thorpe
says,” Jordy continued. “You have been a bit moody.”

Rasputin fished in the soup for dry lumps,
and sought to trap and crush them against the cup.

“Then again,” said Jordy. “Who could blame
you. Right now you’re playing with a crap hand.”

The microwave emitted a beep and fell
silent. Into the silence came another beep, fainter and plaintive. It took
Rasputin a moment to realise it came from the phone in his pants pocket. He
drew it out and noted its charge was almost spent.

“Since when did you own a phone?” said
Jordy, coming over to inspect.

“It was on the doorstep this morning. I
think it’s from my ASIO angel.” He held it up for Jordy to see. “You got a
charge cable for one of these?”

“I’ll check the tangle in the bathroom
drawer after I’ve eaten.”

Jordy took a closer look at the phone.
“Shiny. You finally enter the 21
st
 
Century
and jump straight to the cutting edge.”

“It’s just a phone,” said Rasputin, but had
secretly fancied himself James Bond with the tech cached in his jeans.

“That thing isn’t even in the country yet—GPS
standard, Zeiss lens. ASIO boys must have some perks. Bit of an oversight not
to send the cable.”

“It might be fancy, but its battery life
sucks.”

“How much credit is on it?”

“No idea,” said Rasputin, to which Jordy
shook his head.

He slid the phone back into his jeans
pocket, and took his soup out onto the back steps. Jordy followed, swapping the
hot container holding his dinner from hand to hand.

“I’ll ask next time I talk to Sam. But he
was pretty jacked off I called this morning.”

“Why would he give you a phone if he didn’t
want you to call?”

“Don’t know. At least my contact list isn’t
empty now.” He pulled the phone out again and accessed its contact list. Sam’s
number was alone, listed under
Tracey, Dick
. “Almost a prime.”

“Are you that bored you checked to see if
his number is a prime?” Jordy stabbed a chunk of potato with a fork and held it
before him. Steam coiled up from it into the early evening air.

“
Checked
nothing. I knew straight
away. It isn’t. It’s three off, as it turns out.”

Jordy rested his fork in the plastic tray
as he turned to look at Rasputin.

“Hang on. Are we talking about the same
thing. Prime, as in prime number? The maths prime, divisible only by one and
itself?”

“No, prime fillet. Sam’s number is just shy
of the barcode on a juicy-looking porterhouse I saw yesterday—”

At the mention of barcodes and primes a
tremor shook him, within the eye. Remembered barcodes mushroomed like an
underwater explosion in a cluster of cauliflower florets. Yes, there were primes
in there...and, if he really wanted to know, more exotic beasts a hairsbreadth
away. But he didn’t. Not now, anyway. Inwardly, he gripped the ballooning cloud
and extinguished it.

“—of course I’m talking about prime numbers.”

Jordy placed his meal on the step and
clasped his hands.

“Then you’re officially freaking me out.”

“Good. I’ve been freaking myself out for
weeks. It’s nice to have company.”

“I didn’t get it when you explained what
happened in Melbourne, with the cards and the players,” said Jordy. “But this,
this is more...pure.”

Jordy’s meal sat forgotten as it vented its
heat into the atmosphere. His gaze seemed fixed on the tangled branches of a bougainvillea
that reached over the back fence in perennial escape.

Rasputin sipped his soup. His desire for
the salty broth bordered on craving. At length, he ventured to interrupt Jordy’s
reverie. “What do you mean,
pure
.”

“Pure
calculation
. When you were
gambling, you were weighing odds with a mix of evidence—cards, people—and came
out on top. But, to be honest, I thought you just got lucky. That’s part of why
I wanted you to get the hell out before you blew it like all the other
suckers.”

“Apology accepted,” said Rasputin.

Jordy smirked, but sobered as he continued.
“But there aren’t odds with a prime calculation. The House takes all: a number’s
either prime or not. End of story. And to work it out, you have to factor the
number until only two numbers remain: one and the number itself. You have to
run an algorithm, and that algorithm gives you a definitive result.”

“So what?”

“That phone number is twelve digits. Minus
the leading zero gives you something of the order of forty billion. A brute
force search for factors, starting from two and going up to half the number
amounts to twenty billion checks.”

Rasputin blinked. Twenty billion was only
three times the Earth’s population. No biggie.

“That’s the worst case,” said Jordy. “The
best known algorithm reduces the number of checks to the quadratic root, a
piddling amount in this case. But that only swaps one problem for another,
because that algorithm isn’t exactly a walk in the park. More than that, you
found the
nearest
prime. That’s even harder.”

Jordy looked at Rasputin for the first time
since he had put down his dinner.

“Either way that’s a prodigious piece of
calculation in ridiculously quick time for a human.”

He paused to retrieve the now-cold chunk of
potato and jam it into his mouth.

“Prodigious piece of
calculation
,
not memory,” he said, chewing noisily. He swallowed. “Or
computation
, if
you prefer.”

He stabbed another potato, held it up to
emphasise his point.

“Question is: why is your head increasingly
emulating a computer? What’s it planning on computing?”

Rasputin recalled Thorpe’s comment about
how metaphors for memory had begun to work backwards when it came to computers,
from life to machine. Just now, the relationship felt more like an Irish
dervish.

Rasputin licked up more soup, savouring its
load of salt.

“No comeback?” said Jordy, coaxing. “That’s
not like you, Monk.”

“Could you do me a favour?” Rasputin said.

Jordy shrugged
of course
.

“Could you think about it?” Rasputin tapped
his temple. “Every time I go in here I find something new. It’s like returning
home to find I’ve been the target of
Surprise Renovations.
Only it
happens every day, and they haven’t just painted the walls and hung curtains,
they’ve joined the basement to the attic, and turned off gravity in the
kitchen.”

Jordy had become still, his gaze fixed on
Rasputin.

“You know what my memory is doing. Maybe
now you get what my mind, my sub-conscious—I don’t even know what to call it—my
deeper
mind, is spewing to the surface.” Rasputin swirled the remainder
of his soup to dredge the sediment and skulled it. He said, quietly he guessed
because Jordy drew nearer, “But it’s growing, like rats in a sewer. And I have
no idea where it’s headed.”

It was the closest he had come to
describing the thing in his head in autonomous terms. He wondered fleetingly if
Jordy thought he was slipping over the edge.

Jordy said, “Your driver’s licence renewal
came this morning. I paid it.”

It didn’t matter that Rasputin could no
longer drive. He said, “Thanks.”

They sat in silence as the temperature fell.
A breeze began to ruffle the bougainvillea, lending its silhouette a B-grade
Horror look.

Rasputin’s phone emitted a sound for the
second time that evening, but it lacked the pleading bent of its earlier cry.
Rasputin drew it out to investigate. The screen read: You have one new message.
He followed the display prompt to retrieve the message.

It read: “CompuCorp makes sense of your
data.”

Jordy leaned over to read it, and said, “You’ve
had a phone one whole day and you get spam. Welcome to the future. Not as rosy
as prophesied.” He rose, stretched and went inside.

“If that’s an ad, it’s an epic fail,” said
Rasputin to the gathering darkness. “There’s no contact number.”

The phone emitted a pathetic, accusatory
bleep and died. Rasputin shivered and followed Jordy.

As Rasputin lay in bed that night
waiting for sleep, with the smell of flannel sheets too-long-gone in his
nostrils, a wind rose and began to play upon the chimes beneath the eaves. To
his ears, the knock of wood had the taste of Asian tones and structures,
something exotic and beautiful if only he could understand its motions and
relations. His mind sifted the random noise for intention, looking for order
and retrospectively altering his anticipation when it was not satisfied. The
only sense to persist was of its alienness.

Behind closed eyes, a place that felt more
like a harbour each day, he gazed at the eye’s constellations. He watched for
the glistening threads strung between memories. He felt both fearful and drawn
to these telltale signs of the deeper structure of his mind.

Sleep was crouching at his door. But before
it slipped through the keyhole, his gaze tripped over something he had
not
seen before.

As he watched glistening ribbons sprout and
reach forth from the day’s freshly minted memories—the rack-shouldered girl at
the bus stop, the interview with Lloyd—he saw motion beyond them, out in the
deep dark, like a wave rolling through an oil spill. The wave caught the silver
light and threw it back in fleeting sheen.

The moment passed and the patch again
became a uniform black.

What the hell was
that?

It wasn’t a memory. He couldn’t simply ask
the eye to pull it near.

He let his gaze roam across the twinkling
vault. A handful of times he caught a flicker of motion in his peripheral
vision, but when he looked square-on it vanished.

He returned his attention to the patch of
sky where he had first seen the motion, gritted his teeth, and concentrated on
it.

A stomach-dipping jolt shook him. He
staggered and nearly fell. He groped for his centre of gravity as if he were
aboard a boat come adrift of its mooring.

When he looked up again, his mouth hung
open.

His little observatory had pulled its
anchor. The globe of the eye was in motion. In response to his desire, it had
lifted into the void like a gondola riding a silver thread.

He crouched and splayed his arms in search
of something to brace himself. He watched, terrified, as the eye travelled
toward a tracery of silver filaments—the skin of his hand tingled with the
memory of the sticky stuff. He feared the tendrils would collapse around the
eye like a spider’s web. Instead, they bowed against its surface—and slipped
behind it.

He sighed with relief and stood up straight.

When the bobbing, swaying motion of the eye
finally soothed his nerves, he looked out again and tried to guess at the
distances between the memory clusters all around him. But he lacked even the
cues to gauge how fast the eye moved. He felt like a skier lost in cloud, where
all is white and he knows not what bumps his legs and buckles his knees, nor if
he moves at all.

But he was moving. The patch of
once-disturbed darkness continued to take shape, a snatch of black velvet
hanging in a jet sky, until a tug forward told him the eye had come to rest.

Rasputin waited for a sign or explanation.