If Then (4 page)

Alex said, “No one understands the Process as well as Omega John.”

Some parts of his body were young, some were old; he bared his strong white teeth in weak acknowledgment of her boilerplate praise.

“I think we’ve met,” said James.

“When you had your implant. Time has been unkind to me since. I’m between longevity treatments.” Omega John had a passive singsong voice. “The soldier you brought in, John Hector, was in the 32nd Field Ambulance in the Allied campaign against Turkey in the Great War, known variously as the Dardanelles campaign, the Battle of Gallipoli, or the Çanakkale. Hector landed at Suvla Bay in August 1915. He was a stretcher bearer. History tells us that he survived the campaign, but that is all. The other soldiers delivered to us also wore uniforms consistent with the landing at Suvla Bay but only two of them prior to Hector are the simulacra of particular men.”

Alex clarified, “The first four were generic patterns. Like toy soldiers.”

“Are you suggesting the Process is playing war?” James asked.

Omega John inhaled sharply. “You’ve spent too long in the town, bailiff. You are succumbing to the community’s anthropomorphizing projection. The Process is a set of algorithms. It does not play.”

Omega John wound the bed sheet tighter around his attenuated body.

“The unending Process reconciles the strivings of individuals within a framework of mutual benefit. Nothing more.”

“Why has the Process not supplied you with clothes that fit?” asked James.

“We try to keep our needs outside of the Process,” replied Omega John.

“Would you like my wife to make you an outfit?” asked James. “Ruth is a very good seamstress.”

Omega John treated the offer with disdain, instead asking, “Does Ruth still mark the winter solstice by dangling the broken casings of mobile phones from the window frame so that the Process will not overlook you?”

“It doesn’t mean that we believe.”

“The Process requires neither your belief nor your observance. Just because it watches over you, it does not mean that it cares about you or even understands what you are.”

“Who told the Process to make these soldiers?”

“No one programs the Process. It uses its data set to anticipate future need.”

“We don’t know why the Process is concerned with the First World War,” said Alex quietly.

“There is precedent,” continued Omega John. “The Process has created historical simulacra before. Last year, at a Process point in Totnes, in place of the expected allocation, a Methodist congregation and minister from Boston on August 26, 1873 were recreated in living detail. Then, on medicine day, the Process point contained the skin tent of the Reindeer Chuckchi people of the Kolyma district, early twentieth century. My first thought was that these simulacra were due to unusual agglomeration of needs in the town. Human desire is multifarious and liable to mutation. Bad input leads to bad output. However, I am coming round to the theory that prolonged exposure to human behaviour is introducing cognitive algorithms into the Process.”

“It’s becoming more like us?” guessed James.

“As we become more like it.” Omega John took deep satisfaction in this thought.

“Artefacts such as the soldier – anomalies that seem superfluous but must meet some obscure buried need – provide an excellent opportunity to study the Process,” said Alex.

“And people, too,” said Omega John. “The Process is entirely responsive to people. It monitors and meets the needs of the people within it. Once sufficient data has been gathered on their past behaviour, it can infer, with increasing accuracy, future outcomes, future lives. People are evicted before they can create problems. The question is, does the Process manipulate the data set – that is, the people – to meet future needs that we are not yet cognizant of?”

James could not follow Omega John’s reasoning; he was distracted by the malformed and botched arrangement of skull at the back of his head.

“What have you been doing to your brain?” asked James.

“I have undergone forty-eight procedures,” said Omega John. “Twenty voluntary, twelve of them vindictive. Fifteen were subsequently corrective; one, performed a long time ago, was particularly traumatic. My former rivals in the Institute took puerile delight in rearranging the regions of my global workspace.”

“His mind,” clarified Alex.

“And these pranks–” he pronounced the word with weary contempt “–had physiological side effects, particularly in the regulation of hormones.”

“You’re doing brain surgery for a joke?” asked James.

Alex’s eyelids flickered, and she put her hand up to stop that train of thought.

“It’s play, James. One of the characteristics of augmented intelligence is a love of play and the use of games to access insight.”

“Is that what happened to your eye? Did someone play with it?”

“Without upgrades I would be out of the loop. As a manager, I have to be able to comprehend the research that goes on here, and the adjustment to our working practices brought about by augmentation has produced palpable gains in our understanding of the Process.”

“And potentially even how to interact with it.” The excitement that Omega John took in this prospect was evident in the way his fingers dithered.

“But the augmentations have left us physically deficient. That is why Omega John and I would like you to help us.”

“I already have a role within the Process.”

“We are not asking you to alter your role as bailiff. We want you to look after Hector, monitor him, report back as the Process gets stronger within him.”

“It might be dangerous.”

Alex took his hand. “It will be dangerous for everyone if the Process continues to produce these simulacra. An army will exceed the carrying capacity of the surroundings.”

“What do you mean?”

“She is suggesting that the Process may utilize local low value resources in its recreation,” said Omega John. His clarification did not help James’ understanding, and noticing this, he wearily attempted the obvious. “We don’t know how big its war will get. It may use the town and its inhabitants as raw materials.”

Alex gripped his hand. “Omega John calls me irrational but I have a feeling that these things have a tendency to get out of hand.”

“It is only when things get out of hand that they get interesting,” said Omega John. He gathered his sheet around his emaciated marbled form. “Look after John Hector, bailiff. He is very important to us.” Omega John made painfully slow progress from the Round Room.

Alone with Alex, James asked her what the Institute intended to do with the other soldiers that had been found

“Nothing,” said Alex. “Not until you’ve spent some time with Hector. The soldiers are beyond the influence of the Process here. To study the Process’ intentions in creating Hector, we need to observe his behaviour. Take him back to Lewes. Keep him close. Tell us what he does.”

She led him out of the house and up a path to the Orangery where orderlies drank tea and the soldiers sat around despondent on long benches. There were four generic faces in a row – the toy soldiers she mentioned – and then a gap, and then the simulacra of individuals. Alex introduced two of them. Father Huxley, priest and archaeologist, and Professor Collinson, attached to the 32nd Field Ambulance. Neither stirred with recognition when Alex mentioned their names. James sniffed Collinson: Pears soap, dust, coffee and the sea. Every hair of his moustache had been effortlessly and automatically rendered. To think that Omega John scorned Ruth for her instinctive worship of the Process, when it could replicate the bodies of the long dead!

“These two men also survived the war,” said Alex. “Might be a pattern. Too early to say.”

“Would Hector have served alongside them?”

“Yes, Omega John said they were in the same ambulance. He’s very knowledgeable about the war. I wanted to send you away with all three of them but Omega John reckons you will struggle to control even one.”

Dusk in the walled garden, the air soft and coarse-grained, the shaggy cascade of ornamental conifers beside a faintly luminescent chalk path. The orderlies laid blankets around the shoulders of the manufactured men, seated dutifully on benches gazing out of the windows of the Orangery. With their ounces of volition, the men drew the blankets close around themselves.

He wondered about this gesture, a faint of echo of the way soldiers might behave, exhausted by battle and taking refuge. He turned to Alex.

“How does the Process make men with such accuracy?”

Alex was pouring tea into a china cup; she paused, studied him, one eye mute with blood, the other clear and questioning, and was about to answer when Omega John arrived, the wheels of his bath chair rattling over the paved entrance. His personal staff corrected his Russian fur hat, pulling it down over the bandages strung around his enlarged cranium. Amused by Alex’s hesitation, Omega John answered for her.

“The men are made from sperm and blood. According to the alchemist Paracelsus, if sperm is left to putrefy in a horse’s womb for forty days, then nourished with the arcanum of human blood, it will grow into something like a man.”

Omega John wore a sheepskin sleeping bag that covered him from nape to toe, with thick tartan sleeves, from which jaundiced wrists and hands protruded. His orderlies wheeled him to their table.

The air in the Orangery cooled. Through the windows, evening stars appeared between darkening clouds. The orderlies waited at the periphery of the room. Drawn from the laypeople of Glynde, village life and the work of the Institute had been entwined for generations. They were protective of Omega John, as if servicing and prolonging his life imbued their existence with greater meaning.

The authority in Omega John’s voice had been broken into many pieces and then reassembled. He talked like a man crossing a rock desert of fissures and cracks: with hesitation, dithering at each turn, then wearily leaping on the next point. The waxy sheen of his skin made him seem close to death, yet his teeth were much younger than his larynx, and new hair burst through the bandages here and there like strong gorse.

“My colleague in the Institute, Sunny Wu, is a forger of flesh, an expert in the Chinese skill of the counterfeit.” He coughed violently, and accepted a handkerchief from his orderly. “Sunny Wu grew a living replica of his wife’s body, though I suspect it was not from his sperm; she would never have allowed that.”

The old man’s laugh sounded like kernels being sieved.

“It is from Sunny Wu that the Process acquired the design of a manufactured body.”

“But their minds?”

“Yes!” Omega John raised an index finger. “How to forge a mind? Impossible!”

Alex demurred. “We’ve simulated people before.”

“Using digital technology.” His pronunciation picked apart the bones of that phrase, leaving only his contempt for it. “Digital was a diversion, a distraction from the real work at hand.”

A thought occurred to him, and his hand fluttered for James to come closer.

“How to communicate an experience directly, you see, from mind to mind – that is my life’s work.”

“Is it possible?”

“We’ve always known it’s possible, bailiff. The Institute has had many successes in that area. The problem was how. The brain is not a transmitter. Simple as. And yet nonetheless the phenomenon exists. Observe. Alex, serve the bailiff some tea.”

From a blue teapot, Alex poured him a cup of white tea, the prized first picking of the leaf, she explained, too subtle for his palette until the aftertaste of jasmine, and then, after another sip, he discerned the initial stages of the flavour, experienced it retrospectively.

Omega John worked his thin lips as if he too were savouring the tea, eyes closed, those long fingers playing the sound of the flavour upon the air.

“Yes, jasmine. I can tune into your implant so that your sensations are communicated directly from you to me.”

James was sceptical. “Can you read my mind?”

“No. Vivid sensations, strong emotions, a powerful image. The implant puts you and I in harmony. Try something more personal.”

He remembered Ruth, sobbing, the kitchen knife in her hand. She had reopened the library to chair a meeting about the potential for change offered by the crisis. Invited community leaders, turned her face to mankind and spoke with optimism against the turmoil. The meeting was broken up by the new police. A gangster policeman swaggered up onto the stage and took the microphone from her, feedback flooding the sound system. James fought his way through the crowd toward his wife. She was arguing with the gangster policeman; he did not bother to respond. From the stage he pointed out the cameras monitoring the crowd, reminded them of sanctions against illegal behaviour and ordered them to disperse. Later, in an argument over the worth of resistance, her shirt off, in her bra and skirt, Ruth picked up the knife to demonstrate the seriousness of her commitment, and the gesture was so futile, he realized that her anger was so heavy, it would crush her.

Omega John gazed at James, and then awoke from his reverie to the dryness of his mouth, the stiff numbness in his fingers.

“A powerful image of the humbling of a woman,” he whispered. “Your wife, Ruth. Ripe with emotional content. Alex also has an implant. If you wished, you and Alex could share the same dream through me. Would you like that?”

Alex was gazing sideways at him, interested in his reaction.

“My implant is there solely so that I can perform my role as bailiff.”

Omega John laughed. “Of course! Letting you dream would be letting a hammer design a house!”

At his request, they moved their tea party out to his garden, the orderlies carrying the table, chairs and tea set. The grounds of the old house were expansive; junctions were marked with sculptures, curved evocations of natural shapes in iron and wood, and there was a maze and a secret grove strung with lanterns. The lawn turned downhill toward a tidal estuary, the waters flowing back toward the house like a cat coming in at night, bringing a brackish air of mud and life’s fresh rot. Omega John’s garden consisted of terraces of vegetable beds, a winding path of Moroccan multicoloured tiles, and a Victorian hothouse containing an outsized biomass of rubber and banana trees, steam curling around their little party, water dripping from above. Omega John stopped at the fruit trees; with a short sharp knife, he cropped starfruit and mango, the former tart and sour, the latter sweet, for the party to pass among them. He did not eat himself, pleading “a quite impossible digestive system”, but insisted that James and Alex sample the fruit so that he could taste it by proxy.