The Thing on the Shore (32 page)

“So. You signed a confidentiality agreement, and what I'm about to tell you cannot be disclosed. It's covered by the terms of that agreement, understand?”

“OK, yes, I understand.”

Outside the sun shone brightly. There were no clouds in the sky, as if they had all rained themselves out of existence last night. It was a cold day, though. Cold and hard like a stone plucked from the seabed.

“A good few years ago, Interext embarked upon a very large project,” Artemis said, as he leaned back and entwined his fingers behind his head. “Do you want a drink, by the way? You look fucked.”

“A coffee, maybe,” Bracket said. “But the canteen won't be open yet.”

“Go and get one from the machine,” Artemis said.

Bracket went and fetched one from the machine.
OK
, he was saying in his head.
OK. OK. OK.

Artemis then explained that Interext had spent years developing an advanced call-analytics system. This was not the very large project that Artemis actually wanted to talk
about; in fact this was a separate project, but one which was to play a key part in the greater project.

“It is fucking amazing,” Artemis said, gesturing extravagantly. “You wouldn't know—you
would not know
—that you were talking to a program and not to an actual human being. It's like science fiction but it's not, Bracket. It's loaded with so many pre-recordings that every time you ring up you get the words spoken differently, in a slightly different tone. And what is being said is different every time because it depends on what the caller, what the customer says in the first place. In essence, it's AI. It's clever stuff. But it works.”

“Then why aren't Interext using it?” Bracket asked.

“We will,” Artemis said. “We're just a bit ahead of our time. It's all a bit sensitive, because all the subsequent redundancies wouldn't do our corporate responsibility profile any good. To be honest—you know me—I couldn't give a fuck about the workers—no offense—but that wouldn't be my decision ultimately. And, besides, it needs testing.”

“OK,” Bracket said, uncertainly. It sounded fascinating. It genuinely
did
sound fascinating, Bracket had to admit. But alarming, too, for all the obvious reasons.

“My wife was involved,” Artemis continued. “She was the project lead, but she was … what would you say?”

Bracket didn't know what you would say. He widened his eyes and tried to think of a suitable response, but Artemis was now looking upward, thinking hard, as if grasping there for an answer to what was, Bracket now
realized, actually a rhetorical question. The room—seeming especially massive when there was practically nobody in it—hummed with the electric sleep of hundreds of dormant computers, their power cables and connective wires alive with power and energy and information and yet totally immobile.

“What would you say?” Artemis repeated, with an expression almost of wonder, one that Bracket had never witnessed before.

Artemis seemed to finally settle on something. “You would probably say that she was not afraid to get her hands dirty, or something equally as inane. That sounds a bit too tawdry, but you see what I mean. Toward the end of the project, she herself contributed her voice. She recorded herself speaking. She spent hours of every day for months—for years, Bracket—recording her voice for this project.”

“I didn't know you were married,” Bracket said, but he was already thinking how Artemis's wife must have been trying to get away from him. Either that or she was obsessed in some way. But, then, a lot of highly successful business people are successful only because they are totally obsessed.

“Well,” Artemis said, “Eleanor is dead now. She died in hospital shortly after giving birth to our daughter.”

“I'm sorry,” Bracket said. “God, I totally put my foot in it. I'm really sorry. That must have been awful.”

“Yes,” Artemis said. “It was awful. You might find it hard to believe, but we had a very loving relationship.”

“So … you have a daughter?”

“Bracket,” Artemis said, firmly, “stop asking questions. Our daughter was stillborn.”

Bracket didn't say anything to that. He just swallowed, and then swallowed again.

“Eleanor spent most of her last year alive in that one little room, making all those recordings,” Artemis continued. “She spent the final months of her pregnancy on that project. She didn't spend any of her time with me. She didn't spend it resting. She spent it here. Not here in Whitehaven, but
here
, at work, do you see?”

Bracket nodded.

“This work is so very important,” Artemis insisted. He was now leaning forward, his face closer to Bracket's face. He grinned mirthlessly. “Do you see?” he repeated.

“Yes,” Bracket said, “I see.”

“Good,” Artemis leaned back. “I loved her very much, Bracket.”

“Of course,” Bracket said.

Artemis pinched the bridge of his nose. “We're drifting off topic,” he declared. “Where were we?”

“We—”

“Ah, yes, the voice! The system's voice, it is my wife's voice. It is female. This is important.”

“OK,” said Bracket.

“We'll come back to that, though. The other project—the big one—relies upon it.”

“OK.”

“So, there is the AI. Then there is something else: the Interstice. Now, the Interstice is a place.”

“Yes!” Bracket said. “When I answered your phone that time, that's what they said! ‘We have made contact with the Interstice,' or something like that.”

“It is actually a place,” Artemis continued, as if Bracket hadn't spoken, “but it is very hard to reach. You can't travel there by everyday means. Being there is about perception. It is about total faith.”

“Faith” was not a word you usually heard thrown around the office environment. Bracket wasn't sure what to make of it, how to take it. He felt uncertain. He looked uncertain, too.

“Wait,” Bracket said. “How do
you
know about the Interstice, if you can't know about it without perceiving it?”

“You can simply
know
about it,” Artemis said. “People have known about it for centuries—for thousands of years. And people have been there, too. But to open up a channel of communication, or an actual reliable route in or out—those things have never been done, as far as we know. So, we need to access the Interstice, and we need to communicate with that intelligence, that entity. We have made contact with it—we had the AI calling out through the telephone network in order to attract its attention—but we now need somebody that can report back.”

“Me.”

“No, not you. The subject was identified years ago.”

“What? Who?”

“Harry.”

“Harry! How? What do you mean?”

Artemis frowned. “Harry has been receiving phone calls,” Artemis said, “from his dead wife.”

“No,” Bracket replied. “I don't actually believe that. Now I think you're making things up.”

“Bracket, you pillock,” Artemis said, “of course they're not really from his dead wife. They're from the AI. We're not using it commercially, but it's been dialing him for ages. We know whenever he's not at work, see, and it just rings him in accordance with his shift patterns.”

“Why Harry?”

“We were looking out for somebody susceptible,” Artemis said. “We were waiting for an employee to suffer a bereavement.”

“But Harry didn't even work for Interext then!” Bracket exclaimed. “He would have been working for Outsourcing Unlimited.”

“He was not working directly for Interext, no, but ultimately he was. Many, many people work for Interext, without knowing it. That's just the way the world has gone.”

“So the AI is ringing Harry up in order to … what? I don't get it.”

“In order to trick him into believing in the Interstice,” Artemis said.

“Why? Why do you have to trick anybody into believing in it, if it's real?”

“Do you believe in it?” Artemis asked.

Bracket thought about that.

“You see?” Artemis said. “It's the same for me also. It
sounds too fantastic. I can't sit at the end of a phone line and just imagine the place, and then
be
there. The plan was for Harry to believe in it, and for it to happen to him. It didn't happen to him, though.” Artemis rubbed his eyes. “It happened to Arthur instead. The entity came for Arthur, somehow. Arthur was sitting at Harry's desk on that day. The implication is that the awareness runs both ways, which is ultimately good, but it resulted in the entity trying to make contact through Harry's phone, and reaching Arthur instead. We think.”

“You think?”

“We are not dealing with an exact science here, Bracket,” Artemis replied, “as I'm sure you appreciate. We are operating at the limits … no, we are operating beyond the limits of our understanding.”

“I think I get that,” Bracket said. “I still don't know what you need me to do, though.”

“You need to know all this, just in case. If I for some reason have to go, Bracket, then you will be responsible for this shithole. You will get sent all of the briefing packs in that eventuality, of course, but by then … well, you might appreciate the little understanding I've just given you before things get to that stage, shall we say.”

“I can't believe what you've done,” Bracket said. “It's horrible.”

Artemis looked at Bracket and frowned. “Please,” he said, “let's not get sentimental.”

Pauline would always open the doors of the Vine to Harry. He was a good customer for a start, spending an obscene proportion of his wages—and maybe even his son's wages—inside. But, more than that, he was a kind of friend. A friend purely out of familiarity, if that made any sense. So, however early he rolled in, Harry was welcome.

This time he had turned up within official opening hours, arriving at about nine o'clock on Monday night. Now it was nine o'clock on Tuesday morning and he was still here. Pauline herself was asleep, her head resting on the bar. Harry was not actually asleep, but he was not really conscious either. Not in the true sense of the word. He swayed around on top of the bar stool like he was dancing slowly, even though there was no music playing.

Apart from Pauline and Harry, the bar was empty. The
room was dark, too, apart from the stripes of light that made it through the cracks in the blinds. They didn't illuminate anything, though. They just hung there, in the dust-filled air, like solid things.

Arthur showed up for work at about eleven o' clock. It wasn't like him to be late, but then it wasn't like him to have slept outdoors like a tramp. He was wearing yesterday's clothes, as well.

Bracket accosted him as he walked across the call center floor.

“Hey!” Bracket shouted, “Arthur!”

Arthur pretended not to hear him, but was forced to turn around when Bracket grabbed him by the shoulder.

“What?” Arthur said.

“Jesus Christ,” Bracket said, jerking backward. “What happened to your eye?”

“I was badly sick,” Arthur said. “Look, I know I'm late. I just want to get started, OK? I'll make the time up at the end of my shift.”

“Yeah, OK.” Bracket nodded. “God, are you alright?”

“I barely know what I'm doing here,” Arthur said. “I haven't really slept.”

“Well,” Bracket said, “if you need to, go and have a sit-down in the break room.”

Arthur looked down at the smaller man for a moment, and then nodded. “Thanks,” he said. He turned away and continued to his desk.

Bracket watched him go. He had wanted to tell Arthur to go home and get some real, actual rest—to go home and not worry about this stupid, stupid job.

Go home and stay safe.

Bracket couldn't stop thinking about Artemis losing his baby. Of course, the possibility of something going wrong with his and Isobel's baby was a fear that never stopped throbbing away unpleasantly at the back of his head, but up until now he had, by and large, been able to dismiss it as some kind of natural paranoia. It was something that he assumed every prospective parent must feel. But this—what had happened to Artemis—made that eventuality seem much closer, much more likely, for some reason.

Something else that Bracket hadn't really considered before was what if the baby grew up to be a total bastard? What if the baby grew up to be like Artemis? What were Artemis's parents like? Bracket didn't think he'd ever met such an absolute wanker before, and so hadn't worried unduly about his child growing up to become one. But now … now things were different.

At night, when neither he nor Isobel were sleeping that well, he would be assailed by sweaty panics and dreadful fantasies in which their child grew up miserable and bitter and became the kind of man or woman who could only
wear suits and spent all night at the office because they had nothing to go home for and ended up getting a prostitute habit and dying lonely or angry or both. He worried that, despite their best efforts and intentions, their child would become some kind of monster. For some reason, he envisaged the baby as something with green rotten eyes and skin slick with algae. Something that would grow up to feel just as at home slithering around in silt as it would all cleaned up and masked and slithering around some boardroom somewhere.

It might help if Isobel would talk more about what she was feeling. But she didn't really. They spoke less and less, as if ever-longer periods of their lives were being spent with some kind of “mute” button on. Isobel did not seem angry or unhappy; just completely content within a self-contained world. She and the baby. The bump. Bracket sometimes touched the bump—the sensation of movement within was thrilling—but he always felt like he was intruding on something private when he did so.