The This, page 23
That was what it was like for Adan. Except with thought instead of air. His mind expanded as a lung fills with freshness.
Or we could put it another way: his thoughts, which had been trying throughout his three and a half decades of life to stretch beyond the tight jacket woven of habits and of upbringing – and, most of all, of physical neuronal capacity and arrangement – found themselves for the first time unhindered. His thoughts stretched and expanded, because thought is breath, and breath is pneuma, and pneuma is spirit and spirit is thought and he, as you, as I, touched the bedrock of the cosmos itself in thought, in thought, in thought.
6
Richest
Now that Rich was inside The This, time went orthonormal. His previous experience of time was revectored into a new kind of experience of time.
Where does it start?
If we were to abstract one basic principle from the cosmos it would be: small things lead to big things. If we had to summarise life in one phrase, that would be it.
Take this as your theory as to how the universe exists at all, that great puzzle of physics and metaphysics, all this glorious plenitude of matter cinched into galaxies and black holes and planets and people. Say there was one single thing. Imagine it as the tiniest thing: not trillions raised to the trillionth power of tonnes of matter, but one solitary impossible twist in the fabric of an otherwise entirely empty spacetime. Subatomic scale, say, although not subatomic as such since there are no atoms for it to be sub. At this point there’s nothing at all, just cavernous emptiness on a scale you can’t imagine. And your solitary one-thing, your Saint-Mark’s-quark, the twist in your existential sobriety – it simply exists. That’s all. It exists and exists, blandly, boringly, inertly, and it goes on existing through the billennia, until the curve of time brings the empty cosmos to an end and – a notional ping-pong ball, blocky as any pixel, hitting its rudimentary virtual paddle, bouncing back – it returns. Now it is an anti-quark, simply existing as before but this time existing from the end of all to the beginning of all. It occupies the same space as the original quark, for all time, and so it fuses, an impossible copula. And now it’s a proton, existing from the beginning of time to the end, and then an electron existing from the end of time to the beginning. And now it’s an atom of matter, existing from the beginning of time to the end, and then an atom of antimatter existing from the end of time to the beginning. And now it’s a clump of atoms, existing from the beginning of time to the end, and back again, and then as many atoms as there are paths through this timeline to the end and back, before – the singularity sagging heavier and more unstable – the inevitable happens, and a bang bigs itself up, and trillions raised to the trillionth power of tonnes of matter come pouring out into spacetime from a point so close to dimensionless it makes no odds, creating the spacetime in which our originary quark first voyaged in the first place.
Brave little mite.
The whole universe grown from one seed! Except that the question remains: where did that first little twist in the fabric of spacetime originate? The question remains: where does it start?
When Rich first joined the nascent idiom of a properly co-ordinated human collective consciousness, his initial experience was bliss.
Bliss. He had not realised how empty was his soul until it was filled. He knew, comprehensively, and was as comprehensively known. He went from a solitary atom in an alienated universe to a plenitude of belonging he had not realised was even possible.
Bliss. He wept.
Bliss. He wept with joy. He wept in shame and frustration and bitterness, because he was – consciously, wilfully, with malice – bringing a poison into The This, attempting to disrupt and wound it. To wound himself, now that he was part of the whole, now that he was a loving-living-partygoing metonym in the flesh.
The This knew what he was bringing, but they took him in anyway. He was intensely grateful for this acceptance. His stubbornness dissolved with gratitude. A lifetime of not fitting in and suddenly he fitted perfectly in the most perfect place.
In terms of the material world, of which Rich was very much still a part: he stepped out of The This building by the Thames, and walked up Putney High Street past the various human-shaped empty shells and crossed the junction when the green man sobbed, and walked up Putney Hill, and turned right into his road, and let himself back into his flat. He hadn’t been there for a while. There was a sheen of dust on the surfaces and a bad smell in the fridge. A lid of mould sealed-in the half-drunk coffee in its mug on his desk. But the sunlight was inside him now, and everything gleamed with joy and meaning and purpose. He set to work tidying and cleaning and rearranging. He moved things into more ergonomic locations, folded away and set back what he could. He fired up his computer and logged in, and immediately reconfigured all his bank details to funnel money into the nexus of The This-related financial underpinnings.
Over the months that followed he began a process of decluttering on a more permanent basis, selling valuable items, paying a company to come to his door and schlep away valueless ones for recycling. And he established a new routine: no more alcohol, much more eating vegetables, morning and evening runs up to and around the heath. He slept eight hours every night and in the days he worked harder than he had ever done before. He took an online course in legal coding, proofing and text/apping, and dedicated himself to that tedious, relentless but solidly paid occupation. The This always needed money, and individual members worked as hard as they could, as hard as their other duties permitted them, to supply this need.
In terms of his new existence, though, Rich was experiencing existential plenitude for the first time in his life. Clock time, the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons lolloping round with their awkward rollovers, all of that hardly impinged. His IQ was a thousand times more capacious than before, but, more importantly, so was his EQ. He shared the wisdom of the totality and apprehended reality with the pristine freshness of a newborn. He lived each breath, and every specific detail of the world shone with realness: this cup, this finger, this taste, this beam of sunlight through the window, this congeries of dust motes circling lazily in the light, this breath, this moment, this now, forever slipping from no-longer-existent past to not-yet-existent future, thin as an electron shell but hefty enough to carry the weight of all being and all perception and all consciousness. Every this replete with everything. All in all and all a joy. Holy delight and holy dread.
All that, in a moment. And at the same time, all that was taken from him.
He was, in terms of the collective, a toxic cell. It was imperative that he become part of The This – he saw that, now, and saw why – but he could not be immediately accepted wholly into the collective body. They (we) had known it would be this way, that the remnants of individuated Homo sapiens were trying, in their clumsy way, to thrust a dagger into The This’s heart. But not until Rich actually presented himself at the organisation’s front door, not until he had the Thistech fitted, could they (we) judge the viability and seriousness of the threat, or more accurately the hugeness of the opportunity Rich presented.
It proved more viable, and potentially more serious, than they (we) had first assumed it would be. Rich proved more essential than they (we) could ever have realised prior (that is) to assimilating him.
It couldn’t be helped. Moses saw the promised land but did not cross the Jordan. Rich experienced the fullness, and then was sequestered. In material terms he worked and walked and ate and slept as before, but his consciousness was buffered. Points of connection kept him in touch with the plenum, and the experience was still vastly more integrated and whole than his previous loneliness had been. Nonetheless, all the time he was aware that he was at arm’s length. He did not wish to remain in that semi-separated circumstance, sss, the snake in an Eden he had no desire to contaminate.
Inside his brain new, unique code grew, slow as stalactites and stalagmites, in his Thistech network. The virus – so very cunningly framed – seethed inside its spherical firewall, and a Thistech alt-virus tried to match it, grew strange fronds and weird lattices, and, as it did so, slowly grew into something amazingly potent and unique.
And that’s where we were. And that’s where we are.
Things happened in the material world. Helen Susanna died, finally succumbing to her medical situation. Other people died more unexpectedly. There was a spike in gun crime in the Richmond and Putney area, something lamented by the media as the consequence of gangs and drugs and social decadence, although Rich, as part of The This, knew the truth – a complex of assassinations, some by The This assets, and infighting between different branches of the security services. It died down.
So far as Helen Susanna’s superior, Hoyle, was concerned (Rich could monitor her day-to-day and her communications much more effectively than she, or her people, understood) the attack that Rich had carried into the organisation had failed. It hadn’t. But that’s what Hoyle believed.
The police came to Rich’s flat and arrested him. This was Hoyle making him a de facto prisoner of war. But no actual war had ever been declared, and the UK legal system had to generate pretexts to hold him, and The This-funded lawyers lobbied and prosecuted aggressively for his release. Accordingly, in time, he was released. His passport was confiscated, which bothered him not in the least. Why would he need to move his body from country to country when his consciousness was a global quantity?
And so he went on with life. He reconfigured his flat and settled into his new routine, and every second was joyous, and each joy was tinged with the regret that he was buffered and could not partake as integrally in the gestalt as he wanted to. He was a bomb, to be defused, but this was proving tricky. First of all, he had to wait until the new network of Thistech had grown into its mature setting, filling out the interstices of his wet-cell brain. That took a while, considerably longer than was normally the case for new recruits, because the net had both to grow to encompass and to restrain the enemy implant.
He chafed. It tainted his bliss.
‘How much longer?’
‘Soon,’ they (we) said.
And days followed days, each unique in itself and each exactly the same as every other. As is the way with days. Rich worked, and exercised, and ate and slept. Different people have different talents, and a degree of specialisation was bedding itself into the internal dynamic of the gestalt – Rich’s skill was not (as it might be) recruitment, programming, practical procurement, financial affairs, engineering or strategy or public relations. In one sense he was a lesser member of the whole, except that nobody was lesser or greater and all partook equally in the – really, I’m sorry to keep repeating myself but there’s no better word – bliss.
So he got on with mundane life, and his hairline receded, and his face grew wrinklier, and he had a series of malign polyps removed from his lower intestine, and he started taking naps during the afternoon. History raged around him: riots, martial law, war overseas, technological advances, cultural regression, and above all the relentless encroachment of the ocean. Several British coastal towns went the full Dunwich. All coastal towns had to abandon at least some of their seaside or riverside real estate to the natural course. Winter storms blew wilder, odd spurts of unseasonal heat or cold became the norm. London built some vastly expensive remedial infrastructure: huge dykes on the Thames Estuary, walls embanking the flow of the river through the city. But on stormy days the highest tides gushed over these defences and the riverside was always sloshing with water, and the reek from perennially damp basements and neglected property became so marked that, when the wind was blowing the right way, Rich could smell it even halfway up Putney Hill. He sometimes strolled by the river, or wandered the ramparts, as the metal walkway on top of the Thames Wall was called. Living in a first-floor flat on top of a hill meant that he wasn’t personally inconvenienced by any of it. Things became more expensive, and people moved out of the city, but since he had joined The This money was no longer an issue for him and, having joined The This, he had no more need for other friends or, indeed, company.
He lived like an old man long before he became an old man, but in time he actually became an old man. More cancer. He had malignant tumours removed from his skin: they looked, as he peered down at his anesthetised arm, like antique coins, roughly circular, rough-edged, blackened by time. The thought tickled his imagination. Each coin inscribed in miniscule with the four-letter twisting legend of runaway genetic replication, instead of GULIELMUS V D G REX. Cancer as king. Fungible flesh. This, in turn, put him in mind of the days when he used to collect banknotes. Fascinating, intricate artwork that drew the eye in. A stylised, and therefore reified and modular and therefore more manageable, version of reality. Everything exchangeable, which is to say interchangeable, and yet to hold one specific banknote was to hold something unique. Think of an old one-pound note. You couldn’t have bought a similar-sized piece of art, a finely worked engraving of such craftsmanship, for a pound, back then. Such a print would have cost you a great deal more money than that. The amount of metal in a 2p coin was worth more than 2p. Something about this apparent paradox delighted Rich’s soul.
‘There,’ said the surgeon. ‘Not too much of an anticlimax, I hope?’
Not at all, said Rich. Not at all.
And then he was back, memory washing over him like tidal waters and carrying him back: him carefully photographing each of his more valuable banknotes obverse and reverse, uploading them to NoteBay and annotating each in turn. Selling the rest off as a job lot. Passing the funds he raised thereby along to The This. Returning currency to the currents of exchange and movement. He’d done this a couple of weeks after he joined.
And then another memory, somehow connected to this first, from a year later … or, was it only a year? So hard to get all the synchronous days and dates lined up into chronological order. He remembered that Hoyle herself knocked on his door. And actually it must have been several years later, because he remembered he’d been under continual surveillance, and then, after two years of blameless and perfectly regular monk-like existence, the Powers That Be had decided he wasn’t worth surveilling any further, and had pulled everyone and everything off his detail. Rich didn’t see this, so much as perceive it via his connection to the gestalt. But it indicated that those Powers had given up on anything coming of his introduction into The This.
And it was after that that Hoyle rang his doorbell.
She looked more careworn than she had previously, the skin under her eyes blotched, her black hair scratched with strands of white. Her manner was markedly less boisterous than the last time the two had met.
‘Mr Rigby,’ she said, over the intercom. ‘Might we chat?’
It did occur to Rich that she might have come round specifically to kill him. But two years had proved plenty long enough for the tendrils from the inserted Thistech to integrate itself, and the prospect of losing the day-to-day holding together of his cellular body didn’t fill him with any dread. His body could die, but he no longer could.
‘By all means,’ he said.
She came up, and sat awkwardly on his sofa staring at the blank screen of the offswitched TV while Rich made coffee. He brought a chair through from the kitchen and sat on that.
‘So …’ said Hoyle.
‘Good to see you again,’ offered Rich.
It was the kind of thing people said after not having been in touch for a while. Access to the collective wisdom of The This now meant that Rich understood the Popeye reference she had mentioned during their last encounter, and which had at that time gone over his head. Indeed, access to that collective knowledge meant he knew a huge amount about Hoyle: the occasional urgencies and more usual velleities of her career progression; her marriage and its fractious breakdown; her two lovers, neither of whom knew about the existence of the other. Rich could have altered that mutual ignorance with a thought, but he only smiled at her and waited for her to come to her point.
‘Helen Susanna died,’ she said, eventually.
‘I know,’ said Rich.
Hoyle slurped at her coffee: a sound like a lame foot being dragged across gravel. She put the cup down on the little table in front of her.
‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ she said. ‘The point is a question. There’s a question I want to ask you.’
Rich waited.
‘We failed,’ she said, shortly. This wasn’t a question. ‘I mean the operation, the attempt to infiltrate malware into the inner network of The This. It obviously failed.’
Rich didn’t say anything.
‘I’ve been relieved of operational command.’ This also wasn’t a question. ‘What I mean is – I’m not here in an official capacity. I just … I just …’ She picked up her coffee cup and took another astonishingly noisy slurp from it. ‘Curious, I guess.’
‘Curious?’
‘Mr Rigby, we underestimated The This. I apologise to you for that. I apologise for sending you into that situation.’
‘There’s no need to apologise,’ said Rich genuinely. ‘I’m happier than I’ve ever been.’
Hoyle nodded sombrely, as if this was exactly the kind of brainwashed babble she was expecting from him.
‘Well, that whole operation has been cancelled. There will be an enquiry – not open to the public and not publicised, but I’ll have to give evidence. As you might expect, I’ve been going over and over the whole operation in my head.’
Rich waited.
‘Here’s one thing I’m curious about,’ she said, putting her coffee cup down again. ‘One thing we never got to the bottom of. Why were The This so keen to get you?’
‘Ah,’ said Rich.
‘I mean, they went out of their way to recruit you – they don’t do that. That’s not how they, how you, operate. So there was something in you that they really wanted. And the thing that slices my loaf is – having got you, they don’t seem to have done anything with you.’
