The This, page 25
Would you mind telling me whose brain you gave me? Promise you won’t be angry?
I will not be angry.
Abby … somebody.
Another memory visited his deathbed. When he was a kid, and when it was winter, on the walk to school, he had taken a peculiar delight in cracking the new-frozen puddles. To step down with his new school shoes, shiny as liquorice, and kick a spiderweb of fracture lines through the shield of ice – a pure delight. He could stomp a path from puddle to puddle all the way to school. This connected with a later memory: screwing the top off a new 70 cl bottle of whisky. The faint cracking as the perforations in the tin gave way and the top unscrewed.
‘You drank to excess,’ said somebody, ‘before you joined The This.’
‘Not afterwards, though,’ Rich wheezed. ‘It cured me of that.’
Two fat tears rolled out of his old eyes and dribbled down his cheeks. Somebody was singing ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’. Was that a memory? Was he actually hearing that?
His care robot was sitting beside his bed. But that wasn’t right. The robot had no need to rest and wasn’t designed to sit. Who was this? His eyes were blurry with tears and he couldn’t quite make it out.
‘It’s been tricky enough getting in to see you,’ said the stranger.
‘Hoyle?’
But no: Hoyle was long dead. Who, then?
‘Call me Ahab. No, that’s not right. What I mean is – an Ab. One of them, it turns out, thanks to the miraculous multiple natures of our branching realities. One of thirteen! But Abby, for all that.’
‘Abby Normal,’ wheezed Rich.
‘Well, quite. Let’s ritz this cracker, you and I. Let’s put it on.’
‘I don’t know you.’ It was very hard to co-ordinate breathing to get the words out. ‘Do I?’
‘Knowing is such a complicated business,’ said Abby. ‘But I know you – so I have to say, yes you do. You do know me. And I know there’s a war on. And I know the stakes. Rather better, in fact, than you do. Rather better than either of the two parties currently squabbling over this world.’
‘Who are you?’ Rich gasped.
‘I am come, my old mucker, to throw a wall of twice five miles around this … all this … what shall we call it? The wossname inside your cranium? This necessary injection of modified alien code into the structure of The This’s network. This needful stimulus that will enable you-all to create real-world, functional immortality – to bind your connection into something that transcends the elements out of which it is constructed. You and yours have been letting it ferment, inside your grey matter, for as long as possible, haven’t you, this yin-yang of virus and alt-virus. See how much I know! You need the occasional injection of hostile code, suitably modified, to inoculate you against future harm, and to boost your own software evolution, and you have the highest hopes for this particular package. But even your high hopes fall short of the reality of what it can achieve, and for that reason, I’m afraid, I’m going to have to destroy it.’
‘No,’ said Rich.
‘There’s no help for it.’
There was a loud knocking at street level – it sounded like somebody trying to break down the door from the outside, and it sounded like that because that was what it was. It was The This, realising too late that they were about to lose this long-gestated package. They had importunately seized control of a number of robots in the local area. One such was at the door, another was walking stiffly and rapidly towards the building. But these were built for menial work and low-level care jobs, and so were not particularly strong, and it was taking time for them to break the door down.
A great many human members of The This were running as fast as they could, converging on the building. They had also and belatedly realised the danger. They were rushing. They would not get there in time.
The knocking continued.
‘I’m dying anyway,’ gasped Rich. ‘No point in killing me. Seconds away from death.’
‘No time to lose, then,’ was the reply.
The stranger – Abby Normal – extended a prong, as long as a knitting needle, and inserted it up Rich’s left nostril.
‘Farewell, my pharaoh,’ said Ab. ‘And welcome to eternal life. We’ve all got to start somewhere, after all.’
The tip broke the sinus bone and entered the brain pan, and then it sprouted little vanes and began spinning. The matter inside was whisked to a froth in moments, and Rich’s face slackened. He lost the ability to talk, and then the ability to think, and then he was nothing but a human-shaped body, old and broken, breathing wheezily. By the time The This’s proxies arrived he was panting like a thirsty dog, and his care robot was standing beside his body, bent over the bed, powered down and restored to factory settings.
7
Twenty Eighty-Four
:1:
There are only three people alive in the world. Two of these are stronger and one of them is weaker. It’s just the way things are. Naturally the first two have discussed this situation among themselves, after the peculiar manner by which these people discuss things. They have debated whether it would be plusgood fully to unperson the third. It is what the strong do to the weak, after all. But these two people have not yet done so. This is because the pulse of their mutual interaction (trialectic rather than the simpler dialectic that would obtain if only two people existed) creates more complex eddies, chaotic quasi-fractals at the edges of their meeting, and these patterns add richness to the existence of the two. Eventually they will become strong enough not to need these extra – let’s call them, by analogy, vitamins – and then the third person can be unmade. But that’s in the future.
The two people are called Oceania and Eurasia. We need not bother with the name of the third.
Once, long ago, there were billions of people alive in the world. Before history. Now there are exactly three people alive. Of course, if one wishes to be vague about one’s definitions, and if one wishes to quantify in terms of sheer numbers, then there are billions of Homo sapiens still swarming over the face of the globe. But these are not persons, in the sense that Oceania and Eurasia are persons. And now that these two are in the world, Earth is again Eden, and all the previous people not only cease to be but cease ever to have been.
:2:
Jones was on his way home when the thinkpol came for him. He waited on the pavement for a bus to pass, hurried over the road through the little dusty tourbillons of air the vehicle’s passage had whipped up, and then turned along the pavement towards the entrance to his building. The block’s wall was on his left, its plaster varicosed with cracks. The party agents came at him from the right. The fact that his position generated, inside him, a small sense of panic was, he knew, borderline thoughtcrime. Feeling trapped was tantamount to desiring freedom, and desiring freedom, in any sense, was the very definition of thoughtcrime.
He despised himself.
‘Joygreet,’ said the first agent.
‘Bellyfeel joygreet,’ Jones replied, trying to put some gusto into his words. Ratchet up that smile another notch. Put your heart into it, you worm!
The second agent held out a tube.
‘Oldspeak goodspeak transpol dayorder Jones,’ the second said. ‘Evans, scienceman.’ He stopped and consulted a piece of paper in his left hand – Jones could see it contained a number of words from the C Vocabulary, words with which the agent, as a security official of the state, would have no cause to understand. ‘Ref astronomer, radiodataset plusnow doubleplusnow dayorder duckspeak-duckspeak ungood sciencecrime transpol duckspeak transpol goodspeak dayorder.’
This was startling.
‘Plusyes,’ said Jones, standing up straighter as he accepted the cylinder.
The first agent eyed him carefully.
‘Upsub fullwise,’ he said.
‘Doubleplusyes.’
The two agents departed briskly, without saying anything else.
Jones stood for a moment, blinking. Another bus passed. A copter swooped overhead, grinding its rotors and hauling itself away in a blizzard of noise. The thinkpol had come to him. Jones became, belatedly, aware how hard his heart was pounding – they had come to him, not to arrest him, which he could have understood, but just to give him this job. Jones often did work for thinkpol, but always, without exception, he had been summoned to the Miniluv pyramid via his telescreen to receive his orders. Jones had to assume that the fact that they had come to him spoke to an unusual urgency about his commission.
He wanted to open the cylinder straight away and discover what kind of job needed two agents to hand-deliver it, but it would, of course, be better to do so in front of his telescreen, so that the Party would see he was enthusiastically complying with their orders. So he hurried in through the main doors, past the poster of Big Brother, up the stairs and into his tiny flat. He didn’t bother taking off his overcoat or his hat: he just sat on the end of his bed, in full sight of the telescreen, and unscrewed the cylinder. A name, Georgina Evans, and an address; and then a long document heavy with Vocab C words. He was to translate the document for Evans, obtain her response, and report immediately to the Miniluv. Jones glanced at the document. He couldn’t see what about it was so pressing. Many of the Vocab C words were not ones Jones knew off the top of his head, but he had a C-dictionary in his apartment, and there had been no mistaking the urgency of those thinkpol agents, so he repacked the cylinder with its documentation, dropped it in a bag with a couple of needful reference books, and hurried out of the building again.
He took a bus to the train station and then took an underground train out to Metropolitan District 76. The carriage was very crowded, and the recent cuts in the soap rations meant that everybody reeked. Jones was conscious that he must be equally smelly. He couldn’t smell himself, however. An eyeball cannot see itself. A single mind cannot comprehend its own mentation. Only the collective had the capaciousness for such profundity of apperception. But Jones could not avoid the reek. Somebody at the end of the carriage was coughing into a handkerchief. She held the cloth before her face to examine her own phlegm and Jones caught a glimpse of red before the whole train lost its vital current and slid noiselessly to a stop in complete darkness. Silence. Stench. Then the woman began her dry cough again, an axe-chopping-wood cough sound, and Jones shut his eyes, even though it was completely dark, and tried not to perceive the outside world at all.
Eventually the train came to life again, and rumbled on. Soon enough Jones was alighting at Station 76. The lifts were out of order, so he climbed a circular staircase that turned and turned. He had to stop three times to get his breath before he finally emerged, into a dazzle of sunlight at street level. There were no taxicabs, so Jones walked the remaining half mile, passing out of habitation into a wilderness of half-dismantled houses, roofs falling in, windows cracked or boarded, cement beginning to reveal its true being as the dust that it was and the dust that it shall be again. Gigantic banks of nettles grew everywhere, a million leaves dusted with stingers like icing sugar. Jones approached a red car fitted with train wheels rather than tyres, and it piqued his interest; but when he got closer he saw that it was just a regular car, its chassis entirely covered with rust, the rubber of its tyres perished to rags.
Then Jones passed something he recognised: a large Miniluv van, brand new, parked at the side of the road. Two thinkpol agents were standing beside this, arms folded, watching him.
He checked the address again. Why was this person, this Evans, living in this dead part of the city? Was the Miniluv lorry there to surveil her, or to check up that Jones was following the dayorder? Best to assume both.
He mounted a steep step, past a rusting water butt and through an untended front garden overwhelmed by a giant knotted bloomless rose bush gone rogue. The bell didn’t work, so he knocked as loud as he could. Eventually the door was opened. A woman.
‘Evans?’ he said.
Her face was covered in fine lines, like silverpoint, and when she smiled two deeper crescent lines creased each cheek. She smiled now.
‘You’ve come from the Ministry of Love?’
‘I don’t work for …’ said Jones, suddenly feeling awkward. ‘I’m not technically part of the Ministry. I’m here to talk. With you – I’m a translator, and the Ministry would like a clarification on certain …’
He ran out of steam.
‘You’d better come in,’ said Evans, stepping back to let him pass. She was dressed in a pigeon-grey dress. The hallway was narrow and dark, its floor tiled in a diamond pattern. ‘The light doesn’t work here,’ she said, shutting the door. ‘Go right through to the back.’
He walked down the hall.
‘You have this entire house to yourself?’
‘Amazing, isn’t it? But most of the place is unlivable. There are mushrooms growing in the carpet of the sitting room and the walls are blue with mould. Mostly I live in the kitchen. And upstairs – I keep two rooms upstairs clean enough, one for my books and the other for my telescope.’
They came through into a grimy kitchen. A pile of turnips on the table. The plipping sound of an incontinent tap. Sunlight shone in shafts through greasy windowpanes.
‘Would you like tea?’ said Evans.
‘I would.’
‘I don’t have any. Would you like a coffee instead? Hah, too canny to answer that. Well, I don’t have any coffee either, although there’s some ersatz powder in the cupboard, and I have a third of a bottle of gin under the sink. So I’ll tell you what – if the Ministry of Love is interested in me, then I have to assume it won’t be long before I’m arrested and unpersoned. I’d hate to die leaving undrunk gin behind me. Let’s have a glass each, eh?’
Jones wasn’t about to say no to gin. He moved a pile of papers from a chair to the floor and sat. Evans brought out the bottle and two glasses and put them on the table. The tap continued audibly to measure out the half-seconds.
‘You have a telescope upstairs? On the roof?’
‘It’s not an optical telescope,’ Evans replied, taking her own seat. ‘You’re thinking of the wrong kind of kit. It’s a radio telescope and its receptors are here, next door and at the back of the garden. It’s the machinery I use to collate and decipher the radio-data. That’s what’s upstairs.’
‘I’ve never heard of such technology,’ said Jones.
‘No,’ agreed Evans. ‘I have access to old astronomical books for my work, and most of those are, as you would expect, concerned only with science. Sometimes through them I get little glimpses of how things used to be, a century and a half ago. They were much better, believe me. People in fine clothes, sumptuous houses, delicious food and wine. Things are worse now.’
Jones looked around for the telescreen.
‘You can’t say that,’ he noted.
‘I know. You’re looking for the screen? There’s no screen here. There was one in my old flat, of course, but since the Party moved me out here … nothing.’
‘You live a life,’ boggled Jones, ‘unobserved?’
‘They’re withdrawing from us,’ said Evans, simply. ‘A lot of the day-to-day oppression is habitual, I think. Social structures contain a lot of inertia. But since Oceania has … what would we say? Woken? Since that moment, they are increasingly un-interested in peripheral humanity. I don’t see much hope, in fact. Eventually they’ll either take specific actions to terminate the excess humanity, or else perhaps just cut off supplies from the collective farms.’
Jones stared at her. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘Have some gin,’ she said, emptying what was left in the bottle into two tumblers. ‘You could get hit by a bus tomorrow, as my old mum used to say.’ She handed Evans the glass.
‘I don’t understand. How can you say that? I don’t understand you. You’re an astronomer?’
‘I am.’
‘What is there to see? How can an astronomer possibly occupy her time? The stars are bits of fire a few kilometres away,’ said Jones. ‘The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’
‘Oh, I disagree.’
Disagree wasn’t an option.
‘I’m speaking the truth of the Party when I say that, comrade,’ Jones said, forcefully.
‘That truth could change tomorrow.’
‘Obviously,’ agreed Jones. ‘Nonetheless, it is today’s truth, and you would be veering crimewise to contradict it.’
‘Then I shall not contradict. Let’s talk about you. You’re a translator.’
