The next three days were Thomas’s happiest. Having sworn him to secrecy, Costa swiftly admitted Thomas into HALPEVAM’s inner sanctum. There he felt cocooned in Costa’s strange world, among the tangle of machinery that occupied the vast, brightly lit lab. It was the first place to hold his attention more effectively than the fantasy worlds he inhabited when gaming. That no one other than Costa had ever entered the lab before made him feel special.
Costa worked methodically, rapidly but unrushed, with a dignified sense of purpose. Thomas watched intently as the master moved from station to station, attaching new devices to existing ones, occasionally pausing to exchange Morse-coded messages with Kosti. Careful not to disturb him, Thomas bided his time and waited until Costa went to his coffee machine for a refill before asking, ‘So, what exactly is the plan?’
‘As the great Mike Tyson once put it,’ Costa replied with a grin, ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. That is, I’m sure, what HALPEVAM is thinking about my plan as I manipulate its entrails.’
Thomas envied Costa as much as he revered him. Gaming allowed Thomas the solitude he craved, but afforded him neither kudos nor self-esteem. Playing in someone else’s universe was not the same as creating one. HALPEVAM was the laudable product of Costa’s pristine seclusion. Just as it had been impossible for the Apostle John to feel lonely while manically writing the Book of Revelation in his Patmian cave, so Costa’s lab work shielded him from the loneliness constantly afflicting Thomas.
Over his cup of coffee, Costa sought to temper the youth’s admiration by sharing some of his darker thoughts. There were times, he confessed, when he feared that only a thin grey line separated him from the crazed adolescent locked up in his parents’ garage planning the next high school massacre. During the years he had spent designing and building HALPEVAM in his self-made technological prison, to avert losing his mind he would spend four weeks every summer floating off the southern coast of Crete on a small wooden boat, offline, reading nothing but poetry.
‘Why poetry?’ asked Thomas.
‘Because it’s all we have to prevent our dreams turning into nightmares,’ Costa replied.
A futurist since he had read Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto at a tender age, Costa’s faith in the future started receding in 1976 – the year he heard his beloved Sex Pistols singing ‘there’s no future’. Since then he had walked a hopeful tightrope over an abyss filled with dreams of emancipation shattered by the alienating power of his technologies. HALPEVAM was to be his redemption, his special gift to humanity.
‘Now look at me. I live in terror that it will fall into the hands of humanity’s worst enemies. Even if we restore the wormhole,’ he told Thomas emphatically, ‘we must destroy the whole damned thing within a week.’
Sharing as much technical detail as Thomas could digest, Costa described the accident that had created the wormhole. He explained how HALPEVAM relied on CREST, the wake of quanta from our lived experiences that Iris had called a river of life, and how he had built Cerberus to prevent big tech from tapping into it. But when he tested Cerberus’ capacity to scramble tiny strands of CREST, the wormhole had appeared unexpectedly.
Never before had the young man felt a stronger sense of purpose. ‘So, how do you plan to restore it now?’ he asked.
Costa explained that to keep the wormhole open and relatively stable, a similar process would be needed but that it would have to be incredibly delicate and coordinated with precisely the same process at Kosti’s end. He and Kosti had scheduled it to take place at 11 a.m. that Wednesday.
Iris was due to fly back to England the following day, but Eva’s plans were vaguer.
‘What’s up with your mum? Do you know what her plans are?’ Costa asked casually.
‘She was pressurizing me to spend Thanksgiving with her and her mum in New York and got pretty upset when I told her I’m going back to my dad’s before that. I didn’t dare ask what her plans are now.’
Having no idea whether the wormhole restoration experiment would work, or maybe turn his building into a hole in the ground, Costa decided not to go out of his way to remind Iris and Eva about it. So when they mentioned going out on Wednesday morning, only the second time they would have left the building since they arrived in San Francisco, he encouraged them. Thomas agreed they should be told nothing until after the experiment. If the wormhole got an extra lease of life, there would still be time to offer his mother and Iris one last opportunity to communicate with Siris and Eve.
‘And I think you better stay well clear of the building too,’ said Costa. ‘It would be best if you went out with them. And try to keep them away for as long as possible. Suggest lunch. They’ll never say no to you.’
Thomas was disappointed but understood: there was no knowing what havoc the experiment might wreak.
And so, that Wednesday, at just after one in the afternoon, having spent an awkward morning walking along the waterfront with his mother and Iris before ending up at a restaurant, Thomas made his excuses to rush back, leaving the two of them to enjoy their lunch. He was immediately relieved to see that the building was still standing. Hurriedly he made his way upstairs to the lab.
From the mess hall, everything looked normal. So normal that he feared the experiment had not worked. He called Costa via the intercom, not daring to enter the lab uninvited. Costa eventually appeared, his face ashen.
‘How did it go?’ asked Thomas breathlessly.
‘Too damned well,’ said Costa, sitting down slowly on the bench. He leaned back and gazed at the ceiling, smiling faintly. ‘Too damned well,’ he said again, with a distinctly Cretan gesture of amazement.
‘What do you mean you crossed over?’ Eva demanded to know incredulously.
It was as undeniable as it was unbelievable. Throughout the preceding weeks, Costa had shielded them from the technicalities involved. While Iris and Eva had to be within the vicinity of HALPEVAM in order to communicate with their other selves, Costa had taken care of the actual exchange of information, providing them with printed copies of incoming dispatches and converting their missives into an appropriate form for sending. They had no idea of the almost undetectable orifice appearing as a tiny blue dot on the wall behind HALPEVAM’s transmuter array. And he had seen no reason to tell them that their dispatches were sent and received by pointing a microwave antenna at that minuscule blue point of light on that nondescript wall. Now, Costa had no option but to let them see for themselves what had replaced the blue dot.
At first sight, it was as if an artist had painted on the wall an uneven oval-shaped patch of black, about three metres across. Until you got closer and tried to touch it. Iris was reminded of a sculpture by Anish Kapoor, which used a perfectly black convex form to create the illusion of a black surface that one’s hand would pass straight through if you tried to touch it. Thomas was the first to dare try; it was as if the wall weren’t there. Frightened to see his finger disappearing, he pulled it straight back.
‘Can you guess what’s on the other side?’ Costa asked expressionlessly.
They could. It was a portal to the Other Now.
‘So, are you coming?’ he pressed them. ‘You have a little less than an hour to decide before it collapses for good. It’s perfectly safe,’ he added as casually as if he were suggesting a trip to the pub.
‘How on earth do you know?’ asked Eva.
‘That’s what I’m telling you: I’ve been through it. And as you can see, I came back. In one piece. But it won’t stay open for much longer. So, make your minds up.’
They sat around the dinner table for the last time, mugs of coffee in hand, struggling to absorb the news. In a mood better than any he had been in for years, Costa broke with tradition and put some music on. Iris noticed he had chosen Roxy Music’s ‘Both Ends Burning’. She would soon know why.
‘Our coordinated attempt to stabilize the wormhole this morning,’ Costa said good-humouredly, ‘was, not to put too fine a point on it, a qualified disaster.’ The trick, he explained, was to use Cerberus’ technology at both ends simultaneously. The concept was sound and it worked. The wormhole was stabilized. Except, having nothing to base their input-output computations on, he and Kosti had miscalculated the aggregate energy release by a ridiculous factor. ‘Both ends burning,’ he admitted, ‘my tiny blue wormhole grew into a black tunnel three metres wide.’
So, the wormhole had been made stable and expanded into a wormtunnel – but only for a very short while. The result was the brief window of opportunity that they now faced: to step through into the Other Now, if they wished, and live the rest of their lives there, or to choose Our Now, knowing that no such opportunity would ever arise again.
‘Did you really cross over? Where did you end up? Did you speak to anyone?’ Thomas asked hungrily.
Costa explained that he had spent a little less than an hour with Kosti in his lab. ‘The tricky part was not going but getting back.’ His passage to the Other Now was made possible by the presence of his own DNA at the other end – in the form of Kosti. How to make the return trip when they were both in the same place? ‘To make sure I would end up back here, I left behind some of my DNA to function as a homing beacon.’ Mistaking the expressions of amazement and shock on their faces for interest in the technicalities, he went on. ‘If you must know, it was a jar of cotton buds soaked in my saliva.’ Their expressions were not to be mistaken this time: he immediately realized he had overdone it.
‘But how was it?’ asked Thomas.
‘A little like meeting a long-lost twin,’ he said in an emotionally charged voice. But he hadn’t met Eve or Siris, for the simple reason that Kosti had kept them well away that morning, just as he had Eva and Iris. But both of them would be there now, following Kosti’s summons and the astonishing news of Costa’s surprise visit. Their presence in Kosti’s lab meant that if Eva and Iris were to jump through the black hole in the wall, they would end up there too.
‘What about me?’ asked Thomas, his mind racing. ‘Is my doppelgänger also at Kosti’s lab?’
Iris stole a glance at Eva, whose strained expression spoke volumes. Costa decided to explain the situation himself. Time was scarce, and what had to be said had to be said quickly. He broke the news calmly. ‘No, Thomas,’ he said. ‘There is no you at Kosti’s lab. In fact, there is no you in the Other Now at all, I’m afraid.’
Thomas looked dazed, trying to grasp the meaning of this information – and its implications.
‘Eve chose a different path from me,’ Eva said quietly. ‘She has a daughter, Agnes.’
‘So does that mean I can’t go to the Other Now?’ said Thomas urgently. ‘What would happen if I just stepped into the wormhole?’ Apparently, the news that he had never been born in the Other Now and that he had a sister of sorts mattered less to him.
‘Yes,’ said Eva turning to Costa with similar urgency, the realization dawning. ‘What would happen?’
‘Well’, replied Costa ‘if any living creature lacking a DNA counterpart at the other end were to step into the wormhole, then in theory Cerberus would detect a breach of security and destroy CREST, destroy HALPEVAM and presumably … destroy that person.’
Thomas went pale.
‘Relax,’ Costa continued, looking at Thomas reassuringly. ‘Even though you lack a DNA counterpart, were you to cross over holding tightly on to someone with a DNA counterpart on the other side, you will end up safely there, your companion’s DNA granting safe passage to both.’
‘Isn’t it a little irresponsible to be hypothesizing like this, with no evidence?’ asked Eva anxiously.
‘I have all the evidence we need, Eva,’ replied Costa nonchalantly. ‘We tested it with Baloo, Kosti’s dog. On my way back I stepped first into the wormtunnel, followed by Kosti, who held Baloo in his arms to test our theory. Lo and behold, both made it here intact, Cerberus treating the Labrador simply as additional information. Then Kosti stepped right back into the wormtunnel, still holding Baloo. Both made it home safely, courtesy of a pile of DNA swabs he had left behind.’
Thomas’s eyes lit up. ‘Which means that I can come with you, Costa, right?’ he asked, glancing at his mother.
Iris intervened. ‘Let me tell you a story from your past, Thomas. You were only ten at the time,’ she said in her warmest voice, ‘but it has remained with me ever since. And I think, before any of us make any big decisions, it would be worth recounting now.’
Unsurpassed in the art of diverting a conversation, Iris had captured her companions’ full attention.
‘One evening back in Brighton, your mother came round in something of a state and asked me to look after you for a few hours so that she could go out by herself and clear her head. She seemed frazzled, almost despairing. When I asked what the trouble was she said that when she picked you up earlier that day from school, she had seen you punching a younger boy and then taking a toy car from him. She explained how she had tried to reprimand you for doing so but you had doggedly defended what you’d done. You told her there was nothing wrong with your behaviour, except that you’d been careless enough to get caught. All of your mum’s attempts to convince you otherwise had come to nothing. She had tried to persuade you that, for their own sake, smart people renounce violence towards others, that it was in your own best interests to do so if you wanted to live a successful life. But her arguments had all crashed on the shoals of your brilliantly precocious reasoning. She was at her wits’ end.
‘I agreed to look after you,’ Iris went on, ‘and so your mother went out and you spent the evening with me. I probed a little, asking what had happened, and you explained your point of view. I must say,’ she said, glancing at Thomas, ‘that for a ten-year-old bully you were terribly impressive – and frightening! You rejected the idea that a successful life demands renouncing the right to be violent to others, to coerce them to do what suits you. You had a better idea, you claimed: learn how to appear as if you have renounced violence, so as to get others to relax around you, but be ready to pounce on them, to bully them, the moment it suits you – as long, of course, as you can do this without getting caught. In other words, to be successful learn the art of pretending to be good, strategically. Do you remember how I responded?’
Thomas admitted he hadn’t the faintest memory of any of it.
‘I told you the story of Odysseus and the Sirens – the mythical island-dwelling creatures whose mesmerizing song lured passing sailors to a beach, where they invariably butchered them. Like every enterprising man, Odysseus wanted to have his cake and eat it: to satisfy his burning desire to hear the Sirens’ song but also to avoid being lured by it to his death. So he instructed his ship’s crew to plug their ears with wax so they could not hear a sound then sail close to the island’s shore but, first, tie him tightly to the ship’s mast so that he could not succumb to temptation and join the Sirens. I remember you were intrigued by the story but, understandably, unclear what relevance Odysseus’ story had to your quarrel with your mum. The answer I gave you then is the one I give you now: a good life requires that we find, like Odysseus, a strong mast to which to tie ourselves when it matters, lest we remain slaves to our every whim. This mast must be good and it must be self-chosen, but crucially it cannot simply be another, higher or more powerful desire. It must be something separate from and independent of our self. Lashing ourselves to it is the only way of ensuring the true freedom and autonomy that we crave.’
Costa suddenly understood what Iris was up to. This was her roundabout way of breaking to her friends the news that she was not planning to join them in the Other Now. And what better way to do this than via a rendition of her favourite theme: the sovereignty of good – her conviction that great art cannot be willed into existence by the calculus of an artist’s desires; that, similarly, exquisite music and brilliant mathematical proofs emerge for their own sake, not because of a musician’s or a mathematician’s self-interested scheming. By lecturing Thomas on how freedom can only be built on rational self-restraint, she was working her way to announcing that she was staying put. A convoluted train of thought, but one that Costa saw through.
‘Do you know what you asked me, Thomas, all those years ago?’ Iris went on. ‘You asked: how can my mast be made of something I don’t want? It is the most important question of all. If one’s mast is not to be made of one’s own desires, then what is it to be made of? And my answer is this: it must be made of a capacity to do what is right, and to do it for no reason at all – except that it is right and good.’
‘But how can it be reasonable to do something for no reason?’ Thomas now asked. His unexpected comebacks always gave Eva a small thrill, who enjoyed being reminded of quite how smart her usually withdrawn son could sound.
‘Animals and computers always have practical reasons for doing things,’ retorted Iris. ‘This is why they never do great things! To achieve true greatness, genuine freedom, you must be like the sculptor who sets aside her ego before chiselling a statue, surrendering fully to the feeling that she will go berserk unless she gives it form. Not being a bully is like a great work of art that you sweat long and hard to produce for no reason other than that you must. Just as art is, and can only be, an end in itself, so good things happen only for their own sake, for the hell of it – not because our desires drive them but only after we restrain those desires. Ironically, it is only then that our desires can be satisfied, as a by-product of our success in not being their slaves.’
For Iris, doing something for nothing was not merely possible but the prerequisite for a good life. Her subversive belief that reciprocity sucks, that life should not be lived on the basis of one quid pro quo after the next, was the reason she had been so moved by Esmeralda’s Soho Address – and so devastated by the news of her violent death. For Esmeralda’s words were a paean to the seditious idea that had motivated Iris since she was a girl: that love, happiness and freedom meant losing one’s self in another, not merely exchanging or transacting with another.
It took only a small additional mental stride from lecturing Thomas to offering her friends an explanation of her difficult decision: ‘The very things that the Other Now’s laws and institutions have revived, protected and made great again – a world of transactions, of exchange values and of markets – are the very things I wish to escape. So why would I ever cross over to what sounds like my worst nightmare?’
Listening to his difficult friend, Costa was reminded of one his favourite episodes of Star Trek. In it, the crew of the USS Enterprise chance upon a centuries-old spaceship in which they discover three cryogenically preserved humans. It transpires that in the early 1990s these three people had been suffering from incurable illnesses and had paid vast sums of money to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that, one day, they would be found, reanimated and cured by the advanced medicine of some alien species. Having been revived – and indeed cured – one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, formerly a rich industrialist, is informed by Captain Picard that he has been discovered by twenty-fourth-century humans living in a society in which technology provides for everyone’s material needs. The accumulation of riches and possessions, which had so preoccupied the man throughout his life, is now considered infantile. The challenge is not to enrich oneself but to improve oneself. Mortified, Offenhouse tells Picard that he has it all wrong: ‘It was never about possessions. It’s about power.’
‘Power to do what?’ asks Picard.
‘Power to control your life, your destiny,’ Offenhouse replies.
Picard looks at him patronizingly and tells him, ‘That type of control is an illusion.’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ points out Offenhouse.
Costa recounted Picard’s conversation with Offenhouse and then said to Iris, ‘You’re staying, and I bet this is why. Because in a true utopia, such as Star Trek’s twenty-fourth-century abundance-communism, Offenhouse’s way of thinking has no place. But in the Other Now, it absolutely does.’ Momentarily unsure of himself, he felt he had to ask, ‘Am I right?’
‘Yes,’ said Iris. ‘If your wormhole led to Picard’s world, I’d leap through it without hesitation. But even though the Other Now is undoubtedly a far, far better place than ours in many respects, I refuse absolutely to go there.’
As a feminist freedom junkie, Iris knew the past was a horrible place, especially for women, but that was not a good reason to praise the present. Similarly, the hideousness of Our Now was not a good reason to leave for the Other Now, even if it constituted a remarkable improvement.
‘I applaud Esmeralda, Akwesi, Eve, Ebo and the other OC rebels for eradicating capitalism, and I do not criticize them for preserving money and markets and those other financial instruments to get things done. Until we live in a world where material needs have been eliminated by Star Trek replicators on every wall, things like money and auctions will remain essential. Until that happens, the only alternative is the Soviet-like rationing system that vested horrid arbitrary power in the ugliest of bureaucrats.’
‘But if, as you say, you think it a far, far better place, why would you not cross over to it?’ asked Thomas.
‘Because I prefer,’ Iris answered, ‘to stay in Our horrid Now than live in a much better version of it that only makes the prospect of a Star Trek communism feel further away.’
Iris was making the point that, once upon a time, she had disdained other leftists for making – that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better, that improvements only hinder the generation of the forces that bring radical change.
‘I did not waste my youth fighting against Thatcher’s campaign to reduce all values to prices only in order to migrate now to a place where markets are even more stable, sustainable and admired – loved, even. When we reconfigure societies to put exchange at their centre, Thomas, we violate our nature. Humans thrived by hunting together, cooking communally, making music and telling stories around a blazing fire at night. Sure, the societies that replaced these communal practices with market exchanges unleashed great powers, allowing them to overwhelm others that did not. But there was a price to pay. Market exchange dissolves what makes us human. It is why our souls feel sick. By allowing exchange value to triumph over doing things together for their own sake – for the sheer hell of it – we end up crying ourselves to sleep at night. It’s what depresses us and enriches the self-help gurus and big pharma. I am, I admit, fascinated, impressed, awestruck even, by what the OC rebels have achieved in the Other Now, particularly the democratization of corporations, money, land ownership and markets. Except that democratized markets still prioritize the transactional quid pro quo mentality that undermines the sovereignty of good and, ultimately, our fundamental well-being. Democratized market societies, freed from capitalism, are infinitely preferable to what we have here, except for one crucial thing: they entrench exchange value and thereby, I fear, make impossible a genuine revolution that leads to the final toppling of markets – and thus to the emergence of Picard’s society, Costa. In any case,’ she concluded more light-heartedly, ‘anyone who believes that happiness lies elsewhere is a fool.’
Costa and Eva looked at each other. They required no telepathy to know what the other was thinking: that raging against the system was Iris’s only way of being, her loneliness vaccine. The Other Now was too pleasant, too wholesome to rage against. It would have made Iris’s life intolerable.
‘It is almost time,’ said Costa. ‘In less than fifteen minutes the wormhole will begin to lose its integrity. Iris, I think you have made your position clear.’
‘You cross if you want,’ she said pompously. ‘The lady is not for crossing.’
‘What about you, Eva?’ asked Costa.
‘Face it, Eva,’ interjected Iris. ‘You are the epitome of Homo systemicus, adapting to any system of authority and ready to do its bidding. If we lived in the Soviet Union you would be a party apparatchik while I languished in some gulag. Never a shrew, but entirely tamed, like Desdemona you preserve your purity by your complete submission to whichever system prevails. Your only saving grace is your love for this young man,’ she said, looking at Thomas. ‘It makes little difference to you if you stay or go. But crossing over will offer him his best chance of a decent life.’
Eva was appalled that she agreed with Iris. Were it not for Thomas, she would have been in two minds. The Other Now sounded fascinating, but Our Now had been kind to her too. Thomas was, however, the clincher. Being with Costa had, for the first time in years, brought him calmness and purpose. Crossing over would extract him from a world of pain, not least the monster that was his father. Moreover, over the preceding weeks Eva had begun to think of Eve as a sister and Ebo not just as a brother-in-law but as a force for good. And then there was Kosti, whom she was dying to meet, if only to compare and contrast him with Costa, Cleo and also Mari, Kosti’s partner. Not to mention Siris, of course – heavens above, she would be losing one Iris to gain another, possibly a fiercer one! In the Other Now, Eva realized, she would have that which she lacked here: an extended family, including a half-sister for Thomas.
‘Well, Costa, I will go if you will,’ said Eva, knowing that if he went, Thomas would gladly follow.
It had also been clear to Costa that, from the moment he laid eyes on it, the teenager had been dying to dive through the wormtunnel – as long as Costa went first. Costa realized it was up to him, not Eva. Mother and son would cross over if he did, not otherwise. Like Iris, Costa also believed that the Other Now would be a better place for Thomas and so for Eva too. But how could he tell them he wasn’t going? How could he extinguish their best hope of a worthwhile future by declaring his determination to stay to ensure HALPEVAM never fell into the bastards’ hands?
That’s when he decided to lie. Predicting that Thomas would only walk into the wormtunnel if he were to go in first, Costa played along.
‘I shall step in first,’ he told Eva and Thomas. ‘You two follow me immediately. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t forget to hold hands tightly. OK?’
Anxiously, they promised to comply.
‘What about HALPEVAM?’ asked Thomas.
Costa explained that he had installed a failsafe device that would unleash an electromagnetic pulse so powerful that it would destroy every piece of technology in his lab once they had crossed over.
Thomas was delighted and instantly agreed. Eva felt she had no choice. Iris looked at Costa suspiciously for a while and then stood, bade all three of them a stern farewell and set off towards her room.
Thomas ran after her and threw his arms around her shoulders. Eva rose and made her way over to them. She hugged Thomas and then extended the embrace to include Iris as well. The three stood there for a long moment, tearless but all choked up.
Costa broke the silence. ‘If we are to cross over, we have to go – right now.’
Eva and Thomas broke away from Iris. Costa looked Iris in the eye and said, ‘See you.’ Then he followed Eva and Thomas into the lab, closing the door behind him.
Eva and Thomas stood next to him, holding hands in readiness for the crossing as instructed. Costa smiled and walked casually into the perfect blackness on the wall. Eva and Thomas followed him immediately. The lab was suddenly empty and, but for the whirring machines, silent.
Costa did not bother Iris that night. He had no idea if she had cottoned on to his plan to sneak back into Our Now, but by the time he emerged from his lab several hours later, there was no sound. He assumed she was asleep and went to bed quietly. He would save the ambush for the following morning – around 10 a.m., he thought, an hour before she was due to leave for the airport – giving them enough, but not too much, time together.
Iris betrayed no surprise when he appeared in the kitchen the following morning, where she sat drinking her coffee.
‘It’s impossible to destroy HALPEVAM safely from afar,’ Costa ventured sheepishly. ‘I have to do the job myself, in situ, thoroughly and over time.’
As Costa gave his explanations, Iris stared at him with an expression of sympathy mixed, unmistakably, with pity. Costa was, to her mind, merely the latest in a long line of male engineers who fantasized about breathing life into mechanical creations for some deluded higher purpose. Her list began with the Greek god of technology, Hephaestus, paused at Dr Frankenstein and ended with AI, or artificial idiocy as she called it. None of them had led to anything but ill in the end. Goodness knows what horrors HALPEVAM will beget, Iris had thought when Costa first explained his towering project to her. Her love for him, however, prevented her from sharing her thoughts.
And yet Iris’s contempt for the defective sex was balanced to some degree by scorn for her own. She almost chuckled at the thought of Eva’s equivalent inventions – the terrible economic models that Medusa-like turned the mind of any student who studied them to stone. Oh, how she would miss her! Iris’s Brighton sanctuary had always offered her the essential freedoms – quiet and independence – that Virginia Woolf had argued were the prerequisites for any writer or artist. But that room of her own would be terribly lonely now that Eva was not on the far side of the wall.
Costa’s explanations and self-justifications had by now morphed into his usual diatribe: the terrible uses that big tech would put his inventions to given half a chance, the importance of not leaving any trace of his blueprints online, his paranoia that, even if he destroyed HALPEVAM, ‘they’ could reconstruct it by reading his engrams, and so on.
Eventually she interrupted him. ‘For you, dear Costa, I fear something altogether closer to home.’
‘And what is that?’ he asked.
‘That your soul is too pure, too delicate, to bear the burden of having lied to young Thomas.’
Costa did not reply. But he knew Iris was right. His heart could withstand the solitude of his lab, the fear of big tech and the loneliness that Kosti’s family had made him so aware of. But it could not also endure the weight of the lie he had spoken and acted upon so effortlessly. The thought of Thomas’s disappointment broke his heart.
Iris’s phone rang; her taxi had arrived. Costa helped carry her suitcase downstairs.
Accustomed to farewells, they went through the motions of pretending it was no big deal and of promising to be in touch soon. Costa stood on the pavement for a moment, watching as the car drove silently away, a poor substitute for the goodbye he would never be able to say to Eva and Thomas. And then he rushed back upstairs to get on with the elimination of any trace of HALPEVAM’s existence.
A month later, Costa put up his lab for sale. His work at an end, he intended to move to Crete permanently in the New Year. He was sixty-four. Not a bad age to retire. Maybe that wooden boat off the southern coast of the island could be his salvation again: a conduit to Another Now of his own, where his lying to Thomas might one day look nobler, less damning. Maybe he could coax Iris into visiting him, to reminisce about Eva, to imagine together how Thomas was flourishing in a world without banks, oligarchs or share markets. Then again, maybe not.
On the day he was supposed to fly to Athens, where he was to transfer to a domestic flight to Heraklion, he changed his mind. Instead, he caught a plane to London. The land of quiet desperation was better suited to his new project. It was not enough, he had decided, to wreck HALPEVAM. If he had been smart enough to tap into CREST, to build the damn thing, big tech could do it too. His duty now was to create gadgets that constantly sabotaged theirs. He would have to be careful, though. A fixed address of any sort would eventually be traceable. He would have to be permanently on the move, always one step ahead of them, dedicating his life to being their worst enemy.
Once the plane had taken off from San Francisco, he opened his laptop to pass the time. Unthinkingly, he created a new file and started typing. Ten hours later, as the plane was approaching Heathrow and the flight attendants asked him to stow his computer for landing, he found he had written a couple of chapters. Before switching off, he scrolled back to the first page to give the book a title: The Madness of Hephaestus. It would be a memoir.