Asaph sits down at the table in the canteen. He always looks forward to his monthly lunch with Kala. Sometimes it’s all he’s got. This has been one of those months. He keeps a slight smile on his face because he has to. He doesn’t even have to think about it now, it’s habit. The managers have set their machines to notice anything else. Asaph is in Research and Development. His primary goal in life is not to be noticed by management. His secondary goal is research and development. “Good day to you,” he says brightly to Kala as she brings over her tray. And he means it.
She greets him back. She’s also got that slight smile, but hers is a different flavour, the slight smile of special projects. That comes with a hint of continual terror. “The Company,” she says, “have generously also given me the work of Geldroy to do while he’s on indefinite sick leave.” The tone isn’t sarcastic. It’s a breezy sincerity that Asaph habitually reads as if it were sarcasm directed against their employer. She seems to treat his tone in the same way. Or she might mean every word she says and, as far as she’s concerned, so might he. Neither of them will ever actually know, he thinks.
“I’m continuing that project about causing fear through manipulating ‘the Uncanny Valley,’” he says.
“Yeah, tell me more.” They’re chiefly friends, if they are friends, because they’re close enough in security clearance to talk freely about their work.
“Well, for decades, everyone’s known that human beings have big problems with representations of reality, particularly representations of people that are textured very close to how reality is textured, but not perfectly. The Company have been looking for a way to quantify that process, with a view to weaponizing it in the fight against the Three Great Threats of terrorism, to see if it can be used to intimidate, scare, change belief systems. I’ve been given access to some human brains –”
“In person or out of person?”
“Out of person.” He keeps his tone calm, but that tiny question was very important to him at the start of this week, and is still not entirely as solved as he’d like it to be, though for now he seems to have won that one.
“Okay.”
“We’re getting into some fine detail already. The history of this stuff is glorious.” He keeps his tone level, though he realises he said the word ‘history’, which is an alert for those on lower security levels, and maybe a box tick toward a check on his.
“‘The record of this stuff does sound interesting, yes.” She didn’t even emphasise the word she’s suggesting to him as an alternative. If she is.
“When the first representational motion pictures were made, audiences ran from the theatre when they saw what they thought was a train coming straight at them. Then, when social media evolved, when people were presented with metaphors for lived reality that were not reality itself, the negative emotional impact was enormous. That example lasted several decades. The feedback element was important there, I think. Why didn’t people feel at home in online…? I nearly said ‘spaces’ –”
“When the whole point is, there’s no real space involved.”
“Right. Why didn’t people feel at home in those early social media communities for more than a few years? Why did something always spoil that home? Because, I think, human beings have a feeling for the grain of actual experience. They become gradually disturbed, having been initially comforted, by the sensation of not being alone when they are actually alone.”
“And that situation became less and less of a problem with functional virtual realities and then linked presence in actual reality, and so on…”
“And thus the angst itself was overcome and bypassed instead of investigated. An investigation into it is what I’m attempting now.”
“Interesting. I guess that’s why we’re all so happy now.”’
‘I guess it is.’
She pauses for a moment, then tries him with her new thought. ‘Why do you think we evolved like that? To notice that granularity? What’s the evolutionary advantage in sensing that, when it wouldn’t have been a problem until the early modern era, after human evolution had, for most uses of the term, ceased?’
That gives him pause. He has not, he realises, considered this at all. This is the best news all week. ‘That’s brilliant,’ he says. ‘I can’t see how it goes anywhere –’
‘But that’s the joy of Research and Development, right?’
‘One of the many joys,’ says Asaph. ‘Of course, the most urgent question is if that thought contributes to the aim of weaponizing the Uncanny.’
‘Of course. How’s that going?’
‘I have used the Uncanny Valley to make several chimps slightly uncomfortable.’
She taps her fork on her plate and quickly wipes her mouth with a napkin , which Asaph always takes to be their shared code for laughter. ‘Excellent progress.’
‘Still, I’ll add your idea to my list of things to think about. Anyway, enough about me. What are you working on?’
‘Well, Geldroy’s project turns out to be really interesting. Obviously. He’s been looking into ways of observing the really small that don’t need exponential increases in the amount of energy required to observe the smallest particles. Now, obviously, that’s been on the cards for years, since it became clear that every law of physics, right down to quantum theory, was a matter of statistical averages, that these ‘laws’ weren’t set in stone. That in itself suggested there was a more fundamental level to reality. Geldroy was looking at exploiting exceptions to the laws and had started to make observations.’
‘The potential for weaponizing energetic particles is obvious. Obviously.’
She pauses, and he’s convinced for a moment that he’s nearly made her laugh. ‘Obviously. Except he hadn’t found a new level of particulate structure at the smallest lengths he was studying.’ Which is, she doesn’t say, probably why he’s on indefinite sick leave. ‘So I want to get back to that, to get that back on track.’
‘Of course.’ If he said obviously again, that might be noticed.
‘Beneath the Planck length, beneath the fluctuations of the quantum foam which defeated researchers for so long, he seems to have found a different order of structure.’
This is very strange. Is it a trap set by the Company? He’s heard of incidents where they’d planted something in the materials, usually obvious to the experimenter, particularly in circumstances where the project was security sensitive. This must be what Kala’s asking him, if he can share his experience of such situations. Her expression offers only the tiniest hint of inherent complexity. ‘It could be noise in the experimental set-up, of course. But, let me ask you, as someone from an entirely different discipline… wouldn’t such noise have to be itself of a very high energy to manifest in the experiment at all?’
In other words, the Company’s power may extend to matters economic, political and military, but she doesn’t think they can actually do magic. Neither does he. It’s one of the things that appeals to him about R&D, that he can go out at night, look up at the stars, and know that some things will always be beyond the grasp of economics. ‘That’s my feeling too. What kind of thing are we talking about? What sort of structure? You do still mean the probability fluctuations we call “particles”, right?’
‘I… don’t think I do. But I can’t put a name to anything yet. I’ll let you know more next time.’
He refrains from any exclamation that would be noticed. And yet he can’t help but be amazed. That she brought this wonder with her, that such potential is living inside her. ‘I very much look forward to that.’
And then their talk turns to the weather.
Asaph spends the month concentrating on making chimps uncomfortable, but he tries to be at home for his children for at least some of the time. His wife Sorsha is under pressure too, with so many weddings required at the chapel, now that the drive for bigger families has been announced. They themselves, with a son and a daughter, are neither penalised nor rewarded under the new program. Sorsha says, in bed, using their private language where they touch their fingertips at particular places on each other’s spines, that a lot of the couples she’s marrying hardly seem to know each other, that they’re lying to her, to each other, and to Prosperity Jesus. But seeing how poor they are, how they’re going to benefit from breeding as swiftly as possible, she can’t bring herself to deny them.
Angus and Deschamel, their little boy and girl, are growing up full of questions, of course. The times when they come home talking about the latest version of the history of Europe secretly terrify Asaph, the times when they’re wondering how it can make sense terrify him even more. The contradictions are supposed to be deliberate. A way to weed out those who aren’t in line with the corporate vision, the ones who ask questions. But Asaph knows there’s another level to how the machine works. He knows that whenever a cog misses a gear in the Company, mere words flow in from all quarters to attempt to bridge the gap. But words are no substitute for cogs and gears. They’re not made of the same stuff. He feels that history as taught has a lot of places where words have flooded into gaps where cogs and gears should be present.
At the next months’ lunch, Kala is looking excited. This is fine. This is allowed. It’s about her work. But nevertheless, the excitement immediately makes them both nervous. This is sharkerlar, as the slang has it, the nausea about feeling too excited.
‘I think I can now begin to describe what we’ve observed,’ she says, without even having greeted him. ‘It’s very low energy. Everything at higher energy levels, the level where there are what used to be called particles, is busy being matter, energy, and the fundamental force –‘
‘But you’re talking about what’s underneath that? About the very small?’
‘Right. When you get down to below the Planck length, when you start to use probability charting methods to observe what should be unobservable, well, those little fluctuations of possibility down there, they seem to form into… recurring patterns. It’s as if that underlying level of reality is informing everything built on it, directly, and I mean directly, telling matter/energy and force what to do.’
Asaph is alarmed that this has suddenly become… overwhelmingly and unavoidably political. Because this sounds very like unauthorised religion. He fumbles mentally toward deploying any useful language. ‘It’s just as well it’s not actually doing that, because it can’t be.’
‘Of course not. Cultists would make such a mountain out of this tiny molehill.’ Cultists who believed in Intelligent Design, for example, who followed a God that intervened in the great mechanisms of nature in ways that were current and ongoing, rather than through the theologically obvious process of choosing, before the start of history, those who were to be blessed with fame and fortune. God was not meant to intervene in the here and now. If He did, He might offer… opinions. ‘It’s a great blessing that this was discovered inside the Company. It would be terrible if it became more widely studied. It requires careful context.’
‘It certainly does. So this looks like…?’
‘It’s as if it’s… language. Programming. I’m advancing a metaphor that it’s like cell memory in the human body, that certain kinds of spacetime are programmed to include certain possibilities within them.’
‘That’s…’ Only slightly safer. ‘… potentially of great interest in terms of weaponization. Obviously.’
‘Because those possibilities could include explosions, yes.’ Kala bears her teeth in a wide grin which reminds Asaph of the responses of his uncomfortable, threatened chimps. ‘Management are sending a team to debate my findings on Tuesday. Which is of course very welcome. I’ve been told there is going to be a values aspect to the debate.’ There’ll be a largely silent individual sitting at one end of the table, checking to make sure Kala isn’t speaking sedition, hasn’t stumbled on the unravelling of the planned and perfect world. If it turns out someone else, or even something else, is planning all of reality, she may actually have done just that.
He wants to say he hopes he’ll see her again next month, that he hopes Geldroy’s illness has not infected her too. He wants to reach out and touch her hand. But that would definitely spread the illness to him. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘fingers crossed that everything’s okay.’
‘Fingers crossed,’ she says.
Asaph notices that she hasn’t touched her lunch.
Asaph worries. He makes himself do and think of other things. He walks a lot, around the compound, on the track. He loses a little weight.
He hangs around the usual corner of the canteen at the usual time a month later, but Kala doesn’t arrive. He does nothing about that. He doesn’t even consider it much. Apart from in the middle of one night, where the sounds of one of the children dreaming wake him up, and he goes to the toilet and he stops for a moment looking out of the window at the silent outside, thinking about the information and purpose everywhere around him.
He tries again next month. She’s back.
They sit down immediately, without a word. ‘I’m glad your work allows you a moment for lunch,’ he says, daringly.
‘I’m glad too. I’ve been so busy.’ She isn’t displaying any injuries, as those who’ve come back from values-related debate sometimes do. And she’s being a little daring too, so it must have gone well. ‘It turns out there isn’t a religious dimension to what we’re working on at all.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Not unless… the unknown uses software.’
That’s a standard euphemism for God in any sentence that might attract blasphemy listening. But Asaph is too amazed to register that for more than a moment. ‘So you think it’s… software? Information?’
She’s started eating. Heartily. She pauses between mouthfuls. ‘Listen, I’ve been authorised to invite in specialists from other disciplines. Do you want to come and see, in a couple of months?’
‘See what?’ He’s delighted for her. She looks to be heading for promotion. He raises his water glass a little.
She smiles back. It looks genuine. ‘We might be heading for something we can replicate.’
The Special Projects building is designed to take power from the high winds on this part of the coast, like a sail standing out, the appropriate sea rise level back from the salt flats. The sight of twenty years of higher tides being anticipated always depresses Asaph, but nothing can entirely dim his mood today. He’s shared as much as he can with his wife, nothing with his children, apart from some serious hugging this morning. He shows his newly accessorised pass to the guys on the gate and through he goes.
Kala is there to meet him. ‘We’ve waited for you. Getting the team to wait has been tough, I tell you. Which means it’ll all collapse when we show it to you.
He laughs along with her, delighted to be able to.
She leads him down the green and blue sea-themed corridor to the lab suite, where he’s introduced to the rest of the team, about half of whom turn out to be glef. Asaph had been privately considering that he, along with his wife, when the children have grown up, might at least try it out for a summer. But those thoughts came from a time before the new Company family plan, and nobody quite knows where gleves stand now. Asaph privately wonders if Kala gathered these scientists to her when it became clear she could offer a modicum of favour and protection. ‘Okay, so we’ve been documenting long stretches of probability variations at this miniscule level of attention, sampled locally at various points. We have no idea what we’re documenting, but we see repeated patterns. We’ve brought in linguists who tell us this reminds them not so much of a human language, but, as I said, more of a programming language. And now we think we have a way to replicate what we’re seeing. Heather?’
Heather is one of the glef scientists. She has that calm, unbothered look about her. She opens one of the panels in the display section of the suite, and brings out a living human brain, with the modules and power supply hanging from it that suggest it’s out of person, but person-attached. Asaph doesn’t like to see it. He’s had to work with a couple of these. He hasn’t mentioned that to his wife.
Kala notes his discomfort. ‘Norry here is in an induced coma. We intend to kill him after the run.’ She puts the brain on a lab table, still connected to the mechanisms from the suite.
Asaph lets out a breath, hoping he’s not revealing too much. It would be so easy to let his guard down. ‘Fair enough.’
Heather has raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Seriously, don’t worry about Norry. He’s away with the fairies. You see, we thought about bringing in –’
‘Heather means she thought, this is her contribution.’
Heather makes the ‘let’s get past that’ hand gesture, batting the compliment sideways. ‘We thought about bringing in ideas from the field of probability manipulation. This has always been a tremendously marginal effect, replicable, just about, but so fragile it gets lost in the noise. That’s been the case since it was first discovered, during what was called “psi research” in the 1970s. It’s clear that some aspect of brain function can alter probability, vaguely, sometimes. Some robust research was, however, carried out about twenty years ago, in secret, under the aegis of a competitor, and, well… Norry here worked for them, and…’
That gesture again. ‘They stimulated parts of the brain that the researchers in the 1970s didn’t have access to, and got some solid, if tiny, results. They could, just about, influence the decay of a lump of radioactive material to blip faster or slower, by some tiny factor, just over half the time. It would not be enough to give you an advantage at a game of craps, unless you played for around half the lifetime of the universe.’
This is the first Asaph has heard of anything like this. The security clearance involved is one thing that staggers him; the questions going begging are another. ‘Why… is the human brain able to interfere with the mechanisms of chance, even slightly?’
‘Good question. Not our question, though,’ says Kala quickly.
‘Anyway,’ continues Heather, ‘we can now stimulate the brain in that specific way, activate the interaction between the mind and the physical world, and see if it somehow slightly alters the patterns at the miniscule level of reality that we’re recording.’
‘So you think what you’ve found, underlying all reality, is the mechanism by which human brains can sometimes, ever so slightly, make the world change? The brain interacts with this underlying… data stream, changes it, and up pops, I don’t know, a bent spoon or a poltergeist?’
‘Exactly. And through studying that effect, if there is one, we aim to find out more about what this underlying structure is. That’s what we’ve brought you in to consult on. Given your recent work.’ There’s no hesitation in how she says that. He’s here just as a friend of Kala’s, but she’s being generous about that. And at a stretch, Asaph supposes that at least he’s been working with brains.
‘So,’ says Kala, taking the brain and plugging one of the modules in to the tree of recording devices and… whatever that lash up is, the stimulator, presumably, ‘we’re ready to go for recording of the first run.’ She indicates to Asaph to watch a particular read out. Across it are spinning swirls of ever-changing numbers. ‘The patterns aren’t generally of an order humans can immediately notice, but maybe there’ll be some small blip, and if there is, the graphic is designed to highlight it. We don’t know. This is our first time.’
‘Thank you for bringing me along.’
Kala gives him a look that says he’s welcome. He guesses that he was the only friendly face for her during some worrying times back then. And so he’s here for this important moment.
Kala prepares the experiment, gets her team to their positions, makes sure they all know what their tasks are, and finally declares the start of the run, on three… two… one. She clicks a switch. There’s no change in any of the tiny sounds the equipment is making. But Asaph is surprised to notice an immediate change in the numbers on the screen. The display is designed to represent numbers as patterns, it turns out. The swirls suddenly become pulses. He calls Kala over, and she’s delighted.
She’s about to say something, but that’s when somebody starts yelling. They all turn around. Heather now has a hand over her mouth, and her ‘get past it’ gesture has become a hand batting the air as if to drive something away. Right beside her, hovering in the air within touching distance… or not any more, as Heather backs away… there’s… it’s suddenly there, and then parts of it suddenly aren’t. Its presence isn’t like any apparition or special effect Asaph has ever seen. The quality of what it’s doing with light in his vision is entirely new. That’s shocking on some basic level he never knew existed in him. He is experiencing, he realises, the Uncanny Valley, the difference between what he’s used to from reality and what’s being presented, accidentally weaponised and pointed at him.
It’s a human body. A male body. Its muscles and meat and eyeballs and glands are fading in and out in that startling new use of light, but it’s looking around, moving, and then… not, because its arm just wrapped right around and is somehow now growing out of its back, and its head imploded inwards and has now… burst from its arm.
It screams.
They all cry out, they move back as one. ‘Shut it off!’ shouts Kala.
‘No,’ says Heather, who’s recovered more quickly that the rest of them, ‘Ma’am, we have to keep recording –’
Kala steps forward and hits the switch herself.
The pile of meat is suddenly obviously real and utterly in the room and falls to the ground, making an enormous groan as it collapses. There’s a little screech, then it’s dead.
Asaph can’t help but come out with a work-prohibited word. Several of the others do too.
Kala staggers over and looks down at the… body, Asaph supposes they’re going to have to call it that. Suddenly, he’s witness to a business that produces… well, all right, there’s no suddenly about it, his own work has produced enough corpses, but now he’s right there in the room with one. ‘Heather, you were right,’ Kala says, ‘we should have kept recording. I just –’
‘I know, ma’am,’ says Heather.
Asaph wants to say that was magic. He finds that part of his scientist self knows bad magic when he sees it. He has never seen it before. Because what else is magic but making things… monsters… people… appear from nowhere, from out of thoughts?
Kala tells the others to wash up and go home, to not say a word of this to anyone. Then she finds a bottle. It’s cheap stuff, not the sort of thing you get in the Company store, though it’s kept in one of their bottles.
They sit on lab stools and look at the body. Asaph finds he wants to burst into tears. He takes a swift drink and refrains. ‘Well,’ he says.
‘The brain must have been… thinking of its own body,’ she says. ‘No, not thinking, beneath the level of thinking. It must have been… aware that it had a body, had a continuing sense of it, like a phantom limb, and we just… broadcast that. We gave it access to the code that makes reality, and it… made some.’
‘Those systems… the brain… the mind… and the code, they’re… compatible.’
‘They’re frighteningly compatible.’
Are they being listened to here? Probably. But the listeners may well share the emotions that led to these very serious words. ‘You made a person,’ says Asaph. He finds he has to hold back an awful laugh. ‘You are Frankenstein.’
‘Finally, the goal of all fiction is achieved.’ She throws back her drink, and puts down the glass. ‘Come on, let’s get you out of here, I have to tidy up and report this.’
Because, Asaph is sure, any members of her team who are not fundamentally grateful for her political shelter, or who think more could be found elsewhere, will already be reporting it. He stops at the doorway, and can find words only suitable for when leaving a party. ‘Please,’ he says, ‘invite me back.’
It’s three months of no lunch meetings before she even gets in touch, and another month before he gets to go and see her at her workplace again. In the meantime, he’s been listening for rumours, looking for signs. The science complex suddenly has more astronomers than before, he notes. Which is to say, it has more than three. They all arrive one Wednesday night, and are oddly tight-lipped for astronomers. Budgets are up across the board, and that particularly applies to those working in the sort of systems Asaph glimpsed in the lash-up Kala had created. His own work is, by contrast, now getting little attention, and he loses two assistants to other departments. That’s fine by him. The chimps can sleep a little easier at night, now he’s no longer trying to disturb them with things that don’t look quite like chimps. He himself has not been sleeping well. He’d tried to tell his wife, in their secret language, what he had seen. But she grew so startled, so much in need of translation, that he couldn’t continue, and they have not yet found a private corner where he could safely tell her the truth.
He’s not actually sure that telling her the truth is a good idea. It’s obvious that belief runs thin in higher management, thicker the further down the corporate ladder you look, while the ostentatiousness of that belief runs the other way. The ability to suddenly make… conscious life… that would surely rock the ladder at both ends.
But these are dangerous thoughts. He puts them aside as he enters the special projects complex once again. The security is tighter. He has to show his glorified pass three times.
Kala meets him once again. She looks tired now, careful. She introduces him to a team which is largely made of newcomers. Now, only one of them is a glef. Of Heather there is no sign. The realisation of that makes Asaph, oddly, feel panicked. He supposes that he associates this place with what happened here last time, that minor alterations to reality caused by politics now remind him of major ones caused by…
‘Magic,’ says Kala. Her team all carefully laugh at the word. ‘That’s a ridiculous way to describe it, but I’m sure it’s occurred to all of us.’
‘It’s not about this “psi” thing, is it?’ Asaph asks, letting out what’s been in his head so long. ‘It’s not that being connected to the underlying… reality data… allowed some heretofore unknown ability of that brain to manifest itself. It’s that our brains evolved with that stratum of the real underlying all things, and there’s obviously some natural process inside the brain which makes use of that data on an everyday basis.’
‘Exactly what we’ve been thinking,’ says Kala. ‘Perhaps it’s dreaming. We still know very little about what dreams are or why there’s such a need for them that it’s more valuable, in survival terms, to have them than to stay awake all the time and not be so vulnerable to predators. Maybe dreams are the brain reading that deep data.’
‘And all you did was reverse the process, force the brain to… anti-dream, to make reality rather than passively experience it.’
‘Right. And that process is so like traditionally-described magic that it’s hard not to imagine that that barrier hasn’t been broken before, that certain individuals haven’t managed to meddle with the actions of their minds, create such pulses of probability fluctuation and make reality.’
Asaph comes out with a disallowed expletive again. Nobody seems to mind. ‘Hence precognition in dreams. It’s not a reading of time ahead of the dreamer, it’s a rehearsal of the change in reality the dreamer has just unconsciously altered probabilities to make happen. Particularly if it’s to do with luck, if you dream the winning horse in a race!’
‘But this is all beside the point, the sort of ridiculous thinking that could lead less disciplined minds into years, possibly decades, of fruitless research.’
Her tone is full of warnings. Asaph realises he’s said too much. ‘Exactly my point. Those “psi” researchers created a whole field of useless work out of it.’
She’s relieved. ‘We’re looking instead in the other direction. How can we, practically, map and replicate this code? What can be made using it?’
‘So a brain used in this process won’t always try to make a body for itself?’
‘It might try. But now we have a record of the code that does that. The brain seems to have reached out and found the code in the nearby space, which was, after all, occupied by several human bodies.’
‘Not many male ones.’
She pauses, purses her lips. ‘I was wondering if I should tell you. We did genetic tests on the body. It was…’
‘Me?’
She nods, watching for his reaction. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. His whole heritage, everything his ancestors wrote into him, was counterfeited in a moment. ‘Wow. Was there a brain in… that thing?’
‘One was being built, yes. The autopsy found that it had… kind of exploded.’
A copy of his own brain. Would that have had a copy of his mind inside it, because of the physical structure, or was it being built for the mind of Lonny, the anti-dreamer who’d created it, or would it have been a brain empty of all personhood? Would it be someone entirely new? It’s not frightening, or worrying, not really. It’s just kind of… staggeringly odd. These are circumstances nobody’s had to deal with before. It may take a while for the whole reaction to sink in. ‘Wow,’ he says again. ‘Okay.’
‘So for this run, we’re going to block that code, and instead feed the brain stretches of data we’ve taken from areas without people in them. Today should be a lot calmer.’
‘Fingers crossed.’
She smiles a little at his choice of words, and goes to prepare. Asaph looks around the team, sure they’ve all been chosen for their adherence to the Company’s current core values. Wouldn’t the Company just love to be able to actually replicate them? To make eighty copies of loyal and presumably fertile, given her wedding ring and youth and concrete choice of gender, Amy here? Surely Kala must know that’s the possibility she’s showing him? He looks to her and sees her looking serious back at him. That must be one of the practical functions being considered. They’d talk initially about replicating the best soldiers. It would be like cloning was depicted in old movies, where they come out as simple copies of whole people. But the brain, the mind, that would be the problem… hopefully an enormous problem.
He can’t believe that he’s having these unwise thoughts. He considers instead another question: why have all the astronomers arrived? Why would this project need them? To this he can think of no simple answers.
Kala goes to the new brain, attaches the modules, which he sees this time are different in design, presumably to limit its attention to objects rather than people, then starts the run, and this time Asaph is rather more prepared for the strange effect of objects appearing… this time in a place specially prepared for them. And this time it is indeed just simple tables and chairs… until the wood suddenly warps and in his vision, for a moment, he sees geometrical impossibility out of M.C. Escher, and the whole thing falls because gravity couldn’t support that, only this time it’s a tree falling in the forest instead of flesh into a butcher’s lap.
‘I can see many industrial uses,’ is the neat little phrase he comes up with.
That night, Asaph is surprised when Sorsha reaches out to him in bed, and starts to urgently tap his spine. They’ve decided that they each have an alphabet down their backs, A at the neck, Z at the arse. It means they have to think as they snuggle about what the most likely translation is, given that they only have a rough idea of where each letter is, but they’ve gotten better with time. ‘Meet her,’ she says.
‘Who?’ he taps back. He only has jokes for where a question mark might be.
‘Kala Singh Carlton,’ she taps, at length, but he gets it way before she’s finished. He frowns at her in the half light. Is she asking if he’s having an affair? But no, the look on her face is encouraging, determined, even.
‘Where?’ he uses his fingers to ask.
He supposes that a message was passed to his wife at her church, that maybe the communion rail isn’t monitored. That’s too complicated to ask about. He has to find a way to get to the location given without arousing suspicion, but discovers the location itself offers him an obvious way, that a message was implanted within the choice of place.
The engine park is full of the half-wrecked remains of cars and lorries and trains. They have swings and slides and climbing frames built into them, and exercise devices scattered amongst them. As always, the items designed for fitness do not seem to be the first choice of the children. The grass grows to a cushioning height, and above the plain is an opaque sail that blocks the UV and the wind from the coast. Asaph and his children run into Kala and hers, and they let them all run off to play together while they have a coffee. They sit on the grass, a long way from any solid object, with no lines of sight to any buildings. They walked together to the spot and seemed to choose it entirely without thinking, though there was a little ballet of ‘shall we sit here, or over there?’ right at the end.
‘It’s fucking terrifying,’ she says, through that grin, which is a rictus again on the lip of her cup.
‘Tell me.’
‘The astronomers have been given the whole of the air security apparatus for a deep scan of the sky. They’ve been bringing back enormous data sets of what the underlying reality is out there and…’ She closes her eyes, as if willing him to believe what she’s about to say. ‘It’s thin.’
‘Thin?’
‘There is less underlying reality data cosmologically than there is here on Earth.’
‘What…?’ He’s getting there already, horribly, but he has to make himself ask the question. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means other galaxies and stars in this galaxy, and distant quasars and everything are real, but… not as real as we are. They are rendered with less information. The cosmos is wallpaper. A stage curtain.’
He has to say the horrors out loud. ‘So… so… the universe is here… for our benefit?’
‘That’s what the Company are saying, in secret, at the highest levels. They’re having some kind of weird celebration about it. They’re getting kind of hysterical. They do indeed see it as confirmation that human beings are the most important things in the universe, that their handy religion is true, so their philosophy of prosperity and hard work is also, obviously, written into things, as above, so below. Nobody’s ever found any aliens because there aren’t any to find. Because minds are the difficult bits, the hardest things to write. There won’t be anyone with an entirely different philosophy coming along from outer space to contradict any of the global companies now. I mean, yes, the Company are also completely terrified, shaken to their core, but when you shake that core, it turns out they’re so used to smiling they just smile bigger.’
Asaph is struggling to take this all in. ‘So, if space… isn’t as real as we are, if it’s been written, then were we written? The data you found under reality, is that, genuinely, code, as in a game, or a virtual reality?’
‘It is exactly that. It was hidden under a bunch of noise, supposed laws of physics written to give the impression that there was a level beneath which it wasn’t worth looking. We are the rats who have seen the maze.’
‘Nothing is real.’
‘Yep.’
Asaph looks up at the sun through the sail and feels giddy with a sudden, terrible freedom and a sudden terrible sense of enclosure, all at once. And yet, he still feels the same as he has always felt. ‘Are they going to tell people?’
‘I doubt it. Not everyone would deal with it in the way they’re dealing with it. Not everyone would deal with it, full stop.’
‘So, what are we, exactly? Are we… a simulation running in someone’s computer?’
It takes a long time, but she finally inclines her head. ‘I think we are.’
Asaph has to take a deep breath. With it comes a realisation. ‘I… believe I understand something from my own field of study now. You know I was saying, all those months ago, about the angst we feel about artificial representations of reality? Well, why don’t human beings in general feel utterly at home in real reality? Why are we always harking ahead to better times, or back to a golden age, or to somewhere the grass is greener? Why do we have angst about real life? Could it be… because we’re based on our… designers? We feel like we were developed elsewhere, made for different lives. We’ve been living in the Uncanny Valley and calling it home.’ He gestures around him. ‘What kind of sadists are they, these gods whose image we’re made in? This isn’t a game, is it? This isn’t fun!’
‘I don’t think they’re running it moment by moment. All the code we’ve found creates objects, physical laws, types of energy. Oh, that’s why everything fell apart during the experiments with the flesh and the furniture. By the way, we weren’t anticipating various mismatched energy spikes. We could have killed everyone with the wrong sample, sheer luck we didn’t. So I don’t think they’ve coded for personality, or politics, or societies. I think they just fired it up and let it run. Apart from the fact that they were clearly aiming for life on this world, and not on any other. I’d say there’s a good chance they made us to be like them, mainly because I like your angst.’
‘You like my angst?’
‘I like your concept of angst.’
‘Well, it seems they really do like it. They haven’t stepped in to help us with the situation the world’s in, have they?’
‘Maybe they’re in exactly the same situation, and are looking to us for solutions.’
‘Oh, well done gods. Thanks so much. Angst by proxy.’
They talk some, but it goes round and round. That night, Asaph tries to communicate all that’s been said to Sorsha. She jerks as she works out what the taps mean, stares at him in shock and anger. She tells him she will not believe this, that she knows her God.
Asaph replies that this might mean that her God is real. Perhaps they’ll find the code that includes Him in this universe.
Sorsha closes her eyes and starts to weep. She won’t listen to further comfort, and finally Asaph leaves her to sleep. He knows she’s not the sort of person to push away rationality, that he’s just encountered her first reaction. She’ll have to talk to her God and find a way to include this in her religion.
He slips out of bed and goes to see Angus and Deschamel, asleep in their room. He looks with his fake eyes at the code working itself out in fake little breaths, fake dreams inside their fake heads making fake mouths flutter fake words. The artifice has finally struck him deep, he’s sick with the virus of his own unreality, his now ever-present nausea at the distance he will always have from the perfect real.
Perhaps that’s what his wife’s God is, the perfect real. It’s unfortunate for Asaph that he’s never believed in that. Not beyond saying the words. It’s especially unfortunate if it turns out that he and God are only as real as each other.
Or is this what the creators of this reality, the beings he’s named as ‘gods’, as an offhand metaphor, are? Are they actually what he’d recognise as gods? Are they worthy of that? He goes to the window and looks out at the glittering wallpaper of creation.
And he has a terrible idea.
‘We can ask them,’ he says, on his next outing to the park with Kala and their children.
‘How?’
She must have been having the same sort of thoughts he has. The political and social powers at the heart of their approximation of a world will have been having the same thoughts he has. ‘Have you found any aspects of the code that don’t seem to be there to enact creation?’
‘Yes, we’ve started to break down the code into specifics, down to individual units of creation. There’s some that doesn’t seem to do anything. I’ve obviously been looking at the possibility that that’s there for housekeeping rather than creation. However, we’re right at the start of this research. I don’t want to leap to conclusions.’
‘What if some of it allows communication with what might be called… devices? Either heritage code from whatever the initial device that began this creation was, or… or perhaps currently active monitors.’
‘Oh my God. You’re talking about –’
‘I’m talking about hacking the cameras of the gods and gaining access to their systems.’
It takes a year, played out in the steady beat of those park meetings, for Kala to find anything useful. In that time, Asaph’s existence changes as much as if the gods themselves had put their fingers down onto the surface of his flat world and stirred. The incentives toward larger families are forgotten, but not the purges and persecutions that had previously been linked to such whims of the Company. They continue. They were only linked previously, Asaph realises, in his thoughts, as he’d tried to square Company policy with logic. Various categories of people, including those of registered minority religions and different sexual classes are called out of their shifts and never return. It’s as if the Company, knowing that nobody is a person, has decided that personhood is an arbitrarily-assigned construct, that they can take away. Sorsha has found there is, daily, more and more pressure on her to square these sudden bigotries with established doctrine, to rewrite the prosperity gospel to include every policy shift, to ‘make up God’s will in the pulpit’ as she puts it. She talks about quitting. Asaph urges her not to. He’s waiting for… communication. The arrival of something else in the world. For the gods to arrive and confront the Company? No. That’s just the archetypal version, the need for parental justice to descend from the skies that plays out in his fake dreams… that he now takes more notice of than he should. It suddenly seems as if meaning might be found there, when none has been before.
His own work gains an enormous budget and a terrifying urgency and lots of oversight. The Company are now very interested in the business of scaring people with things that aren’t quite people. The idiots are considering trying to weaponise their own lack of existence, to be able to control the situation through fear, should knowledge of the simulation become public. They aim to use the image of the gods, to suborn the gods, to be the gods.
Or maybe they’re just hysterically grasping at straws.
The great mass of people have no idea they aren’t real. They’re scared, more liable to sudden enthusiasms and panics, but that’s just them reacting to the increasing jarring chaos, the day to day acceleration of meaning and declaration from the Company. That’s the other thing the Company are doing, throwing out more and more rules, as if they’re the ones actually running this reality. Sheer projection. Sheer panic in the body politic.
For Asaph, the nausea of non-being comes and goes, a regular pulse inside his life, or non-life, something he sets aside or gets distracted from, then is reminded of, over and over, like a wound or the knowledge of guilt. He finds it’s actually a mode of being that he’s used to, in that he had previously spent his life forgetting about his own mortality. Is that now an outmoded form of nausea? Is there mortality? Or are they all… filed for future use, put into another form of simulation having pointlessly died in this one? Why? Why do they bother with having their creations die? Why do they bother with having them do anything?
At one park meeting, Kala sits down and tells him, quickly and quietly, that she might indeed have a way to find the not-quite-people. Or rather, the more-people. The representatives of the real. The gods. ‘We’ve discovered what looks like a sensor structure. I didn’t think it necessarily would be, but the tech is similar to ours, so, incidentally, I think there must actually be an ongoing element to creation. There’s general, continuous observation going on. I’ve shared all this with the Company.’
‘But –?’
‘But I haven’t yet shared that we’ve also found what that structure is connected to. You’re now at a high enough level that I can get you in. Do you want to be there when we take a look at the world of the gods?’
This time he holds up his pass imperiously as he enters, indicating to the guards that yes, he’s exactly the right sort of made-up person, that he’s very important in their made-up system, like a child in the playground. He smiles as he does it.
He’s smiling a lot these days, he knows. People comment on it. They comment on it politely, worriedly. The wrong people will notice. But as Asaph is seeing more and more now, the wrong people are wearing those free and chaotic smiles too.
Kala’s team has changed again. Now they all have the right shape and look. She smiles at him as he enters. He smiles back. Because they can’t help it. Because what the hell. But, no, they both steady themselves, stand straighter, what they are doing here is important. As important as anything done in fiction.
‘We got an image yesterday. It was mostly noise. We’ve been cutting through the code using linked brains and expert systems, refining and refining. Here’s where we are now. This is being improved on a moment by moment basis.’ She switches on a monitor. On it appears a picture of… he hears the gasps from the team and realises he’s again vocalised something himself. They’re looking down, from a high corner, as if from a security camera, on a recognisable laboratory suite. This is surely just somewhere in this building, isn’t it? No, he doesn’t recognise some of the equipment, there’s an odd roundness to the design, and the cabling is… it looks like they’re using… he doesn’t even know what that material is.
Someone walks into the picture.
They all jump like it’s a monster. But no, it’s a guy, a white guy with a beard, in jeans and a t-shirt, looking down at whatever he’s working on. He’s making adjustments to a lashed-up… whatever that is.
Is he making adjustments… to them? To their lives? Or are they running somewhere in the background, forgotten?
Kala laughs. ‘Hello, God.’ Which ups the tension in the room instead of releasing it. She might have been vanished for saying that even before the current crisis. She seems to realise, and quickly becomes more serious. ‘We could actually modulate the information we’re sending that way, get their attention, send a message.’
Asaph has so wanted to see the architects of their situation, to make a complaint. But now the moment has passed, he finds himself utterly deflated by it, so lost inside it that he might start sobbing. ‘I’d say no,’ he whispers. ‘They might… switch us off. We should hope they’re not paying too much attention any more. I mean, time there seems to be flowing at the same rate, so this must be a long-term project of theirs.’
‘But not billions of years long. Meaning that our universe started, given that they have the same sort of tech we do… less than two hundred years ago,’ says Kala. ‘History is a lie.’
Which is hitting the Company’s history lessons head on. Asaph hears sobs from one of the others. ‘Can we… can we learn anything more?’ he says. ‘Can we find out what they’re working on?’
She tells him on one of their park days. It’s a gorgeous day in the simulation. The sun that has been set to kill them, like a cat left in their maze, is shimmering through the sail, and cool breezes are being generated by non-existent geographical history.
She’s looking beaten-up. Not literally. Not like Sorsha had been by her congregation on the day she said she quit. Kala’s eyes look like she’s in a nightmare, which she is, every muscle of her face rendered as being tense beyond anything Asaph has seen before. ‘I found out,’ she says, ‘what they’re working on. I told the Company. I want to see what happens.’
‘What?’
‘The gods with beards are looking into the urgent possibility that their world is a simulation. That’s why they’re running one of their own. Why they’re running us. To test the theory.’
Ha. Ha.
Oh. Is that an ending? He wants it to be. It causes another hole to tear open somewhere inside his ridiculous self-definition. But he continues. He keeps going. He finds something to say. ‘Of… of course. If such perfect simulations as this one are possible, there must be an enormous number of them. It’d be mathematically unlikely for us to have been made by the only real reality.’
‘I’ve got one of my seconded specialists to make a burrowing program that’ll follow the code, to find simulator systems and get into them. We’ll find reality. We will find it. The real reality. The origin point.’
He starts to laugh, then stops himself and spits on the ground. ‘I’ll bet it’s beards all the way down.’
Asaph and Sorsha stay home as much as they can. He goes into work when he’s called. She spends time in meditation, says she’s having trouble finding God. She’ll stand for no bleak jokes from Asaph about that. The kids are getting into fights at school. They can’t even say what about. There seems to be more violence every day. The Company television is reporting riots in the street, which it never has in the past, and then there’s silent footage of people in masks being mown down. The lack of commentary offers way too little in the way of meaning.
The news outlets seem to have taken on Kala’s expression, injuries from within, on the faces of their front people, in their text.
Suddenly, Kala is at the door. ‘It’s worse,’ she says.
He almost laughs. ‘It can’t be.’
‘Come with me,’ she says. He calls behind him, weakly, that he’s off to work, and allows himself to be led. She leads him not to her offices, but, via back streets, away from where public proclamations and the noise of large vehicles can now be heard, to a cul de sac, at the end of which sits a nondescript government building. ‘That’s where it is,’ she says.
‘Where what is?’
‘We used the data worm to follow the code, leaping between monitor systems, from simulation to simulation, looking at the situation in each one, seeking one where the simulation wasn’t being used to test the idea that those present were not themselves in a simulation.’
‘And have you found one?’
‘No.’
‘So the search continues?’
‘No. Six simulations into the stack, we found one running code that wasn’t a version of or a precursor of ours, but that was ours, that had recognisable security strings in it.’
He can’t grasp it. He numbly points to the building. ‘So?’
‘We compared it to existing Company systems. It’s running on a series of brains and machines in that building. Do you see? In there, they’re running a simulation of reality, which includes a simulation of reality, which includes a simulation of reality… all the way down to a simulation which is running this simulation that we’re in.’
He has to sit down. There on the pavement. He can hear the sounds of protest and military vehicles again nearby. ‘So… there is no original reality?’
‘It seems not.’ And she bursts out laughing, long and hard.
He can’t help but join in. ‘Oh… how many simulations are there?’
‘There are seven. Interesting number. All nested in each other, the snake devouring its own tail. Also interesting, that we already have that image from mythology as being of cosmic importance.’
‘But what’s outside?’
‘I don’t think there is an outside.’
‘What originally created this… ring?’
‘Before we knew about this, we were equally vague about the lack of reason behind the physical universe. One could, I suppose, see this as a gesture –’
‘From who?!’
‘Not from the men with beards and t-shirts, not in any reality. I mean, we are the beards. The beards themselves! But it’s like we’ve been… given control of ourselves. Of everything. There’s no difference between us and those who made us. We made them. We made ourselves, in the end. We are each other.’
Asaph considers for a moment, as best he can. He feels both free and trapped. He’s pretty sure, after all this time, that he’s been radicalised. But in what direction? Has the system around him collapsed, or been defined? ‘I think,’ he says finally, ‘that I’m going to go back to work.’
‘Oh,’ says Kala.
‘I’m going to go back to work and free the chimpanzees. I’m going to weaponise the Uncanny Valley in an entirely new direction.’
‘Well,’ she says, with a new purpose in her voice, as the sounds of yelling and oppression get closer, ‘that seems like the least we can do.’