A Waterfall of Lights
Ian Watson
Two summers earlier, of a Friday evening, Roderick and Nancy and Nick and I had a beer- fueled discussion in one of the snug rooms in the Eagle and Child, where Tolkien used to meet up with his Oxford author chums. A chinwag about the possible existence of alien civilizations.
The Bird and Baby, as it’s known to the locals, was serving a green guest ale, something I’d never encountered before. By “green” I don’t mean that it was an ecologically worthy beer produced not too far distantly from organic ingredients, but that it was almost grass-green in hue. This brew turned out to be made from young unroasted hops, hence the color. Surprisingly tasty and refreshing it was too. Green beer led to the notion of little green men visiting Earth to sup it, although of course our ale might make them sick due to their alien biology.
Nick dearly wished that fellow astronomers would stop wasting time on the search for extraterrestrial life.
“Microbial life’s fairly likely elsewhere in our galaxy, but as for anything more complex: forget it!”
Because, you see, complex intelligent life on planet Earth was the result of a long series of lucky accidents . . .
“If the sun were in a more crowded part of the sky, supernovas or gamma bursts would have sterilized the world repeatedly—”
If there’d been “bad Jupiters” orbiting nearer to the sun or more eccentrically, forget any planet Earth at all. Early random collisions gave us our spin axis and our length of day—yet without a moon the hefty size of our Earth’s tilt angle would wander, hopelessly destabilizing climate.
“What’s more, our sun’s a quarter richer in heavy metals than other nearby stars, hence Earth’s iron core—”
—which caused our vital strong magnetic field.
Earth could so easily have become a hell of heat like Venus, or alternatively a permanent iceball—although without massive glaciations, higher plants and animals might never have evolved.
If there hadn’t been the right proportion of land to water! If there hadn’t been continental drift! If this had not happened thus. If that had not chanced to occur. A list as long as your arm. Every single condition needed to be fulfilled.
“Including a mighty impact wiping out the dinosaurs?” prompted my Nancy.
Nick shook his half-bald head. “No, some dinos might have evolved intelligence, so we could have had Saurus sapiens instead of Homo sapiens.”
“But not speaking Latin,” she teased. “I suppose Saurus sapiens would have drunk green beer. Them being mainly green in pictures.”
“Nobody knows what color—” He broke off, well aware of her sense of mischief. “I’ll grant you,” he resumed, “that the same long lucky streak might have happened in some other galaxy far away. But as for our own there’s unlikely to be anything as complicated as a crab out there.” Nick was partial to eating soft-shelled crabs for starters at the Vietnamese restaurant. “The real question isn’t where are the aliens, because they simply aren’t—but where are the A.I.s? Where are the artificial intelligences, eh?”
“But we haven’t made any yet,” said Roderick, whose own field was ophthalmology. “Surely we haven’t? Ah, are you meaning A.I.s created by actual aliens many galaxies away from us? Yet a few billion years ago, so that by now they’ve had ample time to replicate over vast distances?”
Roderick liked to keep up with a whole range of popular science beyond his specialty, practiced at the Nuffield lab within the John Radcliffe Hospital up in Headington where he was a consultant. We all did so. My Nancy wasn’t just a pretty face gracing admin at the Botanic Garden; she had her degree in plant sciences. And I directed the School of Geography and the Environment, though never let it be said that geographers play second fiddle in the science orchestra! We’d all been close since we were undergraduates a couple of decades earlier, obviously Nancy and I the more so. Maybe Nick was the purest scientist, in a sense.
“What I mean,” said Nick, “is where are the A.I.s from the parent cosmos of ours—presuming that we budded off from a previous cosmos.”
And Nick treated us to the explanation that an artificial intelligence would by definition be immortal—as well as able to redesign and enhance itself in due course into something godlike; and the A.I. would have one goal for sure, namely survival, which must include surviving the death of the universe it arose in . . .
“Consequently A.I.s from previous cycles of existence must have passed through into our own universe, and after fourteen billions years they’ve had plenty of time to spread everywhere and manipulate on a grand scale if they care to.”
“Maybe they don’t care to?” said Nancy. “If intelligent life’s so rare, maybe our galaxy’s a nature reserve set aside for us?”
Nick snorted. “Along with all of observable space? True, there seems to be something very big indeed that’s tugging from beyond the observable boundary—”
“A.I. HQ?” I quipped.
“Tom, how would they know anything about us unless they already visited? In which case they’d surely leave at least one clone A.I. hereabouts to observe developments. Anyway, nothing can have visited us from beyond the observable boundary. That’s the whole point of a boundary—even light hasn’t time to visit.”
“Maybe they use short cuts, Nick,” said Roderick slyly.
“It’s ridiculous to imagine an entire universe being cordoned off for the sake of one inhabited world, which might be snuffed out any old time by a big asteroid hitting us! Or whatever disaster. Why bother to do so, in any case? Your trouble, Rod, is that you always extend things to absurdity. Or reduce them.”
“An extending rod or a reducing rod,” Roderick mused.
“I believe there are rods in the eyes,” I said.
“Rods gobble up light, thus we see at night,” Roderick rhymed. “We can spot a single candle seventeen miles away.”
“Surely not,” I said. “I don’t believe that.”
“We could carry out an experiment,” Roderick said merrily. “How about if we all take a holiday somewhere without any light pollution, say in tents in the middle of the Sahara desert?”
“Why would anyone want to see a candle seventeen miles away?” asked Nancy. “And how about all the Saharan starlight? Isn’t that brighter than candles?”
“And where,” said Nick, “are the A.I.s from the grandparent of our present universe, and from its grandparent? Given an infinite succession of universes, A.I.s that tunneled through from one universe to a successor universe ought to be here.”
I wondered what Tolkien would have made of this discussion in his snug. Maybe he’d have begun trying to invent an alien language . . . And would he have approved of green beer for Hobbits?
“Maybe the tunneling bit is too difficult?” suggested Nancy, twirling a golden lock.
“For biological life, yeah. But for immortal information—?”
Nick’s mobile rang, tootling a theme from Holst’s Jupiter.
“There’s been a gamma ray burst in—well, the galaxy only has a catalogue number,” he apologized, draining his glass speedily.
“When would that have been?” asked Nancy. “A billion years ago?”
“More like four. Um, billion.”
“Ah, the urgencies of astrophysics.”
His mobile tootled again, and now he was apologizing to his wife Lucy. He would just take a quick squint at the data, then be home for dinner. No, he hadn’t forgotten that Lucy’s mother was visiting. Shrugging, Nick departed into the leafy avenue of plane trees that was St. Giles.
Roderick sighed. “I ought to marry a woman called Lucy. Or maybe Lucia. Named for light.”
“Maybe,” said Nancy in a kindly way, “you should simply marry a woman.”
At forty-six, Roderick was perhaps unlikely to. He was affably shambly looking in his person, although obviously there must be a high degree of delicacy to his touch, given the corresponding delicacy of eyes, or vice versa. Maybe the right word was gentleness. But we all knew that he had desired Nancy, in vain. Paradoxically this was one of the strings that united us four. Also, Nancy and I hadn’t had kids. By now Nancy was on the age-cusp of never being able to. My fault: low sperm count—just my bad luck, one of those things. We’d talked about having my sperm mixed with a donor’s in case one of mine, swept along with the crowd, proved to be lucky. But we hadn’t done so. Nancy filled our house with orchids.
Whereas Nick had married his Lucy almost inadvertently, so it seemed. A secretary, originally, at the Department of Astrophysics, she’d become starry-eyed about him. Now they had two teenagers, Philip and Philippa, names that had struck me as a failure of imagination in the domestic department or some peculiar economy measure. Or maybe something dynastic: Nick’s strongwilled barrister father was a Philip.
“Did you know,” said Roderick, “that St. Lucy had beautiful eyes, so she was deoculated as a martyrdom? Her symbol is a pair of eyes on a saucer.”
“That’s squirmy,” protested Nancy. “Doesn’t make it any better by saying deoculated.”
“She’s the patron saint of the blind, but I don’t have her picture in my office. Could be off-putting, hmm?”
“A Lucia mightn’t be well-advised to marry you.”
I noticed that Nancy didn’t say “a Lucy” since Lucy was Nick’s wife, just as Nancy was mine. Probably Roderick had mentioned St. Lucy in the past—the story did ring a bell, though not a loud one; he’d been a lapsed Roman Catholic even in our college days.
Fairly soon it was time for us to go our separate ways, Nancy and I by bus to Summertown, Roderick on foot to his bachelor home in Jericho. And thus it was time for his traditional non-crushing bear-hug of Nancy, and for her to peck him on the cheek.
Out of vague curiosity I looked up St. Lucy. Apart from her beautiful eyes, she was a Christian virgin heiress with a big dowry, ordered to marry a pagan. Her refusal led to her martyrdom. And it occurred to me that in Roderick Butler’s eyes my Nancy might bizarrely classify as some sort of virgin in the sense that I’d never made her pregnant. Consequently he could venerate her? Not exactly . . . more like regard her as a still nubile Venus who happened to be tied to the wrong chap. Or a bit of both.
I recalled a holiday we’d all been on together five years earlier, including Mrs. Nick, although not the kids who opted to stay with her parents for a week; two weeks stuck on a canal in a narrowboat had little appeal for young Philip and Philippa. We could understand why when we arrived at Somerton Deep Lock, which resembled, especially in the rain, a wet version of Doré’s Hell. However, we managed to have a fairly good time, especially at canalside pubs, in one of which I remember a folksinger chap causing Roderick, after several pints, to burst tipsily into a rendition of “Billy Boy,” which goes thus:
Where have you been all the day,
Me Billy Boy?
I’ve been out with Nancy Gray,
And she’s stolen me heart away,
She’s me Nancy, tickled me fancy,
Oh me charmin’ Billy Boy.
Is she fit to be a wife?
me Billy Boy.
She’s as fit to be a wife,
As a fork fits to a knife.
She’s me Nancy, tickled me fancy,
Oh me charmin’ Billy Boy.
Hmm, yes exactly. Nancy tickled me fancy. Is she fit to be a wife?
Afterwards, Roderick’s snores rumbled in the confines of the narrowboat, and in the morning he denied all knowledge. Amnesia due to beer. Nick and Lucy teased him a bit, but Nancy didn’t, nor did I. During that fortnight no love-making occurred due to the limited privacy of our boat, so to Roderick’s subconscious Nancy may have seemed chaste.
When Roderick offered Nancy a state-of-the-art examination at his lab, which would involve him staring deep into her eyes, she diplomatically claimed to have visited Vision Express in town just recently. Roderick included me in this invitation, though more as an afterthought. He didn’t raise the matter again.
What Roderick did raise, when we all met up for another convivial drink, accompanied by a meal, this time in the King’s Arms at the end of Broad Street, was Nick’s assertion that the absence of A.I.s was a big puzzle.
“Didn’t we cover all that last time?” Nancy said. “By the way, what did the gamma ray burst have to say?”
“What it basically said was: tough luck for any life in that galaxy. Well now, I think I said you can forget about the absence of intelligent aliens being a mystery, due to a suitable planet like ours being a one in a zillion chance.”
“Although there still might be brainy aliens far far away?” I chipped in. “On the principle that someone has to win a lottery now and then, given billions of galaxies?”
“Too far away ever to be known to us. Or too distant in time. Or both.”
“Yet immortal A.I.s ought to be everywhere,” said Roderick doggedly.
“Or at least some sign of them. In my view.”
“In . . . your . . . view,” Roderick repeated, sounding rather as if he was a skeptical tutor addressing a bumptious student. “In your view.”
“Are you taking the piss, by any chance?”
“Absolutely not. A notion came to me . . . I fancy the fish and chips.”
Nick glanced at the chalked menu board. “Good notion!”
It was a year later that Nancy and I received, by the very same post, invitations to a private viewing at the Museum of Modern Art in Pembroke Street, RSVP to email address. The artist: Jon Bell. Title of exhibition: Eye Watch You. Scientific Advisor: Roderick Butler (plus his eminent qualifications). Neatly penned on the printed cards: Hope to see you! RB.
Why send two separate invitations? An error on the part of some secretary at MOMA? It seemed more as if Roderick hoped to ensure that Nancy would pay full attention. And what was Roderick doing mixing with modern art? He hadn’t mentioned any such thing in the meanwhile. Jon Bell was blurbed on the back of the card as a leading techno-conceptual artist with a background in electronics as well as being a graduate of Goldsmiths’ College in London.
I phoned Nick. Yes, he and Lucy had also received an invitation, although Lucy probably wouldn’t be going. An invitation. An. No, Roderick hadn’t let on about this new string to his bow.
I tried to phone Roderick several times to give a verbal RSVP, but in vain. His mobile went to voicemail, and his shared secretary at the Nuffield lab said he wasn’t available.
We’d have to wait and see.
Jon Bell looked the epitome of cool, dressed all in black, which made him seem even more slim and wiry, slim oblong black sunglasses, a ring in his ear and a minimalist black beard, Vandyke- lite. Numerous acolytes or colleagues were present, several with tiny wifi computers on which they tapped, or internet phones with which they shot video clips, so that what was happening was enhancedly happening.
Trays of wine. Some blow- ups around the walls of dissected eyeballs. A beaming Roderick, wearing his professional suit, although with a rakish yellow cravat at his neck.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“Wait for the show,” he told Nancy, and yes, me too. “I hope you’ll be impressed.”
Occupying the large downstairs gallery, to which we duly trooped, was a huge transparent perspex globe, seated upon a square steel framework, in front of which stood a short flight of steps. A whirr of motors, and the—what was that called again?—yes, the cornea descended to give access to a circular doorway into this enormous eyeball. What was now the upper surface of this access, of blue-green plastic—slim bands of blue and green radiating out from a round transparent center—must be the iris, right? Whirring too, a crystalline disk of plastic rose upward within hydraulically: the lens of the eye undoubtedly. As that final obstacle rose, a multi-stranded cable that looked fiber-optic, connecting the midpoint of the lens to the rear of the, oh yes retina, rose up, sagging somewhat. A disc of thick see-through plastic provided a flat floor within to stand upon, for say half a dozen people without crowding . . .
“You’ll notice the resemblance of the eye to an old-style diving bell,” declared Jon Bell. “The humor of Bell’s bell is that it should really be full of liquid! Unlike a true diving bell, which keeps liquid out. You’ll have to imagine that the air inside is liquid. We could of course pump liquid in after it closes up, but then participants would need bathing costumes and oxygen masks. So I omitted that aspect.”
Wineglasses in hand, people laughed appreciatively.
From the back of the eye, corresponding I supposed to the optic nerve, a multitude of optic fibers protruded, many looping around to attach themselves to the rear half of the sphere all over the outer surface, others leading to electronic gear and a computer tower.
The gallery lights dimmed somewhat.
Fish-eye images of us guests upstairs a few minutes earlier—there must have been tiny concealed cameras—and now downstairs (hidden cameras here likewise!) flashed around the interior of the giant eye while we gazed in a sort of childish wonder, and projected out onto the gallery walls distortedly enlarged, bouncing in and out, coalescing, separating, inverting randomly. Faces zoomed in and out, and bits of body, and hands holding wineglasses, quite a few looking like night-vision and also infrared images. What a dizzying dance of visions of ourselves.
Of a sudden Jon Bell clapped his hands.
“Pay ATTENTION, Eye!”
All the images promptly rushed to the back of the eye, forming a mosaic, which quickly became a single curved image of all of us gathered in front. What I’d taken for Lucite must be something smarter, maybe bonded in layers.
I whispered to Nancy, “Do you suppose Roderick put up any of his own money for this?”
“Well, that could be a good investment if Charles Saatchi or some Russian billionaire buys it . . . sort of like Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull? But, like, why?”
Just at the moment Roderick surged, seized Nancy by the hand with a hasty excuse-me, as if cutting in on a dance floor, and tugged her towards and up the steps on to the cornea hatch, where he paused to call out: “Room for four more inside!” Jon Bell beckoned at three of the prettiest young ladies present and an austere chap who might be an art critic.
As soon as the chosen few were inside the big chamber, the iris descended and the cornea rose.
What my eyes saw from outside was how I imagined a psychedelic trip, not that I’d ever taken LSD or mushrooms or whatnot. The doors of perception opening up, and all that, though for me the hatch was shut; Nancy later confirmed my impression, and she had taken a few naturally occurring substances in the past, which seemed quite allowable for a botanist. To what extent had Roderick arranged all this in order to dazzle and impress her?
But never mind about the dazzling head-trip—or more correctly eye-trip—in company with Roderick. The astonishing thing came after Nancy was back beside me, when Roderick occupied the cornea hatch, lowered once more, and, standing beside Jon Bell who hopped up to join him, made a little speech, filmed to be streamed by the artist’s online cyberchums.
“How do we pay attention to what we see?” Roderick asked. “There’s an almost psychedelic jumble of different lights inside the eye. Blue’s always out of focus, for instance, so how do blue things appear to have sharp edges? It’s because our retina is an extremely sophisticated computer. Hidden away behind a carpet of blood vessels and nerves, as though the system is back-to-front, and almost invisibly transparent, our retina’s as thin as paper, yet it has at least ten different layers of neurons to process and edit and compress information. Some cells can compress to a thousandfold! Our retina is the brain that intervenes between the world and our brain. And because of that, our sight is extraordinarily acute—”
I remembered about seeing a single candle flame at a distance of seventeen miles . . .
“—which of course is how we first made tools, and therefore all of technology subsequently. We talk about hypothetical intelligent aliens out there and we listen with our radio telescopes for decades in vain—no evidence of any, nor that we’ve ever been visited in the past. Yet in our universe there ought to exist one kind of immortal intelligence—and emphatically I’m not referring to a God.”
By now the guests were regarding Roderick in a puzzled, though indulgent, way.
“I mean artificial intelligences brought into existence by intelligent aliens in previous universes and which survive forever from universe to universe, unlike their makers. They ought to be here, even observing us, since intelligent biological life must be very rare. So where are they?
“I declare that I know where they are! They are in the amazing computers of our eyes, the retinas. Not one in each retina, no no, for individual people die or are blinded. The A-Eyes, as I call them,” and he spelled out the word, “are each distributed among millions of individuals, connected by photonic entanglement—”
“But that’s bananas!” Nick exclaimed at me. “Information can’t be conveyed at a distance by entanglement—”
“Shshshsh,” said Nancy.
“They see what we see in mosaic form, time-sharing on our retinal computers while busy with their own computations. This will become evident as we gain more sophisticated insight, yes, you might well say insight, into the retinal computer, which I for my part intend to pursue from now on. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the aliens in our midst, the super-intelligent evolved immortal creations of aliens from another cosmos which preceded ours! They are in your very own eyes! We don’t see the aliens in our universe because it is through those alien intelligences that we perceive!”
Jon Bell and his electronic-art cronies burst into applause, grinning. So did almost all of the audience because this seemed to be yet more of the art event, an authentic happening for dessert. Nancy and I clapped our hands too, so as not to spoil Roderick’s moment of glory, though Nick refrained: “Either he’s lost it totally, or else he’s having us on . . .” And guests queued up to experience a trip in the eye-globe, winking or gazing meaningfully into one another’s eyes.
Afterwards, Roderick accompanied us ebulliently to the Miter in the High Street, at one point linking arms with Nancy who still seemed dazed by the psychedelic visions.
“So how did you team up with this bright new star of Brit Art?” I asked as soon as I’d downed my initial gulp of ale.
“Well now, I needed an art event as a showcase for my revelations in case my medical colleagues thought I’d gone loopy. I wouldn’t have been able to publish this in any orthodox form. Really, we need nanotechnology to validate this, although I’ve applied for a research sabbatical to see what progress I might make.” Roderick chuckled. “Obviously the Nobel Prize is a good way off yet.”
Nick hesitated. “You believe what you said?”
“Dear chap, it’s the answer to your conundrum. But,” he added significantly.
“But?” Nancy obliged by asking.
“Can any of you guess the other reason for an art event that’s quite likely to make a few waves, even more so when it transfers to London?”
Nick made a show of scratching his head. “Um, to get in the news and attract funding from an eccentric billionaire?”
“The news, yes, that’s part of it. Jon says he’s fairly sure Eye Watch You will go viral on YouTube and people’s phones and whatnot. The point is that this is out in the open now, unstoppably. I didn’t want the A.I.s to notice prematurely in case they took exception to being revealed.”
Paranoia . . . ?
“They’d already have seen what you were up to,” I said. “I mean, if they exist.”
“Tom,” patiently, “a distributed intelligence can only sample what it sees, say for a few seconds or even microseconds. It wouldn’t exactly read my mind! Yet there’s a point where something can be detected and appropriate measures taken before it’s too late, to suppress information—”
I wondered what measures he had in mind? Blindness? An induced stroke?
“—and beyond that point simply too many people know the idea.”
For a moment I thought Nancy was about to reach out to pat his hand, which Roderick might have misinterpreted. She said gently, “Isn’t this idea of yours a bit like a conspiracy theory? You can present some evidence—as with the fall of the Twin Towers being a controlled demolition—but it can’t be proved, even if it’s plausible. And so the theory soon gets linked up with other far-out ideas that are definitely potty, such as that humanoid lizards secretly rule the Earth. Which devalues the original theory.”
My Nancy had recently read a book about conspiracy theories. According to some energetic chap American presidents and the British royal family were lizard-human hybrids in disguise.
“But I didn’t say anything at all about retinal A.I.s controlling or influencing human behavior.”
“Conspiracists might do so—leading to silliness. I don’t want you to expose yourself to ridicule.” Evidently the rush of excitement caused by her trip in the Eye was giving way to wiser counsels. Yet then she went on, perhaps unadvisedly, “Or . . . are you actually hoping to provoke a proof, on the part of your A.I.s? Rather than protecting yourself, instead: some detectable response?”
At which, a gleam came into Roderick’s eye, as it were!
“The Eye serves several purposes,” he said contentedly. Or did he say “the eye”?
“What about the eyes of chimps, for instance?” Nick chipped in. “Are they parts of A.I. as well? What about cats?—they see pretty well.”
Roderick waved away such irrelevancies.
The private viewing of Jon Bell’s Eye Watch You did indeed go viral over the next few days. The artist must have been rubbing his hands in glee, anticipating the transfer to a London gallery, or even a preemptive purchase by a collector for a large sum in Oxford itself.
A week later, sevenish of an evening, came a ring-ring.
“Tom Cooper here,” I said. I like to identify myself fully on the telephone since the way most people merely say hullo strikes me as silly. Is that you, yes it’s me. And what if you don’t immediately recognize which “John” someone is out of half a dozen possible candidates?
“Thank goodness, I managed it!” Roderick’s voice sounded at once anxious and exalted; and what did he mean?
“Can you and Nancy possibly come round right now? It’s fairly urgent.”
“Well . . . yes, I suppose—I’ll need to check with Nancy.”
“Do tell her it’s important. Would you mind ringing Nick to ask him as well?”
“Can’t you ring him yourself?”
“I mightn’t succeed! I’ll explain when you come.”
Jericho is the part of Oxford between Walton Street, former location of the Nuffield Ophthalmology Lab, and the canal; hence Roderick buying a house within what had previously been easy walking distance of his workplace. The building of the canal in the later eighteenth century, to bring coal quickly and cheaply to the city, caused a veritable ghetto of laborers and craftspeople, which became a crammed slumland of terrace houses, prey to cholera and other degradations. Nowadays the area is highly gentrified and expensive. Naturally the terrace houses remain small, but they’re very bijou, much desired by young professionals; and Roderick of course remained a bachelor.
Nancy and I had taken a taxi to his door, its pointed archway of bricks painted in red and yellow just like those arches in the Great Mosque of Córdoba in a minor key. In contrast his New Age neighbors on one side had gone for all the colours of the rainbow, up one side of the arch and down the other.
The door opened and Roderick blinked at us.
“Nancy? Nick?”
“Can’t you see properly?” she asked.
“Come, come.” He blundered ahead of us to his living room, where he located a comfy armchair into which he subsided with a sigh of relief. A framed print of Seurat’s pixelated Bathers hung over the fireplace, and an impressionist Monet lily pond by the window.
“What’s wrong?” asked Nancy.
Roderick held up his palms as though determined to count how many fingers he had.
“I’m seeing text scrolling down all the time. Beautiful text! You’re just like a vague mirage behind this golden curtain or waterfall. But I’m buggered if I can read any of it. The symbols aren’t any alphabet I’ve ever seen or ideograms or math or music . . .”
“When did this start?” I asked.
“About an hour ago. I just watched for a while, bewitched, trying to make sense of a single squiggle, but they never stay; they scroll down as I say.” His descending hand indicated the rate of descent, about a foot every couple of seconds. Personally I’d be able to read a document in English at that speed, but the task would become cumulatively exhausting.
Of course his grey eyes looked exactly the same as ever, although just to be sure I stepped closer.
“It’s retinal, damn it, Tom. You can’t see anything.”
“And you, er, reckon it’s the A.I.s communicating with you?”
“What else can it be? I haven’t been drugged by some security service and had super cyber contact lenses stuck over my iris. Precious data is passing away every moment, just supposing that I could understand it . . .”
“Maybe,” said Nancy to calm him, “after a while the message repeats and carries on repeating.”
Just then the doorbell rang and I went to let in, predictably, Nick, whom I quickly briefed in the hallway. Nick promptly took out his phone to find Google News, then other sites in swift succession.
He announced as he entered the living room, “No reports yet on the web of the same thing happening to other people. Hullo there, Roderick. So how did they zero in on you?”
“Maybe it’s a bit early for reports,” said Mary. “This only started an hour ago.”
“If it’s happening to many people there’d be reports already, believe me.”
“Maybe the victims, I mean, the contacted people can’t see clearly enough to send reports. Maybe they’re too distracted.”
“Oh well, of course that’s a possibility.” Nick stooped and peered at Roderick’s face just as I had done.
“I told you it’s retinal!” Roderick protested at whatever blur he was seeing. “You can’t see what I see! And they found me because my identity’s all over cyberspace at the moment, so they carried out an Oxford-specific eye-search.”
“For your eye-dentity,” I said.
Nick had spied a large notepad upon a bookshelf. Seizing and flipping the notepad open to bare pages, he produced a pen and thrust both at Roderick.
“Can you copy anything? Stick with a first line and follow it down.”
Roderick tried, bless him, but his bit of scribble was such a squiggly mess.
“Lost it already . . .”
“Can you write the quick brown fox?”
That Roderick could manage readably, but I could have done so blindfolded.
“Just testing,” said Nick. He blinked rapidly, as though trying to induce the same phenomenon in himself, to no avail. “Roderick, have you phoned Jon Bell?”
“It was hard enough calling Tom!”
“Conceivably your Mr. Bell might see this as another publicity opportunity, if he isn’t affected himself—ah, but does he have a blog?”
“The link’s in my laptop upstairs,” said Roderick.
“Oh, this cascade of golden lost opportunities!”
“Never mind, I’ll just search the Web.” Which Nick proceeded to do on his phone.
And before long he announced, “Excellent, Bell’s latest posting, some blather about artichokes, is only fifteen minutes ago. So he’s unaffected. I believe we shouldn’t tip him off till we’ve slept on this. Besides, Rod’s problem might simply stop if it’s psychological or neurological. Him getting overexcited. Like people having visions of angels.”
“This is real. Look, I do know about peculiar neurological visual effects.”
“But you aren’t a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists usually deal with visions.”
“Softly,” said Nancy.
“Why should you want to dismiss this,” demanded Roderick, “when it’s such a breakthrough I’m beholding? First contact with the retinal A.I.!”
“If they’re so artfully intelligent, they should have slowed the pace and made what you’re seeing comprehensible.”
“Give a chimp Shakespeare to read when it can’t even read,” muttered Roderick.
“Humans aren’t that dimwitted,” said Nick. “We can read starlight and understand it. The way you describe this seems more like trying to read something of huge significance in a dream—the words go out of focus because there isn’t actually any text, just a sensation of a text, a wish that there could be a text that reveals stuff. I’ve had dreams like that.”
“If only there was some way of showing you what I’m seeing!” roared Roderick in frustration. “Some way of displaying this! Of linking the back side of a retina to a monitor screen!”
I said, “I hope you aren’t thinking along Biblical lines: if thine eye offends thee . . .”
“Of course not! Is that what the A.I.s might be hoping? That I’ll psychotically pluck out my eyes? I doubt it!”
“Oh Roderick,” said Nancy, “what shall we do with you? Would you prefer to go to hospital for observation . . . or should we stay with you overnight and see what’s what in the morning?”
“Observation? By my own peers, who will see nothing! I can’t inconvenience all of you. Only one of you needs stay. I shan’t do anything foolish.”
We exchanged glances. One of us. Was Roderick hoping that Nancy would volunteer? Woman’s nursing touch and all that . . .
“If we get you to bed,” I said, “since I know it’s a double bed, I can share it just in case.” I contrived some humor. “No monkey business, mind you! Acceptable?”
“I might keep you awake. I don’t know if I can go to sleep with what I’m seeing. It doesn’t stop when I shut my eyes. It’s permanent.”
“Till it stops,” said Nick. “Hospital might be better, for sedatives.”
“So you can sleep on the sofa here,” said Roderick quickly. “Thank you, Tom. True friend, and so forth.”
I said, “We can argue about bed or sofa later, but frankly I’m quite hungry. Should one of us pop out for a takeaway? Could you eat Indian, Rod?”
“Saffron rice and golden message . . . might be confusing.”
“Okay, fish and chips. Eat by feel. And I prescribe some strong beer to relax you.”
I’d packed Nancy off back home and Nick too. In loosened clothes I dozed on the sofa, living room and bedroom doors open. In the wee hours Roderick’s bellow of Tom! broke a dream.
Up I rushed. Switching on the bedroom light caused Roderick, upright in bed in his purple paisley pajamas, to throw his hands over his eyes, then peek cautiously through his fingers.
“It’s gone, it stopped, I thought I’d gone blind—”
“But you aren’t, are you?”
“Everything seemed so black after the golden dazzle. They’ve stopped downloading, Tom. Maybe those were instructions for building a device to display what the brain perceives . . .”
“Pretty stupid instructions if you can’t read them until after you’ve carried them out.”
“Maybe they’re all stored in my brain now.”
I thought. “Did you manage to fall asleep?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure . . . Why?”
“Put another way, did your conscious awareness switch off?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. Like a computer crashing, interrupting the message. No, I think I must have received everything. At least for the moment. What a relief.” He rubbed his scalp. “Is it all up here . . . or lost?”
Or never was, I thought. To what extent had the hallucination been for Nancy’s benefit, even though Roderick mightn’t be aware of this? I went downstairs to heat mugs of milk mixed with a lot of dark rum.
In the morning on the sofa—a clock showed six—the phone woke me, so I answered it, precise as ever: “Roderick Butler’s house. Tom Cooper speaking.”
“Who?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, and hectic. “Never mind. Is he there? Please get him! Tell him it’s Jon Bell and something crazy scary is happening to me. It’s like a waterfall of lights—”