70

I don’t have a first memory. However hard I try to think back, I can’t.

Those were the words that had flickered across the great bank of screens in front of Michal Piotrowski as he sat by the shiny white control desk on the top floor of the glass tower.

The twenty-sixth of November had been a long day: long, eventful, dramatic. In some ways its actual beginning came just before nine a.m., when he walked into Warsaw University Library. At that point the day had scarcely woken up, a glorious late autumn morning with clear high air and a colourless sun that almost managed to send a little warmth to the branches of the wild grapevine, glowing with its last red relics of the season.

There, he had logged on to one of the library computers to send the last of three emails to William Sandberg. Just as he had done earlier that same morning, he used two different public computers to send another two emails with the exact same content.

Stockholm Central Station, Arlanda Airport Express, third of December, 4pm precisely.

That was it: no sender, no name. Sent from different places, impossible to trace, all so that no one would be able to find out what he was doing.

If he’d been scared before, it was nothing compared to how he felt now.

—

I remember no birth.

I remember no places.

All I know is that I am alive now.

—

Now, it was evening, and now, he was alone in his office. And yes, it tormented him. He should have gone home with her to celebrate, of course he should have. So many years of their lives had led up to this day, and Rebecca had been dedicated throughout, although it had been his project to begin with.

Now he had disappointed her again, and he hated that. He hated the look in her eyes every time she said she understood when she didn’t, just as he hated when he deprived her of the ordinary, everyday things that he could not allow himself to do. A little walk, a Sunday brunch in a café, falling asleep with heads touching on uncomfortable aeroplane seats.

No, she didn’t understand. Accepted, certainly, and he loved her for that, but every now and then it would surface, the frustration at not being able to live life like everyone else; that he was so scared of it ending that he never even allowed it to begin. He saw ghosts, she said, worried about dangers that never were.

He didn’t feel the slightest satisfaction in finally proving her wrong.

The first time he saw the picture, it was in one of the many journals they used to read. It might have been Science, or perhaps New Scientist, regardless, it had been printed across two pages, more of a fascinating, anecdotal photograph than a real news story. That was over a month ago now.

It looked like a sea anemone, or a firework, but it was neither. It was a snapshot of internet traffic on the nineteenth of September. On the same day, read the caption, a number of essential services had gone down across the American continent, everything from the banks to NASDAQ, a presumed hacker attack that was never traced. That particular attack had been frozen for posterity, an unintended artwork where the traffic streams were illustrated in luminescent colours in a spectrum that ranged from light red, meaning large streams of data, down to dark blue, which meant the opposite.

It was impossible not to recognise the pattern. It looked like his own project. It looked exactly like thoughts.

And you’re not a real scientist unless you are curious. That’s what he always used to say, and it’s what he’d said now. He had decided to proceed with the first experiment that same day, half as a joke, half serious, and he had fired up their large computers, launched all the programs, those that they were constantly striving to refine and that one day might succeed in transcribing human thought. But instead of the experiment booth’s electrodes, he had hooked up to the fibre-optic cables that linked the office complex with the outside world. And the more tests he ran, the clearer it became.

The pattern wasn’t just like thought. It was thought.

They were present the whole time, barely measurable in the great stream of traffic, data that wasn’t actually data and that appeared and then disappeared into the background noise, exactly like human thoughts get lost in the noise of other information. And, as dizzying as the idea was that some kind of thoughts might be circulating out there, the question of why was quite terrifying.

Who had created them? Why had they paralysed essential services across half of the US? And perhaps most important, what else were they capable of?

Once those questions had occurred to him he couldn’t just let them go. Had there been similar attacks on other dates, besides the one that had knocked out the NASDAQ and several banks in September?

Yes, there had. Trawling through archives and news articles, he found them all across the globe: power cuts that had come without warning, servers and power distribution infrastructure that had shut down for no reason whatsoever. Each time they followed the same pattern, and Piotrowski’s conviction grew stronger and stronger. This was something far bigger than a nice picture in a magazine.

This was a weapon. A weapon in the shape of an untouchable program that popped up and disappeared again like thoughts. An advanced virus, maybe an artificial intelligence–an invisible, electronic guerrilla soldier that could strike at any time, anywhere in the world, of its own accord. The perfect tool for crippling a nation. Or worse still, the world.

He knew that he wasn’t going to be able to find out more without help, and his thoughts turned straight away to three people he had met at a conference. One of whom had threatened to kill him if he ever made contact again.

Once upon a time I didn’t exist, and one day I will be no more.

In between though? Is it really so much to ask to know who you are?

Once the last email had been sent from the university library that morning of the twenty-sixth of November, the rules of engagement changed markedly.

Perhaps it was his fear that helped him survive, that constant state of preparedness he always maintained and that Rebecca called paranoia, but regardless, something had made him register the motor revving from a distance. It was the unmistakable whine of an automatic gearbox, not changing up until ever so slightly too late, and it came from the other end of the narrow street to the river, just as he was crossing the road on his way from the library back towards town.

When he turned around a taxi was heading straight for him, behind the wheel a face white with fear.

Around him, students dived for safety, seeking shelter along the frontages. Piotrowski ducked off the road, up onto the pavement in front of the tobacconist’s. Tyres squealed across the tarmac as the car corrected its skid in a long, searching turn, and then came the sound of glass as the shop window exploded, a cacophony that drowned out anything else, shelves collapsing, metal scraping, whole stacks of products falling to the ground.

The engine kept screaming and revving long after the shattered window had gone quiet. From the street, you could only see the rear end sticking out; the rest of the taxi was inside, listing on one side above the shelves, smelling of exhaust fumes and burning rubber while the gaping hole that had once been a window displayed the flayed remains of special offers, newspaper posters, and photographs of bands that would soon be appearing in concert.

When the students rushed to see what had happened to the dark-haired, bearded man, none of them expected to find him in one piece. But as the chaos began at last to settle, they realised that he was no longer even there. By that point, Piotrowski was already several blocks away, breathless from fear and shock, grateful that he’d managed to react in time.

There and then, he properly understood what he had known all along. That no, he wasn’t paranoid.

That day had turned out to be the one where the stars aligned. Life loves ironies, and thus the day someone tried to crush Michal under the wheels of a taxi was also the day that his project bore fruit for the first time. For the first time, Rosetta cut through the noise and managed to isolate conscious thoughts.

Their test subject was a sixty-year-old woman from an agency, and their experiment was the same as ever, with one major exception. For the first time, Michal was able to read the subject’s unuttered words on the screens as she responded to Rebecca’s questions.

The day he’d both longed for and feared in equal measure had arrived. Looked forward to, because he had finally fulfilled his promise to Gabriella; feared because he knew that once it was over, the emptiness that plagued him would step up its efforts. The only thing Michal Piotrowski felt now, though, was fear. He was too scared to celebrate, too afraid to feel that emptiness, and far, far too terrified to explain to Rebecca why. As she left the office with proud yet wounded eyes, he was left sitting in a lonely silence for which he had only himself to blame.

But what could he do? Clearly, he had come across something that he was not allowed to know. They’d seen him go into the university library, decided to take him out, and failed by a hair’s breadth. For the second time in his life, he had survived an assassination attempt.

That evening he repeated the experiment. He disconnected the electrodes and let the internet data streams pass through their equipment, hoping that the new calibration would succeed once more. And if his head had spun when the woman’s mundane responses had appeared on the screen, it was nothing compared to how it was spinning now.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so scared of dying.

Because if I never get to find out who I am, have I even really lived at all?

The twenty-sixth of November had been a long, long day. When evening came, Michal Piotrowski was standing in his office, watching the computer spit out the last of three newly copied CDs. Hidden in a piece of music, in one of the many piano concertos he hated so much, were thoughts he had found on the internet. No–thoughts that had been thought by the internet. Not artificial intelligence, nor a virus, or anything that had been engineered by a foreign power: it was a thinking, living consciousness that was unhappy and morose and wondering why it existed. A life that should not have been able to exist, but that did nonetheless, I think, therefore I am. How and why, he had no idea, he just knew what it meant: that if that consciousness was now trying to attack humanity, it was going to be impossible for Piotrowski to do anything about it.

It also meant that as soon as it realised who the three people he was asking for help were, they would be in as much danger as he was.

On each of the three CDs he wrote a short message explaining that the meeting was cancelled, then he stuffed each one into a padded envelope.

The very last thing he did was to grab a handful of Post-it notes.

It was four days before he left his apartment again. By then, no one would know him any more. He’d cut his own hair over the bathtub, trimmed his beard, and shaped his eyebrows until they looked thin and well cared for. From public terminals in internet cafés and petrol stations, he booked journeys he never intended to make, then hired a car he paid for with cash, on the outskirts of town. On the afternoon of the second of December he began his journey westwards, first towards Berlin, then Hamburg, Copenhagen and on into Sweden. He avoided ferries and harbours, sticking to the back roads to avoid tolls and speed cameras.

Yet there are cameras everywhere.

As he crossed the border into Sweden, heading into the dark, night-time fog, the modern entertainment system on the dashboard kept glowing just as it had all along. But he couldn’t see what was happening inside. Because how could you see someone’s thoughts?

When the train thundered towards him, he thought to himself that no one could have known that he was going to be right here. Simply because he hadn’t even known himself.

William Sandberg was sitting in the narrow culvert alongside the track. It was dark and dank, and the laptop open on his knees was his only source of heat. Somewhere outside the passage he could hear trains rattling past, and occasionally the culvert was illuminated by light spilling from passing windows.

All he could think of, though, were the words shining straight out at him from the screen. He read them over and over again, feeling a chasm open up beneath him, one that coupled vertigo with claustrophobia, as if they described his own life. Words of loneliness, of looking for answers, an unwilling farewell letter from one who had just taken the world hostage.

This was the dead end, he thought, the terminus, a dark and filthy offshoot from a railway tunnel. That’s where he was going to be sitting as meltdown after meltdown made half of the planet uninhabitable.

And perhaps that was just as well. He had lost everything. He’d had a life and a family and a home, and then he’d been sacked, his wife had left him, and in both cases it was all his own fault. Just because their daughter had turned her back on them, had withdrawn from the world and decided to hate it, and the moment he thought about her, he knew why the words had hit him so hard.

It wasn’t his life they described.

William sat with his eyes closed. There were things he should have done long ago, things that would always be too late. A sad person will eventually become an angry person; an angry person will do something about it.

He had failed once, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again.

Before he shut down the computer, he read the words one last time.

I don’t want to hurt anyone.

But what can you do when you don’t have a choice?