If Then Read online

  The charcoal burner tended to his kiln, dousing the conical pile with water so that it did not burn too hot; steam rushed forth and then slowed, drifting upward among the tall larch trees. The stew boiled away on the dixie.

  “How are things in town?”

  The charcoal burner was keen for gossip, for some connection with society. James thought of Lewes as he had left it that morning; quiet and self-contained, wood fires and malt steam from the brewery mingling with a curious mist. Lewes had been established over a thousand years earlier to take advantage of its situation: from the top of the Norman castle, a sentry could see seven miles south to the sea, west to Firle Beacon, and north, along the river to the chalk pit and the approach along the disused railway line. The town had two hearts, one high up by the castle, and the other lower down, in the lee of a chalk cliff face sharking free of the undulations of the Downs. It had been easy to erect barriers at each of the points of ingress, securing Lewes against any incursion of the evicted.

  “The town has everything it needs,” said the bailiff.

  The charcoal burner gestured around at the woods.

  “Except freedom.”

  “It has freedom.”

  The charcoal burner tapped the top of his head, meaning the stripe. “Matter of opinion.”

  James asked for directions to the Institute.

  “Follow the wood down, and then turn west at the weir. That will bring you to the old house from the direction of the gardens. You’ll have more visibility that way. If you follow the walls then you will end up in the bunkers around the back. That’s the way my sons went. I would avoid that. You’re welcome to stay for some stew. My wife will be back soon, and she’ll be sorry she missed you.”

  “Perhaps upon my return.”

  The burner and his boys watched James go, pulling the soldier along behind him, Hector’s face fixed in a thousand yard stare.

  James followed the directions down to the river. At the shallow bridleway, the glide of the river appeared to reverse against the consecutive drags of stepping stones. In the lee of each stepping stone, the water bubbled and cohered into memory pools hemmed in by the swirl of the current, memories that were inseparable from the current yet appeared – if only briefly – to belong to an individual rock.

  He had spent time at the Institute, first undergoing the implant, and then recovering from it. It had seemed the only way to get through the Seizure with any quality of life. He and Ruth had done very badly out of the collapse, and prior to that, the crisis. And then events accelerated.

  No, James corrected himself, acceleration implies forward movement. Events lateralized. Events networked.

  He had argued with Ruth about the meaning of the Seizure. She insisted that it was plain theft and exploitation. They argued about the onset of their obsolescence, what had been lost, what would never be. They argued about the state of the world before the crisis, or the collapse or the Seizure. James believed that they had been deluded as to the true nature of their society, whereas Ruth believed that the future they found themselves within was a lie, and that the past, and the way they had once been together, was the truth.

  Throughout their arguments, events continued to slide sideways, in the same way that if he stood on the bank staring at the river’s flow, it seemed as if the bank was moving backward while the river remained motionless.

  Humans are astonishingly adaptable. A few years living within the Process and already it seemed as natural to him as the river’s progress to the sea.

  The soldier went splashing through the cold water of the bridleway; his features had the potential to be cunning, even demonic, if intelligence returned to them.

  He hauled the soldier along a muddy path and through the trees he glimpsed the gothic castellations of the Institute: the roof with its eighty or so chimneys, the east wing covered with autumnal ivy, the west wing a turret and great Round Room. Between him and the house, there were three hundred yards or so of meadow ending in a haw-haw, and then a low courtyard wall. It was as if the Institute was below sea level, in a muggy stilted zone, with mosquitos in the air that made the scar on his scalp itch.

  The foundations had been laid in the ninth century for a priory. The house had undergone a major renovation at the end of each of the previous three centuries so that it was a patchwork of architectural fashions covered in crimson lichen and vines. Time was fermenting here, becoming an intoxicant. The moon was high and so was the sun. He took the soldier by the hand and they walked together across the meadow. Atop the turret of the Round Room, taut silver sails rigged at oblique angles monitored the ether. Behind the windows, strange shadows passed to and fro.

  He stood at the door and shouted Alex’s name, then tested the handle. The door opened onto a hallway, a muddy black and white tiled floor interspersed with buckets and chamber pots to collect drips from the leaking roof. Murmurs and whispers came from a bright side room, and through a crack in the doorway he saw the painful movements of a tall and half-naked figure.

  But it was Alex Drown who met him at the entrance of the Round Room. Her right eye was entirely bloodshot.

  “James. You’ve come back.”

  “I’ve brought you something.” He helped Hector into a seated position on the tiled floor. “I found him trapped in some barbed wire on the Downs. The wire was new.”

  She inspected the soldier, opened the pockets of his outfit, rooted around in his backpack, and looked inside his mouth and his ears.

  “I’d say this one was made from archive photographs, reverse engineering from descendants, and something weirder.”

  She registered the name on the identity disc. “Has Hector been livelier than this?”

  “He took a swing at me outside Glynde. The villagers said they had found other soldiers and brought them to you.”

  “We have half a dozen now. But Hector seems different, as if made from a more detailed pattern.”

  “Pattern from where?”

  “Something weirder, as I said.” She grinned at him. Her dark hair was short and ragged, cut by herself in the reflection of a grimy mirror. Her trouser suit had blood stains upon the collar. He noted the vinegary odour of stale female perspiration. Two villagers dressed in boiler suits and frayed grey lab coats arrived to take the soldier away.

  “It’s good to see you again, James.”

  “Your eye,” he said.

  “I know. Upgrades. We should never have augmented the hardware.”

  He didn’t understand.

  “The implants,” she explained, reaching over to him, feeling through his hair for the scarred intake on the back on his skull. “We should have confined ourselves to hacking the software and not dabbled with the wiring. You live and learn. Every time Omega John upgrades me, my eyes bleed, my fingernails fall out and I lose my sense of balance. Will you join me in the Round Room?”

  The Round Room was in a state of benign neglect. The dome of the rotunda was covered by a mural depicting characters from the history of the Institute. The other walls were slick with damp and the paint sloughed off them in silvered waves. Alex perched upon the edge of a heavy dark wooden desk and huddled into her suit jacket against the draught from the sash window frames.

  “Do you mind if I ask Omega John to come in on this meeting?” Remnants of corporate dialect remained in Alex’s speech. Before the Seizure, she had worked for a technology company called Monad.

  An awkward half-naked figure, the same one that James had glimpsed on the way in, walked into the Round Room. He wore a bedsheet like a sash. Skin and bone iterated in a massy cauliflower-like clump at the base of his bald head. Perspiration welled on his sunken spotted chest. The arms were as pallid as wishbones, the shoulders like knuckles. He ran a dry tongue over chapped white lips before speaking.

  Alex said, “No one understands the Process as well as Omega John.”

  Some parts of his body were young, some were old; he bared his strong white teeth in weak acknowledgment of her boilerpl
ate praise.

  “I think we’ve met,” said James.

  “When you had your implant. Time has been unkind to me since. I’m between longevity treatments.” Omega John had a passive singsong voice. “The soldier you brought in, John Hector, was in the 32nd Field Ambulance in the Allied campaign against Turkey in the Great War, known variously as the Dardanelles campaign, the Battle of Gallipoli, or the Çanakkale. Hector landed at Suvla Bay in August 1915. He was a stretcher bearer. History tells us that he survived the campaign, but that is all. The other soldiers delivered to us also wore uniforms consistent with the landing at Suvla Bay but only two of them prior to Hector are the simulacra of particular men.”

  Alex clarified, “The first four were generic patterns. Like toy soldiers.”

  “Are you suggesting the Process is playing war?” James asked.

  Omega John inhaled sharply. “You’ve spent too long in the town, bailiff. You are succumbing to the community’s anthropomorphizing projection. The Process is a set of algorithms. It does not play.”

  Omega John wound the bed sheet tighter around his attenuated body.

  “The unending Process reconciles the strivings of individuals within a framework of mutual benefit. Nothing more.”

  “Why has the Process not supplied you with clothes that fit?” asked James.

  “We try to keep our needs outside of the Process,” replied Omega John.

  “Would you like my wife to make you an outfit?” asked James. “Ruth is a very good seamstress.”

  Omega John treated the offer with disdain, instead asking, “Does Ruth still mark the winter solstice by dangling the broken casings of mobile phones from the window frame so that the Process will not overlook you?”

  “It doesn’t mean that we believe.”

  “The Process requires neither your belief nor your observance. Just because it watches over you, it does not mean that it cares about you or even understands what you are.”

  “Who told the Process to make these soldiers?”

  “No one programs the Process. It uses its data set to anticipate future need.”

  “We don’t know why the Process is concerned with the First World War,” said Alex quietly.

  “There is precedent,” continued Omega John. “The Process has created historical simulacra before. Last year, at a Process point in Totnes, in place of the expected allocation, a Methodist congregation and minister from Boston on August 26, 1873 were recreated in living detail. Then, on medicine day, the Process point contained the skin tent of the Reindeer Chuckchi people of the Kolyma district, early twentieth century. My first thought was that these simulacra were due to unusual agglomeration of needs in the town. Human desire is multifarious and liable to mutation. Bad input leads to bad output. However, I am coming round to the theory that prolonged exposure to human behaviour is introducing cognitive algorithms into the Process.”

  “It’s becoming more like us?” guessed James.

  “As we become more like it.” Omega John took deep satisfaction in this thought.

  “Artefacts such as the soldier – anomalies that seem superfluous but must meet some obscure buried need – provide an excellent opportunity to study the Process,” said Alex.

  “And people, too,” said Omega John. “The Process is entirely responsive to people. It monitors and meets the needs of the people within it. Once sufficient data has been gathered on their past behaviour, it can infer, with increasing accuracy, future outcomes, future lives. People are evicted before they can create problems. The question is, does the Process manipulate the data set – that is, the people – to meet future needs that we are not yet cognizant of?”

  James could not follow Omega John’s reasoning; he was distracted by the malformed and botched arrangement of skull at the back of his head.

  “What have you been doing to your brain?” asked James.

  “I have undergone forty-eight procedures,” said Omega John. “Twenty voluntary, twelve of them vindictive. Fifteen were subsequently corrective; one, performed a long time ago, was particularly traumatic. My former rivals in the Institute took puerile delight in rearranging the regions of my global workspace.”

  “His mind,” clarified Alex.

  “And these pranks–” he pronounced the word with weary contempt “–had physiological side effects, particularly in the regulation of hormones.”

  “You’re doing brain surgery for a joke?” asked James.

  Alex’s eyelids flickered, and she put her hand up to stop that train of thought.

  “It’s play, James. One of the characteristics of augmented intelligence is a love of play and the use of games to access insight.”

  “Is that what happened to your eye? Did someone play with it?”

  “Without upgrades I would be out of the loop. As a manager, I have to be able to comprehend the research that goes on here, and the adjustment to our working practices brought about by augmentation has produced palpable gains in our understanding of the Process.”

  “And potentially even how to interact with it.” The excitement that Omega John took in this prospect was evident in the way his fingers dithered.

  “But the augmentations have left us physically deficient. That is why Omega John and I would like you to help us.”

  “I already have a role within the Process.”

  “We are not asking you to alter your role as bailiff. We want you to look after Hector, monitor him, report back as the Process gets stronger within him.”

  “It might be dangerous.”

  Alex took his hand. “It will be dangerous for everyone if the Process continues to produce these simulacra. An army will exceed the carrying capacity of the surroundings.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She is suggesting that the Process may utilize local low value resources in its recreation,” said Omega John. His clarification did not help James’ understanding, and noticing this, he wearily attempted the obvious. “We don’t know how big its war will get. It may use the town and its inhabitants as raw materials.”

  Alex gripped his hand. “Omega John calls me irrational but I have a feeling that these things have a tendency to get out of hand.”

  “It is only when things get out of hand that they get interesting,” said Omega John. He gathered his sheet around his emaciated marbled form. “Look after John Hector, bailiff. He is very important to us.” Omega John made painfully slow progress from the Round Room.

  Alone with Alex, James asked her what the Institute intended to do with the other soldiers that had been found

  “Nothing,” said Alex. “Not until you’ve spent some time with Hector. The soldiers are beyond the influence of the Process here. To study the Process’ intentions in creating Hector, we need to observe his behaviour. Take him back to Lewes. Keep him close. Tell us what he does.”

  She led him out of the house and up a path to the Orangery where orderlies drank tea and the soldiers sat around despondent on long benches. There were four generic faces in a row – the toy soldiers she mentioned – and then a gap, and then the simulacra of individuals. Alex introduced two of them. Father Huxley, priest and archaeologist, and Professor Collinson, attached to the 32nd Field Ambulance. Neither stirred with recognition when Alex mentioned their names. James sniffed Collinson: Pears soap, dust, coffee and the sea. Every hair of his moustache had been effortlessly and automatically rendered. To think that Omega John scorned Ruth for her instinctive worship of the Process, when it could replicate the bodies of the long dead!

  “These two men also survived the war,” said Alex. “Might be a pattern. Too early to say.”

  “Would Hector have served alongside them?”

  “Yes, Omega John said they were in the same ambulance. He’s very knowledgeable about the war. I wanted to send you away with all three of them but Omega John reckons you will struggle to control even one.”

  Dusk in the walled garden, the air soft and coarse-grained, the shaggy cascade of orname
ntal conifers beside a faintly luminescent chalk path. The orderlies laid blankets around the shoulders of the manufactured men, seated dutifully on benches gazing out of the windows of the Orangery. With their ounces of volition, the men drew the blankets close around themselves.

  He wondered about this gesture, a faint of echo of the way soldiers might behave, exhausted by battle and taking refuge. He turned to Alex.

  “How does the Process make men with such accuracy?”

  Alex was pouring tea into a china cup; she paused, studied him, one eye mute with blood, the other clear and questioning, and was about to answer when Omega John arrived, the wheels of his bath chair rattling over the paved entrance. His personal staff corrected his Russian fur hat, pulling it down over the bandages strung around his enlarged cranium. Amused by Alex’s hesitation, Omega John answered for her.

  “The men are made from sperm and blood. According to the alchemist Paracelsus, if sperm is left to putrefy in a horse’s womb for forty days, then nourished with the arcanum of human blood, it will grow into something like a man.”

  Omega John wore a sheepskin sleeping bag that covered him from nape to toe, with thick tartan sleeves, from which jaundiced wrists and hands protruded. His orderlies wheeled him to their table.

  The air in the Orangery cooled. Through the windows, evening stars appeared between darkening clouds. The orderlies waited at the periphery of the room. Drawn from the laypeople of Glynde, village life and the work of the Institute had been entwined for generations. They were protective of Omega John, as if servicing and prolonging his life imbued their existence with greater meaning.

  The authority in Omega John’s voice had been broken into many pieces and then reassembled. He talked like a man crossing a rock desert of fissures and cracks: with hesitation, dithering at each turn, then wearily leaping on the next point. The waxy sheen of his skin made him seem close to death, yet his teeth were much younger than his larynx, and new hair burst through the bandages here and there like strong gorse.

  “My colleague in the Institute, Sunny Wu, is a forger of flesh, an expert in the Chinese skill of the counterfeit.” He coughed violently, and accepted a handkerchief from his orderly. “Sunny Wu grew a living replica of his wife’s body, though I suspect it was not from his sperm; she would never have allowed that.”