I have the power, and it’s not as if the world is so very perfect. Inaction is not neutrality, but choice – and in this I choose love, always. My fingers twist and shape, plucking at his soul as if I were closing a pie crust. Pinch, press and so. So and so.
I feel the weight of him, the blades of his shoulders. I slip my hand beneath the back of his head, as I did after he was born – I would not wish him to jar it as he wakes. I exert my strength, and the honey parts, this time not unwillingly but as if in satisfaction at a job well done. His brow breaks the meniscus. Death whispers: I have held him for you, and now I return him as he was.
I raise up the corpse out of the box, and breathe life into it, the separate parts of him all aligned and stitched together. Consummatum est.
The honey washes away, and with it the darkness of his skin. The coins slip from his eyes, the clods of the comb from his lips and cheeks, and I see – as I once most profoundly wished – the fish-skin face of a demon, mouth twitching downward at me by way of apology, then sweeping up into a familiar smirk.
‘Well. Am I fashionably late?’
I cannot say what you will eventually attain.
Oh, I’m sure you could have, demon. No doubt it’s some great godly plot, some divine necessity. No doubt the lot of man is greatly improved. Or perhaps there is war in heaven. I simply do not care.
Damn you.
Damn you.
And damn me, too.
Damn us all.
*
Well. I expect you’re wondering why I’ve called you here this evening.
apocatastasis
THE DARK IS endless, rich and thick. The Inspector takes it in and does not choke, does not suffocate, as if drawing oxygen from the wings of moths. She wonders if all this has been a dying woman’s fancy: if she is lying on the road outside Hunter’s house that first day, murdered by a pale ghost – or whether she is drowning in Santorini amid the stunned fish. The rich music of the earthquake is playing in her, too deep to be sound, too intimately clear to be imagined.
Perhaps this has been the truth all along: that she is a mind formed spontaneously in a void, dreaming the world. It is not much more unlikely that she should persist in such a case than that she should exist at all. In a universe without light, she will never know what she looks like, and if she is the only thing in it, how could she ever determine where were her borders, the outer limits of her skin?
A match flares over by the water door, and she smells the tang of phosphorus.
‘I expect you’re wondering,’ Lönnrot says, ‘why I’ve called you here this evening.’ Lönnrot, in shirtsleeves and wet through, yet somehow keeping the tobacco dry, of course.
‘You,’ she says, without meaning to. She can still see the others behind, Kyriakos and the rest, but they’re indistinct: not pixelated but granular, like an old film image that has been too ambitiously enlarged. Only Lönnrot feels real. ‘You,’ she says again.
Lönnrot half shrugs in agreement, then recovers a dripping bundle from the floor. A convulsive snapping of the shoulders reveals the bundle to be the familiar black jacket to match the sodden trousers. Lönnrot shrugs it on with just a trace of haste, as if ashamed to be seen out of style. Narrow fingers tap pockets in an eerie simulation of banality: spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. In a moment, the tableau is complete: Lönnrot, soaked and smoking in Erebus, is Lönnrot still.
*
Neith gazes back. ‘You are under arrest. Again.’
Lönnrot snorts indelicately, then seems to consider the response and find it unsatisfying, or perhaps gauche. The white fingers twitch in cursory apology, but she finds she doesn’t mind. It was a silly thing to say, here, at the last.
Instead she says: ‘Who are you?’
‘Who do you think I am, Mielikki Neith?’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t believe you’re from the future – a human mind become like a god. I don’t see it. You’d be so different. Why would you bother with all this?’
Lönnrot appears to consider this. ‘Pique, perhaps. I was really very angry with Zagreus.’
‘Smith.’
A glint of malice at the correction, like bone in the wound. ‘I think not. Or not entirely.’
‘And you’re not Gnomon.’
‘Am I not?’
‘Thousands and thousands of years, thousands of bodies, thousands of minds combined into one, and your best answer to pain is still revenge? I think you’d think that was pathetic.’
‘Perhaps I’m still getting used to all this.’
‘Perhaps you’re Anna.’
A nod. ‘That is the most obvious answer, that Hunter put Anna Magdalena back together as best she could, made her a kind of invisible servitor. And then when Hunter died poor Anna took on the role of Gnomon as a crab takes on a shell – she became me so she could kill Smith for revenge without going mad? That’s who I am? It’s a little high.’
‘I did wonder if you might be the Witness itself, using Anna as a peripheral. Or Firespine.’
‘Oh, very good! The birth of a new kind of technological humanity, accidental and traumatic. That would be a genuine apocatastasis, I suppose: a fresh genesis of spirit from stone, the hand of a machine in a human glove, an avatar in reverse. And linguistically quite appropriate, too. Anna Magdalena – it means “elegant grace”. They do say recursion is the inception of mind.’
The Inspector shakes her head. ‘Perhaps you’re the jinn, trapped in the Chamber of Isis, and this is all your dream. Have you thought of that?’
Lönnrot applauds abruptly as if delighted. ‘It’s turtles all the way down, Inspector! All the stories are true. Everything depends on your direction of travel, and like children sharing bunk beds, metaphysicians argue about who goes on top. No. Shall we try once more? Am I Oliver Smith’s counter-narrative? A false personality conjured from – let us say, from Diana Hunter’s unconscious doubts – and set within her mind to untangle her and rope her like a wayward cow? Escaped into the world to wreak havoc, like any good monster, on my maker?’ A dangerous flash of teeth now, of anger. ‘Is that what you think of me?’
They glower at one another in the dark.
‘Just tell me,’ Neith says at last. ‘Just tell me what you want.’
‘I have told you. I wanted you to find Diana Hunter’s diaries and bring them to me. Which you have done, although I must say you were remarkably chippy over it.’
She is about to object that she has done nothing of the kind, but Lönnrot has produced a pair of gloves – from where must be a secret known only to expensive tailors – and is now pulling up a line of copper wire, and a moment later is holding the first knots of the core rope memory.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that.’
‘This is important – but I meant the stories you found in her head. You realise you are the only person to review them all? To live with them in you, as part of you, and learn from them. To allow them to exist in your mind. You held universes in your head – which makes you even dearer to me.’ The narrow chin lifts. ‘As it happens, you are asking the question in the wrong direction. The question is, who are you? Or more cogently, who have you become?’
A Grail Knight, to heal the world. A refusenik on the run. A renegade Fire Judge.
No. None of the above.
‘I’m just the investigator assigned to the case. That’s all.’
The words hang in the air, and she tries to call them back. The worst part of the silence is the look on Lönnrot’s face, the ironic smile jagged with sudden and unruly sympathy.
‘You are wrong, my very dear Inspector. It was never true, even in the moment you were born – but still less is it true now, and in this place. All that has happened has happened because you had to be who you are. Everything Jones has done, and Keene and Pakhet. Everything Smith attempted and every one of the lies Zagreus wove, and all of Hunter’s long and endless game. Every jot and tittle of what has been: all for this. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.’ The red eye o
f the cigarette brightens. Eyebrows rise. ‘Who are you now, that you were not before? And what does the answer mean? Hmmm?’
A text which would move the broad shape of an audience member’s connectome closer to that of a given desired shape.
We become one another.
Next-gen connectome stuff just to get you in the door.
She thinks: Impossible, and then knows it to be true.
‘It changed my mind. It literally, actually changed the shape of my connectome so that it would be closer to hers.’
‘Yes.’
‘But the stories … They’re more than that. Tub said they were informationally dense. They’ve got code in them. Steganography. Huge detail, so vast space to store information. Obfuscated executable System code. It’s broken up! It’s broken up and it’s inert – it needs to be reassembled, reconnected, before it can run. That was the compromise. It couldn’t be automatic or the System would recognise it. It was always what she wanted. She had them bring her weapon inside the System and she knew that as long as they didn’t know what was in her head they’d do anything to put it all together, they’d do what she couldn’t and smuggle it in for her. Smith, Jones, whoever – they thought they were beating her. But they weren’t, were they?’
Lönnrot spreads one hand: good. Carry on.
If you want to crack a real deep system, you need someone to open it up for you.
She breathes out slowly. ‘A significant object; a name and a secret; biocloud analysis … modelled on canine scent recognition. And then PNMR, fingerprinting for the soul. This isn’t an interrogation at all.’ Lönnrot smiles, as if to say: at last.
‘It’s a ruse, a boobytrap! She’s breaking into the System. That’s why Hunter got herself arrested. She even planned the stroke to force them to connect her to the machines. She wanted Smith to put it all back together! That’s the whole point. Smith was sabotaging his own security! Hunter – whoever she is – she’s inside. She used the whole thing to get her attack in place. But she’s not fully conscious so you need—’
And then she just says: ‘Oh.’
*
This is the moment that I promised you all along, that you were so eager for. Oh, I grant you, you wanted this before you knew her, before you cared about her – but don’t you feel some measure of responsibility now that the moment has arrived? Her loss of faith, I said, in everything she has believed in her life – and you thought: Oh, excellent! Won’t that be exciting?
Yes, I know. That was before she felt real to you.
Is it satisfactory all the same? Will you see it in her face; in the sudden frozen instant of kairos, in which all is decided? I can. I can see the horror and the bubbling denial, and the certainty that brings them.
Did you imagine my promise meant something so small and commonplace as politics?
In a moment, Mielikki Neith hears herself give voice to something she has begun to understand in one part of herself, but which the deep psychological defences of the human mind have kept from her until now. In the unintended shift in tense from past to present, she reveals the clue she most wishes to avoid understanding. For most people, it would be a momentary lapse, swiftly brushed aside, but Neith’s intellectual integrity will not allow denial, will not brook comforting falsehoods. She was chosen in her role and perfected in her stubbornness by my enemies – but those same virtues might also serve me, depending on the direction of travel. It all comes down to her, and the myriad paths of human possibility collapse upon themselves, infinite choices devolving into a stark binary, a fork in the road.
Now she begins to see it all, as a detective should when gifted by a narrating universe with one last fatal nudge. How could Hunter know the form of Smith’s extinction in advance? Grant that she might instruct her cohort to perform it just so – but Lönnrot is no pushover. There’s a will behind that mad white face. And what if Smith did not perfectly pronounce his lines, and the words did not match? And yet, they do.
How many people, truly, has Neith met in this adventure? There are eight billion persons in the world, of course, of whom the average human being knows between a bare two hundred and a frantic five thousand – yet Neith seems to inhabit a London composed of only dozens, with occasional music.
How many times has she tested her light switches and been relieved? And yet she maintains against all reason that the failure of the Witness itself is not evidence of anything at all, save corruption.
How many impossible things must happen before catching a tennis ball is not a reassurance? A shark devours a man in a tunnel, and the woman who began all this is the author of books whose texts cannot be read.
How many times must a universe fail a dream check before it is pronounced a dream?
It was the whole point that she must reach this realisation here and now. Only she can do what must be done, and only willingly, by her own choice, in the fullest knowledge of its meaning.
Now that she knows, we all must wait and see.
Lönnrot is still there, in front of the others, but somehow the fish skin is almost entirely transparent now. The combinations of shadow and flesh become between instants not four figures disentwining themselves but five arranged along an axis. She can see the bones in Lönnrot’s ribs, and through them she can see Berihun Bekele, the lines of his much older face sketching themselves on to Constantine Kyriakos, and behind them all the handsome, high cheekbones of Athenais Karthagonensis, and all of them together, moving about their tasks, somehow create the stable image of a woman lying in a chair just like the one Neith herself occupies: a ballsy, lined face and big librarian’s hands, unruly hair and eyes that miss nothing.
It is a face she has only ever seen dead, and yet here it is alive and directed in what must be a hallucination and yet clearly is not.
She’s inside.
She is inside.
‘Is’, not ‘was’.
‘Yes,’ deepsea Lönnrot murmurs. ‘I gave you that, too. At the very beginning.’ The words sound strange, composed of a choral babble of other voices which somehow together make a new one. Not Lönnrot’s voice at all: richer, kinder and more vibrant, and painfully more real.
Neith nods. ‘You asked me how long ago the interrogation began.’
‘Because I wanted you to consider when it ended.’
‘And you want me to say that it hasn’t.’
Lönnrot spreads narrow white palms in surrender, and behind Lönnrot the other figures do the same, or something similar, so that from the kaleidoscope of motion the Inspector’s mind assembles the image of a woman sitting up, dismounting the chair. Finally, she takes one more step, and passes through Lönnrot entirely, the white skin settling over her like a veil and disappearing, and now she and Mielikki Neith are alone.
‘No,’ Diana Hunter says, ‘it has not. I could not let it, until now. I was waiting for you. And now that you’re here, we should talk.’
Hunter is ageless to look at, somewhere between fifty and eighty, but poised in a dignity which will never entirely fade: a vibrant energy that fills her eyes and lifts the lines in her wide face. There’s something of Athenais in the way she stands, of Kyriakos in her challenge to the world, of Berihun Bekele in her fingers and of Lönnrot in her lips.
‘This is a lie,’ Neith says.
Hunter sighs. ‘There’s no time.’
‘How much of it? When did I step into the interrogation? When Jones drugged me? Or before that? How much of it is a lie?’
‘Everything you know about the System is true. Firespine is real. I realised I had to tear it down. I planned all this. I was even expecting you.’
‘How long have I been in here with you?’
‘There is no time for this. It’s happening now: do or die.’
‘I don’t care,’ Neith says, realising that this is true. ‘I don’t. Let it all come down, or not. Let the System fall hard, and whatever you have in mind fall with it, and let them work it out for themselves.’
Hunter nods. ‘Bu
t it won’t all come down, Mielikki. I’m losing. I can’t stalemate them; I’m just not that good. Everything was harder than I expected. Even if I let myself die, they can scoop out enough of me to get their answers, to get back in control. I can win or I can lose, but there’s no draw. Firespine falls, or it doesn’t. You have to choose.’
‘And you want me to pull the plug.’
‘Yes. Because it’s right. Because the machine doesn’t serve. It seems to. It pretends to. But in the end we make no real choices, we are governed by diktat. We live under absolute scrutiny. We are known, but we do not know. And five men and women have the right of life and death, the power to determine what comes. How long do you think that can go on, before it is absolutely corrupt? Before a Jones or a Smith becomes something worse? If you don’t agree with me, why didn’t you take the job?’
‘I didn’t want it.’
‘You didn’t want the consequence, any more than I did. You were just quicker to realise.’
‘Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe people are just happier. I know I was.’
‘Yes, the ends and the means. I’m familiar with that one, too. But the means is all we ever get. We never quite reach the end. Would you like to see what that entails? The truth, now, as best I can?’
Neith shrugs, and nods.
‘Then take my hand,’ Hunter says.
*
There are five of them, in white coats, with the tender hands of doctors. They stand over her, around the screens, concerned and clear-eyed and rational. They are probing her mind, with the best of motives and intentions. Her body has been taxed past bearing, and half of it is numb. On the screen, Neith can see the face of Diana Hunter reflected, the slack jaw and drooling mouth.
‘It hurts,’ Hunter says gently to her fellow traveller. ‘That’s the thing. It hurts so much that I can’t see him anymore. I can’t show you his face or tell you his name. This is what he is to me.’ She is shaking, and to Neith she feels cold and diminished. In the room, the words are a murmur of nonsense. FA LA JO JI RO JA.
The body of the closest man is burning in his clothes, and his face is made of fire.