The next day I went to the station. I proved my identity with fingerprints and DNA, and gave a full report of all that had happened.

I had not been assumed dead. My salary had continued to be paid into my bank account, and mortgage payments deducted automatically. The department settled my claim for compensation out of court, paying me three-quarters of a million dollars, and I underwent surgery to restore as much of my former appearance as possible.

It took more than two years of rehabilitation, but now I am back on active duty. The Macklenburg case has been shelved for lack of evidence. The investigation of the kidnapping of the three of us, and Catherine’s present fate, is on the verge of going the same way; nobody doubts my account of the events, but all the evidence against Gustave Lindhquist is circumstantial. I accept that. I’m glad. I want to erase everything that Lindhquist has done to me, and an obsession with bringing him to justice is the exact opposite of the state of mind I aim to achieve. I don’t pretend to understand what he thought he was achieving by letting me live, what his insane notion of my supposed effect on the world actually entailed, but I am determined to be, in every way, the same person as I was before the experience, and thus to defeat his intentions.

Marion is doing fine. For a while she suffered from recurring nightmares, but after seeing a therapist who specialises in de-traumatising hostages and kidnap victims, she is now every bit as relaxed and carefree as she used to be.

I have nightmares, now and then. I wake in the early hours of the morning, shivering and sweating and crying out, unable to recall what horror I’m escaping. Andreas Lindhquist injecting samples of brain tissue into his son? Catherine blissfully closing her eyes, and thanking me for saving her life while her claws rake ray body into bloody strips? Myself, trapped in The Caress; the moment of the realisation infinitely, unmercifully prolonged? Perhaps; or perhaps I simply dream about my latest case — that seems much more likely.

Everything is back to normal.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

BLOOD SISTERS

When we were nine years old, Paula decided we should prick our thumbs, and let our blood flow into each other’s veins.

I was scornful. “Why bother? Our blood’s already exactly the same. We’re already blood sisters.”

She was unfazed. “I know that. That’s not the point. It’s the ritual that counts.”

We did it in our bedroom, at midnight, by the light of a single candle. She sterilized the needle in the candle flame, then wiped it clean of soot with a tissue and saliva.

When we’d pressed the tiny, sticky wounds together, and recited some ridiculous oath from a third-rate children’s novel, Paula blew out the candle. While my eyes were still adjusting to the dark, she added a whispered coda of her own: “Now we’ll dream the same dreams, and share the same lovers, and die at the very same hour.”

I tried to say, indignantly, “That’s just not true!” but the darkness and the scent of the dead flame made the protest stick in my throat, and her words remained unchallenged.

* * *

As Dr Packard spoke, I folded the pathology report, into halves, into quarters, obsessively aligning the edges. It was far too thick for me to make a neat job of it; from the micrographs of the misshapen lymphocytes proliferating in my bone marrow, to the print-out of portions of the RNA sequence of the virus that had triggered the disease, thirty-two pages in all.

In contrast, the prescription, still sitting on the desk in front of me, seemed ludicrously flimsy and insubstantial. No match at all. The traditional— indecipherable—polysyllabic scrawl it bore was nothing but a decoration; the drug’s name was reliably encrypted in the barcode below. There was no question of receiving the wrong medication by mistake. The question was, would the right one help me?

“Is that clear? Ms Rees? Is there anything you don’t understand?”

I struggled to focus my thoughts, pressing hard on an intractable crease with my thumb. She’d explained the situation frankly, without resorting to jargon or euphemism, but I still had the feeling that I was missing something crucial. It seemed like every sentence she’d spoken had started one of two ways: “The virus…”or “The drug…”

“Is there anything I can do? Myself? To… improve the odds?”

She hesitated, but not for long. “No, not really. You’re in excellent health, otherwise. Stay that way.” She began to rise from her desk to dismiss me, and I began to panic.

“But, there must be something.” I gripped the arms of my chair, as if afraid of being dislodged by force. Maybe she’d misunderstood me, maybe I hadn’t made myself clear. “Should I… stop eating certain foods? Get more exercise? Get more sleep? I mean, there has to be something that will make a difference. And I’ll do it, whatever it is. Please, just tell me—” My voice almost cracked, and I looked away, embarrassed. Don’t ever start ranting like that again. Not ever.

“Ms Rees, I’m sorry. I know how you must be feeling. But the Monte Carlo diseases are all like this. In fact, you’re exceptionally lucky; the WHO computer found eighty thousand people, worldwide, infected with a similar strain. That’s not enough of a market to support any hard-core research, but enough to have persuaded the pharmaceutical companies to rummage through their databases for something that might do the trick. A lot of people are on their own, infected with viruses that are virtually unique. Imagine how much useful information the health profession can give them.” I finally looked up; the expression on her face was one of sympathy, tempered by impatience.

I declined the invitation to feel ashamed of my ingratitude. I’d made a fool of myself, but I still had a right to ask the question. “I understand all that. I just thought there might be something I could do. You say this drug might work, or it might not. If I could contribute, myself, to fighting this disease, I’d feel…”

What? More like a human being, and less like a test tube—a passive container in which the wonder drug and the wonder virus would fight it out between themselves. “… better.”

She nodded. “I know, but trust me, nothing you can do would make the slightest difference. Just look after yourself as you normally would. Don’t catch pneumonia. Don’t gain or lose ten kilos. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. Millions of people must have been exposed to this virus, but the reason you’re sick, and they’re not, is a purely genetic matter. The cure will be just the same. The biochemistry that determines whether or not the drug will work for you isn’t going to change if you start taking vitamin pills, or stop eating junk food—and I should warn you that going on one of those

‘miracle-cure’ diets will simply make you sick; the charlatans selling them ought to be in prison.”

I nodded fervent agreement to that, and felt myself flush with anger. Fraudulent cures had long been my bê te noir—although now, for the first time, I could almost understand why other Monte Carlo victims paid good money for such things: crackpot diets, meditation schemes, aroma therapy, self-hypnosis tapes, you name it. The people who peddled that garbage were the worst kind of cynical parasites, and I’d always thought of their customers as being either congenitally gullible, or desperate to the point of abandoning their wits, but there was more to it than that. When your life is at stake, you want to fight for it—with every ounce of your strength, with every cent you can borrow, with every waking moment. Taking one capsule, three times a day, just isn’t hard enough—whereas the schemes of the most perceptive con-men were sufficiently arduous (or sufficiently expensive) to make the victims feel that they were engaged in the kind of struggle that the prospect of death requires.

This moment of shared anger cleared the air completely. We were on the same side, after all; I’d been acting like a child. I thanked Dr Packard for her time, picked up the prescription, and left.

On my way to the pharmacy, though, I found myself almost wishing that she’d lied to me—that she’d told me my chances would be vastly improved if I ran ten kilometers a day and ate raw seaweed with every meal—but then I angrily recoiled, thinking: Would I really want to be deceived “for my own good”? If it’s down to my DNA, it’s down to my DNA, and I ought to expect to be told that simple truth, however unpalatable I find it—and I ought to be grateful that the medical profession has abandoned its old patronizing, paternalistic ways.

I was twelve years old when the world learnt about the Monte Carlo project.

A team of biological warfare researchers (located just a stone’s throw from Las Vegas—alas, the one in New Mexico, not the one in Nevada) had decided that designing viruses was just too much hard work (especially when the Star Wars boys kept hogging the supercomputers). Why waste hundreds of PhD-years—why expend any intellectual effort whatsoever—when the time-honoured partnership of blind mutation and natural selection was all that was required?

Speeded up substantially, of course.

They’d developed a three-part system: a bacterium, a virus, and a line of modified human lymphocytes. A stable portion of the viral genome allowed it to reproduce in the bacterium, while rapid mutation of the rest of the virus was achieved by neatly corrupting the transcription error repair enzymes. The lymphocytes had been altered to vastly amplify the reproductive success of any mutant which managed to infect them, causing it to out-breed those which were limited to using the bacterium.

The theory was, they’d set up a few trillion copies of this system, like row after row of little biological poker machines, spinning away in their underground lab, and just wait to harvest the jackpots.

The theory also included the best containment facilities in the world, and five hundred and twenty people all sticking scrupulously to official procedure, day after day, month after month, without a moment of carelessness, laziness or forgetfulness. Apparently, nobody bothered to compute the probability of that.

The bacterium was supposed to be unable to survive outside artificially beneficent laboratory conditions, but a mutation of the virus came to its aid, filling in for the genes that had been snipped out to make it vulnerable.

They wasted too much time using ineffectual chemicals before steeling themselves to nuke the site. By then, the winds had already made any human action—short of melting half a dozen states, not an option in an election year—irrelevant.

The first rumours proclaimed that we’d all be dead within a week. I can clearly recall the mayhem, the looting, the suicides (second-hand on the TV screen; our own neighbourhood remained relatively tranquil—or numb). States of emergency were declared around the world. Planes were turned away from airports, ships (which had left their home ports months before the leak) were burnt in the docks. Harsh laws were rushed in everywhere, to protect public order and public health.

Paula and I got to stay home from school for a month. I offered to teach her programming; she wasn’t interested. She wanted to go swimming, but the beaches and pools were all closed. That was the summer that I finally managed to hack into a Pentagon computer—just an office supplies purchasing system, but Paula was suitably impressed (and neither of us had ever guessed that paperclips were that expensive).

We didn’t believe we were going to die—at least, not within a week—and we were right. When the hysteria died down, it soon became apparent that only the virus and the bacterium had escaped, and without the modified lymphocytes to fine-tune the selection process, the virus had mutated away from the strain which had caused the initial deaths.

However, the cosy symbiotic pair is now found all over the world, endlessly churning out new mutations. Only a tiny fraction of the strains produced are infectious in humans, and only a fraction of those are potentially fatal.

A mere hundred or so a year.

On the train home, the sun seemed to be in my eyes no matter which way I turned—somehow, every surface in the carriage caught its reflection. The glare made a headache which had been steadily growing all afternoon almost unbearable, so I covered my eyes with my forearm and faced the floor. With my other hand, I clutched the brown paper bag that held the small glass vial of red-and-black capsules that would or wouldn’t save my life.

Cancer. Viral leukaemia. I pulled the creased pathology report from my pocket, and flipped through it one more time. The last page hadn’t magically changed into a happy ending—an oncovirology expert system’s declaration of a sure-fire cure. The last page was just the bill for all the tests. Twenty-seven thousand dollars.

At home, I sat and stared at my work station.

Two months before, when a routine quarterly examination (required by my health insurance company, ever eager to dump the unprofitable sick) had revealed the first signs of trouble, I’d sworn to myself that I’d keep on working, keep on living exactly as if nothing had changed. The idea of indulging in a credit spree, or a world trip, or some kind of self-destructive binge, held no attraction for me at all. Any such final fling would be an admission of defeat. I’d go on a fucking world trip to celebrate my cure, and not before.

I had plenty of contract work stacked up, and that pathology bill was already accruing interest. Yet for all that I needed the distraction—for all that I needed the money—I sat there for three whole hours, and did nothing but brood about my fate. Sharing it with eighty thousand strangers scattered about the world was no great comfort.

Then it finally struck me. Paula. If I was vulnerable for genetic reasons, then so was she.

For identical twins, in the end we hadn’t done too bad a job of pursuing separate lives. She had left home at sixteen, to tour central Africa, filming the wildlife, and—at considerably greater risk—the poachers. Then she’d gone to the Amazon, and become caught up in the land rights struggle there. After that, it was a bit of a blur; she’d always tried to keep me up to date with her exploits, but she moved too fast for my sluggish mental picture of her to follow.

I’d never left the country; I hadn’t even moved house in a decade.

She came home only now and then, on her way between continents, but we’d stayed in touch electronically, circumstances permitting. (They take away your SatPhone in Bolivian prisons.)

The telecommunications multinationals all offer their own expensive services for contacting someone when you don’t know in advance what country they’re in. The advertising suggests that it’s an immensely difficult task; the fact is, every SatPhone’s location is listed in a central database, which is kept up to date by pooling information from all the regional satellites. Since I happened to have “acquired” the access codes to consult that database, I could phone Paula directly, wherever she was, without paying the ludicrous surcharge. It was more a matter of nostalgia than miserliness; this minuscule bit of hacking was a token gesture, proof that in spite of impending middle age, I wasn’t yet terminally law-abiding, conservative and dull.

I’d automated the whole procedure long ago. The database said she was in Gabon; my program calculated local time, judged ten twenty-three p. m. to be civilized enough, and made the call. Seconds later, she was on the screen.

“Karen! How are you? You look like shit. I thought you were going to call last week—what happened?”

The image was perfectly clear, the sound clean and undistorted (fibre-optic cables might be scarce in central Africa, but geosynchronous satellites are directly overhead). As soon as I set eyes on her, I felt sure she didn’t have the virus. She was right—I looked half-dead—whereas she was as animated as ever. Half a lifetime spent outdoors meant her skin had aged much faster than mine—but there was always a glow of energy, of purpose, about her that more than compensated.

She was close to the lens, so I couldn’t see much of the background, but it looked like a fibreglass hut, lit by a couple of hurricane lamps; a step up from the usual tent.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get around to it. Gabon? Weren’t you in Ecuador—?”

“Yes, but I met Mohammed. He’s a botanist. From Indonesia. Actually, we met in Bogota; he was on his way to a conference in Mexico—”

“But—”

“Why Gabon? This is where he was going next, that’s all. There’s a fungus here, attacking the crops, and I couldn’t resist coming along…”

I nodded, bemused, through ten minutes of convoluted explanations, not paying too much attention; in three months’ time it would all be ancient history. Paula survived as a freelance pop-science journalist, darting around the globe writing articles for magazines, and scripts for TV programmes, on the latest ecological troublespots. To be honest, I had severe doubts that this kind of predigested eco-babble did the planet any good, but it certainly made her happy. I envied her that. I could not have lived her life—in no sense was she the woman I “might have been”—but nonetheless it hurt me, at times, to see in her eyes the kind of sheer excitement that I hadn’t felt, myself, for a decade.

My mind wandered while she spoke. Suddenly, she was saying, “Karen? Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

I hesitated. I had originally planned to tell no one, not even her, and now my reason for calling her seemed absurd— she couldn’t have leukaemia, it was unthinkable. Then, without even realizing that I’d made the decision, I found myself recounting everything in a dull, flat voice. I watched with a strange feeling of detachment the changing expression on her face; shock, pity, then a burst of fear when she realized—far sooner than I would have done—exactly what my predicament meant for her.

What followed was even more awkward and painful than I could have imagined. Her concern for me was genuine—but she would not have been human if the uncertainty of her own position had not begun to prey on her at once, and knowing that made all her fussing seem contrived and false.

“Do you have a good doctor? Someone you can trust?”

I nodded.

“Do you have someone to look after you? Do you want me to come home?”

I shook my head, irritated. “No, I’m all right. I’m being looked after, I’m being treated. But you have to get tested as soon as possible.” I glared at her, exasperated. I no longer believed that she could have the virus, but I wanted to stress the fact that I’d called her to warn her, not to fish for sympathy— and somehow, that finally struck home. She said, quietly, “I’ll get tested today. I’ll go straight into town. Okay?”

I nodded. I felt exhausted, but relieved; for a moment, all the awkwardness between us melted away.

“You’ll let me know the results?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I will.”

I nodded again. “Okay.”

“Karen. Be careful. Look after yourself.”

“I will. You too.” I hit the ESCAPE key.

Half an hour later, I took the first of the capsules, and climbed into bed. A few minutes later, a bitter taste crept up into my throat.

Telling Paula was essential. Telling Martin was insane. I’d only known him six months, but I should have guessed exactly how he’d take it.

“Move in with me. I’ll look after you.”

“I don’t need to be looked after.”

He hesitated, but only slightly. “Marry me.”

“Marry you? Why? Do you think I have some desperate need to be married before I die?”

He scowled. “Don’t talk like that. I love you. Don’t you understand that?”

I laughed. “I don’t mind being pitied—people always say it’s degrading, but I think it’s a perfectly normal response—but I don’t want to have to live with it twenty-four hours a day.” I kissed him, but he kept on scowling. At least I’d waited until after we’d had sex before breaking the news; if not, he probably would have treated me like porcelain.

He turned to face me. “Why are you being so hard on yourself? What are you trying to prove? That you’re super-human? That you don’t need anyone?”

“Listen. You’ve known from the very start that I need independence and privacy. What do you want me to say? That I’m terrified? Okay. I am. But I’m still the same person. I still need the same things.” I slid one hand across hischest, and said as gently as I could, “So thanks for theoffer, but no thanks.”

“I don’t mean very much to you, do I?”

I groaned, and pulled a pillow over my face. I thought: Wake me when you’re ready to fuck me again. Does that answer your question? I didn’tsay it out loud, though.

A week later, Paula phoned me. She had the virus. Her white cell count was up, her red cell count was down—the numbers she quoted sounded just like my own from the month before. They’d even put her on the very same drug. That was hardly surprising, but it gave me an unpleasant, claustrophobic feeling, when I thought about what it meant: We would both live, or we would both die.

In the days that followed, this realization began to obsess me. It was like voodoo, like some curse out of a fairy tale—or the fulfilment of the words she’d uttered, the night we became “blood sisters.” We had never dreamed the same dreams, we’d certainly never loved the same men, but now… it was as if we were being punished, for failing to respect the forces that bound us together.

Part of me knew this was bullshit. Forces that bound us together! It was mental static, the product of stress, nothing more. The truth, though, was just as oppressive: the biochemical machinery would grind out its identical verdict on both of us, for all the thousands of kilometres between us, for all that we had forged separate lives in defiance of our genetic unity.

I tried to bury myself in my work. To some degree, I succeeded—if the grey stupor produced by eighteen-hour days in front of a terminal could really be considered a success.

I began to avoid Martin; his puppy-dog concern was just too much to bear. Perhaps he meant well, but I didn’t have the energy to justify myself to him, over and over again. Perversely, at the very same time, I missed our arguments terribly; resisting his excessive mothering had at least made me feel strong, if only in contrast to the helplessness he seemed to expect of me.

I phoned Paula every week at first, but then gradually less and less often. We ought to have been ideal confidantes; in fact, nothing could have been less true. Our conversations were redundant; we already knew what the other was thinking, far too well. There was no sense of unburdening, just a suffocating, monotonous feeling of recognition. We took to trying to outdo each other in affecting a veneer of optimism, but it was a depressingly transparent effort. Eventually, I thought when—if—I get the good news, I’ll call her, until then, what’s the point? Apparently, she came to the same conclusion.

All through childhood, we were forced together. We loved each other, I suppose, but… we were always in the same classes at school, bought the same clothes, given the same Christmas and birthday presents—and we were always sick at the same time, with the same ailment, for the same reason.

When she left home, I was envious, and horribly lonely for a while, but then I felt a surge of joy, of liberation, because I knew that I had no real wish to follow her, and I knew that from then on, our lives could only grow further apart.

Now, it seemed that had all been an illusion. We would live or die together, and all our efforts to break the bonds had been in vain.

About four months after the start of treatment, my blood counts began to turn around. I was more terrified than ever of my hopes being dashed, and I spent all my time battling to keep myself from premature optimism. I didn’t dare ring Paula; I could think of nothing worse than leading her to think that we were cured, and then turning out to have been mistaken. Even when Dr Packard—cautiously, almost begrudgingly—admitted that things were looking up, I told myself that she might have relented from her policy of unflinching honesty and decided to offer me some palliative lies.

One morning I woke, not yet convinced that I was cured, but sick of feeling I had to drown myself in gloom for fear of being disappointed. If I wanted absolute certainty, I’d be miserable all my life; a relapse would always be possible, or a whole new virus could come along.

It was a cold, dark morning, pouring with rain outside, but as I climbed, shivering, out of bed, I felt more cheerful than I had since the whole thing had begun.

There was a message in my work station mailbox, tagged CONFIDENTIAL. It took me thirty seconds to recall the password I needed, and all the while my shivering grew worse.

The message was from the Chief Administrator of the Libreville People’s Hospital, offering his or her condolences on the death of my sister, and requesting instructions for the disposal of the body.

I don’t know what I felt first. Disbelief. Guilt. Confusion. Fear. How could she have died, when I was so close to recovery? How could she have died without a word to me? How could I have let her die alone? I walked away from the terminal, and slumped against the cold brick wall.

The worst of it was, I suddenly knew why she’d stayed silent. She must have thought that I was dying, too, and that was the one thing we’d both feared most of all: dying together. In spite of everything, dying together, as if we were one.

How could the drug have failed her, and worked for me? Had it worked for me? For a moment of sheer paranoia, I wondered if the hospital had been faking my test results, if in fact I was on the verge of death, myself. That was ludicrous, though.

Why, then, had Paula died? There was only one possible answer. She should have come home—I should have made her come home. How could I have let her stay there, in a tropical, Third World country, with her immune system weakened, living in a fibreglass hut, without proper sanitation, probably malnourished? I should have sent her the money, I should have sent her the ticket, I should have flown out there in person and dragged her back home.

Instead, I’d kept her at a distance. Afraid of us dying together, afraid of the curse of our sameness, I’d let her die alone.

I tried to cry, but something stopped me. I sat in the kitchen, sobbing drily. I was worthless. I’d killed her with my superstition and cowardice. I had no right to be alive.

I spent the next fortnight grappling with the legal and administrative complexities of death in a foreign land. Paula’s will requested cremation, but said nothing about where it was to take place, so I arranged for her body and belongings to be flown home. The service was all but deserted; our parents had died a decade before, in a car crash, and although Paula had had friends all over the world, few were able to make the trip.

Martin came, though. When he put an arm around me, I turned and whispered to him angrily, “You didn’t even know her. What the hell are you doing here?” He stared at me for a moment, hurt and baffled, then walked off without a word.

I can’t pretend I wasn’t grateful, when Packard announced that I was cured, but my failure to rejoice out loud must have puzzled even her. I might have told her about Paula, but I didn’t want to be fed cheap clichés about how irrational it was of me to feel guilty for surviving.

She was dead. I was growing stronger by the day; often sick with guilt and depression, but more often simply numb. That might easily have been the end of it.

Following the instructions in the will, I sent most of her belongings— notebooks, disks, audio and video tapes—to her agent, to be passed on to the appropriate editors and producers, to whom some of it might be of use. All that remained was clothing, a minute quantity of jewellery and cosmetics, and a handful of odds and ends. Including a small glass vial of red-and-black capsules.

I don’t know what possessed me to take one of the capsules. I had half a dozen left of my own, and Packard had shrugged when I’d asked if I should finish them, and said that it couldn’t do me any harm.

There was no aftertaste. Every time I’d swallowed my own, within minutes there’d been a bitter aftertaste.

I broke open a second capsule and put some of the white powder on my tongue. It was entirely without flavour. I ran and grabbed my own supply, and sampled one the same way; it tasted so vile it made my eyes water.

I tried, very hard, not to leap to any conclusions. I knew perfectly well that pharmaceuticals were often mixed with inert substances, and perhaps not necessarily the same ones all the time—but why would something bitter be used for that purpose? The taste had to come from the drug itself. The two vials bore the same manufacturer’s name and logo. The same brand name. The same generic name. The same formal chemical name for the active ingredient. The same product code, down to the very last digit. Only the batch numbers were different.

The first explanation that came to mind was corruption. Although I couldn’t recall the details, I was sure that I’d read about dozens of cases of officials in the health care systems of developing countries diverting pharmaceuticals for resale on the black market. What better way to cover up such a theft than to replace the stolen product with something else—something cheap, harmless, and absolutely useless? The gelatin capsules themselves bore nothing but the manufacturer’s logo, and since the company probably made at least a thousand different drugs, it would not have been too hard to find something cheaper, with the same size and colouration.

I had no idea what to do with this theory. Anonymous bureaucrats in a distant country had killed my sister, but the prospect of finding out who they were, let alone seeing them brought to justice, were infinitesimally small. Even if I’d had real, damning evidence, what was the most I could hope for? A meekly phrased protest from one diplomat to another.

I had one of Paula’s capsules analysed. It cost me a fortune, but I was already so deeply in debt that I didn’t much care.

It was full of a mixture of soluble inorganic compounds. There was no trace of the substance described on the label, nor of anything else with the slightest biological activity. It wasn’t a cheap substitute drug, chosen at random.

It was a placebo.

I stood with the print-out in my hand for several minutes, trying to come to terms with what it meant. Simple greed I could have understood, but there was an utterly inhuman coldness here that I couldn’t bring myself to swallow. Someone must have made an honest mistake. Nobody could be so callous.

Then Packard’s words came back to me. “Just look after yourself as you normally would. Don’t do anything out of the ordinary.”

Oh no, Doctor. Of course not, Doctor. Wouldn’t want to go spoiling the experiment with any messy, extraneous, uncontrolled factors…

I contacted an investigative journalist, one of the best in the country. I arranged a meeting in a small café

on the edge of town.

I drove out there—terrified, angry, triumphant—thinking I had the scoop of the decade, thinking I had dynamite, thinking I was Meryl Streep playing Karen Silkwood. I was dizzy with sweet thoughts of revenge. Heads were going to roll.

Nobody tried to run me off the road. The cafe was deserted, and the waiter barely listened to our orders, let alone our conversation.

The journalist was very kind. She calmly explained the facts of life.

In the aftermath of the Monte Carlo disaster, a lot of legislation had been passed to help deal with the emergency—and a lot of legislation had been repealed. As a matter of urgency, new drugs to treat the new diseases had to be developed and assessed, and the best way to ensure that was to remove the cumbersome regulations that had made clinical trials so difficult and expensive.

In the old “double-blind” trials, neither the patients nor the investigators knew who was getting the drug and who was getting a placebo; the information was kept secret by a third party (or a computer). Any improvement observed in the patients who were given the placebo could then be taken into account, and the drug’s true efficacy measured.

There were two small problems with this traditional approach. Firstly, telling a patient that there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that they’ve been given a potentially life-saving drug subjects them to a lot of stress. Of course, the treatment and control groups were affected equally, but in terms of predicting what would happen when the drug was finally put out on the market, it introduced a lot of noise into the data. Which side-effects were real, and which were artifacts of the patients’ uncertainty?

Secondly—and more seriously—it had become increasingly difficult to find people willing to volunteer for placebo trials. When you’re dying, you don’t give a shit about the scientific method. You want the maximum possible chance of surviving. Untested drugs will do, if there is no known, certain cure—but why accept a further halving of the odds, to satisfy some technocrat’s obsession with derails?

Of course, in the good old days the medical profession could lay down the law to the unwashed masses: Take part in this double-blind trial, or crawl away and die. AIDS had changed all that, with black markets for the latest untried cures, straight from the labs to the streets, and intense politicization of the issues.

The solution to both flaws was obvious.

You lie to the patients.

No bill had been passed to explicitly declare that “triple-blind” trials were legal. If it had, people might have noticed, and made a fuss. Instead, as part of the “reforms” and “rationalization” that came in the wake of the disaster, all the laws that might have made them illegal had been removed or watered down. At least, it looked that way—no court had yet been given the opportunity to pass judgement.

“How could any doctor do that? Lie like that! How could they justify it, even to themselves?”

She shrugged. “How did they ever justify double-blind trials? A good medical researcher has to care more about the quality of the data than about any one person’s life. And if a double-blind trial is good, a triple-blind trial is better. The data is guaranteed to be better, you can see that, can’t you? And the more accurately a drug can be assessed, well, perhaps in the long run, the more lives can be saved.”

“Oh, crap! The placebo effect isn’t that powerful. It just isn’t that important! Who cares if it’s not precisely taken into account? Anyway, two potential cures could still be compared, one treatment against another. That would tell you which drug would save the most lives, without any need for placebos—”

“That is done sometimes, although the more prestigious journals look down on those studies; they’re less likely to be published—”

I stared at her. “How can you know all this and do nothing? The media could blow it wide open! If you let people know what’s going on…”

She smiled thinly. “I could publicize the observation that these practices are now, theoretically, legal. Other people have done that, and it doesn’t exactly make headlines. But if I printed any specific facts about an actual triple-blind trial, I’d face a half-million-dollar fine, and twenty-five years in prison, for endangering public health. Not to mention what they’d do to my publisher. All the ‘emergency’ laws brought in to deal with the Monte Carlo leak are still active.”

“But that was twenty years ago!”

She drained her coffee and rose. “Don’t you recall what the experts said at the time?”

“No.”

“The effects will be with us for generations.”

It took me four months to penetrate the drug manufacturer’s network.

I eavesdropped on the data flow of several company executives who chose to work from home. It didn’t take long to identify the least computer-literate. A real bumbling fool, who used ten-thousand-dollar spreadsheet software to do what the average five-year-old could have done without fingers and toes. I watched his clumsy responses when the spreadsheet package gave him error messages. He was a gift from heaven; he simply didn’t have a clue.

And, best of all, he was forever running a tediously unimaginative pornographic video game.

If the computer said “Jump!” he’d say “Promise not to tell?”

I spent a fortnight minimizing what he had to do; it started out at seventy keystrokes, but I finally got it down to twenty-three.

I waited until his screen was at its most compromising, then I suspended his connection to the network, and took its place myself.

FATAL SYSTEM ERROR! TYPE THE FOLLOWING TO RECOVER:

He botched it the first time. I rang alarm bells, and repeated the request. The second time, he got it right.

The first multi-key combination I had him strike took the work station right out of its operating system into its processor’s microcode debugging routine. The hexadecimal that followed, gibberish to him, was a tiny program to dump all of the work station’s memory down the communications line, right into my lap.

If he told anyone with any sense what had happened, suspicion would be aroused at once—but would he risk being asked to explain just what he was running when the “bug” occurred? I doubted it.

I already had his passwords. Included in the work station’s memory was an algorithm which told me precisely how to respond to the network’s security challenges. I was in.

The rest of their defences were trivial, at least so far as my aims were concerned. Data that might have been useful to their competitors was well-shielded, but I wasn’t interested in stealing the secrets of their latest haemorrhoid cure.

I could have done a lot of damage. Arranged for their backups to be filled with garbage. Arranged for the gradual deviation of their accounts from reality, until reality suddenly intruded in the form of bankruptcy—or charges of tax fraud. I considered a thousand possibilities, from the crudest annihilation of data to the slowest, most insidious forms of corruption.

In the end, though, I restrained myself. I knew the fight would soon become a political one, and any act of petty vengeance on my part would be sure to be dredged up and used to discredit me, to undermine my cause.

So I did only what was absolutely necessary.

I located the files containing the names and addresses of everyone who had been unknowingly participating in triple-blind trials of the company’s products. I arranged for them all to be notified of what had been done to them. There were over two hundred thousand people, spread all around the world—but I found a swollen executive slush fund which easily covered the communications bill.

Soon, the whole world would know of our anger, would share in our outrage and grief. Half of us were sick or dying, though, and before the slightest whisper of protest was heard, my first objective had to be to save whoever I could.

I found the program that allocated medication or placebo. The program that had killed Paula, and thousands of others, for the sake of sound experimental technique.

I altered it. A very small change. I added one more lie.

All the reports it generated would continue to assert that half the patients involved in clinical trials were being given the placebo. Dozens of exhaustive, impressive files would continue to be created, containing data entirely consistent with this lie. Only one small file, never read by humans, would be different. The file controlling the assembly line robots would instruct them to put medication in every vial of every batch.

From triple-blind to quadruple-blind. One more lie, to cancel out the others, until the time for deception was finally over.

Martin came to see me.

“I heard about what you’re doing. T.I.M. Truth in Medicine.” He pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “ ‘A vigorous new organization dedicated to the eradication of quackery, fraud and deception in both alternative and conventional medicine.’ Sounds like a great idea.”

“Thanks.”

He hesitated. “I heard you were looking for a few more volunteers. To help around the office.”

“That’s right.”

“I could manage four hours a week.”

I laughed. “Oh, could you really? Well, thanks very much, but I think we’ll cope without you.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to walk out, but then he said, not so much hurt as simply baffled,

“Do you want volunteers, or not?”

“Yes, but—” But what? If he could swallow enough pride to offer, I could swallow enough pride to accept.

I signed him up for Wednesday afternoons.

I have nightmares about Paula, now and then. I wake smelling the ghost of a candle flame, certain that she’s standing in the dark beside my pillow, a solemn-eyed nine-year-old child again, mesmerized by our strange condition.

That child can’t haunt me, though. She never died. She grew up, and grew apart from me, and she fought for our separateness harder than I ever did. What if we had “died at the very same hour”? It would have signified nothing, changed nothing. Nothing could have reached back and robbed us of our separate lives, our separate achievements and failures.

I realize, now, that the blood oath that seemed so ominous to me was nothing but a joke to Paula, her way of mocking the very idea that our fates could be entwined. How could I have taken so long to see that?

It shouldn’t surprise me, though. The truth—and the measure of her triumph—is that I never really knew her.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

AXIOMATIC

‘. . . like your brain has been frozen in liquid nitrogen, and then smashed into a thousand shards!’

I squeezed my way past the teenagers who lounged outside the entrance to The Implant Store, no doubt fervently hoping for a holovision news team to roll up and ask them why they weren’t in school. They mimed throwing up as I passed, as if the state of not being pubescent and dressed like a member of Binary Search was so disgusting to contemplate that it made them physically ill.

Well, maybe it did.

Inside, the place was almost deserted. The interior reminded me of a video ROM shop; the display racks were virtually identical, and many of the distributors’ logos were the same. Each rack was labelled: PSYCHEDELIA, MEDITATION AND HEALING, MOTIVATION AND SUCCESS.

LANGUAGES AND TECHNICAL SKILLS. Each implant, although itself less than half a millimetre across, came in a package the size of an old-style book, bearing gaudy illustrations and a few lines of stale hyperbole from a marketing thesaurus or some rent-an-endorsement celebrity. ‘Become God!

Become the Universe!’ ‘The Ultimate Insight! The Ultimate Knowledge! The Ultimate Trip!’ Even the perennial ‘This implant changed my life!’

I picked up the carton of You Are Great! — its transparent protective wrapper glistening with sweaty fingerprints — and thought numbly: If I bought this thing and used it, I would actually believe that. No amount of evidence to the contrary would be physically able to change my mind. I put it back on the shelf, next to Love Yourself A Billion and Instant Willpower, Instant Wealth.

I knew exactly what I’d come for, and I knew that it wouldn’t be on display, but I browsed a while longer, partly out of genuine curiosity, partly just to give myself time. Time to think through the implications once again. Time to come to my senses and flee.

The cover of Synaesthesia showed a blissed-out man with a rainbow striking his tongue and musical staves piercing his eyeballs. Beside it, Alien Mind-Fuck boasted ‘a mental state so bizarre that even as you experience it, you won’t know what it’s like!’ Implant technology was originally developed to provide instant language skills for business people and tourists, but after disappointing sales and a takeover by an entertainment conglomerate, the first mass-market implants appeared: a cross between video games and hallucinogenic drugs. Over the years, the range of confusion and dysfunction on offer grew wider, but there’s only so far you can take that trend; beyond a certain point, scrambling the neural connections doesn’t leave anyone there to be entertained by the strangeness, and the user, once restored to normalcy, remembers almost nothing.

The first of the next generation of implants — the so-called axiomatics — were all sexual in nature; apparently that was the technically simplest place to start. I walked over to the Erotica section, to see what was available — or at least, what could legally be displayed. Homosexuality, heterosexuality, autoerotism. An assortment of harmless fetishes. Eroticisation of various unlikely parts of the body. Why, I wondered, would anyone choose to have their brain rewired to make them crave a sexual practice they otherwise would have found abhorrent, or ludicrous, or just plain boring? To comply with a partner’s demands? Maybe, although such extreme submissiveness was hard to imagine, and could scarcely be sufficiently widespread to explain the size of the market. To enable a part of their own sexual identity, which, unaided, would have merely nagged and festered, to triumph over their inhibitions, their ambivalence, their revulsion? Everyone has conflicting desires, and people can grow tired of both wanting and not wanting the very same thing. I understood that, perfectly.

The next rack contained a selection of religions, everything from Amish to Zen. (Gaining the Amish disapproval of technology this way apparently posed no problem; virtually every religious implant enabled the user to embrace far stranger contradictions.) There was even an implant called Secular Humanist (‘You WILL hold these truths to be self-evident!’). No Vacillating Agnostic, though; apparently there was no market for doubt.

For a minute or two, I lingered. For a mere fifty dollars, I could have bought back my childhood Catholicism, even if the Church would not have approved. (At least, not officially; it would have been interesting to know exactly who was subsidising the product.) In the end, though, I had to admit that I wasn’t really tempted. Perhaps it would have solved my problem, but not in the way that I wanted it solved — and after all, getting my own way was the whole point of coming here. Using an implant wouldn’t rob me of my free will; on the contrary, it was going to help me to assert it.

Finally, I steeled myself and approached the sales counter.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ The young man smiled at me brightly, radiating sincerity, as if he really enjoyed his work. I mean, really, really.

‘I’ve come to pick up a special order.’

‘Your name, please, sir?’

‘Carver. Mark.’

He reached under the counter and emerged with a parcel, mercifully already wrapped in anonymous brown. I paid in cash, I’d brought the exact change: $399.95. It was all over in twenty seconds.

I left the store, sick with relief, triumphant, exhausted. At least I’d finally bought the fucking thing; it was in my hands now, no one else was involved, and all I had to do was decide whether or not to use it.

After walking a few blocks towards the train station, I tossed the parcel into a bin, but I turned back almost at once and retrieved it. I passed a pair of armoured cops, and I pictured their eyes boring into me from behind their mirrored faceplates, but what I was carrying was perfectly legal. How could the Government ban a device which did no more than engender, in those who freely chose to use it, a particular set of beliefs — without also arresting everyone who shared those beliefs naturally? Very easily, actually, since the law didn’t have to be consistent, but the implant manufacturers had succeeded in convincing the public that restricting their products would be paving the way for the Thought Police.

By the time I got home, I was shaking uncontrollably. I put the parcel on the kitchen table, and started pacing.

This wasn’t for Amy. I had to admit that. Just because I still loved her, and still mourned her, didn’t mean I was doing this for her. I wouldn’t soil her memory with that lie.

In fact, I was doing it to free myself from her. After five years, I wanted my pointless love, my useless grief, to finally stop ruling my life. Nobody could blame me for that.

* * * *

She had died in an armed hold-up, in a bank. The security cameras had been disabled, and everyone apart from the robbers had spent most of the time face-down on the floor, so I never found out the whole story. She must have moved, fidgeted, looked up, she must have done something; even at the peaks of my hatred, I couldn’t believe that she’d been killed on a whim, for no comprehensible reason at all.

I knew who had squeezed the trigger, though. It hadn’t come out at the trial; a clerk in the Police Department had sold me the information. The killer’s name was Patrick Anderson, and by turning prosecution witness, he’d put his accomplices away for life, and reduced his own sentence to seven years.

I went to the media. A loathsome crime-show personality had taken the story and ranted about it on the airwaves for a week, diluting the facts with self-serving rhetoric, then grown bored and moved on to something else.

Five years later, Anderson had been out on parole for nine months.

OK. So what? It happens all the time. If someone had come to me with such a story, I would have been sympathetic, but firm. ‘Forget her, she’s dead. Forget him, he’s garbage. Get on with your life.’

I didn’t forget her, and I didn’t forget her killer. I had loved her, whatever that meant, and while the rational part of me had swallowed the fact of her death, the rest kept twitching like a decapitated snake. Someone else in the same state might have turned the house into a shrine, covered every wall and mantelpiece with photographs and memorabilia, put fresh flowers on her grave every day, and spent every night getting drunk watching old home movies. I didn’t do that, I couldn’t. It would have been grotesque and utterly false; sentimentality had always made both of us violently ill. I kept a single photo. We hadn’t made home movies. I visited her grave once a year.

Yet for all of this outward restraint, inside my head my obsession with Amy’s death simply kept on growing. I didn’t want it, I didn’t choose it, I didn’t feed it or encourage it in any way. I kept no electronic scrapbook of the trial. If people raised the subject, I walked away. I buried myself in my work; in my spare time I read, or went to the movies, alone. I thought about searching for someone new, but I never did anything about it, always putting it off until that time in the indefinite future when I would be human again.

Every night, the details of the incident circled in my brain. I thought of a thousand things I ‘might have done’ to have prevented her death, from not marrying her in the first place (we’d moved to Sydney because of my job), to magically arriving at the bank as her killer took aim, tackling him to the ground and beating him senseless, or worse. I knew these fantasies were futile and self-indulgent, but that knowledge was no cure. If I took sleeping pills, the whole thing simply shifted to the daylight hours, and I was literally unable to work. (The computers that help us are slightly less appalling every year, but air-traffic controllers can’t daydream.)

I had to do something.

Revenge? Revenge was for the morally retarded. Me, I’d signed petitions to the UN, calling for the worldwide, unconditional abolition of capital punishment. I’d meant it then, and I still meant it. Taking human life was wrong; I’d believed that, passionately, since childhood. Maybe it started out as religious dogma, but when I grew up and shed all the ludicrous claptrap, the sanctity of life was one of the few beliefs I judged to be worth keeping. Aside from any pragmatic reasons, human consciousness had always seemed to me the most astonishing, miraculous, sacred thing in the universe. Blame my upbringing, blame my genes; I could no more devalue it than believe that one plus one equalled zero.

Tell some people you’re a pacifist, and in ten seconds flat they’ll invent a situation in which millions of people will die in unspeakable agony, and all your loved ones will be raped and tortured, if you don’t blow someone’s brains out. (There’s always a contrived reason why you can’t merely wound the omnipotent, genocidal madman.) The amusing thing is, they seem to hold you in even greater contempt when you admit that, yes, you’d do it, you’d kill under those conditions.

Anderson, however, clearly was not an omnipotent, genocidal madman. I had no idea whether or not he was likely to kill again. As for his capacity for reform, his abused childhood, or the caring and compassionate alter ego that may have been hiding behind the façade of his brutal exterior, I really didn’t give a shit, but nonetheless I was convinced that it would be wrong for me to kill him.

I bought the gun first. That was easy, and perfectly legal; perhaps the computers simply failed to correlate my permit application with the release of my wife’s killer, or perhaps the link was detected, but judged irrelevant.

I joined a ‘sports’ club full of people who spent three hours a week doing nothing but shooting at moving, human-shaped targets. A recreational activity, harmless as fencing; I practised saying that with a straight face.

Buying the anonymous ammunition from a fellow club member was illegal; bullets that vaporised on impact, leaving no ballistics evidence linking them to a specific weapon. I scanned the court records; the average sentence for possessing such things was a five-hundred-dollar fine. The silencer was illegal, too; the penalties for ownership were similar.

Every night, I thought it through. Every night, I came to the same conclusion: despite my elaborate preparations, I wasn’t going to kill anyone. Part of me wanted to, part of me didn’t, but I knew perfectly well which was strongest. I’d spend the rest of my life dreaming about it, safe in the knowledge that no amount of hatred or grief or desperation would ever be enough to make me act against my nature.

* * * *

I unwrapped the parcel. I was expecting a garish cover-sneering body builder toting sub-machine-gun —

but the packaging was unadorned, plain grey with no markings except for the product code, and the name of the distributor, Clockwork Orchard.

I’d ordered the thing through an on-line catalogue, accessed via a coin-driven public terminal, and I’d specified collection by ‘Mark Carver’ at a branch of The Implant Store in Chatswood, far from my home. All of which was paranoid nonsense, since the implant was legal — and all of which was perfectly reasonable, because I felt far more nervous and guilty about buying it than I did about buying the gun and ammunition.

The description in the catalogue had begun with the statement Life is cheap! then had waffled on for several lines in the same vein: People are meat. They’re nothing, they’re worthless. The exact words weren’t important, though; they weren’t a part of the implant itself. It wouldn’t be a matter of a voice in my head, reciting some badly written spiel which I could choose to ridicule or ignore; nor would it be a kind of mental legislative decree, which I could evade by means of semantic quibbling. Axiomatic implants were derived from analysis of actual neural structures in real people’s brains, they weren’t based on the expression of the axioms in language. The spirit, not the letter, of the law would prevail.

I opened up the carton. There was an instruction leaflet, in seventeen languages. A programmer. An applicator. A pair of tweezers. Sealed in a plastic bubble labelled sterile if unbroken, the implant itself. It looked like a tiny piece of gravel.

I had never used one before, but I’d seen it done a thousand times on holovision. You placed the thing in the programmer, ‘woke it up’, and told it how long you wanted it to be active. The applicator was strictly for tyros; the jaded cognoscenti balanced the implant on the tip of their little finger, and daintily poked it up the nostril of their choice.

The implant burrowed into the brain, sent out a swarm of nanomachines to explore, and forge links with, the relevant neural systems, and then went into active mode for the predetermined time — anything from an hour to infinity — doing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of mother’s milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job. There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad . . .

I packed everything back into the carton, put it in a drawer, took three sleeping pills, and went to bed.

* * * *

Perhaps it was a matter of laziness. I’ve always been biased towards those options which spare me from facing the very same set of choices again in the future; it seems so inefficient to go through the same agonies of conscience more than once. To not use the implant would have meant having to reaffirm that decision, day after day, for the rest of my life.

Or perhaps I never really believed that the preposterous toy would work. Perhaps I hoped to prove that my convictions — unlike other people’s — were engraved on some metaphysical tablet that hovered in a spiritual dimension unreachable by any mere machine.

Or perhaps I just wanted a moral alibi — a way to kill Anderson while still believing it was something that the real me could never have done.

At least I’m sure of one thing. I didn’t do it for Amy.

* * * *

I woke around dawn the next day, although I didn’t need to get up at all; I was on annual leave for a month. I dressed, ate breakfast, then unpacked the implant again and carefully read the instructions.

With no great sense of occasion, I broke open the sterile bubble and, with the tweezers, dropped the speck into its cavity in the programmer.

The programmer said, ‘Do you speak English?’ The voice reminded me of one of the control towers at work; deep but somehow genderless, businesslike without being crudely robotic — and yet, unmistakably inhuman.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want to program this implant?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please specify the active period.’

‘Three days.’ Three days would be enough, surely; if not, I’d call the whole thing off.

‘This implant is to remain active for three days after insertion. Is that correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘This implant is ready for use. The time is seven forty-three a.m. Please insert the implant before eight forty-three a.m., or it will deactivate itself and reprogramming will be required. Please enjoy this product and dispose of the packaging thoughtfully.’

I placed the implant in the applicator, then hesitated, but not for long. This wasn’t the time to agonise; I’d agonised for months, and I was sick of it. Any more indecisiveness and I’d need to buy a second implant to convince me to use the first. I wasn’t committing a crime; I wasn’t even coming close to guaranteeing that I would commit one. Millions of people held the belief that human life was nothing special, but how many of them were murderers? The next three days would simply reveal how I reacted to that belief, and although the attitude would be hard-wired, the consequences were far from certain.

I put the applicator in my left nostril, and pushed the release button. There was a brief stinging sensation, nothing more.

I thought, Amy would have despised me for this. That shook me, but only for a moment. Amy was dead, which made her hypothetical feelings irrelevant. Nothing I did could hurt her now, and thinking any other way was crazy.

I tried to monitor the progress of the change, but that was a joke; you can’t check your moral precepts by introspection every thirty seconds. After all, my assessment of myself as being unable to kill had been based on decades of observation (much of it probably out of date). What’s more, that assessment, that self-image, had come to be as much a cause of my actions and attitudes as a reflection of them — and apart from the direct changes the implant was making to my brain, it was breaking that feedback loop by providing a rationalisation for me to act in a way I’d convinced myself was impossible.

After a while, I decided to get drunk, to distract myself from the vision of microscopic robots crawling around in my skull. It was a big mistake; alcohol makes me paranoid. I don’t recall much of what followed, except for catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, screaming, ‘HAL’s breaking First Law! HAL’s breaking First Law!’ before vomiting copiously.

I woke just after midnight, on the bathroom floor. I took an anti-hangover pill, and in five minutes my headache and nausea were gone. I showered and put on fresh clothes. I’d bought a jacket especially for the occasion, with an inside pocket for the gun.

It was still impossible to tell if the thing had done anything to me that went beyond the placebo effect; I asked myself, out loud, ‘Is human life sacred? Is it wrong to kill?’ but I couldn’t concentrate on the question, and I found it hard to believe that I ever had in the past; the whole idea seemed obscure and difficult, like some esoteric mathematical theorem. The prospect of going ahead with my plans made my stomach churn, but that was simple fear, not moral outrage; the implant wasn’t meant to make me brave, or calm, or resolute. I could have bought those qualities too, but that would have been cheating.

I’d had Anderson checked out by a private investigator. He worked every night but Sunday, as a bouncer in a Surry Hills nightclub; he lived nearby, and usually arrived home, on foot, at around four in the morning. I’d driven past his terrace house several times, I’d have no trouble finding it. He lived alone; he had a lover, but they always met at her place, in the afternoon or early evening.

I loaded the gun and put it in my jacket, then spent half an hour staring in the mirror, trying to decide if the bulge was visible. I wanted a drink, but I restrained myself. I switched on the radio and wandered through the house, trying to become less agitated. Perhaps taking a life was now no big deal to me, but I could still end up dead, or in prison, and the implant apparently hadn’t rendered me uninterested in my own fate.

I left too early, and had to drive by a circuitous route to kill time; even then, it was only a quarter past three when I parked, a kilometre from Anderson’s house. A few cars and taxis passed me as I walked the rest of the way, and I’m sure I was trying so hard to look at ease that my body language radiated guilt and paranoia — but no ordinary driver would have noticed or cared, and I didn’t see a single patrol car.

When I reached the place, there was nowhere to hide — no gardens, no trees, no fences — but I’d known that in advance. I chose a house across the street, not quite opposite Anderson’s, and sat on the front step. If the occupant appeared, I’d feign drunkenness and stagger away.

I sat and waited. It was a warm, still, ordinary night; the sky was clear, but grey and starless thanks to the lights of the city. I kept reminding myself: You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to go through with it. So why did I stay? The hope of being liberated from my sleepless nights? The idea was laughable; I had no doubt that if I killed Anderson, it would torture me as much as my helplessness over Amy’s death.

Why did I stay? It was nothing to do with the implant; at most, that was neutralising my qualms; it wasn’t forcing me to do anything.

Why, then? In the end, I think I saw it as a matter of honesty. I had to accept the unpleasant fact that I honestly wanted to kill Anderson, and however much I had also been repelled by the notion, to be true to myself I had to do it — anything less would have been hypocrisy and self-deception.

At five to four, I heard footsteps echoing down the street. As I turned, I hoped it would be someone else, or that he would be with a friend, but it was him, and he was alone. I waited until he was as far from his front door as I was, then I started walking. He glanced my way briefly, then ignored me. I felt a shock of pure fear — I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the trial, and I’d forgotten how physically imposing he was.

I had to force myself to slow down, and even then I passed him sooner than I’d meant to. I was wearing light, rubber-soled shoes, he was in heavy boots, but when I crossed the street and did a U-turn towards him, I couldn’t believe he couldn’t hear my heartbeat, or smell the stench of my sweat. Metres from the door, just as I finished pulling out the gun, he looked over his shoulder with an expression of bland curiosity, as if he might have been expecting a dog or a piece of windblown litter. He turned around to face me, frowning. I just stood there, pointing the gun at him, unable to speak. Eventually he said, ‘What the fuck do you want? I’ve got two hundred dollars in my wallet. Back pocket.’

I shook my head. ‘Unlock the front door, then put your hands on your head and kick it open. Don’t try closing it on me.’

He hesitated, then complied.

‘Now walk in. Keep your hands on your head. Five steps, that’s all. Count them out loud. I’ll be right behind you.’

I reached the light switch for the hall as he counted four, then I slammed the door behind me, and flinched at the sound. Anderson was right in front of me, and I suddenly felt trapped. The man was a vicious killer; I hadn’t even thrown a punch since I was eight years old. Did I really believe the gun would protect me? With his hands on his head, the muscles of his arms and shoulders bulged against his shirt. I should have shot him right then, in the back of the head. This was an execution, not a duel; if I’d wanted some quaint idea of honour, I would have come without a gun and let him take me to pieces.

I said, ‘Turn left.’ Left was the living room. I followed him in, switched on the light. ‘Sit.’ I stood in the doorway, he sat in the room’s only chair. For a moment, I felt dizzy and my vision seemed to tilt, but I don’t think I moved, I don’t think I sagged or swayed; if I had, he probably would have rushed me.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

I had to give that a lot of thought. I’d fantasised this situation a thousand times, but I could no longer remember the details — although I did recall that I’d usually assumed that Anderson would recognise me, and start volunteering excuses and explanations straight away.

Finally, I said, ‘I want you to tell me why you killed my wife.’

‘I didn’t kill your wife. Miller killed your wife.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s not true. I know. The cops told me. Don’t bother lying, because I know.’

He stared at me blandly. I wanted to lose my temper and scream, but I had a feeling that, in spite of the gun, that would have been more comical than intimidating. I could have pistol-whipped him, but the truth is I was afraid to go near him.

So I shot him in the foot. He yelped and swore, then leant over to inspect the damage. ‘Fuck you!’ he hissed. ‘Fuck you!’ He rocked back and forth, holding his foot. ‘I’ll break your fucking neck! I’ll fucking kill you!’ The wound bled a little through the hole in his boot, but it was nothing compared to the movies. I’d heard that the vaporising ammunition had a cauterising effect.

I said, ‘Tell me why you killed my wife.’

He looked far more angry and disgusted than afraid, but he dropped his pretence of innocence. ‘It just happened,’ he said. ‘It was just one of those things that happens.’

I shook my head, annoyed. ‘No. Why? Why did it happen?’

He moved as if to take off his boot, then thought better of it. ‘Things were going wrong. There was a time lock, there was hardly any cash, everything was just a big fuck-up. I didn’t mean to do it. It just happened.’

I shook my head again, unable to decide if he was a moron, or if he was stalling. ‘Don’t tell me “it just happened”. Why did it happen? Why did you do it?’

The frustration was mutual; he ran a hand through his hair and scowled at me. He was sweating now, but I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or from fear. ‘What do you want me to say? I lost my temper, all right?

Things were going badly, and I lost my fucking temper, and there she was, all right?’

The dizziness struck me again, but this time it didn’t subside. I understood now; he wasn’t being obtuse, he was telling the entire truth. I’d smashed the occasional coffee cup during a tense situation at work. I’d even, to my shame, kicked our dog once, after a fight with Amy: Why? I’d lost my fucking temper, and there she was.

I stared at Anderson, and felt myself grinning stupidly. It was all so clear now. I understood. I understood the absurdity of everything I’d ever felt for Amy — my ‘love’, my ‘grief’. It had all been a joke. She was meat, she was nothing. All the pain of the past five years evaporated; I was drunk with relief. I raised my arms and spun around slowly. Anderson leapt up and sprung towards me; I shot him in the chest until I ran out of bullets, then I knelt down beside him. He was dead.

I put the gun in my jacket. The barrel was warm. I remembered to use my handkerchief to open the front door. I half expected to find a crowd outside, but of course the shots had been inaudible, and Anderson’s threats and curses were not likely to have attracted attention.

A block from the house, a patrol car appeared around a corner. It slowed almost to a halt as it approached me. I kept my eyes straight ahead as it passed. I heard the engine idle. Then stop. I kept on walking, waiting for a shouted command, thinking: if they search me and find the gun, I’ll confess; there’s no point in prolonging the agony.

The engine spluttered, revved noisily, and the car roared away.

* * * *

Perhaps I’m not the number-one most obvious suspect. I don’t know what Anderson was involved in since he got out; maybe there are hundreds of other people who had far better reasons for wanting him dead, and perhaps when the cops have finished with them, they’ll get around to asking me what I was doing that night. A month seems an awfully long time, though. Anyone would think they didn’t care.

The same teenagers as before are gathered around the entrance, and again the mere sight of me seems to disgust them. I wonder if the taste in fashion and music tattooed on their brains is set to fade in a year or two, or if they have sworn lifelong allegiance. It doesn’t bear contemplating.

This time, I don’t browse. I approach the sales counter without hesitation.

This time, I know exactly what I want.

What I want is what I felt that night: the unshakeable conviction that Amy’s death — let alone Anderson’s — simply didn’t matter, any more than the death of a fly or an amoeba, any more than breaking a coffee cup or kicking a dog.

My one mistake was thinking that the insight I gained would simply vanish when the implant cut out. It hasn’t. It’s been clouded with doubts and reservations, it’s been undermined, to some degree, by my whole ridiculous panoply of beliefs and superstitions, but I can still recall the peace it gave me, I can still recall that flood of joy and relief, and I want it back. Not for three days; for the rest of my life.

Killing Anderson wasn’t honest, it wasn’t ‘being true to myself.’ Being true to myself would have meant living with all my contradictory urges, suffering the multitude of voices in my head, accepting confusion and doubt. It’s too late for that now; having tasted the freedom of certainty, I find I can’t live without it.

‘How can I help you, sir?’ The salesman smiles from the bottom of his heart.

Part of me, of course, still finds the prospect of what I am about to do totally repugnant.

No matter. That won’t last.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

THE SAFE-DEPOSIT BOX

I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

* * * *

I wake just before the alarm goes off (I usually do), so I’m able to reach out and silence it the instant it starts screeching. The woman beside me doesn’t move; I hope the alarm wasn’t meant for her too. It’s freezing cold and pitch black, except for the bedside clock’s red digits slowly coming into focus. Ten to four! I groan softly. What am I? A garbage collector? A milkman? This body is sore and tired, but that tells me nothing; they’ve all been sore and tired lately, whatever their profession, their income, their lifestyle. Yesterday I was a diamond merchant. Not quite a millionaire, but close. The day before I was a bricklayer, and the day before that I sold menswear. Crawling out of a warm bed felt pretty much the same each time.

I find my hand travelling instinctively to the switch for the reading light on my side of the bed. When I click it on, the woman stirs and mumbles, ‘Johnny?’ but her eyes remain closed. I make my first conscious effort to access this host’s memories; sometimes I can pick up a frequently used name. Linda?

Could be. Linda. I mouth it silently, looking at the tangle of soft brown hair almost hiding her sleeping face.

The situation, if not the individual, is comfortingly familiar. Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife. I whisper to her, ‘I love you,’ and I mean it; I love, not this particular woman, (with a past I’ll barely glimpse, and a future that I have no way of sharing), but the composite woman of which, today, she is a part — my nickering, inconstant companion, my lover made up of a million pseudorandom words and gestures, held together only by the fact that I behold her, known in her entirety to no one but me.

In my romantic youth, I used to speculate: Surely I’m not the only one of my kind? Might there not be another like me, but who wakes each morning in the body of a woman? Might not whatever mysterious factors determine the selection of my host act in parallel on her, drawing us together, keeping us together day after day, transporting us, side by side, from host couple to host couple?

Not only is it unlikely, it simply isn’t true. The last time (nearly twelve years ago now) that I cracked up and started spouting the unbelievable truth, my host’s wife did not break in with shouts of relief and recognition, and her own, identical, confession. (She didn’t do much at all, actually. I expected her to find my rantings frightening and traumatic, I expected her to conclude at once that I was dangerously insane. Instead, she listened briefly, apparently found what I was saying either boring or incomprehensible, and so, very sensibly, left me alone for the rest of the day.)

Not only is it untrue, it simply doesn’t matter. Yes, my lover has a thousand faces, and yes, a different soul looks out from every pair of eyes, but I can still find (or imagine) as many unifying patterns in my memories of her, as any other man or woman can find (or imagine) in their own perceptions of their own most faithful lifelong companion.

Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife.

I climb out from under the blankets and stand for a moment, shivering, looking around the room, eager to start moving to keep myself warm, but unable to decide what to do first. Then I spot a wallet on top of the chest of drawers.

I’m John Francis O’Leary, according to the driver’s licence. Date of birth: 15 November, 1951 —

which makes me one week older than when I went to bed. Although I still have occasional daydreams about waking up twenty years younger, that seems to be as unlikely for me as it is for anyone else; in thirty-nine years, so far as I know, I’ve yet to have a host born any time but November or December of 1951. Nor have I ever had a host either born, or presently living, outside this city.

I don’t know how I move from one host to the next, but since any process could be expected to have some finite effective range, my geographical confinement is not surprising. There’s desert to the east, ocean to the west, and long stretches of barren coast to the north and south; the distances from town to town are simply too great for me to cross. In fact, I never even seem to get close to the outskirts of the city, and on reflection that’s not surprising: if there are one hundred potential hosts to the west of me, and five to the east, then a jump to a randomly chosen host is not a jump in a random direction. The populous centre attracts me with a kind of statistical gravity.

As for the restrictions on host age and birthplace, I’ve never had a theory plausible enough to believe for more than a day or two. It was easy when I was twelve or thirteen, and could pretend I was some kind of alien prince, imprisoned in the bodies of Earthlings by a wicked rival for my cosmic inheritance; the bad guys must have put something in the city’s water, late in 1951, which was drunk by expectant mothers, thus preparing their unborn children to be my unwitting jailers. These days I accept the likelihood that I’ll simply never know the answer.

I am sure of one thing, though: both restrictions were essential to whatever approximation to sanity I now possess. Had I ‘grown up’ in bodies of completely random ages, or in hosts scattered worldwide, with a different language and culture to contend with every day, I doubt that I’d even exist — no personality could possibly emerge from such a cacophony of experiences. (Then again, an ordinary person might think the same of my own, relatively stable, origins.)

I don’t recall being John O’Leary before, which is unusual. This city contains only six thousand men aged thirty-nine, and of those, roughly one thousand would have been born in November or December. Since thirty-nine years is more than fourteen thousand days, the odds by now are heavily against first-timers, and I’ve visited most hosts several times within memory.

In my own inexpert way, I’ve explored the statistics a little. Any given potential host should have, on average, one thousand days, or three years, between my visits. Yet the average time I should expect to pass without repeating any hosts myself is a mere forty days (the average to date is actually lower, twenty-seven days, presumably because some hosts are more susceptible than others). When I first worked this out it seemed paradoxical, but only because the averages don’t tell the whole story; a fraction of all repeat visits occur within weeks rather than years, and of course it’s these abnormally fast ones that determine the rate for me.

In a safe-deposit box (with a combination lock) in the centre of the city, I have records covering the past twenty-two years. Names, addresses, dates of birth, and dates of each visit since 1968, for over eight hundred hosts. One day soon, when I have a host who can spare the time, I really must rent a computer with a database package and shift all that crap on to disk; that would make statistical tests a thousand times easier. I don’t expect astounding revelations; if I found some kind of bias or pattern in the data, well, so what? Would that tell me anything? Would that change anything? Still, it seems like a good thing to do.

Partly hidden under a pile of coins beside the wallet is — oh, bliss! — an ID badge, complete with photo. John O’Leary is an orderly at the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute. The photo shows part of a light blue uniform, and when I open his wardrobe there it is. I believe this body could do with a shower, though, so I postpone dressing.

The house is small and plainly furnished, but very clean and in good repair. I pass one room that is probably a child’s bedroom, but the door is closed and I leave it that way, not wanting to risk waking anyone. In the living room, I look up the Pearlman Institute in the phone book, and then locate it in a street directory. I’ve already memorised my own address from the licence, and the Institute’s not far away; I work out a route that shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, at this hour of the morning. I still don’t know when my shift starts; surely not before five.

Standing in the bathroom, shaving, I stare for a moment into my new brown eyes, and I can’t help noticing that John O’Leary is not bad looking at all. It’s a thought that leads nowhere. For a long while now, thankfully, I’ve managed to accept my fluctuating appearance with relative tranquillity, though it hasn’t always been that way. I had several neurotic patches, in my teens and early twenties, when my mood would swing violently between elation and depression, depending on how I felt about my latest body. Often, for weeks after departing an especially good-looking host (which of course I’d have delayed for as long as possible, by staying awake night after night), I’d fantasise obsessively about returning, preferably to stay. At least an ordinary, screwed-up adolescent knows he has no choice but to accept the body in which he was born. I had no such comfort.

I’m more inclined now to worry about my health, but that’s every bit as futile as fretting over appearance. There’s no point whatsoever in me exercising, or watching my diet, since any such gesture is effectively diluted one-thousandfold. ‘My’ weight, ‘my’ fitness, ‘my’ alcohol and tobacco consumption, can’t be altered by my own personal initiative — they’re public health statistics, requiring vastly expensive advertising campaigns to budge them even slightly.

After showering, I comb my hair in imitation of the ID photo, hoping that it’s not too out of date.

Linda opens her eyes and stretches as I walk, naked, back into the bedroom, and the sight of her gives me an erection at once. I haven’t had sex for months; almost every host lately seems to have managed to screw himself senseless the night before I arrived, and to have subsequently lost interest for the following fortnight. Apparently, my luck has changed. Linda reaches out and grabs me.

‘I’ll be late for work,’ I protest.

She turns and looks at the clock. ‘That’s crap. You don’t start until six. If you eat breakfast here, instead of detouring to that greasy truck stop, you won’t have to leave for an hour.’

Her fingernails are pleasantly sharp. I let her drag me towards the bed, then I lean over and whisper,

‘You know, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.’

* * * *

My earliest memory is of my mother reverently holding a bawling infant towards me, saying, ‘Look, Chris! This is your baby brother. This is Paul! Isn’t he beautiful?’ I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Siblings were like pets or toys; their number, their ages, their sexes, their names, all fluctuated as senselessly as the furniture or the wallpaper.

Parents were clearly superior; they changed appearance and behaviour, but at least their names stayed the same. I naturally assumed that when I grew up, my name would become ‘Daddy’, a suggestion that was usually greeted with laughter and amused agreement. I suppose I thought of my parents as being basically like me; their transformations were more extreme than my own, but everything else about them was bigger, so that made perfect sense. That they were in a sense the same from day to day, I never doubted; my mother and father were, by definition, the two adults who did certain things: scolded me, hugged me, tucked me into bed, made me eat disgusting vegetables, and so on. They stood out a mile, you couldn’t miss them. Occasionally one or the other was absent, but never for more than a day.

The past and future weren’t problems; I simply grew up with rather vague notions as to what they actually were. ‘Yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ were like ‘once upon a time’ — I was never disappointed by broken promises of future treats, or baffled by descriptions of alleged past events, because I treated all such talk as intentional fiction. I was often accused of telling ‘lies’, and I assumed that was just a label applied to stories that were insufficiently interesting. Memories of events more than one day old were clearly worthless ‘lies’, so I did my best to forget them.

I’m sure I was happy. The world was a kaleidoscope. I had a new house to explore every day, different toys, different playmates, different food. Sometimes the colour of my skin would change (and it thrilled me to see that my parents, brothers and sisters almost always chose to make their own skin the same as mine). Now and then I woke up as a girl, but at some point (around the age of four, I think) this began to trouble me, and soon after that, it simply stopped happening.

I had no suspicion that I was moving, from house to house, from body to body. I changed, my house changed, the other houses, and the streets and shops and parks around me, changed. I travelled now and then to the city centre with my parents, but I thought of it not as a fixed location (since it was reached by a different route each time) but as a fixed feature of the world, like the sun or the sky.

School was the start of a long period of confusion and misery. Although the school building, the classroom, the teacher, and the other children, changed like everything else in my environment, the repertoire was clearly not as wide as that of my house and family. Travelling to the same school, but along different streets, and with a different name and face, upset me, and the gradual realisation that classmates were copying my own previous names and faces — and, worse still, I was being saddled with ones they’d used — was infuriating.

These days, having lived with the approved world-view for so long, I sometimes find it hard to understand how my first year at school wasn’t enough to make everything perfectly clear — until I recall that my glimpses of each classroom were generally spaced weeks apart, and that I was shuttling back and forth at random between more than a hundred schools. I had no diary, no records, no class lists in my head, no means of even thinking about what was happening to me — nobody trained me in the scientific method. Even Einstein was a great deal older than six, when he worked out his theory of relativity.

I kept my disquiet from my parents, but I was sick of dismissing my memories as lies; I tried discussing them with other children, which brought ridicule and hostility. After a period of fights and tantrums, I grew introverted. My parents said things like ‘You’re quiet today!’, day after day, proving to me exactly how stupid they were.

It’s a miracle that I learnt anything. Even now, I’m unsure how much of my reading ability belongs to me, and how much comes from my hosts. I’m sure that my vocabulary travels with me, but the lower-level business of scanning the page, of actually recognising letters and words, feels quite different from day to day. (Driving is similar; almost all of my hosts have licences, but I’ve never had a single lesson myself. I know the traffic rules, I know the gears and pedals, but I’ve never tried going out on to the road in a body that hasn’t done it before — it would make a nice experiment, but those bodies tend not to own cars.)

I learnt to read. I learnt quickly to read quickly — if I didn’t finish a book the day I started it, I knew I might not get my hands on it again for weeks, or months. I read hundreds of adventure stories, full of heroes and heroines with friends, brothers and sisters, even pets, that stayed with them day after day. Each book hurt a little more, but I couldn’t stop reading, I couldn’t give up hoping that the next book I opened would start with the words, ‘One sunny morning a boy woke up, and wondered what his name was.’

One day I saw my father consulting a street directory, and, despite my shyness, I asked him what it was. I’d seen world globes and maps of the country at school, but never anything like this. He pointed out our house, my school, and his place of work, both on the detailed street maps, and on the key map of the whole city inside the front cover.

At that time, one brand of street directory had a virtual monopoly. Every family owned one, and every day for weeks, I browbeat my father or mother into showing me things on the key map. I successfully committed a lot of it to memory (once I tried making pencil marks, thinking they might somehow inherit the magical permanence of the directory itself, but they proved to be as transitory as all the writing and drawing I did at school). I knew I was on to something profound, but the concept of my own motion, from place to place in an unchanging city, still failed to crystallise.

Not long afterwards, when my name was Danny Foster (a movie projectionist, these days, with a beautiful wife called Kate to whom I lost my virginity, though probably not Danny’s), I went to a friend’s eighth birthday party. I didn’t understand birthdays at all; some years I had none, some years I had two or three. The birthday boy, Charlie McBride, was no friend of mine so far as I was concerned, but my parents bought me a gift to take, a plastic toy machine gun, and drove me to his house; I had no say in any of it. When I arrived home, I pestered Dad into showing me, on a street map, exactly where I’d been, and the route the car had taken.

A week later, I woke up with Charlie McBride’s face, plus a house, parents, little brother, older sister, and toys, all identical to those I’d seen at his party. I refused to eat breakfast until my mother showed me our house on a street map, but I already knew where she’d point to.

I pretended to set off for school. My brother was too young for school, and my sister too old to want to be seen with me; in such circumstances I normally followed the clear flow of other children through the streets, but today I ignored it.

I still remembered landmarks from the trip to the party. I got lost a few times, but I kept stumbling upon streets I’d seen before; dozens of fragments of my world were starting to connect. It was both exhilarating and terrifying; I thought I was uncovering a vast conspiracy, I thought everyone had been purposely concealing the secrets of existence, and at last I was on the verge of outsmarting them all.

When I reached Danny’s house, though, I didn’t feel triumphant, I simply felt lonely and deceived and confused. Revelation or no revelation, I was still a child. I sat on the front steps and cried. Mrs Foster came out, in a fluster, calling me Charlie, asking me where my mother was, how I’d got here, why I wasn’t at school. I yelled abuse at this filthy liar, who’d pretended, like they all had, to be my mother. Phone calls were made, and I was driven home screaming, to spend the day in my bedroom, refusing to eat, refusing to speak, refusing to explain my unforgivable behaviour.

That night, I overheard my ‘parents’ discussing me, arranging what in retrospect I now believe was a visit to a child psychologist.

I never made it to that appointment.

* * * *

For the past eleven years now, I’ve been spending my days at the host’s workplace. It’s certainly not for the host’s sake; I’m far more likely to get him sacked by screwing up at his job than by causing him one day’s absence every three years. It’s, well, it’s what I do, it’s who I am these days. Everybody has to define themselves somehow; I am a professional impersonator. The pay and conditions are variable, but a vocation cannot be denied.

I’ve tried constructing an independent life for myself, but I’ve never been able to make it work. When I was much younger, and mostly unmarried, I’d set myself things to study. That’s when I first hired the safe-deposit box — to keep notes in. I studied mathematics, chemistry and physics, in the city’s central library, but when any subject began to grow difficult, it was hard to find the discipline to push myself onwards. What was the point? I knew I could never be a practising scientist. As for uncovering the nature of my plight, it was clear that the answer was not going to lie in any library book on neurobiology. In the cool, quiet reading rooms, with nothing to listen to but the soporific drone of the air conditionings, I’d lapse into daydreams as soon as the words or equations in front of me stopped making easy sense.

I once did a correspondence course in undergraduate level physics; I hired a post office box, and kept the key to it in my safe-deposit box. I completed the course, and did quite well, but I had no one to tell of my achievement.

A while after that I got a pen pal in Switzerland. She was a music student, a violinist, and I told her I was studying physics at the local university. She sent me a photo, and, eventually, I did the same, after waiting for one of my best-looking hosts. We exchanged letters regularly, every week for more than a year. One day she wrote, saying she was coming to visit, asking for details of how we could meet. I don’t think I’d ever felt as lonely as I did then. If I hadn’t sent that photo, I could at least have seen her for one day. I could have spent a whole afternoon, talking face to face with my only true friend, the only person in the world who actually knew, not one of my hosts, but me. I stopped writing at once, and I gave up renting the post office box.

I’ve contemplated suicide at times, but the fact that it would be certain murder, and perhaps do nothing to me but drive me into another host, makes an effective deterrent.

Since leaving behind all the turmoil and bitterness of my childhood, I’ve generally tried to be fair to my hosts. Some days I’ve lost control and done things that must have inconvenienced or embarrassed them (and I take a little cash for my safe-deposit box from those who can easily spare it), but I’ve never set out to intentionally harm anyone. Sometimes I almost feel that they know about me and wish me well, although all the indirect evidence, from questioning wives and friends when I’ve had closely spaced visits, suggests that the missing days are hidden by seamless amnesia — my hosts don’t even know that they’ve been out of action, let alone have a chance of guessing why. As for me knowing them, well, I sometimes see love and respect in the eyes of their families and colleagues, I sometimes see physical evidence of achievements I can admire — one host has written a novel, a black comedy about his Vietnam experiences, that I’ve read and enjoyed; one is an amateur telescope-maker, with a beautifully crafted, thirty-centimetre Newtonian reflector, through which I viewed Halley’s comet — but there are too many of them. By the time I die, I’ll have glimpsed each of their lives for just twenty or thirty randomly scattered days.

* * * *

I drive around the perimeter of the Pearlman Institute, seeing what windows are lit, what doors are open, what activity is visible. There are several entrances, ranging from one clearly for the public, complete with plushly carpeted foyer and polished mahogany reception desk, to a rusty metal swing door opening on to a dingy bitumen-covered space between two buildings. I park in the street, rather than risk taking a spot on the premises to which I’m not entitled.

I’m nervous as I approach what I hope is the correct doorway; I still get a pain in my gut in those awful seconds just before I’m first seen by a colleague, and it becomes, very suddenly, a hundred times harder to back out — and, looking on the bright side, a whole lot easier to continue.

‘Morning, Johnny.’

‘Morning.’

The nurse continues past me even as this brief exchange takes place. I’m hoping to find out where I’m meant to be from a kind of social binding strength; the people I spend most time with ought to greet me with more than a nod and two words. I wander a short way along a corridor, trying to get used to the squeaking of my rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. Suddenly a gruff voice cries out, ‘O’Leary!’ and I turn to see a young man in a uniform like mine, striding along the corridor towards me, wearing a thunderous frown, arms stuck out unnaturally, face twitching. ‘Standing around! Dawdling! Again!’ His behaviour is so bizarre that, for a fraction of a second, I’m convinced he’s one of the patients; some psychotic with a grudge against me has killed another orderly, stolen his uniform, and is about to produce a bloodstained hatchet. Then the man puffs out his cheeks and stands there glaring, and I suddenly twig; he’s not insane, he’s just parodying some obese, aggressive superior. I prod his inflated face with one finger, as if bursting a balloon, which gives me a chance to get close enough to read his badge: Ralph Dopita.

‘You jumped a mile! I couldn’t believe it! So at last I got the voice perfect!’

‘And the face as well. But you’re lucky, you were born ugly.’

He shrugs. ‘Your wife didn’t think so last night.’

‘You were drunk; that wasn’t my wife, it was your mother.’

‘Don’t I always say you’re like a father to me?’

The corridor, after much seemingly gratuitous winding, leads into a kitchen, all stainless steel and steam, where two other orderlies are standing around, and three cooks are preparing breakfast. With hot water constantly running in one sink, the clunking of trays and utensils, the hissing of fat, and the tortured sound of a failing ventilation fan, it’s almost impossible to hear anyone speak. One of the orderlies mimes being a chicken, and then makes a gesture — swinging one hand above his head, pointing outwards, as if to take in the whole building. ‘Enough eggs to feed—’ he shouts, and the others crack up, so I laugh along with them.

Later, I follow them to a storeroom off the kitchen, where each of us grabs a trolley. Pinned up on a board, sheathed in transparent plastic, are four patient lists, one for each ward, ordered by room number. Beside each name is a little coloured circular sticker, green, red or blue. I hang back until there’s only one left to grab.

There are three kinds of meal prepared: bacon and eggs with toast, cereal, and a mushy yellow puree resembling baby food, in descending order of popularity. On my own list there are more red stickers than green, and only a single blue, but I’m fairly certain that there were more green than red in total, when I saw all four lists together. As I load my trolley on this basis, I managed to catch a second look at Ralph’s list, which is mainly green, and the contents of his trolley confirms that I have the code right.

I’ve never been in a psychiatric hospital before, either as patient or staff member. I spent a day in prison about five years ago, where I narrowly avoided getting my host’s skull smashed in; I never discovered what he’d done, or how long his sentence was, but I’m rather hoping he’ll be out by the time I get back to him.

My vague expectation that this place will be similar turns out to be pleasantly wrong. The prison cells were personalised to some degree, with pictures on the walls, and idiosyncratic possessions, but they still looked like cells. The rooms here are far less cluttered with that kind of thing, but their underlying character is a thousand times less harsh. There are no bars on the windows, and the doors in my ward have no locks. Most patients are already awake, sitting up in bed, greeting me with a quiet ‘Good morning’; a few take their trays into a common room, where there’s a TV tuned to news. Perhaps the degree of calm is unnatural, due solely to drugs; perhaps the peacefulness that makes my job untraumatic is stultifying and oppressive to the patients. Perhaps not. Maybe one day I’ll find out.

My last patient, the single blue sticker, is listed as Klein, F. C. A skinny, middle-aged man with untidy black hair and a few days’ stubble. He’s lying so straight that I expect to see straps holding him in place, but there are none. His eyes are open but they don’t follow me, and when I greet him there’s no response.

There’s a bedpan on a table beside the bed, and on a hunch I sit him up and arrange it beneath him; he’s easily manipulated, not exactly cooperating, but not dead weight either. He uses the bedpan impassively. I find some paper and wipe him, then I take the bedpan to the toilets, empty it, and wash my hands thoroughly. I’m feeling only slightly queasy; O’Leary’s inurement to tasks like this is probably helping.

Klein sits with a fixed gaze as I hold a spoonful of yellow mush in front of him, but when I touch it to his lips he opens his mouth wide. He doesn’t close his mouth on the spoon, so I have to turn it and tip the food off, but he does swallow the stuff, and only a little ends up on his chin.

A woman in a white coat pops her head into the room and says, ‘Could you shave Mr Klein, please, Johnny, he’s going to St Margaret’s for some tests this morning,’ and then vanishes before I can reply.

After taking the trolley back to the kitchen, collecting empty trays along the way, I find all I need in the storeroom. I move Klein on to a chair — again he seems to make it easy, without quite assisting. He stays perfectly still as I lather and shave him, except for an occasional blink. I manage to nick him only once, and not deeply.

The same woman returns, this time carrying a thick manila folder and a clipboard, and she stands beside me. I get a peek at her badge — Dr Helen Lidcombe.

‘How’s it going, Johnny?’

‘OK.’

She hovers expectantly, and I feel suddenly uneasy. I must be doing something wrong. Or maybe I’m just too slow. ‘Nearly finished,’ I mutter. She reaches out with one hand and absent-mindedly massages the back of my neck. Walking on eggs time. Why can’t my hosts lead uncomplicated lives? Sometimes I feel like I’m living the outtakes from a thousand soap operas. What does John O’Leary have a right to expect of me? To determine the precise nature and extent of this relationship, and leave him neither more nor less involved tomorrow than he was yesterday? Some chance.

‘You’re very tense.’

I need a safe topic, quickly. The patient.

‘This guy, I don’t know, some days he just gets to me.’

‘What, is he behaving differently?’

‘No, no, I just wonder. What it must be like for him.’

‘Like nothing much.’

I shrug. ‘He knows when he’s sitting on a bedpan. He knows when he’s being fed. He’s not a vegetable.’

‘It’s hard to say what he “knows”. A leech with a couple of neurons “knows” when to suck blood. All things considered, he does remarkably well, but I don’t think he has anything like consciousness, or even anything like dreams.’ She gives a little laugh. ‘All he has is memories, though memories of what I can’t imagine.’

I start wiping off the shaving soap. ‘How do you know he has memories?’

‘I’m exaggerating.’ She reaches into the folder and pulls out a photographic transparency. It looks like a side-on head X-ray, but blobs and bands of artificial colour adorn it. ‘Last month I finally got the money to do a few PET scans. There are things going on in Mr Klein’s hippocampus that look suspiciously like long-term memories being laid down.’ She whips the transparency back in the folder before I’ve had a chance for a proper look. ‘But comparing anything in his head with studies on normals is like comparing the weather on Mars with the weather on Jupiter.’

I’m growing curious, so I take a risk, and ask with a furrowed brow, ‘Did you ever tell me exactly how he ended up like this?’

She rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t start with that again! You know I’d get in trouble.’

‘Who do you think I’d blab to?’ I copy Ralph Dopita’s imitation, for a second, and Helen bursts out laughing. ‘Hardly. You haven’t said more than three words to him since you’ve been here: “Sorry, Dr Pearlman.”‘

‘So why don’t you tell me?’

‘If you told your friends—’

‘Do you think I tell my friends everything? Is that what you think? Don’t you trust me at all?’

She sits on Klein’s bed. ‘Close the door.’ I do it.

‘His father was a pioneering neurosurgeon.’

‘What?’

‘If you say a word—’

‘I won’t, I promise. But what did he do? Why?’

‘His primary research interest was redundancy and functional crossover; the extent to which people with lost or damaged portions of the brain manage to transfer the functions of the impaired regions into healthy tissue.

‘His wife died giving birth to a son, their only child. He must have been psychotic already, but that put him right off the planet. He blamed the child for his wife’s death, but he was too cold-blooded to do something simple like kill it.’

I’m about ready to tell her to shut up, that I really do not wish to know any more, but John O’Leary is a big, tough man with a strong stomach, and I mustn’t disgrace him in front of his lover.

‘He raised the child “normally”, talking to it, playing with it, and so on, and making extensive notes on how it was developing; vision, coordination, the rudiments of speech, you name it. When it was a few months old, he implanted a network of cannulae, a web of very fine tubes, spanning almost the entire brain, but narrow enough not to cause any problems themselves. And then he kept on as before, stimulating the child, and recording its progress. And every week, via the cannulae, he destroyed a little more of its brain.’

I let out a long string of obscenities. Klein, of course, just sits there, but suddenly I’m ashamed of violating his privacy, however meaningless that concept might be in his case. My face is flushed with blood, I feel slightly dizzy, slightly less than real. ‘How come he ever survived? How come there’s anything left at all?’

‘The extent of his father’s insanity saved him, if that’s the word to use. You see, for months during which he was regularly losing brain tissue, the child actually continued to develop neurologically — more slowly than normal, of course, but moving perceptibly forwards nonetheless. Professor Klein was too much the scientist to bury a result like that; he wrote up all his observations and tried to get them published. The journal thought it was some kind of sick hoax, but they told the police, who eventually got around to investigating. But by the time the child was rescued, well—’ She nods towards the impassive Klein.

‘How much of his brain is left? Isn’t there a chance—?’

‘Less than ten per cent. There are cases of microcephalics who live almost normal lives with a similar brain mass, but being born that way, having gone through foetal brain development that way, isn’t a comparable situation. There was a young girl a few years ago, who had a hemispherectomy to cure severe epilepsy, and emerged from it with very little impairment, but she’d had years for her brain to gradually switch functions out of the damaged hemisphere. She was extremely lucky; in most cases that operation has been utterly disastrous. As for Mr Klein, well, I’d say he wasn’t lucky at all.’

* * * *

I seem to spend most of the rest of the morning mopping corridors. When an ambulance arrives to take Klein away for his tests, I feel mildly offended that no one asks for my assistance; the two ambulancemen, watched by Helen, plonk him into a wheelchair and wheel him away, like couriers collecting a heavy parcel. But I have even less right than John O’Leary to feel possessive or protective about ‘my’ patients, so I push Klein out of my thoughts.

I eat lunch with the other orderlies in the staff room. We play cards, and make jokes that even I find stale by now, but I enjoy the company nonetheless. I am teasingly accused several times of having lingering

‘east-coast tendencies’, which makes sense; if O’Leary lived over east for a while, that would explain why I don’t remember him. The afternoon passes slowly, but sleepily. Dr Pearlman has flown somewhere, suddenly, to do whatever eminent psychiatrists or neurologists (I’m not even sure which he is) are called to do with great urgency in faraway cities — and this seems to let everyone, the patients included, relax. When my shift ends at three o’clock, and I walk out of the building saying ‘See you tomorrow’ to everyone I pass, I feel (as usual) a certain sense of loss. It will pass.

Because it’s Friday, I detour to the city centre to update the records in my safe-deposit box. In the pre-rush traffic I begin to feel mild elation, as all the minor tribulations of coping with the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute recede, banished for months, or years, or maybe even decades.

After making diary entries for the week, and adding a new page headed JOHN FRANCIS O’LEARY

to my thick ring-binder full of host details, the itch to do something with all this information grows in me, as it does now and then. But what? The prospect of renting a computer and arranging a place to use it is too daunting on a sleepy Friday afternoon. I could update, with the help of a calculator, my average host-repeat rate. That would be pretty bloody thrilling.

Then I recall the PET scan that Helen Lidcombe waved in front of me. Although I don’t know a thing about interpreting such pictures myself, I can imagine how exciting it must be for a trained specialist to actually see brain processes displayed that way. If I could turn all my hundreds of pages of data into one coloured picture — well, it might not tell me a damn thing, but the prospect is somehow infinitely more attractive than messing about to produce a few statistics that don’t tell me a damn thing either.

I buy a street directory, the brand I am familiar with from childhood, with the key map inside the front cover. I buy a packet of five felt-tipped pens. I sit on a bench in a shopping arcade, covering the map with coloured dots; a red dot for a host who’s had from one to three visits, an orange dot for a host who’s had four to six, and so on up to blue. It takes me an hour to complete, and when I’m finished the result does not look like a glossy, computer-generated brain scan at all. It looks like a mess.

And yet. Although the colours don’t form isolated bands, and intermingle extensively, there’s a definite concentration of blue in the city’s north-east. As soon as I see this, it rings true; the north-east is more familiar to me than anywhere else. And, a geographical bias would explain the fact that I repeat hosts more frequently than I ought to. For each colour, I sketch a shaky pencil line that joins up all of its outermost points, and then another for all its innermost points. None of these lines intersects another. It’s no perfect set of concentric circles by any means, but each curve is roughly centred on that patch of blue in the north-east. A region which contains, amongst many other things, the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute.

I pack everything back into the safe-deposit box. I need to give this a lot more thought. Driving home, a very vague hypothesis begins to form, but the traffic fumes, the noise, the glare of the setting sun, all make it hard to pin the idea down.

Linda is furious. ‘Where have you been? Our daughter had to ring me, in tears, from a public phone box, with money borrowed from a complete stranger, and I had to pretend to be sick and leave work and drive halfway across town to pick her up. Where the hell have you been?’

‘I — I got caught up, with Ralph, he was celebrating—’

‘I rang Ralph. You weren’t with Ralph.’

I stand there in silence. She stares at me for a full minute, then turns and stomps away.

I apologise to Laura (I see the name on her school books), who is no longer crying but looks like she has been for hours. She is eight years old, and adorable, and I feel like dirt. I offer to help with her homework, but she assures me she doesn’t need anything at all from me, so I leave her in peace.

Linda, not surprisingly, barely says a word to me for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow this problem will be John O’Leary’s, not mine, which makes me feel twice as bad about it. We watch TV in silence. When she goes to bed, I wait an hour before following her, and if she isn’t asleep when I climb in, she’s doing a good imitation.

I lie in the dark with my eyes open, thinking about Klein and his long-term memories, his father’s unspeakable ‘experiment’, my brain scan of the city.

I never asked Helen how old Klein was, and now it’s too late for that, but there’ll surely be something in the newspapers from the time of his father’s trial. First thing tomorrow — screw my host’s obligations —

I’ll go to the central library and check that out.

Whatever consciousness is, it must be resourceful, it must be resilient. Surviving for so long in that tiny child, pushed into ever smaller corners of his mutilated, shrinking brain. But when the number of living neurons fell so low that no resourcefulness, no ingenuity, could make them suffice, what then? Did consciousness vanish in an instant? Did it slowly fade away, as function after function was discarded, until nothing remained but a few reflexes, and a parody of human dignity? Or did it — how could it? — reach out in desperation to the brains of a thousand other children, those young enough, flexible enough, to donate a fraction of their own capacity to save this one child from oblivion? Each one donating one day in a thousand from their own lives, to rescue me from that ruined shell, fit now for nothing but eating, defecating, and storing my long-term memories?

Klein, F. C. I don’t even know what the initials stand for. Linda mumbles something and turns over. I feel remarkably unperturbed by my speculations, perhaps because I don’t honestly believe that this wild theory could possibly be true. And yet, is it so much stranger than the mere fact of my existence?

And if I did believe it, how should I feel? Horrified by my own father’s atrocities towards me? Yes. Astonished by such a miracle of human tenacity? Certainly.

I finally manage to cry — for Klein, F. C, or for myself, I don’t know. Linda doesn’t wake, but moved by some dream or instinct, she turns to me and holds me. Eventually I stop shaking, and the warmth of her body flows into me, peace itself.

As I feel sleep approaching, I make a resolution: from tomorrow, I start anew. From tomorrow, an end to mimicking my hosts. From tomorrow, whatever the problems, whatever the setbacks, I’m going to carve out a life of my own.

* * * *

I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One name, unchanging, mine until death. I don’t know what my name is, but that doesn’t matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

SEEING

I gaze down at the dusty top surface of the bank of lights suspended from the ceiling of the operating theatre. There’s a neatly hand-lettered sticker on the grey-painted metal — slightly yellowing, the writing a little faded, peeling at one corner. It reads:

IN CASE OF OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

PHONE 137 4597

I’m puzzled: I’ve never come across a local number starting with a one — and when I look again, it’s clear that the digit in question is actually a seven. I was mistaken about the ‘dust’, too; it’s nothing but a play of light on the slightly uneven surface of the paint. Dust in a sterile, air-filtered room like this — what was I thinking?

I shift my attention to my body, draped in green save for a tiny square aperture above my right temple, where the macrosurgeon’s probe is following the bullet’s entry wound into my skull. The spindly robot has the operating table to itself, although a couple of gowned-and-masked humans are present, off to one side, watching what I take to be X-ray views of the probe approaching its target; from my vantage point, the screen is foreshortened, the images hard to decipher. Injected microsurgeons must already have staunched the bleeding, repaired hundreds of blood vessels, broken up any dangerous clots. The bullet itself, though, is too physically tough and chemically inert to be fragmented and removed, like a kidney stone, by a swarm of tiny robots; there’s no alternative to reaching in and plucking it out. I used to read up on this type of operation — and lie awake afterwards, wondering when my time would finally come. I often pictured this very moment — and I’d swear, now, that when I imagined it, it looked exactly like this, down to the last detail. But I can’t tell if that’s just run-of-the-mill déjà vu, or if my obsessively rehearsed visualisation is fuelling this present hallucination.

I begin to wonder, calmly, about the implications of my exotic point of view. Out-of-body experiences are supposed to suggest proximity to death . . . but then, all the thousands of people who’ve reported them survived to tell the tale, didn’t they? With no way of balancing that against the unknown number who must have died, it’s absurd to treat the situation as signifying anything at all about my chances of life or death. The effect is certainly linked to severe physical trauma, but it’s only the ludicrous notion that the

‘soul’ has parted from the body — and is perilously close to floating off down a tunnel of light into the afterlife — that associates the experience with death.

Memories leading up to the attack start coming back to me, hazily. Arriving to speak at Zeitgeist Entertainment’s AGM. (Physically present for the first time in years — bad move. Just because I sold off HyperConference Systems, why did I have to eschew the technology?) That lunatic Murchison making a scene outside the Hilton, screaming something about me — me! — stiffing him on his miniseries contract. (As if I’d even read it, let alone personally drafted every clause. Why couldn’t he have gone and mowed down the legal department, instead?) The motorised window of the bulletproof Rolls gliding upwards to shut out his ranting, the mirrored glass moving silently, reassuringly —and then jamming . . .

I was wrong about one thing: I always thought the bullet would come from some anal-retentive cinephile, outraged by one of Zeitgeist’s ‘Sequels to the Celluloid Classics’. The software avatars we use as directors are always constructed with meticulous care, by psychologists and film historians committed to re-creating the true persona of the original auteur . . . but some purists are never happy, and there were death threats for more than a year after Hannah and Her Sisters II, in 3-D. What I failed to anticipate was a man who’d just signed a seven-figure deal for the rights to his life story — out on bail only because of Zeitgeist’s generous advance — trying to blow me away over a discounted residual rate for satellite transmissions dubbed into the Inuit language.

I notice that the unlikely sticker on top of the lights has vanished. What does that presage? If my delusion is breaking down, am I deteriorating, or recovering? Is an unstable hallucination healthier than a consistent one? Is reality about to come crashing in? What should I be seeing, right now? Pure darkness, if I really am under all that green swaddling, eyes closed, anaesthetised. I try to ‘close my eyes’ — but the concept just doesn’t translate. I do my best to lose consciousness (if that’s the right word for what I’m experiencing); I try to relax, as if aiming for sleep — but then a faint whir from the surgeon’s probe as it reverses direction rivets my attention.

I watch — physically unable to avert my unphysical gaze — as the gleaming silver needle of the probe slowly retracts. It seems to take forever, and I rack my brain for a judgement as to whether this is a piece of masochistic dream-theatricality, or a touch of authenticity, but I can’t decide.

Finally — and I know it a moment before it happens (but then, I’ve felt that way all along) — the tip of the needle emerges, bonded outrageously by nothing more esoteric than a speck of high-strength glue (or so I once read) to the dull, slightly crumpled bullet.

I see the green cloth covering my chest rise and fall in an emphatic sigh of relief. I doubt the plausibility of this from an anaesthetised man on a breathing machine — then suddenly, overwhelmingly weary of trying to imagine the world at all, I allow it to disintegrate into psychedelic static, then darkness.

* * * *

A familiar, but unplaceable, voice says, ‘This one’s from Serial Killers For Social Responsibility. “Deeply shocked ... a tragedy for the industry . . . praying for Mr Lowe’s swift recovery.” Then they go on to disavow any knowledge of Randolph Murchison; they say that whatever he might or might not have done to hitchhikers in the past, celebrity assassination attempts involve an entirely separate pathology, and any irresponsible comments which blur the issue by confusing the two will result in a class action—’

I open my eyes and say, ‘Can someone please tell me why there’s a mirror on the ceiling over my bed?

Is this a hospital, or a fucking bordello?’

The room falls silent. I squint up at the glass with a fixed gaze, unable to make out its borders, waiting for an explanation for this bizarre piece of decor. Then one possibility dawns on me: Am I paralysed? Is this the only way to show me my surroundings? I fight down a sense of panic: even if it’s true, it need not be permanent. Nerves can be regrown, whatever’s damaged can be repaired. I’ve survived, that’s what counts — the rest is just a matter of rehabilitation. And isn’t this what I always expected? A bullet in the brain? A brush with death? Rebirth in a state of helplessness?

In the mirror, I can see four people gathered around the bed — and I recognise them easily enough, in spite of the awkward view: James Long, my personal assistant, whose voice woke me. Andrea Stuart, Zeitgeist’s senior vice-president. My estranged wife, Jessica — I knew she’d come. And my son, Alex

— he must have dropped everything, and caught the first flight out of Moscow.

And on the bed, almost buried under a tangle of tubes and cables, linked to a dozen monitors and pumps, an ashen, bandaged, gaunt figure which I suppose must be me.

James glances up at the ceiling, looks down again, then says gently, ‘Mr Lowe, there is no mirror. Shall I tell the doctors you’re awake?’

I scowl, try to move my head, fail. ‘Are you blind? I’m staring right at it. And if I’m not plugged into enough machinery to tell whoever’s monitoring it all that I’m awake—’

James gives an embarrassed cough, a code he uses in meetings when I start to wander too far from the facts. I try again to turn to look him in the eye, and this time—

This time, I succeed. Or at least, I see the figure on the bed turn its head—

—and my whole sense of my surroundings inverts, like an all-encompassing optical illusion exposed. Floor becomes ceiling and ceiling floor — without anything moving a millimetre. I feel like bellowing at the top of my lungs, but only manage a startled grunt . . . and after a second or two, it’s hard to imagine that I’d ever been fooled, the reality is so obvious.

There is no mirror. I’m watching all this from the ceiling, the way I watched the bullet being extracted. I’m still up here. I haven’t come down.

I close my eyes — and the room fades out, taking two or three seconds to vanish completely.

I open my eyes. The view returns, unchanged.

I say, ‘Am I dreaming? Are my eyes really open? Jessica? Tell me what’s going on. Is my face bandaged? Am I blind?’

James says, ‘Your wife isn’t here, Mr Lowe. We haven’t been able to reach her yet.’ He hesitates, then adds, ‘Your face isn’t bandaged—’

I laugh indignantly. ‘What are you talking about? Who’s that standing next to you?’

‘Nobody’s standing next to me. Ms Stuart and I are the only people with you, right now.’

Andrea clears her throat, and says, ‘That’s right, Philip. Please, try to calm down. You’ve just had major surgery — you’re going to be fine, but you have to take it easy.’ How did she get there — near the foot of the bed? The figure below turns to look at her, sweeping his gaze across the intervening space, and —

as easily as the implausible one changed into a seven, as easily as the whole ludicrous sticker ceased to exist — my wife and son are banished from my vision of the room.

I say, ‘I’m going mad.’ That’s not true, though: I’m dazed, and distinctly queasy, but a long way from coming unhinged. I notice that my voice — very reasonably — seems to come out of my one-and-only mouth, the mouth of the figure below me — as opposed to the point in empty space where my mouth would be, were I literally, bodily, hovering near the ceiling. I felt my larynx vibrate, my lips and tongue move, down there . . . and yet the sense that I am above, looking down, remains as convincing as ever. It’s as if. . . my entire body has become as peripheral as a foot or a fingertip — connected and controlled, still a part of me, but certainly not encompassing the centre of my being. I move my tongue in my mouth, touch the tip to the point of my left incisor, swallow some saliva; the sensations are all intelligible, consistent, familiar. But I don’t find myself rushing down to ‘occupy’ the place where these things are happening — any more than I’ve ever felt my sense of self pouring into my big toe, upon curling it against the sole of my shoe.

James says, ‘I’ll fetch the doctors.’ I hunt for any trace of inconsistency in the direction of his voice . . . but I’m not up to the task of dissecting the memory of his speech into relative intensities in my left and right ears, and then confronting myself with the paradox that anyone truly up here, facing down, would hear it all differently. All I know is that the words seem to have emerged from his lips, in the customary manner.

Andrea clears her throat again, and says, ‘Philip? Do you mind if I make a call? Tokyo opens in less than an hour, and when they hear that you’ve been shot—’

I cut her off. ‘Don’t call — go there, in person. Take the next suborbital — you know that always impresses the market. Look, I’m glad you were here when I woke’ — glad your presence, at least, turned out to be more than wishful thinking — ‘but the biggest favour you can do for me now is to make damned sure that Zeitgeist comes through this unscathed.’ I try to make eye contact as I say this, but I can’t tell whether I succeed or not. It’s twenty years since we were lovers, but she’s still my closest friend. I’m not even sure why I’m so desperate to get rid of her — but I can’t help feeling exposed up here ... as if she might suddenly glance up and see me — see some part of me that my flesh always concealed.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive. James can baby-sit me, that’s what he’s paid for. And if I know you’re looking after Zeitgeist, I won’t have to lie here sweating about it; I’ll know it’s all under control.’

In fact, as soon as she’s gone, the idea of worrying about anything as remote and inconsequential as my company’s share price begins to seem utterly bizarre. I turn my head so that the figure on the bed looks straight up at ‘me’ once more. I slide my hand across my chest, and most of the cables and tubes that were ‘covering me’ disappear, leaving behind nothing but a slightly wrinkled sheet. I laugh weakly — an odd sight. It looks like a memory of the last time I laughed into a mirror.

James returns, followed by four generic white-coated figures — whose number shrinks to two, a young man and a middle-aged woman, when I turn my head towards them.

The woman says, ‘Mr Lowe, I’m Dr Tyler, your neurologist. How are you feeling?’

‘How am I feeling? I feel like I’m up on the ceiling.’

‘You’re still giddy from the anaesthetic?’

‘No!’ I very nearly shout: Can’t you look at me when I’m speaking to you? But I calm myself, and say evenly, ‘I’m not “giddy” — I’m hallucinating. I see everything as if I’m up on the ceiling, looking down. Do you understand me? I’m watching my own lips move as I say these words. I’m staring down at the top of your head. I’m having an out-of-body experience — rght now, right in front of you.’ Or right above you. ‘It started in the operating theatre. I saw the robot take out the bullet. I know, it was just a delusion, a kind of lucid dream — I didn’t really see anything . . . but it’s still happening. I’m awake, and it’s still happening. I can’t come down.’

Dr Tyler says firmly, ‘The surgeon didn’t remove the bullet. It was never embedded; it only grazed your skull. The impact caused a fracture, and forced some bone fragments into the underlying tissue — but the damaged region is very small.’

I smile with relief to hear this — and then stop myself; it looks too strange, too self-conscious. I say,

‘That’s wonderful news. But I’m still up here.’

Dr Tyler frowns. How do I know that? She’s bent over me, her face seems to be hidden — yet the knowledge reaches me somehow, as if conveyed through an extra sense. This is insane: the things I must be ‘seeing’ with my own eyes — the things I’m entitled to know — are taking on an air of unreliable clairvoyance, while my ‘vision’ of the room — a patchwork of wild guesses and wishful thinking —

masquerades as the artless truth.

‘Do you think you can sit up?’

I can — slowly. I’m very weak, but certainly not paralysed, and with an ungainly scrabbling of feet and elbows, I manage to raise myself into a sitting position. The exertion makes me sharply aware of every limb, every joint, every muscle . . . but aware most of all that their relationships with each other remain unchanged. The hip bone is still connected to the thigh bone, and that’s still what counts — however far away from both I feel ‘myself’ to be.

My view stays fixed as my body moves — but I don’t find that especially disconcerting; at some level, it seems no stranger than the simple understanding that turning your head doesn’t send the world spinning in the opposite direction.

Dr Tyler holds out her right hand. ‘How many fingers?’

‘Two.’

‘Now?’

‘Four.’

She shields her hand from aerial scrutiny with a clipboard. ‘Now?’

‘One. I can’t see it, though. I just guessed.’

‘You guessed right. Now?’

‘Three.’

‘Right again. And now?’

‘Two.’

‘Correct.’

She hides her hand from the figure on the bed, ‘exposing’ it to me-above. I make three wrong guesses in a row, one right, one wrong, then wrong again.

All of which makes perfect sense, of course: I know only what my eyes can see; the rest is pure guesswork. I am, demonstrably, not observing the world from a point three metres above my head. Having the truth rendered obvious makes no difference, though: I fail to descend.

Dr Tyler suddenly jabs two fingers towards my eyes, stopping just short of contact. I’m not even startled; from this distance, it’s no more threatening than watching The Three Stooges. ‘Blink reflex working,’ she says — but I know I should have done more than blink.

She looks around the room, finds a chair, places it beside the bed. Then she tells her colleague, ‘Get me a broom.’

She stands on the chair. ‘I think we should try to pin down exactly where you think you are.’ The young man returns with a two-metre-long white plastic tube. ‘Vaccum cleaner extension,’ he explains. ‘There are no brooms in the private wards.’

James stands clear, glancing upwards self-consciously every now and then. He’s beginning to look alarmed, in a diplomatic sort of way.

Dr Tyler takes the tube, raises it up with one hand, and starts scraping the end across the ceiling. ‘Tell me when I’m getting warm, Mr Lowe.’ The thing looms towards me, moving in from the left, then slides across the bottom of my field of view, missing me by a few centimetres.

‘Am I close yet?’

‘I—’ The scraping sound is intimidating; it takes some effort to bring myself to cooperate, to guide the implement home.

When the tube finally closes over me, I fight off a sense of claustrophobia, and stare down the long dark tunnel. At the far end, in a circle of dazzling radiance, is the tip of Dr Tyler’s white lace-up shoe.

‘What do you see now?’

I describe the view. Keeping the top end fixed, she tilts the tube towards the bed, until it points directly at my bandaged forehead, my startled eyes — a strange, luminous cameo.

‘Try . . . moving towards the light,’ she suggests.

I try. I screw up my face, I grit my teeth, I urge myself forward, down the tunnel: back to my skull, back to my citadel, back to my private screening room. Back to the throne of my ego, the anchor of my identity. Back home.

Nothing happens.

* * * *

I always knew I’d get a bullet in the brain. It had to happen: I’d made far too much money, had far too much good luck. Deep down, I always understood that, sooner or later, my life would be brought into balance. And I always expected my would-be assassin to fail — leaving me crippled, speechless, amnesic; forced to struggle to make myself whole again, forced to rediscover — or reinvent — myself.

Given a chance to start my life again.

But this? What kind of redemption is this?

Eyes closed or open, I have no trouble identifying pinpricks all over my body, from the soles of my feet to the top of my scalp — but the surface of my skin, however clearly delineated, still fails to enclose me.

Dr Tyler shows me-below photographs of torture victims, humorous cartoons, pornography. I cringe, I smile, I get an erection — before I even know what I’m ‘looking’ at.

‘Like a split-brain patient,’ I muse. ‘Isn’t that what happens? Show them an image in half their visual field, and they respond to it emotionally — without being able to describe what they’ve seen.’

‘Your corpus callosum is perfectly intact. You’re not a split-brain patient, Mr Lowe.’

‘Not horizontally — but what about vertically?’ There’s a stony silence. I say, ‘I’m only joking. Can’t I make a joke?’ I see her write on her clipboard: inappropriate affect. I ‘read’ the remark effortlessly, in spite of my elevation — but I don’t have the nerve to ask her if it’s really what she wrote.

A mirror is thrust in front of my face — and when it’s taken away, I see myself as less pale, less wasted than before. The mirror is turned towards me-above, and the place where I ‘am’ is ‘shown’ to be empty

— but I knew that all along.

I ‘look around’ with my eyes every chance I get — and my vision of the room grows more detailed, more stable, more consistent. I experiment with sounds, tapping my fingers on the side of the bed, on my ribs, my jaw, my skull. I have no trouble convincing myself that my hearing is still taking place in my ears

— the closer a sound is to those organs down there, the louder it seems, as always — but nor do I have any difficulty interpreting these cues correctly; when I snap my fingers beside my right ear, it’s obvious that the source of the sound is close to my ear, not close to me.

Finally, Dr Tyler lets me try to walk. I’m clumsy and unsteady at first, distracted by my unfamiliar perspective, but I soon learn to take what I need from the view — the positions of obstacles — and ignore the rest. As my body crosses the room, I move with it, hovering more or less directly above —

sometimes lagging behind or moving ahead, but never by far. Curiously, I feel no conflict between my sense of balance, telling me I’m upright, and my downwards gaze, which ‘should’ (but doesn’t) suggest that my body is facing the floor. That meaning has been stripped away, somehow — and it has nothing to do with the fact that I can ‘see’ myself standing. Perhaps my true orientation is gleaned, subconsciously, from the evidence of my eyes, at some point before the damaged part of my brain corrupts the information — like my ‘clairvoyant’ knowledge of ‘hidden’ objects.

I could walk a kilometre, I’m sure, but not very quickly. I place my body in a wheelchair, and a taciturn orderly pushes it — and me — out of the room. The smooth, involuntary motion of my point of view is alarming at first, but then gradually starts to make sense: after all, I can feel my hands on the armrests, the chair against my legs, my buttocks, my back — ‘part’ of me is in the wheelchair, and, like a roller-skater staring down at his feet, I should be able to swallow the notion that the ‘rest’ of me is attached, and obliged to follow. Down corridors, up ramps, in and out of elevators, through swing doors ... I fantasise daringly about wandering off on my own — turning left when the orderly turns right — but the truth is, I can’t begin to imagine how I could make that happen.

We turn into a crowded walkway linking the hospital’s two main blocks, and end up travelling alongside another patient in a wheelchair — a man about my age, his head also bandaged. I wonder what he’s been through, and what’s in store for him now — but this doesn’t seem like the time or place to strike up a conversation about it. From above (at least, as I see it) these two head-wound cases in hospital gowns are almost indistinguishable, and I find myself wondering: Why do I care what happens to one of these bodies, so much more than the other? How can it be so important . . . when I can barely tell them apart?

I grip the armrests of the chair tightly — but resist the temptation to raise a hand and signal to myself: This one is me.

We finally reach Medical Imaging. Strapped to a motorised table, my blood infused with a cocktail of radioactive substances, I’m guided into a helmet comprised of several tonnes of superconducting magnets and particle detectors. My whole head is engulfed by the thing, but the room doesn’t vanish at once. The technicians, cut loose from reality, keep themselves busy fussing with the scanner’s controls — like old celluloid-movie extras pretending, unconvincingly, to know how to operate a nuclear power station or an interstellar spacecraft. Gradually, the scene fades to black.

When I emerge, with dark-adapted eyes, for a second or two the room is unbearably bright.

* * * *

‘We have no previous case histories of a lesion in exactly this location,’ admits Dr Tyler, thoughtfully holding the brain scan at an angle which allows me to observe, and simultaneously visualise, its contents. She insists on addressing her remarks solely to me-below, though, which makes me feel a bit like a patronised child — ignored by the adults, who, instead, crouch down and say hello to Teddy.

‘We do know it’s associative cortex. Higher-level sense-data processing and integration. The place where your brain constructs models of the world, and your relationship to it. From your symptoms, it seems you’ve lost access to the primary model, so you’re making do with a secondary one.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Primary model, secondary model? I’m still looking at everything through the same pair of eyes, aren’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then how can I fail to see it that way? If a camera is damaged, it produces a faulty image — it doesn’t start giving you bird’s-eye views from down on the ground.’

‘Forget about cameras. Vision is nothing like photography — it’s an elaborate cognitive act. A pattern of light on your retina doesn’t mean a thing until it’s been analysed: that means everything from detecting edges, detecting motion, extracting features from noise, simplifying, extrapolating — all the way up to constructing hypothetical objects, testing them against reality, comparing them to memories and expectations . . . the end product is not a movie in your head, it’s a set of conclusions about the world.

‘The brain assembles those conclusions into models of your surroundings. The primary model includes information about more or less everything that’s directly visible at any given moment — and nothing else. It makes the most efficient use of all your visual data, and it makes the least possible number of assumptions. So it has a lot of advantages — but it doesn’t arise automatically just because the data was gathered through your eyes. And it’s not the only possibility: we all build other models, all the time; most people can imagine their surroundings from almost any angle—’

I laugh incredulously. ‘Not like this. Nobody could imagine a view as vivid as this. I certainly never could.’

‘Then perhaps you’ve managed to redeploy some of the neural pathways responsible for the intensity of the primary model—’

‘I don’t want to redeploy them! I want the primary model back!’ I hesitate, put off by the look of apprehension on my face, but I have to know. ‘Can you do that — can you repair the damage? Put in a neural graft?’

Dr Tyler tells my Teddy Bear, gently, ‘We can replace the damaged tissue, but the region’s not well enough understood to be repaired, directly, by microsurgeons. We wouldn’t know which neurons to join to which. All we can do is inject some immature neurons into the site of the lesion, and leave them to form their own connections.’

‘And . . . will they form the right ones?’

‘There’s a good chance they will, eventually.’

‘A good chance. If they do, how long will it take?’

‘Several months, at least.’

‘I’ll want a second opinion.’

‘Of course.’

She pats my hand sympathetically — but leaves without so much as a glance in my direction.

Several months. At least. The room begins to rotate slowly — so slowly that it never actually moves at all. I close my eyes and wait for the feeling to pass. My vision lingers, refusing to fade. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. There I am, on the bed below, eyes closed . . . but that doesn’t render me invisible, does it? It doesn’t make the world disappear. That’s half the trouble with this whole delusion: it’s so fucking reasonable.

I put the heels of my palms against my eyes, and press, hard. A mosaic of glowing triangles spreads out rapidly from the centre of my field of view, a shimmering pattern in grey and white; soon it eclipses the whole room.

When I take my hands away, the afterimage slowly fades to darkness.

* * * *

I dream that I look down upon my sleeping body — and then drift away, rising up calmly, effortlessly, high into the air. I float above Manhattan — then London, Zurich, Moscow, Nairobi, Cairo, Beijing. Wherever the Zeitgeist Network reaches, I’m there. I wrap the planet in my being. I have no need of a body; I orbit with the satellites, I flow through the optical fibres. From the slums of Calcutta to the mansions of Beverly Hills, I am the Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age—

I wake suddenly, and hear myself swearing, before I even know why.

Then I realise I’ve wet the bed.

* * * *

James flies in dozens of the top neurologists from around the world, and arranges remote consultations with another ten. They argue about the precise interpretation of my symptoms — but their recommendations for treatment are all essentially the same.

So, a small number of my own neurons, collected during the original surgery, are genetically regressed to a foetal state, stimulated to multiply in vivo, then injected back into the lesion. Local anaesthetic only; at least this time I get to ‘see’ more or less what really happens.

In the days that follow — far too early for any effects from the treatment — I find myself adapting to the status quo with disarming speed. My coordination improves, until I can perform most simple tasks with confidence, unaided: eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, washing and shaving — all the lifelong familiar routines start to seem ordinary again, in spite of the exotic perspective. At first, I keep catching glimpses of Randolph Murchison (played by the persona of Anthony Perkins) sneaking into the steam-clouded bathroom every time I take a shower — but that passes.

Alex visits, finally able to tear himself away from the busy Moscow bureau of Zeitgeist News. I watch the scene, oddly touched by the ineloquence of both father and son — but puzzled, too, that the awkward relationship ever caused me so much pain and confusion. These two men are not close — but that’s not the end of the world. They’re not close to a few billion other people, either. It doesn’t matter.

By the end of the fourth week, I’m desperately bored — and losing patience with the infantile tests with concealed wooden blocks that Dr Young, my psychologist, insists I perform twice daily. Five red and four blue blocks can turn into three red and one green, when the partition hiding them from my eyes is lifted — and so on, a thousand times . . . but it no more demolishes my world-view than pictures of vases that turn into pairs of human profiles, or patterns with gaps that magically fill themselves in when aligned with the retinal blind spot.

Dr Tyler admits, under duress, that there’s no reason I can’t be discharged, but—

‘I’d still prefer to keep you under observation.’

I say, ‘I think I can do that myself.’

* * * *

A two-metre-wide auxiliary screen attached to the videophone lies on the floor of my study; a crutch, perhaps, but at least it takes the clairvoyance factor out of knowing what’s happening on the smaller screen in front of my face.

Andrea says, ‘Remember that team of Creative Consultants we hired last spring? They’ve come up with a brilliant new concept: “Celluloid Classics That Might Have Been” — ground-breaking movies that were almost made, but didn’t quite survive the development process. They plan to start the series with Three Burglars — a Hollywood remake of Tenue de Soiree, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Depardieu role, and either Leonard Nimoy or Ivan Reitman directing. Marketing have run a simulation which shows twenty-three per cent of subscribers taking the pilot. The costings aren’t too bad, either; we already own emulation rights for most of the personas we need.’

I nod my puppet head. ‘That all sounds . . . fine. Is there anything else we need to discuss?’

‘Just one more thing. The Randolph Murchison Story.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Audience Psychology won’t approve the latest version of the screenplay. We can’t leave out Murchison’s attack on you, it’s far too well known—’

‘I never asked for it to be left out. I just want my post-operative condition left unspecified. Lowe gets shot. Lowe survives. There’s no need to clutter up a perfectly good story about mutilated hitchhikers with details of a minor character’s neurological condition.’

‘No, of course not — and that’s not the problem. The problem is, if we cover the attack at all, we’ll have to mention the reason for it, the miniseries itself. . . and AP says viewers won’t be comfortable with that degree of reflexivity. For current affairs, all right — the programme is its own main subject, the presenters’ actions are the news — that’s taken for granted, people are used to it. But docudrama is different. You can’t use a fictional narrative style — telling the audience it’s safe to get emotionally involved, it’s all just entertainment, it can’t really touch them — and then throw in a reference to the very programme they’re watching.’

I shrug. ‘All right. Fine. If there’s no way around it, axe the project. We can live with that; we can write it off.’

She nods, unhappily. It was the decision she wanted, I’m sure —but not so casually given.

When she hangs up, and the screen goes blank, the sight of the unchanging room quickly becomes monotonous. I switch to cable input, and flick through a few dozen channels from Zeitgeist and its major competitors. The whole world is there to gaze upon, from the latest Sudanese famine to the Chinese civil war, from a body paint fashion parade in New York to the bloody aftermath of the bombing of the British parliament. The whole world — or a model of the world: part truth, part guesswork, part wish-fulfilment.

I lean back in my chair until I’m staring straight down into my eyes. I say, ‘I’m sick of this place. Let’s get out of here.’

* * * *

I watch the snow dust my shoulders between the sharp gusts of wind that blow it away. The icy sidewalk is deserted; nobody in this part of Manhattan seems to walk anywhere in the most clement weather any more, let alone on a day like this. I can just make out the four bodyguards, ahead of me and behind me, at the edge of my vision.

I wanted a bullet in the head. I wanted to be destroyed and reborn. I wanted a magic path to redemption. And what have I ended up with?

I raise my head, and a ragged, bearded tramp materialises beside me, stamping his feet on the sidewalk, hugging himself, shivering. He says nothing, but I stop walking.

One man below me is warmly dressed, in an overcoat and overshoes. The other is wearing threadbare jeans, a tattered bomber jacket, and baseball shoes full of holes.

The disparity is ridiculous. The warmly dressed man takes off his overcoat and hands it to the shivering man, then walks on.

And I think: What a beautiful scene for The Philip Lowe Story.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

A KIDNAPPING

The office’s elaborate software usually fielded my calls, but this one came through unannounced. The seven-metre wallscreen opposite my desk abruptly ceased displaying the work I’d been viewing —

Kreyszig’s dazzling abstract animation, Spectral Density — and the face of a nondescript young man appeared in its place.

I suspected at once that the face was a mask, a simulation. No single feature was implausible, or even unusual — limp brown hair, pale blue eyes, thin nose, square jaw — but the face as a whole was too symmetrical, too unblemished, too devoid of character to be real. In the background, a pattern of brightly coloured, faux-ceramic hexagonal tiles drifted across the wallpaper — desperately bland retro-geometricism, no doubt intended to make the face look natural in comparison. I made these judgements in an instant; stretching all the way to the gallery’s ceiling, four times my height, the image was open to merciless scrutiny.

The ‘young man’ said, ‘We have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into this account/If you don’t want her to/Suffer.’ I couldn’t help hearing it that way; the unnatural rhythm of the speech, the crisp enunciation of each word, made the whole thing sound like a terminally hip performance artist reading bad poetry. This piece is entitled, ‘Ransom Demand’. As the mask spoke, a sixteen-digit account number flashed up across the bottom of the screen.

I said, ‘Go screw yourself. This isn’t funny.’

The mask vanished, and Loraine appeared. Her hair was dishevelled, her face was flushed, as if she’d just been in a struggle — but she wasn’t distraught, or hysterical; she was grimly in control. I stared at the screen; the room seemed to sway, and I felt sweat break out on my arms and chest, impossible rivulets forming in seconds.

She said, ‘David, listen: I’m all right, they haven’t hurt me, but—’

Then the call cut off.

For a moment, I just sat there, dazed, drenched with sweat, too giddy to trust myself to move a muscle. Then I said to the office, ‘Replay that call.’ I expected a denial — No calls have been put through all day — but I was wrong. The whole thing began again.

‘ We have your wife . . .’

‘Go screw yourself. . .’

‘David, listen . . .’

I told the office, ‘Call my home.’ I don’t know why I did that; I don’t know what I believed, what I was hoping for. It was more a reflex action than anything else — like flailing out to grab something solid when you’re falling, even if you know full well that it’s far beyond your reach.

I sat and listened to the ringing tone. I thought: I’ll cope with this, somehow. Loraine will be released, unharmed — it’s just a matter of paying the money. Everything will happen, step by step; everything will unwind, inexorably — even if each second along the way seems like an unbreachable chasm.

After seven chimes, I felt like I’d been sitting at the desk, sleepless, for days: numb, tenuous, less than real.

Then Loraine answered the phone. I could see the studio behind her, all the familiar charcoal sketches on the wall. I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t make a sound.

Her expression changed from mild annoyance to alarm. She said, ‘David? What’s wrong? You look like you’re having a heart attack.’

For several seconds, I couldn’t answer her. On one level, I simply felt relieved — and already slightly foolish, for having been so easily taken in . . . but at the same time, I found myself holding my breath, bracing myself for another reversal. If the office phone system had been corrupted, how could I be sure that this call had reached home? Why should I trust the sight of Loraine, safe in her studio —

when the image of her in the kidnappers’ hands had been every bit as convincing? At any moment, the ‘woman’ on the screen would drop the charade, and begin reciting coolly: ‘We have your wife . . .’

It didn’t happen. So I pulled myself together and told the real Loraine what I’d seen.

* * * *

In retrospect, of course, it all seemed embarrassingly obvious. The contrast between the intentionally unnatural mask, and the meticulously plausible image that followed, was designed to keep me from questioning the evidence of my own eyes. This is what a simulation looks like (smartarsed expert spots it at once) ... so this (a thousand times more realistic) must be authentic. A crude trick, but it had worked

— not for long, but long enough to shake me up.

But if the technique was transparent, the motive remained obscure. Some lunatic’s idea of a joke? It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, for no greater reward than the dubious thrill of making me sweat with fear for all of sixty seconds. As a genuine attempt at extortion, though . . . how could it ever have worked? Were they hoping that I’d transfer the money immediately — before the shock wore off, before it even occurred to me that the image of Loraine, however lifelike, proved nothing? If so, surely they would have kept me on the phone, threatening imminent danger, building up the pressure — leaving me with no time for doubts, and no opportunity to verify anything.

It didn’t make sense either way.

I replayed the call for Loraine — but she didn’t seem to take it very seriously.

‘A crank caller with fancy technology is still just a crank caller. I remember my brother, when he was ten years old, phoning up random numbers on a dare, putting on a ludicrous high-pitched voice which was meant to sound like a woman . . . and telling whoever answered that he was about to be gang-raped. Needless to say, I thought it was totally sick — and extremely immature . . . I was eight — but his friends all sat around laughing their heads off. Thirty years later, this is the equivalent.’

‘How can you say that? Ten-year-old boys do not own twenty-thousand-dollar video synthesisers—’

‘No? Some might. But I’m sure there are plenty of forty-year-old men with the same sophisticated sense of humour.’

‘Yeah: forty-year-old psychopaths who know exactly what you look like, where we live, where I work .

. .’

We argued the point for almost twenty minutes, but we couldn’t agree upon what the call meant, or what we should do about it. Loraine was obviously growing impatient to get back to work, so, reluctantly, I let her go.

I was a wreck, though. I knew I’d get nothing done that afternoon, so I decided to close the gallery and head for home.

Before leaving, I phoned the police — against Loraine’s wishes, but as she’d said: ‘You got the call, not me. If you really want to waste your time and theirs, I can’t stop you.’

I was put through to a Detective Nicholson in the Communications Crime Division, and I showed him the recording. He was sympathetic, but he made it clear that there wasn’t much he could do. A criminal act had been committed — and a ransom demand was a serious matter, however rapidly the hoax had been debunked — but identifying the perpetrator would be virtually impossible. Even if the account number quoted actually belonged to the caller, it carried the prefix of an Orbital bank, who’d certainly refuse to disclose the name of the owner. I could arrange to have the phone company attempt to trace any future calls — but if the signal was routed through an Orbital nation, as it most likely would be, the trail would stop there. An international agreement to veto exchanges of money and data with the satellites had been drafted a decade ago, but remained unratified; apparently, few countries could afford to forgo the advantages of being plugged into the quasi-legal Orbital economy.

Nicholson asked me for a list of prospective enemies, but I couldn’t bring myself to name anyone. I’d had business disputes of various degrees of animosity over the years, mostly with disgruntled artists who’d taken their work elsewhere — but I couldn’t honestly imagine any of the people involved wasting their energy on such a venomous — yet ultimately petty — act of revenge.

He had one final question. ‘Has your wife ever been scanned?’

I laughed. ‘Hardly. She loathes computers. Even if the cost came down a thousandfold, she’d be the last person in the world to have it done.’

‘I see. Well, we appreciate your cooperation. If there are any further incidents, don’t hesitate to get in touch.’

As he hung up, I belatedly wished I’d asked him: ‘What if she had been scanned? Why would that be a factor? Have hackers started breaking into people’s scan files?’

That was a disturbing notion . . . but even if it were true, it had no bearing on the hoax call. No such convenient, computerised description of Loraine existed, so however the hoaxers had reconstructed her appearance, they’d obtained their data by other means entirely.

* * * *

I drove home on manual override, breaking the speed limit — marginally — on five separate occasions, watching the fines add up on the dashboard display, until the car intoned, ‘One more violation and your licence is suspended.’

I went straight from the garage to the studio. Loraine was there, of course. I stood in the doorway, watching her silently, as she fussed over a sketch. I couldn’t make out the subject, but she was working in charcoal again. I often teased her about her anachronistic methods: ‘Why do you glorify the faults of traditional materials? Artists in the past had no choice but to make a virtue out of necessity — but why keep up the pretence? If charcoal on paper, or oil paint on canvas, really is so wonderful, then describe whatever it is you find so sublime about them to some virtual art software — and then generate your own virtual materials which are twice as good.’ All she’d ever say in reply was: ‘This is what I do, this is what I like, this is what I’m used to. There’s no harm in that, is there?’

I didn’t want to disturb her, but I didn’t want to walk away. If she noticed my presence, she gave no sign of it. I stood there and thought: I really do love you. And I really do admire you: the way you kept your head in the middle of—