The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 56

The Korean national dish is kimchi.

When travelling, it is important to have an open mind. It permits you to engage in conversation with a stranger, to compliment your host, engage in discourse and find some limited perspective.

I say this as one who tried kimchi with an open mind, and thought it was disgusting. Perhaps, aficionados say, I have not tried the best kinds.

Basic ingredient: cabbage, though cucumber or scallion may be used. Season with brine, chilli, ginger, radish, shrimp sauce, fish sauce, etc. Bury in an earthenware pot, perhaps with a dash of fermented shrimp to help the process, and leave underground for a few months, until the dish is nicely mulched. The first Korean in space, Yi So-yeon, was sent to the stars with some of the most expensive kimchi known to man, after it was specially treated to remove the most harmful bacteria and decrease the odour. Who wants to spend six months in a space station reeking of Grandmother’s finest fermented vegetables?

Byron14 was already downstairs, at a table by a wide window that looked towards the sea. We were the only two in the restaurant. As I sat, our hostess put kimchi on the table with the menus, just to get us into the spirit of the meal.

Quiet, a while. The clouds across the sea were turning false-night dark, cutting off the sun, blocking out the sky. The smaller ships were heading to port, the larger freighters seemingly stationary on the horizon, until you looked again, and found they were gone. The light of the restaurant reflected our faces back to us against the glass. I hoped Byron had been to the toilet before she left — I would need her uninterrupted attention.

At last she said, looking at me

(for the first time)

(this time)

“Do you have Perfection?”

I put the USB stick on the table between us.

A flicker in her eyes, a slight pulling in of her breath — surprise? Excitement? Perhaps both.

“That’s it?” she asked, eyeing the USB stick.

“That’s it.”

Her eyes lingered a moment longer than perhaps she wished, then rose to look at me, an active effort, conscious will. Intelligence in every part of her, intelligent enough perhaps to play dumb, to smile and nod at the stupidity of others, no pretence now, she was happy for me to be afraid.

“All this run-around, and you give it to me over dinner?”

“I thought I’d let you pay for the meal.”

Byron speaks, soft voice, clipped English accent. “I confess myself perplexed. Why this journey? Why such hassle?”

“I needed to speak to you alone, face-to-face, in an isolated environment away from danger.”

“Why?”

“Meeting on my terms gives me control of the situation.”

“There are ways to exert control without taking risks.”

“Words are complicated. I needed to meet you.”

“Well then,” she said at last. “Here I am. Was it worth it?”

I tapped the table top, the length of my index finger brushing against the USB stick. “You tell me.”

Silence between us. Busy, fluent silence. Impressions made, images found. I let her look, met her eyes, defiance, me, my gaze, let her stare and draw every conclusion she can, it is nothing, it is only now.

A storm building out to sea, no thunder, no lightning, just the wind and the waves, a blotting out of the light.

At last she said, “I didn’t see you on the ferry.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“I didn’t see you at the port.”

“No. Not there either. I have questions.”

She half raised her shoulders, chin coming down. “All right then: ask.”

I said, “Who is Gauguin?”

A smile in the corner of her mouth, her eyes turn towards the sea, then to the ceiling, then return to me, taking her time. “He used to work for the government.”

“And now?”

“Now he works for the Pereyra family.”

“Why?”

“Better pension.”

“An answer that means something, please.”

“Guilt, mostly, I think. We used to be lovers.”

So flat, so simple, so easy, a lie? A truth? A truth that sounds like a lie?

She went on, finger running round the edge of the plate of kimchi, not eating. “Rafe and Filipa believe that Matheus Pereyra was murdered. Gauguin feels the same way; more, he feels he should have been able to prevent it. He feels remorse at having failed to do so.”

“Was he murdered?”

“The coroner gave an open verdict. There were ambiguities in the toxicology report.”

“Does Gauguin think you killed Matheus?”

“Yes.”

“Did you?”

She drew in her lips for a second, then puffed them out, smiled, looked at me without remorse or joy, said, “Yes.”

She knows what she will give, she knows what she will take.

“Why?”

“Numerous reasons; do you care?”

“Gauguin connected me to you. If he hadn’t, I don’t think he would have cared. You landed me in the middle of your mess.”

“That’s not entirely true.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” she mused, assembling her thoughts gently, voice light. “Of course not. You chose to steal the Chrysalis from Dubai. You chose to do so in the middle of Rafe’s most important public event, in front of the eyes of the world. You chose to humiliate him, damage the prospects of Perfection in the UAE. You made your own bed and slept in it, and myself and Gauguin were merely drawn by the snoring.”

“I just wanted the diamonds.”

“Did you? There were other ways to steal them that didn’t involve humiliating Rafe.”

“I wanted…” My words trailed off. I turned to watch the clouds darkening over the sea, a long way off, the horizon vanishing where sea became shadowed sky.

Byron adjusted her chopsticks, waited. In the East, never leave your chopsticks in a bowl of rice when you finish eating; to do so is an offering for the dead. Other traditions: four is an unlucky number, , sì, it has the sound of death, , also always remember that… that… fuck it. Whatever.

She waited for me to grow uncomfortable, waited for my thoughts to run amok, control gone, words and denials spinning uselessly through the part of my brain where discipline should have been. Waited a little moment longer, then said, her eyes indicating the USB stick between us, “I assume this isn’t the only copy.”

“No. Why did you kill Matheus?”

“I’m not sure this is that conversation.”

“It is, believe me.”

She sucked in breath, then let the words all out, controlled and practised. “Perhaps because he was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people. Not by killing them himself, of course. Matheus was much more than a media mogul; he invested in politics, lobbied extensively, commanded campaigns. This is nothing out of the ordinary; he was a man with money and an ideology. Ideology colours truth. When a paper was produced suggesting, for example, that eating lemongrass was as effective a cure for cancer as chemotherapy, he ordered his editors to run the story. Naturally, the study was written by a crackpot and was instantly dismissed, but he gave it a voice. A policeman gunned down a child, cop called heroic at Pereyra’s command, the child slandered as a thief, irredeemable aged thirteen. The cop was white, the boy was black; it’s a common story. An electoral campaign based on hating the foreigner, the poor, the unknown, every lie of course destroyed by experts — but Matheus Pereyra did not print the views of the experts, but rather… printed the screaming. Always, the world screaming, loudly, screaming.

“Back then I was still working for the government, and one day I got a phone call saying Matheus was going to run a story about an MP’s ex-wife. The MP was being tried for corruption — he had cooked the books, sold £1.3 billion of public assets to a bunch of his mates for £400 million, taking a pleasant £150 million commission in the process. His mates were old uni pals; pals of Matheus too. But he’d also been beating his wife, and one day she had enough, packed up all his records, proof of what he’d done, and went to the police.

“We put her in witness protection, new name, new identity. Matheus found her. The headline was ‘The Face of Treachery’, followed by a four-page exposé, painting her as a drug addict, adulteress, liar. Photos of her, where she lived, her kids. I told them the story was embargoed, court order. Don’t run it; you will compromise an ongoing investigation. I went to the top, to Matheus himself. And he just looked at me and said, ‘Get over it, bitch.’”

She repeated his words distantly, a thing half recalled, made inhuman with too much contemplation.

“The corruption case collapsed, of course, and the MP stood again in a safe seat, and won; and the day after he got the kids back, his wife took an overdose. Didn’t die — these things are difficult to get right. We took Matheus to court for compromising an ongoing case. He lost, ordered to pay a fine of £75,000. He laughed, when he heard that. ‘Get over it, bitch,’ he said and of course he was right. He would do what he wanted, and that was that, and the most you could do was get over it. Words screamed loud enough: ‘The prime minister lied’, ‘It caused heart disease’, ‘The immigrant murdered his landlady’. All those lives destroyed, the suffocation of debate, the raising up of noise over content, the simplification, objectification, the brutal destruction of thought that he committed against all mankind. The dead who refused to take the medicine because lemongrass would work, the guns that were fired because he’s an extremist who took our job, the women branded sluts, whores, bad mothers, the ones who got away with it because they knew which hands to shake — and you wonder why someone would want him to die?”

I nodded at nothing much, thought of Luca Evard, tried, without much conviction: “This is the modern world — there are resources, means to find justice…”

“Such as.”

“Truth.”

“Meaningless, if you cannot make it heard.”

“The law.”

“Not if you don’t have money to pay for it.”

“History is full of battles being won by the oppressed against the great.”

“Is it? Cite me a meaningful victory. When the Bhopal disaster hit, over three thousand people died and half a million people were injured or disabled. The outcome? Seven ex-employees of the chemical company were sentenced to two years in prison each and a fine of $2,000. The parent company was fined $450 million and is now the third-largest producer of batteries in the world. Deepwater Horizon, eleven dead and nearly five million barrels of crude oil spilt into the sea. BP fined $4.5 billion. BP profit in 2013: $23.7 billion. Would you like more personal numbers? Inter-racial hatred, discrimination on grounds of religion, gender; reportage on climate change, on scientific development, on medical breakthrough, versus reports on immigration numbers, violent crime and celebrity personality, shall we break down the truth, the bitter, unloved, bloody-nosed truth? Tell me, in a world where wealth is power, and power is the only freedom, what would desperate men not do to be heard?”

“Civil rights, sexual emancipation, freedom of speech, the abolition of slavery—”

“Economic necessities. In 1789 the French rebelled and found an emperor. The Americans found freedom from the British and enslaved the Africans. The Arab Spring bloomed and the military and the jihadists seized power. The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell. Have you never heard priests proclaim that the meek will inherit the earth and wondered if the kings of old didn’t smile to hear it? Your reward comes after death. Nirvana. The wheel of life turns and we are elevated from animals to women, from women to men, from men to kings, from kings to gods, from gods to… perfection. And what is perfection now? Not crucifixion, not poverty endured patiently on the mountaintop. No — the perfect life is to have an annual salary of £120,000, an Aston Martin, a £1.6-million-pound home, a wife, two children and at least two foreign holidays a year. Perfection is an idol built upon oppression. Perfection is the heaven that kept the masses suppressed; the promise of a future life that quells rebellion. Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable millionaire. Perfection kills. Perfection destroys the soul.”

Silence.

She had not raised her voice. These words had been spoken a hundred times before, though perhaps only to herself. Across the sea the sun was down, reflection from its passage bouncing off the water and the underside of the clouds, black and gold. Our hostess, seeing an opportunity to strike, darted between us with a cry of “You ready order?”

Byron played it safe, ordered vegetarian, cabbage and noodles, broth and egg. I picked a plate at random and smiled faintly as our menus were collected, glasses taken away. Neither she nor I were drinking tonight.

Silence.

“Get rich,” she said at last. “Get thin. Get medicines. Get a car. Get married. Get perfect.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to know what your life is worth.”

A flicker in the corner of her mouth, contempt, perhaps? She is still unknown to me. That’s fine; I’ll follow her to the ends of the earth, meet her a hundred times until I know her.

“‘Worth’ is a concept almost as dangerous as ‘perfect’,” she said. “‘Worthy’, to be—”

“Important. Honourable. Having merit or value. Possessing qualities that merit recognition and attention.”

“And are we not worthy?” she asked, rolling the end of one ceramic chopstick back and forth between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. “Are our lives devoid of merit? Are we not generous to our friends, kind to strangers, skilled in our areas of expertise, reliable with rent, gentle with children, quick to phone an ambulance when we see a man hit by a car, thoughtful in word and deed? Do we not have worth enough? Are we not already perfect? Perfectly ourselves? Perfect in being who we are?”

“I have no one to measure that quality against.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

“Do you have eyes, judgement?”

“And I see the world, but I have no one else’s eyes to measure my own vision against.”

“Of course you do. You have the words of friends and strangers. You have discourse and reason. You have critical thought, which may be trained to the highest degree. In short, you do not need the world to tell you what to be. Especially if the world tells you that you are never good enough.”

“I am a thief,” I said, and for the first time since… I was not sure how long… the words were not proud. Almost… angry, perhaps.

Again, a little shrug: these things don’t matter to her. “Were we living in a different time, perhaps ballads would be sung to your honour. In this day and age, 0.7 per cent of the world owns 48 per cent of its wealth. Is thief such an indictment?”

“Yes,” I snapped, surprised at my own vehemence. “If I stole for a cause, perhaps; if I stole for anything that mattered…”

“It is worthy to live,” she corrected, “when the alternative is to die. Life is precious.”

“But Matheus Pereyra died.”

“And his children built Perfection — life is complicated. It defies mathematical ordering or the scales of justice.”

I leant forward on the table, twining my fingers, resting my chin on the arch of my hands. “Why not kill Filipa?” I asked. “She built Perfection.”

“Better to kill Rafe — he turned it from a science project into something he could sell. Filipa has always been a frightened infant; she thought she could program people to be smarter, kinder, braver, because these are all the things she is not. Rafe saw her work and transformed it into an algorithm that makes rich people richer, poor people poorer; that divides the ‘them’ from the ‘us’ and profits from the self-doubt of humanity. He made the 106.”

“There have always been elites. Three quarters of the UK cabinet are millionaires. Winning a seat in the US Congress costs anywhere in the region of ten million US dollars. The 106 is nothing new.”

“But the treatments are.”

My breath stuck in my throat. She saw it, saw me fight not to show it, saw me lose, smiled at my effort. I realise that I am afraid — very much afraid — of Byron14. “Tell me about them.”

“What have you observed?”

“You have everything Filipa ever created for Perfection here,” I replied, tapping the USB stick. “The code of the app, the names of people who used it, the science behind the treatments — and at cut-price too. Tell me what I want to know.”

A sigh, overplayed, she leant back in her chair. This is one of the many things she is willing to give for free, a little truth, perhaps, to smooth over all the lies. “The treatments were created by Filipa Pereyra. An awkward child punished for being awkward which of course made her more awkward. She has learned a degree of skill in covering it now, but it is only an… algorithm, shall we say. A routine learned by the numbers, as she tries to compute her way through life. I would say that she is very lonely.”

I think she is.

(You are a stranger to me. Is it you?)

(How excited she had been to meet me, that last time.)

“Go on,” I breathed.

“She studied the mind. Her family let her; no point involving the sister in affairs of business, that was all going to the brother — but her research grew expensive, difficult. They didn’t fully comprehend what she was working on, not until she went bankrupt, too much of her own funding poured into the effort. This was some… two, three years after her father died? Rafe bailed her out, but he is a businessman more than a brother. The price was her research. She accepted, of course. Didn’t matter to her who owned her work, so long as she could keep going. The treatments began as an experiment to help children with severe speech impediments. I believe there is something to do with electrodes — it’s all very technical.”

Deep brain stimulation. Use of an electric probe to induce weak electric current, causing activity in otherwise unstimulated parts of the brain. A largely untried tool, though some promising developments in treatment of depression, schizophrenia, stroke — further research required.

(Where had I read that? In Tokyo, in the hotel, researching Filipa. “All thought is feedback,” she said. “Repetition of a thought strengthens neural paths.” A simple sentence, easy to say in a hurry, assured not to cause offence, and within it, the building-blocks of consciousness.)

Byron, less interested in the how than the what. “The results were of limited interest to Rafe, of course. He could sell them for a bit, but they weren’t something he could advertise in the papers. Then his sister told him what the ultimate aim of her research was, and of course, he became far more interested.”

“And what was the ultimate aim?” I asked, sensing the answer already, tired by the suspicion, about to become certainty.

“To make everyone better. All people. Perfection is just a lifestyle tool. Positive activities are rewarded, negative punished — nothing new. The treatments are the next step. You take an ordinary human mind, with all its flaws and fears, and impose upon it a…” a pause, a smile, Byron chuckling over the word, no humour in her laugh, “… a ‘better’ pattern. From doubt — confidence. From terror — bravery. Anxiety becomes ambition; humility becomes assurance. The treatments edit out the patterns of human behaviour which are considered imperfect, character flaws you might say, and replace it with a model of humanity that is… shall we say — and I think here we should — shall we say ‘perfect’? The perfect man. The perfect woman. In and of itself, an appealing idea, perhaps. Filipa was in love with it — not with the concept of perfection, but with the very simple notion that she could make people better. When she began, she could give a voice back to the speechless, help people suffering from depression to find a level from which they could begin to rebuild. She programmed away phobias, helped the shy woman speak in front of a crowd of her peers, all with science. Easier to do science, for Filipa, than human things, I think. Then Rafe took her product, and redefined the end goals. No longer was success the overcoming of extreme anxiety — treatments were to be offered to the 106, to help this new elite become something more. Rafe asked himself what behaviours it would be… sexy to reinforce. What it was that his buyers might want to become. He found perfection. A perfection defined by the magazines and the TV soaps, by movie stars and captains of industry. Perfectly charming. Perfectly refined. Perfectly confident. Perfectly ambitious. Perfectly a monster — would you go so far?”

Parker, smiling at me in Tokyo. Refusing to help when I was burning in Istanbul.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I would.”

“Filipa has created a device to make everyone perfect, and the same. Perfection sells Nirvana in an electromagnet.”

Nirodha and magga, freedom from samsara, the end of the Buddhist eightfold path.

“Perhaps it is a kind of heaven,” I mused. “Perhaps the 106, when they are perfect, are also free.”

“Perhaps they are,” she replied, rolling the chopsticks between her fingers. “Free from doubt, anxiety, guilt, compassion, empathy, and all that it brings. It will only be a matter of time before the treatments are rolled out to more than just the 106 Club. They are a good test sample; volunteers, monitored through Perfection. But Rafe sees the profit in it, and I have no doubt it will sell. Can you imagine a world in which everyone has treatments? Can you imagine a planet covered in happy, smiling, perfect clones?”

“Yes. I think I can.”

“And are you not appalled?” she mused, laying the chopsticks down on the edge of her mat, over-played surprise on her face. “It is obscene.”

“Many things are obscene — what makes this your battle?”

“Ah, I see — may I not simply have a cause? Environmentalists protest against climate change, and yet Arctic meltwaters haven’t hurt their puppies yet.”

“You won’t tell?”

“Will you tell me why you stole the Chrysalis diamonds?”

“I wanted to fuck up some spoilt rich people. I wanted them scared and humiliated. My friend — she wasn’t my friend — had Perfection, and was very alone, and I didn’t spot it, and she died, and they didn’t give a fuck and I thought… fuck them. It was a momentary lapse in my professionalism.”

“It sounds like a cause to me.”

“It wasn’t; it simply wasn’t. You won’t tell me?”

Byron picked at a piece of kimchi with the end of her chopsticks and didn’t answer.

I sat back in my chair, arms folded. The USB was between us, and for a moment I considered walking out, throwing it into the sea, see if that wiped the smile from her face.

Neither of us moved. At last I said, indicating the stick with my chin, “What will you do with the information on this?”

“Imagine.”

“No. I have spent a lot of time imagining. Sometimes fantasies need to stop.”

“I will sabotage Perfection, destroy it from within. I will show humanity that it is obscene, and no one will forget.”

I flinched, and she saw the motion, didn’t understand it, a flicker of a frown. I licked my lips, looked down and to the side, asked the floor, “Will people die?”

“Perhaps.” The USB stick between us, the base-code of Nirvana, heaven without doubt, a world without fear. Her head, tilted slightly to one side, eyebrows raised. “Is that a problem?”

“Perhaps. I think… yes.”

“To destroy Perfection, I must destroy Rafe’s ability to sell it. To prevent people seeking treatments of their own accord, the damage must be significant.”

“There are ways to achieve that which don’t involve corpses.”

“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps not.”

Silence. I opened my mouth to say this is obscene, all of it, laughable, obscene, unworthy, we, unworthy, we ourselves unworthy, to judge, to be, to speak, a killer and a thief, ridiculous, of course, simply ridiculous.

No words came.

Instead, our hostess. Ceramic bowls full of broth and noodle, cabbage and strips of fried tripe, fish balls and, of course, more kimchi, to burn the taste away.

Byron was good with chopsticks. Held the bowl up with both hands to blow steam away from the surface. Slurped down soup, no need for spoons.

I said, “Can you replicate the treatments?”

“If this contains all of Tokyo’s data? Yes.”

“Can you strip out Rafe’s programming?”

“Why?”

“There are parts of Filipa’s design that deserve to survive. You said it began as speech therapy, as a treatment for depression…”

“Once you start attempting to reprogram the human brain from without, there’s no stopping it,” she retorted, harder and sharper than I think she’d meant.

“Hasn’t that always been the argument against all science? Gene therapy, retrovirals, plant modification, atomic energy…”

“From which we have the potential to cure cancer, crops that can sustain a human population in the billions, drug-resistant bacteria and the nuclear bomb,” she snapped. “I am no Luddite, but if the history of humanity has taught us anything it is that we are children, and this is not a toy we should use.”

“I think you’re wrong,” I replied. “I think there is something within Filipa’s treatments that could help me. I agree with you on practically everything you’ve said — I agree that they are obscene, and what they have become is vile. But the fundamental technology, as Filipa intended it, is neither good nor bad, merely a tool. I think it will help me become something I haven’t been for a very long time, and I need to know if you have the ability to unpack that information, or if I need to go back to Filipa to get what I need.”

Surprise, whole and true, a flash across her face. My voice had risen, our hostess was staring from across the room. Byron put the bowl down, chopsticks to one side, took a moment to gather her thoughts, at last breathed, “Do you want treatments?”

I let out a breath that had been cramping somewhere at the bottom of my stomach, and said, “Yes.”

“In the name of God, why?” Horror, indignation, incomprehension, of me, of herself. Could she think she had begun to know me and now discovered that she had been so wrong?

“Because people forget me,” I replied. “And I’ve been lonely for too long. And it was fine. I was doing fine. I had my… my rules. Run, count, walk, speak, knowledge, always, knowing things, filling up that place where… where there should be other things, things like… like work or friends or… but I was fine. I was doing fine. Because that’s what had to be done, it was… and then I saw Parker. The one and only Parker of New York, remembered the words, remembered writing them, reading them — didn’t remember him. He’s had treatments, though. And I remember him now.”

Byron, pressing her chopsticks flat together, then lifting both her hands and gently interlacing the fingers, a conscious act, a physical reminder to herself to be something, or not to be something else. Neuro-linguistic programming; a rubber band around the wrist. Swish and I am something else, swish and I am calm. She was calm; she was calmness.

Swish swish. Whatever I do, in this moment, I am terrified.

Slowly, comprehending/not comprehending, eyebrows down, lips tight: Byron, considering.

To consider: to turn over in one’s mind. To think carefully.

Does knowledge hold back tears? “Consider”, poem, Christina Rossetti, b.1830, d.1894, does knowledge drown out the place where fantasy should be, imagination, dreams of friends and love? Does breath fill the void where I should have humanity, grown and nurtured by human experience, experience of humans? Am I nothing more than this?

(Google search: perfect woman. Lips like celebrity x, hair like celebrity y, husband, car, house, diamond ring, young, white, child, maybe two — there was a time when I wanted to be perfect, nothing stood in my way because there was no one around me, behind me, with me, only myself, only my will, Nietzsche, will to power, Christianity, the triumph of weakness, words always words and thoughts and words and shut up shut up shut up!!)

Then she said, “To be forgotten is to be free, you know that, don’t you?”

Easy, an easy thing, a tiny part of a greater argument, I heard the words and my hands hit the table so hard and fast that soup sloshed over the side of her bowl, cutlery tinkled, she jumped and I screamed, “I have never been free!”

My voice, loud enough to make the hostess duck, loud enough to frighten all other noise, so that the silence, when now it came, had the room to itself, deafening.

I am my breath. I am my ragged, gasping breath. I am rage. I am my tears — when did they come? I am injustice. I am damnation. I am here, I am real, remember me, remember this, how could anyone forget? How can you look on my red eyes and my blotched face, hear my voice, and forget me? Are you even human? Am I?

At last, she said, and she was kind, “All right.”

I am my fingers gripping the table.

I am the table.

Body of plastic and metal.

I am cold.

I am the sky growing dark outside.

I am the washing sea.

Tears are merely salt water and warmth on my face; nothing more. Chemicals. Mucin, lysozyme, lactoferrin, lacritin, glucose, urea, sodium, potassium, that’s all tears are. A biological mechanism for the cleansing of the eye. Curious fact: tears of emotion have a slightly different chemical composition than basal or reflexive tears.

I am knowledge.

And again, Byron says, and there is so much kindness in her voice, an old woman smiling at me across the table, resisting the temptation, perhaps, to put her hand in mine, “All right.”

I made her write down the terms of our bargain.

Why: having delivered the base code of Perfection, Byron14 to give to Why, as soon as available, access to and knowledge of treatments such as may make her memorable.

Signed by both.

Neither of us offered up thoughts on what would happen in the face of betrayal. It would have been rude.

I took a photo of the napkin on which our deal was struck; so did she. Then I made her take a photo of me, my face, holding the napkin beneath it. She asked why; I said to remember.

She didn’t ask why again.

We ate dinner, and she told me a joke she’d heard once from a Russian oligarch about fish. It was long, and surprisingly dirty.

I felt the salty lines on my skin where tears had dried, but they were someone else’s tears. I was only my voice. I told her the one about the patriarch, the rabbi and the mullah.

She laughed, hearty and true, and when the bill came paid without asking, and looked out at the now-dark sea and said, “How shall we keep in contact?”

“I will send you a message with my instructions. You keep the napkin — a reminder of your commitments.”

“I am not likely to forget.”

“No,” I replied, without rancour. “You will forget. But I’ll help you remember.”

“We have a deal, though I don’t understand your terms.”

We shook hands. There were thin calluses, reinforced and softened by repetition, on the bends of her right hand. I wondered if she had children, and imagined that if she did, they must love her very much.

“You are an extraordinary woman, Why,” she mused. “Strange as it has been, I am glad to have made your acquaintance.”

“My name is Hope,” I replied. “You’ll have the opportunity to make my acquaintance again.”

I waited for our hostess to clear away the dishes, put my napkin on the table by the USB stick, smiled politely, and was gone.