The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 66

On the sixty-second day, she said, “I have something exciting to show you.”

She’d hired a car, an apartment too, got herself a US driver’s licence — good forgery, nice photo, adapted from a dead woman in Baltimore — and she took me to a clinic in Daly City. Straight bright streets surrounded by matching straight pastel-coloured homes. Two floors high, sloped grey roofs, same cars, same flags, same bins, same plants, same shops, a suburb built at a time when suburbs seemed like a good idea, a place for the comfortably old who couldn’t do better and the up-and-coming young who hoped to achieve more. It was an incongruous place for Byron to have set up shop, but there, between a nursery school and a motorbike-repair shop, was an unmarked single-storey white building which had once been a dentist’s clinic, and which was now the property of Hydroponic Fertilizers Ltd., Water Is Our Future, a shell company whose shell was so fragile a sea anemone could have brushed it away.

“I used to love creating companies,” mused Byron as we tramped up the path to the locked and bolted front door. “My proudest achievement was a pumpkin-pie company in Israel. Did so well I often thought I’d retire and do it for real.”

The office was shuttered, almost entirely empty, the furniture of its previous owner moved out and never replaced. A coffee-coloured stain on one wall had been crudely covered over with an ancient picture of Ronald Reagan. A burn in the carpet had been less effectively protected with a three-legged wooden chair laid casually, yet eye-drawingly, over it. If Byron cared about these cosmetic difficulties, she didn’t show it, but led me on past a pile of empty cardboard and plastic boxes, into a back room where a dentist’s chair had been set up and converted to a newer, not-at-all hydroponic purpose.

I looked at it, she looked at me, and I counted backwards from ten before saying, “Where did you get it?”

“A broker in Mexico. It works; I’m sure of that.”

A dentist’s chair, for sure, but the apparatus around it was not for pulling teeth. I circled it once, twice, three times, and concluded that it was in every way which counted the same set-up as I had seen in Tokyo. The same machines for tinkering with your brain, the same devices for altering the way your mind worked, a mask for eyes, a sensor to lay on your tongue, earbuds and microphones, monitors and needles. In a back room in Daly City, Byron had set up her own treatments for Perfection.

I counted backwards from ten again, then stopped and said, “Isn’t stealing it a risk?”

“Huge. Potentially catastrophic.”

“You took precautions?”

“Numerous. Gauguin will be scouring North Carolina for me as we speak.”

“Will it work?”

“I have every reason to think so. The mechanical parts aren’t so complicated; the data you stole was the difficult part.”

Calm in her voice, pride as well, curiosity, waiting to see what I’d do. “Can I use it?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“We’re still at the early stages of unpicking Filipa’s programming. At this stage, the treatments we give you, even modified, risk re-writing your brain.”

“You make it sound simple.”

Her left hand rested lightly on the back of the chair; with her right she picked up the goggles hanging loose by its side, turned them over in her fingers. “Visual stimulation. Auditory. An electrode on the tongue; another in the back of your neck. Sedatives and stimulants pumped in roughly equal measure into your blood. Preliminary treatments are little more than medically enhanced hypnosis. Images of the perfect you, flashed up while pleasurable sensations are stimulated. Images of imperfection, correlated with the taste of bile; that sort of thing. Nothing extraordinary. Only on your eighth or ninth treatment do they drill a needle-sized hole in the back of your skull, and insert the electrodes. They don’t leave them in for very long; a few hours at most, and you are only conscious for part of the procedure. Deep brain stimulation; a brain pacemaker, it used to be used for Parkinson’s, chronic pain, but Filipa is more sophisticated than that. Perfection helps them map your mind, you see. Every time you use it, every purchase you make, every decision, every reward claimed and action performed, gives them a little more data for when the time comes for your treatments, so they know which part of your brain to keep, and which to burn. That is the other purpose of Perfection; that is why you need a million points before they give you treatments. Data gathering, for both marketing, and to target the results.” Her head tilted to one side, watching me for a reaction, finding none. “We only know this because of you,” she added gently. “Before you, we were guessing.”

“We?” I asked.

“I have a lot of people working on the problem.”

“How do you fund it all?”

“I steal,” she replied simply. “Like you, I am an exceptionally good thief, although I mostly steal through stock markets, which doesn’t even count as theft.”

Her hand, resting on the back of the chair, like the proud owner of a prize horse, wondering whether now is the time to sell.

Then she said, “Do you still want treatments?”

“I want to be remembered.”

“But do you still want treatments?”

I don’t remember what I said in reply.

Headaches.

A doctor who’d seen me eleven times already said, “Ah, you’re new here!”

Yes, I’m new here. I’m always new here.

Blood drawn; how much blood did I have left to take?

Brains, brains scanned, students brought in, introduced, Hello, you’re new here, still new, still always new, always and for ever just like yesterday, like tomorrow, goodbye, hello; hello, goodbye.

Byron woke from a nightmare, cold and shaking, saw me in the dark across from her, reached for her gun, froze, lips moving, struggling to find recollection. I saw her eyes white in the gloom, heard the rumble of a fat lorry passing by outside, waited, heard her breath slow, saw her lower her head back onto the pillow, close her eyes, go back to sleep, and I did not sleep.

I did not sleep.

On the sixty-eighth day of my association, I broke my own rule, and followed her, discreetly, to a meeting. It was the perfect evening for it, fog rising off the bay, a thin drizzle of rain obscuring the lights high in the hills, winter coming. I carried an umbrella, hid my face behind a scarf, wore a new, shop-stolen coat that I could discard on the way home. I followed her to the edge of Berkeley, watched her walk through the mist to the front door of a detached, two-storey white-timbered house with an American flag flying on the porch and a bright pink plastic rocking horse abandoned by the path, and when she looked back over her shoulder before knocking, I hid behind a car and counted to ten before peeking round to see who answered.

The man was in his fifties, olive skin and pepper hair, a checked shirt and grey jogging bottoms, a pair of slippers each with a rabbit face and a pair of floppy ears on the front. He shook Byron’s hand quickly, and led her inside.

I looked up his address when I got home. Agustin Carrazza, retired MIT professor, quietly shuffled into obscurity when it was suggested he’d had a few too many links with questionable experiments, of which the highlight had to be a 1978 case in which the water supply for a small town in Missouri was laced with a mild hallucinogenic, resulting in two days of confusion and chaos, three deaths, six pet deaths including one iguana, two car crashes, ninety-four injuries of varying degrees, the slaughter of two hundred and seventeen dairy cows and a statistically significant jump in the birth rate nine months later.

When asked in interview in 1998 if he’d ever been part of unethical or illegal experiments, his reply was classically Nixonian: “If the government says it’s ethical, then that’s good enough for me.”

That night I bought a couple of sleeping pills from a pharmacy that advertised itself with the picture of two grinning, Stetson-wearing snakes coiled round a crucifix, and slipped one into Byron’s water when she went to sleep.

One hundred and fifty snores later, I rolled out of bed, took her notebook from her bedside table, turned on the torch at the back of my phone and sat, like a child, under the duvet covers to read.

Pages of notes. Reflections and musings, scrawls in the corner –

Scared of ECT? Possible sister? Northern English accent sometimes. Reluctant to talk about family. Drinks tea with milk. Runs, average 10k per day. Steals habitually. Unaware of own habit? Stole pair of running shoes, bar of chocolate, apple, bottle of brown sauce, multitool and knife (hidden, taped under bed — weapon?).

Late home tonight.

Did I pull a gun on her? In my dream I woke, and held a gun against an intruder, but there was no one there, and I went back to sleep, but in the morning my gun had moved. Why?

Smell of alcohol on her shirt this morning.

Today I like her.

Today she is uneasy.

Today she is calm.

Today she is funny.

Today I felt pity for her.

Today she spoke of honour.

Today she stole a new mobile phone, hidden behind bathroom cistern. (Must move hotel; see what she does with change.)

Too many recordings, too many videos, not enough time to track. Will record all notes here, attempt to compile.

She does not trust me.

She is frightened.

She hasn’t heard the screaming.

She will not accept ECT; do not ask her again.

She is beginning to suspect that these tests will not cure her condition.

And fairly soon:

Is she following me?

Is she the she I think she is? Performance, a face in the camera, voice on the tape, what is she when there is nothing digital to recall her? What might she do? Who is she when I cannot remember her?

After nearly sixty pages of notes, the writing transformed into a language I couldn’t recognise. Alpha-numeric, characters and symbols, numbers and dashes. I took a stab at deciphering it, but it resisted monoalphabetic frequency analysis, and I didn’t have time or expertise to break it down into anything more complicated. Still Byron’s handwriting, but a code, and my head hurt, and I was tired, so I photographed the pages and put the notebook back, and re-sealed the hair she’d left stuck over its pages, and tried to go back to sleep.

On the seventieth day, she said, “Have you been following me?”

“No.”

“I shouted at a woman in the street today who I thought was you.”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t me.”

“I know. When I went back the other way, she was crying down the phone, and I remembered her face.”

I shrugged.

“I mean to say… if I say anything, I think I should apologise now.”

“You haven’t said anything that bothers me,” I replied, and that same evening she said, “Have you been following me?” and I said no, and we had the conversation again, but this time she didn’t manage not to look afraid.

That night I stole a book on cryptography, and by the white light of the bathroom, studied while she slept.

On the seventy-first day, alone in an internet café in Bayview, I started an email to Luca Evard. I wrote it five times, and on the sixth attempt, deleted the draft and went for a run instead. That evening, as Byron held her secret twice-weekly meeting with a group of underemployed postgrad Berkeley computer-science students who were busy breaking Perfection down into its component parts, I caught a cab into the hills of San Rafael, and with two hundred stolen bucks walked into the China Creek Casino. I counted cards, made no effort to hide my methods. CCTV cameras watched, but no one came. I was a stranger who bet lucky

now

and now

and now

all past patterns forgotten.

At five thousand US dollars, I was ready to go home, when I saw the 106 Club. They were secluded from the rest of the casino by a sliding glass partition, playing high-stakes games in a function room where clean water rolled down the inside of the walls and champagne bubbled from a fountain ensconced in a bed of ice. I considered walking away, didn’t. I stole a drunk woman’s mobile phone, used the invite recorded in pixel form on its memory to get me through the doors of the club.

The lights were a moonlight blue, the games were poker and roulette. They played terribly. Ridiculous bets, $7,000, $10,000, and why? Because you’re worth it, baby, hey, baby, you just say the word. $15,000 lost on a ridiculous turn of the cards, hit, she said, though she had seventeen in her hand and the dealer couldn’t be carrying more than fifteen at a shot, and the dealer hit and as her money was taken, she laughed, screamed with laughter and said, “I wish my ex was here to see this!”

A man came up to me said, “You don’t seem happy.”

“I’m not sure I enjoy watching money being squandered.”

“It’s just money,” he replied. “It’s just paper.”

“It’s time,” I said, sharper than I’d meant. “It’s the means to purchase time. It’s the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it’s a year’s salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it’s the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it’s not money. It’s what it could have been.”

The man stared at me, physically pulling his head back on his neck, like a bird recoiling from a potential predator, and he was beautiful, and he’d had treatments — of course he’d had treatments, look at him, charisma, confidence, the sense of his own worth, worth, to be worthy — of a quality that is commendable, admirable, respected, and he said,

“Wow, that is so deep.”

He meant it, of course.

“You’re really real,” he added breathily. “Say something else.”

I decided he wasn’t worth punching, and walked away.