Murmur Page 4

  And yet these episodes explain a lot.

  I have a private mind again, its images a dark, suspended carousel—the satellite returning news of water, solar fans a sort of cosmic colander, a woman pouring water over chopped cabbage, bathing and sex. And this story, a way of telling you, strange listening consolation, how it happened. How it—we—began.

  A scientist is at a party, bored by people who advance opinion as fact.

  His own calling and expertise are under wraps. He turns a wineglass by its stem and leans against a locked piano, listening to a young man from an advertising company explaining to his friends that “research shows the future lies in neuromarketing.”

  The young man’s manner is a parody of academic vanity. He has the scientist’s own irritation with the laity down pat—taking a breath before speaking, tumbling his hands—except, in this case, all the irritation is a pantomime, a bluff. He clears his throat while others tentatively ask questions, looks blank and then is rude but with a shortness that stands in for sharp integrity. He works long hours, he says (but dresses far too well for that). He brushes what he says aside.

  “We’re very close,” he will admit. “It won’t be long before we map feelings. The tech is first gen—at an early stage, of course. But still …”

  Clever, the scientist thinks. The disavowal of a brag. Which isn’t just inaccurate, but is a serious lie paraded in the service of the trivial: “If we can find which areas of the brain respond to purchase-pleasure, then we can increase your brand awareness—stimulate the brain to be much more aware of those specific purchases and brands that give pleasure.” It is the application of money that makes him plausible, this young executive—money and the elation of the con, showering the party with false coin and flattery (who doesn’t want to feel pleasure?), and greed. The young man has no hair, a shiny head that’s going nova in the black wood of the piano, enormous arm muscles, and skinny legs. He wears potent cologne.

  On his way out, the scientist makes sure to shake the young man’s hand and quietly confides in him: “You did that very well. You have authority. You’re not just wrong, you’re confidently wrong. I’m a biologist. My colleagues model nerve plasticity and growth. They do a lot of neuro work with computational semantics. Nothing you have said tonight is true. We are a hundred years away from mapping cognition.”

  The young man’s caught. He bites down and his jaw flexes.

  “The point of what you do is not to get at what’s human about our mental processes, or what it is to feel, but to reduce the definition to a data set that you can use to write proprietary algorithms that will tell us what you think we’d like to buy. The data doesn’t have to be remotely accurate. It just has to be everywhere—and when it’s everywhere, and used by everyone, it will be right. Lovely party.”

  Like many rationalists, the scientist is shadowed by his emotion. Notebooks of hate and lust exist in desk drawers. Secret expenditures that keep him close to what, and who, matter. He wakes before his wife and in the morning brings her tea. She mouths “Thank you,” then turns her head.

  The sun comes through half-leaded windows in the shallow bay of their bedroom. Pale star and silent monitor, be kind to us. She may not see it quite like that. He doesn’t know. How could he? He makes toast and goes to work, driving more carefully because he’s soon to be a father, and is unprepared and wants to cry. It’s not an overwhelming urge, although the self-control required to stop it happening suggests it could have been, or could still be. He could now swerve onto the hard shoulder, and weep.

  He comes back to himself in time to take the turning to the university, but indicates too late. The car behind slams on its brakes, then barrels past, honking. The scientist pulls out of the main flow and glances over at the man he has annoyed, the shaking head and unheard oaths speeding away.

  I’ll never know what that man feels, the scientist thinks.

  He parks his car on the top deck of Lot 11, right across from his laboratory, and looks out over beeches browning in the heat. Their roots are raised, not deep. The trees grow spreading branches near the ground to lower their center of gravity. A chill snakes up his back. That other man is in an office now, saying, “Some lunatic, on the way in … He jumped two lanes, no lights, nothing. Pulled over right in front of me. That’s twice this week. Pulled off and up the sliproad like I wasn’t there.”

  The scientist can see it, hear it, happening: the man shaken, the new woman across from him a little skeptical (twice? Can it be all someone else’s fault?), but kind, making coffee. Having a similar story to tell herself. I nearly got pushed off a cliff. Once. In the Pyrenees. He wants to be there, to say sorry, but of course it’s just a fantasy of guilt. He’s only there in fantasy. The angry man has gone. It’s over. Forget it. Somewhere he hears his mother’s voice, his own possible screams. He has earache. The squeal of pressure searches for a note as sunlight washes through a colander.

  The chill along his spine is real. The magpies in the beech cooperate. They twitch, rebalance, weigh down twigs, take off for no reason. His thought is now: what would it look like, a shared mind? Where would the need for people go, the unspoken, the private stranger whom we love for being, like us, alone?

  *

  He wants to go back to that young gun from the advertising agency. Perhaps he’ll ring him up. He wants to say: You’re still wrong, but the dream … the dream of access to another’s thoughts, with certainty—transparency—is the first step. That I can see. The welter of connectedness, the phones and messages, commuters trailing wires, staring past bodies into space, the sound-image of ghostly callers in your head wherever you may be, whatever time it is—all of this talked-up knowledge isn’t knowledge yet.

  And yet, soon, soon.

  One day, and with the creepy precision of retrospect, it will seem logical.

  If we could be inside another person’s head, we would be putting bodily identity at risk. What would it mean to meet the person whose cascade of thought—primary images, weird signs and verbal flashes, syntax, argument, subconscious fantasies of argument—you knew already or could leap to find? What would a conversation be with instant, mutual apprehension of its themes?

  We’d entertain each other’s thoughts, not each other. Be many, one, and none. Look now, look there. (The scientist has left the car park and walked over to the library café.) Two people at a table, together, each on the phone to someone else. The physically present companion incidental to the real contact. The sign, you see, is contradictory: those people on the phone are saying, “Yes, I know exactly what you mean,” but there is no distinction between you and you, between an electronic echo and the occupant of space. And this is what it will look like, to begin with—a sort of ecstatic, immediate empathy (I know exactly what you mean) increasingly detached from any one person’s presence. You will see more and more people perplexed, distressed, distracted by the men and women they are with, people they love, preferring to take calls or messages from friends or strangers who are elsewhere, and so full of potential.

  And now the scientist is sick. He’s made it to the lab, where his assistant has prepared a paper for a peer-reviewed journal on what he calls the “sympathetic valency of brain function in hives.” They work on trauma, neuronal recovery, and shared intelligence. He’s guided to a chair he’s startled in his swoon to recognize as a refuge. A chair is what he needs. Safety. And from the chair he falls onto his knees, all fours. He tries to speak, to say what’s happening, what’s happened to him in the past two hours. The poor assistant, with his hand upon the scientist’s wet back, asks him questions. “Are you OK? Should you be lying down?” He goes off and the scientist can hear him running down the corridor.

  He rolls over, looks out along the carpet tiles toward a huge window. The room is dark, the window bright, and through the glass the stricken researcher sees deep into a complex green: the beeches from another vantage point, shifting dynamically, hidden birds’ eyes taxed with their subroutines of grooming,
sex, and predation.

  Is that a magpie or a jay? Its puppet head confronts the scientist. It looks without seeing, alert. Its vision is a corvid mystery of weak interpretation and associated forms. “Oh God.” He wants to say it’s all so clear: the borders of the self. Forget the hives, for now at least. He knows in one exploded moment why his wife flinches when he comes just that bit too near, and why his fear charges the air. Why she shivers, wondering perhaps if this is what she really wants.

  “Don’t try to speak.” The kind assistant is raw-linen-faced, holding his hand, wiping away the froth he cannot feel from his slack lip. “The ambulance is on its way. Try to conserve your energy. I’m here. Alec, it’s me, Julius. Just breathe.”

  He breathes into a point of infinite and traceless pain. He stares hard at a carpet tile that’s come unstuck and wants to say: It isn’t knowing what another person thinks or feels that makes us who we are. It’s the respect for not knowing.

  We are consoled by someone’s efforts to conceive us, and that effort’s keen shortfall. We are unreachable. A shared mind has no self-knowledge. A field awareness cannot be unique or self-conceal: it has no privacy of mind.

  “That’s it. Try to conserve your energy.”

  The people in the café, all the endlessly communicating lovers who don’t talk, are in the first throes of becoming field and finding privacy of mind unbearable. An irritant. They do not like their single form. They must be able to be got at, all the time. Unpenetrated bodies disturb them. Are separate. Sex is a salve, partly mechanical, to join what can’t be joined. And feelings, what of them? Where will they go? (Outside, the leaf-veiled corvid’s beak opens. A signal light enters its eyes. The cable lying on the tile uncoils. A plug rises, hissing, and strikes the hand that wired it.) They will be put away, feelings. They will be stored, removed from the body, given profiles in sanctuary—a part of field that doesn’t have to impede field from being everywhere, ideally bodiless. And this is what I now see, what I now predict. The shared mind and machine field must be lesser things, a lower-order consciousness, because they can’t help but connect. The higher-order consciousness, of which our private thought process and yearning are a part, implies a disconnection from the group.

  The heart must be broken, the mind cut off behind a look, its feelings and its godlike intuition trapped, or else it has no heart. It is no mind.

  I am a thinking reflection. He is the animal-organic part, the body unthinking. I am a searching mechanism with a soul. I’m him, but only when he’s near the glass, metal, water, the surface where I’m found. I search for some way to express this separation that feels all the wrong way round.

  A bird is puzzled by its reflection; not, surely, the reflection by the bird. And yet I’m one with him. I’m one, and separate. I search for ways to describe this. I live and think within all glass. He only has a body and can’t hear this murmuring; sees himself in a mirror—doesn’t know that it is me.

  Nothing will be the same again. No two things are. Equivalences lie: x, y are not y, x, because the order is reversed, the flow and spin. The same answers given in different rooms. The parroted, the meant. Capacity to want, desire. The star-tipped torchlight waving overhead, the torchlit star.

  *

  Dear Alec,

  You are a tease. Perhaps your man is from the future? I have heard that dreams are p- and t-reversed: they mean the opposite of what they show, and are all effect in anticipation of cause! So perhaps he is not terrified and a prisoner: he bodes well! Have you considered? It is delightful that he comes to you in a mirror, since I do not believe I have ever caught you looking in one, except to lose patience with a tie.

  What is the probability of A, who abhors mirrors, being contacted by p-A, who appears in one and cannot exist without it?

  You always spare me your pain, dear Alec. But are you well enough?

  I can’t quite resist a remark about your solitary virtue. You are wrong about relationships, I think, because you have not taken our species’ adaptability into account. An odd omission, I think you’ll be forced to agree. M. Baudelaire is quite right in all that he says about the inner life, though he does not complete his derivation of proof viz. lonely thinkers and bustling crowds.

  The crowd is the complete set of boring demands made on a loved friend, A, or his loving friend, J. But A and J, in mental seclusion, in the middle of the crowd, are indeed free of it, and having a lovely time!

  Darling, time turns out to be infinitely expandable. The more I do of the awful drudgery (and it is fairly awful, I admit), the more I find myself thinking of the real work I still want to do and coming to a strange conclusion. The thinking is the work, and the trick is to catch it on the wing, while one does the washing-up or ironing. Or, in your case, while you attend appointments and meetings with your hoodoo Freudian. To be serious, what I mean is, we are creatures, you and I, of salutary distraction. I love Bill, but he has no understanding of a very important part of me. When he is chatting, I am thinking, solving puzzles, fretting. And yet, his conversation is so important, because in the kindest way it sends me back into myself. I could not be reminded of myself without his chatter. Let the set of demands on A, or his friend J, be like the man in the mirror: a mysterious liberation. Oh, let it, darling, for all our sakes.

  I do believe he is trying to tell you something.

  Your other friend, for aye,

  June

  PS Trentham’s field awareness: I wasn’t aware of it. Send it? Send him?

  It is always possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it. If he does this he must leave a note of instructions (written in some standard form) explaining how the work is to be continued.

  —A. M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (1936)

  The Miscreants

  Acoustic dark: voices and squeaks, the slide and shunt of forms. The darkness has a leathern softness, lit by brass flashes. The brightness of a buckle or the ring of metal round an inkwell permits me the briefest of glimpses of faces, shoes, socks, ties, and desks—before I’m on the move again, on the back wall, rising through polished wood. Wainscoting. Painted initials, glorious lists scroll down before me. I’m behind the sad letters (Atkins, B. S., Atkins, J. T.), scanning from right to left until a sort of dawn breaks and I’m clear.

  A boy with parted hair and brown perceptive eyes looks through me, through the pane: Alec Pryor, the name just visible in an upturned collar. Beside him sits a paler, neater blond boy, C. C. Molyneaux (according to a red notebook), fully absorbed in the lesson, unlike his friend, who yawns and mists the glass so that my view of both boys is obscured. When the mist clears, Pryor stares with a new intensity. He whispers, “Absolute …” and presses with his dirty shoe on the much cleaner toe of C.C.M. Turns back to face the front seconds before the master stops chalking equations on the board.

  “Hindsight,” the master’s high and drifting voice declares, “may have a scientific use. Physical measurements that we make now, of particles in flight, affect the story we can tell about the past.”

  The thirty lives in this cold room, seen from some distant vantage point, are like the hopeful lanterns of a struggling ferry.

  “That is the world of quantum measurement advanced by Mr. Schrödinger. But note: the past itself is still secure. Pryor, I saw you roll your eyes. I heard you say, ‘Nonsense.’ These marks of insolence are fixed. While I may change the story that I tell of them, should any mitigating information come to light, I may not change the marks themselves. On a related matter, we may not go back. We recollect our own past and form impressions of history in general. But to revisit any part of it is out of the question, unless we are unhinged and can mistake the fact of being able to imagine Agincourt for Agincourt itself.”

  “Sir.” The blond boy raises his hand only to lower it again. He has a way of interrupting and then hesitating that wrong-foots autho
rity. Masters forget to chide or punish him. They like him. He has interesting things to say.

  “Molyneaux.”

  “What if you could really go there, sir, the past, I mean? Observing, not acting. But be there, knowing it, much more than if you were just looking back?”

  “Charming hypothesis.” The master smiles. The other boys begin to yawn or look bemused. “Alas, here we intrude upon the realm of fantasy.”

  “You’d need a machine,” Pryor says, his shoe pressing on Molyneaux’s.

  “As I was saying, Pryor, here we part company with the real. If you could build such a machine, then Mr. Wells and Mr. Hilton, not to mention Mr. Wilfrid Ashley of the Ministry of Transport, would be breaking down your door. Now—”

  “But, sir,” Pryor objects. He’s come alive and speaks quickly. “It only need be hypothetical. We only need to know what sort of machine it would be, for now. To have an abstract idea.”

  He laughs softly. One dissipating “ha!”, the wheeze of a harmonica.

  Seated, holding his chalk, the master says, “Go on.” It isn’t what the boy says that matters. It is the boy himself, his shyness overcompensated for by chatter, dares, and intellect.

  Pryor explains. A group of individuals have an idea, work hard, give way to others, who refine the problem in a different way until it’s solved or, probably, transformed. The abstraction evolves until it can be made. It takes a certain quantity of time. “It’s just an algorithm, sir. Like anything. Like any set of instructions. A time machine to build another time machine!