Axiomatic (28 page)

Harold stands by Mary’s bed. She’s lying on her side, turned away from him. He breathes slowly through his mouth, hoping that this is the quietest way - and thinks about the trillions of cells of her body. If he stabbed her in the heart, only the tiniest fraction of them would be killed directly by the blade - just a few million cells in her skin, her soft tissue, her heart muscles. The death of her neurons would be almost coincidental, more a product of this organism’s poor design than anything else. A slime mould would easily survive similar treatment.

* * * *

He stands for a while, waiting to see what he will do. Part of him - a small, vestigial subsystem with no interest whatsoever in brain physiology, the philosophy of consciousness, or even obsessive love - pleads fervently to be allowed to put down the knife and flee, but Harold pays it about as much attention as the soundtrack of a child’s cartoon overheard playing on a neighbour’s TV. He stands, and he waits.

Harold doesn’t mourn for the brief lives he helps create; he knows they die long before the most primitive thoughts or feelings have a chance to arise, and he can’t believe there’s a machine up in heaven, churning out a white-robed feather-winged soul for each of these tiny clusters of cells.

Rather, he rejoices. Because The Vat says something about human life - human life of every age - that had to be said, and although today he is alone in heeding this message, he knows that in time the insights he’s gained will be the common heritage of all humanity.

Harold retraces his steps. He returns the knife to its place in the kitchen. He leaves by the bathroom window, and closes it behind him.

He wanted to kill her, he muses, more than he’d ever wanted anything before. He wanted, very badly, to be free. But something in his genome, or something in his past, declared that it wasn’t to be. Or perhaps the quantum dice simply happened to fall in her favour. This time.

He walks home slowly, his face uplifted to the photons flooding down from the stars, and he counts them one by one.

<>

* * * *

THE WALK

Leaves and twigs crunch underfoot with every step; no gentle rustling, but the sharp, snapping sounds of irrevocable, unrepeatable damage — as if to hammer into my brain the fact that no one else has come this way for some time. Every footfall proclaims that there’ll be no help, no interruptions, no distractions.

I’ve felt weak and giddy since we left the car — and part of me is still hoping that I’ll simply pass out, collapse on the spot and never get up again. My body, though, shows no signs of obliging: it stubbornly acts as if each step forward is the easiest thing in the world, as if its sense of balance is unimpaired, as if all the fatigue and nausea are entirely within my head. I could fake it: I could sink to the ground and refuse to stir.
Get it over with.

I don’t, though.

Because I don’t want it to be
over.

I try again.

‘Carter, you could be
rich,
man. I’d work for you for the rest of my life.’ Good touch, that:
my
life, not
your
life; makes it sound like a better deal. ‘You know how much I made for Finn, in
six months?
Half a million! Add it up.’

He doesn’t reply. I stop walking, and turn back to face him. He halts too, keeping his distance. Carter doesn’t look much like an executioner. He must be close to sixty: grey-haired, with a weathered, almost kindly face. He’s still solidly built, but he looks like someone’s once athletic grandfather, a boxer or a football player forty years ago, now into vigorous gardening.

He calmly waves me on with the gun.

‘Further. We’ve passed the people-taking-a-piss zone, but campers, bush walkers . . . you can’t be too careful.’

I hesitate. He gives me a gently admonishing look.
If I stood my ground?
He’d shoot me right here, and carry the body the rest of the way. I can see him trudging along, with my corpse slung casually across his shoulders. However
decent
he might seem at first glance, the truth is, the man’s a fucking robot: he’s got some kind of neural implant, some bizarre religion; everybody knows that.

I whisper, ‘Carter . .
.please.’

He gestures with the gun.

I turn and start walking again.

I still don’t understand how Finn caught me out. I thought I was the best hacker he had. Who could have followed my trail, from the outside?
Nobody!
He must have planted someone inside one of the corporations I was screwing on his behalf — just to check up on me, the paranoid bastard. And I never kept more than ten per cent. I wish I’d taken fifty. I wish I’d made it worthwhile.

I strain my ears, but I can’t pick up the faintest hint of traffic, now; just birdsong, insects, the crackling of the forest’s debris underfoot. Fucking
nature.
I refuse to die here. I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit — preferably around the sun. I don’t care how much it costs, just so long as I don’t end up part of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen.
Gaia, I divorce thee.
Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

Wasted anger, wasted time.
Please don’t kill me, Carter: I can’t bear to be absorbed back into the
unthinking biosphere.
That’d really move him.

What, then?

‘I’m
twenty-five years old,
man. I haven’t even
lived.
I’ve spent the last ten years farting around with computers. I don’t even have any kids. How can you kill someone who hasn’t even had kids?’ For a second, seduced by my own rhetoric, I seriously think about claiming virginity — but that might be pushing it . . . and it sounds less selfish, less hedonistic, to assert my right to fatherhood than to whine about sex.

Carter laughs. ‘You want immortality through
children’?
Forget it. I’ve got two sons, myself. They’re nothing like me. They’re total strangers.’

‘Yeah? That’s sad. But I still ought to have the chance.’

‘The chance to do what? To pretend that you’ll live on through your children? To fool yourself?’

I laugh knowingly — trying to make it sound like we’re sharing a joke that only two like-minded cynics could appreciate.

‘Of course I want a chance to
fool myself.
I want to lie to myself for fifty more years. Sounds pretty good to me.’

He doesn’t reply.

I slow down slightly, shortening my stride, feigning trouble with the uneven terrain.
Why?
Do I seriously think that a few extra minutes will give me the chance to formulate some dazzlingly brilliant plan? Or am I just buying time for the sake of it? Just prolonging the agony?

I pause, and suddenly find myself retching; the convulsions run deep, but nothing comes up except a faint taste of acid. When it’s over, I wipe the sweat and tears from my face, and try to stop shaking — hating more than anything the fact that I care about my
dignity,
the fact that I
do
give a shit whether or not I die in a pool of vomit, weeping like a child. As if this walk to my death is all that matters, now; as if these last few minutes of my life have superseded everything else.

They have, though, haven’t they? Everything else is past, is gone.

Yes — and so will this
begone.
If I am going to die, there’s no need to ‘make peace’ with myself, no reason to ‘compose myself for death. The way I face extinction is just as fleeting, just as irrelevant, as the way I faced every other moment of my life.

The one and only thing that could make this time
matter
would be finding a way to survive.

When I catch my breath, I try to stretch out the delay.

‘Carter, how many times have you done this?’

‘Thirty-three.’

Thirty-three.
That’s hard enough to swallow when some jilted gun fetishist squeezes the trigger of his sub-machine-gun and firehoses a crowd, but thirty-three leisurely strolls into the forest . . .

‘So tell me: how do most people take it? I really want to know. Do they puke? Do they cry? Do they beg?’

He shrugs. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Do they try to bribe you?’

‘Almost always.’

‘But you can’t be bought?’

He doesn’t reply.

‘Or — has nobody made the right offer? What do you want, if it isn’t money?
Sex?’
His face remains impassive — there’s no scowl of revulsion — so instead of making a joke of it, retracting what might have been an insult, I press on, light-headed. ‘Is that it? Do you want me to suck your cock? If that’s what you want, I’ll do it.’

He gives me that admonishing look again. No contempt for my spineless pleading, no disgust at my misjudged offer; just the mildest irritation that I’m wasting his time.

I laugh weakly, to hide my humiliation at this absolute indifference — this refusal to find me even pitiful.

I say, ‘So, people take it pretty badly. How do
you
take it?’

He says, matter-of-factly, ‘I take it pretty well.’

I wipe my face again. ‘Yeah, you do, don’t you? Is that what the chip in your brain is for? To let you sleep at night after you’ve done this?’

He hesitates, then says, ‘In a way. But it’s not as simple as that.’ He waves the gun. ‘Get moving. We’ve still got further to go.’

I turn, thinking numbly:
I’ve just told the one man who could save my life that he’s a
brain-damaged, subhuman killing machine.

I start walking again.

I glance up, once, at the blank idiot sky, and refuse to take delivery of the flood of memories linked in my mind to the same astonishing blue.
All of that is gone, it’s over.
No Proustian flashbacks, no Billy Pilgrim time-tripping for me. I have no need to flee into the past: I’m going to live into the future, I’m going to survive this.
How?
Carter may be merciless, and incorruptible — in which case, I’m simply going to have to overpower him. I may have led a sedentary existence, but I’m less than half his age; that has to count for something. At the very least, I must be faster on my feet.
Overpower him? Struggle
with a loaded gun?
Maybe I won’t have to; maybe I’ll get a chance to
run.

Carter says, ‘Don’t waste your time trying to think up ways to bargain with me. It’s not going to happen. You’d be better off thinking of ways to accept the inevitable.’

‘I don’t want to fucking
accept it.’

‘That’s not true. You don’t want it to happen — but it
will
happen. So find a way to deal with it. You must have thought about death, before now.’

This is all I need: grief counselling from my own assassin.
‘If you want to know the truth: not once. One more thing I never got around to. So why don’t you give me a decade or two to sort it out?’

‘It won’t take a decade. It won’t take long at all. Look at it this way: Does it bother you that there are places outside your skin —
and you’re not in them?
That you come to a sudden end at the top of your skull — and then there’s nothing but air? Of course not. So why should it bother you that there’ll be times when you won’t be around — any more than you care that there are places you don’t occupy?

You think your life is going to be undone — cancelled out, somehow — just because it has an end?

Does the space above your head cancel out your body? Everything has
boundaries.
Nothing stretches on forever — in any direction.’

In spite of myself, I laugh; he’s gone from the sadistic to the surreal. ‘You believe that shit, do you? You actually think that way?’

‘No. I could have; it’s on the market — and I seriously considered buying it. It’s a perfectly valid point of view…but in the end, it just didn’t ring true for me — and I didn’t
want it
to ring true. I chose something else entirely. Stop here.’

‘What?’

‘I said stop.’

I look around, bewildered, refusing to believe that we’ve
arrived.
We’re nowhere special — hemmed in, as ever, between the ugly eucalypts; calf deep in the drought-shrivelled undergrowth — but what did I expect?
An artificial clearing? A picnic spot?

I turn to face him, scouring my paralysed brain for some strategy to get within reach of the gun — or get out of his range before he can fire — when he says, with perfect sincerity, ‘I can help you. I can make this easier.’ I stare at him for a second, then break into long, clumsy, choking sobs.

He waits, patiently, until I finally manage to cough up the word: ‘How?’

With his left hand, he reaches into his shirt pocket, takes out a small object, and holds it up for inspection on his outstretched palm. For a moment, I think it’s a capsule, some kind of drug — but it’s not.

Not quite.

It’s a neural implant applicator. Through the transparent casing, I can just make out the grey speck of the implant itself.

I have an instant, vivid fantasy of walking forward to accept it: my chance, at last, to disarm him.

‘Catch.’ He tosses the device straight at my face, and I put up a hand and grab it from the air.

He says, ‘It’s up to you, of course. I’m not going to force you to use it.’

Flies settle on my wet face as I stare at the thing. I brush them away with my free hand. ‘What’ll this give me? Twenty seconds of cosmic bliss before you blow my brains out? Some hallucination so vivid it’ll make me think this was all a dream? If you wanted to spare me the pain of knowing I was going to die, you should have just shot me in the back of the head five minutes ago, when I still thought I had a chance.’

He says, ‘It’s not a hallucination. It’s a set of. . . attitudes. A philosophy, if you like.’

‘What
philosophy?
All that crap about . . .
boundaries in space and time?’

‘No. I told you, I didn’t buy that.’

I almost crack up. ‘So this is
your religion?
You want to convert me, before you kill me? You want to save my fucking
soul?
Is that how you cope with slaughtering people?
You think you’re saving their
souls?’