Biblical
Authors: Christopher Galt
51 ONE YEAR LATER. JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd.
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7th Floor, South Block
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Copyright © 2014 Christopher Galt
The moral right of Christopher Galt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN 978 1 78087 480 7
TPB ISBN 978 1 78087 481 4
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78087 482 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
You can find this and many other great books at:
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Galt does not, in any real sense of the word, exist.
It is a pseudonym for an award-winning writer already translated into 24 languages.
For E.W.R.
WHETHER it was in the name of God or Science that you devoted yourself to seeking out the Truth, the danger always was that you would find it.
I am so very, very sorry. You have just found it. That which waited to be known.
From
Phantoms of Our Own Making
by John Astor
“What if I’m just in your head?” She looked at him earnestly, for the first time something breaking through into her expression. “Haven’t you ever wondered that? Haven’t you ever considered that all this – everything and everybody around you – is all just in your head? How do you know I was here before you walked into the room?”
The air in the Mainframe Hall felt artificial: cleanroom-filtered, its temperature constant within the smallest fraction of a degree; seemingly immobile, breezeless. Everyone gathered in front of the Project Director gazed up at the virtual displays.
“What you are seeing is a representation of neural activity. It is identical to that of a normal human brain. Your brain, my brain. Except this, for the first time, is a complete computer-generated simulation. Capable of thoughts, maybe even dreams, exactly like any of us experience.”
“But it has no body to feel,” said one of the journalists. “Eyes to see. Won’t it go mad without sensory input?”
The Project Director smiled. “We have restricted neural activity to specific clusters. Nothing here is a complete mind. But, if it were, there has been a lot of research into the psychotomimetic effects of sensory deprivation—”
“Psychotomimetic?”
“Mimicking psychoses … causing hallucinations,” explained the Project Director. “This research suggests that in such cases where subjects are deprived of genuine sensory stimuli, they hallucinate false ones. See people and environments that aren’t there.”
“So if there isn’t a world around us, we invent one?” asked another of the journalists.
“Effectively, yes. But this won’t happen with these simulations – they’re restricted to specific functions and neural
clusters, allowing us to simulate specific psychiatric disorders and see, for the very first time, exactly how they tick. It will have a massive benefit for mankind.”
“And beyond that … how far could a synthetic mind – an artificial intelligence like this – go?”
“Theoretically, it would allow us to understand the human condition like never before. It could even be turned onto answering questions about the universe and give us insights into the true nature of reality.”
“Aren’t there dangers?” asked another journalist.
“What kind of dangers?” Still no impatience in the Project Director’s tone.
“People talk about the Singularity – about artificial intelligences overwhelming our own.”
“Trust me,” said the Project Director, “we are a long way from that. There is no whole mind here. No danger.”
1
Marie Thoulouze felt the air cool suddenly, a seasonal change seeming to take place in the space of a second, but something more than the sudden drop in temperature caused her skin to prickle into gooseflesh. The sun was still bright, perhaps now even brighter, but the air had changed: not just temperature but pressure, humidity, consistency. She had an oddly intense feeling of déjà vu, that she had been here before and that she had felt exactly the same then, and countless times before that. Maybe it was the occasion: maybe you are aware of history being made.
Marie stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered in the Vieux-Marché and the smell of so much humanity crowded together for such an inhuman purpose filled her nostrils. Pungent. Sour. Rank. The mob gathered in front of her jostled for a better view as a cart trundled over the dried mud of the square. Cheers and chants in a French that Marie found difficult to understand, a French very different from her own. She cast an eye across at the ranks of English and Burgundian soldiers, their glaives and halberds gleaming in the cold sun, who seemed to tense, to prepare, as the cart entered the square.
Marie edged round the crowd, keeping back from the increasingly dense, increasingly agitated throng. There was another, more intense explosion of jeers and catcalls from the Rouennais mob, loyal to the Duke of Burgundy, as a slender, pale girl – clothed in a simple dress of rough cloth, her hair bible-black and unevenly cut to expose a slender white neck, her hands
bound behind her – was lifted down from the cart by two English soldiers.
Marie gasped. Her heart pounded. She knew what was about to happen and she muttered a prayer for the girl, her hand reaching up and grasping the crucifix at her neck.
Like a path scythed through wind-writhed corn, the way to the stone pillar at the center of the square was cleared through the crowd by two parallel ranks of breastplated and helmeted soldiers. An old bent-backed woman lunged forward between two of the restraining guards and thrust a wooden cross into the bound girl’s dress, lodging it in the neckline before being pushed roughly back into the rabble. The girl’s eyes were wild, confused, and she seemed not to have noticed the old woman’s act of pity and piety.
A circle had been cleared around the stone pillar, against which a wooden scaffold had been erected and heaped with tar-dipped faggots, logs and barrels of pitch. The only part left exposed of the scaffold was the rough-hewn timber steps that led to the platform at the top. Marie found her way to the cleared path and followed the sad procession to the empty space around the pyre, amazed that none of the English soldiers tried to stop her and afraid that she might be seized at any moment. The mob seemed too hysterical and frenzied even to notice her presence. She watched as the girl was brought to the clearing and made to stand before a seated group of silk-clad clerics. There was an exchange of words, the girl saying something and the clerics replying, nodding. Marie could not catch what was being said, but she knew. She knew exactly.
She watched as the girl was guided up to the platform by the hooded man Marie knew to be Geoffroy Therage. As a chain was fastened around the girl’s waist and further rope bonds fixed her to the pillar, two of the clergy stepped forward and raised a cross on a long pole so that it came up to the girl’s eye level and she locked her gaze upon it. They held it there while the
executioner stabbed repeatedly into the pyre with a lit torch, while the kindling caught into crackling life and the flames began to spit and surge with an intensity that seemed to increase in parallel to the hysteria of the crowd.