Fractions (53 page)

‘2093.'

Wilde opened his eyes and gazed out over the canal.

‘I take it,' he said, ‘that the humans and human-equivalent robots didn't do all this on their own.'

‘Indeed not. Among the struts of the platform were huge entities that we called macros. They were made of nanomachines, and they were the hardware platform for millions of uploaded minds. People here, now, call them “the fast folk”. They were by then well beyond the human, and they were building a wormhole – the one our ship came through to get here.'

‘Where are they now?'

‘Ah,' said Jay-Dub. ‘A good question. The ones around Jupiter lost interest, shall we say, in the external world. The templates from which they developed, the source-code if you like, we brought with us, as we brought the stored minds and coded bodies of the dead.'

‘Including me?'

‘Well, yes. Your actual body wasn't coded, as far as I know. There was a tissue-sample, from which you were later – from which I cloned you. Your mind was coded, as I said.'

‘Separately from yours?' Wilde sounded puzzled.

‘My mind and yours were copied from the same original,' Jay-Dub said. ‘I woke up in that machine in exactly the same frame of mind as you woke up yesterday, and with exactly the same memories. And in less auspicious circumstances.'

‘My heart,' said Wilde, ‘absolutely fucking bleeds.'

‘My enormously sophisticated software detects a degree of hostility.' The machine's voice was attempting irony, something outside its familiar range.

‘I hope it does,' said Wilde. ‘You've just admitted that clones are a separate issue from stored minds. So the presence of anybody here who looks like somebody I used to know, is no indication what-so-fucking-ever that that person is actually here, am I right?'

‘In principle, yes, but –'

‘So your remark about the clone being some reason to hope that Annette was, as you put it, among the dead was a complete lie?'

‘No,' said the machine. ‘It does mean there's a chance.'

Wilde shook his head.

‘The more I think about it,' he said, ‘the more I doubt it. She never believed in cryonics or uploading or any of that shit. If she believed in anything, she believed in the general resurrection at the end of time. The Omega Point.'

‘And all that shit,' said Jay-Dub.

Wilde laughed. ‘You still think so? Well, I'll bow to your greater experience.'

The machine shifted slightly. ‘The end of time may be closer than you think, and worse than you can imagine.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I'd rather you worked it out for yourself,' said Jay-Dub. ‘Anything I tell you about it would only put further strain on your credulity. But it does add a degree of urgency to our task.'

‘Our task?' Wilde almost shouted. ‘What do you mean, “our”? The way I see it, I'm not Jon Wilde. I have his memories, and my body is like his was at twenty.' He lit and drew on another cigarette; smiled through a cough. ‘At twenty, we all feel immortal. But if anyone has a claim to
be
Wilde, it's you. You can keep his promises, fight his battles. I'm sure you remember one of those drunken discussions with Reid about cloning bodies and copying personalities; and the conclusion you came to: a copy is not the original, therefore…Reid had some quaintly theological way of putting it, you may recall.'

‘“The resurrected dead on the Day of Judgement are new creations, as innocent as Adam in the Garden.”'

‘Exactly,' said Wilde. ‘That's what I am: a new creation. A new man.' He sent his cigarette-end spinning into the canal and jumped to his feet, stretching his arms wide and looking up at the sky. ‘A New Martian!'

‘You're Wilde all right,' said the machine. ‘That's exactly how he would have reacted.'

The man laughed. ‘You don't catch me that easily. Similarity, no matter how exact, is not identity. Continuity is.'

‘That may be,' said the machine. ‘But everything about New Mars is a logical consequence of assuming the opposite.'

Wilde closed his eyes for a moment, then squatted down beside the robot and scratched lines in the dirt and gravel of the quay with a fishbone. He gazed at the resulting doodle as if it were an equation he was struggling to solve.

‘Ah,' he said. He thought about it some more. ‘Everything?'

‘Everything that matters,' said the machine.

‘But that's insane. It's worse than wrong – it's
mistaken.
'

‘I expected you to think that,' said Jay-Dub, a note of complacency in its tone. ‘That way, whether you identify yourself with the original Jonathan Wilde or not, you'll probably want to do what I want you to do.'

‘And what's that?'

‘You said Reid killed you – me, us, whatever. At the very least he was responsible. Sue the bastard for murder.'

Wilde laughed. ‘Sue, not charge? You have that too?' It sounded like his interest in his own case had been diverted by curiosity about the law.

‘That too,' Jay-Dub said heavily. ‘Polycentric legal system, we got.'

‘Whatever the legal system,' Wilde said, ‘for a living man to stand up in court and claim he was murdered is, well, pushing it.'

‘Exactly,' said Jay-Dub. ‘And I want to push it till it falls.'

Wilde scratched in the dust some more.

‘Ah,' he said. ‘I see. Very neat. All the answers are wrong. Like a
koan.
'

He looked up.

‘Why,' he added, ‘couldn't you sue Reid on your own account?'

Jay-Dub stood up, straightening and extending its legs. ‘Look around you,' it said, flailing its arms about at the busy quay. ‘Every jumped-up monkey here has rights that a court will recognise. I don't. I'm
instrumentum vocale
: a tool that talks.'

‘So what about this distinction you make so much of, between
human equivalent
and
just a fucking machine
?'

‘“Human equivalent”,' the robot said with some bitterness, ‘is a
marketing term.
It has no legal standing whatsoever, except with the abolitionists, and nobody gives a fuck about
them.
'

‘Oh?' Wilde looked interested. ‘That's the people the…gynoid went off with?'

‘Yes.'

‘I want to talk to them. They sound like my kind of people.'

‘I assure you they're not,' the robot said. ‘They're the kind of moralistic, dogmatic, self-righteous purists that you despised all your life.'

‘Fine,' the man said. ‘I said my kind of people, not Wilde's.'

He got to his feet. ‘I'm going to see them.'

‘That would be a mistake.'

Wilde set off briskly along the quay. ‘It's the kind of mistake,' he said, as Jay-Dub rose and followed, ‘that I died not making. Not many people get the chance to learn from that.'

 

Reid's office is large. The walls are curved, made from a plain grey cement that gives an unexpected atmosphere of warmth. The window's view adds a good percentage to the room's price. The morning sunlight slants through it. On the desk, of solid wood polished so that it looks almost like plastic, there's a standard keyboard and screen. Reid has contacts, which he seldom uses, on his eyes.

He's sitting on the desk, leaning across it, paging through a search. The search is fast, and the scenes flash by in reverse order. Days of recorded phone-calls jabber and gesticulate backwards.

He stops, slows, pages forward. Freezes the scene.

He looks up. ‘C'mere,' he says.

Collins and Stigler step over and peer at the screen. It shows the interior of the cab of some big powerful haulage vehicle. The details are quaint: a dangling mike, a peeling motto, padded polyethylene seats. A man with a lined, leathery face is looking into the camera. Beside him is a young woman with very dark eyes, very black hair, a tight tee-shirt and cropped denim shorts. She has the look of an intelligent and wary slut.

Reid fingers a key and the picture moves. There's a flicker of interference that makes all three men blink and shake their heads slightly. As they open their eyes the screen clears.

‘Forget it,' the man's saying. ‘Wrong number.'

His hand moves out of frame and the screen blanks. Another recorded call begins. Reid stops and scrolls back. He pauses at the interference, runs it past again slowly.

‘Oh, shit,' he says.

He clicks on another screen icon and pulls in some analysis software. The flicker suddenly becomes a page of symbols. Reid clicks again. The symbols expand into screens and screens of text. Reid runs his finger down the monitor, his frown deepening.

‘Son of a
bitch
,' he says, sitting back.

Stigler is twitching. ‘That guy,' he says excitedly. ‘With the skin thing, he's –'

Reid looks at him. ‘No shit, Sherlock.'

He calls up the picture again and runs another program, which smooths and softens the man's features.

‘Hey!' says Collins.

Reid points at the screen. ‘Get him,' he says.

‘Wait a minute,' says Stigler. ‘You said we'd need a warrant, and I can't see no court giving –'

Reid claps him on the back. ‘Don't you worry about it,' he grins. ‘That man is
dead.
'

He stalks away and leans once more on the sill, looking out through the window at the city, and smiles into the sunlight.

I looked up from the
Observer
on the breakfast table. Outside, through the french window, our small walled backyard hummed with bees and bloomed with weeds. Ten o'clock sun slanted steeply in. Annette was sitting feet up along the bench opposite, leaning against the wall, enjoying her first cigarette and second coffee of the day. Eleanor, the main reason why we were up at this hour on a Sunday morning (and the result of a Sunday morning seven years earlier when getting out of bed was the last thing on our minds) knelt over felt-tip pens and a colouring-book.

‘What are we doing today?' I asked.

‘Peace-fighting,' Annette said firmly.

‘Not me,' I said, in chorus with Eleanor's groaned ‘Oh
no
, mummy.' I'd forgotten about the CND demonstration, although it had been pencilled, then biro'd, on the kitchen calendar for weeks.

‘Please yourselves, anarchists,' Annette said, stubbing out her cigarette. Something in her tone and gesture told me she was annoyed – having succeeded in getting us to demos before, she knew our objection was based more on sloth than principle. In this year of Chernobyl and Tripoli, we were letting the side down.

‘How about if we meet you there?' I suggested hastily. ‘Eleanor and I could nip over to Camden market, then we'll go and see Granny and Grandpa at Marble Arch and watch out for you, and we can all go to McDonald's afterwards.'

As I spoke Eleanor transparently calculated whether trailing around second-hand bookstalls was worth it for the sake of seeing her grandparents and tanking up on cheeseburger and milkshake. From the way her eyes brightened it looked like the bottom line was in the black. I turned to Annette, who gave me a relenting smile.

‘OK,' she said. ‘At least you'll be there.' She stood up, in a graceful slither of nightdress and negligée. ‘And come on, you,' she added, stooping to pat the sticking-up rump of Eleanor, now back at her colouring. ‘Get yo' little ass into some kinda decent gear.'

 

‘Do we have-to?'

There were times – like this, and bedtimes – when I regretted ever answering the question: ‘Daddy, what's libertarianism?' with anything but a lie.

‘No, we don't
have
to,' I said. ‘But we're going to, because I bloody say so.'

‘I'll tell mummy you said that.'

‘Said what?'

‘Bloody.'

‘Go ahead, clipe.'

‘Whassa clipe?'

‘A
much
worse word. A terrible word.'

By this time we were in the street, walking briskly along to Holloway Road. Even on a Sunday the trucks were lined up, honking nose to stinking tail. I blamed the environmentalists, who'd delayed the widening of the Archway road for years and inflicted planning blight on the entire neighbourhood. At least it lowered the price of a ground-floor flat. I relieved my feelings by starting to sing ‘Ten Green Protestors' and got Eleanor skipping and singing along. By the time we'd reached ‘…there'd be no Green protestors and a road through the wall!' we were on the Camden bus.

Top deck, branches brushing past. Smokers had to sit at the back. I blamed the environmentalists.

Chalk Farm Road and Camden Market cheered me up, as they always did whether or not I found anything I wanted. Stalls and canals and the invincible hand of the flea market, its black plastic bags and canopies the banners of an anarchist army that would still be there when the rest had done their worst, if anything were there at all.

We left with a leatherbound Lord Macaulay for me, an antique rayon bodice for Annette, a coral paperweight for my parents and a climbing wooden monkey for Eleanor. So I was in a good mood when we emerged past the lines of cops at Marble Arch and found my mother and father near Speakers' Corner. As I'd expected, they were leafletting and pamphletting and generally irritating the first contingents to trail in after traipsing – with an entirely unjustified sense of having achieved something – from another park to this one.

Eleanor raced up to be grabbed by her grandparents. I encircled them both in a quick air-hug and let them get back to work. Tall, stooping, grey-haired, and tough as a pair of old boots, they'd seen it all before: the Peace Pledge Union, CND, the Committee of 100, Vietnam Solidarity, CND again…Today they were doing a respectable trade in a pamphlet. In between keeping half an eye on the demo and chatting to whichever of them wasn't in full flow, I flipped through
Is a Third World War Inevitable?
: its cover as lurid as any peace-movement propaganda, its contents a frosty dismissal of two centuries of peace campaigns – all of which had failed to prevent (where they hadn't actively endorsed) increasingly destructive wars.

A Scottish ASTMS banner bellied through the gateway, and as it sailed closer I saw Annette a few rows behind it. She was walking with a man whom I recognised, with a pleasant surprise, as Reid. We'd seen him a quite a few times over the past decade, kept in touch: he'd crashed out on our floor often enough when he was in London for work or politics.

I stood there under the trees while my mother talked to Eleanor and my father argued with a stray Spartacist, and watched their approach. They were deep in conversation, faces serious, eyes oblivious to the surrounding march. When they were about twenty metres away Reid, perhaps distracted by the raised voices nearby, looked aside and saw me. He touched Annette's elbow and she saw me too, and immediately they broke ranks and hurried over.

Reid's hair was shorter and neater than it had been the last time I'd seen him, at a
Critique
conference the previous year. His shirt, black jeans and Reeboks were new. His denim jacket was faded, frayed, breastplated with badges against Reagan and Thatcher, Cruise and Pershing; for the Sandinistas and Solidarnosc, and (as if that unlikely combination wasn't enough) a red-and-gold enamel badge celebrating the 1980 Moscow Olympics. A carrier-bag flapped lightly from one hand.

‘Hi Dave. Good to see you, man.'

‘Yeah, likewise.' He slapped my shoulder. ‘Hello, Eleanor. You've grown a lot.' Eleanor gave him a smile that showed all the gaps in her milk-teeth. Her gaze kept returning to the bright rows of badges.

My father's dispute had ended in a stand-off. The Spartacist, a scrawny lad in a knit cap and lumber-jacket, saw Reid and turned like a locking-on radar.

‘Comrade –' he began, stepping forward and moving a bundle of papers into combat position.

‘Oh, piss off,' Reid said, barely glancing at him. He faced my father. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Wilde. I'm David Reid. Annette and Jon have often told me about you.'

‘Martin,' my father said. ‘And this is my wife Amy. Pleased to meet you, David.' He grinned. ‘Jonathan tells me you're quite bright, for a Trot.'

Reid looked at me with raised eyebrows. I shrugged and spread my hands. ‘I take no responsibility for what his warped mind makes of anything I say.'

‘Can we go to McDonalds now?'

My father smiled at Eleanor and checked his watch. ‘There'll be a couple of comrades along shortly,' he said. ‘What about you, David?'

Reid jiggled his carrier-bag on one finger. ‘I've sold most of my papers. Yeah, I'll be OK to skive off for half an hour or so.'

‘It'll be all boring speeches now,' Annette said. She smiled and waved airily. ‘Fine by me.'

‘She never brings anything to demos,' I explained.

‘Only my beautiful self.'

‘That's enough,' Reid and I said at the same time, and we all laughed.

 

We hung about for a few more minutes until my parents' comrades – who, to my surprise, had green hair and studded nostrils – turned up. Then we ducked under the main road and through the golden arches, to find the place packed. A lot of badges and plastic bags, a lot of post-attack black.

‘Goddamn anti-Americans,' Martin muttered as we queued. ‘Under-fed, under-employed and underfoot!'

He trotted out some variant of this at every occasion of suspected anti-Yank sentiment, and now I barely grunted at it, but Reid grinned broadly. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘They come down here, they take our seats…'

Ten minutes later we were crowded around something that wasn't so much a table as a painstakingly exact plastic replica of one. Eleanor sat between her grandparents and kept them entertained. Annette sat on one bolt-down seat and Reid and I half-leaned, half-sat over another.

‘Annette says you're still lecturing,' Reid said.

‘Yeah.' I blew on a hot fry. ‘Part-time, short-term contracts. Further education's run like a typing pool these days.'

‘You should approve.' Dave was eating quickly, glancing away every, now and then.

‘I would if there was some sense to it all…Just as well Annette's got a steady job.'

‘Solid breadwinner,' Annette said, around a mouthful.

‘Safe from everything except the animal rights nutters?'

‘That's about it. How're you doing yourself?'

‘Working for North British Mutual,' Reid said. ‘Big insurance company in Edinburgh. I'm supposed to be a software engineer. It's just like being a programmer except you do it properly.' He leaned closer in a parody of confidentiality, and winked at my father. ‘Money for old rope.'

‘Still with the Migs, I take it?'

Reid gave a twisted smile. ‘Everybody's in the Labour Party these days, but you know how it is. Got into working in the union. Been on the branch committee for the past year.'

My father looked suddenly alert. He'd been on
his
branch committee for decades.

‘God, that must be thrilling,' I said.

For a moment Reid's face took on a look of utter weariness.

‘It's OK,' he said. ‘Better than Labour Party ward meetings anyway.'

‘I'll tell you what your trouble is,' my father said quietly. ‘You're still doing it for the party, not for the union.'

Reid shook his head. ‘I'm for the union!'

Martin narrowed his eyes, held his gaze for a second, then returned to teasing Eleanor.

‘What's
your
political activity these days?' Reid asked, breaking an awkward silence. ‘Deep entry in the Tory Party?'

‘Very funny,' I said. I
had
once spoken at a fringe meeting, but I wasn't about to tell him that. ‘I do odd bits of work and write articles for what I consider good causes. Everything from Amnesty International to the Space Settlers' Society, with the Libertarian Alliance somewhere in between.' I shrugged. ‘I know – it sounds a bit…all over the place.'

‘Space and freedom, huh?' Reid said lightly.

Across the street the demonstration was still going past. A banner with a picture of a rising rocket – a Polaris missile – caught my eye, and I think that was the moment when it all came together, when I had the vision. I saw a future where other people – infinitely different from these, infinitely like them – carried banners with other and greater rockets, chanted unfamiliar slogans I couldn't quite make out.

‘That's it!' I said. ‘That's what we need to get away from the nuclear terrorists. A
space
movement! Escape from the planet of the apes!'

‘That'll be the day,' Reid said. He examined a hunk of sesame-sprinkled roll, stuffed it in his mouth and chewed it. ‘OK folks, I gotta go.' He smiled around the table, saw Eleanor's covetous look at his badges and took one off and gave it to her. Jobs Not Bombs. ‘My phone-number's still the same. See you soon, I hope.' I caught a flicker of a look between him and Annette. His eyes, as he turned to me, were calm and friendly as ever. ‘Next time we'll have a proper drink, right?'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘“Not those rich imperialist tit-bits.”'

‘Yeah,' he grinned. ‘Well, back to the Judean People's Front.'

‘What!?? Don't you mean the People's Front of Judea?'

Reid smote his forehead. ‘Of course. See ya mate.'

He edged through the crush and vanished into the crowd.

 

We finished up our fast-food in a defiantly leisurely way. The queue, as apparently unending as the demonstration, shuffled forward. My father spotted a young woman carrying a bundle of papers whose headline – no, it wasn't even that, it was the actual
masthead
– read ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!' and asked her in a tone of polite curiosity: ‘Why don't you fight capitalism, for a change?'

But after the young woman had said only a few sentences, he stopped her with a smile and an uplifted finger. He looked at his watch, and brought the finger down to tap it triumphantly.

‘One minute, twenty-five seconds,' he said to the puzzled cadre. ‘Congratulations. That's the shortest time yet for a member of – let me see –' he made a pretence of counting on his fingers ‘– a split, from a split, from a split, from the Fourth International to call
me
a sectarian!'

He stood back as we all rose to sweep our detritus onto trays.

‘Wasse on about?' the young woman said indignantly, seeing a look of surreptitious sympathy from Amy. ‘Wassis Fourf Inte'national?'

‘Don't you worry, dear,' Amy said, squeezing past. ‘He's a terrible man.'

But she slipped the girl a leaflet all the same.

Amy believed there was hope for everybody yet.

Except, possibly, Martin.