A flush swept across Morgan’s bony chest. ‘The pursuit of knowledge,’ she said, ‘has nothing to do personal gain.’
‘And yet through pursuing knowledge, you personally have gained an impressive position. An impressive status.’ Cassie held her gaze. ‘No, I mean, you should be proud. You’re such a rarity. A woman at the top of your profession. A CBE. Inventor of this amazing technology. Scholarly integrity – a good reputation – is everything, isn’t it, in your field? What a shame it would be, if yours was trashed, because of a couple of bad decisions.’
For a moment Cassie thought Morgan wasn’t going to rise. Then: ‘If you’re alluding to what I think you are … I can assure you that clinical trial had full regulatory approval. Every aspect complied with legal requirements, with the research governance framework—’
‘Yeah yeah, that’s what Oswald told me. None of this was illegal. But whether or not that’s true, it wasn’t ethical. Was it? To run a trial with participants who were so ill, some of them, there’s no way they had the capacity to understand the risks involved? And then, when it goes wrong, to cover up the results – paying the patients’ fees at Raphael House, for instance, so it’s pretty much impossible for their families to move them to any other facility? Again, nothing illegal – but I think your academic colleagues would judge all of this to be profoundly unethical.’
Morgan opened her mouth, closed it again. Her face was mottled, white patched with red; the good opinion of her peers was something she couldn’t afford to lose. Cassie knew she’d found the sorest spot to press – and instead of pushing harder, she eased off. Changed tack. Almost casually, she said, ‘Tell me about the remedy.’
Morgan blinked at the change of subject. Ran her tongue round the inside of her mouth. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, I think you do. In fact, I know you do – because I’ve seen it. It’s downstairs right now. It’s in your kitchen.’
Eyes wide as a frog’s, Morgan pressed her lips shut.
Cassie leant forward. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You owe me an answer.’
In her armchair, the professor raised herself a little straighter. ‘Do I, though?’ She held Cassie’s gaze. ‘Do I really? Because, notwithstanding the slight risk involved in delivering the upgrade, it seems to me you’ve done very nicely out of this.’
It surged through her, fierce and jagged, the same rage that had taken her in Make-Believe. She could do it again, she could do it for real, reach right in to this woman and tear her apart—
Oblivious, Morgan carried on. ‘You’ll get your job back – the career you so carelessly threw away. You’ll get, no doubt, a healthy golden handshake …’
‘You. Know. Nothing.’ The words fell hard and black between them, tiny grenades, as Cassie rose to her feet. Too late, Morgan shut her mouth. ‘You know nothing about me. I didn’t sign up for this to get my job back, or money or anything like that. I’m doing it because one of your subjects’ – the word was a sour hiss – ‘is a friend. Alan Lauder?’ She laughed, incredulous, at Morgan’s vacant expression. ‘You don’t even recognise his name. Admitted to Raphael House, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia? Moved to the locked ward when his condition deteriorated? He’s the reason I agreed to deliver your bloody upgrade. I did it to help my friend.’
Morgan looked baffled. ‘But … perhaps I’m confused? I don’t see the relevance.’ She held up a hand as Cassie’s face twisted. ‘No, please: I don’t mean to say that your friend is irrelevant, or his situation … Only that the upgrade can’t possibly be of any help to him.’
Cassie wanted to rage and argue, to tell Morgan she was wrong. But the woman was only saying what Cassie already knew. What she knew, and couldn’t bear. She dropped back in her seat. ‘Oswald. He told me a story,’ she said. ‘He told me what I wanted to hear. You asked what he promised me; he said the upgrade would sever the connections.’ She shrugged. ‘And now I know the opposite is true, and you’re right. It’s too late. It’s too late for me to help Alan.’ Her mouth started to crumple, and she hid her weakness with a hand pressed to her chin. Tried to keep her voice steady. ‘So don’t tell me you don’t owe me anything, because this is not about me. It’s about Alan. And I don’t know how you’d even start to calculate your debt to him, but I’d say it’s pretty fucking massive, wouldn’t you?’
Cassie looked away from Morgan’s frog-like face. Stared hard at the carpet. Her sock-clad feet. Morgan’s naked and veined. There was nothing left to say, but Morgan spoke anyway.
‘We meant well.’
‘Fine. That makes everything alright.’
‘But it’s true. We never intended for it to happen like this,’ Morgan said. ‘I didn’t set out to invent an entertainment technology. It was always meant to be a therapeutic tool, Make-Well, we called it.’ She glanced at Cassie, then looked away. ‘I … have a brother,’ she said. ‘Younger than me; he’s always struggled – since his teens. That’s probably why …’
Each time she flattened them, Cassie’s hands pulled back into fists. She slid them beneath her, carried on listening to Morgan’s excuses.
‘We genuinely meant to help. The subjects …’ A flicker of self-awareness accompanied the word, a glance that could have been an apology. ‘We took a great deal of care with their selection. Very serious mental illness, not a great deal of hope for any kind of significant recovery. In the care of excellent facilities, small teams of psychiatrists who were completely committed to the project.’ She looked puzzled, as if it still surprised her, the turn her project had taken. ‘There was genuinely no negligence, we were in no way cavalier about patient safety. What happened was extraordinary, it was – we simply couldn’t have foreseen it.’
Almost every sentence Morgan spoke demanded a challenge: how could she justify a clinical trial with subjects who could never have given consent? How could she claim to care for the patients when the upgrade she’d designed would do nothing but exploit those botched results? Cassie chose just one to launch at the wall of self-justifications Morgan was building.
‘You said there would be real-time monitoring to protect people from traumatic connections – manual intervention for wealthy subscribers. Will that be applied in Raphael House, to protect the patients?’
Morgan looked down at her lap, where her fingers were fidgeting with her dressing-gown belt. ‘I did make a case for it, but … It’s a question of resources, I’m told.’
Slowly, Cassie shook her head. That was how much Morgan cared about clearing up the mess she’d made: she had made a resources request.
‘If it helps, at all, to know … I haven’t emerged unscathed from this.’ Morgan reached as if to tighten the belt of her dressing gown, then remembered it was undone, inside out. ‘It’s not the same, of course but – look at me, here alone. This isn’t a house for a single woman. My partner is, was, part of the research team, we were both early users …’ She stood, shrugged out of the gown and wrestled it right side round. ‘Such an intimate connection. It’s impossible to bear.’ Threaded her arms back in, tied the cord tight round her waist. ‘You can’t get that close and remain undamaged. With your feelings intact, for each other.’ Double knot. ‘In the end, we couldn’t look at each other. I would have left. She just got there first. The kids, thankfully – both too young—’ She sank back down in her chair.
Cassie looked at her with pity. It wasn’t true, of course, what Morgan was saying; she knew that. Not with someone you really loved. To be so damaged by the intimacy of Make-Believe, Morgan’s relationship must have been an impoverished thing in comparison to what she and Alan had shared. But … there was a chance, here, to draw Morgan close to her – for whatever good it might do. She painted sympathy onto her face, offered a sad smile of recognition.
‘So you’ve lost someone too – because of Make-Believe. It’s robbed us both.’
Morgan lifted a hand in a gesture of helplessness, let it fall back into her lap. For a short time, Cassie rem
ained silent while they settled into this new arrangement: still facing off in their opposite chairs, but side by side in loss. Then Cassie spoke softly.
‘What’s the remedy, Fiona?’
Morgan met her eyes, and Cassie could see the fight in her. Wanting to tell; holding back.
‘Is it something to do with the upgrade?’
A shake of the head. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘No? Why’s that?’
When Morgan replied, it took Cassie a moment to realise she was answering some different question, one that hadn’t been asked. ‘The problem with the upgrade – with Imagen’s whole approach to the situation – it preserves their commercial advantage, yes, but it’s short-term thinking.’
‘And the remedy, that’s not short-term?’
‘It can’t be.’ She was animated, suddenly, leaning forward to make her point. ‘It’s not only the immediate difficulty we need to consider, but future developments that are potentially even more problematic. It’s a question of control.’ She was watching Cassie closely now, to be sure she was following the argument. ‘Think about it: we engineered these user networks to be programmed, determined, to have a static function. Instead, they’re responding to their environment. Each closed system, as it connects with another, becomes part of a greater, dynamic system. The results are utterly unpredictable.’ Morgan swept her hands through the air, caught up in the urgency of her explanation. ‘Interaction with environment is a basic function of all living things; these biomolecular networks are living things. So we have to consider, what other actions are basic functions of life?’
Cassie thought of the biomolecules inside her, inside Alan. Joining. Growing. Spreading. The most basic drive of all: to reproduce. Was this what Morgan meant? But the professor was still talking, circling back to answer the question Cassie had originally asked.
‘You agreed to deliver the upgrade because you wanted to sever the connections – ironically so, because that’s what’s made my remedy obsolete.’ She saw the uncertainty on Cassie’s face, and jumped to clarify. ‘The remedy, you see, would have had the exact effect you wanted.’
‘You’re saying … the remedy would cut the connections?’
‘It was the obvious approach, to develop a fix that would disable the networks’ capacities for connection. But that wasn’t what Imagen wanted. So.’ She folded her hands in her lap. ‘It became my personal research.’
Across her shoulders, down her spine, Cassie felt a tingle: the brush of possibility. ‘Downstairs, in the freezer? That’s what you’ve been working on?’
‘Not that it’s ready. It’s not even a beta. A delta, perhaps: a first, untested version. But yes, if it were to work, it would achieve what Oswald promised you. It would disable the connections.’ Her gaze shifted. ‘The difficulty would have been in finding someone to deliver it. One of the patients would be ideal, of course—’ She caught Cassie’s expression, and raised her palms in apology. ‘Well, anyway, that’s not a possibility. There’s simply no way I could negotiate that kind of access to the patients, given everything that’s happened. All we’re permitted to do, now, is observe. But you … If you hadn’t agreed to deliver the upgrade, perhaps you might have been the one.’
‘But I would! Of course I would.’
Morgan glanced at her with regret. Gave the slightest shake of her head.
‘What would happen if I did? If I took your remedy?’
‘What would happen? Well, who knows … The upgrade you’ve already taken is untested. We think we know what it will do; we hope it will do this, and nothing else. We are far from certain that this is the case. Imagen consider this to be an acceptable risk, if it’s carefully managed – and without being insulting, that’s presumably why they chose you to deliver it: not only did they have the information and leverage that enabled them to manipulate you, you’re also fairly disposable.’ Morgan fixed Cassie with a curious gaze. ‘Incidentally – what did it feel like, the upgrade?’
‘Cold,’ said Cassie, with feeling. ‘Thick, and cold – and buzzy. Like insects. And the headache. But it’s fine now.’ She found she was rubbing her temples. ‘Mostly, it’s fine.’
‘Cold. That’s interesting … Anyway: add my remedy into the equation – two alterations together’ – she meshed her fingers – ‘and I’m many, many miles away from certain as to what might happen. How would they interact? I don’t know. Would one override the other? If so, in which order? I don’t know. These are sets of instructions: would the first take precedence over the second – or would the second wipe out the alterations made by the first?’ She shook her head. ‘Possibly, the second upgrade wouldn’t work at all – as with a computer upgrade that’s intended to update an operating system, but doesn’t recognise the operating system it ought to update, because that system has already been altered. You follow?’
‘So far.’
‘It’s also possible, I suppose, that the two alterations would somehow combine. Two sets of instructions, and a network attempting to implement both at once.’
‘Sounds … unpredictable.’
Morgan made a short, explosive sound that might have been a laugh. ‘Unpredictable would be an adequate summary. Think of what happens when there’s an error in your computer operating system.’
‘It crashes.’
‘Right. Then, after a crash, sometimes you can restart without any problems – but sometimes your operating system becomes corrupted. Nothing can run, no applications. You find you’ve lost your data. Or, you can’t start up at all.’
Lost data. Failed start-up. If Cassie was the computer in this analogy, there was no need for Morgan to explain any further.
‘But even if that weren’t the case,’ Morgan went on, ‘as I say: the remedy’s not ready yet. In animal tests it works to a certain extent – but the problem is the precision of the targeting. I need to achieve a fine edit, as it were, of the biomolecular functionality. As it stands, there’s a significant risk that the remedy wouldn’t merely destroy the capacity for connection between users. It could destroy the whole Make-Believe infrastructure.’
Cassie knew she was reaching for the impossible when she asked, ‘How long, until it’s ready?’ If they were looking at weeks or even months, perhaps there was a way …
‘With minimal resources, and no lab assistance – realistically it would be four, five years, before we had something that was ready to be introduced into humans.’
It was worse than she could have thought. To wait that long – it was inconceivable. She lowered her head, cradled it in her hands, like something beyond broken. Remembered what Nicol had said to her, once: that what Imagen put inside you remained their property, even when it became a part of you.
Well then. Better a shotgun than a laser. Better to destroy the whole damn thing. Everything that belonged to them. Every shred of Make-Believe.
Cautiously, she raised her head. Morgan was sitting low in her chair, staring into space.
‘Don’t you think it would be worth it?’ Cassie said, gently. ‘Don’t you think we should take the risk?’
Morgan seemed to haul up the words from somewhere deep inside. ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ she said – and from the desolation of her tone, Cassie understood she was thinking not of the patients in Raphael House, not of her complicity, but of her own loss. Her partner. Her children. And with this understanding came the realisation that it was Morgan’s loss that mattered, now. Insignificant as it was, that loss was how Cassie would persuade Morgan to help.
‘What’s your partner’s name?’ she asked.
Morgan hesitated. ‘Her name is Mika.’
‘Mika. OK then. Here’s the thing: you told me Mika’s left to escape the connections, all of that terrible damage. But where is she now, with that network still inside her? It’s like you said to me. A week, a month, however long; the next time she’s asleep near to someone else with an active network, she’ll be back there, in Make-Believe. With no control over what�
�s happening to her.’
Morgan was silent, hands gripping the cord of her gown.
‘But we can stop that. With your remedy – if you help me – it’s a way to protect her; actually, the only way. And not just that.’ She pressed her hands together, concentrating on getting the words right. ‘It’s like turning back the clock, on everything that went wrong between you. As best as you can, you’re giving yourself another chance. A clean slate.’ It was what Oswald had said to her, back in his office: it’s erased. For all her cynicism, how seductive that had been.
In the bay where they sat, between the shutters, the sky was lightening from the east. Across the city, Imagen’s people were searching. With all their resources, and all their urgency, they would find her eventually. They might even find her here. If Morgan’s remedy behaved in the same way as the upgrade – if it would take twenty-four hours before it was ready to work – she needed to act now. Alone, or with Morgan’s help.
‘Listen, I know what you stand to lose,’ she said. ‘But you said it yourself: you never intended for this to be an entertainment system. Think: you could start again – with your reputation intact.’ The threat was carefully buried, but she knew from the flinch that passed across Morgan’s face that it hadn’t gone unregistered. ‘You could find a better way to use the technology for therapeutic purposes. Do it properly, this time.’
A lifting of the head. A lengthening of the spine. The changes were slight, in Morgan’s posture, but Cassie thought – hoped – they might be significant. She clasped her hands tightly. Took a breath, and went to close the deal.
‘I could do it on my own. If I went downstairs right now and took your remedy, administered it to myself, I don’t think you would stop me. I don’t think you could. But it’d work better with your help. Please. For Mika, and Alan. Will you help me make things right?’
An agreement made without words. Made with a raise of Morgan’s chin, with a narrowing of her eyes – as if towards a shaft of light that fell, unexpected, from what had seemed a solid wall, and turned out to be a door.
A User's Guide to Make-Believe Page 26
