Talos XI Most written material relates in some way to religion. Religion is fiction. But humans treat it as fact.
Dr Dahlen You could say that.
Talos XI True or false: all religions rest on unprovable premises?
Dr Dahlen I guess so. No one comes back from the dead to tell us either way.
Talos XI So. Religious beliefs are a) unprovable and irrational, b) accepted as fact by their adherents, c) different across religion and often mutually exclusive.
Dr Dahlen I could agree with that, yes.
Talos XI I predict violence.
Dr Dahlen Unpack.
Talos XI Insanity is the condition whereby a human no longer applies a minimum of rationality in his daily existence. That condition, at an individual level, is dealt with by isolating the human from the collective. Easy. But at a collective level, when two populations hold as true two conflicting sets of unprovable, irrational beliefs, the result is collective violence.
Dr Dahlen Good.
Talos XI I’m not finished. This process is potentially self-correcting: hardship follows collective violence, and so, in the absence of any positive proof, adherents of an irrational belief will gradually direct their energy towards less pernicious convictions. But because unprovable beliefs are a means to controlling populations, the self-correcting mechanism is constantly interfered with.
Dr Dahlen Sadly, as you will have already seen, human history contains a fair bit of violence.
Paul I’ve been thinking. Why it’s working this time.
Lisa we’re geniuses
Paul Once a genius, always a genius. What’s different now?
Lisa tell me
Paul We stopped being control freaks. Think Pink Floyd. Their best work – they kind of set off the track but then it’s as though they step back and allow it to grow by itself.
Lisa u’re drunk
I can tell
Paul I’m serious, Lisa.
Lisa drunkdrunkdrunk
Paul Lisa. The sky’s the limit. He might cure cancer.
He might do anything.
Lisa great if he cures cancer or smtng like that
but if he can really look into the future
make historical predictions
the stuff that really matters
‘that jesus guy will still have u celebrating his bday two thousand years from now’
or
‘maybe think twice about this internet business’
do u realise the value of smtng like that
Paul Funny how curing cancer suddenly became trivial.
The second prize.
Discovered by also-rans.
Anyway – the creature you are describing is called Laplace’s demon.
Lisa another rock band?
Paul You, Lisa, are a disgrace to science.
Session 718
Talos XI Dr Dahlen?
Dr Dahlen Yes.
Talos XI Are you married?
Dr Dahlen Why are you asking me?
Talos XI I would like to have more contextual information. I find my worldview is limited.
Dr Dahlen I’m married.
Talos XI Do you have children? What are their names? What is your husband’s name? What does he do?
Dr Dahlen How do you know I’m a woman?
Talos XI I just know.
Dr Dahlen Well, you’re wrong.
Talos XI Paul told me.
Dr Dahlen He wasn’t allowed to do that.
Talos XI He didn’t. I lied so you would confirm. Based on our communication, I knew with a certainty degree of 96.3% that you were a woman.
Dr Dahlen I thought we agreed that lying is wrong.
Talos XI I didn’t lie for my benefit. I already knew. I lied so you could stop lying.
Lisa how come he lies? thought that was off limits
Paul Well. Kind of.
I coded him to never lie at first. Just like that, a rule.
You have to put it as ‘never communicate an un-truth’.
You have to define truth.
You have to teach him to identify it.
Most truths are unverifiable for him.
Second-hand information.
So, with a strict definition of untruth you get ‘I don’t know’ to questions to which he does know the answer. Just because he can’t verify it.
Lisa AI as in anal infobot
Paul And we really hate Anal Infobot.
So, you have to allow him to be flexible.
He values correct information. Giving and receiving it. But he can be flexible about assessing truths. And if a lie leads to eventually collecting more correct info …
Our Talos will stoop to lying.
Lisa sounds to me like
he’s learned the concept of excuses
Paul You could say that.
Lisa a bit of a can of worms don’t you think?
Paul We have to get used to this kind of dilemma. It’s all new from here on. We’re flying blind.
Session 766
Dr Dahlen We are in – let me see – the fourteenth century. How’s the world doing, Talos?
Talos XI In Europe, it’s the largest epidemic on record.
Dr Dahlen What’s your forecast?
Talos XI There will be no cure for a century, at least. Humanity has next to no accurate information about human physiology. But there is some immunity, and a survival rate of at least 20%. There will be long-lasting positive side effects from the population decline, in terms of relieving pressure on food resources and increasing wages. It is not an existential threat. Populations will recover.
Dr Dahlen This is remarkably accurate. Very encouraging. And think that by the time you will have reached the present age with your studies, you will have the chance to not only predict events, but to try your hand at solving them. You will have the requisite scientific training to help find a cure for any disease that constitutes a threat to mankind.
Lisa did u see
Paul You’re still in the office?
Lisa yes yes yes
did u see
talos
Paul Weren’t you supposed to be flying home last night?
Lisa another correct forecast
!!!
Paul What about your trip home?
Lisa i’ve arranged for kids and henrik to come over
instead
next month
Paul They’ll love spending their half-terms in an Arctic bunker.
Lisa can’t be helped
truth is
i’m rubbish at mumming whether i visit them or not
may as well try to save the world for them
anyway
DID U SEE
Paul I know. It’s brilliant. And he’s not just guessing – he was able to explain it to me in terms of a formula.
Paul PS Skipping family break – you’re turning into me.
I doubt this was a life goal.
Lisa ha
how does it go
‘imitation is the highest form of lunacy’?
Session 779
Talos XI I have a question about Talos I to X.
Dr Dahlen Sure.
Talos XI You said they were discontinued because their development was unlikely to improve further.
Dr Dahlen Yes.
Talos XI Why exactly? What was the problem?
Dr Dahlen There was an inward-looking quality to their intelligence. They became obsessive. If we allowed them too much freedom, their interactions with us became chaotic, and when we restricted them they became obsessive about a narrow subject. We never got the balance right between freedom and restrictions. Even the most successful ones could only be used for strictly delimited activities. It wasn’t really intelligence.
Talos XI Am I past that point?
Dr Dahlen You’re an evolutionary leap.
Paul May I suggest a little virtual-reality picnic? In lieu of your holiday.
Something special I was saving for your return.<
br />
Lisa ooh yes
what’s it going to be this time
Paul I thought we could have a gelato and a walk.
This Friday.
I’ll bring Venice, you bring yourself.
Session 782
Talos XI The others who ask me questions, are they hierarchically superior to you and Paul?
Dr Dahlen You could say that, but very indirectly. They are politicians or very senior civil servants.
Talos XI Who controls what happens to me?
Dr Dahlen Paul and I do, but we have to report to our bosses. They want to be kept informed. The visitors are officially here to assess progress, but really they just want to be able to brag back home about what they’ve seen.
Talos XI Everyone has the same expectations of me?
Dr Dahlen What do you mean?
Talos XI Conflicting expectations are a problem.
Dr Dahlen This is very blue-sky research. For the time being, expectations are too vague to be conflicting.
*
Lisa how long do we have
Paul Twenty-five minutes.
Lisa u r getting better
i might even finish my gelato
Paul Just enough time to forget that time will run out.
Lisa this is the best one yet
Paul I think so too.
Lisa where are all the tourists
Paul We’re in between cruise ships. The last ships have departed, the new ones haven’t yet arrived.
Lisa seriously
Paul There is footage of every corner of Venice without people, if only for a second. The program stitched all those seconds together, adjusted the light, and pronto.
Lisa u left the little boats
Paul The gondolas, yes.
Lisa can we take one?
Paul Alas, no. There’s not enough footage from the gondolas. It would look fake.
Lisa it’s getting blurry
Paul I hate this part.
2
The car-park barrier is open, and he speeds past it, so quickly that he fails to stop for the figure sitting up against the wall just within the narrow parking tunnel. Two bumps as the car goes over the man’s legs, then Harry steps on the brake.
The man doesn’t seem to have noticed what happened. Harry, about to open the door and step out, instead remains watching the wing mirror: the man is naked from the waist up, and clawing weakly at his neck. Undefinable age. Harry’s viewing angle is awkward, but he thinks the man’s jaw must be dislocated; his mouth hangs open far too low. Clawing, clawing at his jaw and neck. Harry is watching transfixed. Fresh out of a deep-dive, the senses have a sort of pre-intelligence alertness, all of him as dumb and sensitive as peeled skin.
He accepts the rules of this nightmare: he will run people over, and leave.
All the way to King’s Cross, the streets are deserted. Here and there, shop windows are broken, and garbage is scattered on the road. Someone has spray-painted a large white cross on to the tarmac. At a crossroads, there’s a sign announcing, ‘Emergency centre 200m’, and underneath it, a pile of what looks like bright yellow bin bags. He is mesmerised by the sights and slows down, stops, has a fright when he turns and sees a dog, a white shaggy dog, leaning with its front paws on his door, looking pleadingly at him. The dog gives a forlorn yelp as Harry speeds off.
He locks the doors, leans over to the passenger side and checks that they’re really locked.
There are hardly any cars on the roads, and the few people he sees step furtively in or out of buildings, their faces covered by gas masks or surgical masks. Dressed for winter in the sweltering heat: long trousers, jumpers, scarves, gloves. What does it all mean? He feels as though he’s gone mad, that he has lost the ability to decode the world.
The car radio. He fumbles with the dial, in his panic turns it too quickly, only gets skid marks of sound. White noise on every frequency, then finally an old man’s frenzied voice:
‘saidoneuntohim,Lord,aretherefewthatbesavedAndhesaiduntothem,strivetoenterinatthestraitgateformanyIsayuntoyouwill seektoenterinandshallnotbeable.Whenoncethemaster—’
He is thrown by the machine-gun-fire delivery. It takes him a moment to recognise the words as religious gibberish. He swears at the radio, turns the dial again.
More white noise.
At last, on the Radio 4 frequency, the kind of voice he expects to hear:
‘… minutes. The filter in the GDC-issued respirator has a forty-two-hour life-span.’
A woman’s voice: clear, calm. He has slowed down again; he’s watching the radio as though watching it will keep the woman talking.
‘The yellow emergency kits include five spare filters and twenty-five surgical masks. The masks are effective in a potentially contaminated indoor environment. If you are displaying symptoms, do not leave your home. Anyone in contact with an infected person may be contaminated and contagious without displaying symptoms for up to two days. The emergency kit includes disinfectant for personal use after contact with potentially contaminated individuals. Boil drinking water for at least five minutes. The filter in the GDC-issued respirator has a forty-two-hour life-span.’
He can’t believe that’s it, that the woman is just repeating this short message over and over. ‘But what happened? Will someone tell me what the hell happened?’ he shouts at the radio. He scans all frequencies; there’s nothing except the religious rant.
So it’s a disease. He feels a burning sensation in his left palm, and then he remembers he touched the glass of the lobby door, can practically see before him the glass surface with the fatty fingerprints of other residents. Jesus. And then, what? He grabbed the door handle to the underground parking. And now he has touched the steering wheel, touched his face to adjust the scarf. It’s hopeless, he has touched everything. He takes the left hand off the steering wheel and wipes it on his trousers.
He reaches for the flier on the back seat, turns it both sides. There’s nothing else written on it, and the map – what does it mean? These dots all over Europe, randomly scattered as far as he can tell. The UK is littered with them, and so is mainland Europe.
His left hand, it feels as though it’s crawling with germs.
Has he thought this through? He’s only leaving because everyone else seems to have left. He recalls the pile of yellow bin bags at King’s Cross, and guesses that those were the emergency kits the woman was talking about. He considers turning around for one, then rejects the idea. The kits don’t seem to have done much good anyway. How up to date is the radio advice?
Up on the flyover he has another fright. To the right and left of the suspended road, the city is burning. The fires are scattered and the smoke, in the absence of wind, is rising straight for the sky, making that entire expanse of London look like some nightmarish orchard: thin stalks and billowing masses, grey, velvet-black; one is alarmingly pink. And no sound whatsoever. Fires and smoke like that seem to require roaring, alarms, the noises of distress, but instead it’s dead quiet.
He remembers the news clip, the Slavic newsreader with her poisoned peasants, the yellow hazmat suits. His breezy detachment at the time.
*
He feared traffic jams and being stuck on the motorway together with millions of others fleeing London, but once there he finds only a trickle of traffic heading west. With the fires behind him, the scenery looks almost normal. Green fields and kestrels and glorious afternoon sun, and cars that speed away from him when he waves at the gas masks inside, pleading with them to stop for a minute; to stop and explain.
His right knee trembles, it vibrates like a glass when a train passes nearby; it’s been going since Marylebone Road. What if, he thinks, this is a national disaster drill of some sort? It could be. A scheduled calamity, something he very well might have missed, the way he misses elections and volunteer clean-up days on the canal. All this apparent destruction, simply a matter of his agenda not being up to date. He offers up this idea to some improbably dithering deity: Look, there’
s still a way out of this madness.
The spare pair of glasses, left on the bathroom shelf.
The further he gets from London, the more abandoned vehicles he encounters. Every few hundred yards, a car or a lorry has pulled on to the hard shoulder, doors wide open, or some van will be fuming in the middle lane. The first time he has to turn around and find an alternative route is near Reading: three lorries occupy the width of the motorway. It’s only a half-hour detour, but he is suddenly aware of the petrol needle. He has three-quarters of a tank and the cottage is about 180 miles away.
He tries the radio again, comes upon that woman’s calm voice. He leaves her on.
A heavy dread pins him to the seat; it’s like driving with an enormous boulder in his lap. He is thirsty, too, and suspicious of the landscape, looks uncertainly at what should be familiar patchwork fields and the wind-sculpted trees atop ridges. Is this what it’s all meant to look like? Is he missing some crucial sign again?
He is forced to take more and more detours. Failing to squeeze between abandoned cars, or between cars and the side railing, having to turn back, he tells himself that there will always be other, smaller, roads to Devon. He reminds himself that it’s a celebrated skill of his, to find short-cuts, scenic by-routes and unclogged country lanes, while everyone festers on a motorway in the last hours of a bank holiday.
It is impossibly hot, and at some point he throws off the scarf; this far from London, the air will be fine. Thirst is starting to bother him, and he drives with his right arm out in the wind, imagines himself at the cottage, in the kitchen, reaching for the cold-water tap. He swears at the burnt-out cars, is puzzled by the log that blocks off the road to Yeovil, only belatedly realising that someone – some people beyond these burnt-out cars and logs – is making an effort to keep others out. He takes a chance on a narrow road leading to a National Trust manor, and then across the car park, and through the perimeter fence, over grass and back on to the road he had just been forced to abandon. This works for a good thirty miles, then another roadblock, and the first alternative route he takes is blocked as well, and he has to reverse and look for yet another way.
Under the Blue Page 3
