Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  If I want the Chamber for my own, I must agree to do four murders. I must use it to go into the lives of four people at a particular point along their way and make them die. I am being, in the quaint old-fashioned legal term, contracted to conduct an assassination, and these are the conditions of my payment: I must go and kill the banker, the alchemist, the artist and the librarian.

  I have no problem with that at all.

  You could justify what I will do by saying it’s a small sacrifice in order to preserve really absurd numbers of other people, and it is. But that’s not why I don’t care. I don’t care because I don’t care.

  There’s a joke. It’s actually one of the best jokes ever told in all the long history of human wit, not just because it’s funny – if you’ve got the chops to nail the delivery – but because it is an incredibly powerful measure of persons. You can tell a great deal about someone from how they respond to this joke. I might actually make it a point to tell it to the banker, the librarian, the alchemist and whatever the other one is. In fact, it’s so revealing that I’m going to tell it now and see whether my invisible interlocutor has anything to say about it.

  So: two beekeepers walk into a pub. It’s a nice pub in the country somewhere, with really good beer. It’s been a longish time since they’ve seen one another, so they order a couple of pints and set to talking, and when they’ve talked about families and the papers and the church roof, they come – inevitably – to bees.

  ‘My bees didn’t do so well over the winter,’ the first guy says.

  ‘How so?’ asks the second.

  ‘Well,’ the first guy says, ‘I lost a couple of hives. The queens died. So that was a shame. But on the upside there’s some really great new meadowland growing up around where I live, so the honey from the others tastes amazing.’

  ‘How many bees have you got now?’ his friend wants to know.

  ‘Well,’ the first guy says, ‘I’ve got maybe two hundred and fifty thousand, in eleven hives. I bought some in after January to make up for the losses, you know, and obviously that was pretty nervous because I didn’t want to import any diseases. I’ve petitioned the local council to move the cellphone mast, although I don’t really think that makes a difference, and I’ve shifted to a new brand of smoke in case the one I was using was too harsh. I’ve sprayed a bit with some fungicide, checked for varroa mites, all that. What about you? How many have you got now?’

  ‘Couple of million. I s’pose,’ says the other.

  Well, the first guy had no idea his friend was working on that scale. ‘A couple of million? That’s huge! How many hives is that?’

  ‘Oh,’ says the second guy, ‘you know, just the one.’

  Now his friend is completely flummoxed. ‘You’ve got a couple of million bees in one hive? That’s insane! They must be all jammed in every which way!’

  The second guy shrugs. ‘Yeah, I expect they are. But, you know. Fuck ’em: they’re bees.’

  And they are.

  That said, just because I don’t care about metaphorical bees doesn’t mean I don’t care at all. Zagreus is offering me something massive; it follows that the curious price must be worth the item, and I don’t want to discover too late that Z is suicidal and wants me to turn the whole of causality into its Viking funeral. I ask why.

  It’s an unpopular question: the gut of this body, full of intestinal microbes that are all Zagreus, sours and heaves.

  That’s my price.

  ‘Yes. I want to know why.’

  I feel something moving in this borrowed head, moths laying eggs, but if it’s an answer, it’s in a language I don’t understand.

  ‘Z?’

  It is to be desired.

  ‘By you.’

  You desire the Chamber. You will accept, of course. To imagine otherwise is to waste … time.

  Scratching laughter. Yes, Z. Very droll.

  Z is right, of course. There is in the end no prospect of my walking away from this. A being outside time, with co-adjacent access to all the instants along its own extension, would be able to slip backwards and forwards along the temporal axis, effectively solving the problem of finality and creating a loop of permanence – possibly. How well this strategy would have worked against the actual Dämmerung, the fragmentation and demise of history at the end of things, is an open question. I’ve never been comfortable with looping as a strategy, because it seems to me that when the whole field in which the loop exists is erased, so the loop goes, too. You might argue that since the loop never actually touches the point at which that happens, it never ceases to exist – but experimentally speaking you can’t prove that unless you can step outside the whole process, and whether you can do that is the point of the experiment, creating another and more unwelcome sort of loop. In the abstract, I’m not impressed with this questionable permanence. However, I find it’s much easier to maintain that lofty perspective before someone actually presents you with a time machine on a plate.

  *

  I make preparations. Does it matter what they are? Will you thrill to know that I set up cognitive stream regulation, labyrinth overflows, filtered mentation and reboot boxes, and a panoply of other tricks – all the psychological equivalent of the protective gear worn by bomb disposal teams, with much the same confidence in its value? No, you won’t. These things are noise to you, the coding jargon of a Freemasonry that has not yet laid the first stone of its temple. So don’t ask. I get ready. Think of it as packing clean socks and a toothbrush. My world is concept made flesh, where matter proposes and mind disposes. What’s in your head is what is.

  Once, not long after I became what I am, the privileged son of a Continuance household took one of my instances with a view to absorbing it into himself. I think it began as a dare, one of those ridiculous coming-of-age challenges which, declined, are the occasion of much drinking and ritual humiliation. After a certain point, though, it had become an obsession, and he did not decline, no doubt to the horror of his peers. Weeks and weeks he prepared the instance in a sealed room. He had read extensively about wetjacking, and he had the money to create an environment that was perfectly suited to the task. What he lacked in experience he made up for in thoroughness. He isolated my instance and he succeeded in inducing in it the fugue of fear and loneliness that is the necessary precursor of defection. He took the fragment into his mind, and revelled in the strange glimpses of my memories to which he now had access. He found the manner of my thinking intoxicating, and wanted more. He delved into the instance, trained himself to replicate its pattern. He became his own drug.

  I was annoyed, of course, but an instance is just an instance. From my perspective it was a tiny thing, as if he had taken a lock of my hair to wear on his lapel. I might have filed charges, eventually. More likely I’d have squirrelled the matter away against a later favour.

  Five months on, he grew listless. The debauchery and hedonism of his set seemed hollow to him. He began to read, and to spend time with scientists and thinkers, poets and priests. He was not satisfied by their answers. He had become aware of the distant shadow of finality, and he realised they had no recourse. They were fatalists, or in denial, and the whole of the Continuance, wide and seemingly endless, and the deep experiments in biology and cognition of the others, their playful sculpting of worlds – none of it had any effect at all on the incremental drawing down of the universe itself. In the crudest assessment of things: I am viral, and he had developed a bad case of me.

  Two years, thirty-eight weeks and four days after he had subsumed my instance, he arrived at my house to apologise, and asked to become part of me. We spoke for a long night, he and I, this tiny spark of fear and horror courting dissolution into a great mass of the same. In the end, content that it was his true will, I brought him in through the gates of the instance he had stolen, and washed him away into the shadows of my self. He faded, and I grew.

  It was unknown then for one greater intelligence to swallow a lesser one entire, even with conse
nt, and thereafter it was made illegal. I was reviled. Baby eater. Shark. Monster. And yet his consciousness persists in mine. His memories are here, his responses and intellect are one ten-thousandth of that which I am. He is not alive, any more than your finger is independently alive, but nor yet is he dead. In me, he acts. What’s in your head – my head – is what is.

  I remember what he felt as I received him: the overwhelming vastness of the ocean into which he was dissolving, the sense of hopeless flight fading as he became less himself and more me, and together we turned to face an enemy vaster than us both, until – in the act of turning – he was gone, and I, once more, alone.

  *

  Zagreus hovers around me while I work, kibitzing and complaining and itching against my thoughts. If I am in part a viral attitude of mind, I’m beginning to think Z is an irritating rash.

  After nine hours I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I find a place to sit for every single one of me, briefly aware as I generally am not of the fractal fishgut smear that is the map of my physical locations in the universe. If this gets bumpy, I’ve no desire to break things by passing out. I don’t want to make first contact with the world beyond the world with ten thousand nosebleeds in my mind.

  Then I look around in case Z has made a personal appearance, sent an actual instance to see me off, but it hasn’t. It makes no distinction between minor and major foci of its neural presence: a mycelium is as much as a man. In a sense, I suppose, it’s coming with me anyway, in the person of my intestinal flora and fauna – and of course the whole point is that it’s already there.

  So I don’t get much of a send-off. I just walk into the middle of the primitive, ramshackle frame that is the Chamber of Isis, and there we are.

  After a while, I say: ‘Is this thing on?’

  Then, it is.

  *

  Imagine a perfectly elegant machine parting your skull and unwrapping the precious involutions of your brain into individual strands so that they can be cleaned and washed and healed, and reassembled exactly as they are. Imagine infinitesimal fingers, kind and cool, ravelling up the softness that is you, supporting every link in the chain of consciousness and caressing the agitated nerves, so that even this terrifying touch is a pleasure, the most intimate and most comforting of interventions, like a true love’s hand laying balsams upon an infected wound. Imagine that you could know to a mathematical certainty that every aspect of your identity is being preserved and kept close, so that the whole appalling operation loses no data, not even blood from the cuts around your skull, not even a single cell of your skin. Imagine that the repair, the weld, the weave were all without flaw, and you could relax into the loving dark, and know that when the day is done and the strange, rummaging presence you cannot directly see – and yet perceive with some unheralded sense, some facet of proprioception or quintessential bodily integrity – when all that is done, you will be as you were, and yet more yourself. You will be uplifted and sluiced out and washed so that every functioning part is better than it was. You will play the piano faster, laugh more readily, think more clearly, love more truly.

  Would not that be a wonderful, transformative, affirmative thing?

  Hold the thought in your mind, that unequivocal feeling of benignant perfection.

  Now understand with the same fervour, the same awareness of your own vulnerable extension as you lie upon the table, spread out like a butterfly from the open edge of your bone casement, that the surgical machine has broken, that all the doors and windows of the operating theatre are open to the grey polluted sky, and inrushing on the gusts of a storm come grit and birdshit, fine particulate matter from dirty engines, viruses and bacteria and fungi and parasites, gross fragments of vegetation and gravel zinging and pinging around the room like shot. And now, as the arachnoid arms of the machine ripple and flourish the slurrying essence of your body’s emergent self, so all the spare attachments and medical instruments are sucked into a vortex by the howling wind, and riding the squall come hungry gulls and burrowing carnivorous ants. The clean, glistening surfaces of you are marinated in grime, pecked and invaded, stolen for the hexagonal incubators of blind larvae, or just digested where they lie – and yet, you live. You live and you continue to think and be aware. You feel the pattern of who you are deliquesce as if you were a caterpillar in a cocoon. They lied to you when you were a child: the grub does not become the angel. It melts and dies and from the foetid stew emerges a new animal. Metamorphosis is not transmigration. It is the retooling of meat.

  On the operating table you disappear. The person you were is gone – all the colours and tones, all the rich sense of history and life, all the things you did by habit, learning and design.

  They.

  Are.

  All.

  Gone.

  I can feel the confirmation in Zagreus’s receding nervousness, in the echo of its duplication in my own head. I’m falling now.

  It occurs to me that I should have seen this coming. Why didn’t I ask more questions? Was that an infection of Zagreus – some subtle microbial recklessness? Coccidioides immitis, no doubt, or something like it: headaches, white tears and bad judgement. Directly affecting only this instance, of course, but the flush of sympathetic hormonal response all through me would do the rest. Very clever. Very Z. Thank you, Z. Fuck you, Z.

  I could die here. My mind is twisting and I am forgetting the detail in all the pain.

  O fa la! I do believe I shall faint. Whatever, what ever shall I do?

  I tried to tell you before: I am not like you. The thing that I am does not work the way that you work.

  So what if I can’t remember yesterday? If I lose the memories of my former selves? So what? Do you imagine that in all the time I have been alive, I have never contemplated this? What am I? Some lost sheep? A carnival villain or a comic book character, perpetually amazed at the childish three-colour schemes of chess masters whose ploys would be obvious to anyone paying even a modicum of attention?

  What am I going to do?

  I am Gnomon, sometimes called the Murdering Angel, occasionally the Last Redoubt. I’m going to live forever in the skull of the next universe, and the next, and the next, until I’ve got universes all around me like a turducken, and maybe sooner or later I’ll figure out a simpler way of dealing with the problem, or maybe finally the next universe will just see me, standing there dressed in the skin and bones of all the previous ones, and get the message and fuck off.

  Why, what are you going to do?

  voice on scratched vinyl

  LEAVING GNOMON IS like pulling myself up through a vat of honey. Through the sweet meniscus I can see my body in desiccated gold, but the barrier is glutinously impenetrable. The merest touch of the other mind clogs my mouth. It is enormous. I am a grub breaking free from a single hexagonal cell, but the hive is flooded and a great wash of honey fills the spaces that should be air, a honey composed of alien flowers and flavours for which I have no names. I jar upwards, stick legs kicking, wing cases fracturing as they press away from my carapace into a medium too thick for their newborn fragility. I let them fall away into the amber deep and kick, for my life.

  Gnomon does not care what is destroyed. It will do anything, anything at all, to achieve what is necessary. It’s the most powerful thing I have created inside my own head, the most heedlessly determined. I’ll have to watch it doesn’t do anything too destructive. It’s not as if I need more trouble in here. Apparently I may suffer brain damage if I continue to resist the procedure. That’s the sort of thing that can happen when someone tries to John Henry the interrogation machines.

  Which reminds me that my husband and I used to sing that song. Do you know it?

  The man who owned the steam drill,

  he thought he was king of the mine!

  John Henry drilled more than sixty feet;

  the steam drill, fifty-nine!

  Oh, the steam drill fifty-nine.

  I love that song. I can’t generally think the w
ords without singing them, even under my breath. I sing them in the stacks as I climb the little wooden stepladder to put an old, foxed paperback on the top shelf. This time I can’t sing, because I don’t have access to my own mouth, but I can hear a sound like someone with a very bad cold trying over and over again to say a word with lots of Ns and Ms in it. Monomaniac. Mnemonic. Noumenon. It’s a terrible noise. She should stop. She sounds like an aphasic. It’s grotesque.

  I’m hearing it with my ears.

  Which means I am once more plugged into my body. They have put me back.

  And then, too, I know that voice – not its slurred, slurried, sullied version, but the original, clipped and clean.

  It’s me. That’s me singing.

  That noise, that appalling salad of sound: that is me singing.

  On the screens I can see my own face, crying, and I can see the words that I don’t want to believe or even understand.

  The music in me is broken.

  And in the other room I can hear them saying: She had a musical talent.

  She had a musical talent, but that is gone now.

  Did Gnomon do that to make room for itself? Is that its tunnel through time? Through my music? Maybe it was that or the part of me that makes my heart beat. There’s not a lot of room left in here. They think it was a stroke, but in many ways it wasn’t, it was just what happens when your brain runs out of space. I’ve been shunting too much stuff around; the lower levels are supposed to keep the body working but I think I may have overwritten them a bit.

  A lot.

  What is Gnomon for, anyway? What was the point of such a blunt object in all this? It’s in everything, tendrils and fingers, so that it looks as if it was there all along but somehow it’s new, drawn out and made to look as if it’s part of the package. Did I improvise it? Why?

  Checklist. Checklist. Kyriakos, Athenais, Berihun. The banker, the alchemist, the artist. And me: the librarian. All present and correct. Four faces of Diana, turning and turning so that none of them can be touched.