Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  t ry to m ake th ings feel better it doesn’t last

  o f cou rse it’s like th is it would be no no

  p lea se don’t tell m e it needs to st op

  I nearly scream when I see the shark.

  I’m like that, but with teeth.

  Afraid it’s outside the box.

  Cognitive.

  I am G omo I am hanging in the water and here is this tiny man dreaming touching the wooden walls the jewels the art of it no th at’s ullsh t One of the greatest absolutely the greatest of your generation it’s such a pleasure to see you working again I was devastated devastated when you honey no not you not you

  I am Gn m n I am

  Cognitive, yes. She will continue to deteriorate unless we intervene surgically. There is some considerable hope of bees

  Gno Gno Gno

  TEETH like that but with considerable hope of improvement if we can sever no I understand that’s not what you wanted to hear but there is some considerable hope of

  Get your damn hands off me you Roman lout I will stick you like a librarian here is the scroll as you can see it is a most delicate and significant no master I would strongly suggest you not it no it no it no no no

  Gno on am mon.

  Could I send some champagne to your room? We have some excellent – yes and for the ladies? We’ll have to think outside the box—

  Gnomon.

  My fingers on the canvas for the first time. I have always used board or paper. Canvas is expensive even if you stretch it yourself. Under my fingers it stretches and I know it as I have known nothing else. This is my world. This surface.

  Blood in the water is there blood am I is there blood—

  I am attenuated. I am not mad. I am not a woman in a box I am not a banker dying in the Aegean I am not I am not I am Get it the fuck together.

  I am Gnomon and this is only pain—

  so hot and so dry and every day they come and then – I don’t want to think about that I don’t but they come anyway the drawings I do are – they are all I remember and sometimes I think there never was a world and I just paint it in here and that’s all there is – and then they break a bone and I cannot hold a pencil any more and I use my other hand and—

  pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain Gnomon pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain pain— Yeah that’s what I was saying only pain.

  She will suffer ongoing degradation, I’m afraid, unless we split the brain and reconstruct. (But when I look again, as I do day after day after day, it is always him, golden and unchanging in the box.)

  Think of it as being like a very severe physical accident which has happened in s i d e t h e s k u l l ZagreusyoubastardyoubastardIwill

  Gnomon. Here and now and everywhen I am one at the same time.

  Stella died of cancer, ridiculously.

  Doesn’t everyone die ridiculously if you think about it?

  I mean if y u hink s rious y th n d ath is ab urd and lif ’s a hor or a d I m res ons ble fo ev ryth ng hat app ned oh sh t her I o a ain NO.

  No.

  No. That’s it. There. Hold on to that word. That’s what I am.

  I am No.

  I am Gnomon.

  I am Gnomon, a thing so far beyond what you understand as human that I would no more fit in your head than a world in a jar of honey. I exist in any number of places at one time. That’s normal for me. (Normal normal normal for me. Me.) No.

  Not going anywhere. Hah.

  That’s normal for me. Indeed, although it doesn’t usually occur to me, I expand at the rate of a few hundred bodies a year, and I am probably the biggest single human mind that has ever existed. It’s a little hard to tell. Some of my competitors – not that it’s a competition – some of them are either not single, not human, or not obviously minds any more.

  You know how that goes.

  This is normal for me. (Me. Me. Fuck.)

  No. Hold on. (On. On. On. On.)

  No. (On.)

  But now I exist across time as well and that

  I do hope you’ve enjoyed your stay?

  No I haven’t.

  No.

  That is different and it changes things. It changes. That’s not right. Change is an artefact of time and this isn’t time this is sideways like— Two apiarists. Fuck ’em, they’re bees. But what if – what if each apiarist suddenly saw the world through the eyes of his hives?

  Then who’s fucked? Right? Then who’s fucked?

  No. Hold on. It just – it changes things, is all. It’s an effort to understand and think sideways. My mind isn’t organised properly for this mode of— Cognitive, I’m afraid.

  It changes – but there are possibilities, too, inherent in the—

  It ch n es t ings it is dis olut on t s end ng it s ubiquity l ke de th a d his is the pain of t i We’ll need to reconstruct almost entirely, but of course these days that is considerably more plausible than – yes, yes, I believe – yes. All right, yes, I’ll record an authorisation, are you ready?

  To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere. I am Gnomon and this is y ha r ou i g o o I no n som tim s cal ed he Des ation Proto l, ome imes th urder g Ang l. I will fuck you up is what I will do. I will tear you apart like a oh sh t ere I o gain uck I am falling into a white world.

  I think it’s me, all at the same time.

  Good. As administrator, I formally request a surgical intervention on this subject in the interest of health and security, this day (time stamp, please).

  Stop that. Stop it.

  time stamp please

  Just make it stand still.

  *

  Colson is standing by the window. He has risen from our bed and is looking out at the unmistakable shining of midnight London in December: the lucent, indigo sky.

  ‘Colson,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Firespine. I know they’ve asked.’

  They did not ask. I proposed it, because I am afraid. And then I stepped back and told them no, no. But I have been asking myself: what if the slide into horror is inevitable? What if that is the turning of the tide? In that case, is it not better to protect people from consequences than to say full steam ahead and hope that at the far end, when enough suffering has happened, someone will make something good from the wreckage? The first duty of the state is to protect. If it does not do that, it does nothing.

  But protect what?

  No one ever says that people have to be better. No one says that all these things we espouse – these free choices and self-governances – depend on our behaving like the best of ourselves and not the worst. Who is to stop us, to catch us, when we fail? When rage spirals like birds in a meadow, like a cloud of insects, and tears apart whatever is underneath, good or bad?

  After what we’ve been through – what we’re still going through – only a fool would still be an optimist. A fool, or Colson. I love him so much, because he is brave.

  What if he’s wrong? What if I am? What if there has to be someone to say no?

  ‘Don’t even go to the meeting,’ I say.

  ‘All right,’ he tells me. ‘I won’t. You’re right. Let it be the real thing, brakes off all the way.’

  ‘Brakes off all the way,’ I agree.

  We make love then, with the blind open so that the purple light of the city washes us both. It is wonderful, but it hurts, too.

  But later, in the dark, he whispers to me: ‘What if we’re wrong?’

  What if we are?

  I reschedule the meeting and go. H
e does not know until later, and then he is angry. But by then we are committed. We are building Firespine.

  Because people are not always good. Not always rational at heart, or kind. Sometimes we amplify the best in one another, sometimes the worst.

  We need a way to make sure people make the right choices with their freedom. Something that pushes us to be better.

  I used to think otherwise, before all this. I’ve changed my mind.

  I think I’ve changed my mind.

  I thi k I’v cha ged—

  I t i k—

  *

  Stop.

  Close your eyes and shut out the din. Draw yourself to your smallest possible point, the least of you.

  Imagine, please, that you are hiding inside yourself.

  Imagine they have an electroencephalograph listening to your skull, and if they see so much as a twitch they will send worms into your head to eat you.

  Be very quiet, inside.

  Be the least of you.

  Now imagine a single, flat image of yourself, a still photograph.

  Now another next to it.

  And another.

  Still just single frames. The things you know best about yourself in all the world. The things that are most comfortable.

  But be very quiet, because if they hear you: worms. Orchid tendrils with green soft teeth.

  White spores.

  Gulls.

  How many pictures can you hold? Three? Five?

  Hold as many as you can. Get used to them. Move between them, focus on them, on your smiling face, on the perfect moments you have conjured. Are they really memories, or are they collections of habit? Do you really remember one particular instance of sitting in your favourite chair, or have you made up a perfect aggregation? Is your sanctuary still? Or is it rustling like leaves?

  Can they hear you?

  Good. Hold the quiet. The frozen moment. Let the green eye of the electroencephalograph pass over you and move on. Trick the sonar. Good.

  Relax again into the images.

  Until they begin to move.

  Each and every one of them now plays out its scene and then moves on to the next thing that happened, at the same time spawning another window on the past which begins from the original framing so that now there are ten, and then twenty and then forty and now some stretch on and on and on into things that haven’t happened yet, branching futurities which babble and clatter like drunken kitchen skivvies at the end of the night and you are cheating, cheating right now because you’re skipping from one to the other to watch and trying to do this in sequence but that’s not how it is, it can’t be, they come all at once and there are more and more and more and louder and the green eye of the machine is back and glaring down at you but that’s the least of your worries now because here you are, stretching like a balloon and the rubber is reaching that taut dry drumskin feel and you know it will— I am Gnomon. This is the pain of being a single mind stretched in time as well as space.

  Identity is sequential. Internal chronological ubiquity is intolerable. To be everywhere at once is not to be at all and so I from time to time I— I b r t nd I b gin g in a d e ch tim it h rts a l ttle m re but I come back because that is what I do I no n som tim s cal ed he Des ation Proto l, ome imes th urder g Ang l. I will fuck you up is what I will do. I will tear you apart like a oh sh t ere I o gain uck No.

  I am No.

  I am – oh fuck it.

  Looped again. I hate the fucking loops. Human cognition requires linearity, picks it out of the noise and insists on time even as events occur simultaneously.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  If I exist across time.

  My mind is detemporalised. There are possibilities, if I can just—

  and I for the voice record I am Diana Hunter, section chief. Yes. File that, please, and proceed.

  The banker, the alchemist, the artist and the librarian. I’m going to kill them.

  Is that what I’m going to do?

  Tell you one thing: I’m going to kill someone for this.

  *

  In the Chamber of Isis, I meet someone, and full of a terrible anger I cut him apart, then stoop to look for some fragment of something I cannot name. Pentemychos: the hidden seeds of the new creation.

  It’s not there. Why would it be? Who is he? Some dark-haired boy-man. A nobody. Sometimes I do things without knowing why. Sometimes I find out later, when that moment reaches me. Sometimes I discover it happened because it has always happened and I have to make up a reason.

  I kill the boy in the box.

  A woman binds me to a tree in a black desert and rails at me for sins I have not practised.

  That I know of.

  I spit back at her, whatever comes into my head.

  She commands the earth, and the pain is exquisite. She’s looking for something I don’t have. She does not believe me. I kill the boy in the box and try to find it. Something drives me away.

  I hang in salt water and watch time itself fall away into the depths. Endless depths and endless time, and a cool water that is for ever, a paradise of now. I hang, and exist in that instant. I glide away into the dark. I eat the man. I leave him be.

  I don’t change my mind. My mind changes. Or perhaps someone else changes it for me. Perhaps I do. It depends on where you stand, or when.

  I pursue the sparkling thing: time is everything, and I am the hunter of time.

  Below the sea there is a room, and in the room a woman sleeps. Not the same. Not different. She is invisible, she is transparent.

  I almost know why, but the connection breaks: that’s all there is of me.

  I wake, clogged, in a coffin full of honey. The woman nearly drops me back down when she sees my face. She cries and hauls me out and shouts at me again, why why why— *

  This is a fugue: a reversible amnesia characterised by unplanned travel or wandering, in which the memories and personality of an individual are suppressed as a consequence of a stressful episode.

  Or it’s time travel, leading to a kind of ubiquity. Have I accidentally become a god? And discovered, as gods do, that it is impossible to continue as one was before, now that one is everywhere and inside everything?

  It’s pretty stressful, actually. You wouldn’t like it.

  Being torn apart is stressful, by definition.

  So, yes: fugue. Though rather more than that, as well. There was indeed pain, pain on an order I cannot describe, and I fled from it. Now I am wandering. In fact, I am bewildered: lost in a pathless place. When I recall myself, the pain is still there, as I’m stretched upon a rack built for the torment of angels.

  Well. You don’t murder a universe without some degree of discomfort.

  But that was always the plan. I must be torn, before I could be real.

  Whose plan?

  Time stamp and authorise.

  Hers. Or mine. Or ours? Or is that Zagreus talking, too?

  But now I must inhale. I must seek my other parts where they are fallen.

  There are possibilities. But if I’m going to live, I have to change my mind.

  *

  So I am torn. This is my last chance to write something to you before they go ahead. It’s a sort of time capsule – a message from me as I am now to you, whom I will become. Or who will take up residence in my body, afterwards. There’s a certain amount of debate about that, which I have to say I find a little upsetting, because it isn’t the sort of thing that should be in doubt. So I feel a bit torn about the whole thing, and about you. I hope you understand.

  My name is Anna Magdalena. You can have it, if you like.

  I have been diagnosed with a rare form of – look, actually, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to operate on my head to stop me from getting worse. The trouble is that we already know it won’t save me. I will definitely die. My mind is defined by a kind of broken-ness that can’t be replicated in ordinary function. I sound fine for now, but it’s temporary. It’s a window, if you like, open
because of drugs and electrotherapy and all sorts of other things.

  Did you know they can’t read my mind? They can barely even find it. That’s because of what’s wrong with me.

  I can see the world, and it’s not what it seems. Everything I’ve ever known, and every person – it’s all just a skin over something infinitely bigger and more important. It’s not an illusion. It’s all real. It’s just that you only see the smallest possible part of it, from the wrong angle, and draw all sorts of wrong conclusions. They say that I’m potentially very dangerous because of that perception. I could hurt someone. (I couldn’t, really: that never really happens because the world is not what it seems. That’s the sort of thing I say that makes them unhappy.)

  Listen very carefully: all that is nonsense. I found something I wasn’t supposed to see and now they’re killing me to hide it.

  That’s the paranoia talking. I have transient paranoia. I freely and happily consent to this procedure. I need it. Without it I will kill myself, or kill someone else, or both. I’m afraid – but that’s normal.

  I just didn’t want you to have nothing of me. I wanted you to know that I wish you luck. That I don’t resent you. That I hope you’re better at this than I am.

  Remember: they murdered me. The Fire Judges. They made me believe all this because it’s better than revealing the secret truth of the world and now they’re going to finish the job.

  Just my little joke. There are no Fire Judges. That’s part of the fantasy. Don’t worry about it.

  Go on: just try to be you.

  Ju t ry o be y o

  Ju ry be yo

  JI JA JO RA FA LA TA

  *

  Time stamp and authorise.

  Drifting: warm water, fat man swimming, hunter of time.

  Drifting: stretched across the endless frame of years, splitting.

  Lying mad in the little room, death creeping in by the window. The road to Thagaste. Alem Bekagn. It’s all the same.

  Feeling myself wrap around the Chamber.

  Feeling myself braided with them all, with the cardinals. The alchemist, the librarian, the artist and the banker. We are bound together now, and that was the point. Alchemist, librarian, detective, assassin. Murderer, torturer, painter and banker.

  Cognitive, I’m afraid.