Gathering Evidence
Martin MacInnes’s first novel, Infinite Ground, was shortlisted for the Saltire Awards and won the 2017 Somerset Maugham award. He has previously won the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. He lives in Fife.
Also by Martin MacInnes
Infinite Ground
Gathering Evidence
MARTIN MACINNES
Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Martin MacInnes, 2020
The moral right of Martin MacInnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 345 3
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 346 0
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Gathering Evidence
PART ONE
Nest
The concept was simple: the user donated data and the app displayed the pattern. The data came from users’ phones, tracking movement. The pattern – a looping line, branching off, folding back on itself – updated in real time, rotating in bright colour against the dark phone screen.
Users checked on their aesthetics day-to-day. They saw a correspondence between mood and pattern. Initial comments were ironic, generating memes, but after a tiring or frustrating day, coming home to the pattern was a consolation. People reported seeing the pattern – its growing complexity, its turning knots of activity – and feeling that someone was listening to them, paying attention to them, responding to them.
The app’s signal innovation was its sensitivity to motion. Rather than mapping a user’s broad direction, drawing a diagonal line as they walked or drove across the city, the app took its measurement closer to the ground. It recorded the way a vehicle behaved, the lurches and minor vibrations shaking the carriage. It noted the firmness with which pedestrians pressed on the ground and the distance they sprang on the next step. It read pauses as people anticipated and moved aside for others, as they stopped to take a call or as they looked at an advertisement or another person or a feature of the landscape. It inferred whether the user was proactive in avoiding collisions. It tracked changes in pedestrian speed and rhythm and correlated these with the music the user listened to; it then identified when the user was thinking about the piece of music and when they were thinking in a way that resembled the mood of the music.
Users became adept at reading the pattern. There was something in the shape, a meaning you picked up in a glance, a significance in the difference between the two most recent iterations. Inside this discrepancy was the story of what happened to you.
The app was especially useful after fraught or anxious encounters, events with uncertain outcomes such as a first date or job interview. Not knowing how to feel afterwards, one solution was to look at the pattern. There, you saw an indication of the other’s attitude, implied in your small responsive movements. Providing you kept it close, the tracker was sufficiently alert to absorb many hundreds of gestures. A glance at the image showed how many times you crossed your arms, craned your neck, looked distractedly over your shoulder, leaned in at the meeting-room desk, sat back in the comfortable chair at the bar.
The benefits of the app extended further. Users measured their state, deciding to walk out in order to come back and see how they came through in the pattern. Tests could be open, performed without set purpose, or directed. Unsure how to act in a given situation, you could walk, think about the issue, the various factors that made it hard to decide, and track your thinking. The app grew more sensitive, learning the particular rhythms of its user, and received a regular stream of automatic software updates increasing the power and range of its sensors.
There were relatively minor social effects in the beginning. Meetings changed, users wishing to accelerate past the provisional experience to find out what it meant. Public transport was affected, users refusing to board certain vehicles. Communities tallied segments from multiple patterns to measure and evaluate services. Drivers, servers and assistants generated open profiles based on data derived from the app, and employment in public-facing work became contingent on the app’s measurement of quality of experience.
Though mobile devices typically remained slender and light, users felt an extra weight from the pattern inside. People were uncomfortable and anxious if dispossessed of their phones. Seats in public transport were fitted with a pair of narrow lateral cushions supporting the head in a fixed position, looking downwards, and blocking peripheral visual information. Chairs in office environments were designed to offer increased support to the strained neck, and mattresses were built with hollow grooves ready to tip back and lay your head inside, in relief.
With the development of new hardware, fittings on the phone that would pick up movement on the inside and periphery of the body, and with new, extensive changes to the terms and conditions, the app, which remained free to use, was branded with a name – Nest. Shortly after, to make readings even more authentic, more powerful and accurate, and to make the experience more comfortable, remote body-sensors were distributed. These sensors, placed initially behind the ear and on the hip, were neither conspicuous nor intrusive, appearing as tiny moles on the skin’s surface. Previous motion capture, which included heart rate and body temperature, had been tentative, limited to the distant reception picked up by the phone device itself. The new updated hardware, combined with significantly more sophisticated and powerful software, made earlier nest forms comically inept.
Data was captured from a variety of time scales, microseconds to months, and from every available spatial perspective – the trunk and limbs of the moving body, the changing oxygen concentration in each microlitre of blood. Movement was rendered in patterns of far greater detail, in vast, coiling depth, and from many different and complementary perspectives, each of which was available to view on the original phone screen and on user-endorsed, encryption-secured external devices; this allowed for a much greater and more speculative pattern analysis.
Sensors tracked sleep, making recommendations on diet and exercise and suggesting changes leading to better rest and health. The app adjusted morning alarms as close as possible to optimal points in the sleep cycle. It informed users how long they had dreamed and split up dream activity into distinct narratives. It exposed dream content through users’ expressive physiology – pulse and breath, temperature, eyelid-motion tracking phantom objects. It monitored limb movements, the number of times the body turned and any words spoken from inside the dream world.
Data was incorporated into many areas. Open access to nest patterns during work hours was made a condition of employment. Performance reviews and salaries were tied to nest readings. Employment could be revoked because of non-conscious evidence.
The app detected illness before substanti
al development. The best chance of catching and excising a tumour was to follow the pattern. The evidence existed in the total record of behaviour, bearing something alien and new inside it. It found signs of depression and mental illness through associated patterns in body movement. It made confident assertions as to when someone was in the process of changing their mind.
Nests began and ended as a single line. Flatlines recalled birth, a record of arrival, a beginning in a strange and unimaginable place. Subsequent versions replaced flatlines – in birth and death – with rougher fibres, neither resolving into nor beginning ultimately from a single line. For a spell, activity extended into embryonic development and disposal of the corpse. Fetal nests provided valuable insight, allowing family to posit character and resemblance before the person was born. Several institutions and corporations offered incentives to share this data, awarding scholarships and positions to promising candidates. Insurance firms provided attractive rates to clients, conditional on nest activity being supplied. The decay of the deceased body also fed the nest: patterns formed while the corpse dispersed. This data too was interpreted. After intense religious lobbying, the app was modified and an artificial clear line reinserted to mark the definitive beginning and end of the person.
Beyond data voluntarily shared with employers, insurance firms, medics and security forces, users guarded their nests. Each pattern’s repetitions and escalations generated unique security criteria, nest-prints being akin to behavioural fingerprints. If a device was intercepted by another user, it wouldn’t function; the corresponding identity must be physically proximate for the device to open. The advantages of nest-print security over standard biometrics was in the near impossibility of mimicry. Nest-print – a unique unconscious pattern generated repeatedly by each user in the course of their flowing behaviour – wasn’t something that could be lifted out by a third party, as a body part might be. Nest-prints were created by tens of thousands of active movements ongoing inside and on the edge of the body; attempted hacks – users surveilled over long periods, their habits and mannerisms aped – were bound to fail by virtue of the sheer range and depth of the data fields fed into the nest.
Users spoke of having a relationship with their nest, describing the product as an entity itself, with agency. A common comparison was to domestic animals. Advantages emerged independently, organically, as users, eager to support the well-being of their nest, took better care of themselves. In periods of sickness, the pattern became dimmer, pulsed slower and sometimes appeared to barely move at all. Users made every effort to ensure the same lifelessness never again afflicted their nest.
A number of different settings were available to display nests. The default setting remained a black background, the nest a spinning 3D object, but alternative pattern displays were added regularly, each elaborating on and complementing the core design. Nest software converted data into landscape simulations. Animal simulation was popular, user data articulated by the movement of a chosen species, every aspect of which conformed to both the local detail and the general pattern of the individual’s life. Users could watch the simulation from several perspectives and at a range of speeds, observing the failures and pains and satisfactions the animals met; they could then switch to a time-lapse showing the origin and development of the species, its migratory patterns and changing rates of mortality and reproduction, all the while knowing every detail was an illustration of their own life, formed only by their movements, their decisions, conscious or not, knowing everything ultimately came from them.
Simulations were developed of fully inhabited cities, planets, galaxies and universes, again exactly corresponding to the individual’s data; a simple scaling process, the activity regulating the growth of the pale crescent at the base of a fingernail was expressed, in one example, through the drama across twelve months of a family of three.
Finally, users were able to hold their nest in their hands. The heart-sized hologram was fitted with tactile boosters, giving the impression of smoothness and roughness, weight and temperature. Users made formal nest displays, presenting their pattern to another person, handing over the hologram in a highly charged symbolic act, securing strong, long-lasting bonds. Couples cared for each other’s nest, feeling the heat and weight of the other in their hands. Using a partner’s nest as a light and heat source was popular among young users, who sometimes renounced all other sources of artificial energy, living, for as long as was possible, exclusively on the power generated by the other person.
Couples observed the effects of nests projected onto walls. They replayed segments of pattern and altered the display speed. The nest made a storm of light, turning in a spiral that entranced them. The darkness of the room was ruptured by a strobe effect that distorted their perception of time.
Hallucination and observation were difficult to separate. Couples saw significance everywhere. They read language in the patterns and they reached out, trying to hold the meaning that had already gone. They saw people and places, memories the source user had buried long ago, reanimated through transcribed physiological rhythm. Unspeakable stories, frightening exhibitions of creation. Pattern inside pattern, each layer opening to a further one beneath. Among the images forming and dissolving were large urban vistas, rows of superstructures, smooth black monoliths reaching into space.
Images broke, turning into tubular forms and gently waving fibres – the user’s genetic structure, the electrochemical composition coincident with the memories and the neural cascade taking place while the individual watched. Couples, underneath and inside the images, reached to them, tried to grasp or wrestle them away, to treasure or destroy them, punish them for what they signified, what they were unable to accommodate inside. This ritual behaviour supported, encouraged and prolonged lovemaking, and people often claimed children were conceived in these nest ceremonies.
An update to the immersive holographic feature – popular among couples and its potential beginning to be exploited in other areas, including psychotherapy, the criminal justice system and medicine – enabled a user to appoint, at any time, a single other person as their nest custodian. The custodian would receive, from the moment the appointment was formalised, a live replica of the other’s nest, their own heart-sized copy of the spinning 3D object, developing and updating in parallel to the source life. This was a significant stage in the development of nest technology, marking a shift, after the identity euphoria of nest exhibitions, back towards the separation of user and nest. It was now possible to display a nest at great, even unlimited, distance from the user’s physical instantiation.
Holographic identity displays continued with both partners present. But custodians’ exclusive use of the nest copy began to dominate, then to obstruct, physical meetings between people. Custodians became addicted to the copy, spending long blocks of time visualising the development of their partner’s life.
Users reserved areas of their house to keep the copy in, going out of their way to ensure it was well heated and insulated, that it got plenty of light. They put it in a protective box. They watched it, monitored it, came back to it, thought about it continually. They heard and felt it through the night, the heart-sized image of the person that they loved. People slept beside the representation, turning towards it, holding themselves against it, enjoying its pulse. They put blankets around the box to further protect it. A house containing a representation, a custodian’s house, was always locked. Additional security systems were set up to protect the representation. There were frequent nightmares about water spilling over and extinguishing the form, ruining and breaking it, dousing a fire. Dreams of power outages, faulty generators and reserves, of a whole city full of melted, expired nests.
Custodians were careful not to make too much noise or say anything unkind when the nest was present. They maintained they knew the nest worked unidirectionally, that it couldn’t be influenced by factors remote from the source user. But the dissonance remained. There were reports of custodians attempt
ing to feed the image.
After a limited trial, and with clear indications of where the application would lead, Nest Inc. approved a software update temporarily suspending the remote access feature, reinstating the original user as a necessary fixture beside his or her nest.
Nest-based artworks began quietly, with users designing tattoos matching recurrent motifs and stamping them on the source body part: walking patterns on feet, breathing rhythms on chest and throat. Brief fads included tattooing brain activity onto the scalp, carrying coded messages under the growing hair and inking the whole body in fragments that would only become visible under certain sound frequencies.
There was commercial potential in enabling users to incorporate nest patterns into food. Ready-made stencils, based on lines and curves invariably found in each nest, were sold in inexpensive packets. Elaborate personalised versions depicted whole stretches of an individual’s behaviour. People baked and fried nest fragments, celebrating occasions and special moments. Users marked particular experiences they wanted to live again, identifying the associated nest activity and using it to shape edible matter.
Trauma sufferers were drawn to shaping, producing and eating material based on what had happened to them. One of the pleasures in eating your trauma was the strangeness of seeing and feeling the thing disappear – of holding the event in your hand, opening your mouth, incorporating it and making it nothing.
The adaptability, the versatility of a nest pattern was impressive. Nests offered direct, unmediated translation into music. Concerts were performed dramatising particular moments in a user’s life. The nest of a user living to average age would be rendered in a musical piece with an estimated duration of twelve to thirteen billion years. Scaler technicians, working on software that would truncate musical life-pieces to weeks and hours, stated that the perspective admitted to humans was approximately equally near to the smallest known thing and the largest – that, according to best estimates, people occupied a position midway between nothing and everything.
Gathering Evidence Page 1
