Something had happened – a phone call; water boiling over in the pan – and he couldn’t remember getting back to the conversation. But they must have, he thought – they must have done. So why couldn’t he remember it? And why was this particular conversation, this incomplete memory, coming back to him now?
At work, a language profile built up for every employee, holding every report they wrote, every search they entered, every email they sent, every email they drafted and ultimately didn’t send, everything they coded too. This data trove was examined by software initially built by the same employees – so that it was a kind of self-analysis, the software examining its own origins and generating prints for the staff, an identifying unconscious mark that came through in everything they wrote, the employees expressing more of their own tics and flaws in attempting to understand them. The objective was ostensibly to give ‘transparency’ to the workplace, to make it clear in every system they designed which individual was responsible for which part.
The same software studied language and behaviour in video and audio, watching lips move, noting the changes in facial muscles, pupil dilation, body temperature, the vocal stress coincident with certain words. The software made original observations which it then used to rebuild itself and improve its own performance and its understanding. It did this autonomously. The staff watched this but didn’t understand it. Self-created languages built more efficient systems, which led to even more advanced understanding, new languages, further systems, exponential increases in productivity. In answer to her question, he thought, and which he must remember to mention to her whenever they get back from the doctor’s – what, he thought again, was taking them so long – part of a conversation that had happened so long ago that she would probably look at him blankly, saying, John, what are you talking about, saying for the life of her she had no recall whatsoever of ever having had any such conversation, saying that, in fact, it just didn’t sound like her, is he sure, she would say, that he was remembering it correctly, and he hadn’t in reality simply invented it? In answer to her question he would say something like, I don’t know.
Shel, again, her lips, her voice – there was a further significance, something he just wasn’t realising, a breakthrough waiting for him just out of his reach. Graphics and data, anatomy and a life’s work. Shel, language, everything that she said, everything that he remembered. Her arm unconsciously rising over him last thing at night and pushing the dial so that the music stopped, deceptively at first, and then darkness, dreaming, blank sleep, morning again. He remembered his rehabilitation under the doctor’s supervision, the feeling, prolonged over the days and nights that followed, of a whole world fanning out from a single concrete detail, one movement, one line – a beginning – Shel, his partner, lifting her arm over him. He had remembered – he thought, now, he had remembered – every movement he had ever seen her make, every one of which he treasured and wanted to hold onto, hold close to him, to feel the warmth of it and never lose it again. The fact of their lives had overwhelmed him, lying in the quiet, dark room upstairs in the cottage all those months ago, because for the preceding days he had lost it, lost an unbelievable, unrealisable data-stream.
Now, he thought, concentrate, focus, realise the implications. Every movement of a life, beginning from the smallest thing, a newborn child, Doll, her first breath, her tiny body—
A sound, a vibration, the phone in his pocket. Shel. ‘Yes?’ he said, putting the phone closer to his ear. ‘Shel?’ he said. ‘What is it? Shel? What’s wrong?’
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank everyone at Atlantic Books and Georgina Capel Associates, especially James Roxburgh and Rachel Conway.
I am indebted to Andrew, Kirsten and family for their generosity in Castlebay in winter 17/18.
Matt, Diana – my brother and my sister-in-law, in Mexico City, in Panama City – for giving me the space, for making me feel at home, for enabling me to write this book: thank you. I won’t forget it.
Gathering Evidence Page 24
