The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  It seemed (said Dr Giridharadas, the hobbit-sized, energetic doctor attached to my case) that ‘something very peculiar indeed’ had happened to the ligaments and tendons of my left leg. ‘I have never seen an injury quite like it,’ she told me, with too-poorly-concealed professional delight. ‘You did not receive this injury playing tennis.’

  I assured Dr Giridharadas that I had not received this injury playing tennis.

  ‘The plantaris tendon is quite gone,’ said Dr Giridharadas, putting the end of her left little finger against her right thumb, and then swivelling both hands about to bring the end of her right little finger against her left thumb, then repeating the entire gesture once, twice, three times. ‘It has been removed. The Achilles is snapped, or rather sliced. You are lame, my friend.’

  Since I couldn’t get out of bed, this seemed to me a reasonable diagnosis.

  ‘You can see the little hole through which the plantaris was removed,’ said the doctor, although the waddy bandages covering my swollen leg meant that I could see nothing of the sort. ‘By pliers, perhaps?’

  ‘It just,’ I said, ‘slid out – like a snake out of its den.’

  ‘Of its own accord?’

  ‘I was assaulted,’ I said. ‘A man called Roy Curtius attacked me. He is very dangerous – the police must be informed.’

  Dr Giridharadas looked very grave, wrote the name down, and promised to have the authorities notified. I got the sense she was humouring me. I dare say humouring patients is a large part of the job. A nurse came in to check on me, and loitered by the door when she discovered that the doctor herself was there. ‘As for the Achilles,’ she said, ‘I would normally say: immobilise it and leave it to heal. But the break is so smooth, bizarrely smooth, oddly smooth’ – each iteration added more ‘oo’ to the word – ‘so smooth that I am afraid stitching will be needful. Actually the absence of the plantaris isn’t a huge problem. You will experience some reduction in the functionality of the knee, I think; but people get by without that tendon pretty well.’

  This fact brought me, a little, out of my self-absorption. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It is by way of being an evolutionary hangover, I think, from when our ancestors used to manipulate things with their feet the way we do with hands. In fact, we sometimes use the palantaris posterior when we need to transplant a more vital tendon somewhere else in the body, because the patient can get along fine without it. You may find movement of the knee and ankles a little restricted. You may limp a little. Interesting fact: it’s the longest tendon in the human body, often thirty-five or even forty centimetres long.’

  ‘It hurt when it came out,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure it did. There will be swelling and discomfort for a while. But you can function pretty well without a plantaris. It’s the Achilles I’m worried about. How did you come to snap that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It may have happened,’ she said, ‘during the extraction of the plantaris.’ She looked at me again, with a wary eye. ‘Did he use pliers? This Mr— What did you say his name was?’

  ‘Curtius. And no.’

  ‘He must have used pliers,’ said Dr Giridharadas decidedly. ‘Or some similar tool. The extraction was remarkably efficient. Is he a surgeon, then, this Mr Curtis?’

  ‘Curtius,’ I said. ‘And: no.’ I could have explained that he used telepathy, but I realised how that would sound, and I held my tongue.

  ‘At any rate if he pulled it out without anaesthetic, then it must have hurt. Very distressing. It’s possible that you snapped your own Achilles, thrashing or jerking your foot in pain.’

  I thought back, but couldn’t remember very much, besides the strangely placid expression on Roy’s face. And the agony, of course. ‘I don’t know.’

  Dr Giridharadas put each of her little fingers inside the shell-curl of her two ears, one either side: and ran them around the groove in unison. It made her look as though she were making pretend elk-horns at the side of her head. Then she put her hands in her pockets. ‘Let me say this: your injury is unusual enough to merit me writing it up for the BMJ. I’m not legally obliged to obtain your permission to do this, I should tell you, and of course I will anonymise the details. But I hope you don’t mind, at any rate. What I don’t understand is how Mr Curtis got hold of the end of the tendon.’

  ‘Curtius,’ I said.

  ‘It can’t be pliers. You’re quite right to correct me. It can’t be pliers, because the wound through which the tendon was extracted is no larger than the tendon. I’m envisaging a long steel knitting-needle-type structure, with a hook on the end. Is that right? Am I ballpark?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Most unusual!’ she cried. ‘Thoroughly unusual case.’

  I had my Achilles stitched under local anaesthetic, lying on my front. Then I spent two days with my leg elevated and motionless. Then they gave me an NHS walking stick, which hung on a peg at the end of my bed, and I tried hobbling around with that for a bit.

  Then things took a downturn. There was some post-operative infection, and I grew feverish. I was put on antibiotics, and the first course disagreed with me, plunging me into a near hallucinogenic state of total prostration. I had odd visions. Some of the things I had seen in Antarctica returned to me, but with the hazy lineaments of vision rather than the hideous immensity of actuality. A great black hill, burning with fire, glimmering with darkness visible, and a door in the hillside that opened to scorching white fires within. I saw Irma, but she looked sourly at me and left. I saw the ghost-boy, and wished I hadn’t.

  One night was especially grim, and I writhed so much I wrenched my foot from its elevating cradle, and pulled the stitching out. Further surgery was necessitated. The wound was reopened and the torn stitched removed; and then the tendon was fixed with glue and restitched and a hard cast placed on my foot to keep it in place.

  I understand the regular police visited me during this time, but I was not responsive to their questions. Then representatives of the government came – Belwether, and her armed guard – and relieved the local police of their duty to pursue further inquiries.

  All this I learned after the fact. I went through a phase when I was only half present, heavily medicated and passive, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. At one point (really, this is all very hazy) I tried to get out of bed. Unused to the cast on my leg, and not fully compos mentis, I fell. There was a loud clatter, and I was attended not by a nurse but a man in a sports jacket. I had a moment of mental clarity when I thought: this geezer isn’t a nurse. As he leant over to help me, his jacket gaped open to reveal a pistol in a shoulder holster. The scarred boy, behind, winked at me with the eye on the good side of his face. And then the night nurse came in too, and the two of them had a low-volume conversation that, in my fever-heightened state, I heard perfectly. ‘I heard a crash, I didn’t know.’ ‘Wendell, please leave it to the nursing staff to attend to the patients.’ ‘I was just helping him up.’ And so on.

  I slept. When I woke it was dark and still and I was alone again, with only the hallway light spilling through the little window over the door for illumination. I listened. There were various sounds, distant and irregular, to do with the functioning of the hospital. There was a regular pulsing sound, like a wonky wheel turning, or a car alarm very far away. The more I listened to this, the more it drew me out of myself and into the sound. It was not coming from inside the hospital, I decided. It was from outside. It was a dog barking, or perhaps a fox, but a long way away. And then a sub-rumble added itself to the barking, and this grew to supplant it, and finally a trapezoid of light appeared on my ceiling, stroked smoothly across and half down the wall before vanishing again, and the mystery clarified in my head. I heard the ambulance shutting off its engine, and then a series of tubular, metallic noises as (I assume) its back doors were opened, a stretcher loaded on to a gurney and wheeled inside.

  The distant scraping sound of the motorway, like a faraway waterfall. After a
while you stopped hearing it.

  No birdsong.

  Then some coughing, low-level conversation – two male voices, too muffled to be decipherable – and the ambulance engine drum-soloing back into life and receding, and eventually, quiet again. The lights did not appear again on my ceiling.

  I must have slept because the next thing it was morning – late in the morning, in fact. A nurse brought me breakfast, and Belwether was sitting in the corner, looking at me. After the nurse had gone, I spooned muesli into my gob. ‘When is it?’ I asked my visitor.

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘I meant month.’

  ‘September. Aren’t you curious who I am?’

  ‘I always liked that the ninth month was called “seven”. And the tenth, “eight”; and the eleventh, “nine”. And the final month in our twelvemonth year called “ten”. That’s pleasantly wonky. Don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s almost as if the year begins in March,’ she said. ‘My name is Belwether. I work for Her Majesty’s Government.’

  I finished my muesli, and took a sip of orange juice. ‘She employs a lot of people, that lady.’

  ‘Mr Gardner. How are you feeling? Well enough to talk?’

  ‘I do feel better,’ I said. And it was true. There was something familiar about Belwether, although, outside of this hospital, I’d never met her before. I couldn’t put my finger on the familiarity.

  She sat up a little straighter. ‘You won’t be aware,’ she said, ‘what happened at the Institute.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well there is some good news, at any rate. They’re not all dead.’ My heart gave a little fishflappy spurt. Dead. ‘There weren’t many people on site when it happened, which was lucky, I suppose.’

  ‘When what happened?’ But I already knew what she was talking about.

  ‘Curtius,’ she said. ‘He did that to your leg, you say? You were with him in Antarctica, of course. You went to see him in Broadmoor, back in July.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  She smiled. ‘I wish we knew.’

  ‘Hence the armed guard on my door?’ The horror of this was percolating through my brain, and I’m not proud that one of my first thoughts was personal survival. ‘You think that will stop him?’

  ‘To be honest, we’ve never dealt with a situation like this before.’

  ‘Like what before?’ I swung the tray away from the bed on its hinged bracket and sat up. My leg was throbbing vaguely, discomfort rather than acute pain. ‘What? Here’s what I’d like: I’d like you to explain what on earth is going on.’

  Belwether sighed a modest little sigh. ‘I was rather hoping you would explain it all to me. You’re an Institute member, after all. I’m not.’

  ‘Me neither, it transpires,’ I said. The memory was sour, and I daresay I scowled, and it led me to: ‘Irma. Is she all right? Is she still alive?’

  Belwether took out her phone and glanced at it. ‘This would be,’ she said, thumbing down, ‘Irma Casbrook? My understanding is that she wasn’t on site when Curtius attacked.’

  ‘So where is she?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. That’s not my job.’ She put her phone away again. ‘Mr Gardner. May I call you Charlie?’

  ‘You may not,’ I said.

  ‘I’m going to anyway. Let’s start with something we agree on. What you said about Her Majesty.’

  This wrongfooted me. ‘What?’ I didn’t remember saying anything about the Queen.

  ‘As you said, she employs a lot of people. In her house are many mansions. I don’t need to spell out for you in precisely which sub-department of which section of which ministry I am employed. But I’m part of that group that handled liaison between the Institute and the Government.’

  ‘I was there a couple weeks, max,’ I said, taking hold of the cast on my left leg with both hands and trying to shuggle it a little, to reach an itch on the skin. ‘I was never really part of it. They used me, and then they discarded me.’

  ‘The point I’m making is that I’ve signed the Official Secrets Act.’

  ‘How marvellous for you.’

  ‘So have you, as it happens.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ I objected.

  ‘At the Institute, a Professor Kostritsky gave you a number of documents to sign. Contracts, waivers and so on. The Official Secrets Act was one of these. All members of the Institute signed it, on account of the extraordinary sensitivity of their work.’

  ‘You’d be better,’ I said, looking past Belwether and through the window. September, she’d said; but the leaves were still green, ‘better off talking to Kos yourself. She knows the ins and outs.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Oh.’ Good grief. I tried to think of other people I’d known at the Institute, but though a few faces flashed upon my memory I couldn’t recall their names. That’s bad, though, isn’t it? ‘And – Peter?’

  ‘Peter?’ queried Belwether.

  ‘Head honcho. You know.’

  ‘I’ve already told you. She is dead. Tragically. Who’s Peter?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Belwether paused for a moment to peer at me, and then said: ‘I believe you know more about the workings of the Institute than you let on. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve been well briefed on the day-to-day. The project aims and objectives.’

  ‘Isn’t that tautology? Aren’t aims and objectives the same?’

  ‘By no means!’ said Belwether. For the first time there was actual passion in her voice. But it passed quickly. ‘I tell you what, Charlie. I’ll give you a summary of what we think the Institute was up to, and how Curtius is involved. And you can tell me whether that chimes with your understanding.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Having said that, I’ll have to begin with something I’m not sure about. The Institute was set up to programme and develop superfast computers. At some point, apparently prompted by interactions of some undisclosed nature with Roy Curtius, they radically revised their ambitions – upwards, if you see what I mean. Developing AI, in itself a huge achievement, wasn’t enough. They decided that the very thing that had held back earlier advances in this field was the thing that could revolutionise almost every aspect of human existence. Computers had been programmed to one extent or another after the manner of human consciousness. Not surprising, when you come to think about it. Back in the last century, people thought robots would eventually be humanoid creatures with arms and legs, for no better reason than that we are such creatures. In fact, as we now know, robots are hinged and craned arms in car factories, or plate-sized vacuum cleaners, or whatever. As with robots, so with computers. Maybe mimicking human consciousness was not the way to make AI. Maybe you had to try something radically different.’

  ‘Kos told me they’d succeeded. Or thereabouts.’

  ‘In the early days Her Majesty’s officers of statecraft had little interest in their research. The world is full of small companies programming and developing computing stuff. Our interest came later. They approached us, in fact; or rather, they approached officialdom. They did this because they claimed that their research was going to lead to something rather extraordinary. Remote viewing; vastly more speedy travel, perhaps even instantaneous passage, circumventing the speed of light. Manipulating objects at a distance too. Professor Kostritsky even hinted at slowing down or speeding up time. And she was able to back up her claims, to the satisfaction of our experts.’

  ‘Pretty far-fetched,’ I said. ‘Are we sure it’s not some big con?’ The memory of Roy drawing the tendon from my leg returned to me. But then, maybe I was misremembering that? Maybe he had yanked it out with a pair of pliers, as Dr Giridharadas suspected, and afterwards hypnotised me, or otherwise messed with my head. Maybe my hallucinations in Antarctica has predisposed me in some way. Made me suggestible. ‘Small mercies, though,’ I added. ‘At least you’re not wanking on about Immanuel Kant.’

  ‘I was just coming to him.’

  I sighed. �
��Of course you were.’

  ‘Professor Kostritsky was very clear about this. As I understand it, Kant had certain theories about the relationship between the human mind and the world around us. Specifically, he thought that space and time, as well as a number of qualities such as cause and effect and so on, were “in” the way our mind structured experience, rather than being actual features of the cosmos. This provided philosophers with pleasant matter to discuss for several centuries. But it was all abstract discussion because there was no way of testing it objectively. That there was no way of testing it objectively was a central part of the theory. Human consciousness is defined by reality, and reality is defined by human consciousness, both at the same time. Or at least our reality was defined that way. We couldn’t “step outside” our humanity and get, as it were, a third opinion. Until now.’

  ‘AI.’

  ‘Exactly. The Institute developed AI, or at least a programme close to that. It did it by not programming in imitation of the paradigm of human perceptions of time and space. And according to Professor Kostritsky, it meant that Kant’s theory could finally be triangulated – and proven right. She was very excited at the possibilities.’

  ‘I remember her telling me,’ I said. ‘Eradicating space and time was just the start of it.’

  ‘For myself,’ said Belwether, ‘I have to assume that the time thing is a non-starter, or we’d already know about it. Future time travellers would be everywhere, wandering around, taking photos of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben. But they’re not. But the space thing is very – live. I spoke to my superiors, and they spoke to their superiors, that the Institute might be on the threshold of developing a remote viewer. It’s been a holy grail of espionage for a while. All the fancy cryptology in the world is no use to our enemies if we can just zoom in on their secrets before they even code them. If we can eavesdrop and spy on any terrorist training camp, without needing satellites or drones, just by turning on Prof. K.’s clever new computer.’