by Sam Leith
‘You’re joking,’ Red Queen said.
‘Yes,’ Bree said. ‘I am joking. Tell me about the observer’s paradox.’
Bree felt annoyance in the quality of the pause. Bree didn’t know, quite, why she felt the need to get on Red Queen’s nerves, but she knew that her boss seemed to be unusually tolerant of it. It was, perhaps, the nature of the work they did: facetiousness was a way of expressing scepticism. Too much DEI stuff head-on and you started circling the plughole. The material you were dealing with started to seem plausible. You didn’t want to end up in one of the deep levels, gibbering about impossible angles, elder gods and colours unknown to man.
Red Queen continued. ‘We know that this thing does weird things to chance. Right out on the end of the bell-curve things. It’s not like it weights the dice a bit. It’s like it makes the dice land on one corner and stay there, or makes all the spots fall off spontaneously. Well, this plane.’
‘If it did assemble this plane -’
‘Which we’re assuming for the moment it did. This plane is not purely random. It’s a thing. It’s an idea. It has to do with an expectation – whose, we don’t yet know.’
‘Why should it be?’
‘That’s what they think. That’s what we’re working on. In quantum mechanics you can’t look at something without affecting it – that’s for very, very tiny things, at least. But if they could… well, the working theory is that this has somehow turned that round – there’s a professor we pulled in – MIT guy, came highly recommended – who says that it might be designed to “weaponise the observer’s paradox”. It will take what you’re expecting, and then something else will happen. Or, if you’re expecting it to do that, perhaps it will make the original thing that you were expecting happen after all. Before you stopped expecting it.’
‘How does it know what you’re expecting?’
‘When you stare into the abyss…’
‘Now you’re being facetious.’
‘Yes. We don’t know. If we did, we’d have built it ourselves.’
‘So it’s affecting random events and making them not random?’
‘Not quite. It’s more as if it’s doing things that are surprising.’
‘Plane appears in Alabama,’ conceded Bree. ‘That’s surprising.’
‘Yes,’ said Red Queen. ‘It is.’
‘So, Jones,’ Bree said later. It was lunchtime and they were eating burritos. Bree hadn’t wanted to broach what she’d been told about Jones with him until she’d had the chance to size him up. But now she’d spent more time with him, she’d got a better sense of the way in which Jones’s condition might relate to the job in hand. Besides, she was curious. ‘You’re hard to surprise?’
Jones looked at her levelly. He had taken off his sunglasses and his eyes were a striking ceramic grey. He was, Bree thought, quite attractive. They had, earlier on, reached an accommodation on the smoking issue. Bree’s asthma, aggravated by Jones’s perpetual smoking – how many packets a day did he get through? – had reduced her to near-speechless wheezing.
She had wound down first her window, then – pointedly – his, then cranked the air con up to full blast. He hadn’t so much as interrupted his stream of cigarettes, so much as asked her whether she minded if he smoked. Nothing of the sort.
Finally, she had said: ‘Jones, I’m dying here.’ He had looked at her with quizzical sharpness. ‘Would you mind, please, not smoking while we’re in the car together?’
‘You want me to stop smoking cigarettes.’
‘Yes. Please.’
‘Certainly.’
And, with no signs of ill will, he had.
As soon as they’d got out at the Taco Bell, though, Jones had lit a cigarette. They were outside in the children’s play area. Bree had ordered first: two beef combo burritos and a big Sprite. Jones had ordered the same thing. Now Bree was eating her second burrito. Jones was still on his first, because he was smoking in between mouthfuls.
‘Hard to surprise,’ he said. ‘No. Impossible to surprise.’
He took a drag from his cigarette, and continued to chew. He showed – as he tended to – no real sign of continuing to speak. Bree pressed him.
‘This special condition of yours,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it. Why are you not possible to surprise? See everything coming, do you? Got it all figured out?’
‘No. I don’t see anything coming. I don’t expect things,’ he said without inflection. ‘I’m apsychotic.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Apsychotic. Not “psychotic”. It means no soul. My doctor told me to explain it this way: I don’t have an imagination.’
Bree chewed her burrito and looked at him.
Jones waited a bit, then continued to speak. He sounded dutiful, as if what he was saying had been learned by rote. ‘I say my doctor told me to use that phrase, but I do not know what it means. I cannot imagine an imagination. I do not know what you mean by “surprise”. I can’t talk about “future”. Things take place. I do not expect them. I do not expect anything else. I have no expectations at all.’
‘Whoa,’ said Bree. ‘Jones, how can it be possible for a person not to have an imagination?’
‘There are areas of the brain that associate objects that are not the same together, that associate -’ he hesitated, frowning – ‘imaginary objects with real ones. Those areas in my brain are not the same. Imaginary objects don’t exist for me. I can’t understand how they exist for everybody else. I cannot use metaphors. I don’t know what it would mean to do so. Dr Albert said it’s “like explaining colour to a blind man”.’
Bree continued to chew and continued to look.
‘I don’t understand that,’ added Jones, ‘either.’
‘There exist more extreme forms of my condition. I can use language. I can read photographs and even some pictures. I know that -’ he pointed to her burrito – ‘this food is called a burrito and that both this food -’ he pointed to his – ‘and that food -’ he pointed back to hers – ‘is the same food, called burrito. Olga Thurmer, twelve, in Oslo, has severe apsychosis. She cannot – Dr Albert says this is a joke – “see the wood for the trees”? She went to a wood. The wood was not “tree and tree and tree and tree and tree and tree and tree”: she gave all the trees proper names. She could not see what they had in common.
‘James Hart, seventy-two, in Brisbane, Australia, has severe apsychosis. He has never spoken. Nelson Kogbara, thirty-four, in northern Nigeria, has severe apsychosis. He cannot perceive the borders of objects. When objects move in space he does not recognise them. Ava Howard, twelve, and her identical twin sister Ana, from Bushey in the United Kingdom, have severe apsychosis. They cannot tell themselves apart. Han Fa, ninety-nine, from -’
‘OK,’ said Bree. ‘OK. Stop. So you can talk.’
‘It means I can’t think about anything that doesn’t exist. I can’t -’ he seemed to reach for a phrase that did not come naturally – ‘see things coming. I don’t desire things in the future.’
‘You seem to like cigarettes,’ said Bree, who was already starting to wonder about the wisdom of letting Jones drive the car.
‘That’s a chemical craving. That’s habit. I don’t make mental pictures about cigarettes. It’s hard to explain. I don’t fear things in the future.’
‘Apparently not,’ said Bree. ‘Do you know what those cigarettes are doing to your lungs?’
‘Yes,’ said Jones, and didn’t say anything else.
‘Ain’t hearda your Mr Smart,’ the guy in the hat said in the umpteenth motel Sherman and Davidoff tried. Best Western, Motel 6, Holiday Inn, Marriott, Days and Crown Plaza had, as Davidoff had predicted, come up blank. Now they were onto the small places, the ones without computerised directories you could get into; and, probably, the ones that might waive the need to show a passport or a driving licence.
These were the sorts of places he’d be staying. The chances, mind, that if he was bothering to stay in this sort of plac
e he’d be doing so under his own name, were slimmer. But they’d nothing else to do, and Sherman had insisted on at least trying so that they could say they had tried. It beat listening to Neil Young over and over again, and as long as he hadn’t been through the airport he was not likely to have got far from Atlanta. A picture of him might have been helpful, though.
The old man was running a thumb down a paper register on an old clipboard. ‘You can leave a message. Maybe he shows up,’ he said, evidently moved to compassion by Sherman’s affecting story. ‘I’d sure hate for him to miss his momma’s funeral.’
They had briefly entertained the idea of leaving a message at the first place that had offered them the option. But it seemed more likely to do harm than good. If he was deliberately moving about, he’d be unlikely to return to somewhere he’d been. And if he’d been there, or was there, under a false name, he wouldn’t like finding a message under his real name. And if he hadn’t been there he’d like finding a message for him even less. Whichever way you looked at it, he seemed unlikely to call an unknown number and arrange to meet even a kindly-sounding stranger in a non-public place in order to be robbed.
But Davidoff – who was lazy and irritable – wasn’t giving up. They stepped a little bit away from the clerk’s window.
‘How about: you’ve won the lottery, call this number?’ the bigger man suggested, pulling the sweaty patch on the front of his T-shirt away from his skin.
‘Davidoff, of all the bad ideas you’ve had in your long career of having bad ideas, that is the most idiotic.’
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘I’d call the number if I got that message.’
Sherman had let that hang in the air as its own reproach.
Davidoff thought for a bit longer. Then he said: ‘No ticket.’
‘No ticket,’ said Sherman. ‘No ticket. No American citizenship. No reason for the Georgia state lottery ever to have heard of him. Mind you, he does have a machine that wins lotteries.’
‘No way,’ said Davidoff.
‘Don’t pretend not to remember,’ Sherman said. ‘You were there when we were briefed. Didn’t Ellis say that in the early days, when they’d sent two experienced people after this thing, both of them won the lottery within a week of each other and instantly quit the company? Real problem. They thought it was the machine doing it.’
Davidoff turned his palms upwards and smiled at the memory. ‘Yeah. That’s why winning the lottery was on my mind,’ he admitted. Then, looking at his feet: ‘I spent two hundred pounds on tickets.’
Sherman wasn’t going to share with his partner that the same idea had occurred to him, at least briefly, before being dismissed. I mean, what if this thing really was that powerful? He’d conceived the suspicion that Ellis somehow wanted them to believe the story about the lottery winners, or at least know it. But if this magic device really did keep evading pursuit by making its pursuers so rich they gave up the chase, he didn’t imagine that Ellis would have assigned them to the task of hunting it down with quite such obvious relish.
No. Ellis had probably not been telling them the whole truth. It seemed far more likely, he reflected, that this probability machine had decided to change tack and start putting its pursuers off by, for instance, having them be hit by a meteorite, eat a Snickers bar infested with MRSA, or suffer a plague of agonising boils. It might bend the very laws of probability around it… but that was no reason to think it would necessarily be nice. If you could choose carrot or stick, you’d choose stick, wouldn’t you? Every time.
As he went over these speculations in his head, it occurred to Sherman that he’d started thinking oddly. He had used the word ‘decided’ of a piece of inanimate technology. He’d cast himself as its ‘enemy’, come to that. He’d started to think of this machine itself almost as a person: as if it, rather than the guy carrying it, was the one making the decisions. He had started to acquire the paranoid impression that this fugitive piece of property might not want to be recovered.
‘Two hundred pounds?’ he said. ‘You muppet. Did you win?’
‘Three numbers. A tenner.’
‘Unlucky.’
‘Yes. No note then?’
‘No note, lad. Now. Have we gone through all the motels?’
Davidoff looked at the page they’d torn from the phone directory.
‘Yup.’
Something nagged at Sherman. ‘Davidoff?’
‘Yup.’
‘Did we try our own motel?’
Davidoff let his jaw hang open for a moment while he considered the proposition.
‘No,’ he said at length. ‘We didn’t.’
‘Well, shall we go back and have a look, then?’
It took them thirty-five minutes to drive back to the Hazy Rest Motor Inn through rush-hour traffic.
The adenoidal kid in the faded Skynyrd T-shirt was back manning the office. Sherman noticed that the boy had painted his fingernails black. They offered, by now with more briskness than conviction, their line about why they were trying to find out whether there was an Alex Smart in the motel.
‘Aren’t you the guys in room 9?’
‘Yes,’ Sherman said.
‘Here y’go. Yeah. Yeah. He was here. English dude, yeah? I thought you were like together or something. Two doors down in room 7.’
He shuffled the register round so Sherman could read it.
Alex Smart. Checked out late that morning. They’d probably passed each other on the balcony.
They thanked the clerk and went back to the car where Davidoff had parked it across two spaces at an angle. They sat back down and Sherman thought for a while.
‘What are the chances of that happening?’ Davidoff asked. He put his sunglasses on and looked out of the window. Sherman thought he was probably admiring himself in the reflection. Something occurred to Sherman.
‘Car hire companies,’ he said.
‘Can’t we check them online?’ Davidoff grunted. ‘And get some lunch while we’re at it?’
‘No,’ said Sherman. ‘Most of them are at the airport. He’s only got a few hours on us at the moment, but by the time we finish buggering about on the Internet he’ll be long gone and they’ll all be shut. Let’s go.’
Davidoff sighed, turned the key, and wheeled round the car park just over-fast enough, and stopped at the junction with the highway just over-abruptly enough, to signal his exasperation.
They made good time. Twenty minutes later the two men were at the Hertz office in a Portakabin in the airport rental car park. They joined the queue behind a tall kid wearing a rucksack, Davidoff tapping his feet impatiently, Sherman looking about him, sucking his teeth, wondering the best line to spin the clerk… Conversational was what was needed, he thought. A bit of finesse. Use the English accent. Something about a stag party that got separated… phone not working in America… groom in danger of not making it to the church on time. That might – well, that or something like…
‘Smart,’ said an English voice, and Sherman’s awareness returned to the room. ‘S-M-A-R-T. Yes. As in clever.’
Well, I’ll be, Sherman thought. The boy in front of him in the queue pushed a British passport and driving licence across the counter. The woman smiled indulgently but professionally. Sherman risked a slight craning of the neck. Yes. Come to think of it, he did look vaguely familiar from the motel.
Davidoff wasn’t paying any attention. Sherman gently put finger and thumb around the bones of his elbow and dug the tips in harder than was necessary.
Davidoff hissed something and his head whipped round. He looked at Sherman crossly. The kid in front didn’t notice. Sherman made his face tense and looked at the boy’s back. Davidoff cottoned on. He blinked and frowned.
‘All right, Mr Smart, you need to sign here -’ she circled something quickly with her biro – ‘and here and here -’ a couple of dashed crosses. The boy cocked his head, started scribbling.
‘Here are your keys. The car’s a silver Pontiac, mid-size. It’s in
space number 137, row 8. Remember to return it full.’
‘Thanks.’ The boy shouldered his rucksack and walked out of the building.
‘Next,’ she said, turning her empty smile on the two men waiting in the line. They looked at each other, then one of them mumbled about having forgotten something and they walked out of the office and round to the right, where young Mr Clever had gone. She looked at her nails and wondered what Chef Boyardee was going to prepare for her dinner tonight.
Outside, Sherman and Davidoff walked among the rows of cars keeping the kid in sight. They pretended to be looking for a car of their own – though Davidoff’s nervousness meant that he had to be prevented from hard-targeting behind the nearest SUV whenever the boy glanced round. As soon as they’d made the boy’s car and noted down the number plate, they returned to their own, parked up outside the fence within sight of the exit. Davidoff turned the engine on and let it idle.
He’d be nervous driving a new car. They had no way to know whether or not he’d driven in America before, but it was a safe bet he’d take a bit of time to familiarise himself with the controls. Sure enough, it was getting on for five minutes before the silver Pontiac rolled out of the car park and turned, hesitatingly, onto the road and rolled west.
The two men gave him six car-lengths or so of a start, and then pulled out behind him and began to follow.
He joined the 285 heading north towards the west side of the city. Davidoff was driving. Sherman opened the glove compartment and pulled out the little map of the area that they’d given him at the hire car place. Their own car, too, was a rental and they hadn’t thought to buy an atlas. Sherman thought that if the kid headed out of town that was a decision they might regret.
The silver Pontiac pulled out ahead of them and was momentarily obscured by a white eighteen-wheeler. It had ‘Xpress Global Systems’ written on the side in blue block capitals, and underneath, in smaller letters: ‘A division of MIC Industrial Futures’.
‘Fancy that,’ Sherman said whimsically. ‘On our team.’
‘What?’
‘The truck.’
