by Claire North
She grabbed my hand, fingers brushing past the bracelet she’d given me, all those months ago, dragging me towards the door. “Come, come!” she clucked. “Come, come come!” and pulled me into the house.
Walls, painted over boiled pea green. Creaking floorboards covered with speckled linoleum. High ceilings, a brass chandelier hanging uneasily to one side in the central hall. Coats thrown across a dresser by the door, no hooks to hang on. Staff: young, mostly, a few middle-aged executives, turning to stare as Filipa pulled me down the hall.
“This is my friend,” she barked at one man who stood in our way. “She’s an expert.”
A turn of the corridor, a gurney left outside a door. This place was once full of the chattering of the French upper classes, or the quiet silence of wealthy wives left to pine while their men slipped off to more interesting climes and hotter beds. Perhaps in the Second World War it was occupied by German soldiers, the family told to make do or get gone; or no, maybe not, not this far south, perhaps it was a hotbed of quiet resistance, of little gatherings on a Sunday where men and women spoke in hushed voices of their fathers’ guns still hidden under the floorboards.
How it had come to be a medical facility, quietly transformed in the dead of night, I didn’t know, but that was what it was, a large room, perhaps a place that had once been for dancing, now transformed, six beds across the wall, five of them occupied. They were beautiful, even asleep, even with pipes in their veins and electrodes in their skulls, even with goggles over their eyes and nodes taped to their lolling tongues, obviously they were beautiful, in a surgical kind of way. Five slumbering beauties, three men and two women, Louise Dundas in the bed nearest the window, eyes shut, her hair spread out behind her across the white pillow, a sleeping princess.
Two nurses and a doctor overseeing them, surprised to see me, but deferential to Filipa who said, “Can we have the room, please?”
Filipa Pereyra-Conroy, for all that she is not her brother, is still a member of her clan. They gave her the room. “Filipa…” I tried again.
“They are all perfect,” she explained, taking in the sleeping figures with a sweep of her hand. “Germany, Spain, two from France, one from Italy. Nine in America, eight in China, four in India, one in Indonesia, three in Australia, Rafe said fix it, it’s your machines, you fix it, make it better, just like that, boof, like the atom was split in a month, like the apple just fell from the tree splat like—”
“Filipa…”
“He shouted at me. Usually he laughs, doesn’t shout. Did you do it? You stole the base code; with the code you could do this, of course – I’m not angry. I wouldn’t have done it that way, I never would have dared, but if it works? If Rafe pulls the treatments then that’s a good thing, that’s how it should… is it you?”
She didn’t meet my eye as she asked, kept her back straight, head turned towards the sleeping figures. Bravery: courage, valour, daring, prowess, audacity, nerve, spirit, mettle, pluck.
Takes bravery not to look at a woman who you’re afraid of as you accuse her of murder, and in her way – yes – Filipa is scared of me too.
I took her hand, gently, and she looked at the floor. “I didn’t do this,” I said. “I stole Perfection for someone else.”
Her eyes, rising quickly, a woman on a mission. “Who?”
“She called herself Byron.”
“Byron? Ah, yes, of course – the woman who murdered our father.” She nodded at nothing much. “Matisse told me about her.”
“Matisse…”
“His real name is John, did you know that? But he does all this spy-stuff. I thought he had to be wrong about Byron, it was all too silly for words, but…” A half shake of her head, a different thought for another time. “And the poetry, yes? They all heard something which triggered the change, the treatments you see, an evolution from basic NLP, but better, much better. Thought is association, you anchor a concept – beauty – repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes true, you can be beauty, you are beauty, beauty beauty beauty beauty—” I gripped her hand tight, and she stopped as quickly as she’d begun, head turning up, then down again, rolling around her neck like a thing beyond her control.
We stood a little while in silence, staring at the sleepers.
Then, very quietly: “Perfection’s been hacked, you see. I knelt at Rafe’s feet, told him to stop, begged, but he wouldn’t. It’s worth too much money. Panic if it’s pulled, he said, just put the bodies away some place and fix it on the quiet, fix it! Loss of customer confidence. Small-scale incidence, a statistical blip, individual cases rather than a product issue. Not just Perfection, but the data gathered from Perfection, the marketing of course, access to phone, email, search terms, location data, eating habits, shopping, travel, ambitions, aspirations – he sells it for a fortune, in-app product placement, the hair, the clothes, the holidays, the shoes, the magazines, the make-up. He told me to go back to the lab and fix it. Go and tinker, he said. Go tinker with your toys. For a while I thought that I’d done it, that it was my fault. I thought my treatments were doing this,” a hand, taking in the room, head down again, now she is ashamed, “but I looked again and there was a hack. Two months ago, something else put into the treatments, hidden in the beauty beauty beauty beauty beauty. Hard to find; hard to fix. I think it sends people mad.”
Fact. Here is the problem, there is the truth.
You are beauty you are beauty you are beauty…
Repetition making a thing the truth.
You are beauty you are beauty you are beauty…
Can’t repeat your way out of five sleeping bodies in a house in France. I am sane I am sane I am sane I am sane…
Silence a while between us.
I said at last, “I stole it. I didn’t… do this.” My words, dead even before they were spoken.
“That’s okay.” She shrugged. “I think what you’re doing makes sense.”
“You do?”
“Of course. Perfection destroys the human soul. You know I used to help kids with brain damage find their voice? That was before Rafe made me a monster.”
“You’re not…”
“I killed humanity,” she corrected, light as a feather, before I could speak. “I gave people the tool to suck out everything that was flawed, ugly and bitter, and it turns out that all that is left is a piece of marketing. Of course I blame Rafe too – he chose the parameters, he decided that Perfection was an advertiser’s dream. If your Byron could kill Rafe, perhaps it would stop, but I doubt it. I think she probably knows that. I think maybe that’s why this makes more sense.”
“Can you fix it?” I asked. “Can you make them… better?”
Her eyes flickered fast to me, surprised. “Why on earth would I want to do that?” she breathed.
Her hand fell from my fingers. I took a step back, Filipa now meeting my eye, clear and defiant. “My work,” she explained, steady, calm, “needs to be destroyed. It is an absolutely necessity. I’m grateful to you, for stealing Perfection. It gives me hope that one day all of this will be over.”
I looked to the sleepers in their beds, five men and women who had heard some words and gone insane, looked back at Filipa, saw something that could be madness in the corner of her eye, turned to the door, to walk – to run – far away. She said, “Matisse is determined to find you, almost as much as he wants to find Byron. He wants to show that you’re real. If he finds you – if Rafe finds you – I think you may end up on the dissection table. Please be careful.”
I stopped, fingers on the doorhandle. “Don’t you want to know how I work too?”
“Yes. Of course I do. But you’re human, whole and true, and whether your condition is artificial or naturally induced, it is… extraordinary. In Tokyo I gave you my bracelet. I have no memories of you, but I can conjecture based upon the data that is given. Sometimes there is cognition without words; a reading of a situation that cannot be rationalised by the artificial merits of logic. Words complicate things, sometimes. Numbers are simpler,
but only black and white. Thought is… constrained, and we never really see it. But with you, I saw myself smile. I – I sometimes make myself smile, because it’s what people expect, smile smile smile for the camera smiling all the time because it’s what… but with you it seemed real. I think, for a few hours, you may have been my friend. And even if you weren’t, you are still human, still extraordinary in being human, and human is a species which is currently under threat.”
I opened my mouth to answer, didn’t have any words, stood in front of her like a mannequin, locked in her stare.
Then she said, “Luca Evard has been looking for you.”
The words slipped out so easy, so simple, that they caught me entirely off-guard. She saw it, the slight leaning back onto my heels, the flexing of my fingers at his name, and struggled for a moment to understand. “He was sacked from Interpol,” she added. “Matisse employed him instead.”
“Why?”
“He told his bosses that a thief he was tracking had the ability to be forgotten. He thinks he may have slept with you. Did he?”
“Are you recording this?” I replied.
“No – but that’s not fair, that means you want to tell me something you know I’ll forget, that… but then I’ll forget all of this, so go on. One of us may as well have a meaningful experience tonight.”
“I slept with him.”
“Really? Why?”
“He… he’s the only man I’ve ever met who’s been interested in me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” she tutted, turning back to the patients, a dismissal again of a silly idea, and Filipa is a woman who has no time for silly ideas. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Filipa…” The words broke on my lips before they could get out, I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, tried to find them again. “Filipa. Your treatments could make me memorable.”
Surprise; then just as quickly, rejection, a fast shaking of her head. “Oh no no no no. That’s not right at all.”
“I met someone, like me, a man from New York, only I remembered him and he was perfect—”
“Absolutely not. Your condition – chemicals, perhaps, some sort of inhibitor; or electrical, a device, a… a field, yes, perhaps some sort of field generated, must be artificial in that case in which case you choose, but treatments? No, not at all. They don’t do anything… surgical.”
“You’re a scientist; I’m telling you what I saw.”
“Don’t be—” she began, then stopped herself, pulling back. “Is this why you stole Perfection?”
“Part of it, yes. But the treatments changed Parker, they made him… I thought maybe the treatments without Perfection…”
“It’s just a series of ideas, that’s all they really are. Chemically enhanced, electrically aided, but still only thoughts. If I could remember you, I could study you, I could make recordings, we could… you don’t want that?”
Seeing something on my face, which I couldn’t hide. “Byron studied me.”
“And what did she find?”
“I don’t know. She said she’d make me memorable, but there was… there was a poem she’d say, the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe and love itself…” I stumbled over the words, dragged down breath, Hey Macarena!
“Programming.” Filipa spat the word, utterly unimpressed. “Crude concept. Advertisers programme us, see image of perfume bottle, think of beautiful women. See picture of running shoes, think of sex sex sex sex always sex, of course, low-level manipulation, but the treatments – deeper, much deeper. Hard to control consequences, stupid hangover from foolish notions of hypnosis, not at all what it’s about, not how it works, ignorance, naivety. There are approximately eighty-five billion neurons in the brain, and we can image it beautifully, very beautifully, but imaging isn’t comprehension, isn’t power, it just makes scientists feel good!”
She spun on the spot, throwing her hands into the air, an academic faced with poor processes, a woman whose life, whose every breath had taken her to the place she thought she wanted to be, only to discover on arrival that it was nothing like she’d imagined. Silence between us. My fingers traced the curve of the Möbius strip around my wrist, rolling over and under, over and under.
Filipa’s shoulders dropped, her eyes turned back towards the floor. “I wanted,” she began, and stopped. Then again, “I wanted to be… silly now, of course.”
“Perfect?” I suggested.
“No! Not that – never that! I just wanted to… I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to like who I am.” Again, stopping, head turned to one side, picking at her own memory, shutting down lines of enquiry. “Do you like who you are?” she asked, eyes fixed on something far away, out of sight.
“I… don’t know. For a while I thought… [words get complicated, I try to find a way through them and]… I thought I wasn’t worthy.”
“Worthy? Of what?”
“Of anything. That my life was without worth. I went from place to place, took what I wanted, did what I felt like, pretended to be whoever I wanted to be, and it was… good, as good as things can be when you’re… but it was without meaning. Or without worth. An unworthy life. Worthy as in honourable. Upright. A life of merit. To myself. To others.”
“And now?”
I thought about it, straightening my back, hands tight at my sides. “Byron called me enlightened. She thought that if the world forgot me, I was outside the world. Free from its chains, my life shaped only by myself, my soul a thing entirely of my making, not made by… by the screaming. By the world screaming at me to be something I’m not. I think she was wrong, I think she’s wrong about a lot of things. But also… not as wrong as words or numbers might make her.”
She nodded, at what I wasn’t sure. “I have not led a worthy life,” she said at last. “I have come to terms with nothing.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s true,” she replied simply. “As a child I was a disappointment to my father, then to my brother, and finally to myself. I have been consistently informed that I am a genius, and brilliant – not by people who matter to me, of course, but still by enough people so that the words have acquired a certain baggage – and with my brilliance I have constructed tools to perpetrate the end of the world. Is that too much, is that wrong? Devastation, destruction, damnation, death. But it is foolish to let anyone say ‘genius’ outside a cartoon. I have perpetrated a device that obliterates the minds of all who use it, making them little more than internet memes, walking marketing boards, human placards selling us the sex, the clothes, the cars and the holidays that the markets demand. The 106 Club is a hangout for clones – physically and mentally – the surgeon’s scalpel, my treatments. I have no doubt that they are happy. Self-doubt, insecurity, neediness, emotional fragility – these are not traits of perfect people. Have you spoken to anyone in the 106? They can respond to any situation with a two-dollar retort from a self-help book at a pinch. Is your father dead? He’s gone to a better place. Have you lost your job? Stay strong – if you believe in yourself, you’ll find a way. Husband left you, taking the kids? You can fight this one, and with the strength you have inside and the love of your children, you can win. The world is boiled down to aphorisms and fairytales. I watched them, my brother’s programmers, trawling the web. ‘How to deal with anxiety: remove anxious foods from your diet. Eat strawberries.’ Perfect people always have a solution to a problem, you see. But what do you do when words fail? Truth: sometimes a murderer cannot be found. Truth: sometimes your children are taken and you are left behind. Truth: poverty is a prison. Truth: disease and age come to us all. These are so terrifying, we program them out of the human brain. Treatments make everyone who has them happy, and happiness is always sexy, isn’t it? Happy happy sexy happy beautiful sexy sex happy beautiful happy sex—”
Tears on her face, something wild in her voice. A thousand times she has looked at her own reflection in the mirror, and said these words to herself, a
thousand times she has tried to pick them apart, to tell herself no, no, it’s not like that, see, see, there’s a silver lining after all. And again: she has failed. Only truth remained.
I shuffled towards her, uncertain, stopped, hands useless at my sides. What did the perfect people of this world do when they saw tears?
How To Comfort Someone: 4 Steps:
1. Place a hand on their shoulder.
2. Be compassionate and understanding. Even if you think they have done something wrong, do not blame them.
3. Think of yourself, if you were in their place. Remind them that you will always be there for them.
4. Before you leave, ask them if there is anything else they need to talk about. Maintain eye contact.
I placed my hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.
I held her head tight, her hair in my fingers, and she wrapped her arms around my middle and cried for a while, and I said nothing, and she just cried.
After a while, her tears slowed, but she didn’t let go. Snot and salt seeped through my shirt, and I held her, and that was fine.
“When I dance,” I hummed, swaying a little as I held her, “they call me Macarena. They all want me, they can’t have me, so they all come and dance beside me.”
Her fingers clung in the small of my back, and still she didn’t let go, but let me sing, my feet stepped and so did hers, though she didn’t raise her head, “Hey Macarena!”
I spun her gently, and she let herself be spun, face red and swollen, a smile somewhere behind her tears.
“I see why I liked you,” she sniffed, wiping her face with her sleeve.
“We could help each other.”
“Could we?”
“I know Byron. I saw her photo at the party in Nîmes, that’s why I came here. I know who she is, what she does.”
“Can you find her?”
“I can try.”
“Matisse couldn’t.”
“She’s hiding from him, not from me.”
“And what if she’s right?”
“To hide?”
“To destroy Perfection. What if thought is not free? What if memory is a prison, society a lie? Sometimes I look around and all I hear is screaming, screaming, screaming – what if you are the enlightened one?” She was smiling as she asked this, but the smile was empty.
