by Sam Enthoven
Anna couldn’t really see where any of this was headed. ‘So?’ she asked.
‘You’d be surprised how much humans forget, Anna,’ said her father. ‘Things slip away; they get stored in some dusty corner of the mind and your conscious brain forgets how to find them. But they’re still there, Anna. Still there!’ He paused. ‘Do you see what I’m talking about yet?’
Anna looked at him.
‘Do you want to know more about her?’ asked her father. His eyes glittered strangely. ‘Do you want to see what I saw of her, know what I know? Because that’s one of the things I can offer you.’
Anna said nothing.
‘It’ll be like that for everyone who joins us, Anna. Everything will be shared – hopes, dreams, knowledge, wisdom, memory, all of it. If you choose, you’ll know as much about your mum as I do. You’ll know how much I loved her because you’ll have seen her the way I saw her. You’ll know exactly what you missed when she was taken away from us because through me you can see her for yourself, from the day we met to . . .’ He paused. ‘To the day she died.’ He looked straight into Anna’s eyes. ‘Anna, I can give you that – and more besides. Well,’ he added, ‘what do you say?’
Anna looked at him. ‘You can do that?’ she asked. ‘If I join you, we can share memories?’
‘Memories, sensations, everything,’ said Mallahide, grinning again. ‘Think of it! And think, for a moment, of what it’ll be like when everyone is like us too! True freedom of information at last!’
He was going off on one of his tangents again. ‘Dad—’ said Anna.
‘A world of wisdom waiting to be shared!’
‘Dad—’Anna repeated.
‘Perfect understanding! Perfect communication! Heaven on Earth,’ said Mallahide. ‘For ever!’
‘Dad!’ said Anna.
‘What?’ Mallahide asked.
Anna took a deep breath. ‘Dad, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to say it. What you’re asking is just . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Well – weird. Don’t you think?’
Mallahide blinked, astonished. ‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ said Anna heavily, beginning to lose patience, ‘knowing a bit more about Mum than I do right now, all right, I can’t pretend that side of it isn’t a bit tempting. But you said it yourself: your memories of her will be through your eyes, not mine.’
‘So?’ asked Mallahide.
‘So,’ said Anna, ‘to you, she was your wife! To me, she was my mum! It’s different!’
Mallahide looked at her blankly.
‘So,’ Anna prompted again, ‘sharing your memories of her isn’t necessarily a good thing for me, is it? In fact, from my point of view, it’d just be . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Weird! Don’t you see?’
Mallahide didn’t answer.
Anna bit her lip. But she had to say it.
‘What you’re offering,’ she went on, ‘leaving our bodies behind, sharing everything, becoming what you are – all of it. I mean: we’ve talked about this stuff. I’m more used to your wild ideas than anybody. But to most people, what you’re saying is just . . . mad.’
‘People of vision,’ said her father, with icy dignity, ‘have always been called mad.’
‘But can’t you see how strange it is?’ Anna pursued. ‘To most people, thoughts and memories and feelings are private. They’re not supposed to be shared around – you have them by yourself. That’s what makes them what they are.’
‘That’s old thinking, Anna! Human history has been filled with the idea of “keeping things for yourself” – a ’s got the world!’
‘You’re not listening to me,’ said Anna, shaking her head. ‘You’re not understanding what I’m saying at all.’
‘But I do understand,’ said Mallahide. ‘Believe me, I do! It’s just that—’
Suddenly he stopped.
‘What?’ Anna asked.
‘It’s just . . .’ Mallahide bit his lip and looked at her. ‘All right, you’ve made me say it: I just know more about this than you do. All right?’
Anna looked at him.
‘I’ve done it, Anna,’ said her father, his face flickering as he spoke. ‘I’m the one who took the step. I’m the one who knows what it’s like to do this – and an ordinary human mind just can’t conceive it.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying, Anna,’ said Mallahide, ‘that we can argue about this all night, but at some point you’re going to have to trust me. I am your father,’ he said. ‘I want what’s best for you. And believe me, this is best. Better,’ he added, smiling again, ‘than even you can imagine.’
He held out his hand towards her – his translucent, black-and-white hand.
Anna sat up in bed – and as she did so, she noticed something.
The molecule-size machines reacted almost instantly, but it wasn’t quite fast enough. For a tiny fraction of a second – a time so short that someone who hadn’t been looking for it might have missed it – Anna had seen the truth.
The way her father was appearing to her then was a projection. It was a two-dimensional image, as if he was showing up on a screen. For a moment, when she’d sat up, she’d looked round the side of it. There was nothing there.
She took another deep breath. She’d been sure before. She was twice as sure now.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ she said. ‘But no.’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t do it.’
Mallahide’s smile vanished. ‘What?’ he said.
‘I just . . .’ Anna sighed. ‘It’s the way you’re acting. The way you speak. You don’t seem like you were before. You’re different now. Too different. And I . . .’ She looked at him, pleading for his understanding. ‘I’m just not sure. You know? I’m not ready to take the step. Not yet.’
Mallahide looked at her. ‘That’s your decision?’
‘That’s my decision.’
Mallahide shook his head. ‘Then I’m sorry too, Anna. Sorry it has to be this way.’
Anna frowned. ‘What—?’
‘Relax.’ Her father’s face had already started to change, but enough of the swarm still looked like him to say, ‘You’ll soon see this the way I do.
‘Believe me,’ he added, ‘it’ll only hurt for a moment.’
‘Dad?’ said Anna. He’d vanished – but suddenly the room seemed to be heating up around her. There was a tingling, itching sensation on her skin, growing stronger every second. ‘Dad, what are you doing?’
‘I am your father, Anna,’ said a voice that seemed to come from everywhere. ‘I know what’s best for you. It’s a shame you’ve made me do this against your will, but in the long run, I promise, you’ll thank me.’
The itching sensation grew to a sudden sharp sting. Her face, her arms, every part of her exposed flesh felt on fire with a spreading pain.
‘It’s for the best, Anna,’ her father repeated.
‘Dad, no! No! Please!’
‘In a moment you’ll see what I mean.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Yes, Anna,’ said Mallahide. ‘I can. Now stop struggling, please, you’re interfering with the process.’
‘Stop it, Dad – you’re hurting!’ Anna could feel it now, all over her body, as her father’s machines went to work. They were going to rip every cell of her into its constituent parts, to be examined and recorded and reproduced as something else.
They were taking her to pieces.
The room lit up in a blaze of light. Someone had switched on a lamp. Chris – heavy sleeper that he was – had woken up at last.
‘Anna, what’s wrong?’ he asked blearily, rubbing his eyes. ‘You woke me. What’s the mat—’
Anna saw him freeze as he caught sight of her.
‘Oh no,’ he said.
‘Chris! Chris, do something!’
‘I’m thinking!’
‘Chris—!’
‘Yes!’ He leaped out of bed –
– and pressed the buzzer on the door.
Nothing happe
ned.
Perhaps the security guard was right. Perhaps the buzzer wasn’t connected to anything and Chris and Anna were locked in a small, windowless room, deep underground, with only a cloud of all-consuming nanomachines to keep them company.
But Chris didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the issue. With a last few despairing jabs on the buzzer, he turned, taking in the room, thinking of what he could do or use: then, yanking the blanket off his bed, he ran to where Anna was still sitting.
If the swarm in the room with them now had carried anything like the numbers of nanobots Mallahide usually moved around in, everything would already have been over. Even so, the skin of Anna’s arms and face was raw red where the tiny machines had begun their dreadful work.
Chris smothered her like you would someone who was on fire, swatting at her helplessly.
‘Get off her, dammit! Leave her alone!’ he yelled as the very air around them both seemed to buzz with anger.
Under the blanket, Anna shrieked with pain and fright, her bare feet drumming wildly on the floor by the bed.
It was happening, Chris thought. It was really happening. She was being dissolved right in front of him. In a moment the arms and head under his frantically rubbing hands were going to shrink down and vanish and disappear—
‘Stop it!’ Chris yelled. ‘Stop it!’
And there wasn’t a single thing he could do! Worse than the screaming had been, Anna had now gone silent. Her feet had stopped drumming and were now pressed against the floor, her whole body arching back in a sudden spasm.
At that moment, the door to the room crashed open.
‘GAAAAAAAAAAAH!’ said the burly security guard who’d locked them in earlier, in his best approximation of a war cry. He lifted the nozzle of the fire extinguisher he held in his hands –
– and let rip.
When the security guard, whose name was Wilson, had heard the buzzer and caught sight of what was going on over Chris and Anna’s room’s closed circuit TV feed, he hadn’t had much time to consider how to react. In fact, apart from hitting the alarms to call for backup, he hadn’t had any time at all: it was a pure fluke that the extinguisher had happened to be clipped to the wall of the passage outside, and simple instinct that had made him grab it as he ran past. But Wilson’s instinct was a good one. The extinguisher was of the kind filled with aqueous-film-forming foam: Mallahide’s reduced swarm was thinned out even further as the tiny machines malfunctioned or were simply swept aside by the continuing torrent of smothering gunk. Still Wilson kept the handle pressed, squirting away, until Chris and Anna were almost covered in the stuff. And as the extinguisher reached the end of its reservoir and the torrent of foam subsided to a dribble, it became apparent that Mallahide had given up his attempt: Anna was still there, still in one piece. Spluttering, Chris pulled the now foam-sodden blanket back from her face.
‘Anna?’ he yelled. ‘Anna!’
She opened her eyes. Her face was red and starting to go puffy. Her eyelids were scored and scratched – flaky, like her skin was peeling from sunburn. But—
‘I’m all right,’ she said weakly.
Chris breathed out in relief, and for a moment there was silence.
‘Where is he?’ said Wilson, pointing the nozzle of the fire extinguisher around the room like a gun (even though it was empty). ‘Where’s he gone? Where is the bastard?’
‘It’s no good,’ said Anna. ‘We . . . can’t see him. He’s too small.’
But she was wrong.
Imperceptibly at first, the foam covering the room began to twitch and move. The particles of it all began to boil and wriggle as the tiny, and only temporarily stunned, molecule-size machines underneath it began to wake up again and re-form themselves.
All over the blanket of foam, large flecks and spits of the stuff began to shudder and lift themselves into the air. For a second it looked like the jet from the extinguisher was happening in reverse: the foam lifted from the blankets and furniture, coagulating into a strange bulging blob that hung in the air in front of the staring eyes of Anna, Chris, and Wilson the security guard. The blob extended itself downwards and outwards, flattening out . . . into another version of Professor Mallahide. He hovered in the air, a child’s drawing of himself, daubed in foam.
‘I’m very disappointed in you,’ said the foam mouth – its lips two distended sausages of white goo, hunching out the shapes of the words. ‘You’re all of you being very stupid about this. I expected it, of course, but I’m disappointed just the same. Especially with you,’ the foam effigy added, extending a pale bubbly streak of an arm and pointing it at Anna. ‘It seems that you’re every bit as childish as the rest of the human race.’
Anna stared at the apparition palely but said nothing.
‘That’s what old humanity is to me now,’ Mallahide hissed: ‘children. Humans are children compared to me – compared to what you can become. The fact of the matter is,’ he added bitterly, ‘that as a race, you are simply not mature or capable enough to make decisions concerning your own future. As with any child, serious decisions must be made for you, by an adult. And as a responsible parent, it seems the duty and power to make those decisions falls to me.’ Mallahide paused. ‘You will all of you follow me and become what I have become. There is no other choice. And in the end, I still believe you will thank me. But tell your leaders, tell whoever you have to: if anyone tries to stop me in any way whatsoever, you will all be very sorry.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Anna asked.
‘I’ve tried being reasonable. Thanks to you,’ the foam face of her father added, ‘I find I’m forced to try another approach. We will meet again, Anna. In time you will learn to appreciate what I’m offering you, and then, I hope, you’ll understand me a little better than you do now. Goodbye.’
The foam effigy suddenly flew into pieces, making a headlong rush for the door.
‘Oh no, you don’t—’said Wilson, then, ‘AAGH!’ He flung his hands up over his face as the remains of this particular part of what had been Professor Mallahide swept past him like a gust of wind.
Chris and Anna looked at each other.
There was silence.
RAMPAGE
INSTANTLY, OR AS close to instantly as made no difference, the microwave transmissions that Mallahide was currently using for thoughts had reached the edges of the main body of the swarm. In the night sky over London the cloud of machines immediately began to flatten and spread out. Tendrils of Mallahide reached for the surface: billions upon billions of his molecule-size machines drifted down towards the London streets like a rain of near-invisible ash.
Mallahide was angry and hurt by what Anna had said. To him, the situation was clear. The human race was failing to make the right choice. They were failing to join him. Without his intervention they would fail to reach their potential, fail to become like him. So (he told himself) only one course remained open to him.
It was time to make the choice for them.
In the West End below, the first bars and pubs were starting to close. For a frenetic hour or so the pavements and Tube stations would be bustling with humans, many of them rowdy, many of them happy, most of them in some state of intoxication.
They didn’t know what hit them.
It wasn’t at all how it had been with Anna. Perhaps (Mallahide reflected) that had been part of the problem: if there had been enough of him in the room with her to make the dissolution process as quick as he was now capable of making it, then Anna and that ‘Chris’ boy might not have resisted him in the way they had. When the main mass of the Mallahide swarm hit the crowds thronging the West End, it was quite different.
Now people just began to disappear.
It happened so fast that those whose turn had not yet come didn’t even notice it at first. But young men and women all over the West End suddenly weren’t there any more. Their partners and friends would turn and look: their last thoughts before being transfigured themselves would be, Where’s X gone
? She was here a second ago – then they too would vanish, rendered down into their constituent atoms and meticulously recorded by the expanding swarm of Mallahide’s astonishing little machines. For a full three minutes, nobody realized what was happening. Then—
Pandemonium.
Everyone still standing made a rush to get off the streets – stampeding into Tube stations, desperate to escape. But they didn’t escape. Escape was impossible. No matter how hard they struggled or screamed or cried, Mallahide caught them just the same.
To Mallahide, the sudden vast influx of information was almost overwhelming. Scores of entire lives – ambitions, dreams, griefs, loves – poured into him. His billions of pristine digital fingers sifted it all. And the skills and talents! Mallahide could take what he wanted: cookery, kickboxing, parkour, human resource management – Human resource management? he thought, interrupting himself. Well, why not? When the time came, everything might be useful. Anything was possible in the new world order that was coming – except one thing.
He couldn’t let these people be free. He couldn’t convert them properly – not in the sense that they would be allowed the ability to choose their own paths or make their own decisions – not for the time being. They might band together and try to stop him. They might overthrow him, taking control of the swarm. They might threaten his plan, and that was something he could not tolerate.
No. He was the first posthuman. As Anna had failed to understand, he knew best. The new converts would simply be stored, suspended, kept in a holding pattern until Mallahide was ready to return their freedom to them. And in the meantime the swarm would remain under his exclusive control.
It wasn’t a betrayal of his principles, he told himself: not at all. He was doing this for the people’s own good. There was plenty of time for freedom later, he told himself, once his task was complete. For now, all he needed was to get bigger, stronger, increasing his swarm until it was the size it needed to be.
There was, after all, a whole world to conquer.
‘And – yes – following on from this morning’s incredible events in Hyde Park, we’re now receiving reports of some kind of incident taking place in the West End. It appears that the strange cloud that has formed over London – the freakish phenomenon newspapers have dubbed the “Mallahide Swarm” – is now on the attack. Exact numbers of casualties are hard to estimate at present because . . .’
