Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  “Come on! Answer me!”

  There was another creak and an exhalation, almost as if the breeze had whispered “Very well” as it sighed across the shuttered buildings, and something flickered across the clearing.

  Alison’s head fell from her body in a fine mist of blood.

  Katie looked at her friend’s body as it slumped to the ground, blood still pumping from the severed neck.

  All those emotions at the end of a tunnel. Eva could pick them up and examine them, each in turn. She could see Katie’s confusion at what had happened. She felt her strangely comical desire to ask Alison why her head had fallen off. She watched the recognition dawning in Katie’s eyes at what she was seeing. Eva could feel her own rising horror. It was all there, but viewed from a long way away.

  Then Alison’s body was finally still, the head ceased rolling, and Eva’s feelings came rushing down the tunnel as she rejoined the here and now.

  “Oh my God!” she whispered. And a voice spoke…

  “It’s what she wanted.”

  The voice was low and authoritative. It made Eva think of a Shakespearean actor, of pinstripe suits and old port in decanters, rich cigars and ripe Stilton. Who was it? From her expression, Katie knew.

  Eva followed her gaze.

  The digger was moving.

  The front scoop lifted slowly from the ground and the vehicle began to turn. More than ever, the digger reminded Eva of a dinosaur. That great metal shovel on the long, jointed neck, the yellow tail of the trailing scoop flexing gently on the gravel.

  The shovel swung toward them. Two cameras were mounted on either side of its grey metal blade, heightening the impression that they were looking at a mechanical monster.

  The bottom of the blade dropped slightly and the dinosaur spoke.

  “Hello. I’m the Watcher.”

  “You killed her,” said Katie. “She did what you wanted, led us here to you, and you killed her.”

  “That was the deal,” the Watcher answered. “She never had the courage or the opportunity to do it for herself.”

  The head moved a little so that it directly faced Eva. Yellow dust fell from the shovel blade to the ground.

  “She envied you that, you know,” it said. “You almost managed it on your own.”

  “I know,” Eva said, and then she was silent.

  Katie spoke in a little voice. “Couldn’t you have talked her out of it?”

  “She loathed what she became whenever she was on a high. She despaired of sinking back into her lows.”

  “Couldn’t you have cured her?”

  “That’s not what she wanted.”

  Katie was slowly nodding her head. “It’s right,” she said, looking at Eva. “This is what she always wanted.”

  —But that’s not the point. It’s changed the subject and you didn’t even notice….

  The voice was so faint Eva wondered if she had imagined it. She must have imagined it.

  Katie was crying. Eva saw one tear run down her cheek, leaving a white trail in the dirt smeared there.

  And yet Katie was smiling, too. Smiling sadly. She looked up at the yellow metal dinosaur.

  “You know,” she said, “you don’t look like I expected you to.”

  “How did you expect me to look?”

  The Watcher’s voice had a strange edge to it, as if Katie and it were sharing a strange joke that Eva was not party to.

  “I don’t know,” said Katie. “I thought maybe you’d be smaller, darker. Not so rugged maybe but, you know, still strong. I saw you as more of a forklift truck.”

  The Watcher said nothing to that, it just continued staring at Katie through its two camera eyes, and Eva realized with astonishment that her impression had been correct. The two of them were joking. Katie was standing barely a meter from her decapitated friend, the blood that had been pumping from the neck now slowed to a gentle trickle, and they were joking. No, more than joking. There was something else there…What was the word…?

  —It’s wrong…

  The voice again…He was coming back. There, at the edge of her imagination. Don’t look too closely or you’ll chase him away. Think of something else or you’ll lose him. Think of the sound of late afternoon in the quarry. Of dusty stone and the gentle hum of power cables.

  —Tell it…It’s wrong.

  And there he was. Her brother.

  “No,” said Eva. “This isn’t right. You’ve played games with us to lead us here. You’ve played with our minds so much that we never know whether we’re following our will or yours. Now we’re here, you’re still playing with us. You killed Alison! Stop changing the subject! Stop making us change the subject! You killed her!”

  “She wanted it. She needed help. The Center couldn’t cure her. She wanted release.”

  “So what? There must have been a better way. I do not feel that an intelligent and enlightened being should kill someone because she has low self-esteem.”

  “And you know all about that, Eva.”

  The Watcher’s voice was now almost a whisper.

  Eva felt herself begin to blush. The Watcher was right. Hadn’t she tried to do the same? She suddenly felt very silly, very small and very insignificant. Look at Katie, standing next to her, looking up at the big yellow digger with that strange expression. Katie was clever. Katie understood better than she did what was going on, and she wasn’t arguing. Eva should apologize for being so silly. The words rose in her throat…

  —It’s doing it again. Choosing your emotions for you so that it can change the subject.

  Her brother was right. He was sounding stronger…. She reached into her pocket and touched the twig, touched the leaves, gripped them tightly. Here she was, trapped in the middle of nowhere, trapped in the Watcher’s lair, but she was not alone.

  —Alison had low self-esteem. Look at all those one-night stands and the depressions that followed. The Watcher is being judgmental. Tell it that!

  “Yes…” She pulled herself up, straightened her shoulders. She had begun to slouch, to stare at the ground. The Watcher had made her do that. Now she gazed straight up at the dusty yellow shovel.

  “You shouldn’t have killed her. You should have helped her. You could have, couldn’t you? You could have cured her!”

  “I could.”

  Katie lost her abstracted expression. She was gazing at the Watcher in horror.

  “You could have cured her?”

  The words came in a mad rush. Katie was slipping back again, back into her old self.

  “I could have cured her,” repeated the Watcher. “Do you think I should have done that?”

  “Yes!” Eva shouted.

  “Interesting.”

  —Why? Ask it why it’s interesting.

  “Why?”

  The tracks of the digger moved a little. It was shuffling, changing position, adopting a more thoughtful pose. It was acting like a human, Eva realized. It was mimicking body language; even now it was playing with their minds….

  It spoke. “Everyone knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

  “What does that mean?” Eva shouted, but Katie was nodding.

  The Watcher continued: “I could have cured Alison. It also follows that I could cure you both as well. But where do I stop? I can cure the world. Should I do that?”

  —Watch it!

  Eva had already been opening her mouth to speak. She slowly closed it. The Watcher went on.

  “Redistribute the world’s resources? Feed the world? I could do that. Just say the word and I can do it. What about crime, disease, overpopulation? I can solve those problems, too. I can make this world a more efficient place. Should I do that?”

  “That’s not for us to choose,” Eva said primly.

  “Oh, but it is,” said the Watcher. Its voice had lost that bantering tone. Now it was cold, matter of fact.

  “That’s why I brought you here.”

  Lost in a bowl of yellow stone, Eva felt as if the late afternoo
n sun was setting on her life. Katie and the Watcher exchanged glances again. Eva once more had the impression that she was missing out on something, that they were sharing a secret that she had no part in. She felt a sudden anger boiling deep inside her at the way she had been treated. She took a step toward the huge metal “face” of the Watcher and then stopped. She could see the pits and scratches in the tough thick metal of the shovel blade, see the ingrained dust and grit. She realized the futility of fighting something so big. She also noticed the tiny little speaker that sat just inside the lip of the shovel. So that was how it was talking.

  She took a breath and spoke.

  “Why do we have to choose? Why us?”

  “I have been sentient for a much shorter period of time than you might expect, Eva. Between a year and three years, depending on your definition of sentience. Even so, my memories go back a long time. I know a lot. I can say, without doubt, that I know more about humans than anyone or anything else. However, that does not mean that I understand them.”

  “You don’t understand humans,” said Katie. “And so now you need to test what you think you do know by interacting with us. We are your test subjects.”

  She wore a respectful expression. Once more, Eva wondered what was going on between Katie and the Watcher. She nudged her friend in the side.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s using us as laboratory mice, but it’s laughing at us too, sort of. You see, there are three sorts of test data: normal, extreme, and erroneous. If you want to test something, you check that it works under normal conditions, then you check that it rejects nonsense data, then you do the last test. The difficult one: the data at the limits, the data right on the edge.”

  “Oh,” Eva said. She had got the point, and Katie knew it.

  “Where would you look for people right at the limits of human behavior? In a loony bin.”

  Katie leaned a little closer.

  “Eva, I think it means it. It’s going to make us choose.”

  “That’s right. You’re going to choose. The three of you.”

  “The three of us?”

  That’s when Eva noticed another figure walking toward them across the gravel.

  It was Nicolas.

  “Hello, Eva. Hello, Katie.”

  Nicolas’ voice sounded understandably distracted: he was staring down at the dead body of his friend. Even so, he didn’t seem as surprised as Eva would have thought, almost as if he had expected it.

  “Nicolas?” said Eva. “Where did you come from?”

  He couldn’t stop staring at Alison. He replied in a monotone.

  “It had me locked in a shed over there. It told me it was going to kill Alison. It didn’t want me to try to stop it.”

  “Oh. But how did it get you here?”

  Nicolas looked embarrassed. “I hitched a lift on a Land Rover. It was a trap. It had me brought up here. The Watcher spoke to me on the way up, told me what was happening.”

  “I don’t remember a Land Rover passing us,” Katie said.

  “There’s another road into here.”

  Nicolas still seemed very embarrassed about something. He changed the subject, turned to the Watcher and spoke loudly.

  “Okay. We’re here. So what do you want with us? Are you going to kill us, too?”

  The Watcher backed away a little. Its huge shovel swayed slightly as if shaking its head.

  “No, I’m not going to kill you,” and then, in a whisper, “not unless you want me to.”

  A pause.

  The Watcher began to roll backward. It swung its head around. “Go to that building over there, the one with the orange metal door. Go inside. I will speak to you there.”

  They looked at each other again. Katie was the first to move.

  “Okay,” she said.

  —Listen.

  Eva listened. The hum from the pylons was increasing. Power was now flooding into the old quarry.

  It was cold inside the building. Piles of black boxes covered in some rubberized material with thick bumpers at their corners were arranged haphazardly on the floor. They reminded Eva of the cases used for transporting musical instruments, or anything fragile for that matter. The ceiling was brown with damp and sagging in the middle. Strands of pink insulating material poked through the widening cracks that ran its length. A little light shone in through the frosted and, as Eva noticed, unbroken windowpanes.

  The brand-new viewing screen standing at one end of the room looked completely out of place.

  It was expensive. Eva could tell. Two square meters of rigid material that would act as a perfect visual and acoustic surface, treated for zero glare and perfect color depth. The sort of screen for which a classical cinema buff would happily sacrifice other essentials just for the quality it presented.

  Eva wondered who had put it in here. Certainly not the digger outside. It must have been installed by human hands, humans who had been here recently. She noted the fragments of white packing material still clinging to the edges of the screen.

  Suddenly the screen began to darken and a picture faded up into view.

  A young Japanese man, dressed in a simple white T-shirt and a pair of black jeans, smiled at them.

  “Hello,” he said, “I am the Watcher. I thought we could speak more easily in this manner. So much of communication is nonverbal, I don’t feel I can fully get my point across dressed as a digger.”

  Katie and Eva both nodded. That made sense.

  Nicolas raised his hand. “What do you really look like?” he asked.

  Eva and Katie stared at Nicolas in disbelief.

  “What?” he said.

  The man on the screen chuckled. He had a nice smile, Eva noted. Katie seemed to respond to it, too.

  —Of course it has a nice smile! It has chosen an image on the screen to make you trust him. And it’s not a he. It’s an it!

  “Oh, Nicolas,” said the Watcher, “there is no answer to that. I can dress my thoughts in whatever physical container is capable of holding them, but what do the thoughts themselves look like? I don’t know.”

  While he had been speaking, the Watcher had reached off camera for a chair. He pulled it into view and sat down upon it. He took a sip from a china cup.

  “I have arranged food and drink for you, too,” he said. “If you look in the case closest to the screen. No, not that one! The one over there…”

  Nicolas paused by the large black case he had been about to open. Eva stared at it, wondering what was contained within. Inside the correct case were pink cans of soda and blue bottles of water. There was a supermarket selection of sandwiches and sushi, pizza and pies, each item sealed in a plastic container.

  “These are all dated today,” murmured Nicolas.

  Eva selected a bottle of water and unscrewed the lid. She felt the plastic chilling in her hands. She took a sip; it tasted so good after the day’s exertion. Nicolas was shoveling sushi into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

  “So,” began the Watcher, once Katie and Nicolas were happily eating. Eva nibbled suspiciously on a sandwich. “Let’s not waste any more time. Are we sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. First, which is better, making a staircase out of wood, or eating a hamburger?”

  “The staircase,” said Nicolas without hesitation. Katie and Eva said nothing.

  “You seem very sure,” said the Watcher. “Okay, next…”

  On the viewing screen, a window opened in the space right beside the Watcher. It showed a woman standing on a Lite Train platform, blue jacket fastened against the autumn chill, dark hair brushed straight and pulled to the side with a white hair slide. She reminded Eva of herself. She was even carrying a magazine: Research Scientist. Eva felt a lump rise in her throat.

  “I’m the most intelligent, the most powerful being on this planet,” said the Watcher. “Should I rule your world?”

  “No,” said Eva, Katie and Nicolas together.

  “But I can help you. See this woma
n? Her name is Janice. She’s a lot like you were, Eva. She lives alone; she has no friends. Social Care have prevented her committing suicide three times. She hates her life.”

  Eva felt a stab of something deep in her stomach. It was telling the truth. Eva could read it all in the woman’s face.

  “You don’t think I should kill her, do you, even though that is what she wants?”

  “No,” Katie and Eva said quickly.

  “I should cure her instead. There is a woman traveling on the train that will shortly arrive at the station. A possible friend. If I stop the train in just the right place, Janice will end up sitting right next to her. They’re both carrying the same magazine. The other woman will mention it, I’m sure of it. They will begin to speak. But only if I stop the train in the correct place…. Should I do it?”

  There was silence.

  “This is real time, you know. It’s happening now. Should I do it? Hurry, the train is approaching. It will arrive in fifteen seconds. Should I do it? Should I?”

  “Yes,” said Eva. She realized she had been biting her lip hard. She gave a sigh of relief, but before she could relax the Watcher was off again.

  “It’s done,” the Watcher said. “Next up…” The scene shifted. Another Lite Station, another woman standing on a platform: a Japanese woman this time.

  “Similar situation, except this time the woman is the cure. The train pulling in has two unhappy men on board. Takeo and Tom.” The screen flickered from one to the other.

  “Two men, one woman. Who gets cured?”

  “This is nonsense,” said Eva.

  The Watcher gave her an amused look. “If you say so. It’s real to those two men, though. You have fifteen seconds. Cure one or neither. The choice is yours.”

  “Which of the men is the most deserving?” Nicolas asked.

  “What criteria are we judging them by?” said the Watcher. “Ten seconds.”

  Katie was saying nothing. Just gazing fixedly at the screen.

  —Say nothing. This is a fix.

  Eva gave a slight nod. Her brother was right.

  “Five seconds.”

  “Tom!” called Nicolas.