A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  The talk-down squad shepherd him down the fire escape. Gareth seems to have lost the ability to walk and see where he’s going at the same time. His coalman’s hat isn’t anywhere. One of the beer-monsters has climbed up on to the terrace and is trying to repeat the stunt. But the crowd has lost heart, and no one cheers the latecomer. I watch them disperse, seeing a younger me in a few fresh faces; convinced, as I was, that this is just the giddy start of a blissful immortality. If I could tell them the truth, I wouldn’t even bother. I’m thirty. This isn’t the time to start feeling old.

  The last of them haul up over the steps on the other side. We’re alone on the bridge. This is me, and that’s James.

  ‘Actually, that was fucking stupid,’ he says.

  He takes a hipflask from his pocket and hands it to me. The whisky is fiery, warmed by his body.

  ‘I read his essay. It’s pretty bizarre.’

  ‘He won’t show it to me.’ He presses his mouth to the steel lips of the flask, still wet from my own mouth. ‘I’ve asked him. I’ve watched him work so hard on it, and I want to know what he’s doing. He’s my friend. I want to share this with him. But he’s obsessed. Completely adamant. You’re the only person who’s allowed to know about it.’

  ‘Why the secrecy? What’s he afraid of?’

  ‘Everyone. He’s totally paranoid. He thinks this thing he’s working on is so big, people are going to do anything to steal it from him.’

  ‘Well, if he’s trying to give me a clue, it hasn’t worked. I’ll have to ask him about it tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re seeing him?’

  ‘We’re meeting to talk about his essay. Perhaps I can get him to explain his suicidal behaviour as well.’

  James props himself against the parapet. ‘It was like this last time. One minute he’s pushing the pranks a bit too far, and the next he’s attracting the interest of the sanity police.’

  ‘Last time? What happened last time?’

  ‘You know Gaz missed a semester?’

  I didn’t, but maybe I should. ‘Is that why he was going on about his college record?’

  He passes the flask again and watches me drink. ‘He was obsessed with these philosophical thought experiments. Pure rationality. He was totally in his own head. Reading like a fanatic, all this stuff about the mind and the brain. First it was the idea of an artificial consciousness. The brain is just a machine, and the brain is conscious, so machines should be able to become conscious too. He got this idea that if he could connect up enough second-hand computers he could create consciousness in an artificial system. You know, like a network that would become aware of itself. It all went over my head. Then there was some other thing which was like an art performance. He sat in this box in the middle of Monastery Green and got people to pass bits of paper to him through a slot in the side. And then he’d pass them back with other stuff written on them. The writing was all in Chinese. What’s that about?’

  I try to recall the details. ‘It’s to do with how you can have a material mind. If you go by the scientific description, we’re just a complex system of connections. How does that come to have experience, to feel pain and joy and all the rest of it?’

  To be that person, in this room, right now. James put it pretty well. I think of the attachment that came with Gareth’s essay. His notes were full of these kinds of musing on the philosophy of consciousness. They might be a better guide to his obsessions than I imagined.

  ‘Anyway, that got him in enough trouble to start with. He got on to one of the networks and tried to get all the accounts talking to each other. Like the network itself could become conscious. Then he just vanished.’

  ‘Vanished?’

  He tosses up his hands, scattering imaginary cards. ‘This hacking stuff he’s into? Normally, when you’re online, you leave a trail: sites you’ve been to, messages you’ve sent. Gaz knows how to cover the tracks. He knows how to make himself disappear. I mean completely. Without a trace.’

  ‘So how did they find him?’

  ‘They didn’t. Not until he was ready. He just turned up. Suddenly he’s in New York and he’s trying to get a meeting with the CEO of PowerServe. You know, the software corporation? Says he has a deal to offer them which will make them both rich. He gets about eight seconds into his spiel, they call Security and he’s escorted off the premises.’

  ‘Into the arms of the psychiatrists?’

  He nods. ‘Diagnosis: bipolar disorder. Manic phase.’

  ‘You say he’s planning something. You think he’s trying to make money out of this?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s about money for Gaz. It’s about the ideas. You tell me. What does it say in his essay?’

  I hold my satchel close. Gareth has entrusted me with this, and I’m not sure I’m ready to pass that trust on, even if James is an old friend.

  ‘Not much. Some weird stuff about enhancing human memory. It’s manic alright. I think he’s got fixated on what we were talking about today. I’m going to have to talk to him.’

  Some postgrads wheel past, heading for the same late-night bar. James’ whisky is tugging at my sense of balance. The thought almost shames me, but an obscure regret is tingling in me, a feeling that Gareth’s attention-grabbing has spoiled something.

  ‘I’d better be getting back.’

  ‘Wait.’

  He’s leaning on the rail, reading his future in the exposed workings of the Churl.

  ‘If you want an extension on your coursework, forget it.’

  ‘I want to know what you think.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About me.’

  ‘I’m thinking that I ought to report you.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘Because sometimes I’m not sure if it really matters. Whether I do the thing or don’t do the thing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You want to know what I think, James. I don’t think. That’s the problem.’

  He turns around to face me. I appear to amuse him.

  ‘I’m empty,’ I say. ‘There’s no “me” to do the thinking. I’m an illusion. The confection of a restless, pattern-seeking brain.’

  Fuck, it’s cold. I wish we could go somewhere warmer. I don’t know what I’m saying any more.

  ‘I’m sorry. You don’t really want to know all this.’

  ‘I like learning from you, Dr Churcher.’

  I stand next to him at the rail. His body makes a faint shield from the wind.

  ‘You think you’re in control of your actions. You think that just by deciding to do something, that makes you do it. But it doesn’t. Something makes it happen, but it’s not anything that corresponds to “you”. You might feel you’re in control, but that’s just because you’re taken in by the illusion. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with me. I’m not different to you. I’ve just stopped believing in the illusion.’

  ‘And this illusion...That’s just because we’re all made of molecules and connections and there’s nothing else?’

  ‘Basically, yes. I’m not saying it because I want to be different. I’m saying it because the neuroscience proves it.’

  ‘Weird. You’re some kind of zombie, Dr Churcher.’

  ‘Well, I have perceptions and everything. My input systems are working. I can tell you that my knee is aching and I’ve got a shiver down my back, and the little toe on my right foot has died and gone to heaven. But it doesn’t have any centre to it. Maybe it’s a bit like being mildly drunk all the time, except it’s not like that because you feel like it all the time. You have this onrush of sensations and somehow they don’t all fit together.’

  ‘I’m a student: I know about being mildly drunk all the time. But how come you don’t fall over?’

  ‘Because the individual systems work well. My visual system sees an obstacle coming and patches the information straight through to my motor cortex. All you need are close linkages between input and output, more-or-less autonomous subsystems
doing what they do. The neuroscience has moved on. We haven’t got a Mr Spock up there, working through everything coolly and logically and omnisciently. We’ve got a ragtag collection of self-obsessed processors, each of which is mostly blissfully unaware of what the others are doing. We think we’re steering this thing, but we’re not. There’s no one in control. There’s not even a centre of consciousness. Half of the time you don’t need consciousness. You’d get along fine without it.’

  ‘Because there isn’t a you.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can deny consciousness, Dr Churcher. What about love? What about ecstasy? Don’t they make you feel complete?’ Was I there, when Mateus was there? I remember his weight, his garlic sweetness. That summer night we lay on the roof of my treehouse, our bodies warm chocolate, held in the sticky hand of love. He thought he was there. He thought he was inside me. But he wasn’t anywhere near. I was just a figment of his higher-level visual processes, a brilliant illusion. I was in pieces, and all he saw were fragments. His zombie girl.

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Well, maybe when you meet someone you really like, it will feel different.’

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Is that why Mateus is getting back in touch? Because he wants more of that emptiness, pushing back against him?

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I say. ‘I’ve just read too much neuroscience.’

  ‘But listen to what you’re saying. You’re talking about me. What’s me if not a single, indivisible self?’

  ‘It’s a word. A word for a thing. However fragmentary my experience is, it’s tied to a particular body, a particular pair of eyes and ears, the biological machine that runs all these separate systems. I’m not one of these people who’ll doubt the existence of the bridge I’m standing on. I’m here, I’m real. I can’t doubt that.’

  He turns to me, rubbing his raw red hands, leaning with one hip propped against the rail. There goes my windshield. In the lensy cold I see him blurred against the union buildings, the millionaire town-houses, masses of piled-up land waiting for snow. My gloves are lined suede, but I can distinctly feel his hand pressing down on mine, squeezing the fingers into each other then slowly letting go. This word comes into my head—whoosh, just whoosh—and I feel a warm, throbbing amazement, and I wonder what happened to that girl who was loved for her emptiness, that zombie girl. Whoosh. Just whoosh. He turns me around and closes his hands behind my back. I look up, wanting to say something. Then he kisses me, fleetingly and insubstantially, like divers must kiss, when they’re buoyed up by something heavier than air. All my life’s been like this, a richly-detailed sleepwalk, a being caught off-guard by the passing of important things, so that none of the importance could stick to them, they would all be forgotten in the morning. He tastes of blood. I could conk out in his arms. A woman clicks past in expensive heels, and with her goes the vague idea that she might be my boss, Gillian Sleet. But I take no notice, because I’m nothing but the trembling object of James’ kiss, which isn’t ending, because I don’t want it to.

  ‘You’re here,’ he says.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  How To Get Rich Without Really Trying

  ◉

  I’ve arranged to see Gareth the next day. I want to talk to him about his essay, and find out more about this scheme he’s trying to convince me of. But last night has given us other things to talk about. His performance on the footbridge could have been the first sign of something serious. James seems to be half-expecting another breakdown, and this is how it would begin. I’m Gareth’s tutor; I have a duty to keep him out of trouble. And if that means arranging to see him on a Saturday, when the Institute is supposed to be closed to all but essential research staff, then that’s what I’ll have to do.

  He’s five minutes early. He’s standing next to the water maze in my lab, watching a mouse sink to its ears in the milky water and paddle out from the side of the pool. I reboot the tracker and watch the icon nibble its way across the monitor screen. You’d never have thought a mouse could be a good swimmer until you saw one in the water maze. At first it’s going wrong by about forty-five degrees, heading straight for the middle instead of the south-west quadrant, but then it finds its bearings and starts closing in on the platform. The plastic disc it’s looking for is submerged fifteen millimetres below the surface, invisible until you’re right on top of it. I haven’t moved it since the last block of trials. We watch the mouse scrabble up onto the platform and sit there, flicking at its whiskers in quiet triumph.

  ‘He’s done that before,’ Gareth says.

  ‘Only once. But the tracking’s playing up so I need to give someone an extra trial.’

  ‘Someone?’ He sounds amused. ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘There’s ninety-nine of them. I can’t give them all names. Now, you’ve had your treat. You’re not supposed to be here.’

  Gareth seems quite convinced that he should be here. He’s leaning with both arms stretched out along the rim of the pool, as if he were the owner of this thing and he didn’t quite like where it had been planted. It’s warm in here, but he’s still wearing his coalman’s hat. I thought that had gone in the river last night.

  ‘You said you wanted to see me. I’m just doing what I’m told.’

  The tracker monitor blanks out. I turn the light down over the pool, hoping it’s just a reflection confusing the sensor. The screen stays blank. I reboot the tracker, fish the mouse out of the pool and dab at it with a towel. A few years ago they found that half the mice trialled on the water maze were suffering from hypothermia. My little chat with Gareth can wait: I have to get these two back into their room across the corridor before they catch my cold.

  ‘That was a normal mouse,’ I tell him, trying to asphyxiate a sneeze. ‘This next one’s been transgenically modified to produce too much amyloid precursor. That’s the thing that makes beta-amyloid, which is the protein that forms the plaques in Alzheimer’s. James got that bit right, at least. We genetically programme the mice to produce too much precursor, so they end up with brains full of the same kind of plaques. So we’ve got a mouse model of Alzheimer’s.’

  I put the second mouse down at the same starting point. It starts paddling even before it hits the water, hugging the wall like a drunk then striking out blindly for the dead centre. The monitor tracks it for a while and then flickers into blankness. The mouse reaches the far wall and starts swimming back in the direction it came from. I watch it struggle back to where it started, then reach in and pluck it to safety.

  ‘That’s the transgenic one. Classic Alzheimer’s features: memory loss, behavioural inflexibility, impaired learning. This mouse has got what your granny will probably have by the time she hits eighty-five.’

  ‘Cool,’ Gareth says. ‘So you’ve cracked the mystery of Alzheimer’s Disease.’

  ‘I wish. This is quite exciting because we can now directly connect these mental problems with the formation of amyloid plaques. What we still don’t understand is where the critical points for plaque formation are. You’ve seen how complex these memory circuits are. We need to know where the amyloid is building up, and how it’s having the effect it’s having.’

  ‘That’s why you need the map of the Lorenzo Circuit.’

  ‘Exactly. Once we know where the pathways run, we can work out how the system goes wrong in Alzheimer’s. That’s what they’re working on downstairs. Charting the Lorenzo Circuit, neurone cluster by neurone cluster.’

  ‘Is that the floor the lift doesn’t stop at?’

  I get the mouse into its cage and start hunting for a tissue for myself. ‘You noticed.’

  He starts pressing buttons on the tracker. ‘Don’t you need huge scanners to do all that brain-mapping stuff?’

  ‘They’ve got huge scanners. They’ve got optical imaging scopes and lightweight headcoils of a power I could only have dreamt of when I was a student. The main cooling problems were solved ages ago. They run c
omputer simulations using linked mainframes spread across the Lycee. They’re not short of ways of getting this mapping information.’

  ‘But they analyse it all downstairs. All the top-secret data which the evil biotech Sansom is desperate to get its hands on.’

  I smile, and sneeze violently. ‘James is a romantic. He has his ideas.’ ‘But it is hot stuff.’

  ‘It sure is. Everyone’s desperate to get hold of it. But they won’t.’

  I remember the one time I got let on to the third floor. I was trailing along with the head of the Institute, Gillian Sleet’s puppy for the day. Even the great scientist had to press her manicured fingers against a bioscanner before they would let us through. Combination-locked doors, screened-out windows. They didn’t let us through for long.

  ‘How come they won’t get it?’

  ‘Because it’s safe.’

  He looks awestruck. ‘Have you got FGP? Is that how you’re protecting it?’

  ‘Safer than that.’

  ‘Cool,’ he says, in a different voice.

  I start trying to recalibrate the two infrared sensors. My eyes are streaming and I can’t make out the markings on the fiddly little dials. I undim the light over the pool and a headache comes sirening into earshot.

  ‘So you take security pretty seriously. I had to give my life story before the defenders of science would let me up here.’

  ‘We have to. You’ve seen what some people want to try and do to this place.’

  ‘I thought Conscience were going after Sansom. Because of what they’re supposed to be doing with chimps...’

  I swallow painfully as one of the calibration thumbwheels starts to loosen between my fingers. Too long standing out in the cold last night: it’s left me open to infection. I’ve seen my own evidence of Sansom’s chimp experiments, and it has to be more convincing than any of the video footage that James and his Conscience friends have dredged up. Our moment on the footbridge is not going to change any of that. It’s the sort of fact that’s dead before it has even finished happening, because the world is how it is, the size and the shape that it is, and there’s no room in it for students to go around stealing kisses from their sad and lonely tutors. Moments on dark bridges don’t fit anyone’s reality. The world spins on without them. It’s probably better that way.