A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  I say nothing. There’s a tiny, embarrassed flame inside me. I’m remembering what Gareth said to me when we sat here in this room, about making the birds come when you call.

  ‘Yvonne?’

  She turns back to me. The birds startle and scatter.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  I glance at the hologram. ‘Can’t you tell?’

  She laughs and gestures vigorously with the amulet.

  ‘This light-show gives us patterns of bioelectrical activity. You know as well as I do that it doesn’t show us thoughts. How many times have I had to set students straight about...?’

  I gasp, my whole body jerking. ‘Jesus. Do that again.’

  She pulls back from the hologram, tucking the amulet out of range behind her back. She looks at me, ablaze with curiosity.

  ‘Do it again...’

  I see her twisting at the figurine’s ear. A spurt of activity yellows in the cleft between the hemispheres.

  ‘There it is,’ she whispers. ‘There she blows.’

  Gareth. In this room, right here. The vision hits me with such force that I have to glance over to the door, to prove to myself that he hasn’t just walked in.

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gareth.’

  ‘You didn’t see him. You remembered him. There’s a difference.’

  Those hooded, thyroid eyes. His scarecrow ears, turned towards me. A weird yellowness to his skin, as though his natural colour were green and this were the effect of years without daylight. The face of a less complicated time, looming into my derailed here-and-now.

  ‘So where is he?’ Gillian says. ‘Where did he put our data?’

  ‘He was talking about an aviary. Materialism. Thoughts that have nothing to do with you...Wait. It’s gone. Press it again. Do what you were doing.’

  ‘I do pity your boyfriend.’

  She is quiet, her fingers busy with the thumbwheel. I hold my eyes closed tight, but nothing happens.

  ‘Yvonne...’

  I’m losing it. There’s a flood of raw emotion, a swell of directionless sadness. My eyes are wet with tears.

  ‘What have they done to me?’

  ‘Come on.’ Her voice is firm. I can hear a printer working above the hum of the projector. ‘Let’s get you out of there.’

  ‘No. I’m just...You must have hit something. All these pathways are woven together, thoughts and feelings, rationality and emotion. But how did I see Gareth? It was like a new memory. But it was real.’

  ‘It came from you, Yvonne. This implant can’t give you memories you haven’t had. It can only give a nudge to what’s already there.’

  ‘But memory’s a fiction. That’s what I tell the students. It’s hashed together from bits of knowledge, sensory impressions, all stitched together in a hurry. It’s not what actually happened. It might be, but I can’t rely on it. That’s my problem.’

  ‘OK, so you’ve finally joined us in the real world. That’s how the Circuit works, Yvonne. None of us can rely on it. The brain has to impose order on whatever information it has available. That information gets lost, overwritten, degraded, you name it. Your cortex has only got a part-time interest in the truth. For the rest of the time it’s a deceitful egotist, just wanting to suit its own needs.’

  ‘Tell a story that fits...?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I could go to therapy if I wanted that.’

  ‘You got anyone in mind? I need a good shrink, what with everything that’s been happening here.’

  ‘There’s a guy called David Overstrand.’ I wipe my eyes, smiling bitterly. ‘But I don’t like what he charges.’

  ‘You don’t need a therapist, Yvonne. You need to find out who did this, and why. Or rather, you need to let the police worry about it.’

  I flip the visor shut. I’m getting used to the weight of this thing. Perhaps it’s just the force of my determination. I want to see this through.

  ‘Someone has had the bright idea of fucking with my memory. I need to understand that before I do anything else.’

  ‘Yvonne, we have to get this thing out of you. If that implant slips, it could kill you. I know someone who can get rid of it. I’m not saying they won’t ask questions, but it’s not going to be like rocking up to A&E with a bust of Beethoven up your arse.’

  I flip up the visor and watch the hologram rotating slowly. The swirling has subsided. The scattered empire of the Lorenzo Circuit is almost calm.

  ‘I don’t want it taken out. Not yet.’

  I stare at the yellow ember in the fold between the two hemispheres. For the moment, this implant is part of me. The gleaming ghost in the machine. Without it, I’d be less than I am.

  ‘Are you serious? You’re going to keep that thing inside you?’

  ‘Until I’ve remembered what I’m supposed to remember,’ I say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Fulling Flames

  ◉

  James said he would wait for me at the station. The medieval streets are busy with Southside supporters, arrived on special trains for tonight’s relegation play-off with Pelton. They seem eerily clean, unweathered, sleep-shiny aliens with brand-new human bodies, still learning how to walk right, carry the weight of all this unwrapped flesh. At the new riverside development they crash into bars for last pints before kick-off. Others, dizzy red-and-purple blobs, are crossing the footbridge by the arts centre, their swagger checked by the gravity of the water-mass below them. James ignores them warily, his changing colour registering the threat. He seems anxious, gripping his phone in his hand, checking the screen constantly. Out west, the sun is taking on bloody colours, and its heat on my skin is a weird, amnestic violation. There’s an epic feel about these crowds, a sense that whole peoples are on the move. For the moment, at least, I can blend in with them. No one will have to know I’m here.

  I can hear his phone ringing.

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’

  He pulls it out and looks down at it. He presses down on the power button, blanking the screen.

  ‘Well?’

  I stop walking. He stands looking at the stock prices in the window of the Imperial Bank. Sansom shares are moving up again.

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘He makes a lot of phone calls.’

  I finger the amulet in the pocket of my satchel. I guess he’s seen that I’m not wearing it, but he hasn’t asked why.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I’m starving.’

  The Magic of Asia Food Court. You could lose yourself in there.

  ‘I went to see Gillian. I told her about what we saw in the hotel.’

  ‘Yeah? What did she say?’

  He slides his tray down opposite mine and sits down. A gull flaps off the embankment wall, dives in under the tarpaulin after a discarded fortune cookie, and screeches away over the river.

  ‘She said it was ethically abhorrent, but scientifically possible. That Chinese woman had been implanted with a set of cortical electrodes. The thumbwheel on her amulet was allowing her to tune them in, spread the charge across them in different ways. They weren’t just showing her films, trying to get her to remember. They were controlling her memory.’

  ‘That sounds like something out of a movie, Yvonne.’

  ‘I said to Gillian, “That sounds pretty far-fetched.” And then I said: “So is it significant that I’m wearing the same amulet?”’

  His bruise-yellowed face wears a look of dismay.

  ‘And then Gillian said that the only way to answer that question would be to give me a brain scan. So that’s what she did.’

  I take the envelope from my satchel and show him the printout. He studies it, puzzled.

  ‘And this shows ... what?’

  ‘This shows my limbic system. Part of my entorhinal cortex. Some frontal and occipital regions, and some cortical midline structures. Oh, and there’s a bit of parietal in there as well. Pretty much t
he whole Lorenzo Circuit.’

  I touch at the scab on my collar bone. It’s too tender to press on it, to feel what’s concealed under there. The wound on my scalp throbs, more deeply than before, but its dressing is discreet.

  ‘And what did she find?’

  ‘I’ve had a little cluster of electrodes implanted next to my hypothalamus. That necklace you gave me was controlling the current to them.’

  ‘Hang on, have I just woken up in an episode of Doctor Who?’

  ‘It sounds bizarre to me too, James. Your friend obviously makes some powerful jewellery.’

  ‘I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘Should you have done?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘You must have known about it. This scar on my neck is not from a parcel bomb. It’s from the power supply for a cortical implant.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Yvonne.’

  ‘Is it? Is this just something else I imagined?’

  He sits with his eyes closed, the blue swirls of my cortex laid out before him. He has his head forward and he’s pinching the bridge of his nose. I can’t listen to any more of this, the posture says. Take your truth elsewhere.

  ‘Wouldn’t you have known if you’d had this thing inside you? Wouldn’t you have, I don’t know, felt different?’

  ‘James, the brain has no pain receptors. It can’t feel anything. People walk around for years with chunks of metal in their cortex. Bullets, nails ... they never know they’re there.’

  ‘Well.’ He sits up, gathering himself, and flashes his indestructible smile. ‘I like a woman who’s been enhanced.’

  The joke crashes. Chastened, he picks up the printout again, trying to catch up on this information he’s been missing.

  ‘The question is, who did it?’

  I see Bridge’s face floating through the streaked light of the hallway. We need to know, Yvonne. We’ve got to find the people who did this to you.

  ‘Bridge called the ambulance. She went with me to hospital. Whoever it was who put that thing inside me, Bridge must have known about it.’

  ‘Why Bridge? Come on, Yvonne.’

  His scepticism sounds lame. He knows there’s something going on here, and that he doesn’t know as much about it as he would like.

  ‘She was there, in the hallway. She was talking to me.’

  ‘You remember her talking to you. If Gillian has got her facts right, you’re not going to know what you’re remembering. You might be getting it wrong. That little widget in there might be tricking you.’

  Gillian told me that they try to keep an implant patient conscious. Perhaps that’s what I’m remembering. Maybe Bridge was spreading her fake reassurances at the very moment that they were inside me.

  ‘I know she was there.’ I push the scan back towards him. ‘That thing can’t make me remember things that didn’t happen.’

  ‘But it can make you put the pieces back together differently. The brain is a storyteller. It cobbles together a narrative from whatever information it’s got available. That’s what you keep telling us.’

  I wipe my eyes. Somewhere, deep inside, I’m still crying.

  ‘So when are they taking it out?’ he says.

  ‘They’re not. I don’t want them to.’

  I stare at him, attacking every shadow of emotion. I need to find out what he knows. He smiles uncertainly and reaches for my hand across the table.

  ‘That’s your choice, I guess. Does it change anything? You’re still you, aren’t you?’

  ‘There isn’t a me, James. There’s just a bunch of neural systems doing their own thing. A billion little cortical implants, each as mindless as each other.’

  A roar from the stadium tells us that someone’s gone one down. At the table just behind James, a fan is clearing a space for himself amid the debris. He doesn’t seem to be going to the game. I notice the Pelton FC tattoos, the purple-and-red stripes of this year’s home strip, and I blank him out as another stray Northsider, a rare loner in this land of gangs. He pulls out a card-thin phone and starts texting. It’s the phone my eyes get stuck on.

  ‘At least we know now what Gaz was interested in.’

  James sounds distracted. He’s frowning, looking out at the river, as though understanding something for the first time. Behind him, the Pelton fan is still busy with his phone.

  ‘So when I see him,’ I say, ‘I’ll tell him he was right about what Sansom were doing.’

  ‘The trouble is, Gaz has lost touch with reality. His brain is doing a ton in the fast lane. He’s making connections that don’t always make sense to us. I told you about the semester he went manic. He was obsessed with these thought experiments. How the brain is a biological machine, all that jazz. These implants would have turned him on. You know, twist a thumbwheel and a person has an actual subjective, conscious experience. He’d have loved that.’

  The Pelton fan is looking this way. He’s talking into his phone, not taking his eyes off me. Then I remember where I’ve seen him before. The stranger in the forest. The negligent menace of his rifle. It’s the security man.

  ‘Anyway,’ James says, ‘we have to be patient. Remember what I said about Gaz reappearing in this, in some form no one can recognise? Well, that’s what I mean. From here on, things are going to look different to how they’re used to looking.’

  He grins suddenly, and jerks around to look at the brightly lit coffee stalls.

  ‘Cappuccino?’

  Before I can respond, he’s scraping his chair back and heading off towards the shop-fronts. The security man catches my eye and glances away. He’s texting again, tapping out his orders with a practised thumb. Last time I saw him he was already spying for Sansom. He was out there hunting the runaway chimp with a rifle because the biotech were paying him to. The pits under my toes start to burn. It seems that the Lycee’s old head of security has found someone else to hunt. He’s trying not to make it obvious, but he’s watching me.

  I look over the way James went. He’s switched his phone back on and he’s standing there with two mugs resting on a ledge, reading a message. He doesn’t know I’m watching him. He’s looking puzzled, as though getting instructions he doesn’t like. I feel a moment of cold satisfaction at catching him off guard, even if I hate the thought of who’s checking up on him. He told me he was going back to the squat after dropping me off this afternoon. The thought of St. Lawrence Road is a new kind of fear, smelling of burnt plastic and Pyronox. What I need to know is whether James is as sick of David Overstrand’s disciples as he has been making out. If he’s really finished with them, perhaps I can start believing him again. If not, then I’m going to have to find out the truth about this on my own.

  Then I realise who James is looking at. He’s glancing across at the security man, who is reading a message on his own phone. I tell myself that it’s just coincidence, two men texting in public at the same time, but my heart has already made the connection. When the big stuff happens you feel it directly in your body, opening taps and setting hormonal fires, squeezing the gut like nicotine. James and the Sansom security man are exchanging messages. I catch myself in the moment before realisation, wishing I could be wrong. But I can see it too clearly, the way James has been seeing it all along. He’s putting his phone down and looking over at his contact, who’s angrily avoiding his gaze. James is not even trying to pretend. I trusted him with everything I had, but still he’s found time for secrets like this. If James is in touch with Sansom, then he’s in touch with the people who mean me the most harm.

  A police helicopter hangs over the river, balanced on a thin beam of searchlight. Below us, men are running for the bridges. Across the river something is burning: a car, maybe, parked where you should never park a car. The noise of the riot reaches us thinly, like the goals did, muffled in blankets of night. James watches it all with quietness and a strange tension in his shoulders, sizing up the violence as though he knows he’ll soon be part of it, he won’t get through this wi
thout skin being broken. He has that bigness about him, the bones in his face almost comically swollen, a physicality that asks to be confronted. The thought that he might be killed out there struts coolly through my brain. Fuck him. I’ve been lied to for too long.

  I haven’t said a word.

  He’s still looking at his messages. I’ve a feeling that he wanted me to see him doing this, but I cannot raise the mental energy to work out why. I thought it might be a weird kind of thrill, the realisation that the person you’ve given your life to is not the person you thought he was. But it’s not. It’s draining, a slow enervation. It crushes you like flu.

  I stare at the neat trim of his neckline, the black hairs already sprigged with grey. What is it that I should have noticed? The lies, maybe. The lies should have done it for me. It should have been obvious that he was hiding something the moment he started denying his involvement with Conscience. But even that was an invention. James’ career as an animal rights activist was only ever a show. I swallowed his protests about the suffering of my experimental mice, the whole sick prank of the Atrocity Exhibition, as if I were being paid for it. He’d say it was the unfaceable reality, the truth that makes the stories true. But things are different now. Someone has hurt me, and someone will still be trying to hurt Gareth. That’s not a story. It doesn’t need any help in becoming true.

  He starts down the steps. A couple of Pelton fans tear down past us, laughing and whooping. They’ll be killed if they stay here. They crash to the bottom of the steps and out into the road, making a taxi swerve and blare. The security man is behind us, keeping to the shadows. In a car park across the road I see a white van, night-windowed and inscrutable. A police van rips past full of cops in riot gear. At the bottom of the steps we turn left towards the river. The helicopter has moved on, and for a moment the riot is all distance. Under the streetlights the road is the colour of putty. The Memory Centre gleams behind shadowed hoardings on the other bank, a bright thought throbbing in the night.