by James Smythe
She drags the plug from the side and plugs it into the wall, and then strokes the screen. Doing this is like instinct. The screen flickers to life. There’s the familiar triple tone of the boot noise – ding-ding-ding, ascending and positive, full of optimism – and then the screen is awash with light. Beth hadn’t realized how covered in dust it was. She doesn’t know when this thing was last turned on, but the clock has reset. She pulls her sleeve down over her hand and wipes the screen off. She’ll do a better job later, but she wants to check that this all works before she gets her hopes up. The interface is exactly as she remembers, all big colourful buttons and words driven by positivity. Nothing negative. Even in the act of taking away they were reinforcing. PURGE, COMMIT, REPLENISH. She presses a button, through to sub-menus. There’s a button that offers her the chance to explore the hard drive, which she presses, but the drive is clear. That’s what she’d hoped for. She didn’t want somebody else’s memories lingering here. She heads out of the room and into the other bedroom, her bedroom. Compared to the Machine’s room, it’s chaos. Clothes everywhere, on the floor and bed, – she sleeps around them, making nooks in them where her body lies – and the walls stacked high with vacuum-packed bags full of clothes that she hasn’t worn in years, or that she kept of Vic’s. She keeps the hard drive under her bed, because that seemed like the safest place. If she got burgled, she didn’t want them to take it thinking that it would be worth anything. Pulling it out – it’s been in a box with remnants of who she was before, old library cards and birthday cards and childhood photographs – she walks into the room and sees the drive appear on the screen as she gets closer. It’s a first-generation capacitive wireless device, able to pick up on other wireless items in the vicinity and read their drives. A new option appears on the screen: a cartoonish image of a hard drive. She presses the button – her hands are shaking, because she’s worried that the drive might have wiped itself or corrupted over the past couple of years (ever since she backed up the contents from an older drive one New Year’s Day as she worried about it, worried about the life-span of these things) – and there it is: a folder named after her husband. She presses his name and waits as it loads.
3
There are hundreds of files inside, all date-stamped, and all under an umbrella of his name. She presses the first one, which she can barely remember being recorded because it was so long ago, and waits as it loads. A bar appears on the screen and an icon of a play button. She presses it and the Machine starts thrumming. The file starts loading. The technology isn’t there with the size of these files: the pristine nature of exactly what they’ve recorded, and how long they are. The amount of data that they contained inside the packets of the audio files themselves … Everything important. The audio is essentially worthless. It’s wrapping paper. But the files are enormous, and streaming them all is impractical. It would take far too long; too much waiting for them to load. She should be using the hard drive of the Machine itself, but she wants to check it works first. That, and she wants to hear him. She’s too eager.
Then the first file is done queuing itself up, and it plays automatically, and she hears somebody clearing their throat in the background, the click of something. Somebody sitting down. She doesn’t know where the speakers are in the casement, but they’re somewhere, or it uses the metal itself as a speaker. Maybe that’s where the vibrations come from: internal sound channelled outwards. She saw that once, when she was a teenager: something you could plug your iPod into and it would turn any glass table or window into a speaker. She remembers being impressed by it: as the boys that she knew ran around her parents’ house plugging it into everything they could find, dancing in their room full of art pieces as the glass covering a statue that her father described as priceless vibrated with the sounds of trilling keyboards and squawked singing. They danced on the rugs, because of the novelty of not being able to hear their own footfalls.
The first voice she hears is that of a stranger. It must be one of the doctors who had worked with him.
We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? it asks.
Victor McAdams. His voice is suddenly full in the room. She can’t remember exactly how long it’s been since she heard his voice talking properly, saying sentences. Long enough that it’s become a memory, rather than something tangible. She’s forgotten how deep it was. How it cracks at the higher end. The trepidation as he says their surname, and the pause that hangs in the air afterwards. She can hear him breathing.
And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?
Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.
Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. You know why you’re here?
Yes sir.
Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First-name terms here, Victor.
Vic.
Vic it is. Beth hears the smile. Shall we begin? Beth stops the recording. The voices hang in the air, like the dust. It works. The files are intact. Her first worry dealt with. She presses the screen and goes back a few stages, back to the central menu, and ticks the box to copy the contents of the drive to the Machine itself. The vibrations start as it accesses its drives. It’s older than her tiny hard drive by a couple of years, and she thinks about the information – about the recordings of Vic’s voice, pages and pages of entries where he sat in a room and spoke about the things that he didn’t want to remember any more – she thinks about it all expanding as it fills the drive of the Machine. It gives her a time-bar for the download, of hours rather than minutes. The slowest crawl. She goes to the main room of her flat and thinks about how she should tidy more. It’s become worse since she invested in this project, stealing both her time and her energy. The kids have suffered most: mountains of marking sit by the front door, and she knows that they need to have most of it done before the summer holidays. Her deadlines are theirs. She has six weeks coming up, and she’s planned how she’ll break it down by the day. She’s begun stockpiling food and provisions: the kitchen is brimming with canned foods, and the bathroom has toilet-roll packets stacked behind the door. The plan involves her not leaving the flat for the first week because Vic will most likely need her. He won’t be able to be left alone for more than a couple of hours, not for at least that time, and probably much longer. The schedule of how those six weeks will work is punishing, she knows, but needs must. She has printed them out, a week per sheet of A4 paper, and she’s put them on the fridge under a large magnet that Vic got given by his parents when he was a child, that he hung onto. She’s kept it as well, like a trophy. Proof that he was once real. She can tell that people don’t believe her, when she talks about him. It’s like he’s a ghost. She says, He used to be a soldier, and they smile, and they ask where he is now. She tells them that he’s away, serving still. They look at her – or, if she’s let them past that barrier, at her flat – and they know that it’s a lie. Nobody’s away serving any more. Everything where they were is rubble. So she has to tidy, and she has to make sure that she knows exactly how the Machine works. Two weeks before the end of term.
She has videos on the computer, kept on the desktop. They’re taken from a forum about these things, where she’s nothing more than a username that bears no relation to who she is. Numbers and letters chosen at random, on purpose. She doesn’t know if the forums are monitored – or who would be monitoring them – but just in case. She grabbed the videos over one long weekend, determined in case the site ever suddenly disappeared. She’s renamed the videos with numbers, so that she knows what order she’s learning them in, and she’s already watched them tens of times, but never with anything to practise on. It’s different when there’s a practical application. Plus, there’s a difference in the firmware in the Machines, and she needs to know exactly what she’s playing with. She thinks that she should check it, so she goes back to the bedroom. It’s the first time she’s been surprised: before, she pulled the paper off, and exposed it piece by piece. Now she sees how big it is for the f
irst time, and the mass of blackness seems to make its own negative light, casting the rest of the room in a shadow of its own making. And it seems so tall to her. Impossibly tall. The ceilings are high, ten foot, and this wasn’t much taller than the first removal man, but it seems to fill almost every bit of the space. She tries to see on top of it but can’t, so she idles in front of it. The screen is still active but on standby, the colour and brightness dampened. She presses it and the whole Machine whirs into life. The noise – she hadn’t noticed it before, but it must have been there – is like gears, as if this were some nineteenth-century apparatus. Something almost industrial. She knows that this is a computer, and that what’s inside is fans and microchips and cables to carry processes from one part to another; and the hard drive, never forget the hard drive, which is both the brain and the heart of the Machine – but the noise is unlike any that she’s heard. She supposes that she’s forgotten: that things have changed since this was cutting edge. She thinks about the newer models of the Machine, the ones after this. How much one of them would have cost her, even if it could be hacked and updated like this one has been. That she would have been here in a decade still, forming her plan, slowly losing herself, alone for so long, with Vic’s body rotting more and more. Less her husband with each passing day, week, month, year.
The screen gets lighter, and she sees the button labelled ABOUT. She presses it, and there, a year and a firmware number. She reasons that this must have been one of the first commercial models, before even her mother started on the programme, and well before Vic was using one. She pulls the Crown down from the dock and the screen changes, updates. PURGE, it invokes, or REPLENISH. Like this is some sort of advertisement. She’s seen the language on both beauty products and bleaches. She doesn’t put the Crown on her head, because she dare not.
She’s thought about it, sometimes: as she’s tried to get to sleep, lying in bed, thinking about how easy it would be to wear a Crown, to press the buttons and to talk about Vic and herself, and their old life together. To talk her way through everything that she’s lost. To press the PURGE button and feel it all drift away. Vic used to say that it felt like when you take painkillers for a wound. He said that they gave him heavy stuff after the IED went off and put its shrapnel in his shoulder and his neck, and once he’d popped them there was a sense that it had once hurt, but that it was like an echo of the pain was all that was left, or the memory of the pain. Like it’s been rubbed hard and then left alone. That’s what the Machine did. He rarely spoke about it as time went on, but in the early days, before Beth was allowed anywhere near the process, when Vic still knew what he was doing and why he was doing it, he frequently used to describe it to Beth when he got home. They said it would be two weeks before he’d start to lose what it was he was running from, and it was, almost to the day. After that, Beth didn’t like to say anything more. He knew that it was time for his treatments and he didn’t question them. Beth looks at the bar for copying Vic’s files over, and it’s hardly gone down.
Come on, she says, though it’s not like she can do anything with it here and now. She lies on the bed next to the Machine, a bed that she’s never actually slept in because it felt wrong, somehow, ever since she decorated the room. She watches the bar and shuts her eyes, and thinks about Vic and what he could be.
When the company behind the Machine announced that they were working on a cure – they would put the word in inverted commas, because they were so cautious with how they went about presenting it to the world after the last time – they said that the technology side of things was flawless.
They said, We can take a person and make them whole again.
Beth – everybody – doubted it, but then they showed videos of a man and his progress. In the earliest videos he shuffled like a zombie and needed feeding and changing and his eyes lolled back in his head even as his loved ones poked and prodded him, asking him questions, trying to get a response. In later ones he fed himself and walked, and even responded to his name. They showed old video of him ignoring persistent, insistent calls – Shaun, Shaun! – over and over again. Then they invited him up onto the stage they were making the announcement from: and they did it solely by calling his name. Once. Shaun! He ran up, and he shook their hands. He looked at the cameras, and his gaze was a bit glassy-eyed but he was mostly there. He waved at the crowd, and then they asked his wife up there as well, and they embraced on stage to applause. Standing ovation: he is healed.
And this can only get better, the men from the company promised. Beth saw it in their eyes: the idea that this was somehow their redemption. The thing that might stop their houses being burned and people fighting with them in the streets and the headlines on the tabloid sites. They have destroyed thousands of lives and now they’re back, ready to save the day. They said, It takes years of therapy to bring them to this point. It uses our pioneering technologies. The process works best when we’ve got a full and frank medical history, and when you help us.
Shaun was back in another video. This time, his bedside in some hospice somewhere, where the bed was thin and metal-framed and the bed sheets that yellow colour. On his head was a Crown, or what passes for a Crown now: tiny multi-coloured pads designed by a famous South American designer, to make it appealing, placed on the temples and the forehead, tiny lights indicating that they’re all wirelessly connected. His wife talked Shaun through a shared experience from their past that, presumably, had been lost; she’s laughing and squeezing his hands.
We found it so funny, she said, and then you opened the presents, and you had another one, from Mark and the kids. A funny story, and when she laughed at the end, so too did Shaun, somehow simpatico to it all. On stage, Shaun watched the video and then spoke to the audience. Slow and measured, careful with his words.
I can hardly believe this is me, he said. Standing here in front of you. The audience whooped and clamoured.
Shaun represents hundreds of man-hours of work, the doctors said, and it’s not perfect. Shaun’s not perfect. But we’ll get there. By the end of this decade, they said, we hope to be able to offer this therapy to many of our ex-patients. Shaun waved again. The end of the decade made Beth’s heart sink, because that was eight years away. That was so far away that, by the time it arrived, she would have been apart from Vic for more time than they had been together. And that was two years ago. They were asked, over and over, how long it would be before the public could have access to the tech. We don’t want to rush things, they said. They – everybody – wanted to avoid a situation like the first time around: rushed to market, and then thousands damaged, seemingly irreparably. They were cautious, and their ‘end of the decade’ became the start of the next decade, in the post-Shaun interviews. They wanted to wait until it was right.
The internet didn’t want to wait, though. People who knew things, people who worked for the company and hated what they had done, people with vested interests: they all stepped forward under the internet’s veil of anonymity, and they told others how to do it. They leaked firmware, software, instructions; things that somehow they had got their hands on, that they shouldn’t have had. Cloak and dagger, they explained that the Machine could be used to create a new persona in the damaged. It could build them up again, as they were, based on who they were. It could be achieved through talk, through photographs and videos. It was better if you had the recordings of their original sessions. They got together in clandestine meetings, organized themselves to do work for this: on the technology, the software, the work itself. Eventually they had their own case study, their own version of Shaun: a lady called Marcela. She was from Eastern Europe, and Beth didn’t understand what she was saying but she got the gist. Marcela was herself again, in that she smiled and she waved at the camera and the person behind it, and they bent past the lens and leaned in to kiss her and she kissed his bearded face back, and he gave a thumbs-up to the camera.
We used the original recordings to help Marcela, the video said, and that sold it
to Beth. Because she couldn’t wait. This was too important to her, and to Vic. When Beth opens her eyes, the on-screen bar is finished: only it says that the files have been moved, not copied. She looks at the hard drive and it’s empty, but it doesn’t matter. Vic’s memories are in the Machine now, and where they should be.
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Paperback edition available January 2014
About the Book
What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words, ‘My children. Do not be afraid’?
Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation?
The lives of all twenty-six people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it. Some because they didn’t.
The Testimony – a gripping story of the world brought to its knees.
About the Author
James Smythe was born in London in 1980. Since completing a PhD at Cardiff University he has worked as a computer game writer and currently teaches creative writing. He also writes a fortnightly blog for the Guardian Online. The Testimony is his second novel and won the 2013 Wales Fiction Book of the Year award. Other novels include The Machine, and The Explorer (published by Voyager). He lives in London.
