Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I’m really very sorry,’ he said, looking to his colleagues for confirmation. ‘I’m really very sorry but I can’t place you—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, a sense of almost limitless potential blossoming inside me; like flowers sprouting gaudy and beautiful from the shitty ground of my soul.

  ~ * ~

  2

  Three occurrences of the same thing is enough to establish the sequence in even the most opaque and slow-witted consciousness. The world carried on from day to day in its usual course, and I carried on with it; except that every three days (slightly less than three days I soon realised) I passed from it and reappeared in an identical version of it - or identical in every respect except that I was not known. This happened without fail. Early in the process I experienced a strange anticipatory anxiety as the deadline approached, wondering if this time would be different - if this time I would be (I could hardly help but think of it this way, particularly in the later stages as the transition became increasingly necessary to liberate me from the consequences of my actions) stranded. But I never was. Every three days, the same violet fire; and a re-emergence in the world as an unknown, free, clean, individual. Liberated from my job, I watched a great deal more TV than before. One afternoon I recall watching the movie Groundhog Day and marking the similarity between the fiction and my fact. But the character in that film is trapped in the same day over and over, and is released only when he learns his Hollywood lesson to be nice to people. My world kept moving on, as the world does. Only I changed - my presence in the midst of things wiped clean every three days, like shaking away an etch-a-sketch portrait. Also, the Groundhog Day actor goes so far as to try and kill himself in his desire to escape, only to find himself returned to the start of the same day. I knew, with a bone-certainty, that this would not be my fate. If I died, I would not reappear in a new dimension, I would be dead. Once I stood barefoot on a wineglass (I was drunk) and gashed the underside of my foot. I needed stitches, the wound was so deep; and had to be ambulanced to hospital. But come the violet fire, the wound remained. It took weeks to heal, actually; and I hobbled from alternate reality to alternate reality until it did.

  I still have the scar, like an open-bracket, on the sole of my foot.

  See?

  Naturally, I expended some mental energy on trying to work out why this had happened to me. Accordingly I considered various theories. Most of these were derived from the films I have seen, which is no doubt an indictment of the paucity of my cultural imagination. I pondered whether I was living an A Wonderful Life life, whereby some angelic power was showing me what the world would be like if I had never been born in it. What made this unlikely was that the world was in no discernible way different. Maybe this, of course, was the point the angelic power was trying to make; the ego-eradicating point about my irrelevance. But if so, it was not obvious to me why he had to make it over and over again, pushing the cosmic reset button every three days, without fail. Or, no, not the cosmic button; just the button with my face on it.

  I read books of science, and books of science fiction. One notion I gleaned from one of these is the theory that people slide from alternate reality to alternate reality all the time. That with every decision we make an alternate reality buds off in which that decision went the other way. The books I read suggested that we don’t experience this slide down the delta of possible pathways as anything but a seamless progression, because our point of view passes so smoothly. Like the penny in the arcade machine, jolting down the matrix of pins, bouncing randomly left or right at each interruption to its fall until it lands on the smoothly indrawing-outpushing metal shelf, to take its place in the irregular tessellations of coins.

  Sometimes I wondered if something had happened to my mind - a stroke, perhaps - that had dislocated my perception of this endlessly unfolding and branching net of possibilities. But I kept coming back to the core point: that my perception of the day-to-day remained as smooth and continuous as ever it had; it was other people who experienced the discontinuity, and its name was me. Or to put it more precisely: everybody’s else’s perception carried on as smoothly as it ought, and so did mine. Except that every three days I slipped into the next reality along.

  Speculation, though, was a fruitless exercise, and I gave it up. Quite apart from anything else, and for the first few weeks in particular, more practical considerations intruded. I needed money. I came back to my home town, and even walked back into the hardware store where that first time, furious and impulsive, I had snatched money at knifepoint. The same old man was there, standing at the same till; and he greeted me with glad, unrecognising eyes. It dawned on me that where I now was, the crime had never happened. Indeed, it dawned on me that whatever I did in the world would disappear once the seventy hours point was reached. If I did any good in the world, then all record or memory of it would pass away as if it had never been - no, not as if, but literally so. And if I did evil, the same was true. I could beat a man with a tyre-iron and rob him of his wallet in the morning; and in the afternoon I could encounter that same man - and he would be unbruised, unrobbed, neither recognising me nor suspecting me of any evil intentions towards him. I could kill a man on Saturday and find him alive again on Sunday.

  ~ * ~

  3

  Ask yourself: what would you do, if you found yourself in that situation? What would you do in a world in which the consequences of your actions, no matter what the actions were, lasted no longer than three days? Would you strive to live a virtuous life? But then I must ask you: how? Three days is too short a space to build up any relationships of trust with the people around you. It is too short a space, for instance, to get a job and earn money. Of course you must have money, for you must eat and drink, and sleep in a bed, and do all those things. But there is no Welfare record of your status as a citizen; no National Insurance number attached to your name; no reference from any previous employer. Where is the money to come from? This is where we find ourselves, at no choice of our own. On the one hand, it is impossible to obtain the funds for living legally. And on the other - and this, it seems to me, possesses exactly the same weight - any illegal action you may commit is wiped from the consciousness of the whole world every three days.

  Actually, the money problem sorted itself soon enough. Early on during my time I observed a man at a cashpoint, and was in a position to memorise his pin (it had three sixes in it, which amused me). It was careless of him to permit me to see his pin. Afterwards I mugged him for his wallet. In that reality, I daresay, he cried police! and had all his cards cancelled. But I slid noiselessly into a parallel reality, in which the credit card number still operated. Of course it did, because J R FAIRBOROUGH still existed in that reality; and his bank account was still the same. He was there in all the realities, I think. I was the one who wasn’t. That meant that, every three days, I could seek out a cashpoint and steal a few hundred pounds from his account, book into a hotel with his plastic, and relax. I carried this card from reality line to reality line and it always worked.

  I fell, in fact, into a particular rhythm of life. For my first two days in the new reality-line I kept my nose more-or-less clean, kept out of trouble, amused myself in whatever ways occurred to me. Boredom, frankly was a problem. But the third day possessed a different tenor. On the third day I became excited; that deep-bone tingle children feel as Christmas approaches. On the third day I could do anything to anyone.

  Of course, if it came to it, I could do anything to anyone on any day. About a month into my new existence I got myself, carelessly, arrested by the police on day two. I was stealing something from a shop, some trivial piece of electrical equipment, and, a little drunk, I was careless. A store detective apprehended me, and, disinclined to go along with him, I picked up a laptop computer from the shelf and struck him with it. I may, in retrospect, have hit him rather more times than was necessary to get him to unhand me. The metal folder of the machine became slippery, and I had to keep
changing my grip so as to be able to bring it down upon his supine head. It’s not that the red mist descended - I really can’t say, in honesty, that it did. But violence is something that focuses one’s attention, I find. Once you begin it, it’s hard to concentrate upon anything else until you’ve finished. That day the violence came to an end when two policemen grabbed my arms, and stumbled me awkwardly to the ground.

  I was cuffed and taken away and processed in the police station. A placid-faced PC took his jacket off, held me over a porcelain sink and washed the blood from my hands and face. My clothes were taken away, and I was given scratchy nondescript gear to wear. Then I was put in a cell. Naturally they couldn’t discover who I was. They kept sending in different people to ask me questions. I slept the night fitfully on the narrow cot, and ate scrambled eggs for breakfast - a fact I record as an instance of my bloody-mindedness, for my metabolism cannot abide egg, and I was sick over everything. So the same placid-faced copper, his bald patch an oval, washed me again and my nondescript gear was replaced with more nondescript gear. I was put back in the cell.

  To begin with this new experience was diverting, or at least up to a point it was - since I had never before spent a night in the cells, or had any dealings with the police beyond the most trivial, cautions for reckless driving and the like. But it quickly palled. Sitting in a cell was boring. Moreover, I couldn’t necessarily see how I was going to get out of that place. The third day came, and the violet flicker fire bloomed around me, and when it passed I found myself still in the cell. The difference now, of course, was that the police had no idea who I was, or how I had come to be inside one of their locked cells. They were almost comically astonished, in fact. They kept coming in and out; asking me the same questions, and pressing me with how did I do it? With was I some kind of fucking reverse Houdini? With was it some publicity stunt? They wanted my name, so I gave it them - it hardly mattered (and no, I’m still not telling you my name). Then they wanted to know what I was doing there, how I got in there, what I thought I was playing at. I decided the best answer to that was ‘I don’t know.’ They kept me for the rest of the afternoon, but had no legal ground for keeping me any longer, so they let me go. They asked me to return to the station in a week’s time, something I blithely promised, and then I walked free. They’d taken away all my stuff, of course, in the previous reality-line, and the police in this reality didn’t have it to return to me. But I reobtained J R FARNBOROUGH’s credit card soon enough.

  Which, in turn, raises some interesting questions. There were times, of course there were, when I was intrigued by the parameters of my experience. Mostly it didn’t bother me, and soon after the whole thing began I gave up all attempts to get to the bottom of what was happening. But on occasion a mighty curiosity would seize me. What was going on? The violet light possessed me, and I moved on. Anything I had immediately about my person came with me. On one occasion, as the transition time approached, I grabbed hold of the metal frame of my hotel-room bed, pulling the whole thing a yard out of position in my eagerness, to see if my touch meant that the whole bed would pass along with me. It didn’t. The purple fire passed away and I found myself holding a short metal pipe, sheared, or rather melted away, on either side. Evidently it was the luminous fire that delineated the extent of what passed. So, I assume, the air immediately around me travelled from dimension to dimension; a thin layer of whatever ground beneath my feet passed too; usually I passed from lawn or floor to an identical lawn or floor, so it was hard to tell. Once, unintentionally, I took a hand. This really wasn’t my fault. The truth is I thought I had more time before the fire came. I really thought I had another half hour or so. But I got that wrong, and I happened to be shaking the hand of a man in a pub. Up flared the light, and when it passed away I was holding the hand, and nothing else.

  You can’t blame me for that one, though. It was an accident.

  There were other occasions when I would be seized by a desire to locate the point of difference that differentiated one reality line from another. There must be one, I reasoned; which is to say, there must be a point of difference beyond the fact that I had never existed in all these subsequent realities. Perhaps it was possible that each alternate reality was an exact clone of the one before, every last atom identically placed; but somehow I doubted that. My not existing must have made bigger changes. But so many of the details were identical. I tried to trace my father, but the phone number didn’t work; and hours in the library surfing the net turned up nothing. It was possible that he had never gone to Canada at all, in this reality-line; but although I dug out a few people with his name and called them, none of them was him. It was also possible (of course I considered this) that my mother was still alive in this reality line. It was possible that my dad and mum had never gotten together in the first place.

  For a week or so I became fixated on the idea that they, like I, had been somehow loosened in the sheaf of alternates; that they were passing from one to the other reality-line, just as I was. As to why this might be, I suppose I wondered if my strange experience were linked in some way to my DNA - a part of my makeup concerning which I have only the loosest sense, but which I know I inherited from them. If they had become dislodged, as I had, it would explain why the internet seemed to have no record of Dad; although that might also (of course) simply be a function of his generation and dotage. I travelled around a little, and poked into the matter in a desultory way, but I didn’t get to the bottom of it.

  It occurred to me that if this thing had happened to me, then it could have happened to others. Indeed, it seemed to me unlikely that I would be the only person so affected. But what to do about that? I could think of no way to locate others like me, and no real reason to do so.

  One day, on a whim, I went to my old flat, now occupied by ‘Roderick’, when I was sure he and his girlfriend were at work. I kicked the door open - no longer possessing my keys - and explored. The shape of the rooms was so very familiar; the damp patch in the corner of the bathroom ceiling the same; the stains on the carpet. But here was all Roderick’s stuff; all his junk, and his papers, and a drawer with letters and photographs - Roderick and his bony girlfriend. It was summer. I opened all the windows and stood for a long time looking out, savouring the disconnection of myself and my former life as you might savour the sourness of vinegar. The sunlight was hard as chalk; the air as hot and blue like cigarette smoke. A plane cut a white slit in the sky. The horizon was cluttered with pellet-hard white clouds. From where I stood I could just about make out the cellophane shimmer of the river’s surface. It was the flexing and warping of light into life.

  I found Roderick’s passport, and two thousand pounds worth of Euros - assembled preparatory, I suppose, to some continental holiday the two of them were planning. I took this cash to a bureau de change and turned it into English money.

  I’ll confess this: it took me the longest time to adjust to the profound aimlessness of my new existence. For a while it felt like I was on holiday, and that was certainly a pleasant-enough vibe to surf. But a holiday prolonged becomes tedious; and any kind of life without friends, family or lovers will of course feel vacuous. Family cannot be conjured from nothing; and friends take longer than seventy hours to establish. As for lovers, at first I thought three days was too short a time to persuade a complete stranger into bed with me. For months I employed prostitutes; the first time nervously (never having tried it before), but latterly, as I became habituated to it, with more confidence and ease. I discovered the best phone numbers to call, and arranged for ladies to come to whichever hotel room I was occupying. But I would also meet attractive women, and get chatting with them, and as time went by I found myself wishing, increasingly, for something more than the impersonality of paid-for sex. But let’s say I booked into a new hotel on a Wednesday afternoon, and met a group of business-suited men and women in the bar that evening. The first night would be getting-to-know-everybody; the second might entail a greater sense of intim
acy, and only by the third - even supposed they were staying so long — would a pass be conceivable. And then, nervily, the woman in question, the person who attracted me, would almost certainly be married or with a boyfriend and would put out strong negative signals. If I pushed matters, and asked directly, she would say no, regretfully (as happened a few times), or angrily (as happened once), and that would be that. I am not so handsome a man that women fall over themselves to go to bed with me.

  One night I shared the hotel elevator up with a woman called Rosalee. She had been pleasant enough with me throughout the evening, but had talked rather ostentatiously (I thought) about her husband. She unlocked her room, three doors down from mine; and said goodnight to me, and on a whim I wandered over towards her, as if there were something more I wanted to say to her. Then, trembling with my own impulsiveness, I pushed her into the room, and over her cries and struggles, fell on top of her onto the floor. She screamed a little, and I grew anxious that other people would hear, so I crammed her tights into her mouth. It wasn’t very good sex, I’ll be honest; or rather whilst there was a thrill in the experience, it wasn’t precisely a sexual one. I suppose it was the sense that boundaries did not contain me. It was the sense that nobody could say no to me. It was, in other words, that toddler imperium, that liberating sense of freedom from the shackles of civilised behaviour, that we all once understood, and that we have all crushed under a lifetime’s conditioning and repression. At any rate, I didn’t hurt Rosalee; or I didn’t hurt her beyond the necessary trauma of the initial assault. I did my business, and afterwards I strolled back to my room, gathered my stuff and walked out of the hotel.