This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  The house was silent, its air still.

  Michael had only taken one bag from the car. Not moving any further into the house, he emptied it on to the door mat, then selected a couple of changes of clothes. He put these back into the empty bag, left the other clothes where they were lying, then went outside again and locked the door. When he got back in his car the engine was still hot. You could hear it ticking all the way across the street.

  Michael drove back to the headquarters of Inscape Technologies, left his car in the short-term visitors’ parking lot, went into the building, and didn’t come out again for a month.

  Inscape’s headquarters gets its famous whorled appearance from the Coil, the external glass corridor, a half section of a tube, that begins at ground level and spirals around the core of the building, ever upward, until it almost, but not quite, reaches the tip.

  Designed as an eco-friendly heat-exchange mechanism, and as a passageway and service duct, and also as a gimmick, this award-

  winning architectural feature is in practice rarely used by anyone but janitors and the occasional self-conscious skater. Most people take the glass elevators from one level to another, shooting through the glass tubes in the yawning central vestibule, bubbles inside a syringe.

  In his month wandering alone through the Gyre, Michael spent hours each night in the Coil, walking up and down it until he was tired enough to sleep. Spiralling upward, he would orbit the building’s core in ever decreasing circles, the lights of the valley wheeling around him, the intervals shorter the higher he went, then slowly unspooling as he came down again.

  For the first few days, he could see their old Subaru in the visitors’ parking lot, its windows turning yellow, plastered with parking tickets. After four or five days, a clamp appeared on the front nearside wheel. He stared at it for a long time, from high up in the Coil. He really should do something about that. There was stuff in the trunk from the house in Vancouver. Personal stuff. Alice. He should go pay the parking fines, get an employee’s permit. He was entitled to free parking. Two nights later, the car had been towed. It was registered in Alice’s name, not his. He guessed that, unclaimed, it would eventually be scrapped or sold.

  When the building came back to life in the mornings, Michael, exhausted, would hide in one of the Gyre’s quiet spaces, where nap pods were installed to improve employee wellness. He would climb inside one of these coffin-like couches and listen to the voices in the world outside it, the tapping of keyboards, hiss of sneakers on carpet. The sounds of these other unseen lives lulled him.

  A hatch in the basement took his laundry and returned it, two hours later, in a crisp cotton bag. There was a gym, sauna, showers, a pool, games rooms, in-house supermarkets and speciality stores, meditation spaces, a cinema, and a chaplaincy hub with links to every religion in a fifty-mile radius. He ate for free from cafeterias serving ethnic and fusion cuisines. All he had to do to access any service in the Gyre for free was to wear his encoded photo ID and wave the company phone that Barb Collins had given him. A near-field wireless application, proprietary to Inscape, verified his identity, logged his movements and approved his requests. His own phone and laptop had been in the trunk of the car.

  What did Michael do, when he wasn’t walking or sleeping or eating or hiding? He didn’t use the gym, or the swimming pool.

  The app on his telephone, which told Inscape everywhere he went and everything he ate, every service that he accessed, didn’t know where his eyes went when they weren’t looking at its screen. Which they almost never were, now. He’d never been one for social media, but, in his previous life, he’d used his phone about as much as anyone else, for news and chat and messaging and entertainment. Sometimes, he even made calls. Now, here, in the Gyre, he neither sent nor read any texts, messages or emails. He never made or took any voice calls. He didn’t use the phone’s browser to access the Internet. The phone’s battery lasted for days between charges. This was automatically flagged as suspicious activity, a sin of omission.

  The Gyre doesn’t have a library or a bookstore. Michael didn’t go to its cinema. He did not, as far as is known, talk to any of the thousands of other Inscape employees who drifted from hot desk to hot desk. His only human interactions were with the subcontracted workers who look after Inscape’s talent – the Bengali lady who processed his laundry, the outsourced servers in the various restaurants, humanities graduates, people like that.

  How do you get a read on someone who is living so selfishly, so utterly offline? What was Michael looking at, all that time in the Gyre? What was he thinking? What did he do?

  On his thirty-first day in the Gyre, Michael did something he hadn’t done before. He was sitting in a cafeteria, eating excellent sushi, when he picked up his phone. A few taps on the touch screen opened the settings menu. He located the near-field application that defined his existence at Inscape. His finger hesitated. Then he switched the app to off.

  Twenty seconds later, an alarm sounded in the cafeteria. The alarm was very loud – a synthesised version of a World War Two klaxon. A light flashed in the ceiling. The doors announced that they were locking automatically. Faces lifted from screens. Eyes almost made contact.

  Satisfied, Michael switched the app back on. The alarm fell silent.

  Ten minutes later, as he finished the last of the sushi, Barb Collins came for him.

  You’re ready, she told him. Campbell wants to see you now.

  You haven’t met Campbell Fess, but you more or less know him. You know that he went to Stanford, or Caltech, or maybe MIT. At college, he formed a close friendship with another young man with whom he shared a vision, and then a garage, where Inscape was born. You vaguely know that the other guy isn’t around anymore. He either got cancer, or Fess bought him out. He may even have killed himself – he was the one who liked Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  Hollywood has yet to make a movie about Campbell Fess, but you know what he looks like: a thin, slightly balding but otherwise youthful man in his mid fifties, who wears sweatshirts and blue jeans, and soft leather sandals or black Converse shoes. His hair is short, more grey than black. His eyes are brown, as eyes often are.

  What you don’t know about Campbell Fess is that he secretly records video and audio of everything that he says or does in his private office, in his various homes, on his Gulfstream jet and aboard both of his yachts. He also monitors, wherever possible, the physical vibrations, temperature changes, gaseous fluctuations, magnetic variations, vital signs and quantum ghosting associated with his existence in this universe.

  He does this because he believes that the technologies that already allow several organisations, Inscape among them, to mine your text messages, phone calls, online searches, social media posts, CCTV feeds, medical records, news consumption, shopping lists, criminal record, credit rating, sewage flow, motor traffic data, signal network analysis, GPS coordinates, bank records, battery levels, school reports, biometric traces, baby names and DNA – that enables them to put each and every one of us under the microscope, to fix our activities, beliefs, desires, strengths and weaknesses much better than we know them ourselves – Fess believes that these technologies will soon be merged into a God Algorithm, a technology that will allow those who control the new artificial intelligence (Fess believes that he’ll control the new artificial intelligence) to reverse-engineer a consciousness from the data it produces. He believes that some day soon, in a decade or two at most, the surging power of artificial intelligence, combined with the processing heft of quantum computing, will make it possible for those who control the technology to encode their own souls and become immortal, to live on as charges in silicon synapses. He believes you can cast a soap bubble in glass.

  Why does he believe this? Well, for one thing, Campbell Fess is worth seventy-five billion dollars, minimum, and when you have that much money, it sings to you. It says, If you die, we can no longer be together. If you really love me, you
’ll find a way to stay. Transhumanism. Post-humanism. Seasteading. Life extension. Cloning. Cryogenics. Fess has bets on all of these escape plans and more. He owns his own submarine, and an island near New Zealand that is partially hollow. He has a half share in a spaceship. There isn’t room in it for you.

  Of course, Michael wouldn’t have known most of this as he sat in Fess’s inner office, right at the top of the Gyre. He certainly didn’t know that he was being filmed for his part in Fess’s biopic.

  Fess stood at the window, his back to Michael, staring out across the valley. His lips were pursed, his gaze thoughtful. We know this because there was another camera on a strut above Fess’s eyrie, pointing back at the window to cover that angle. It was one of Fess’s favourite stances, a look that he wanted to keep.

  Eventually, Fess turned, walked back to his chair, sat down, elbows on desk. He steepled his fingers, frowned at Michael through their prism.

  I’m glad you came down from Vancouver, Mike. I’m glad to have a chance to say thanks to you in person.

  You’re welcome, sir . . . Thanks for what?

  This is California, Mike. Don’t call me sir. Call me Campbell.

  Sorry, Campbell.

  That’s all right, Mike. Barb told you that I had a job for you, right?

  Yes, Campbell. But she didn’t say what it was.

  She doesn’t know herself, yet. I like to compartmentalise.

  Oh.

  What I’m going to tell you now is strictly between me and you. I know I can trust you because of what you’ve already done for me. You follow?

  No.

  We can see Michael’s face in the camera hidden in a bookcase behind Fess’s desk, the one that Fess had installed to capture his rear view. It’s clear that Michael doesn’t follow at all.

  Good, said Fess. I have some sensitive business with someone outside the company. I need you to liaise with them.

  Liaise? How?

  Fess lowered his hands to the desk, frowning. He was looking past Michael, at the camera in the orchids on the trellis by the wall.

  We needn’t go into that now. They’ll give you the details.

  Who will?

  No names, Mike. You’ll find out when they contact you.

  What do they look like?

  I don’t even know myself, Mike. I don’t need to. I’ve never met them face to face. That’s your job. You’re my liaison guy. Like I said, I like to compartmentalise.

  I don’t understand, Campbell.

  Fess stood up. He came around the desk to Michael, took him by the elbow, steered him to the elevator.

  We know you haven’t left the Gyre since you got here, Mike. Barb says she thinks you’ve been dealing with some personal stuff. She thinks you feel guilty about your girlfriend. You should never feel guilt, Mike. You did the right thing.

  I’m sorry?

  Don’t be, Mike. It’s time to move on. From today, you go home each evening to that house we gave you. That’s how my contact will find you. It has to happen outside this building. Do you understand?

  Reaching the elevator, Fess shook his hand, released it. The glass door whooshed open.

  Thanks again for what you did in Vancouver, Mike. It was the smart move to make, but it can’t have been easy.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, Campbell.

  Fess activated the down button with a wave of his hand.

  That’s really good, Mike. You’ll do fine.

  Aoife’s parents had christened her from a book of Irish-

  language names, the kind with too many letters that are either silent or make the wrong sound. Like Saoirse, or Sadhbh, or Naoise, or Bláthnaid. Her other given name was Caoilfhionn. There was a good one. Slender and fair.

  How does Aoife pronounce her birth names? Lately, it hasn’t mattered. Lately, she hasn’t been using them much. Today, in Palo Alto, California, Aoife will be Ann, the indefinite article, the most minimal name that there is. She uses it quite often. As for her surname, today she won’t need one.

  In one respect, she didn’t want to be noticed today. In another way, she did. Around her neck was a plain silver chain, dangling a heart-shaped gold pendant in the neck of her light cotton dress. She was wearing more make-up than she would on her own account, but she didn’t think she’d overdone it – just a little more liner around her grey eyes. She’d been in this valley for a week already, and reckoned she had a good read on its men, so she had also dyed her chestnut hair blond, to make up for its relative shortness. Waiting in line outside Antonio’s Nut House, a regular stop for Inscape’s company shuttle, the male engineers glanced at her often.

  The Inscape shuttle bus – electric, driverless – turned the corner from Birch Street on to California Avenue and came to a stop. The engineers swarmed to board it. But now Aoife was blocking its door, searching her purse, looking for something that she couldn’t find. She gave up, turned sideways, letting them push past her and on to the bus. The bus’s door, reading the near-field IDs on their company smartphones, beeped as it let in each one in turn. As Aoife swayed there, trapped between the bus and the scrum, a man pushed past her, a little too close and a little too slowly, trailing a hand across the back of her dress. She lost her balance, leaned briefly against him. He reached the bus door, turned to leer at her, triumphant, but the door beeped a warning and shut in his face. Aoife pushed past him. The door opened for her and then closed again, leaving her groper marooned on the curb.

  Her target, Aoife knew, would have got on the bus at the Gyre. There he was now, two rows from the end, where no one else was sitting, his head against the window, despondent or asleep. She went to the back row of seats and sat in the middle, where she could watch him.

  The bus turned on to the Camino Real, driving south, leaving the leafy fringe of Stanford behind it. She took out the phone she had stolen at the bus stop and pretended to look at it; locked by its retinal sensor, it wouldn’t open for her anyway. The bus slowed, turned right into a neighbourhood of old ranch-style houses shaded by walnuts and hickory, and stopped. One of the engineers gathered his stuff and waddled down the aisle. The bus returned to the Camino Real.

  They were getting close, now. She moved two rows up, sat opposite her mark, her feet in the aisle, turned towards him.

  He seemed to be asleep. She could take a closer look. His black hair was longer than it had been in the photographs, and there was a thin beard now too, neglect, not design. His old sneakers were stained, but the sweatshirt and jeans, though tatty and fading, looked as if they’d just been professionally pressed.

  She leaned across the aisle and shook his shoulder.

  I’ve a message for you, she said, before he had a chance to fully wake. Keep them off balance, she thought, and they’ll fall the way you want them to. That’s what McDonnell had taught her in Belfast.

  He sat up, groggy.

  What?

  You were told someone would contact you.

  She played with her hair while she waited for him to take in the situation, twisting blond strands round her finger. Textbook stuff, really.

  He made the connection at last.

  Is this that thing with Inscape? That thing that Campbell—?

  No names. Someone wants to meet you.

  Who?

  You’ll find out when you meet him. Do you have any money?

  I have cards.

  Real money. Cash.

  No.

  There’s a strip mall two blocks north of your house. We just passed it. It has an ATM machine. Wait until it’s dark, then walk over there and take out some cash. About two hundred dollars will do it. If it gives you the option, ask for small bills . . . Are you listening?

  He was staring at her, face creased in disbelief. Just a little more pressure, in case he recoiled . . . She laid a hand on his bare forearm.

>   Do you understand?

  Yes.

  You take out the money. Tomorrow morning at nine you go to the end of your street and wait at the VTA bus stop for a number twenty-two, heading south. Buy a ticket to San Jose. Pay cash. In San Jose, get off at Santa Clara and First. Walk a block south to Second and take a number sixty-eight VTA bus on up the—

  Just tell me where I’m going and I can use my phone to tell me the way.

  No phones. Don’t even look up the route on your phone – not today, not ever. This trip has to be untraceable. You have to leave your cards and your phone at home tomorrow. I’ve written the route on this paper for you, see? Don’t lose it. You understand me?

  Yes.

  Good. Take a sixty-eight to Gilroy. Pay cash. When you get to Gilroy, switch to a County Express bus to Hollister. Cash. Hollister is out in the farmlands at the head of the valley. You get off the bus there and find a taxi. You can use the payphone in the courthouse to call one, or there’s a limo company over on Fifth. Pay cash. Tell them to take you to up the Santa Ana Valley Road to the junction with Quien Sabe. Get out there. When the taxi is gone, walk for a mile, south, along Santa Anita, to the place where the hills close in either side. There’s a fruit store by the road. The meeting is there.

  How long is that journey?

  There’s a lot of bus stops. Three or four hours. Each way.

  What? Why not just meet here?

  The meeting is there.

  Can’t you give me a ride, then?

  No.

  I could hire a car.

  Without leaving a record? You take the bus, Michael. No one watches the buses.