Genie and Other Weird Tales (6 page)

“Yeah?”

“Did you win?”

His face was motionless for a second, and then he grinned and nodded. “I think I did ok.”

On June 30
th
1908 an earnest, sweet natured woman called Joy sits in a back garden near Hatcham in South London, breathing the summer air and contemplating the sources of the deep contentment she feels. The house she has lived in with her husband Robert for thirty five years stands behind her, and five miles to the north she can see the dome of St Paul's through drapes of green. Robert has risen steadily in his career at Whitehall and is now about to retire. Their son David has been raised as a Englishman and a Christian, and is now travelling the world combining entrepreneurial and missionary endeavours. She regards the wider world with awe and fear, and is glad that she has remained here at its civilised hub. She is proud of the efforts of her husband and her son to tame the chaos and savagery and bring the rest of the world closer to agreeable harmony, and so to God.

Her mental image of the wider world comes from her education augmented by dinner party conversation and her son’s letters. The uncivilised fringes of the world contain hot sweaty forests teeming with hazards where black savages express bestial urges in lascivious rituals. Widows are burned alive and animals worshipped. In her mind Hell, the lowest rung of existence, is a distillation of these things. As Christians, it is their duty to tame them. Heaven, the highest realm of existence, is the summation of efficient, firm but fair governance, ingenious engineering, and meticulous diligence. It is these qualities that set the forests and the fields and the rivers to productive use, and raise the people of these islands closer to Heaven, which is probably a vast stately home set in a carefully laid out garden with acres of perfectly trimmed hedges, verdant but neatly mown lawns and immaculate flower beds.

She is working on a tapestry that is to hang in the parish church. It is a picture she has composed herself: a young blond girl in a white dress standing in a field in a green valley dotted with trees with slightly rocky hills and a river. The girl is looking towards a resplendent sun. Shreds of white cloud surround the sun, and Joy has tried to make it look like they have caught the sunlight. The rendering of nature through the medium of stitched cotton is neat but perhaps a little gauche. Joy is not quite satisfied with the blues that she has chosen for the river, and thinks that it looks a little like a carpet. Robert has remarked that the trees look like hat stands bedecked with holly and that the grass looks freshly mown. In spite of this, she is proud of her effort, and feels that what really fills it with life is a quotation from the Book of Revelation in golden brown lettering against the blue sky:

And His Countenance Like the Sun Shineth in its Strength.

She is mesmerised by the rhythm of the language of the King James bible and certain that the words represent absolute authority. If their meaning is sometimes obscure or difficult, this increases her certainty as she believes that ultimate reality is something that she would never be able to comprehend.

All is serene in the garden until the moment the history of this world diverges from our own. In fact, the divergence occurs many millions of years ago, when a distant cosmic catastrophe sets an object on a collision course with our home. In our own universe it enters the atmosphere in Tunguska in Siberia, scorching and flattening millions of trees, terrorising eyewitnesses, and killing eleven people. The devastated area is vast, and the local people attribute the destruction to the iron bird god, Ogdy, whose wrath has been provoked by the slovenly agricultural practises of the people in the immediate area.

In this universe the object begins its journey on a minutely different trajectory, and the difference increases over the vast expanse of space and time. It enters the atmosphere thousands of miles to the west and it incinerates the heart of the richest and most powerful empire the world has ever seen. The arguments over who, if anybody, has been provoked by what will rage for generations.

Too small and bright for a second moon, the blazing object startles Joy as soon as she spots it against the blue of the sky. It elongates, and soon assumes the form of an arrow of fire pointing at the dome of St Paul’s. The singing of the birds and the rustling of the leaves are submerged beneath a cacophony of discordant sounds like an orchestra tuning up in the bowels of Hell. She turns back to her tapestry, hoping that things will return to normal, but the phenomenon intensifies.

The quickening of her pulse and the heating of her blood are such as she has not experienced since the nightmares of her infancy. The physical symptoms her of fear spawn more fear and soon she feels as if her bones have turned to jelly. Then the cylinder of flame becomes a second sun, which blooms and fills the sky. A moment later there is massive, deep thunder.

The dreaming brain can conjure scenarios of astonishing detail in a split second, and so it is with Joy in the tiny span of time between the searing of her retinas and the permanent extinction of her mind. She finds herself inside the tapestry she has created, as the girl with blond locks looking towards the sun, and everything is moving and real. The neatly crocheted grass has come alive and is writhing, free and wild. The river flows and churns, the wet rocks glisten, the moss is vivid green. The white heat in the sky has set the clouds on fire. The cows bellow, their eyes rolled back inside their heads. Every corner of the valley echoes with screams and thunder, and she recognises the voice that bursts forth at the beginning of space and time. Her last sensation is unexpected relief as she submits to the judgement of all she holds dear.

Thanks very much for reading.

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… and you’ll find up to date info on all of my books on
http://writing.killip.co.uk/

If you’d like to read more right now, there’s a sample of my new novel at the back.

Thanks to Kara May at Goldsmiths for her advice and encouragement, and to Lisa Goll and all who gave feedback at the London Writer's Cafe. Thanks to the early readers, Joan Killip, May Hoose, Richard and Sonya Killip, Matt French, Tom Gifford, James Kirkwood, Shelina Prabitani, Shaff Prabitani, Allegra Dunn and Zolta Hun Gyarmati for their encouragement and feedback. Thanks to Hal Duncan for forthright and imaginative editing, and for pushing me to make these stories better.

Thanks to Dane Low at
http://www.creativindie.com/
for a beautiful cover.

I found the following article useful when writing the final version of Genie:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/29231/11-natural-disasters-led-wars

The Tunguska Mystery by Vladimir Rubtsov was useful for imagining Joy's experience.

Earlier drafts of all these stories are published on
http://www.imagecurve.com/

Thanks to Milen Vasilev at Imagecurve for his interest and encouragement.

Hammond Flux, Life After Flesh - Free Sample.

Hammond Hinkley has written an app that emulates the human brain. He uses it to upload his own mind and spawns Hammond Flux, a version of himself free of human limitations. Rather than use his new power and knowledge to improve the lot of humanity Hammond Flux decides to settle old scores and remake the world to his liking. The chaos that follows threatens to bring civilisation to its knees and Hammond Hinkley is forced to face his worst fears and challenge the monster he has created before it destroys everything he loves.

Chapter one: A Live Human Subject.

When Rachel stuck that photo to the board above my desk I asked her why, what for? She glared down at my crumpled form and said, “Because I think there's more chance of them letting you leave this awful place if you have something to remind you of who you are.”

From my position on the bed I could see her formidable bouffant towering above the dark caves of her nostrils. I returned her glare, reflecting how she looked, from this angle, like a caricature of herself. This is typical of her visits these days. She sweeps in, drops a riddle designed to put me in my place, then leaves. The photo and its justification are classic Rachel: the underlying thinking is vague, and the gesture itself presented as art and imbued with false significance.

I'm not sure I want to leave this place she finds so awful. I exist here in an agreeable state of limbo, free from prying eyes and jostling hordes. The staff are professional and polite; they refrain from the crass probing and insinuations that I've had to endure from the police and members of the security services. Meals are sludgy but regularly served and the décor is of the standard you'd find in a mass market hotel. They've even let me have my laptop, albeit with the wireless disabled. I don't need the internet though for the task in hand: I am writing my version of events to put the record straight. I am sick of being misrepresented. This is not an attempt to prove my innocence. On the contrary, I am determined to reveal the full extent of my guilt. I can handle the accusations of murder and treason, it's the bleeding hearts like Rachel who see me as a victim that irk me the most.

So I sit at my desk with my right hand jammed beneath my buttocks. My left hand navigates the keyboard in a manner that becomes less faltering by the hour. There is a pleasant glow in my belly as lunchtime's sludge slides through my system. I can clearly see how I am going to construct my account. The memories are all present and correct, ready to be transcribed, but the photo keeps distracting me. I am unable to remove it, for reasons to do with my rogue right hand. Reasons that are strange and embarrassing, that I may choose to reveal if I deem it in the interests of clarity.

Rachel's woolliness niggles: the fact that she doesn't grasp that who we are changes each day. I remember being the person in that photo: a man who thought he was at the height of his career, flushed with confidence and success. My peers and many in the wider world held me in awe. But I'm not that person now. I don't mean the obvious differences that I see when I look in the mirror: the new pouches and wrinkles, the darkness in the eyes. I don't even mean my changed status as a resident in a forensic mental health unit. I am infinitely wiser and more fulfilled than the blithe ingénue in the picture who thought he had the world at his feet; and I continue to change, as we all do, as each new thought and perception alters the vast web of lightning threads that link our neurons.

Sometimes I like to daydream that there exists an all-powerful God in the style of the Old Testament. He decides one day to challenge Rachel's naïve assumption that a person's essence is something simple and unchanging that can be captured in a photo. So he takes her to a place far from human habitation and sits her on a mountainside on a moonless night. Then He empties the stars from the sky; the nearest first, then the entire Milky Way. They stream past her eyes like fireflies and the night lasts three thousand years as she counts them all. Then He frees her brain from her skull, and the hundred billion cells fly up to replace the stars in the Milky Way. Pulsing threads connect them, and He shows her how this vast web warps and ripples as each moment changes who she is forever.

Sadly, I do not yet have the resources of Jehovah. The only way I can express myself is via this laptop. I am striving to write a simple, truthful account of how I sought to harness the power of the human brain for the good of all, and what I learnt about the nature of Life itself.

My story begins on a Saturday afternoon in summer about one year ago at Lazarus, the start-up I founded with my colleague, Addison Royal. Lazarus was one of three companies run from a building called Sparrix Row, a converted cargo storage facility near London Bridge. Most of the activity went on in a huge vault with whitewashed walls adorned with street art. A rich and slightly rank smell hung in the air. I blamed it on the nearby Thames, seeping through the London clay. Addison said it was the body odour of programmers blended with the rich variety of takeaway food that was consumed on the premises.

During the week highly caffeinated developers filled the vault, sitting in clusters, wired into their private worlds, clicking, scanning and gurning. The one thing that could distract them was Addison's bob and jive as she tried to be present in all the places where she was needed. She had handpicked the developers from her web of virtual sparring partners, and they were mainly self-taught fanatics, untainted by academia or industry. She smoked with them in the courtyard and drank with them in the nearby pubs. She reciprocated their love and had learned all their histories, talents, vices, values and longings.

Only Addison and I were aware of the purpose of Lazarus. The other staff believed that we intended our massive brain emulator to power a web service that would digest the contents of people's minds to find their true heart's desire and purpose then sell them suitable products and services. This was a cover story dreamt up by Addison and I over a bottle of wine. It was a compelling goal for a start-up, and matched the nature of the tasks assigned to the staff.

I shared a corner of the office with Addison, a rectangle partitioned from the rest of the vault by a soundproofed wall of tinted glass. Here we captured data from living brains using the Lazarus scanner, a giant, beige polo-shaped structure designed by myself to map every connection in a brain. The data it collected was processed by a quantum computer comprised of hundreds of glowing cubes that lined the walls of the room. The cubes turned from green to amber as they filled with data, glowing fierce primary red when full. They were powered by an application written by Addison called the Forward Chaining Liminal Uncertainty Matrix. We shortened this to Flum, but then Addison had insisted in calling it Flux, for no other reason than it sounded better. When running on the quantum computer Flux could emulate the human brain, had massive capacity and lightning speed, and sucked more energy from the national grid than the neighbouring Shard.