Collective Mind (23 page)

After
staying at Link’s villa for three days, the two friends decided it was time to
be heading back. Arguing about the future with Link and Bikie was interesting,
the Professor was lavish of praise but Isaac was dying to see Michelle. The two
of them had been calling and writing to each other regularly and he wanted to
tell her everything. Peter already knew that Link had been found: Isaac had
sent him a brief text, saying they had a new recruit, with a heap of
exclamation marks and smilies. Their only problem was that the van had been
sold, and they had to devise a way to get home.

Link
offered to take his van and bring along his things and a small laboratory. When
they thanked him for the favor, he remarked with his typical directness that it
remained to be seen who was doing who a favor. He could not bear traveling in
that old banger, he said. In addition, the van was the best, if not the only
place, where they could carry out the experiment on Pascal. So the little wagon
would have to be driven back anyway, but Link was quite content it wasn’t him
who’d need to worry about this.

Although
the professor was not supposed to set out until a week after Isaac and Bikie,
and the experiment could not begin without him, Isaac and Bikie wanted their
time on the road fly by as fast as possible. Even though they were not late for
the ferry, Bikie pushed on at top speed, occasionally exceeding the speed
limit. Their impatience had them all tensed up, each absorbed in his own
thoughts. Isaac was wondering if they ought to inform Peter about a new guest
they intended to bring into his house or, recalling his request, not tell him
anything. Isaac felt a really big urge to do it, after all, this was not just a
guest. This was the guest!

Isaac
squirmed on his seat, trying to picture the future. It looked bright. There was
Michelle, Bikie and Peter, and Vicky, healthy and well, and Pascal, resurrected
from veggiehood, and Link. He was so much absorbed in his new life that he
could no longer recall the time when he was not part of the team. The past
seemed far away and somehow unreal. Now was a different life, everything was
seething and his head was spinning.

Isaac
smiled and slapped Bikie on the shoulder:

“Thanks
for being you, my friend!”

Bikie
looked at Isaac as if he were crazy, rolled his eyes and growled:

“Put
the sun visor down. You have heat stroke.”

“You
fool, Bikie, I’m just happy and delighted with life.”

“For
now, delight in being dealt a good hand at the beginning of the game. You still
have to make the right moves.”

“No,
Bikie, I wasn’t dealt it, I pulled it out of the pack myself. Card by card. So
sorry, but it’s not a matter of luck, just the right approach. A rational
approach and precise calculation and reliable partners, of course. I was just
thinking that everything could have turned out differently. How many
coincidences had to come together for us to be driving along like this from
Link’s own villa! Just think about it! It’s unimaginable.” Isaac continued,
counting on his fingers, “I went to UNICOMA on a particular day, and only
because Vicky needed surgery, and what’s more, her illness is extremely rare.
Secondly, that was the very day when Elvis went there; thirdly, for no
particular reason I got up and they thought I was an accomplice; thirdly, out
of the entire heap Elvis picked out the memory unit; and finally he handed it
on to me…”

“Twenty-fifthly,
twenty-sixthly, and twenty-seventhly, blah-blah-blah. You can say that about
any life. Absolutely any, starting from conception. Everyone knows there are
millions of sperm, and only one will reach the egg. Although in your case it
obviously wasn’t the very best of the bunch that made it there.”

 “Apart
from the fact that the first card I pulled out of the pack was a low one with
tattoos on it, I can’t imagine what you’re criticizing me for.”

“You’re
the low card. I’m the ace of spades!”

“Yeah,
an ace of shovels, that’s right. A sequence of events like that does not happen
every day.”

“It
does. Every life is a correlation of unique, unrepeatable events and
coincidences. The domino principle, only in a hundred dimensions and all
directions. Chaos and the dominoes come rushing at you from all sides, knocking
each other over and creating new chains of events. It’s a funnel stuffed full
of moving dominoes, and that chaos is called daily life.”

“Sometimes
you’re an incredible drag. Let’s just stop to fill the tank, then go to the
café and get some decent eats so we don’t have to run to the buffet on
the ferry.”

“My
God! The youth saw the light and started talking sense! Hallelujah! A miracle!
And the blind shall see, and the poor in wit shall wise up a bit.”

“And
Bikie's sexual maturity shall come to pass.”

“I’ll
show you maturity! You need to take lessons from me, young man!”

“Oh
yes, professor ace, big-fat-face, quickly, tell me do, how you get within a
mile of a girl with a beer belly like that?”

Bikie
swung the wheel abruptly and turned into a gas station at high speed. Isaac
banged his head against the van door.

“Shit,
you moron!”

Bikie
cackled with laughter. Rubbing his bruised head, Isaac summed up:

“It’s
true, apart from the external similarities, rockers and Neanderthals have
identical behavior patterns.”

“Clear
out and get me a double espresso, swiftly. I’ll fill the van in the meantime.”

Isaac
bought croissants, a couple of chocolate bars and tuna sandwiches. Despite a
solid breakfast at Link’s place, he was still hungry. He filled two plastic
bags of all sorts of food and gazed around for something interesting. The tank
was not yet filled, so he decided to take a look at the magazine stand. As
usual, nothing interesting there, the magazines were all like clones from an
incubator.

He
paid, climbed into the driver’s seat, and the van drove into the port to board
the ferry back to Genoa and continued along the highway into France and his own
dear Monte Carlo. Ah, Monaco, Monaco, will you be the cradle of the new world?

“Well,
bro,” said Bikie, biting into a sandwich. “From the look of things, you’re home
already. What are you thinking about?”

“That’s
obvious. Our plan. We have to give Pascal his OE back. Then he’ll be the way he
was before and so will our friendship.”

“Friendship,
friendship,” Bikie mocked. “After you told me about that Pascal-dude and his
private residence, the one thing I couldn’t understand was why we didn’t go to
him for money, instead of Wolanski.”

“Go
to Pascal for money?” said Isaac, frowning. “Believe me, I tried several times.
He always refused and the last time I hated him for it. I went to borrow money
for Vicky’s surgery. He still has our photos together standing around the
place, plenty of them. He is sort of fond of me and he remembers Vicky well,
but he didn’t give me a dime.

“Or
rather, he promised he would if his administrator told him to. His
administrator, though quite a decent woman, explained that the contract with
UNICOMA has a clause that specifically prohibits lending or giving away money
that belongs to a Veggie.

“They’ve
got themselves a really smart set-up. COMA has its own bank, and it has
probably been the most powerful bank in the world for a long time. They pump
money from account to account, and in reality, hardly any money gets spent at
all. All the large fees paid out to the Veggies just lie there unused. The way
the Swiss banks once quietly buried the money of many Jews. The Veggies sign a
contract, and afterwards, with rare exceptions, they don’t spend anything much.
Pascal said that if it wasn’t allowed, there was nothing he could do. I tried
to explain to him that the administrator wasn’t allowed to do it, but he was. I
even said I’d pay it back with interest. And this asshole asked: ‘Why would I
want interest?’

“It’s
like they’ve erased his conscience. And you wouldn’t believe it, but he can
laugh at the jokes in a TV show and watch a movie. He is a gung ho soccer
player. Only he doesn’t have jokes of his own any more, just enough brains to
go ask his nanny, as I call her, to do anything he cannot handle himself.

“It’s
ludicrous, but he has some really good gear at home, all these latest computers
and gadgets. And it all gets replaced regularly. He stipulated in the contact
that it would all be the very latest models. Before he downloaded, he said his
girl Eva deserved the very best, and he was going to do everything to make sure
they had that. Only Eva took off, and the gear is still there. He doesn’t even
switch it on now. And he doesn’t have the wits to stop them from delivering new
stuff.

“He
watches TV all the time, plays sports in the evening, when his nanny tells him
to. Eats simple food and is a vegetarian now. That’s in the contract too. He
has everything he needs and he is happy with everything.”

“A
kind of happy bus driver. Riding along the same route all day and delighting in
life.”

“At
first I tried so many times to shake him out of it. Looked through our school
photo albums with him, remembered adventures we had together. He remembers
everything. ‘Those were great times,’ he says. ‘I’ve changed now,’ he says,
‘and I like different things.’

“I
hate the stinking COMA. And I started hating Pascal too. We were like brothers,
and Vicky was like a sister to both of us. I trusted him like I trust myself.
And his indifference now is like a knife in my heart.

“A
long, long time ago, when we were students, there was this incident when we
went swimming in a storm, and he started drowning. I dragged him out. I would
never dreamt of deriding him for it, but I did remind him about that incident
when I asked for the money for Vicky. And he still refused. I hate him for it.
Veggie or not, downloading his energy was his own decision and he basically
told us all to go to hell.”

“So
you’ve succeeded in making me waste several minutes of my life on listening
about this worthless idiot.” Bikie responded, but the sympathy in his voice was
clear.

“Losing
creativity made him like that, and when the professor pumps his OE back, who
knows what will happen?”

“That
professor has some brain!” said Bikie, changing the subject. “He really
radiates charisma. He seems like an ordinary middle aged guy who’s getting on a
bit, with this strange expression on his face. Drinks his coffee, puffs on his
cigar. But when you think of that juggernaut he blitzed us all with, it’s
terrifying!”

Isaac
understood what he meant. It always feels a bit strange when someone you have
only known by reputation simply talks to you, accepts you as being no fool,
someone worth talking to, even working with. Especially such a behemoth of
science! Associating with someone like that sets you on the next step up in
your life. You are not the old you any longer, you are new, updated, on a
different level.

It’s
especially flattering if that person is a genius who has made his mark in the
history of mankind. The name Jeremy Link was inscribed in the annals of the age
to which he belonged. The generations to come would undoubtedly venerate his
greatness, study his life in school, and name streets, buildings and stars
after him. He was a living legend who had put the world on its head. Isaac’s
head started to spin at the thought of Link becoming a member of his team. Just
imagine!

After
driving the van onto the ferry, the pair went to the upper deck to watch the
boat sail off. The engines hummed, the water seethed and the ferry pulled away
from the shore. Ciao, Sardinia! A few hours later they reached the mainland,
then drove quickly through the center of Genoa and out onto the autostrada.

Bikie
expressed his feelings about what had happened on the island in his own way,
converting his euphoria into the speed with which he drove the van. His
facetious comments became far coarser too.

Isaac
sank back into thoughts about Pascal and what he wanted from him. On the one
hand, it was clear, to see the old friend he loved. On the other, to tell him
about everything. Of his resentment. Of course, Pascal had been locked in a
brain jail. But Vicky! How could he be so unconcerned about her life?

Another
question was what he would be like after all this. What if he didn’t give a
damn about their idea? Or he might say: “What have you done, you dorks, I was
so happy! What have you dragged me into without even asking?”

And
what if he died as a result of the experiment? Or became a total idiot, not
even a Happy? Isaac tried to drive these thoughts away. God was on their side,
as they say. There was no reason things should go wrong.

Somehow
he did not believe that Pascal would tell them to go to hell. He downloaded his
creativity for Eva’s sake and now he lost her. Surely that was a reason to hate
COMA.

Isaac
had started to hate Pascal, and maybe Pascal had already changed a long time
ago. What made Isaac think his friend would be the same great guy as before?
What would he say when he discovered that they had risked his life for the sake
of an idea?