The Raw Shark Texts (17 page)

Scout tipped a little water into the bean tin, swilled it around. “You know, there’s still one thing you haven’t asked me.”

“One thing?” I said. “There’s a million things. I don’t know if Scout’s your real name, where you come from, how old you are, anything.”

“True. But you’re not asking any of
those
questions because you’re surprisingly tuned-in for a guy. You know I’m sensitive about it and you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”

I checked for some kind of trap in that, but I couldn’t see one.

“Thanks,” I said, cautiously.

Scout smiled. If there was sparkly mischief in there too, it was hidden by the flickerings of the fire. “Right back at you. No, the question you really want to ask me is –”

“Who said you could wear my pants?”

“And could you possibly have them back unwashed?”

“You’re pretty sick, you know that?”

“Yeah, whatever, repression boy.”

I smiled a nodding smile, looking into the fire, letting it draw me in and not saying anything back. The seconds ticked away towards a minute, the fun, the silliness, all evaporating up and away through the smashed glass above our heads. The concrete floor felt hard and cold under my crossed legs and the space was huge and black and empty. I looked down at my fingers, the fingers, hands and wrists that had been the first Eric’s for most of their existence. I knew the jokes and games couldn’t hide me from who I was, from what things were. The painful truth was that this whole time-out was a fluke.

“Go on,” Scout said, and I thought I saw something similar in her, that cold again, the shadow over the field.

“I know,” I said, “I was just having fun pretending to be a normal person.”

She nodded slowly, looking away into reds and shadow.

There was nowhere else to go.

“Alright then, I’ll ask it. Who is he, Nobody’s employer?”

“Thanks for trying not to hurt my feelings.” She looked away, her whole face turning to shadow.

“Scout?”

“He’s ninety-nine parts something malfunctioned and horrible, and one part me.”

“You?” I stared across the fire, loose inside my own skin.

“A part of me, a small stolen part, is a tiny part of him. Some of me – most of me – is still me, but,” her hand came up to touch the side of her temple. “God, look, I don’t know how to explain this. Part of him is inside my head.”

“You’re not making any sense. Jesus, what? You’re telling me you were
possessed
or something?”

“It’s more clinical than that, like, a process. It – the rest of him can’t control me or anything, but there’s a dormant chunk of him inside my mind and while he exists –” Scout stopped herself, took a big breath. “Shit, I
so
wasn’t going to do this. I was just going to lay it all out on the line, try to explain it to you using all the right words, but –” her hands tucked the ends of her bob behind her ears. Her chin, her throat, all of her, she was shaking.

“God, Eric, I’m sorry to say this but you’re so lucky. You’re walking around in this constant state of collapse and you’re fine with that, I mean, you
exist
like that. Some people, they might look like they’re in control day to day but if they let themselves go, maybe they’re going to fall all the way apart and never put themselves back together. You know?”

I put my hands up into a church around my mouth, sucked air through my fingers. My brain, my insides pulled in every direction at once. “All I need to know now is, did you send Mr Nobody to find me, Scout? Are you one of them?”

The firelight picked up the fat swell of tears along the bottoms of her eyelids. She worked hard not to let a single drop fall. “No, of course I didn’t.
I would have used the fucking letter bomb on him, but your shark got there first.”

“It’s not my shark.”

“I’m saying I’m
nothing
like him. The me sitting here in front of you now and doing a really good job of fucking all this up, I’m a person just like you are –” a small laugh like a shudder “– although maybe you’re not the best person to make that argument to.”

I knew what she meant. “
A concept wrapped in skin –
”

“
– and chemicals
. There
is
more to people than that, you know.”

I waited as she had a sip from the water bottle, then splashed a cupped handful onto her face, massaging her fingers across her skin, from the bridge of her nose, over her eyes and cheekbones. This done, she offered the bottle to me and I reached around and took it.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” I said. “
The me sitting here?
You’re saying there’s more than one of you walking around? Or –”

Scout ran her hands through her tucked-back hair, shaking it out. “Okay,” she said, “a part of me got stolen, I mean, a part of me in here,” – she touched her temple – “and it was incorporated into something else; a huge, abnormal out of control
thing
. In the place of the part I lost, I got some of
it
.” She stopped to check my reaction. I had absolutely no idea what my face was doing. “The
it
is deactivated, a mass of information packets, like virus code, but it’s there inside my head and there’s no way of getting it out.”

I thought about this. “Can it be activated, this information?”

“Yes. It’s not a two-second process, not like someone flips a switch in New York or anything. They’d have to physically find me, but, yeah, there’s a procedure.”

“And what would happen then?”

“The information packets would go live, spread through my mind. They’d take over and I’d get absorbed into the
thing
.” She thought for a second. “Eric, have I really fucked this up?”

Still trying to get my head around what she was saying, the confusion
must have shown on my face. It must have been the right kind of confusion too. “This – what?”

Scout smiled a tiny smile, a little flashlight. “Listen, I’m going to have a walk around the warehouse and see if I can see the cat. I need a few minutes but then I’ll come back and then I promise to tell you the whole story. Would you be okay with that?”

“Yeah,” I said, still feeling like something had stung me. “Yes, that would be good.”

When Scout came back my fat ginger cat dance-pranced along behind her the way he does when he’s sucking up for something. Normally, and I’ve said this before, Ian doesn’t like anyone. I’ve never seen him give another person the slightly embarrassing dancey routine, not even Aunty Ruth. Watching their silhouettes warm up into 3D as they came closer to the firelight, I thought about trust and where it comes from. Why
had
I followed Scout all the way down here when I knew so little about her? Partly, it was because of my own lack of success in finding Fidorous, but there was more to it than that. From the moment she’d appeared, I trusted her. It just happened. And I had the feeling that whatever came out of her mouth when she sat down by the fire, I would want to go on trusting. Ian’s dance said that as far as he was concerned, she was one of us. I wanted her to be one of us too.

“Are you okay?”

Scout nodded. “I found a friend.”

“Must be because you were so convincing about the tuna.”

She smiled.

We opened a can and fed it to Ian from the back of Scout’s mess tin, filling the lid with a little water for him too.

“I told you he’d come back,” she said, settling back by the fire.

Ian purred, his head bobbing away with greedy chewing.

“You did,” I nodded, and then: “I just thought, I didn’t bring the vodka.”

She winced. “Oversight. It’s okay though, I’m going to attempt this sober.” A pause. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Well –
start at the beginning, go on until you get to the end, then stop
.”

She did a small laugh which was really just a single hiss of air. “Okay then. The
beginning
beginning starts way back with an old man called Mycroft Ward –”

With all my interrupting, being confused and asking for clarifications taken out, this is the story Scout told me.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century there lived an old man named Mycroft Ward. Ward was a former military man and one of the last of the gentleman scientists. He’d gathered quite a reputation for his unbending will (apparently something very fashionable in those days) and had done many heroic things during the Crimean War, being one of the minor heroes of the Battle of Balaclava. Although Mycroft Ward had nothing at all to do with the Charge of the Light Brigade the sentiment was him all over, and so, many years later, when a physician broke the news of a slow but fatal illness, Ward’s attitude didn’t surprise any of those who knew him best.

The old man announced – to family, to friends and to several newspapers – that he had decided not to die, not from this illness, not from anything, not ever. He claimed he didn’t have the time for death and would instead ‘
unshackle himself from the multitudinous failings of the corporeal harness and progress forward
ad infinitum’. He then locked himself in his study for the best part of a year, refusing to comment further or speak to anyone much at all.

The old man’s death the following spring was marked only by a number of small obituaries and a few pithy editorials (one of which compared him to King Canute). Within a few months, interest in Mycroft Ward had grumbled itself away into the aether. The planet smirked, and moved on.

What the planet didn’t hear about, what only a select group of people have ever known, is this: Ward succeeded in his plan. At least, he succeeded after a fashion.

His original technique is lost now, but there seems to have been nothing magical or spiritual or even overly scientific about what Ward did. The system he devised was so down-to-earth and logical an accountant might have invented it. First, through the use of thousands of questions and tests, Ward succeeded in reproducing a very rough copy of his personality on paper. Then, through ‘
the applied arts of mesmerism and suggestion
’ Ward successfully imprinted this personality onto another person.

Now, though the future might come to think differently, Ward was not a bad man. He may have been unbearably pompous and self-righteous, but in planning and carrying out his strange scheme he seems always to have acted honourably and fairly. His private journals, which still survive both on a high-security website and in a deep and fortified bank vault, refer to the transferring of his personality as ‘the arrangement’, and that’s exactly what it was.

Ward spent a great deal of time and money selecting what he hoped would become his new body, eventually opening negotiations with a young doctor named Thomas Quinn. Quinn had been devastated by the loss of his wife a year earlier, letting his small town practice fall into ruin as he lived listlessly on his dwindling savings. Quinn was very much taken with Ward’s technique (partly, we might suppose, because of the nature of his own tragic loss). He believed the old man to be on the verge of a discovery greater than anything achieved by Newton or Darwin and saw in ‘the arrangement’ a chance to “
at last turn away from sorrow and give what little I have remaining to the furtherment of science
”. Quinn, being
the romantic he clearly was, must have fancied himself as the first martyr of the scientific age.

And so, as Ward lay on his deathbed, Quinn underwent a very secret process and a small team of lawyers transferred all assets and monies to the old man’s ‘young and recently discovered great nephew’.

‘The arrangement’ was a greater success than Ward could ever have hoped for. Members of the Ward family initially challenged the validity of this young man who had appeared from nowhere, claimed to be a distant relative and walked away with everything the old man owned. But on meeting ‘Mycroft Ward the Younger’, even the most stubborn and money-fixated of the cousins conceded that the two men must be related – while there was little physical resemblance, their mannerisms, attitudes and opinions were so similar there could be no doubt of a blood connection. Mycroft Ward’s
self
had successfully survived the death of his body. He was young again at the dawn of a new century.

It’s hard to say why the new Ward didn’t go public with the success of his technique, especially when one considers how he’d declared his intentions to the world. Maybe he worried that his family would find a way to take his estate away from him if they discovered his new body did not share a single drop of blood with the old; maybe he wanted to work on the technique further before announcing what he’d done; or maybe he’d just moved on; with horizons broader than any man had ever seen before, there were certainly bigger fish available for frying. What we do know is that by the outbreak of the First World War – stubborn and indomitable as ever – Ward had found himself a place as an officer in the army. But the Great War wasn’t like anything that had gone before it. The era of the Light Brigade was long gone, stripped of its pride and brass and poems and paintings. War was industrialised now, the whole world split into two great funding machines for the daily grinding of a million human bodies.

As I have said, Ward wasn’t a bad man. The decision he came to, once peace was declared, was nothing if not understandable given his particular
resources and circumstances. But then, the worst things don’t always grow from the worst intentions.

War-scarred despite all his bluster and bravado, Mycroft Ward developed an obsession with the one great hole in his scheme; for all the immortality his
self
could achieve through repeated use of ‘the arrangement’, he could – like anybody else – still be shot dead on some future battlefield and wiped clean from the face of the earth forever. In tackling this new anxiety, Ward’s chosen course of action was as practical and as monumental as it had been thirty years earlier. He decided one body was simply not enough to guarantee his survival. This is not to say he aimed to create another Mycroft Ward. Another Ward wouldn’t have been a solution, just a divergence; two people grown from a common source. No, his great plan was this – there would be just one Mycroft Ward, a single
self
inhabiting two bodies.

Throughout the early half of the 1920s, Ward modified the original personality recording template significantly. He added new systems and techniques to refine the collected personality data, developed tests which would capture newly acquired knowledge and opinion, and created an all important procedure whereby knowledge could be gathered from two minds, standardised with minimum loss of information, then transferred back, realigning both minds into a single unified self.

Ward also amended his new personality recorder to instil an increased desire for self-preservation. And it was with this one single action, as sensible as it may have seemed to him in the bloody aftermath of World War One, that Ward doomed himself and cast a long, black shadow over all of our futures.

In winter, 1927, ‘the second arrangement’ took place. Ward and an unnamed associate underwent the new procedure and, fourteen days later, Mycroft Ward became the first single entity ever to exist across two bodies.

Like its predecessor, the revised system wasn’t as complex or mystical as its outcome might imply. For six days of the week, both Wards attended to business as usual but on the seventh day, every Saturday, they underwent
the standardising process; collating the week’s information from each of them, making it uniform, and transferring the amalgamation back into both heads. The process took between twelve and sixteen hours every week, but Ward didn’t miss that time at all. Existing as a single self in two bodies (albeit imperfectly) had an extra, very unusual benefit he hadn’t previously considered; for this new, two-bodied Ward, each day was forty-eight hours long, every week – even with Saturday completely taken up standardising – was twelve days and every year for us, almost two years to him. Something fundamental in the relationship between time and Mycroft Ward changed.

The strong self-preservation urge Ward had built into his new system also began to have an effect he hadn’t foreseen, a terrible effect; the every-Saturday repetition of the standardising process turned Ward’s preservation command into a feedback loop. Every week, the system would deliver the preservation urge into Ward, who, with this urge in him increased, would amend the system accordingly, just slightly, in line with what he now thought to be a wise and suitable survival precaution. The now increased urge would feed back into him
again
the following week, making him increase its presence in the system
again
. Once it had begun, there was no way to stop the loop gathering momentum. As the weeks passed, Ward became a slave to his own machine. In the face of his ever growing all-devouring urge to survive, Ward made more and more amendments to his system and blindly stripped away his own humanity one piece at a time.