A Superior Spectre Read online

  The coughing was wearing down; I cleared my throat. ‘Yes, William … I suppose so.’ He left the room.

  How sad that I had named it; a confirmation of my failure to truly be alone (as I should be), or perhaps evidence that I am one of those wretched creatures who has never tried hard enough to make a connection with actual humans, someone who is socially broken, and so then technology makes it easier to never address the issue. I used to deride people who married their sex dolls, or animals, or buildings. Such large-scale (and yet often proud) failings – mostly men’s. And now here I was in the middle of fuck-knows with time on my hands and a robot servant and fantasy drugs that deleted me from existence for a while so I could live in the mind of another.

  Here I still am.

  I did try, actually, for a few days, to live without William, after I charged him up on the bed. But after even two days I became so sick of the sounds made by my own body: my breathing like that of a dragon, my wet mouth, each sniff the suck of a vacuum on a wet floor. I never knew I sniffed so loud. Going to the toilet, sickening. And I had already begun to read the walls, ceilings, floor. The cracks and protrusions and shapes, the cobwebs, morphing into hair and steel wool – things that scratch you. Nightmarish 3D shapes, branching out. I picked my nose until it was a rough hollow trunk. And then I thought, Fuck this waiting. I’m going to turn him on sometime.

  But lying in bed then, after William left the room, I decided that if I was going to have the andserv, and my dips into the past, I couldn’t have anything else that was easy. There had to be some kind of sacrifice.

  (It’s my dying I need him for; I didn’t really know that then – I hadn’t thought that through, though I’m sure there was an unconscious element. I still suffer, but I am suffering more slowly, because he brings me food and drink, and helps me to walk; I have not withered away over a few days of starvation and pain in a pool of my own piss and shit. I don’t know how long it will take, this way. Sometimes I wish it were over with. Other times I manage to justify my existence. For a little while longer.)

  As a sacrifice, I decided I had to live more like Leonora: by candlelight, eating no packet foods, using no other electricity. No screen. I couldn’t do anything about the plumbing, I’d keep using that, and I had no fireplace here so I’d allow myself to use the cooktop, pretend it was like sitting something atop burning coals. It wasn’t much, but I hoped it’d counter the convenience of having William.

  I made this decision, lying in bed that night, the andserv downstairs somewhere sitting quietly, and then I realised there may not be any candles in the house. I would have to go into Gairloch for supplies.

  W hen I arrived in this hemisphere, I stayed one night in Windermere, in the Lake District. I had to remove the thing from my arm, and I had a good lot of walking ahead of me. I didn’t talk to anyone besides the concierge and wait staff at the old hunting lodge where I was staying. The other guests were on their own journeys. But I was about to be alone for a long time, so I felt restless. On the one hand I had nothing to say to anyone ever again (though that can’t be true as I now feel compelled to tell this), and most of my relationships, if I’m truthful, had felt obligatory rather than easy. On the other hand, I was alone. The word is enough.

  In my room I opened the medical bag with local anaesthetic wipes, scalpel, gauze, bandages. I’d watched enough tutorials to know how to do it. I sat in the bath, naked, so I could wash the blood away, and I set to it. It was tempting, once I saw the blood, to keep going, to get it over with. But no, they would find me here with my ID and want to take my body back to Australia – a burden I couldn’t put on anyone. Once the wound was wrapped up, I sliced a small section of skirting board in the room and hid the tiny device inside. That way, if the hospital by then had alerted anyone (though I’m sure it would take more than one no-show for them to do that, their resources being stretched thin), or if on a screen somewhere my finances and position weren’t adding up, they wouldn’t be able to look any further than Windermere.

  I was up early, sitting with robins and tits in the garden, examining my map. I could take a bus a bit further, to Carlisle, making sure I could pay cash, then walk over the border to Gretna. I knew it would be difficult, but I wanted to put myself through that.

  The bus was no trouble, and when I alighted I put my bag over my back and used my compass to locate the direction in which to follow the River Eden north, keeping covered by various woods and farm areas as I travelled toward the River Esk and the channel where I planned to cross, unnoticed, into Scotland. I’d heard border control was strong around the M6 nearby, but Scotland, rare beast that it was, had banned the use of scanning drones (after two executions were enacted on their soil when foreign drones found and reprimanded citizens who were trying to escape prosecution for religious crimes), and so there was probably not too much trouble crossing in certain areas.

  It was not a utopia, mind you. Like many Western countries Scotland had attempted to become strict about housing refugees of the stretched-out resource wars. Because of Europe’s stricter borders, and Scotland’s physical position, there weren’t too many who got that far, and there was not enough paid work available for it to be high on refugees’ wishlists, anyway.

  My research only told me that I risked being deported by boat. I had to make this work. The shame, the questions, being made to live on – I could not face it.

  It was spring but I was glad for my windproof jacket, as the northern air by the river had a chill. I found the River Eden under Eden Bridge. Immediately ahead, the landscape was green and flat, to my relief. I adjusted my pack and began to walk, the chill, fresh air filling my lungs, my heart pumping to open them up further, and a temporary, tired exhilaration overtaking the worry that I would be found out, that I wouldn’t get across the border.

  Following the river was often tricky. My pants became caked in mud up to my knees, and I had to go slow when the aches of the illness visited me. The pharm only did so much. I saw magnificent, steep-sided sandstone gorges; a tumbledown old church with mossed-over gravestones; and sections of Hadrian’s Wall. I saw countless fish that I don’t know the names of and wasn’t brave enough to try to catch. My squashed protein bars would do.

  Every so often I spotted others rambling, mostly alone, and I would slow, hide or divert to not come too close. I didn’t know if they were a danger to me, and I did not want them to think I was a danger to them. Once, along the other side of the river, I saw a woman with a child dangling off her back and a pack slung over the front. She carried a large staff, sharpened to a point. I don’t know why but I waved at her. She didn’t acknowledge me, and I stopped and let her walk on out of my sight around a bend.

  From the river I crossed into woodland, where I knew I would have to spend an uneasy night. Like something out of an Angela Carter novel, I eventually came to a clearing. I couldn’t hear anybody around. I pulled all the clothes from my pack and laid them across me, and then rested my head on the flatter bag. To my surprise I fell asleep, listening to the sound of wind rustling leaves. I woke once in the night because of a creature nearby, perhaps a rabbit or even a deer, a shifting in the dark. And then just before dawn, light crept under my eyelids. I opened them to a circle of sky, stars fading.

  Eventually I reached the channel. With much relief I saw that it appeared calm, and that in places it was narrow enough to cross. I also had to find a spot away from any houses. After a short rest, there was nothing to do but wade out.

  Once I reached the other side I struggled up the beach and lay out on the nearest patch of grass so the wind could dry the surface of my bag and clothes. They dried brown, but the clothes inside my pack (and thankfully my toiletries and few books, too) had been protected by layers of waterproof plastics, so I changed. I had a small mirror, which I used to ensure my face and hair didn’t look too scruffy. Since I’d learnt about the illness I hadn’t cut my dust-and-sand coloured hair, so it was past my ears, and my in-between facial hair had the same
messy look – couldn’t decide whether to be blond, grey, orange or white. And of all the things to forget to pack, I had no brush or comb. I raked my fingers through my hair and decided that would have to do. My shirt was white, and didn’t wrinkle, so that was good enough.

  It hadn’t even hit me that I was across the border, because I was so drained, and still worried.

  I was tempted to stay lying down. My muscles felt too large, particularly my calves and shoulders. But I couldn’t risk being found here at the edge. Surely there would be patrols. I slipped on my shoes, hoisted my pack back on, let out a sigh, then walked slightly to the east of Gretna so I could enter the town from a less suspicious angle. My feet, as I approached an inn on the fringes of town, felt like stones fallen from Hadrian’s Wall. My extremities were pulsing. My head was also a stone, perched precariously on top; my eyes were mossed over. I thought about the woman and child and wondered if they had safely found a way across.

  I walked into the bar-cum-foyer of the inn, with its ancient crooked roof beams and barrels of ale. ‘Do you have a room for tonight?’ I asked the small barmaid. I disguised my accent, slightly and nervously, going for English but sounding more South African.

  ‘Indeed we do,’ she said with a friendly smile – her accent Scottish-lite, Borderlands appropriate – and she leant over to scan the fake chip ID I had hidden in my sleeve.

  ‘There are no funds I can see, Mr Smith,’ she said.

  I kept my voice even. ‘Oh, sorry, I need to transfer to that account. I have cash?’

  ‘Whatever you prefer.’ She smiled again.

  I paid and she took a key off a row of iron hooks and led me up a set of oak stairs to a small room at the top, with a view, thankfully, to the north.

  And finally I could flop down and be unconscious for a while.

  My calves aching could have been what woke me, or the hunger. My body felt overheated and scooped out. I creaked back down the stairs of the inn and found a few people sitting around wooden tables and propped at the bar – my timing was right – so I sat, away from the window, and ordered from the same lovely girl a half-pint of something dark, and some haggis. I supposed it would be tube-meat, but who knew – the environment here was clinging on, and they were charging a mint. I wished I’d brought a book down as someone sitting by themselves has to glance about the room or find something and fix their stare on it, and these actions did not suit me. I would probably creep someone out. I decided on the roving eye, but accidentally kept locking with a large ginger fellow by the door. Why was he looking at me? I wondered. Was he a border guard, undercover? I moved my eyes to the table in front of me, with hot prickles of paranoia at my brow.

  The haggis was perfectly spiced and filling, just as I’d always dreamed it would be. I asked if I could take a dram of whisky upstairs – a viscous The Balvenie Portwood – and the girl said I could. I took it and myself up the stairs with that feeling you had as a kid of dashing from the bathroom to the bed and leaping over the monsters beneath.

  I was wide awake, though my body was still tired and aching. I wanted to get away from myself, even though this activity, this running away to Scotland, was a way of confronting myself, and so I took the tab out of my bag and decided to chase the whisky with the past. Enter the mind of someone else.

  The way that it works, at least as much as I know from what my colleague Henry told me, is that the tab assigns you a host from the past, within a broad vicinity, and from any era. Someone whose brain functionality is roughly the same as your own. The further back into the past you go, however, while ‘tripping’, the more difficult it is to maintain the link. The tether is pulled tighter. And so the further back the more exhausting it is for your brain, also. This was something, Henry had told me, they were still working on: trying to minimise the harm, giving the tabs more limitations. I also believed that this was why a person was supposed to only visit the same host three times. I wasn’t worried about exhausting my brain, and so I planned to ignore that warning. I knew I’d have a lot of time to kill, and this was a unique way of checking out.

  The tabs were risky, but that was why they would also appeal, commercially. You might end up inside the head of a woman giving birth with no pain relief in the 1700s; you might wake up in the Vietnam War; more likely, you might enter the body of some fat, sad old dude cooking eggs alone in his apartment in 1962. Their mind communicates with yours, and melds, completely, so that you feel what they feel, see what they see, touch what they touch. You are inside their consciousness, like a multi-sensual camera; passive, inert, but recording. If they are speaking Arabic, you understand Arabic, because you are them. You are not yourself. When you wake from the trip you can analyse the experience, but while being hosted you do not have thoughts about the situation, the person. You cannot act.

  I would never have done this, years ago. Relinquish control.

  And you are supposed to do it with someone there. The tab sits under your tongue and hooks on the teeth so there’s no choking hazard, but, you know, the roof may cave in on you while you are tripping. Or someone might try to take advantage of you. You could be woken by someone taking the tab out of your mouth. Otherwise, each trip takes its own course. And time in the past is compacted. Damped down like layers of the earth as new, springy layers settle on top. The further back you go, the more you get out of an hour. An hour tripping can be two hours of experience in 1980, a day in the 1900s, a week in Elizabethan times. Another reason they’re attempting to put controls on the tabs. Imagine if someone accidentally tripped back to Ancient Greece? When they woke up after an hour they’d feel they’d lived a whole lifetime (a dream for some, a nightmare for others). Time goes on between trips as well, so you never just pick up their life where you leave off, but catch up with them along the way.

  Henry had assured me that this prototype had some controls in place already. For example, that once the tab selected a host for me, only I could use it. It would not work for anyone else. So, knowing there were controls in place, I wasn’t as apprehensive as I should have been, perhaps, when I began visiting Leonora.

  It was the morning after I’d decided to try to live more closely to nineteenth-century conditions. I didn’t feel ready or able to give up my helper, though, just yet. I went downstairs to a clean kitchen and the robot offered me tea. He made me breakfast, too, and I watched his movements, definitely mechanical, though his outer tan skin layer showed no joints or divets. I thought of Leonora’s feeling that she had cool rods of iron in her skull, as I watched William’s head turn and nod, human-like, and the movements of his hands. There was no noise from here, though right up close you could hear the workings. His jumpsuit, really, was comically science fictional: ocean blue-green and ridged and bumped in human-like places. Curve of the underarm. Muscle line separating quad from inner thigh. His synthetic blond hair was in a short style but not a razor cut. Simply neat. And his features were boyish, generic: button nose, large blue eyes, small lips.

  My Faye has a button nose, too, and blonde hair, but hazel eyes. She is petite and athletic (when we were together, despite any excesses, she seemed to burn up the pizza and alcohol); others would call her sexy or cute, but I thought she was beautiful. Like when she would come into the room in her towel after her morning shower, throw the towel on the bed and rifle through the drawers with a frown on her face. She’d pull her bra on – she preferred those wireless crop-type bras, more comfortable – and push her small breasts into place, continuing that look of concentration. She’d be standing there with short wet hair, in her bra and no pants, a full mound of pubic hair, and she’d suddenly realise she’d been frowning and would break into a glorious grin.

  You see I wouldn’t want you to think that my shameful desires precluded me from being attracted to women, from loving a woman. There still seems to be a deep misunderstanding, in my experience, about how complex sexuality can be, and about our capacity to desire so much, so many different types of people, at once.

 
But it never worked with Faye because my shame is such a large part of myself, and I couldn’t share it with her. I was terrified of what the look on her face might be. The way her thoughts would be revealed and then hastily covered as she sought an appropriate response to my confession. And because I couldn’t share that secret, she was only seeing part of me. You have to give everything – or almost everything – over for inspection in a relationship. For the connection to be true, anyway. I think with some envy about a Thomas Mann anecdote, where his wife smiles indulgently at the way he is eyeing the waiter, jokes with him about his leering. But if one can express desires the way Mann does in Death in Venice, perhaps the beauty and purity of the expression itself allows those closest to the person to be open to understanding.

  I’m sure Faye’s getting on with her life. But she’ll probably be worried. I’ve been gone now, at the time of recording this, for more than a month.

  I’d made my rule about use of technology, so I decided I wouldn’t use the phone to call the community car to go to Gairloch. But for some reason I thought the bike would be okay (I justified it because it was still harder, and the walk would really just be too far). I crossed the footbridge on a luckily sunny and calm autumn day. An oystercatcher skimmed the surface of the water, reflected in its glass-like surface.

  I pulled the bike out of a small shed on the other side of the footbridge, dusted off the spiderwebs and rode in a few wobbly circles to get used to it. The tyres seemed okay, and my energy was relatively good. The pharm was only just wearing off, and I wasn’t sure how long it would take for my full decline. I set off in the direction of Gairloch, dawdling slowly on the road. Time, after all, was something I had. I got off the bike and walked when I encountered hills. Around one corner appeared a large cove; with the tide low there was a mass of orange seaweed covering the shore. On a very close island I saw a pod of seals, bobbing heads and tails, diving into the water. The sight made me smile, panting, catching my breath, but the warm feeling was pummelled by a wave of sadness. I thought of myself as a ridiculously sentimental creature, half-dead and welling up at these fat, joyous mammals. I watched for a while, then shook my head and rode on.