Gnomon Read online

  I had all those tools once: the car that drove itself, the office chair that warned me when I was sitting badly. And then bit by bit I got rid of them. It was not a grand decision, just a slow shift I didn’t understand until it was done. I got tired of voices in my head and eyes peering over my shoulder. Now nothing I own talks to anything else, and I have hooks in the hallway where people can hang up their wearable devices when they arrive. The whole house works as a Faraday cage. I put the wire in myself, so I know it’s properly done. The Witness is the sun, and my home is made of shadows – or perhaps of shade.

  Instead of electronics, I have books: books in their thousands stacked all over the house. There’s almost no flat surface that is not covered in books. Last year there was an embarrassing incident when a double tower of translated South American fiction tumbled over and buried me in my bed.

  I allow people to borrow books and I keep no records of the loans. Do you know, in fourteen years I have never once had a book stolen? How remarkable, that people will behave so well without being indexed. It’s not scalable, apparently; not realistic in the wider world. Above a certain threshold, it’s no longer a personal trust governed by the rules of friendship, but a tragedy of the commons, and people just steal. That’s always been the problem, I’m told: we need a better sort of human being, not a more just law. We need to change the way people think.

  Not that I’m against indices, per se. From time to time my library grows when someone brings me a cardboard box from an attic or a cellar, and then I write all the details of each book on a little card and I put them away each in its proper place. Sometimes I run classes for children, teaching them how to read books which cannot speak to them, how to close the covers and lie down when they are tired because the pages will not detect their fatigue or tell the house to extinguish the lights so that they know they should sleep. Sometimes I let my small students stay up with a torch, and read under the duvet, though I am careful to be sure they do not know this is by my permission. They rustle and hide and derive great pleasure from flouting my law. I teach them reading and disrespect for authority, and I consider my work well done.

  Yes, I know, I am a witch and I traffic in dark magic. I warp the fragile grey matter of vulnerable infants.

  Speaking of which: in a few moments the technicians will put tendrils of metal into my brain. This sounds enormously sinister, but of course it’s not. The filaments are barely more than a few atoms wide, stiffened by a magnetic field until they can slide and squiggle between cells and along blood vessels like little furry mice seeking their mother’s tit. They will snuggle against the different parts of me and listen. They will hear the signals in my head through chitosan minichips, the same ones that are used to repair trauma victims and connect pilots with their planes. They will learn the language of my neurons, although more properly it should be called a dialect, because it turns out that in general when you and I each see the colour blue, we do indeed see much the same thing, to the endless disappointment of philosophers. Would you believe, though, that men and women process depth perception differently? So that if a man reviews my experience, he will likely get nauseous. Good riddance, of course, but still: I find that intriguing.

  They will test and tweak and then they will read the pages of my brain. The whole process will take a little over half a day, they tell me. It is unknown for it to last longer than that. We are not deep enough, not dense enough, to contain more information than that. Perhaps there should be a unit of identity against time. How many human-hours will this take? And by the answer you could know how real I am.

  Somewhere in the harvest, they will find what they are looking for. I am said to possess a list of reactionaries and bad elements, and I suppose in a way I do, I just don’t think of it as a list. I call it my life. It is everyone I know who is like me, who chooses not to participate in the network of binding plebiscites and bank loans and credit cards and locatively discursive spimes. They are the small remnant or rebirth of a culture of analogue people who do not entirely believe that this version of life is perfect, who feel constrained rather than liberated by the world which has emerged as much from our heedlessness as from any decision. A very few of them actually protest and engage in civil disobedience. They carry protest cards which give a contact number for a lawyer, and they skirt the edges of the law. And I’m sure, in among them, there are some petty criminals: counterfeiters and rumrunners and such. I don’t ask when I’m sharing candles and early Penguin editions how the members of my book group make their money. Mystery allows for dreams and uncertainty for romance, forgetfulness opens the door for forgiveness and even redemption. In my house the hearth is unbroken by the endless torrent of the outer world. It is, like marriage or liberty, not a thing but an action: a process we must create rather than a rock on which we may stand.

  That’s why I’m in here.

  Someone who talks like that, according to the System, may represent a potential security risk to the wider nation, a refusenik culture which, if significant numbers were to follow its lead, would imply the end of the Witness and the System, the end of the benign, stable, all-seeing state we all inhabit. There is no present risk of that actually happening: they are – we are – cracks in the wall, and maintenance is one of the ten commandments of good engineering. By the time the cracks widen and there is water flowing through them, the wall will already be beyond repair.

  The point is that in twelve hours the System will have the names and the faces of everyone I know, direct from my head. After that my part will be over. The machine will make any necessary adjustments for my wellbeing: deal with physical deformities to the brain matter, ensure there is no bleeding or swelling that might endanger me, take preventative and curative measures against sociopathy, psychosis, depression, aggressive social narcissism, sadism, masochism, low self-esteem, undiagnosed neuroatypicality, attention deficit, in other words all the known issues of our complex biological processing, even unto the insidious and alienating cognitive dissonance and maladjustment syndrome. (You really have to watch for that one. Almost anyone can have it.)

  Or you could say that in twelve hours I will have betrayed everyone I love into the hands of these my torturers, and we will all of us emerge perfected and adjusted and happy and enslaved. We will be remade in the image of a creation I once believed was the only way to avoid horror, but which by a ridiculous string of errors and confusions of the mind is now a horror in itself.

  I will probably thank the myrmidons as I leave. When I understand how important it is for me to say goodbye to what I was, it will please me to see the children burn my books as a token gesture of my return to society – and they will do it gladly, after their own therapeutic interventions. I could reacquire them all, later, of course, but it seems that the determinedly miserabilist slant of my non-fiction reading may lose its appeal.

  They take off the blindfold. Some of the processes require visual stimuli. I look at the room, at the screens all around me, at my self everted on them like a rat on a middle school laboratory counter.

  The pain management technician says: ‘Three, two, one, and mark,’ and I realise, as I am going under, that he is the same man who was present for the birth of my daughter.

  I think: You shall not have my mind.

  It comes up on the screen, in sans serif font.

  *

  The Inspector puts the terminals on their stand and, after a moment of silent hiatus, works through a ritual resembling a compulsive disorder of the mind. Over her desk there is a single printed sheet of paper whose contents she changes every so often to avoid memorising them. Last month, the text was Victorian and resonant:

  I pleaded, outlaw-wise,

  By many a hearted casement, curtained red…

  The metre was uneven, the sense and lexicon demanding. That is part of the point: focusing on the poem entails a full engagement of the mind with the text and the moment. A waking engagement, critical and jaggedly real. The new verse is more mann
ered and less to her liking, which makes it perhaps more suited to the task:

  thy breath was shed

  Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine…

  Careful that she is reading word by word from the sheet, she finishes the poem, then picks up an old crank-handled lantern from beside her terminal and winds vigorously. A meagre light spills from the cracked Fresnel lens and paints the outline of the fracture on the wall behind the desk.

  Neith nods in satisfaction: good. The text is static, the lantern works. She passes to the final stage, tossing a single grubby tennis ball into the air, and when – as they always do – it comes back down, catching it.

  These three tests are intended for those learning to recognise and even control the direction of their dreams. Text is unstable in the envisioned unconscious, and either cannot be read or changes itself between breaths. Mechanical objects and light switches tend not to work, and physical laws – such as gravity – are undependable. For Neith, who routinely views considerable quantities of the recorded experience of other minds, the tests are both a practical reality check and an aid to being comfortable and familiar in her own skin at the end of the working day. She runs them directly after a session and at random through her waking life. It has to be a habit to work: if you only do it when you think you may be dreaming, you won’t do it when you are dreaming but believe that you are not. It’s easy enough to recognise the sleeping mind when you find yourself in flight after a champagne dinner with Claude Rains – although Neith does not often dream of flying, which bothers her because Freud insisted such dreams were about sex – but much harder when the deviation is more subtle or more plausible: unknown and undefinable flavours of fruit, vanishingly small worlds stacked with coincidence to the point of inevitability, the power to read menus in other languages or arm-wrestle a man twice your mass. The dream state is wily, and it learns as you do.

  She waits a while longer, until she has completely reassociated with her surroundings. There are approved exercises for this which involve visualising your awareness as an elastic dough and extending it into every extremity one by one. Neith finds them childish as well as somewhat ineffectual. Glancing at the poem one more time, she decides that she has done enough to be sure of her body and goes to make coffee, which is the unofficial punctuation of her rite. She walks to the galley kitchen, dials water from the hot tap. The sink tells her – as it always does – that the water is coming out at 96 degrees Celsius, a temperature that is ideal for making coffee but dangerous to human skin.

  She queries the Witness, and finds that none of the interview technicians in the Hunter matter has ever attended a birth. For that matter, indeed, Hunter had no children. Neith sighs at this evidence of stubborn mendacity. In a few moments, the old woman will be transparent. In the absence of a strategic goal, it takes a particularly tragic sort of refusenik to hold out right down to the wire.

  Lifting the coffee grounds to her nose, Neith inhales, and winces. She cannot afford the brand she really likes because it is frankly luxurious, so she buys the cheapest she can stand. It is counter-intuitively called Truth. On the packaging is a picture of the company’s owner, a very handsome retired footballer from Benin. Benin coffee is usually very good, but Truth is not. She has been trying to acquire a taste for it, and while she still hates it, she now misses it as well when she can’t get it. It is the worst of possible outcomes, one she hopes very much is temporary.

  While the stuff brews, she makes toast and honey, as always bewildered and a little creeped out by the origin of the sweet comb. On the other hand, once you start down that road you won’t be drinking milk, either, and then you might wonder about cheese, or wine, and if you’re in that headspace then to be honest all food – meat or vegetable – takes on the alien tinge of life ingested, the spectre of uninvited growth inside the body. It’s an old, old horror, that notion of something alive under one’s own skin, something touching the interior surfaces of the body where only oneself should go; old – and discredited, because a human being is the sum of many parts, not excluding a great flora and fauna of microbiological co-corporealists necessary to the balance of guts and blood. No one is a single thing; everyone is a network, or a mosaic.

  Speaking of which – and as above, so below – it’s time to vote. Licking her fingers, she returns to the other room and puts her mug of bad coffee on a coaster to cool.

  *

  Every person under the System is encouraged – though not compelled – to spend a certain amount of time each week voting, and is semi-randomly assigned to decision-making bodies for the duration of their session. Each body will most likely be around two hundred individuals strong, and will deal either collectively or in subcommittee jury group with anything from asylum requests or the allocation of medical resources to commercial disputes. It is the most nuanced and democratic system of direct governance ever devised, and it requires genuine participation from the polity. For the body of the state to perform its function properly, each person must make his or her own decision in the light of their personal experience and opinion without being influenced by others at the formative stage, so sessions are initially private and remain anonymous throughout. Each problem is proposed to each person in a way that is fractionally different, tailored precisely to pique their interest and understanding, their self-interest and their altruism, so that every choice is made with the greatest awareness of consequence and meaning.

  In cases where a person serving on the panel has particular, relevant knowledge or experience, verified expertise markers may be deployed to indicate locus to speak on the topic, although the weight given to these by other citizens is variable in line with perception. Non-voting experts can also be sought by quora to explain or give context. The whole gamut of responses is then averaged using an advanced Bayesian mathematics. Certainly even the losing side in most judgements will acknowledge a fairness and balance to the outcome, and as verdicts need not invoke prescribed solutions but can, within certain limits, be creative, the result of litigation can often be profitable to both sides. The System is the will of the plebiscite, and the plebiscite genuinely reflects the people.

  Neith, like other professional investigators, has to stretch to meet her suggested number of plebiscite hours. Sometimes she takes a few days off and binges. The score doesn’t affect anything in your life except your self-esteem; the only person who looks accusingly at Neith when she doesn’t hit her target is Neith – although the involvement of law enforcement professionals at an early stage in governance has been found to be beneficial in many ways, as they are inevitably the ones who must tidy up when the wrong choice leads to negative local realities.

  Today, voting is making her fractionally impatient, so the System is reciprocally terse in its briefings, while at the same time emphasising gratitude for her time during a busy period. She will not be asked to participate in judgements likely to require lengthy debate or research. Instead, she is assigned to an immigration board, and rapidly rejects the entry of two shifty young men with chequered histories hailing from a country generally – and not unfairly – associated with organised crime. They are proposing a business venture with a cargo enterprise in Docklands, and Neith marks the firm for attention, too. A third applicant, superficially very much like the other two, she eventually endorses. She suspects he wants to get the hell out of his home city and make a new life, so she recommends several apprenticeship programmes, and receives a startled and somewhat joyous thank-you from his legal counsel.

  Next assignment: four young women have been caught engaged in property destruction. Neith wants to know why. She briefly interviews all of them separately and together, permitted to take the lead by her co-franchisers after briefly dickering for the spot with a behavioural development specialist. The man yields gracefully and is assigned second chair, then asks questions that in Neith’s retrospective analysis may actually have been more useful than her own. (She flags his name as a possible consultant in future cases to
uching his competence.) The youngsters are designated ‘at risk/negative synergy’ and separated, sent to different parts of the country under the New Start initiative.

  Finally, there’s a wrangle over intellectual property. There usually is, and this aspect takes up a disproportionate amount of voting time and triggers endless philosophical debates, but in the end the general will is that artists and makers should be able to function profitably within what remains a largely capitalist economic apparatus, which entails some form of ownership of their work. In this case, someone designed a game, someone else designed the story that frames it, now they are at odds. This one takes longer than the first two and is more annoying. It seems trivial, even petty. Smooth economic flow and creative justice, the System reminds her gently, are also inherent parts of functional plebiscite-regulated market democracy. She knuckles down. After another fifteen minutes, though, she’s getting the sense that the dispute has nothing to do with money. She queries the backchannel data, runs a quick analysis and raises a tangent flag. The moderator brings her in.

  ‘I’d like to propose that Complainant and Respondent make full disclosure of any personal feelings towards one another at this time.’

  Which they do, and it transpires they are desperate to have sex. Possibly, Neith allows, they are in actual love. The business venture is a pretext which has recently become so successful that it is getting in the way. Neith considers tearing her hair out or imposing a fine, but decides in the end that acknowledgement of the importance of romance by the System is an identifiable good. The Inspector suggests to the committee that both parties be cautioned against allowing their personal business to become a matter of state, proposes a small business loan to hire additional staff, then recommends a hotel. The committee – not without, she suspects, some muffled sniggering at the vision of an anonymous but clearly high-ranking Witness officer having to deal with a sort of self-imposed Romeo-and-Juliet crisis – accepts these measures. The litigating lovebirds are sent off to sort themselves out.