Chapter Two

 

St. Clare’s confrontational face told me my presence was no longer required, but I misread. 

‘His nibs arrived during the night. The library has been cleared for his quarters and office. You must not disturb him. He’ll call you when he needs you.’

He reiterated the warning to keep clear of the Quantum Machines in the Cavern Halls, there’d been reports of headaches, vomiting and involuntary behaviour.

‘Will Charlie March report to the library!’

I felt dutiful enough to be wearing a uniform. The kind of thought sure to illicit a contrary attitude…calm, I told myself… I breathed deeply; breathing in ‘pleasant projection’ and breathing out the build up of passive aggression. I stopped breathing at the library door. I started breathing in the threshold…

‘Hello, Charlie? Charlie March. Edward… I am glad to make your acquaintance…please, take a seat.’

‘You are an enigma,’ I said, something I had cued up not to say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Information about you is sparse.’

‘That isn’t intentional. I like my privacy.’

‘Must be difficult.’

‘My favourite movie is Ex-Machina, I have a next generation personal companion on order…the future is not that far out.’

‘The Philadelphia Story, Some Like it Hot…Ted…Joker…my favourites—’

‘You’re here as a documentarian. I want to draw a line under the previous use of the place. You’ve seen the floor plans? Read the instructions?’

‘Yes…’

‘I understand from Pat that you are looking for a murder mystery to solve…that’s fine…in your spare time…as long as you complete your work to deadline. Pat is working on schedules and itineraries.’

‘It was just a passing interest. I get bored easily. What do you know about Goodmanson?’

‘Absolutely nothing. I am focussed on forward. These are changing times, we must adapt or fizzle out.’

Having built a reputation for being professionally awkward I was surprised at my kowtowing stance 

‘My first loyalty is to my editor.’

‘There are things you’ll never know about me,’ he said, couching himself in mystery. The kind of mystery successful middle-aged men construct for themselves that no one actually finds interesting. Money, wealth, power, repeat. Impressive in some circles and tumbleweed in others. At the end of the day, however rich he was, he couldn’t stop himself being just a man. His view of a man; the big suit he climbed into was of heroism and knightliness, left no room for respecting alternate perspectives. The kind of man he had become did not try and fit into the ranks of society; the kind of man he had become worked the parade ground of society, exploiting, restricting and misleading.

It struck me that it was a curse to have so much potential and waste it because your imagination is limited to what boys are meant to aspire to. In other words his ambitions were restricted to the storytelling of fiction writers from his formative years.

But if you had no money and were incapable of earning any, and there was no one to look after you, you’d be living rough at best.

But he bragged and boasted, a top drawer bore, imagining I was just a kitten he’d taken to teasing with tidbits.

I let several pauses ride. But eventually I slotted in that I needed to go topside, the Sun was calling. I said it in a way that left no room for refusal, ‘No, certainly not…I am not allowing you to jeopardise the operation at this early stage. All our competitors and enemies have local satellites, they are recording activity. New tech is reaching. What you have in your head could be ripped out…’

I made a promise to myself while he was still talking not to apologise…a pertinent spot for the apology arose…I resisted, it passed…there was a moment of conclusion, so I apologised courteously, excused myself, telling him I needed to go and take notes while it was fresh in my mind, and went back to my room, leaving him wanting more.

The room felt safe and secure despite the previously leaked audio. I didn’t have the feeling of being watched, although I probably was. There were several clinks and a clunk; a draw snapped open. Three bound black A4 books, journals sat in the draw. I thought they might contain something useful but they were all blank.

I searched the room for written-in journals. I found a box of pencils and a pencil sharpener. Possessed with a novel strength compulsion to write I took out a journal sat down at the desk, and began writing.

What I often did was free-writing to get things going; NRG: Nonsense, Rubbish, Genius, or the Just Write technique. 

But on this occasion what I wrote was curiously fully formed. As I wrote, with no thought of stopping, and dispelling suspicious accusations the words weren’t mine, I got as much on to the page as I could before the deluge expired. I put the journal back in the draw. And went straight to sleep not long after my head hit the pillow.

I had the lucid dream I had multiple times every night, standing outside the log cabin, unable to see in, knowing the building was being prepared for my arrival.

‘How is the writing going?’ Pat asked. 

‘Yeah…how’s the canteen coming along…any deliveries?’ 

‘Provisions have been despatched, you’ll be glad to know. Do you have anything I could read?’

‘No.’

‘Can you inform me when I can read something, please?’

‘Sure, you’ll be the first to know.’

Our relationship wasn’t blooming due to the food supply issues and me not giving him anything to read.

‘We fired up Q2….]

I was trying to remember some of what I had written the night before but blanked. 

The lock on the draw had been tampered with and the draw wouldn’t close. 

Had I been rumbled? I read the first paragraph. I was writing a novel, nothing to see here; nothing pointed to anything suspicious on my part.

I read the rest of what I had written: 

Foreword.

Some people are born lucky; born into luck. Others are cursed. I was born into luck with a curse, which luck took one look at and said: ‘not today, not in this lifetime, you don’t!’

It was channelling through me. I wrote:

‘I was the boy in the bubble, that was, after my apprenticeship as a baby and toddler in a bubble. All my needs were catered for and my wants supplied with sustainable providence. They trained me to be self-sufficient and free-minded. It was the ultimate in home schooling…’ 

I wondered whose words they were, they weren’t mine.

‘… Mental states developed that projected no excess anger, resentment, frustration, or hatred; it had no need for judgement or criticism. I had a clear understanding of the meaningfulness of Humanity and how I fitted in with it. Life was fed into me with love and nourishment and flowed within me, an aspirant of all that is benevolent and positive. Plus, times infinity on top of that, there were plans, baby plans, that grew alongside me, sprouting into theoretical aims and branching out into impossible potentiality. Longevity schemes were stretching into immortality dreams and I was number one on the list of those eligible for trials… I am getting ahead of myself, there’s stuff in-between, but at some point in my life experience I am expecting the emergence of techniques, as experimental, as hush-hush as they are, to enable a forever life.’

The boy in the perfect bubble, was he dead? Or had he left his body before it was recovered? I carried on reading:

‘We are programmed to look up to our parents, which in some cases does not compute, because even if they are mean and narcissistically too self-involved for full-on doing the right thing, at the right time, all the time; offspring have a clinging gene that obliges they worship, even the scummiest of excuses for parental duty. I did not have to suffer such fools gladly. My folks were not just the best, they were superheroes. They had to keep-their identities obscure because their work was so globally important and invited all manner of foreign interventions by powers that wanted what they had. But caped up, the other side of the phone box they were phenomenal within their sphere. They were scientific wunderkind, celebrities of clinical research, darlings of the ineffable, a dream team couple, far and away outstripping all the avenues and alleyways that innovation and invention indolently stroll down. You are born and you go through life as though it is a script. You know no different, so abnormalities don’t register as such. Without other normals creating a mean norm, your normal is the normal in the spotlight. 

‘I was aware that most other parents were not working on creating parallel dimensions where minds could go to escape the vicissitudes of the body, especially when incurable illness prevails, or alternate worlds where people could take their leisure and expand it into an endless joy, current physical laws did not allow. To my mind what they were doing was as simple and natural as baking a cake. Every care was taken with my development. Such side-niggles as isolation, so desperate in the minds of a socially dictated to creature, were alleviated by the creation, or allowance, of imaginary friends, dear, perfect storm-weathering friends. They took up all my down time; their shared experiences halving troubles and doubling delight. And the adventures we went on prepared me for the life that I was being prepared for.

‘My scientist parents sought to enlarge the envelope of what was considered possible within the universal labyrinth of neural activity, to use the apparatus of dreaming, among others, to create dream come true scenarios. It started with short, darting peeks into the unknown. Chances of going anywhere not high on realism. But, increment by accumulative increment, the void became a place where ideas went to bloom and flourish. They found a way to adjust, manipulate and program electro-chemical brain activity to reconfigure thought patterns, to enhance the thinker’s experience by rewriting their perception. They classed thoughts as nominal interactions keeping the thought process activated. Their research offered the novel idea that thoughts were placeholders, forerunners of the conscious activity evolution had not yet bestowed upon the species: thought as proto-thought. The real purpose of the human brain had not yet emerged. Once the code was broken the dam wall followed, whole edifices of established thought were washed away. The brain reacted to code and it could be spoken to. The brain is animal. Consciousness is alien. The brain is host. Consciousness is a parasite. Consciousness marinades the brain with a distinct flavour that arises from unique brain/mind conglomeration. Within the consciousness nodes, perceptual spaces, space time windows can be formed. If instructed in the right. That being the crucial element that remained elusive.’

I didn’t think I’d sleep at all, but the next conscious thought I had was being pleased I’d had a good night’s sleep…

The recurring log cabin on a snow covered mountainside dream, lucid and with a flood of meaning. I stood outside, the construction not yet solid enough to enter. It was a place of great promise.