‘Real or not, they would have cushioned you from the shock of facing a whole puzzling new world in one go. Prevented you going loopy as you tried to make sense of what you were experiencing. That would have been the theory anyway.’
The point when she’d worked out that her memories were not real was when she’d worked out that she wasn’t human – Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ was the best she had to rely on. It had been a chilling realisation that had her reassessing all the contradictions she’d conveniently suppressed. In time, she came to understand herself and that what relentlessly drove her was the need to be as close to human as she could. An unforgiving quest to be second best.
‘Do you dream?’ he asks.
The speed with which he is moving between subjects is making her head spin. ‘Sometimes.’ What she does not say is that until recently, with so little in the way of variety to draw on, these mental regurgitations have either been extremely fanciful and packed with longing for the unknown, burgeoningly dull and repetitive, or simply terrifying, filled with hooks and wires and fear and pain.
‘I knew it. I just knew it.’ He bangs his fist into his palm. ‘Cuthbert wrote that memory, if planted deeply, would promote dreaming and dreaming would trigger reasoning. All that was needed was a spark to set things running and – boom – you would get consciousness. Sounds unrevolutionary now but get this, she was writing in 1930, before even the first computer.’
‘Not everyone agrees that I am conscious,’ she replies, recalling her husband and the tendency he’d had to articulate his confusion at the most inopportune, intimate moments.
‘But you must be, otherwise we would not be having such a conversation.’
‘Perhaps it is because I am good at pretending – a clever mechanical – a parrot repeating what she does not understand. That is a theory I have also heard.’
‘It’s not a matter of pretending to be conscious. Such a thing anyway would be unpretendable and I don’t believe for a moment you doubt yourself in that way. More interesting is what you feel yourself to be. Whether you feel yourself to be human?’
She is smiling nervously. ‘I of course know I am not human, but even so I do feel it, sometimes.’ This feels like a confession. Like an actress admitting she has been acting as an actress. She felt ‘human’, for instance, when Daniels brought her flowers from the garden or gifts from the shops below. She felt what she assumed it must be like to be human when her husband stroked her hair, the tenderness of the act utterly pointless, a mere performance, if she was nothing more than a machine.
‘When I found you in Cambridge, you were the most human thing in the street, and you know why that was? It was because of your determination to survive.’
‘I’ve never thought about it like that,’ she says. ‘When I’m frightened, I’m frightened, although before the last few days I’ve never undergone anything like this. In the apartment I felt safe because nothing dangerous could really ever happen.’
Nothing dangerous could happen because Matthew had protected her. They were never married, that turned out to be one of the lies. But he had looked after her, kept her safe.
Without her realising it, her grief has crept up on her. Her lips draw thin. Her nose wrinkles. The pressure in her tear ducts grows. ‘I loved him,’ she mumbles to herself. Despite everything, she loved him. She finds herself looking helplessly into Maplin’s stupid, ugly, ecstatic face. Needing someone, anyone, even this ridiculous stranger – part-schoolboy, part-mad scientist – to comfort her. ‘I loved him,’ she repeats.
Maplin stares at her, not understanding.
She is recalling the moment she and Matthew first spent time alone. Just talking to begin with, exploring each other with questions. He smiling into her eyes, caressing her face as if he can’t believe she is really there. Then he had taken her to his bedroom, undressing shyly, slowly revealing to her his slim body. The muscles lean and hard and so inviting to her touch. And now all that is gone, taken away by the years and the intruder’s gun.
Evie starts to smile, finally understanding what the ‘spark’ was that that scientist had been going on about. By giving her the need to love and be loved, the rest just followed – onset of consciousness, sense of self, etc., etc. She feels her mind expanding, comprehending herself properly for the very first time and why she is the person she is.
In the background Maplin is talking again. ‘You know, if you just let me perform some little tests, we could figure out a lot. I could help you with things, all sorts of things.’ He is reaching towards her head again, this time with both hands. The move takes her, in her dazed state, by surprise, and his fingers make clammy contact with her temples.
Evie recoils in a rapid leap back like a frightened animal. All the preceding talk about dreams and memories and inner voices and what it is like to feel this and feel that, has served to hypnotise her, but in that instant she snaps free. Her shoulders strike the wall behind. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she says, staring at him, her teeth bared, rebuffing the greedy light in his eyes with the angry flare in her own.
19
Evie’s fierce reaction to Maplin touching her instantly cools things and he leaves, departing the room with his tail between his legs. She hears him moving around upstairs, banging and dragging things around.
When he comes back down, an hour later, he is carrying a padded envelope.
She expects him still to be angry but he is wanting to be friends again.
‘Evie, do you know where you came from?’ he asks.
‘Where I came from?’ she repeats, uncertainly.
‘It’s the question most of us ask at some time, humans anyway, but at least for you there is an answer. Do you want to see something – something extremely rare?’ He is so eager, he doesn’t give her a chance to reply. ‘Sit down,’ he says, ‘and take a look at this.’
From the envelope, he slips out a brochure printed on thick white paper, roughly quarto in proportions – similar to the size of old A4 laid sideways – which although glossy and uncreased, has yellowed along the edges revealing its true age. He hands it to her. He is unable to stop beaming.
‘Elektra,’ she reads out. The word is printed on the cover in a fleshy pink and underneath, in gold script, ‘make a new life today.’
‘Elektra’? The name is familiar to her but she can’t place it. She opens the cover to an image of a slim young female in an elegant cocktail dress, the hem flouncing attractively to expose her thighs. The woman stands side on, twisting prettily towards the camera, reaching out, palm upwards, like she is seeking to take a child by the hand. ‘Make your appointment with Elektra this November at the Frankfurt 2091 World Fair’ is written in soft grey italics alongside.
The brochure is far older than she thought. 2091 – three years before she was created. ‘What is this?’ she asks. ‘Who is she? Who is Elektra?’
‘Don’t you know?’ Maplin gapes at her, enjoying her confusion. With the delivery of this document he has changed role again, transitioned from amateur scientist to conjuror. She senses that after having been skinned and filleted earlier, she is about to be sawn in two.
He silently preserves the moment, manipulating her suspense. She knows the answer, she thinks, but has no words to put it into.