‘Absolutely, as soon as we’ve finished our interviews today. We don’t want to do anything to set back your treatment.’
‘How do you experience time?’ is a baffling question to ask anyone. The obvious answer would be ‘like you do, probably’. So we’d narrowed it down to:
How do you feel when you remember an event from your childhood?
How do you feel about your last birthday?
How do you feel about the Norman Conquest?
‘Not the same,’ David insisted. ‘Not the same.’
I found myself not sleeping. Expectant mothers do. But while not sleeping, I stared and listened for birds, and thought the same thought, over and over.
It’s been proven that certain traits formed by a child’s environment do get passed down to its own children. It is genuinely harder for the child of someone who was denied books to learn to read.
I’m going to be a terrible parent.
‘Will you play with me?’ I remember how much that sound in my voice seemed to hurt. Not that I was feeling anything bad at the time; it was like I was just hearing something bad. I said it too much. I said it too much in exactly the same way.
‘Later,’ said Dad, sitting in his chair that smelled of him, watching the football. ‘You start, and I’ll join in later.’
I’d left my bedroom and gone back into the lounge. I could hear them talking in the kitchen, getting ready for bed, and in a moment they’d be bound to notice me, but I’d seen it in the paper and it sounded incredible: The Outer Limits. The outer limits of what? Right at the end of the television programmes for the day. So after that I’d see television stop. And now I was seeing it and it was terrible, because there was a monster, and this was too old for me. I was crying. But they’d be bound to hear, and in a moment they would come and yell at me and switch the set off and carry me off to bed, and it’d be safe for me to turn round.
But they went to bed without looking in the lounge. I listened to them close the door and talk for a while, and then switch the light off, and then silence, and so it was just me sitting there, watching the greys flicker.
With the monster.
I was standing in a lay-by, watching the cars go past, wondering if Mummy and Daddy were going to come back for me this time. They’d said that if I didn’t stop going on about the ice cream I’d dropped on the beach, they’d make me get out and walk. And then Dad had said ‘right!’ and he’d stopped the car and yanked open the door and grabbed me out of my seat and left me there and driven off.
I was looking down the road, waiting to see the car come back.
I had no way of even starting to think about another life. I was six years old.
Those are just memories. They’re not from Christmas Day. They’re kept like that in the connections between neurons within my brain. I have a sense of telling them to myself. Every cell of my body has been replaced many times since I was that age. I am an oral tradition. But it’s been proved that a butterfly remembers what a caterpillar has learned, despite its entire neurological structure being literally liquidised in between. So perhaps there’s a component of memory that lies outside of ourselves as well, somewhere in those loose threads of particle trails. I have some hope that that is true. Because that would put a different background behind all of my experiences.
I draw a line now between such memories and the other memories I now have of my childhood. But that line will grow fainter in time.
I don’t want to neglect it.
I’m going to neglect it.
I don’t want to hurt it.
I’m going to hurt it.
They made me this way. I’m going to blame them for what I do. I’m going to end up being worse.
I grew numb with fear as autumn turned to winter. I grew huge. I didn’t talk to Ben or anyone about how I felt. I didn’t want to hear myself say the words.
In mid-December, a couple of weeks before the due date, I got an email from Lindsey. It was marked ‘confidential’:
Just thought I should tell you, that, well, you predicted it, didn’t you? The monkey trials have been a complete success, the subjects seem fine, mentally and physically. We’re now in a position to actually connect minds across time. So we’re going to get into the business of finding human volunteer test subjects. Ramsay wants ‘some expendable student’ to be the first, but, you know, over our dead bodies! This isn’t like lab rats, this is first astronaut stuff. Anyway, the Project is closing down on bloody Christmas Eve, so we’re going to be forced to go and ponder that at home. Enclosed are the latest revisions of the tech specs, so that you can get excited too. But of course, you’ll be utterly blasé about this, because it is nothing compared to the miracle of birth, about which you must be so excited, etc.
I looked at the specs and felt proud.
And then a terrible thought came to me. Or crystallised in me. Formed out of all the things I was. Was already written in me.
I found myself staggered by it. And hopeful about it. And fearful that I was hopeful. I felt I could save myself. That’s ironic too.
My fingers fumbling, I wrote Lindsey a congratulatory email and then rewrote it three times before I sent it so that it was a model of everything at my end being normal.
I knew what I was going to be doing on Christmas Day.
Due dates are not an exact science. We’d had a couple of false alarms, but when Christmas Eve arrived, everything was stable. ‘I think it’s going to be a few more days,’ I told Ben.
I woke without needing an alarm the next morning, to the strange quiet of Christmas Day. I left Ben sleeping, showered and dressed in the clothes I’d left ready the night before. Creeping about amongst the silence made me think of Father Christmas. I looked back in on Ben and felt fondly about him. That would have been the last time for that.
I drove through streets that were Christmas empty. My security card worked fine on a door that didn’t know what day it was.
And then I was into the absolute silence of these familiar spaces, walking swiftly down the corridors, like a ghost.
The lab had been tidied away for the holidays. I had to unlock a few storage areas, to remember a few combinations. I reached into the main safe and drew out the crown of lights.
I paused as I sat in Lindsay’s chair, the crown connected to a power source, the control systems linked up to a keyboard and screen in my lap. I considered for a moment, or pretended to, before putting it on my head.
Could what I was about to do to my brain harm the foetus?
Not according to what had happened with the monkeys. They were all fine, physically. I could only harm myself. We’d theorised that too long a connection between minds, more than a few minutes, would result in an extreme form of what the schizophrenics dealt with, perhaps a complete brain shutdown. Death. I would have to feel that coming and get out, or would have to unconsciously see it approaching on the screen, or just count the seconds.
Or I would fail my child completely.
I nearly put it all away again, locked up, walked out.
Nearly.
I put the crown on my head, I connected the power source, I took the keyboard in my hands and I watched the particle trails in my own mind begin to resolve on the screen, and I concentrated on them, in the way we’d always talked about, and I started typing before I could think again. I hit activate.
The minds of the monkeys seemed to select their own targets. The imaging for those experiments showed two sets of trails reacting to each other, symmetrical, beautiful. That seemed to suggest not the chaotic accident of schizophrenia, but something more tranquil, perhaps something like a religious experience, we’d said. But of course we had nothing objective to go on. I had theorised that since it turns out we evolved with every moment of ourselves just a stray particle away, the human trait of seeing patterns in chaos, of always assuming there is a hidden supernatural world, was actually selected for. We’d devised a feedback monitor that would allow a human subject to watch, and, with a bit of training, hence alter the particle tracks in one’s own head via the keyboard and screen. I had hypothesised that, because the schizophrenic state can be diagnosed, that is, it isn’t just interference like white noise but a pattern of interference, there must be some rule limiting which past states were being accessed, something that let in only a finite number. It had been Lindsay who’d said that perhaps this was only about time and not about space, that perhaps one had to be relatively near the minds doing the interfering, and thus, perhaps, the range was limited by where the earth was in its orbit.