“I am Karel Slade, and I’m not going to tell you anything about the SHG because I don’t know anything.”
“I know it’s hard to grasp. I know it’s just too much. But you’re not Karel Slade. It’s just that you have no other memories except for the ones that were copied from Karel Slade’s brain.”
“You’re a copy,” said Mr Occam bluntly. “Get used to it. A couple of hours ago we fished you out of the tank and dried you down with a towel. Two hours earlier you were a lump of meat. Two hours before that you were just soup.”
“Perhaps it would help to clarify things if we gave you another name,” said Mr Thomas. “Let’s call you… I don’t know… let’s call you Heinz.”
Mr Occam seemed to find this amusing.
“You always call them Heinz,” he complained. “You always call them Heinz or Campbell.”
“Not always,” protested Mr Thomas. “I sometimes call them Baxter.”
There was a TV set in the corner of the room. He strolled over to it and switched it on.
“Something I’d like to show you Heinz. We have one of our sleuths at the restaurant where Karel and his wife are dining at the moment. The Red Scallop. Only just opened this week, I understand…”
Karel – or Heinz – could see them on the screen: Caroline, John, Sue round the restaurant table… and Karel Slade, large and voluble, teasing his future brother-in-law about something or other while the women laughed.
“This is a fake,” he said, “you’ve done this with computer graphics.”
“What, since yesterday? It was only yesterday you phoned Caroline and suggested this restaurant, remember? Previously you had a table booked at the Beijing Emperor.”
“Somehow you’ve done it since yesterday.”
“Dear God, Heinz, we’re good but we’re not that good.”
“I’m not called Heinz, I’m Karel Slade. And that isn’t a live transmission. It’s a fake.”
“Okay, let’s test it,” said Mr Thomas. “What’s your cell phone number?”
Karel told him. Mr Thomas punched the number into his own phone and paused with his finger on the ‘call’ button.
On the screen John was replying to Karel’s banter. Caroline and Sue were watching Karel to see how he would react. They were smiling in anticipation. Karel could be a very funny man. They were looking forward to a laugh. Caroline’s hand was resting affectionately on his arm.
“Now you tell me when to push the button,” said Mr Thomas. “You choose the moment.”
In the restaurant Karel was acting the outraged innocent in response to whatever John had jokingly accused him of. They were all laughing now. The waiter had just arrived with the starters.
“Now,” said Karel-in-the-throne.
Mr Thomas pushed the button.
Karel-on-the-TV reacted at once. The smile faded to an irritated ‘What now?’ expression as he felt his jacket pockets for the ringing phone. When Mr Thomas hung up, Karel-on-the-TV examined his phone to see who the call had come from, shrugged, replaced it in his pocket and, muttering something to Caroline in passing, turned his attention first back to the others and then to the generous plate of seafood in front of him.
Karel-in-the-throne shrugged, as far as a man can shrug when his arms are shackled.
“You could do all that with computers. You could easily do all that.”
Mr Thomas smiled.
“Okay, demonstration number two coming up.”
He took out of his pocket a device like a TV remote controller and pointed it at Karel’s throne, which rose about an inch as small wheels emerged from the bottom of each leg. Mr Thomas and Mr Occam got up from their own seats. Then, with Mr Thomas leading the way, Mr Occam pushed Karel back through into the room where he had woken up, as if he was some elderly invalid in a wheelchair.
It seemed incredible to Karel now that he hadn’t realised at once when he woke up that the alleged hotel room was simply a crude stage set. The walls were plywood panels, in some places not even properly screwed back onto the frame. There was a blank white screen outside the window where there was supposed to be a view of the city. But you see what you expect to see.
Only the sense of smell, it seemed, was not so easy to fool. All that had troubled him on waking had been that plasticky, slightly disinfectant smell.
However it wasn’t the room that Messrs Occam and Thomas wanted to show him. Using his remote, Mr Thomas unlocked the bathroom door and they passed through. Of course there was no bathroom. In fact what lay beyond wasn’t so much a room at all as a hangar or a factory floor. Its dull metallic walls rose to the height of two ordinary rooms and it was the length and width of a soccer pitch. Down the centre of it was a row of five large ovoid objects lying lengthways, each about three metres long and two metres high. They were complex structures, made predominantly of metal. A thick mass of cables – red, green, black, blue, yellow, multi-coloured – fed into plugs across their surface and trailed back across the floor to a bank of monitors against the wall. There was an ozone smell and a soft electrical humming.
“In case you’re wondering, Heinz,” said Mr Thomas. “These giant Easter eggs are Field Inducers.”
They approached the nearest inducer and Mr Thomas pressed a button on its surface to make a segment of the egg slide upwards to create an opening. Inside, beautifully illuminated by lights both above and within it, was a bath of clear liquid. It smelt of iron, like blood. Karel could feel the warmth of it in his face.
“So you’re trying to say you grew me in there?”
“You don’t grow things in a Field Inducer,” said Mr Thomas. “You assemble them. Field induction isn’t a biological process. It’s a physical one. Think of making a recording of a sound. You don’t try and reproduce the same conditions that led up to the sound being produced in the first place, do you? You by-pass all that. You construct a device that can copy the sound waves themselves.”
“But yeah,” said Mr Occam. “That’s what we fished you out of. When you’d got a face, that is, when you’d got past the stage of just being a big clot of blood. We fished you out, put you on the recovery table and got you going with a jolt of current. Then we gave you a shot to put you to sleep for a bit and took you through to the bed.”
Mr Thomas nodded.
“So what we’re saying, Heinz, is that this is the soup can you came out of.”
Karel couldn’t help remembering his dream of drowning and of hands holding him down, but he managed a derisive snort.
“It’s all a film set,” he said. “Like the hotel room.”
All of this was actually good, he tried to tell himself. It was good because it was taking up time. The longer he could keep Mr Thomas and Mr Occam busy with trying to prove he was a copy, the nearer he’d get to his twenty-four hour deadline before having to face the challenge of physical pain.
“Hang on, Heinz, hang on,” laughed Mr Thomas, “we haven’t finished yet.”
Mr Occam pushed him forward to the second Field Inducer. Once again Mr Thomas touched a button. Once again a warm metallic smell wafted out as the device opened up…
Then Karel gasped. Suspended in the fluid, neither floating nor sinking, was a flayed human corpse.
“Dear God,” he whispered. “What have you done?”