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I suppose that I could claim that I had always suspected that the world was a cheap and shoddy sham, a
bad cover for something deeper and weirder and infinitely more strange, and that, in some way, I already
knew the truth. But I think that's just how the world has always been. And even now that I know the truth,
as you will, my love, if you're reading this, the world still seems cheap and shoddy. Different world,
different shoddy, but that's how it feels.
They say,
here's the truth
, and I say,
is that all there is?
And they say,
kind of. Pretty much. As far as we
know.
So. It was 1977, and the nearest I had come to computers was I'd recently bought a big, expensive
calculator, and then I'd lost the manual that came with it, so I didn't know what it did any more. I'd add,
subtract, multiply and divide, and was grateful I had no need to cos, sine or find tangents or graph
functions or whatever else the gizmo did, because, having been turned down by the RAF, I was working
as a bookkeeper for a small discount carpet warehouse in Edgware, in North London, near the top of the
Northern Line, and I was sitting at the table at the back of the warehouse that served me as a desk when
the world began to melt and drip away.
Honest. It was like the walls and the ceiling and the rolls of carpet and the News of the World Topless
Calendar were all made of wax, and they started to ooze and run, to flow together and to drip. I could
see the houses and the sky and the clouds and the road behind them, and then
that
dripped and flowed
away, and behind that was blackness.
I was standing in the puddle of the world, a weird, brightly coloured thing that oozed and brimmed and
didn't cover the tops of my brown leather shoes (I have feet like shoeboxes. Boots have to be specially
made for me. Costs me a fortune). The puddle cast a weird light upwards.
In fiction, I think I would have refused to believe it was happening, wonder if I'd been drugged or if I was
dreaming. In reality, hell, it had happened, and I stared up into the darkness, and then, when nothing
happened, I began to walk, splashing through the liquid world, calling out, seeing if anyone was there.
Something flickered in front of me.
"Hey," said a voice. The accent was American, although the intonation was odd.
"Hello," I said.
The flickering continued for a few moments, and then resolved itself into a smartly-dressed man in thick
horn-rimmed spectacles.
"You're a pretty big guy," he said. "You know that?"
Of course I knew that. I was 19 years old and I was close to seven feet tall. I have fingers like bananas. I
scare children. I'm unlikely to see my 40th birthday: people like me die young.
"What's going on?" I asked. "Do you know?"
"Enemy missile took out a central processing unit," he said. "Two hundred thousand people, hooked up
in parallel, blown to dead meat. We've got a mirror going of course, and we'll have it all up and running
again in no time flat. You're just free-floating here for a couple of nanoseconds, while we get London
processing again."
"Are you God?" I asked. Nothing he had said had made any sense to me.
"Yes. No. Not really," he said. "Not as you mean it, anyway."
And then the world lurched and I found myself coming to work
again that morning, poured myself a cup of tea, had the longest,
strangest bout of
deja vu
I've ever had. Twenty minutes, where I
knew everything that anyone was going to do or say. And then it
went, and time passed properly once more, every second
following every other second just like they're meant to.
And the hours passed, and the days, and the years.
I lost my job in the carpet company, and got a new one
bookkeeping for a company selling business machines, and I got
married to a girl called Sandra I met at the swimming baths and
we had a couple of kids, both normal sized, and I thought I had
the sort of marriage that could survive anything, but I hadn't, so
she went away and she took the kiddies with her. I was in my late
20s, and it was 1986, and I got a job on Tottenham Court Road
selling computers, and I turned out to be good at it.
I liked computers.
I liked the way they worked. It was an exciting time. I remember
our first shipment of ATs, some of them with 40 megabyte hard
drives... Well, I was impressed easily back then.
I still lived in Edgware, commuted to work on the Northern Line. I
was on the tube one evening, going home - we'd just gone
through Euston and half the passengers had got off -- looking at
the other people in the carriage over the top of the
Evening
Standard
and wondering who they were - who they really were,
inside - the thin, black girl writing earnestly in her notebook, the
little old lady with the green velvet hat on, the girl with the dog, the
bearded man with the turban...
And then the tube stopped, in the tunnel.
That was what I thought happened, anyway: I thought the tube
had stopped. Everything went very quiet.
And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got
off.
And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got
off. And I was looking at the other passengers and wondering who
they really were inside when the train stopped in the tunnel. And
everything went very quiet.
And then everything lurched so hard I thought we'd been hit by another train.
And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off, and then the train stopped in the
tunnel, and then everything went -
(
Normal service will be resumed as possible
, whispered a voice in the back of my head.)
And this time as the train slowed and began to approach Euston I wondered if I was going crazy: I felt
like I was jerking back and forth on a video loop. I knew it was happening, but there was nothing I could
do to change anything, nothing I could do to break out of it.
The black girl, sitting next to me, passed me a note. ARE WE DEAD? it said.
I shrugged. I didn't know. It seemed as good an explanation as any.
And then everything faded to white.
There was no ground beneath my feet, nothing above me, no sense of distance, no sense of time. I was
in a white place. And I was not alone.
The man wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles, and a suit that looked like it might have been Armani. "You
again?" he said. "The big guy. I just spoke to you."
"I don't think so," I said.
"Half an hour ago. When the missiles hit."
"Back in the carpet factory? That was years ago."
"About thirty-seven minutes back. We've been running in an accelerated mode since then, trying to patch
and cover, while we've been processing potential solutions."
"Who sent the missiles?" I asked. "The U.S.S.R.? The Iranians?"
"Aliens," he said.
"You're kidding?"
"Not as far as we can tell. We've been sending out seed-probes for a
couple of hundred years now. Looks like something has followed one back.
We learned about it when the first missiles landed. It's taken us a good
twenty minutes to get a retaliatory plan up and running. That's why we've
been processing in overdrive. Did it seem like the last decade went pretty
fast?"
"Yeah. I suppose."
"That's why. We ran it through pretty fast, trying to maintain a common
reality while processing."
"So what are you going to do?"
"We're going to counter-attack. We're going to take them out. It's going to
take a while: we don't have the machinery right now. We have to build it."
The white was fading now, fading into dark pinks and dull reds. I opened
my eyes. For the first time.
So. Sharp the world and tangled-tubed and strange and dark and
somewhere beyond belief. It made no sense. Nothing made sense. It was
real, and it was a nightmare. It lasted for thirty seconds, and each cold
second felt like a tiny forever.
And then we went through Euston, and half the passengers got off...
I started talking to the black girl with the notebook. Her name was Susan.
Several weeks later she moved in with me.
Time rumbled and rolled. I suppose I was becoming sensitive to it. Maybe I knew what I was looking for -
knew there
was
something to look for, even if I didn't know what it was.
I made the mistake of telling Susan some of what I believed one night - about how none of this was real.
About how we were really just hanging there, plugged and wired, central processing units or just cheap
memory chips for some computer the size of the world, being fed a consensual hallucination to keep us
happy, to allow us to communicate and dream using the tiny fraction of our brains that they weren't using
to crunch numbers and store information.
"We're memory," I told her. "That's what we are. Memory."
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