The Gone-Away World (20 page)

“I'm not crazy,” he says more directly. “I just deal with physics which is so complex that it basically sounds—outside of peer-reviewed journals—like nonsense. Like contracts and tax law.” He looks at everyone again, and whatever he sees must be more to his liking.

“You are all familiar with geeks as a genus,” he continues, “but what you need to get your heads round is that I am such a massive geek, such a totally terrifying concentration of nerdhood, that I have actually cracked the code for human social behaviour using mathematics. I am able to interact with people on what appears to be a casual non-scientific footing, and even get laid like a regular guy, because I made an intense study of behavioural and statistical ethnographics, and I am constantly running a series of predictive and quantitative calculations in my head, which provides me with acceptable human responses within the normative band and counterfeits qualitative judgement so well the difference is within the margin of error. On the most primitive level, for example, I know from the precise number of nods you are making and the muscles in your neck and face whether you are actually paying attention or whether you have decided that this part of the induction is not relevant to you personally and started thinking about something else. I know that I have a series of options regarding those of you currently thinking about last night's sexual adventures or the football game this evening, and that these include a) hoping you will get smart and pay attention, b) addressing the issue directly on an individual or group basis by pointing out that I am currently your only chance of a decent rating and hence a job at the end of all this, but more immediately of your physical survival should we go to war, c) mentioning the whole thing in passing as an organic outgrowth of my opening remarks, on the understanding that you are smart enough to take a hint and d) SHOUTING AT YOU, which I gather is the preferred military solution. You will note that I have in fact pursued all these options in a hierarchical progression, and I confess this is because the mathematics of that particular solution were especially aesthetically promising. I mention this not because it is important that you should know it, but because it is the only example of the scale of my IQ advantage over you that you actually may understand. Questions?”

There are no questions. Professor Derek has a very loud voice and his bearing (presumably chosen from a number of distinct ways of presenting himself to us) does not invite attempts at humour or suggest that he is particularly fond of the funnies. Derek is ageless and calm and it seems he may not strictly belong to the same species as the rest of us. It would be better if he were dumpy or badly groomed, but—no doubt resulting from a string of life/quality/work output formulae—he is rugged, in reasonable shape and has neat, ordinary hair. He looks like the kind of Rhodes scholar who could appear on the cover of both
GQ
and
Forbes.
Derek shoots me a glance which says that this is him going with option a) for the moment. I hasten to take notes in a bold, round hand which can be read upside down, but my writing deteriorates as I actually start paying attention.

“Did you know,” says Professor Derek, “that we live in a narrow corridor of space? That if the Earth occupied an orbit only a little different from the one it does, we would not exist at all?”

I did know this, but Professor Derek was speaking rhetorically, or wants to be sure that everyone else knows too, because he goes on to explain. Essentially, what he says is that the Earth is a kind of estate agent's wet dream of happy location. It is close enough to the Sun to draw energy from it to power biochemical reactions such as photosynthesis, without being so close that it catches fire and explodes. At the same time, it is not so far out that the atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground, which is physically entirely possible, and a very nasty idea indeed, not least because it reminds everyone in the room of the middle chamber of Project Albumen, and the man called Tyler whose job is to go in there and scrape careless persons off the walls before they thaw out and go all slushy.

The world we inhabit is balanced between the Sun and the inky gulf of space. If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

“Excellent. Then here,” says Professor Derek, “is the hard part,” and we lean forward and engage the last bits of brainpower we have left over and prepare for a real poser.

Professor Derek turns, and pulls down from the ceiling of the room a white projection screen. It is one of the modern perforated kind, not the old ones which doubled as flypaper, and the projector is sleek and small and expensive. It is therefore something of a let-down when the image projected on the screen is a red circle and a blue circle with a purple bit where they overlap.

“Red and blue,” says Professor Derek, “on top of one another, producing purple. Yes?”

The next image is in fact two: on the left is a series of blobs and wiggles. On the right is a collection of blibs and woggles. Neither image is in any way a picture of anything. We wait for Professor Derek to say that this is a mistake, that these are finger paintings by his infant daughter. He does not. He presses a button, and the images slide together and become quite obviously a silhouette of a cowboy on a piebald horse.

“The world we see is a composite. It is an alloy. It is,” says Professor Derek, in case anyone has not grasped at this point that our world is one thing made of several things, “one thing made of several things. Okay?”

It is a little annoying to be treated as a moron by this guy, but on the other hand he probably has difficulty disintguishing between people who are actually very stupid and people who are just significantly less intelligent than he is.

“It is not just
balanced between
opposing forces. It
is the overlap
of these forces. These things—what you might call elements or essences, if you were of a historical turn of mind—are on the one hand what we refer to as
matter
or
energy
depending on what shape it's in and how it is behaving at the time, and on the other
information.
Matter (or energy) exists. Information tells matter (or energy) how to behave and what to do. It
does
matter—”

Professor Derek pauses for a moment. “May I assume,” he says, “that from this point on when I say ‘matter' you will understand that I also mean energy?” We nod.

“Very well. Information, then,
does
matter—in the sense that it is the organising principle without which matter simply cannot exist. Without matter, there is no universe and there's no place to do anything. Without information, matter withers away. Vanishes. And gradually, even the memory fades. It won't dissipate entirely, of course. But it becomes . . . slippery.”

Professor Derek seems to find that idea poetic. The guy on my left finds it “awesome.” He is right, but I don't think he knows it. Information is what gives shape and stability to the universe. Remove it, and you get a perfect circle of absence, a space where there's nothing, because the matter (and energy) there doesn't know how to behave any more and (I cannot help but imagine it sulking) simply ceases to exist. Like the little toy soldiers in the laboratory downstairs.

Professor Derek and his team, by dint of his enormous intellect and considerable innovative powers and their collective technological know-how, have created a sort of Holy Grail of bombs. Or, at least, they have created the science necessary to create the bomb. The engineering, as ever, is playing catch-up—which is why they annihilated the side of the tank as well as the toy soldiers and why General George spent yesterday afternoon in his office wearing a uniform jacket and a pair of fluffy slippers. But any time soon they will be able to produce a controlled editing of the world within a discrete area, stripping out the information and leaving nothing behind—not even regret. They will have made the perfect weapon.

They will be able to make the enemy Go Away.

M
Y TRAINING
turns out to be split between sessions with Professor Derek dealing with the necessary basic understanding of his theory (field radius, energy interactions, overlap issues, delivery systems) and learning how to be a military officer. The latter implies learning in the first place the rudiments of how to be a “fighting man”—military history being full of people who thought it did not, and these people quite often being associated with heroic, bloody idiocy and words like “rout” and “last stand.” “Fighting man” rather than “soldier,” because the term “soldier” is contentious. Several of our instructors are marines, who use “soldier” only to convey very deep contempt. A few others are technically airmen, in that they are high altitude low opening jumpers for the Special Air Commandos, and these regard the marines and the army with equal disdain because they don't include as part of their routine instruction any information about breathing in low-oxygen environments or what to do if your parachute doesn't open (I would have assumed there wasn't a great deal to do except pray for a subsequent failure of local gravity, but apparently there is a method for unscrambling a parachute which can actually keep you alive in 43 per cent of cases, which has to be better than the odds of not bothering to try).

These gentlemen and ladies take us out for extremely long runs and over assault courses, which are of course gruelling and cold and miserable. The chief misery is actually boredom. Wobbling legs and ravaged muscles become numb, even pain becomes commonplace, but the business of running miles and miles each day on the same track with the same bargain-basement insults flying at you is ghastly because it is dull like nothing else you have experienced. The instructors are probably bored too, and they channel that into clichéd aggression and obligatory howls of fury. And when we are bored into some kind of military shape, able to run in full pack without sinking to our knees, we are handed over to Ronnie Cheung, who regards everyone in the world apart from Ronnie Cheung as a total fucking idiot.

Ronnie Cheung grew up in Hong Kong when it was still part of Cubritannia, or rather when it was still leased by the United Kingdom from the People's Republic of China. He is to train us in all manner of combat. He is small and thickset and scowls at almost everything. He begins our lessons not with press-ups or running, but with a lecture in the same room which Professor Derek used to acquaint us with his genius. He leans on the lectern, doesn't like it and shoves it out of the way. He sits down on the edge of the plinth, so that we have to crane to look at him. Looking at Ronnie Cheung is never going to be a favoured pastime with anyone. He is not easy on the eye. He has broad shoulders and big, ugly knuckles and a wide, bald head. He cultivates a sneer. He has weighed us in the balance, and he is already appalled by the quality of the merchandise.

“What,” Ronnie Cheung demands, “is the single most dangerous weapon used by most people in the course of a lifetime?”

“A gun,” suggests someone immediately, and Ronnie Cheung makes a farting noise between his lips.

“A kitchen knife,” someone else says. Ronnie Cheung shakes his head. By the absence of faux flatulence, we deduce that this is, although wrong, at least wrong in a good way. Domestic objects, then. Rolling pins? Cleavers? Axes? No, no, no. Someone gets lateral.

“The human body!”

Ronnie Cheung holds up his hand: stop.

“My body,” Ronnie Cheung says, “is a lethal weapon. Yours is a sack in which you keep your vital organs.” He flaps his hand. “You're right—the body has the potential to be very dangerous,” and when this response elicits a triumphant smile from his interlocutor, he adds, “which is not to say I didn't notice that that was a suck-arse answer and that you are a suck-arse.”

Ronnie waits. When it emerges that he has defeated us, he answers his own question.

“The automobile,” says Ronnie. “A bludgeon consisting of several thousand kilos of metal travelling at speeds in excess of thirty miles per hour. Dangerous in unskilled hands, which is most of them, but bloody lethal if you know a bit about how to use it.”

So, somewhat to our amazement, the first thing we learn is Automotive Tactical Engagement in Theory and Practice, suited to civil and urban warfare environments. It is an amazing amount of fun. We learn where you hit another car to make it spin out. We learn where to avoid pranging your own car in the course of an auto duel. We learn how to kill a car with sticks, chains, petrol, salt, guns and another car. We get jolted around and occasionally set on fire in our training suits, and we have a ball despite the injuries. Car combat is like sparring: it's about speed, distance and timing. And knowing what you have to hit to knock the other guy down. I am moderately bad at it, in a fun kind of way, and there are plenty of other people who are worse, including Richard P. Purvis and a woman by the name of Kitty who claims to have driven stick since she was nine. We demolish a small fleet of compacts and saloons, and two sixteen-seaters just for variety. It takes three days.

“Right,” says Ronnie Cheung, when the last door handle falls to the dust and Riley Tench clambers victorious from a wrecked Nissan, “mêlée.” Because most of the point of this, really, has been to get us used to getting thrown around and messed up and not caring about it. So we move on to hand-to-hand, which is more personal and more naked, because there isn't a three-foot crumple zone between you and the enemy. This is the bit where it's important that the project has a good dentist. It does, although I am fortunate enough not to need her services more than once before I get back into the habit of moving my head out of the way before doing anything else.

And thus life goes on for a while. I train, I learn and I live in a little green room at the bottom of George Copsen and Professor Derek's anthill. Ronnie Cheung lives on the level above, which is exactly the same, chair for chair, but he has two rooms side by side which he has kicked through into one. He does not invite us into it, but once in a while we are required to meet him at his door so that we can run somewhere or tackle the assault course under fire. Every so often I get a 48-Leave (mostly because it's my turn, and occasionally because I am on the winning team in one of Ronnie Cheung's bizarre exercises, such as the one where you are locked in a room with a selection of foodstuffs and required to make a weapon—the point of this is that a) a weapon doesn't have to be something you hit someone with, it can be something they slip on or which gets in their eyes and hurts, b) weapons are everywhere and c) sometimes weapons are not everywhere, or an improvised weapon is genuinely more trouble than it's worth, and you should just belt the other guy as hard as you possibly can in the head), and when this happens I go and see Gonzo's parents in Cricklewood Cove. Sometimes I bang on my own front door, or let myself into my parents' home with the hidden key. Sometimes there is a note for me or a meal in the fridge, or a brace of old airline tickets in the waste bin in the hall. Mostly, I seek Ma Lubitsch's kitchen and the buzzing of the bees outside. I talk to her and to Old Man Lubitsch about life, and things, and trivia, and I wander around the Cove hoping to meet Elisabeth by accident. Sometimes I stand on the bluff where we scattered Master Wu's ashes and drink tea from a Thermos flask. Once, I think I see her climbing up towards me, but she never arrives.