Logic Beach- Part I Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Inside,” he grumbled.

  He turned and led her in. She bent to peer between his ass and his torso. Only air.

  The corridor twisted and they came on a living room with a dream fountain still turned on. It spat out plumes of gold and purple, shapes occasionally forming, then washing back into chaos: frogs, passenger planes, planets.

  The old man lit another cigarette and stared into the device and smoked.

  “Dream fountains will melt your mind, you know,” Argie said softly.

  “Mine to melt. The selfsense packet, was it genuine?”

  “Yes. Can we turn that thing off?”

  The man shot her a dead glance. “No.” More silence followed. She peered through his torso again. “How did you find me?” he said.

  “A rumour.”

  “Look for the man with air for a belly,” he croaked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Bastards, they only spread it around to annoy me. Send the world and his fucking wife down here at all hours of the day.”

  The dream fountain took on a red hue. A dragon formed for a moment, roared fire, then evaporated. The silence held out. The old man didn’t seem to mind.

  Argie had heard of these machines, dream fountains - reading one's selfsense and spitting out some distorted representation. As the user watched the pictures, the fountain read the perception of itself being watched and distorted that too, the feedback loop intensifying. The result was highly addictive: a dream in broad daylight.

  “I’m Argie.”

  “I know.”

  “And you?”

  “What have you brought with you?”

  “What?”

  “Payment. For the job. You came looking for a guide, yes?” Argie stayed silent. “Don’t play stupid. No one seeks me out for a chat. You tell me where you want to go. If I’m willing to take you, there better damn well be payment for it.”

  “Turn the dream fountain off and we’ll talk.”

  “If the device offends you, feel free to leave,” the old man snapped. A cool wind blew through the house. The fountain turned a scarlet red. Eddies pooled and warped. The figure of a little girl appeared within a whirlpool.

  “Who’s that?” Argie said.

  “No idea,” The Navigator muttered. “Those are your thoughts, not mine.”

  All quiet for a time, then Argie said, “I’ll get you home.”

  The old man turned on her and finished the last quarter of the cigarette in a single drag. “Think you’re the first to try and fool me with that?”

  Argie gifted him another selfsense packet: a six-dimensional proof of her tier privileges. The dream fountain faded to blue and powered off. The old man waved a hand and a sofa pressed into Argie and sat her down. He took his own sofa and lit another cigarette. “Start explaining. Now.”

  “It's complicated. I have tier privileges, I don't know why. They work. I mean, I haven't used them, but I asked an Indigo to examine them once and he said they're genuine. Anywhere I want to go I can go, even the Glass Castle in theory.”

  The old man stared, perhaps checking the packet again. “You don't know why they work?”

  Argie shrugged. “You know how it is.”

  The old man shot a look back suggesting he did not. Then in a gruff voice he said, “Tell me how you’ll do it.”

  “I need passage up, to-”

  “No,” he barked. “Tell me how you’ll do it first. I’ve had enough of daft lies. Hell, they promise me everything and deliver nothing. Tell how you’ll do it or you can just get out.”

  “My signature is valid all the way up to Indigo tier, I told you. They’ll let me and a guest in. I'll take you.”

  “Then why don’t you just go by yourself? Why bother coming here?”

  “I could do with someone who knows the way.”

  “Hm.” He regarded her through the smoke. “I normally take payment in advance.”

  “Not today. When we get to Lemuria you can do me in if I’m lying.”

  “Oh,” the old man purred. “I’ll make hell worse than that.”

  The dream fountain hummed gently to itself, inactive. Now the room was in a half-light murk and a fat quiet settled over the two of them.

  The old man snapped his fingers. A mechanical spider entered bearing two glasses of purple liquid. He took one. The spider scuttled over to Argie. “I like keeping a clear head,” she said.

  “If you can’t provide a downpayment then we’ll at least drink to it.”

  Reluctantly she took the glass, sipped. Timepass tea.

  “I’ll tell you what makes me cautious, shall I?” the old man said. Argie shrugged again. Figures crawled past the window, slowing already. The tea was working. “A strange woman shows up at my house with stolen tier privileges.”

  “I never said they were -”

  “She demands I take her up into the high tiers. And she expects me to put my life in danger for the sake of some vague promise of returning me to my homelands, says I can kill her should the arrangement not go as planned. Meanwhile Indigos have been coming down here for the last thousand cycles asking after me, sniffing about. Gets one cautious. Makes one careful.”

  “It'll be an easy journey, I promise. You saw the selfsense packet. The memories are real.”

  “Talk is cheap. Memories cheaper still.” The old man finished his tea and lit another cigarette. “You could've faked it. Give me a look around your selfsense.”

  “That already happened once today against my will. I don’t feel like doing it again.”

  “Then the deal’s off.”

  “Did you even listen to what I said? I’ll get you out of exile. Fine, stay here another billion cycles. No one will offer you this again.”

  “I’ve been offered better than that plenty of times before. It’s never more than a bluff.”

  Argie finished her tea. This was why the old man had given the drink to her, she realised now. He would never take her on her word, or even on apparent selfsense packets. This was how they did it, the professionals, or so she'd heard: slow time to such a standstill that one could go wandering in another's memories, experience them in real-time if so desired – and still be home in time for dinner.

  The denizens beyond the window were almost completely still now. The air appeared solid, dust motes fixed like pocks in space. To anyone looking in, the two of them would appear little more than wild blurs, such was the time difference.

  Argie sighed. “Go on then, before I change my mind.”

  The old man stared, amazed. “Really?”

  “What other choice is there? You won't trust me otherwise, will you?”

  “No.” He didn’t hesitate, stubbing the cigarette out and waddling over. “I shan’t peek at anything I shouldn't.”

  “Just get it over with.”

  He nodded.

  The experience was not unlike the hag with her fingers, only the old man did not touch her and this time a consent request came first. Argie accepted. The old man entered her selfsense.

  He paused uncertainly like a tourist, then took careful steps inside. She felt him peering at her memories of the day already, of the hag, of the little boy, of her passage through the inner city, all the way from her home burrow.

  And then he reached back through time, through her time. Argie flinched.

  “Does it hurt?” he said.

  “Go on.”

  He walked leisurely back through cycles, ten, twenty, thirty, and stopped where she knew he would. At the birth of her daughter, the scene she had thrown through the door at him.

  He watched the memory from afar, almost as a supervising father.

  Argie was younger, wearing different skin, a different face. She had come to Nufeeja. The place was abandoned. Who has children now after all?

  “I am here as agreed,” she yelled out.

  Nufeeja boomed back, “You are here as agreed.”

  The machine itself was almost consciou
s, straddling the fine line between creative and sentient. Some Indigo must have spent cycles engineering it so.

  “What kind of infant do you wish to bear?” the machine asked.

  “Random permutations,” Argie said without pausing. She had thought this over many times. “Take facets from my selfsense and inject them without design. Use discretion. Make her fairly passive though please.”

  “Her?” Nufeeja said.

  “Yes. She’s to be female.”

  The machine said nothing at this. It was unusual enough that Argie had committed to a gender herself, but to bear a gendered infant?

  “Has the process begun?” Argie called out.

  “It has. Come back in a quarter cycle.”

  “I’d rather stay.”

  “As you like.”

  A rumbling sounded from beneath the ground. Great neon spheres shot up and whirled about, zipping between the clouds. The sky tinted a softer blue. This was nothing more than a spectacle of course; the process could just as well be done silently and behind the scenes. Still, Argie appreciated the effort on the designer's part.

  Most denizens had told her not to come to Nufeeja. On those rare occasions when the process actually worked, the infants turned deranged soon enough. On the other occasions they didn’t live long anyway: did themselves in.

  The spheres were joined by others, totalling in the hundreds now. They span at a dizzying speed, blurring into a single ring of brilliant white, rivalling the suns.

  Argie thought of some distant memory of a trinket or spinning toy, though couldn’t place the thing in time.

  Then the machine said, “The procedure is complete.”

  The spheres stopped suddenly, hung in the air and amassed into a single ovoid and descended to the ground before Argie. The ovoid disintegrated slowly. Inside, Argie saw, was a selfsense without physical form. The mind was energetic and confused, twisting in five dimensions, then two, then eight, trying to find its footing.

  “It’s all right,” the birthing machine said. “Go on.”

  Argie stepped closer and extended her selfsense towards the new mind. “Hello,” she said softly.

  The new mind paused in its flurry, regarded her. Then finally in a voice that was not a voice it said, “Hello.”

  “I am your mother,” Argie whispered.

  “I am your mother,” the mind echoed.

  “Give it time,” Nufeeja said. “This one was an especially complicated recipe. She’ll settle down shortly if she's going to at all.”

  Argie assigned herself with the tag Mother. She gifted the new mind an Infant tag. It was accepted.

  “Go on,” Argie said. “You can wear it if you like. Everyone will know who you are that way.”

  The mind twisted wildly again and shot at Argie, lapped the limits of Nufeeja, and settled back where it had started.

  “I am your mother,” Argie said again.

  The infant seemed to be thinking about this. Then it said, “I am your mother.”

  Argie let out a little sigh. “Was there a problem with the procedure?” she called out.

  “None,” Nufeeja replied. “She doesn't yet know her voice from her thoughts. Too many variables. Sentience only emerges in rare cases. In most attempts, it does not. It's likely the process was a failure. Apologies.”

  “Mmm,” Argie mumbled. She forged a transport link to her home burrow and the request was granted. A portal appeared. She held out a hand to the wild selfsense ahead of her.

  “I’ll take you home,” she said. The selfsense looked the hand over, then looked Argie over and said nothing. “Take my hand. That way we can both travel together.”

  “Travel together,” the infant repeated.

  Argie reached into the new mind gently, browsed. The interior was a mad storm, mental components flying all about, no linkages or associations. The thing would never cohere. She would never have a daughter.

  The birthing machine was old and stupid, addled like the rest of the almost-sentient devices. Would shutting the infant’s mind down amount to murder? It wasn’t aware of itself, it never would be. No one could begrudge her such a mercy.

  She pulled back, a defensive response lest she get stuck inside this strange selfsense. She felt herself recede emotionally too, imagining the cycles ahead of remembering this failure. She would not tell the other denizens. She would not give them the satisfaction.

  The birthing machine watched silently.

  Argie went to initiate the eradicate command. She took a last look at the new mind.

  “I am your mother,” she said, barely louder than a whisper.

  The selfsense listened and did not respond. Argie didn't try to suppress the regret. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could she have been so stupid? All the accusations were correct: arrogant, romantic, misguided. She would return to the Ape Cellar alone and stay alone.

  Then, without warning, a face formed in Local Space, projecting out of the new selfsense: pale, green-eyed, that of a little girl. The pupils focused on Argie’s face. The cheeks rose and fell. The mouth opened and closed. The face settled, smiled.

  “I am your mother,” Argie said again.

  The reply was unsteady, cycling between tones, but audible nonetheless. “And I am your infant.”

  3.

  28/10/2021

  P,

  11 pairs of shoes.

  40 pairs of socks, assorted colours.

  211 books, mostly fiction.

  7 lipsticks.

  2 laptops, both in working order.

  4 digital storage sticks.

  2784 MP3 tracks.

  1 unopened bottle of champagne from your thirty-third birthday.

  2 sex toys.

  3 hairbrushes.

  9 dresses.

  4 pairs of trousers.

  2 pairs of shorts.

  16 t-shirts.

  1 unopened bottle of sexual lubricant.

  3 jumpers.

  7 coats, various lengths.

  2 love letters from ex-boyfriends.

  1 Leonard Cohen CD album signed by Leonard Cohen himself.

  Assorted jewellery: earrings, necklaces, bangles.

  1 urn containing your sister’s (Svetomira Alexandrova) ashes.

  And 1 packet of Marlboro Fine Touch cigarettes and a lighter, hidden at the top of the wardrobe.

  This is your skeleton. Everything you own in our house. I’ve stacked it all in the study, washed the clothes, dusted off the books. I just couldn’t stand to look at it all anymore.

  I explained the entire situation to the cat. She listened intently and without comment.

  While I was tidying up I found some of your old love letters and read them. Sorry about that. You know how good my Bulgarian is, but Google Translate helped. You should’ve hidden them better. Glad I didn’t meet your ex-boyfriends though. They sound like right dicks.

  Emma came over this evening. I think she wanted to make sure I was all right but she just ended up crying and I gave her a cup of tea and some tissues. Then she got angry about how the police should be doing more. I said they’re trying their hardest. Maybe they are.

  Went into the museum yesterday. Everyone was super nice and we avoided the elephant in the room. John said I could take as much time as I needed and that they wouldn’t give my desk away. I found a little note in my desk drawer you’d left in my lunchbox a few months ago. “If the bastards get you down just remember that you’re still my favourite human.” My eyes got a bit leaky.

  That was one of your few open acts of affection. I really hope you don’t mind me saying so. It’s going to get worse.

  I missed you for the first few weeks. Now I feel a bit more objective about it all. I can see the good and the bad. There were things about you that really, really pissed me off. You made me angrier than anyone I’ve ever met, especially with your godawful Eastern European coldness. I thought Brits were bad. You do this thing when you’re angry, attacking anything I say, even if it’s an apology, even when I shou
ldn’t be the one apologising. Or you just disappear off with a friend without telling me where you’re going. Or go to bed without saying goodnight. Do you know how that shit feels?

  And what then? The sky clears and you come back to yourself and we joke a bit or screw and you’re fine and not a damn thing is explained. Everyone thinks you’re so straightforward and rose-coloured spectacles, even Emma. They don’t know all your bullshit like I do. They haven’t spent a day trying to work out if you’re fucking someone else, just because you were so annoyed about me not sticking up for you in an argument that you took off for a night to some hotel. I would never do that to you. I would never dream of doing that to you.

  How far we've come though, huh.

  You were twenty-five. I was twenty-eight. I'd flown to Sofia for a conference on Thracian burial rituals. I hated the city immediately. All the weird monuments and the smoky bars and the same buildings over and over again, hideous communist atrocities on the skyline in every direction. I went and got plastered at some Irish bar in the centre and the place was full of dickhead foreigners who couldn’t function in their own country so they’d come to Eastern Europe to try at being celebrities. They called last orders and I walked back to the hotel. There was an email waiting from my secretary at the museum back home. “Guess you made a friend,” it said. Attached was an online article from a small Bulgarian newspaper. The secretary had run it through a translator.

  “…and not to mention dumb eyes come over with their judging. In particular, new to the city, Benjamin Hare, British archaeologist. Why are under-qualified and foreign archaeologists coming over to dig up what is rightfully Bulgaria's? Why is the legacy of imperialism flirting even with archaeology now, with our history?”

  I got into bed, read it again, and looked up the author on social media – Alexander someone or other. Just as pretentious in pictures as in writing: endless photos of him at rallies, holding placards, looking thoughtfully at books. Blatantly affiliated with all the nostalgic communists still in the country at the time. Not old enough to remember the Berlin Wall coming down, evidently. What a lovely thing utopia is when you were too young to remember the horror that came with it.

  I sent him a direct message. “Hi. I’m the foreign pig come to ruin your country. Since Bulgaria prospered so wonderfully under the protection of Russia, I can see why you’d want to restart the communist project. What harm did it ever do to your people? Besides utter tyranny. Thanks for the mention online. We’ll have to meet up for a drink sometime, I’m sure it’d be just lovely. Good luck ever being taken seriously, Ben.”