The Actuality Read online

‘Mr Maplin,’ she says, ‘what do you want of me?’

  ‘It’s Timothy,’ he replies, in a mock-aggrieved tone, ‘and you came to me, remember?’ He smiles condescendingly. ‘I don’t want anything Evie, I’m just trying to help.’ She notes that he has started calling her Evie rather than Evelyn. She should perhaps prefer it but nevertheless would still choose to keep him at a distance if she can.

  ‘I’m grateful,’ she says begrudgingly, attempting to strike an apologetic note she doesn’t feel, adding defensively, ‘it was you who gave me your card. You invited me to make contact.’

  ‘Well, I wanted to help.’ Maplin blushes, his skin turning pimply.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, adding firmly, still determined to set ground rules, ‘You came in while I was resting. I’d locked the door.’

  ‘Oh no, that wasn’t me, that was Jackson. I told him to leave you alone but he can’t be kept out of anywhere. He probably just wanted to make sure you were okay.’

  ‘Jackson?’

  ‘My monkey – the animatronic.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, feeling suddenly foolish.

  Maplin folds the bread onto itself and looks up at her. ‘Evie, it’s no wonder you’re jumpy after what you’ve been through. I’ll have words with him. It’s been just the two of us for so long and he needs to learn some manners, at least around you. Things have totally changed with your arrival – it won’t happen again.’

  Evie is still disturbed by how she had managed to leave herself vulnerable despite her precautions, but, notwithstanding her distaste, Maplin seems harmless, at worst a bit weirdly starstruck. No harm has been done.

  Simon starts nagging away in the background, throwing up concerns but as usual offering no solutions, and she shuts him out. It is like slamming a door inside her head – something she was not able to do before.

  Besides, she will be moving on soon – once she has found out how to make it to Europe. Even if she does not find Evelyn’s father, Austria, with its tranquil lakes and mountains, promises to be a far kindlier place than England. One she could be happy in.

  Evie looks up, conscious that she has been silent and that he is staring.

  ‘I haven’t thanked you yet for rescuing me,’ she says, assuming a winning smile. She needs to keep him on side until she is ready to make her move; although her efforts to do so hardly seem necessary, he is so clearly delighted by her, blind as to how she is using him.

  18

  ‘The way they exhibit David is a disgrace,’ Maplin says, puffing himself up. ‘Zoo animals get better treatment. They think he’s unaware because he doesn’t say or do much, and therefore must be a bit limited, but he’s just hiding it in here.’ He taps the side of his head, jogging his glasses and making his eyes behind the lenses wobble. ‘He knew who you were, didn’t he – so I say, maybe not so dumb after all.’

  ‘Why is he kept in a museum?’

  ‘That’s Realhuman Corp. for you. Years ago, before it all went pear-shaped, they were the leaders in the field. They think that by exhibiting him, leaving the States and touring him about, they can get people to trust their technology again.’

  ‘Didn’t the Americans change their laws too?’

  ‘They did, but it didn’t stop stuff ticking along in the background. Big business always gets its way.’ This note of scepticism reminds her of Daniels and puts her a little more at ease. Maybe she is getting used to this silly, ridiculous man. Anyway, there is no shutting him up.

  ‘Androids,’ he continues, ‘where there is an element of genuine consciousness, should be granted rights. Our code of ethics needs serious updating. Not getting that sorted is why things ended up the way they did.’

  ‘He asked me to help him,’ she says, recalling David’s eyes lock on hers, the flicker of his thick lashes as he slowly blinked.

  ‘Emotional intelligence as clear as day, and they say that you and they feel nothing!’ He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘But however good David is, Evie, you, you’re something else. The “real deal” as people used to call it. You’re extraordinary, amazing. Beyond even what the likes of Realhuman envisaged could be possible.’ He blushes again, more and more like a schoolboy with a crush.

  She finds herself colouring, too. ‘Why am I so amazing?’ It is one thing she has never felt about herself, and however foolish it is, she’s can’t help but enjoy the attention.

  ‘That you’re so alive . . . and I don’t mean walking about and so forth, that was easy for them, but what has happened since you left the factory. What’s going on inside.’

  ‘And what is going on inside?’

  ‘Ah, the million-dollar question.’ Maplin leans forward, bringing his face uncomfortably close. ‘Despite all the hoo-ha, the science behind you back then was not particularly ground-breaking. I’ve read everything there is on what they used – primarily a version of synthetic neuron replication, and that had been around for decades. It wasn’t about processor size or chip buffers or sequence strings either – all that might have been cutting-edge forty years ago but has since been superseded numerous times. No, the physical stuff, the hardware on its own, is not it. It is something else they did or rather . . . happened. Something in your liveware. Something that generated self-awareness, gave you what we call ‘life’ . . .’ His hand absentmindedly reaches towards her head, to touch where all this amazing ‘stuff’ is going on, but she flinches away and it returns to his side.

  ‘I’m making an educated prediction but they gave you an inner voice?’ He nods to himself as he watches her mull this over. ‘From your face I guess I’m right.’

  ‘What do you mean by “inner voice”?’ Evie knows exactly what he means, but she has never spoken of Simon to anyone, not even her husband, not wanting to give the impression that she might be malfunctioning and may need to be sent back.

  ‘I’m talking about the theory of The Godhead, it had just come into its own back then. Do you know what that is?’

  Evie shakes her head.

  ‘It’s a hypothesis that early humans heard interior voices commanding them to take action, hence all those ancient heroes believing they’re on divine quests! A bit hard to imagine anyone taking such an idea seriously, I know, but with the development of third generation A.I. mid-last century, the theory found a following and led to the supposition that if an entity could perceive its identity in the form of an inner companion, it may be able to develop a voice of its own to take over.’

  Maplin is not only describing Simon, Evie thinks, but also what has been happening to her over the last week: the power of her own thoughts elbowing him into the background. She feels him stir now that he is being discussed, as-ever ready to primitively contest his primacy.

  ‘So what’s it like, this voice?’ Maplin asks.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s easy to describe,’ she answers, unwilling to share such a personal thing. Besides, with his long periods of absence, Simon is beginning to feel progressively less real.

  ‘We humans hear ourselves too, you know. Always a blathering going on in here.’ He taps the side of his head to indicate the location of the racket. ‘Never a moment’s peace,’ and he smiles at her in the way he does when he considers himself amusing. ‘But anyway, you can imagine why everyone is so keen to get hold of you – catch some answers and shortcut their way around a heap of avoidable research. Even Realhuman would be able to learn something, and they were the ones that thought that they knew all there was! This would be the chance of a lifetime to study a mind set in motion nearly half a century earlier.’

  Maplin grins, more and more pleased with his cleverness. ‘And if I was a betting man, I’d guess the voice is male?’

  ‘How do you know that?’ she asks. She feels like she is being turned inside out.

  ‘Just another logical deduction,’ he replies smugly. ‘Evie, have you heard of Jung? Jung theorised the existence in men of a subsidiary female personality which he labelled the “Anima”, and in women, a male he called the
“Animus”. Another psychological model which couldn’t be proven but was of interest to scientists at the time of your development.’

  ‘How do you know all these things?’ Despite her reservations, she is now almost completely in his thrall.

  ‘Just something I’m into, a hobby, but I’ve never had the chance to get answers before. Can I ask something else? Can I ask if they gave you memories? I read that they did that, or were thinking of it.’

  ‘I remember things, of course,’ she answers. ‘Things I’ve done.’

  ‘What about memories of things before you existed?’

  ‘Yes, those too, but they are not mine,’ she says. ‘How can they be?’ It is true they fooled her to begin with but they were false. That she had figured this out, she never admitted to Matthew. It was disorientating, picking the truth from the lies. She had got over it at the time – had to – in order to survive.

  ‘They didn’t have to be real to serve their purpose I guess, although possibly they were real to someone.’

  ‘I don’t even think they were someone’s,’ she replies, contemplating her wedding, which certainly had never belonged to the virginal Evelyn. Virginal, because Matthew confessed early on that he and the actual Evelyn had never passed that particular hurdle. It is one area of her performance that Evie was not expected to mimic. One in which she never felt adversely compared.

  ‘Real or not, they would have cushioned you from the shock of facing a whole puzzling new world in one go. Prevented you going loopy as you tried to make sense of what you were experiencing. That would have been the theory anyway.’

  The point when she’d worked out that her memories were not real was when she’d worked out that she wasn’t human – Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ was the best she had to rely on. It had been a chilling realisation that had her reassessing all the contradictions she’d conveniently suppressed. In time, she came to understand herself and that what relentlessly drove her was the need to be as close to human as she could. An unforgiving quest to be second best.

  ‘Do you dream?’ he asks.

  The speed with which he is moving between subjects is making her head spin. ‘Sometimes.’ What she does not say is that until recently, with so little in the way of variety to draw on, these mental regurgitations have either been extremely fanciful and packed with longing for the unknown, burgeoningly dull and repetitive, or simply terrifying, filled with hooks and wires and fear and pain.

  ‘I knew it. I just knew it.’ He bangs his fist into his palm. ‘Cuthbert wrote that memory, if planted deeply, would promote dreaming and dreaming would trigger reasoning. All that was needed was a spark to set things running and – boom – you would get consciousness. Sounds unrevolutionary now but get this, she was writing in 1930, before even the first computer.’

  ‘Not everyone agrees that I am conscious,’ she replies, recalling her husband and the tendency he’d had to articulate his confusion at the most inopportune, intimate moments.

  ‘But you must be, otherwise we would not be having such a conversation.’

  ‘Perhaps it is because I am good at pretending – a clever mechanical – a parrot repeating what she does not understand. That is a theory I have also heard.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of pretending to be conscious. Such a thing anyway would be unpretendable and I don’t believe for a moment you doubt yourself in that way. More interesting is what you feel yourself to be. Whether you feel yourself to be human?’

  She is smiling nervously. ‘I of course know I am not human, but even so I do feel it, sometimes.’ This feels like a confession. Like an actress admitting she has been acting as an actress. She felt ‘human’, for instance, when Daniels brought her flowers from the garden or gifts from the shops below. She felt what she assumed it must be like to be human when her husband stroked her hair, the tenderness of the act utterly pointless, a mere performance, if she was nothing more than a machine.

  ‘When I found you in Cambridge, you were the most human thing in the street, and you know why that was? It was because of your determination to survive.’

  ‘I’ve never thought about it like that,’ she says. ‘When I’m frightened, I’m frightened, although before the last few days I’ve never undergone anything like this. In the apartment I felt safe because nothing dangerous could really ever happen.’

  Nothing dangerous could happen because Matthew had protected her. They were never married, that turned out to be one of the lies. But he had looked after her, kept her safe.

  Without her realising it, her grief has crept up on her. Her lips draw thin. Her nose wrinkles. The pressure in her tear ducts grows. ‘I loved him,’ she mumbles to herself. Despite everything, she loved him. She finds herself looking helplessly into Maplin’s stupid, ugly, ecstatic face. Needing someone, anyone, even this ridiculous stranger – part-schoolboy, part-mad scientist – to comfort her. ‘I loved him,’ she repeats.

  Maplin stares at her, not understanding.

  She is recalling the moment she and Matthew first spent time alone. Just talking to begin with, exploring each other with questions. He smiling into her eyes, caressing her face as if he can’t believe she is really there. Then he had taken her to his bedroom, undressing shyly, slowly revealing to her his slim body. The muscles lean and hard and so inviting to her touch. And now all that is gone, taken away by the years and the intruder’s gun.

  Evie starts to smile, finally understanding what the ‘spark’ was that that scientist had been going on about. By giving her the need to love and be loved, the rest just followed – onset of consciousness, sense of self, etc., etc. She feels her mind expanding, comprehending herself properly for the very first time and why she is the person she is.

  In the background Maplin is talking again. ‘You know, if you just let me perform some little tests, we could figure out a lot. I could help you with things, all sorts of things.’ He is reaching towards her head again, this time with both hands. The move takes her, in her dazed state, by surprise, and his fingers make clammy contact with her temples.

  Evie recoils in a rapid leap back like a frightened animal. All the preceding talk about dreams and memories and inner voices and what it is like to feel this and feel that, has served to hypnotise her, but in that instant she snaps free. Her shoulders strike the wall behind. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she says, staring at him, her teeth bared, rebuffing the greedy light in his eyes with the angry flare in her own.

  19

  Evie’s fierce reaction to Maplin touching her instantly cools things and he leaves, departing the room with his tail between his legs. She hears him moving around upstairs, banging and dragging things around.

  When he comes back down, an hour later, he is carrying a padded envelope.

  She expects him still to be angry but he is wanting to be friends again.

  ‘Evie, do you know where you came from?’ he asks.

  ‘Where I came from?’ she repeats, uncertainly.

  ‘It’s the question most of us ask at some time, humans anyway, but at least for you there is an answer. Do you want to see something – something extremely rare?’ He is so eager, he doesn’t give her a chance to reply. ‘Sit down,’ he says, ‘and take a look at this.’

  From the envelope, he slips out a brochure printed on thick white paper, roughly quarto in proportions – similar to the size of old A4 laid sideways – which although glossy and uncreased, has yellowed along the edges revealing its true age. He hands it to her. He is unable to stop beaming.

  ‘Elektra,’ she reads out. The word is printed on the cover in a fleshy pink and underneath, in gold script, ‘make a new life today.’

  ‘Elektra’? The name is familiar to her but she can’t place it. She opens the cover to an image of a slim young female in an elegant cocktail dress, the hem flouncing attractively to expose her thighs. The woman stands side on, twisting prettily towards the camera, reaching out, palm upwards, like she is seeking to take a child by the hand. ‘Make you
r appointment with Elektra this November at the Frankfurt 2091 World Fair’ is written in soft grey italics alongside.

  The brochure is far older than she thought. 2091 – three years before she was created. ‘What is this?’ she asks. ‘Who is she? Who is Elektra?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Maplin gapes at her, enjoying her confusion. With the delivery of this document he has changed role again, transitioned from amateur scientist to conjuror. She senses that after having been skinned and filleted earlier, she is about to be sawn in two.

  He silently preserves the moment, manipulating her suspense. She knows the answer, she thinks, but has no words to put it into.

  ‘It’s you,’ he says finally, revelling in the reveal. ‘Evie, you’re Elektra.’

  She holds the page closer, looking again at this girl in her lovely dress, with her flawless skin, her beautiful oval face and sleek shoulder-length hair.

  ‘It’s not me.’

  ‘No, not you, of course not. But it is your model range. This is the brochure. Your brochure. This is what they hand-delivered to rich clients to entice them – printing it on paper, going to that amount of trouble, was all part of the aura they wanted to create of tactile old-fashioned exclusivity. There should be a holo-disk too, but—’ he reaches across and opens the back ‘—the sleeve is empty. I bought it on the USweb from the widow of one of the designers in California. It’s very rare. If it had the disk, it would be priceless. But anyway, why do I need the disk now – I have you!’

  ‘You don’t have me,’ Evie says sharply, looking into his face. She has been someone’s property all her life – someone she was programmed to love unconditionally, to imprint upon like a hapless gosling. She accepted that and took from it the pleasure and joy that it would yield but she is not about to consign herself into this stranger’s possession.

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that. Of course not. But here you are. An actual Elektra – maybe the only one – at least in this country – in my home.’