Sleep and the Soul, page 30
The rattling intensified, shaking him out of his self-pitying reverie. He owed it to the people who’d worked on the launcher to return and tell them everything he’d learned.
He checked the ropes securing the canopy to the tail of the glider, then he took out the pegs, tore the rim free and threw the whole sheet into the raging air. The wind snatched at it wildly until it came to an uneasy equilibrium, stretched out on the ropes above him, squalling like a strange injured animal as the harness bit into his shoulders from below.
“Thanks to Delia, yet again,” he muttered, imagining her scowl when she heard what her handiwork had actually achieved.
Tirell pushed himself away from the floor of the hollow and peered down at the swirling depths. He loosened the harness enough to turn himself around and get his feet in contact with the pedals; he waited as long as he dared, trying to extract as much deceleration from the trailing canopy as possible without falling too low.
Then he cut the canopy loose and took control of the wing flaps, bringing the glider out of its dive.
When he was level, for a moment he was completely at a loss; it had just occurred to him that this would be the first time he’d be flying the glider without Anna beside him. But he wasn’t lost; he’d seen enough of the long-lived vortices in the depths below to get his bearings.
Long before he reached Maldo, he saw a small, unfamiliar forest, suspended in an updraft, visibly rising and falling even as he watched, still finding its balance. If it survived in the new conditions, maybe it could serve as a temporary home. A first step in the migration.
Tirell felt his body tense in anger, ashamed at his own acquiescence. But what choice would they have? Accept the hard fate the cousins had imposed on them, or reject it, rage at it, and die.
When he finally saw his home in the distance, the shame returned and he wanted to flee, but he forced himself to keep going. He found the mouth of the clearing, and he pictured Anna beside him, encouraging and berating him as he circled around a second time, then a third, before he could straighten his path out enough to fly in.
He struck the wall of vines with a bone-shaking jolt, but it felt like a friendly embrace. He sat in the hollow, unable to rise; Anna and Selik appeared beside him, squeezing his arms, talking to him, checking him for injuries.
“If I tell you what happened,” he said, “you won’t believe me. You’ll just say I lost my mind.”
“Come out of the glider,” Anna replied, “and you’ll see why that’s not true.”
She and Selik helped him out, and he staggered across the platform. His legs were impossibly weak. Could it really have been just a few thousand breaths since he’d departed? He felt like he’d returned from a long exile.
He looked back at the glider. Along the side, dozens of shallow but perfectly straight grooves had been carved – or rather, pressed – into the wood. No one who saw that would doubt that he’d been grabbed by the cousins’ strange dispatcher.
He sat down on the platform, and the others sat beside him. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “But then, you’ll need to give me something in return.”
Anna looked annoyed, but she indulged him. “Of course. What is it you want?”
Tirell said, “I need to hear the Full Recitation. Every word you know, everything I missed out on. We’re all going to need to hear it. The struggle that’s coming might last for a thousand generations, and we’re all going to need to make ourselves strong.”
NIGHT RUNNING
1
Luke heard the ping of the elevator arriving and glanced at the time on his screen: 9:49 PM. It was probably the cleaners coming through. The Roombas had started on the carpets about an hour before, but Ray and Elaine, the middle-aged couple who’d told Luke they’d held the cleaning contract for the building for the last eight years, still needed to empty the trash and wipe down all the desks and cubicle partitions.
He rose to his feet and rolled his neck for a few seconds, wondering if he should take their arrival as his cue to leave. The task he’d hoped to finish was now looking even more stubbornly intractable than when he’d begun, and if he didn’t get home before eleven he’d have no chance to do anything but fall into bed. He needed to spend an hour with a book, a game, or a TV show, just to lay down a clear memory that separated each day from the next, or he ended up back at his desk in the morning feeling like he’d never been away.
“How’s it going?” he called to Elaine, who was working her way along the row of cubicles with her spray bottle and cloth. When she didn’t reply, Luke wondered if he’d done something to offend her the last time he’d spoken with the couple. Maybe he’d held them up by talking too long, and then compounded the insult by rushing off suddenly when he realized he was about to miss his train.
Ray was following along behind her with the cleaning cart, and when he saw Luke he frowned and shook his head in mock reproach. “Don’t you ever go home?”
“Soon,” Luke replied, relieved that he wasn’t being ghosted entirely. Maybe Elaine was just listening to music; it was hard to tell if she was wearing earbuds. He walked up to the cart, while Ray pulled the dust cartridge out of a Roomba station and emptied it into the bag. “How’s Molly?” Luke asked. Their grandchild had had a nasty ear infection when they’d talked the week before.
“Much better, thanks,” Ray replied cheerfully, though he seemed a little distracted, watching Elaine through the corner of his eye. “We’re taking turns looking after her while her mother is back at work.”
“Oh, that’s nice.” Luke didn’t want to impose any further; he smiled and headed back to his cubicle. Elaine was still so absorbed in her work that she hadn’t even glanced at him – but then, he’d probably failed to acknowledge half a dozen colleagues himself throughout the day, as he sat staring at the seismic plots on his screen.
He shut down his computer, picked up his briefcase and started toward the elevator. Ray had his back to him as Luke passed, so Luke just called out, “Have a good night! You too, Elaine!” Elaine finally turned and gazed in his direction, but she remained silent, and there wasn’t so much as a flicker of recognition on her face.
Luke hesitated. If he’d offended her somehow, he wanted to put things right. But if she genuinely didn’t know who he was – if she was suffering from some kind of dementia – then she and Ray were entitled to their privacy. No one owed him an explanation.
Ray looked up from the cart and caught him gazing back in puzzlement. Elaine resumed her work, and Luke was about to continue on his way when Ray approached him.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” he urged Luke. “If our insurance company ever found out ... ”
“Of course not. I didn’t know she was sick, but it’s none of my business.”
Ray shook his head. “She’s not sick. We’re taking turns doing our shifts on FF, so we can look after Molly during the day.”
“Oh.” Luke recalled seeing a headline claiming that fruit-pickers were using the drug, but he’d assumed it was just clickbait. “You can really get the work done, while you’re sleepwalking? I’d be afraid of wandering off and falling down the stairs.”
“I wouldn’t try it alone,” Ray conceded. “But with a waking partner watching over you, you’re not in any danger. And when it’s something you’ve done a thousand times before ... ”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Luke replied. At least they weren’t window-washers, rappelling down the outside of the building. But if their job wasn’t hazardous, it certainly wasn’t purely repetitive either: Elaine was deftly shifting knickknacks around on Samantha’s desk so she could wipe the whole surface. Every cubicle was different like that in some way. No wonder the whole business was still too hard to automate.
“If you’re on your feet for hours, don’t you end up tired in the morning anyway?” he wondered.
“We don’t feel tired,” Ray assured him. “Whatever part of your brain needs resting seems to rest.”
Luke wasn’t convinced, but he was starting to feel anxious about distracting Ray from his zombie-watching duties. “I won’t tell anyone,” he promised. “Have a good night.”
On the train, he was too tired to read, but too agitated to listen to music; he just sat staring at the station signs coming and going in the dark. If the drug really functioned as Ray claimed, all power to the two of them; who wouldn’t relish arriving home from work feeling as refreshed as if they’d had a good night’s sleep? A part of him recoiled from the whiff of exploitation, but it wasn’t entirely clear how doing the same work for the same pay and finding it less tedious could be a bad thing.
Luke almost nodded off, but he’d set the GPS on his watch to vibrate when he reached Epping. As he trudged home through the empty streets, he tried letting his eyelids fall shut, curious as to how many steps he could take before he hit a lamppost or veered into someone’s front garden. But Elaine had not been moving blindly through the office; notwithstanding her indifference to his presence, she had been able to see, and react to, everything that mattered for the task at hand.
2
“I think this is the best I can do,” Luke admitted, as his boss, Andrew Keller, sat down and began to inspect the stratigraphic maps Luke had spent a fortnight trying to extract from a collection of sparse, noisy seismic data. The error bars on the accompanying plots were the giveaway; though in principle, Keller’s method could be used to infer the depth and density of all manner of mineral deposits, the same data that hinted at the possibility of their presence was also entirely consistent with their absence.
As Keller scrolled through the report, his scowl of disappointment deepened. “No, no, no,” he protested. “You’ve come at this all the wrong way!”
At the start of the project, Luke had begged him for more explicit instructions; in the end he’d had no choice but to proceed under his own assumptions. “There’s nothing in the literature about the method you described,” he said, which was the politest way he could think of to state that he’d been left to guess exactly what was required of him.
“Of course there isn’t,” Keller replied irritably. “Using wavelets this way is my own innovation. But I don’t have time to dot all the i’s for you; when we hired you, I thought you’d be flexible enough to go beyond what you’d read in the textbooks.”
Luke didn’t reply. He’d gone through three rounds of interviews to get this job; it had felt like he was the last applicant standing after they’d all been force-marched across a minefield. And whatever it meant to him personally, how would it look on his CV if he lost his first paid position in the industry after a mere six months?
Keller said, “Imagine being able to prospect for any kind of mineral, in any region on Earth, using nothing but ambient seismic waves. No blasting at all. And then in stage two, with no special instruments on site – just public data from existing seismic monitors. What do you think the future might hold, for the company that brought that technology to the marketplace?”
“Growth?” Luke suggested.
“Fucking spectacular growth!” Keller roared, before checking himself, possibly recalling some bullet point from an HR seminar regarding the wisdom of shouting obscenities at subordinates on company premises during work hours. “Do you want to be in on that spectacular growth?” he asked Luke, sounding now like a friendly uncle offering investment advice.
“Absolutely,” Luke replied. That wasn’t actually a lie, even if he wasn’t quite sure where the question stood on the continuum between the merely hypothetical and the downright counterfactual. But Keller had thirty years’ experience in the mining industry; Luke had one-sixtieth as much. Who was he to say that Keller’s method was impractical? And if he was part of the team that made it work, surely that would lead to a secure position here, and excellent prospects wherever he went.
“Good for you.” Keller smiled forgivingly. “Now try again. Only this time ... ”
Luke leaned forward eagerly, desperate to learn exactly what he’d missed the first time he’d been instructed about the method.
“This time, get it right,” Keller urged him. “I don’t care how long it takes you. The important thing is to get it right.”
3
When the packet of Fibrofilamide arrived in the mail from Delhi, Luke scanned the QR code on the side of the box. The manufacturer’s web site confirmed that it was an item they’d sent to the online store he’d bought it from, and that no one else had registered the same code before him. He took one pill out of the blister pack, shaved a small quantity off the side with a kitchen knife, dissolved it in warm water, and applied the fluid to the test strip he’d bought from a different store.
The strip turned green; this was the genuine product.
Fibrofilamide had been through six years of clinical trials, in the hope that it might halt the progress of Parkinson’s Disease. In the end, the benefits had turned out to be quite limited, but the side effects had proved equally mild. Even the somnambulism for which it was now famous went away after a week or so, under the high dosage regimen that had been evaluated for clinical use. If he stuck to fifty milligrams every twenty-four hours or so, he’d be taking much less than the trials had shown to be physiologically harmless – and if, as he hoped, the sleepwalking persisted, that would be a testament to the fact that his brain was not habituating to the chemical.
He set up his phone with the camera in wide-angle, low-light mode, swallowed the pill and climbed into bed. For a while he lay in the dark, too self-conscious to relax. His watch would sound an alarm if he stepped outside the apartment ... but if he retained enough cognitive ability in his sleep to scroll through the menus and free himself from house arrest before opening the door – or even the presence of mind to unstrap the device and leave it behind – then he’d probably be capable of completing a midnight stroll without coming to grief.
But the reality was likely to skew in the other direction. How clumsy, how confused, how irrational might he actually be?
He got out of bed, turned on the light, picked up the coffee table, and placed it on its side with the top resting against the wall. In the movies, people who died in furniture-related accidents always split their heads open on the coffee table. But would he now be at risk of tripping on the protruding legs? He fetched a laundry basket and positioned it so it would act as a buffer, keeping him away from the four perilous wooden poles.
Back in bed, he kept fretting, but he was too tired now to do anything but ridicule his remaining fears. The chance that he would wake to find himself in the park, miming some sex act while early-morning dog-walkers looked on in horror and recorded it all for the police, seemed slim. More likely he would just suffer a few hours of anxious, shallow sleep before waking with a splitting headache, wondering why he hadn’t waited until the weekend before subjecting himself to this stupid experiment.
4
When Luke heard his alarm go off, he reached for his watch, but it was not on his wrist. He glanced down and saw that he was standing in a steam-filled room, entirely naked, his skin warm and dripping wet. His muscles were suffused with an invigorating ache, as if they’d just performed some strenuous but entirely welcome task.
In front of him, condensation clouded the mirror on a small medicine cabinet. He cradled his head in his hands, too dazed to panic even though he had no idea where he was, or what he’d done.
The bathmat he was standing on looked familiar. He raised his eyes and examined his surroundings as the steam began to disperse. He was in his own bathroom, and his watch was sitting on the countertop, where he always put it when he showered. He silenced it, then wrapped a towel around his waist and opened the door.
The state of the apartment could not have been more orderly. He’d made his bed, and laid out his work clothes. He’d eaten breakfast – the cereal bowl was soaking in the kitchen sink – shaved, and cleaned his teeth. He was pretty sure he’d used the toilet as well, since he had no remaining need.
Luke skimmed through the time-stamped recording on his phone. He’d risen just after four AM. The monochrome image of a pallid figure pulling away the sheets and leaving his bed raised hairs on the back of his neck ... but then he’d switched on the light, transforming the movie into color, and walked around with such an ordinary gait and matter-of-fact demeanor that it swiftly dispelled the whole Paranormal Activity vibe.
As well as his ordinary morning routine, he’d fitted in almost an hour of body-weight exercises – chair dips, sit-ups, four kinds of push-ups, all the sets he’d done as a student when he had no money to join a gym. Now that he had a membership, he had no time to use it, and he’d pretty much resigned himself to the sluggish, desk-bound state he’d found himself in for the last six months.
He got dressed and walked down to the train station, marveling at how refreshed and clear-headed he felt. And though he’d stayed back at the office until 9:30 the previous night, that now seemed like a lifetime ago. With an early start and a new sense of energy, maybe he could finally make some progress cleaning out Keller’s Augean stables. The method had to be sound, or none of Geoscopy’s other partners would have allowed Keller to devote resources to it, but he was clearly too busy to develop it properly himself. He’d given the job to Luke, and Luke would handle it.
5
One set of parameters, Luke discovered, yielded decent results from the wavelet algorithm for about a third of his test data. Another set worked for another quarter of the cases. If he ignored all the rest, maybe he could find a useful middle ground, gathering the partial successes under one umbrella.
But after hours of telling himself he was homing in on the optimal choice, he realized he was just shifting a bump in the carpet from place to place. Basically, he was cheating: hiding the general awfulness of his latest version of the method by knowing in advance which particular tweaks had made it seem successful for particular cases.
