Déjà Vu

Chapter Six

David stopped in the doorway of his former laboratory and studied the ceiling. False colour belied the dark ruin on which the visor’s zero light camera worked. Fire had taken the tiles. Exposed cables trailed. No doubt some of them carried power.

His first footfall crunched.

‘Ego, can you analyse the air?’

‘There are fine transition metals, some acids—chiefly sulphuric—and insoluble particles. The atmosphere is acutely carcinogenic.’

‘Remind me to give McWhirter a slap.’

‘When would you like this reminder?’

‘Forget the reminder.’

‘Very well.’

The liquid storage device had once prompted a joke about LSD, but David could not remember which of the team had cracked it. The transparent chamber was the size of a car, and the soup of liquid polymer, the tonnes of it, rolled in huge fronts of colour. Once it had reminded David of the surface of Jupiter. In contrast with the darkness, it was nova-bright.

‘Ego, I will place you beneath the forward stanchion of the device. Do you understand?’

‘Perfectly.’

David slid Ego into the drifts of dust.

Though the laboratory had never stored hazardous materials, it contained a decontamination room as standard. There was a shower, a bath, and a huge sink. The concrete floor sloped towards a drain on the far wall. The emergency lights were dead behind their grills. David walked across the broken tiles and burst pipework, and knelt in the corner, where a body lay in a sleeping bag. He peeled away the fabric.

Bruce might have been dead. His face was sunken and his mouth lopsided. His hands were drawn against the chest. There was a blanket over his legs. When David moved it aside, a writhing ball of blackness fragmented into rats—their hands pink, their eyes winking—and he checked the urge to scoop them away. Gently, he examined Bruce’s trousers. They were intact. The rats were in it for the warmth. If Bruce got some warmth in return, David was easy. He resettled the material.

Bruce lay on a mortuary headrest. David felt underneath. Sure enough, there was a neural bridging unit.

‘How long have you been inside, Bruce? Two days now? Soon after you broke in, I bet.’

His unconscious patient said nothing. David considered ripping the cable from his brain. He thought about the lab mice who had died when unplugged. Then he thought of Bruce moving around in the inkiness of this place, making his nest, his grave. The darkness of it. The same darkness that had fallen on Bruce at the age of ten. The blind man navigating by touch; coughing; hurting.

David thought, Cancel, and the rumination evaporated. He went about his work efficiently and calmly. He put a saline drip in the left arm and an antibiotic drip in the right. It was impossible not to think of former, better times. They had been inseparable. He found a note in Bruce’s trouser pocket. It was wet with urine. In handwriting frozen at ten years old, it read:

David rocked back, hugged his knees and stared at his oldest friend.

Later, he left the room, crossed the main laboratory, and entered the suite of immersion chambers. There were six of them arranged either side of a walkway. Their transparent doors were blackened but otherwise intact. The first one opened easily. David put his head inside and tried to inspect the vents in ceiling of the cubicle, but his helmet was too cumbersome. The visor’s alarm whooped as David broke the seal. Perfect darkness slid up. When, finally, he took a breath, he gagged on the air. It stank like an old incinerator. He looked again at the cubicle vents. They were clear. He put the helmet on the floor, imagining the spill of dust, and removed his clothes. His bare feet stepped on silky sediment. The chamber was no larger than a shower stall.

‘Ego, has the computer finished the diagnostic program on the fines in this cubicle?’

‘Yes. The diagnostic has been passed. The machine is safe.’

Next to the vents in the cubicle ceiling was a full-face mask. It slid down like a periscope. David turned aside as two decades of dust hissed out. When the apparatus was producing good air, he attached it to his head, which was now locked in relation to the cubicle. The door closed automatically. Next he heard a whine from above. A warm, viscous liquid poured on his head. White droplets covered his mask, and then his vision was obscured entirely by the deluge.

The liquid evaporated to a crumbling residue, which soon lifted from his naked body as though blown by a wind from below. It formed a swirling, buffeting storm. Each microscopic mote in that mist was a ‘fine’: a smart particle not unlike a bumble bee in appearance. The uncountable billions of fines could move according to instruction and induce temperature through friction. They were a haptic cloud of edges, shapes, and objects. They created the solidity, texture and danger of physical reality.

David watched some log-file text slide across the internal screen of the mask.

‘My voice is my passport,’ he said. ‘Verify me.’ The computer heard the keyword and checked his voice against a database. Its essential components had not changed in twenty years.

The log-file text was replaced by an epic vista. As always, its beauty staggered him. The image was rendered on a screen with pixels so small his eyes could not discern them individually.

He was looking over the ocean of Onogoro. The dawnlit waves at his feet lapped against a sugar-white shore. The grains beneath his feet were virtual surfaces created at whim by the fines; but the feeling was like coming home. It conjured a sudden, painful nostalgia for glory days.

A virtual square appeared. On it was a user interface. One icon would summon The Word, the programming language that controlled the universe. He moved his virtual hand over this panel and a blue dot appeared beneath his index finger. He hesitated over ‘shut down’. A gesture would stop the program. It would send him back into the real world forthwith. He could not guess where it would send Bruce.

He touched another icon. It was a picture of his younger self. His old account.

‘Professor,’ said Ego, ‘the low-frequency transmitter has received a response from McWhirter. He seems upset.’

‘Go on.’

‘I will paraphrase. He knows about the fire that destroyed your home in Oxford this morning, and wants you to cease all activity while an emergency shaft is sunk to remove you from the laboratory.’

‘How long do I have?’

‘The estimate is one hour. McWhirter already has the equipment on site. Do you have a reply?’

‘Tell him to go fuck himself. No need to paraphrase.’