Something Coming Through

19. Avatar

Norfolk | 9 July

A sea mist had rolled in overnight. It softened the edges of everything, thickened into a white wall above low waves that collapsed in foaming fans on the beach where Chloe walked, barefoot on rippled sand. The beach fading into the mist ahead of her, a chain of footprints lengthening behind her. No one else about apart from a couple of dog-walkers and a woman in a white tracksuit ghosting out of the mist, passing Chloe, ghosting away.

It was unreasonably early, a little past six, but Chloe had lain awake a long time thinking about Jack Baines and the trap that she and Henry Harris had chosen to walk into. And when she did sink into sleep she was trying to find her way through narrow crowded streets, searching for her mother. A sense of unbearable urgency, of the air thickening and walls closing in. She’d woken with a start, the dream’s anxiety clinging to her like tar. The first dream about her mother in a long time. On edge, old fears stirring in her blood, she’d pulled on her clothes and gone out into the cold misty morning and the clean smell of the sea to clear her head.

Now she saw a shadow moving through the mist that hung over the sea. Someone wading through breaking waves towards her.

Wait. It wasn’t a person.

A chill clamped her from head to foot. It was as if a tiger or a unicorn had emerged from this ordinary English daybreak.

The Jackaroo avatar sloshed through receding drifts of foam and walked up the wet sand and stopped a couple of metres from Chloe. It was naked, its skin golden. Male but unsexed. Its eyes were white shells in a gold mask. Its mouth formed a smile and the smile parted and moved.

‘Pardon the intrusion. But I did not get the chance to thank you properly.’

Chloe swallowed what felt like a stone. ‘You’re Bob Smith?’

The avatar bowed low, so smoothly and elegantly that it did not seem at all like mockery.

Chloe said, ‘What I did…It was too little, too late.’

‘It was the thought that counted. The gesture. The symbolism. One of the things we like about you is that you risk your lives for those not of your species. It gives us great hope. And besides, as you can see, I have risen again. You cannot destroy the message by burning the paper on which it is written, although I understand why the attempt was made. An example of your bicameral nature. Love and hate. Phobia and agape. All that jazz. You’re afraid, but you are also fascinated. You wonder if I came here simply to thank you. Well, I did want to thank you, but I also wanted to warn you. To tell you that you stand at a place where small actions may have large and unintended consequences.’

‘…This is a warning?’

‘Call it a heads-up. A pause in the game while you receive suggestions about your quest, or are rewarded with extra hit points. Is that a good metaphor? Does it help? Oh, but you’re still confused. Listen: I’m not going to tell you what to do. We cannot make decisions for you. We came to help, but we do not want to interfere. We gave you a gift, yours to do with as you will. But you’ve heard all that before. We’re happy to talk. To answer questions about why we don’t stop war and suffering, cure cancer, end poverty, point the way to heaven or point out that there is no heaven. Ask us anything. We don’t mind. We try our best to be candid, but there is an inevitable degree of mutual incomprehension. Because your qualia aren’t our qualia. Because we’re running models of who you think you are and what you think you know, but they’re just models. Because the map isn’t the territory. Because we aren’t gods. We aren’t even close. You know? At best, we’re pipers at the gates of dawn. Who have come to this little blue planet to help. Just that. But there are others here, with their own agenda. Be careful of them.’

Be careful of who? Chloe started to say, but the avatar was leaving.

It didn’t turn and walk away, walk back to the sea. It simply thinned. Quietly and without any fuss dissolved into the misty air. Its smile and the white stones of its eyes were the last to vanish. If not for its waterlogged footprints in the wet sand, Chloe might have dreamed it.