James Smythe: The Testimony

She goes to work on the bolts. They’re all hand-driven, none requiring custom tools, which is good. Some of them have connectors that need to be touching, but the deliverymen got them mostly lined up for her. All the insides are driven by conductive metal rather than wires, which makes them easy to assemble. Foolproof, even. The pieces sit perfectly flush when they’re connected and lined up, and it takes a bit of effort – heaving them a centimetre this way, a millimetre the other – but they satisfyingly click together. She can’t even see the lines between pieces when it’s done: it’s like a solid lump of black metal from the front, no seams, like something carved from the world itself. It looks, she thinks, almost natural. Like rock.

She drags the plug from the side and plugs it into the wall, and then strokes the screen. Doing this is like instinct. The screen flickers to life. There’s the familiar triple tone of the boot noise – ding-ding-ding, ascending and positive, full of optimism – and then the screen is awash with light. Beth hadn’t realized how covered in dust it was. She doesn’t know when this thing was last turned on, but the clock has reset. She pulls her sleeve down over her hand and wipes the screen off. She’ll do a better job later, but she wants to check that this all works before she gets her hopes up. The interface is exactly as she remembers, all big colourful buttons and words driven by positivity. Nothing negative. Even in the act of taking away they were reinforcing. PURGE, COMMIT, REPLENISH. She presses a button, through to sub-menus. There’s a button that offers her the chance to explore the hard drive, which she presses, but the drive is clear. That’s what she’d hoped for. She didn’t want somebody else’s memories lingering here. She heads out of the room and into the other bedroom, her bedroom. Compared to the Machine’s room, it’s chaos. Clothes everywhere, on the floor and bed, – she sleeps around them, making nooks in them where her body lies – and the walls stacked high with vacuum-packed bags full of clothes that she hasn’t worn in years, or that she kept of Vic’s. She keeps the hard drive under her bed, because that seemed like the safest place. If she got burgled, she didn’t want them to take it thinking that it would be worth anything. Pulling it out – it’s been in a box with remnants of who she was before, old library cards and birthday cards and childhood photographs – she walks into the room and sees the drive appear on the screen as she gets closer. It’s a first-generation capacitive wireless device, able to pick up on other wireless items in the vicinity and read their drives. A new option appears on the screen: a cartoonish image of a hard drive. She presses the button – her hands are shaking, because she’s worried that the drive might have wiped itself or corrupted over the past couple of years (ever since she backed up the contents from an older drive one New Year’s Day as she worried about it, worried about the life-span of these things) – and there it is: a folder named after her husband. She presses his name and waits as it loads.

There are hundreds of files inside, all date-stamped, and all under an umbrella of his name. She presses the first one, which she can barely remember being recorded because it was so long ago, and waits as it loads. A bar appears on the screen and an icon of a play button. She presses it and the Machine starts thrumming. The file starts loading. The technology isn’t there with the size of these files: the pristine nature of exactly what they’ve recorded, and how long they are. The amount of data that they contained inside the packets of the audio files themselves… Everything important. The audio is essentially worthless. It’s wrapping paper. But the files are enormous, and streaming them all is impractical. It would take far too long; too much waiting for them to load. She should be using the hard drive of the Machine itself, but she wants to check it works first. That, and she wants to hear him. She’s too eager.

Then the first file is done queuing itself up, and it plays automatically, and she hears somebody clearing their throat in the background, the click of something. Somebody sitting down. She doesn’t know where the speakers are in the casement, but they’re somewhere, or it uses the metal itself as a speaker. Maybe that’s where the vibrations come from: internal sound channelled outwards. She saw that once, when she was a teenager: something you could plug your iPod into and it would turn any glass table or window into a speaker. She remembers being impressed by it: as the boys that she knew ran around her parents’ house plugging it into everything they could find, dancing in their room full of art pieces as the glass covering a statue that her father described as priceless vibrated with the sounds of trilling keyboards and squawked singing. They danced on the rugs, because of the novelty of not being able to hear their own footfalls.

The first voice she hears is that of a stranger. It must be one of the doctors who had worked with him.

We’re ready? Can you say your name for us? it asks.

Victor McAdams. His voice is suddenly full in the room. She can’t remember exactly how long it’s been since she heard his voice talking properly, saying sentences. Long enough that it’s become a memory, rather than something tangible. She’s forgotten how deep it was. How it cracks at the higher end. The trepidation as he says their surname, and the pause that hangs in the air afterwards. She can hear him breathing.

And could you state your rank and ID number, for the record?

Captain. Two-five-two-three-two-three-oh-two.

Great. Don’t be nervous, the voice says to him. You know why you’re here?

Yes sir.

Don’t call me sir. My name’s Robert. First-name terms here, Victor.

Vic.

Vic it is. Beth hears the smile. Shall we begin? Beth stops the recording. The voices hang in the air, like the dust. It works. The files are intact. Her first worry dealt with. She presses the screen and goes back a few stages, back to the central menu, and ticks the box to copy the contents of the drive to the Machine itself. The vibrations start as it accesses its drives. It’s older than her tiny hard drive by a couple of years, and she thinks about the information – about the recordings of Vic’s voice, pages and pages of entries where he sat in a room and spoke about the things that he didn’t want to remember any more – she thinks about it all expanding as it fills the drive of the Machine. It gives her a time-bar for the download, of hours rather than minutes. The slowest crawl. She goes to the main room of her flat and thinks about how she should tidy more. It’s become worse since she invested in this project, stealing both her time and her energy. The kids have suffered most: mountains of marking sit by the front door, and she knows that they need to have most of it done before the summer holidays. Her deadlines are theirs. She has six weeks coming up, and she’s planned how she’ll break it down by the day. She’s begun stockpiling food and provisions: the kitchen is brimming with canned foods, and the bathroom has toilet-roll packets stacked behind the door. The plan involves her not leaving the flat for the first week because Vic will most likely need her. He won’t be able to be left alone for more than a couple of hours, not for at least that time, and probably much longer. The schedule of how those six weeks will work is punishing, she knows, but needs must. She has printed them out, a week per sheet of A4 paper, and she’s put them on the fridge under a large magnet that Vic got given by his parents when he was a child, that he hung onto. She’s kept it as well, like a trophy. Proof that he was once real. She can tell that people don’t believe her, when she talks about him. It’s like he’s a ghost. She says, He used to be a soldier, and they smile, and they ask where he is now. She tells them that he’s away, serving still. They look at her – or, if she’s let them past that barrier, at her flat – and they know that it’s a lie. Nobody’s away serving any more. Everything where they were is rubble. So she has to tidy, and she has to make sure that she knows exactly how the Machine works. Two weeks before the end of term.