Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

‘Well, I don’t believe such a thing is possible.’

‘That, in a way, is my point. As I understand it, the Native Americans had no concept of the private ownership of land. Result? They lost everything to people who did.’

Vera extended her palm beyond the shelter of the tree to check that the drizzle had stopped. ‘It’s not so mysterious. A plant or a basic mechanical object has a rudimentary consciousness — it responds to external stimuli.’ She passed her hand over some ragged flowers in a tub beside her. ‘These too. And even simple consciousness — grass, a sunflower, a cistern valve — is inscribed with desires. You understand?’

‘A sunflower doesn’t want to turn towards the sun,’ I said. ‘That’s anthropomorphism. That’s what we used to call the pathetic fallacy.’

‘I disagree,’ she said. ‘I think you are simply reluctant to acknowledge the miracle. The miracle is self-consciousness. Recursive consciousness. Consciousness that perceives itself.’

She had lowered her voice. I had to move closer to hear. The aura around her seemed to intensify. I felt as though I was being drawn into her crazy bubble.

‘And where does that come from?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘From language. Logos . Reason — the word — it’s the same thing. Why do you have no memories that precede the acquisition of language? Because before you acquired language, you didn’t exist. There was no you for your experiences to adhere to.’

In the sky to the north-west, the rain clouds had parted. A patch of blue became visible and the sunlight conjured an inappropriate rainbow over the damp pavilions. I had a sudden recollection of the park as it had been: the flowerbeds tended, the exhibits proclaiming the tattered but not yet laughable idea of Soviet superiority.

‘The article I’ve given you was published by Sinan’s father in 1946. It is the theoretical foundation for the procedure which Trikhonov underwent.’

‘Does it work?’

‘Yes, but not exactly as he conceived. Malevin’s ideas were too far ahead of the technological capabilities of his era — like Babbage and Lovelace. But we can now call upon very sophisticated technology for the application of these theories. You know what I mean by a piano roll?’

I told her I did: they’re an antiquated recording technology that captures the melody and dynamics of a particular performance and then allows it to be replayed on a special piano.

‘Conceive, if you can, a piano roll that can listen and respond, both to itself and to the music of an orchestra. It would have the distinctive musical identity of the original pianist, but also the capacity to improvise and embellish. A sophisticated enough version would be indistinguishable from its creator.’

I asked if she was saying that Jack was a robot.

She coloured at this suggestion. ‘Such terms carry their own baggage and aren’t very helpful. The distinction between biological consciousness and what we still tend to think of as machines is increasingly arbitrary.’

‘Can they make one of these piano rolls out of anyone?’

‘In theory, yes, anyone can be coded.’

‘So why Johnson?’

‘A number of reasons. The fact that he authored a dictionary is of course an inestimable advantage. Also because of the abundance of written sources — first and third person. And because the hypotactic structure of his sentences lends itself to the forms of logical branching that form the basis of the code.’

‘But why involve me?’

‘From Hunter and Sinan’s point of view, you were well placed to answer the key question.’

‘Which is?’

‘Authenticity. Was he real? Did he have life, or the simulation of life? Did he merely repeat speech without comprehension, like Montaigne’s parrot, or was he an authentic, autonomous subject? The distinction is the crux of the work. It must be the real thing. Otherwise it is not obshchee delo. ’

‘That’s what you wanted me for?’

‘That is what they hoped to achieve.’

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What about you?’

‘For myself … Strange as it sounds, perhaps I hoped for something very like this.’

She paused. The rainbow had vanished. A man in filthy jeans had emerged from somewhere and was spreading gravel noisily with a big spade.

‘This?’ I asked incredulously. ‘That bloke? Us sitting here? Jack’s death? The … the termination?’

‘Of course not. Not all these things. But the paper I chose was unlikely to fool a conscientious expert. And I was lucky enough to persuade Hunter to engage the services of someone who spoke Russian.’

‘You wanted me to doubt their authenticity.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I need an ally.’

I could see her watching my expression as the implications of her words unfolded. I remembered our first meeting, her feet on the staircase; ‘You pity him?’ — and her eyes averted at the thought of my compassion towards Jack; our drunken intimacy. She had drawn me into the conspiracy. I need an ally. I have been living in the shadow of those words ever since.

We sat in silence for a while. Finally, she gestured towards the rocket which rose up in front of us, topped with its tiny capsule. ‘Before Gagarin, you remember there was Laika, the dog we sent into space? Afterwards, the chief scientist, Gazenko, said, “We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.” Do you understand?’ She searched my face for a reaction. ‘Some progress has an unacceptable price. For a very long time, I believed that what we were doing was a good thing. This idea of Fedorov, obshchee delo , it offers so many possibilities, so much hope. But then we began to apply it. Gradually, I understood that what we were doing was ethically inexcusable. I saw the guilty part I was playing. I became ashamed of myself. This version of obshchee delo is wrong. Latterly, they have failed to heed even the most basic moral safeguards. I no longer ask where the bodies come from. Misha says they are using vagrants, bomzhi , and deserters. This is not what Fedorov conceived of. He called it obshchee, not tainoe delo. ’ The distinction she made in Russian was between a common task and a secret one.

‘Why don’t you just write a letter to the papers?’

‘Do you believe what I have told you?’

I said nothing. It was clear that the answer was no.

She smiled. ‘So, what chance do I have to persuade another?’

I spent that evening in the lobby bar of my hotel, eating chilled soup made out of rye beer and cucumbers, trying to untangle the dense and scientific language of Malevin senior’s article with the help of a Russian dictionary.

In his paper, so far as I was able to understand it, Malevin argued that certain external records of brain activity could be minutely related to the biological foundations of personality and memory. With judicious and sophisticated handling, he contended, these records — in principle, various, but in practice almost exclusively linguistic — could yield codes which mapped every nuance of what he called the ‘core complex’ (in Russian, sushchestvenniy kompleks ). This core complex seemed to be more or less what we consider to be human consciousness. Malevin claimed that with enough material it was theoretically possible to reconstruct the core complex in a new organism. Malevin gave the name ‘proxy complex’ ( zapasnyi kompleks ) to the theoretical being that would result if an exogenously derived code were inserted into a new subject; it was a cuckoo entity perching inside a new carcass.

The terms were confusing and it was slow work making sense of his argument. I knew Vera would have been horrified if she could have seen me riffling through my dictionary in a public place. It was a small but deliberate act of rebellion on my part. She had insisted on leaving the park first. I was to remain on the bench for five more minutes. I watched her walk away, with that slight limp, past the broken Friendship of the Peoples Fountain, dwarfed by its huge and obscurely sinister gold statues. Vera’s paranoia seemed to border on delusion, yet it was far from being the least credible aspect of her claims.