Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Red Queen continued. ‘We know that this thing does weird things to chance. Right out on the end of the bell-curve things. It’s not like it weights the dice a bit. It’s like it makes the dice land on one corner and stay there, or makes all the spots fall off spontaneously. Well, this plane.’

‘If it did assemble this plane -’

‘Which we’re assuming for the moment it did. This plane is not purely random. It’s a thing. It’s an idea. It has to do with an expectation – whose, we don’t yet know.’

‘Why should it be?’

‘That’s what they think. That’s what we’re working on. In quantum mechanics you can’t look at something without affecting it – that’s for very, very tiny things, at least. But if they could… well, the working theory is that this has somehow turned that round – there’s a professor we pulled in – MIT guy, came highly recommended – who says that it might be designed to “weaponise the observer’s paradox”. It will take what you’re expecting, and then something else will happen. Or, if you’re expecting it to do that, perhaps it will make the original thing that you were expecting happen after all. Before you stopped expecting it.’

‘How does it know what you’re expecting?’

‘When you stare into the abyss…’

‘Now you’re being facetious.’

‘Yes. We don’t know. If we did, we’d have built it ourselves.’

‘So it’s affecting random events and making them not random?’

‘Not quite. It’s more as if it’s doing things that are surprising.’

‘Plane appears in Alabama,’ conceded Bree. ‘That’s surprising.’

‘Yes,’ said Red Queen. ‘It is.’

‘So, Jones,’ Bree said later. It was lunchtime and they were eating burritos. Bree hadn’t wanted to broach what she’d been told about Jones with him until she’d had the chance to size him up. But now she’d spent more time with him, she’d got a better sense of the way in which Jones’s condition might relate to the job in hand. Besides, she was curious. ‘You’re hard to surprise?’

Jones looked at her levelly. He had taken off his sunglasses and his eyes were a striking ceramic grey. He was, Bree thought, quite attractive. They had, earlier on, reached an accommodation on the smoking issue. Bree’s asthma, aggravated by Jones’s perpetual smoking – how many packets a day did he get through? – had reduced her to near-speechless wheezing.

She had wound down first her window, then – pointedly – his, then cranked the air con up to full blast. He hadn’t so much as interrupted his stream of cigarettes, so much as asked her whether she minded if he smoked. Nothing of the sort.

Finally, she had said: ‘Jones, I’m dying here.’ He had looked at her with quizzical sharpness. ‘Would you mind, please, not smoking while we’re in the car together?’

‘You want me to stop smoking cigarettes.’

‘Yes. Please.’

‘Certainly.’

And, with no signs of ill will, he had.

As soon as they’d got out at the Taco Bell, though, Jones had lit a cigarette. They were outside in the children’s play area. Bree had ordered first: two beef combo burritos and a big Sprite. Jones had ordered the same thing. Now Bree was eating her second burrito. Jones was still on his first, because he was smoking in between mouthfuls.

‘Hard to surprise,’ he said. ‘No. Impossible to surprise.’

He took a drag from his cigarette, and continued to chew. He showed – as he tended to – no real sign of continuing to speak. Bree pressed him.

‘This special condition of yours,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it. Why are you not possible to surprise? See everything coming, do you? Got it all figured out?’

‘No. I don’t see anything coming. I don’t expect things,’ he said without inflection. ‘I’m apsychotic.’

‘You’re what?’

‘Apsychotic. Not “psychotic”. It means no soul. My doctor told me to explain it this way: I don’t have an imagination.’

Bree chewed her burrito and looked at him.

Jones waited a bit, then continued to speak. He sounded dutiful, as if what he was saying had been learned by rote. ‘I say my doctor told me to use that phrase, but I do not know what it means. I cannot imagine an imagination. I do not know what you mean by “surprise”. I can’t talk about “future”. Things take place. I do not expect them. I do not expect anything else. I have no expectations at all.’

‘Whoa,’ said Bree. ‘Jones, how can it be possible for a person not to have an imagination?’

‘There are areas of the brain that associate objects that are not the same together, that associate -’ he hesitated, frowning – ‘imaginary objects with real ones. Those areas in my brain are not the same. Imaginary objects don’t exist for me. I can’t understand how they exist for everybody else. I cannot use metaphors. I don’t know what it would mean to do so. Dr Albert said it’s “like explaining colour to a blind man”.’

Bree continued to chew and continued to look.

‘I don’t understand that,’ added Jones, ‘either.’

‘There exist more extreme forms of my condition. I can use language. I can read photographs and even some pictures. I know that -’ he pointed to her burrito – ‘this food is called a burrito and that both this food -’ he pointed to his – ‘and that food -’ he pointed back to hers – ‘is the same food, called burrito. Olga Thurmer, twelve, in Oslo, has severe apsychosis. She cannot – Dr Albert says this is a joke – “see the wood for the trees”? She went to a wood. The wood was not “tree and tree and tree and tree and tree and tree and tree”: she gave all the trees proper names. She could not see what they had in common.

‘James Hart, seventy-two, in Brisbane, Australia, has severe apsychosis. He has never spoken. Nelson Kogbara, thirty-four, in northern Nigeria, has severe apsychosis. He cannot perceive the borders of objects. When objects move in space he does not recognise them. Ava Howard, twelve, and her identical twin sister Ana, from Bushey in the United Kingdom, have severe apsychosis. They cannot tell themselves apart. Han Fa, ninety-nine, from -’

‘OK,’ said Bree. ‘OK. Stop. So you can talk.’

‘It means I can’t think about anything that doesn’t exist. I can’t -’ he seemed to reach for a phrase that did not come naturally – ‘see things coming. I don’t desire things in the future.’

‘You seem to like cigarettes,’ said Bree, who was already starting to wonder about the wisdom of letting Jones drive the car.

‘That’s a chemical craving. That’s habit. I don’t make mental pictures about cigarettes. It’s hard to explain. I don’t fear things in the future.’

‘Apparently not,’ said Bree. ‘Do you know what those cigarettes are doing to your lungs?’

‘Yes,’ said Jones, and didn’t say anything else.

‘Ain’t hearda your Mr Smart,’ the guy in the hat said in the umpteenth motel Sherman and Davidoff tried. Best Western, Motel 6, Holiday Inn, Marriott, Days and Crown Plaza had, as Davidoff had predicted, come up blank. Now they were onto the small places, the ones without computerised directories you could get into; and, probably, the ones that might waive the need to show a passport or a driving licence.

These were the sorts of places he’d be staying. The chances, mind, that if he was bothering to stay in this sort of place he’d be doing so under his own name, were slimmer. But they’d nothing else to do, and Sherman had insisted on at least trying so that they could say they had tried. It beat listening to Neil Young over and over again, and as long as he hadn’t been through the airport he was not likely to have got far from Atlanta. A picture of him might have been helpful, though.