John Connolly - The Creeps - A Samuel Johnson Tale

48. Look, this is going to get very confusing. Unless someone decides otherwise, let’s call Dorothy “Reginald,” but stick with the use of the feminine pronoun. That way, she’ll be Reginald, and we can still refer to her as “her,” if you see what I mean.

It’s very troubling when characters take a funny unplanned turn in a book. They really should do what their creators tell them to do, but that brings us to the whole thorny subject of the problem of free will. If I knew what was going to happen at the end of this book—which, at this point, I don’t—then characters like Reginald/Dorothy would have to do whatever I told them to do, because that would be what was needed to make the plot work.

But right now I’m not sure what’s going to happen, and I’m discovering the plot of the book as I write it. This makes me a bit like a god, in that I created these characters, but not the type of god who knows everything in advance. The thing is, if I was that kind of god, and characters like Reginald/Dorothy were, in fact, real, would the fact that I knew what was going to happen to them mean that they had no free will of their own?

Some philosophers have argued that, if there is a god, and he knows everything that will happen in the future, then free will doesn’t really exist. I’m not sure that’s the case because, if it is, then we are all like characters in a book being written by a writer who knows the ending. Maybe it’s truer to say that, if there is a god, then he just happens to know how our story ends, and the choices we make are the ones that will lead to that particular ending.

So can we ever really predict what people will do? Perhaps on one level we can: we are biological machines, each of us made up of—remember?—atoms, and those atoms are made up of—yes, that’s right—quarks and gluons. If we can predict how each of these particles will behave in a given situation, then we can predict how lots of them packed together into a single human body will behave, right?

Yes, theoretically. In practice, it’s a bit harder. We like to think that we’re something more than just a collection of atoms. We use the term I to describe ourselves. We have a consciousnesss. (Philosophers call this experience of mental states—seeing colors, smelling food, feeling pain—the “qualia.”) But what if even consciousness is just an illusion, another product of the actions of all those quarks and gluons in our brains? “I” may not even exist, and if I start having doubts about that, then where does it leave you? You may not exist either. My brain may just have invented you. In that case, you’re as real as Reginald/Dorothy, and I can make you do what I want.

Right, I want you all to club together to buy me a yacht. You can send it care of my publishers. Thank you. After all, even an imaginary yacht is better than no yacht at all.

49. Deepest, darkest space is very cold, so cold that all molecules stop moving. This is called “absolute zero” and is calculated as −273 degrees Celsius, although the temperature in space is probably closer to −270 degrees Celsius because of three degrees of background microwave radiation.

So how long could you survive in space if you weren’t wearing a suit? First of all, you shouldn’t try to hold your breath, as that will cause the air in your lungs to expand and burst things that shouldn’t burst, so you’d die painfully but quickly. If you didn’t hold your breath, you’d probably have about fifteen seconds before you passed out. You wouldn’t get frostbite at first, as you would in cold temperatures on Earth, because there’s no air in space, and frostbite is a result of heat transfer accelerated by air. But your skin would start to burn because of ultraviolet radiation, and your skin tissue would swell.

Overall, then, you’d probably have a good thirty seconds before serious, permanent injury occurred, and a minute or two before you’d begin to die. In 1965, a spacesuit leaked in a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. The gentleman involved, who was rescued and recovered, remained conscious for about fourteen seconds. His last memory of the incident was of the saliva on his tongue beginning to boil. I just thought you’d like to know that.

XVIII

In Which Crudford Proves to Be the Smartest Gelatinous Blob in the Room

THE GREAT MALEVOLENCE, THE Watcher by his side, had been spending a very long time staring at the bits and pieces of what had once been Ba’al, the most fearsome of its allies, its second-in-command, its left-hand demon, and considering the problem presented by them.

It had seemed like such a good idea to allow Ba’al to travel to Earth, exploiting the gap in space and time created by the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. Ba’al was an entity of pure awfulness, but Ba’al was also completely loyal to the Great Malevolence, and there weren’t many beings in Hell who could be trusted entirely. This was one of the problems with running a business based entirely around evil, destructiveness, and rage. It attracted bad sorts.

Unfortunately, the successful planning of the invasion of Earth had required Ba’al to take on human form, and the particular human form that Ba’al had chosen to inhabit was that of Mrs. Abernathy. But Mrs. Abernathy had turned out (a) to have a strong personality of her own; and (b) to be horrible even before she became possessed by a demon. And so the personalities of Ba’al and Mrs. Abernathy had become mixed up in one body, and much of Mrs. Abernathy had come out on top. This had left the Great Malevolence with a demonic lieutenant who liked to dress up in a lady’s skin and clothing. Ba’al didn’t even like being called Ba’al anymore. It was “Mrs. Abernathy” or nothing. Not that this was a huge problem, but it was unusual.

The Great Malevolence missed Ba’al—sorry, Mrs. Abernathy. It wasn’t as though they had ever played draughts or tiddlywinks or Twister together, or gone for long walks with a picnic at the end. No, it was simply that, without her, the whole business of trying to take over the Multiverse was a lot harder, and the Great Malevolence, in addition to being great and malevolent, was also more than a little lazy. It came with being in charge: if you can find someone else to do the hard work, then why would you do it yourself?

But now all that was left of Mrs. Abernathy were various body parts in jars, and those body parts weren’t doing much at all. Quite often, when it came to the residents of Hell, you could disassemble them into all kinds of small pieces, and each bit would do its best to continue being evil. Fingers would crawl across floors and try to poke the nearest eye; jawbones would try to bite; and intestines would slither like snakes and coil themselves around the nearest neck. Really, there was never a dull moment in Hell when it came to tearing things apart.

“Why does she not react more strongly?” asked the Great Malevolence. “Why does this chamber not vibrate with the force of her evil?”

If Crudford could have shrugged, then he would have. Instead, he lifted his hat and scratched his head in puzzlement. He scratched slightly too hard, though, and his fingers appeared inside his head somewhere behind his eyeball. He pulled them out, thought about wiping them clean, and decided, well, why bother? Slowly, he examined each jar in turn, taking note of its contents on a small notepad that he kept in his hat. When he had finished, he went to work on his notepad. He scribbled and drew. He crossed things out, and did a lot of sucking on his pencil. The Watcher tried to peer over his shoulder to see what was being produced, but Crudford shielded the notepad from view like a small boy worried that his homework was about to be copied by the student next to him.