The Treatment

Sometimes the cure is worse than the illness.

I’ve often thought I should write an account of the so-called “zombie crisis” of 2020. That’s the term my son came up with for it, and he’s one of the very few people who know about it. I have resisted until now, because the fact is, my role in it was not covered in glory. Actually, the whole thing was my fault.

What I’m about to write is as much a confession as anything else. The time has come. I’m extremely old now, my wife passed away two years ago, and anyway, no-one’s going to believe me who doesn’t already know the truth.

When Laura and I got married, in Trieste in Italy, I knew that her niece was terribly ill, and was expected to die. We considered postponing our wedding. Laura was close to her sister, Carmela, and she spent a lot of time helping her. It was entirely possible that our honeymoon might get interrupted by a funeral.

Gianna was only ten years old, and she had leukaemia. It had proven resistant to treatment.

On the other hand, we knew she might live even another two years, or longer if a miracle occurred, so we decided to chance it.

At the time I was eking out a living editing videos for people. Most of my time was spent on my experiments, and Laura was very understanding of that.

A year passed after our marriage and Gianna was still alive, thank God, and Laura was pregnant. Even I was starting to think I should just get what people call a “proper job”, but I was beginning to make real progress with my scientific work.

I still remember vividly the day I had the breakthrough. Really it was the end of a series of breakthroughs, but eventually I achieved something really spectacular.

Laura was out helping Carmela with something. I quickly repeated the experiment, and then again, five more times, until I was satisfied that the results were absolutely repeatable. Then I prepared a little surprise for Laura and sat down to wait for her to come home with a huge idiotic smile on my face.

When she came through the door she immediately started talking about Gianna and Carmela. Gianna’s condition was worsening. The doctors wanted her to go into a hospice and they didn’t think she’d last more than three months, but Gianna, having faced death for so long at such a young age, wanted to die at home, and her mother, Carmela, supported her wish.

I knew Laura just had to get all that stuff off her chest, and I waited patiently for her to finish talking. She sat on the sofa next to me and leaned back, exhausted. Her pregnancy was just about beginning to show.

She wasn’t in the best of moods, but we’d been preparing ourselves for Gianna’s death for two years, so it wasn’t a complete shock either.

Eventually she asked me what I’d been up to.

“Actually, I’ve got a surprise for you.” I said.

“A surprise?” she said, a little smile creeping onto her face. “Something nice, I hope. I could do with a nice surprise.”

“Yes, it’s great surprise.” I said, and I went and fetched the apple I had prepared.

“An apple?” she said. “Oh amore, you shouldn’t have. This must have cost you a fortune.”

“Slice it in half.” I said.

“What, with a knife?” she said.

“That’s the usual way to cut an apple in half.” I said.

She smiled again, wondering what I was up to, regarding me curiously.

Then she got up, put the apple on a plate and prepared to cut it open with a knife.

“Not like that.” I said, turning the apple and guiding her hand. “Like this.”

“Very precise.” she said, and she cut the apple in half. “What now?” she said.

And then she saw it. On the exposed inner surfaces of the apple was her name, Laura, written in an elaborate font.

She gasped.

“How did you do this?” she said.

“My research.” I said. “I’ve finally got it working. I knew it could work.”

For several years I had been working on a theory I’d devised. When Einstein developed the theory of Special Relativity (in those days it being the fashion to divide theories into “special” and “general” parts), he formulated the theory on the basis of four axioms. Three of them were things anyone would agree with, and the fourth assumed the speed of light to be constant, even relative to moving observers. That is, it doesn’t matter how fast you move; light will always appear to be moving faster than you by the same amount.

This was necessary to make sense of the known laws of electromagnetics, as summarised by Maxwell.

What I found marvellous about Einstein’s work, was the way he had distilled the very essence of space and time down to those four axioms. And yet, something in the theory still bothered me. The theory, like all of physics, was shot through with the infinitesimal points of Euclid.

Clearly mathematical points are not found in nature, nor moments in time. These are only abstractions.

I patiently worked to formulate a radical new theory, drawing substantial inspiration from Heisenberg’s formulation of quantum mechanics. I devised a theory in which nothing material actually exists; the whole of physics is instead seen in terms of the outcomes of observations, together with standardised steps that are taken to make those observations.

After two years of nearly unremitting effort, during which Laura’s patience was thoroughly tested along with my own powers of concentration, I was finally able to formulate a new theory of physics. Then I set to work to test it. My savings by then were almost exhausted. It was at that point that I turned to making a living as best I could via the Internet, earning enough only to pay half the mortgage and some bills, while I worked on the machine that I believed would validate my theory.

The apple, with Laura’s name written inside its unbroken skin, was the ultimate proof that my theory was correct. I had correctly understood things about space and matter that no-one else had ever understood.

I took her hand and led her through to the little room I used as my laboratory and workshop.

“This machine,” I told her, “can scan organic matter almost down individual atoms, and alter and re-arrange matter without touching the surrounding material.”

“It’s incredible.” she said. “It’s amazing. I knew you’d succeed.”

We hugged, and then, tentatively, she said to me gently, “Pete, will it help us pay the bills?”

I stared deeply into her eyes.

“Not only that.” I said. “It will do something even better. It will cure Gianna.”

What do you call it when someone wants to hope for something, but the thing seems too good to be true by such a wide margin that they fear hope itself? I’ve never seen it written so clearly on someone’s face.

“Really?” she said, tears forming in her eyes.

“I wouldn’t say so if I wasn’t sure.” I replied.

I explained to her what the machine could do. As it stood, it simply followed a template and restructured fructose into caramel along a specified path within the fruit. I knew that if I paired the machine with a neural network, it would be able to track down the defective cells in Gianna’s bones and repair them at the genetic level.

Another possibility that I considered, was that I could have the machine identify errant cells in Gianna’s bone marrow, the ones that were creating defective white blood cells, and simply eliminate them. If there were still healthy stem cells left in her bones, those should take over once the defective cells were eliminated.

I bought a couple of metal suitcases so that I’d have a spare in case I messed one of them up, and painstakingly fitted the machine into one of the cases, gluing a keyboard inside and fitting an LCD screen in the lid.

I also fitted a computer inside the case, under the keyboard.

I knew that I was in a race against time and I worked like a demon to finish the contraption. It took me only two weeks. Getting it all to fit was tricky. Frequently I tore my hair out thinking this was no time to be trying to make it look nice, but the machine didn’t take up a lot of space and I knew it could be made to fit in the case. At the end I had something I could carry around in my hand and it looked great. Everything was glued or screwed in very firmly, and I didn’t have to worry that I’d break something carrying it around.

The next thing I had to do was to use the machine to scan Gianna’s bone marrow. That was easily arranged. Laura and I visited her together at least once a week. On our next visit, I took the metal case and stood it by her bed as we talked. That was close enough for the machine to analyse her cells.

“What’s in the case?” she asked me, her voice weak with illness.

“It’s a surprise.” I said. “I’ll show you next week.”

“I might be dead in a week.” she said.

Laura took her hand.

“Tesoro,” said Laura, “you’ll still be with us in a week. And then Uncle Pete is going to tell you about his new amazing discovery.”

Gianna smiled.

“Is that’s what’s in the case?” she asked.

It was horrible to see her so ill. She was pale as death, and her eyes sallow and rimmed with red.

When I got home I immediately checked what data the machine had gathered. By comparing the stem cell gene sequences that it had located against gene databases and the rest of her DNA, I was able to find the problem. All of the defective cells contained the same mutated gene. There were also plenty of healthy cells left, but they were being crowded out dramatically by the mutated cells.

I decided to follow my second proposed strategy; that is, I would destroy the defective cells, leaving the healthy cells to repopulate the bone marrow. I figured I could do that by simply targeting a gene involved in cell reproduction within the defective cells, and breaking the DNA at that point.

My plan had to be explained to Carmela, obviously. Up until this point I had told her nothing about it, in case I hit some unforeseen road block. I hadn’t wanted to get her hopes up unnecessarily.

When Laura and I told her about the machine and I performed my apple trick for her, at first she was incredulous, and then she began to cry.

“Grazie Dio for your work.” she said, taking my hand in hers. “This is a gift from God. God has sent you to me. You must do it. Cure her.”

She looked at me with teary imploring eyes.

I think her daughter’s long illness had made her more religious. Her Catholic faith was the only thing that had kept her going. Her husband, Marco, had died in a car accident before Gianna’s illness. This woman knew what it was to suffer.

We all went to Gianna’s room together. She was asleep. In those days she slept a lot.

“We should explain it to her.” I said.

Carmela shook her head.

“Don’t trouble her with it.” she said. “She’s already endured so many terrible treatments. I’m her mother. I give you full consent.”

I cleared a space on the bedside table and opened the case. I had already programmed the machine to destroy the mutated cells, but I wanted to do some last-minute checks.

After ten minutes, everything was ready.

“Are you sure?” I asked Carmela.

She nodded.

I hit the return key, and the machine began to locate the bad cells and disrupt their DNA.

It took an hour, and at the end of it, Gianna was still peacefully sleeping.

“It’s done.” I said.

As if on cue, Gianna suddenly began to wake up. She stretched lethargically, and, noticing the open case, asked me again what it was.

With a look at Carmela, I began to gently explain everything.

Then her eyes seemed to abruptly glaze, she coughed, and she began to have a fit.

“Has this happened before?” I asked, in a state of panic.

“No!” said Carmela. “What’s wrong with her?”, she asked wildly.

“I don’t know!” I said.

We called an ambulance, and Gianna was taken to the nearby hospital.

The doctors told us her situation was grave. She had suffered some sort of immune reaction.

I immediately understood what had happened. I should have destroyed the cells’ DNA slowly, not all at once. I thought they would take a long time to die anyway, but evidently Gianna’s immune system had somehow detected the altered cells and was reacting against them.

For two days it was touch and ago. That was a terrible, terrible time. If Gianna died, it would be me who had killed her, and only due to a stupid oversight. Laura barely spoke to me the whole time. I don’t know what was going on in her mind.

We spent most of our time in the hospital with Carmela, who slept overnight there. Gianna was in intensive care and not even Carmela was allowed to see much of her.

On the morning of the third day, a doctor came to us with good news.

“She’s awake, and the immune reaction has subsided.” he said.

Carmela put her hand to her mouth, suppressing a cry of joy.

“There’s something else.” said the doctor. “The leukaemia: it’s in remission. Her blood is filling with healthy white cells. We have no explanation for it. It’s a miracle.”

The rest of the day was truly wonderful. Carmela was ecstatic and did nothing but cry tears of joy. I could hardly remember seeing her when she wasn’t crying, but this time, it was from happiness. We were allowed to see Gianna; she was sitting up and eating. I thought I could detect the beginnings of a healthy colour in her pale cheeks that I hadn’t seen for a long time.

Laura and I drove home around two o’clock, after a light lunch. We were excitedly discussing what we would do next. I would announce my invention to the world, of course, and entire classes of disease would soon become a thing of the past.

At home I began to order some equipment I needed to assemble the necessary experimental results for publication. I planned to side-step the journals and publish the paper online, but I would also send it to various prominent professors of physics, upload videos of my work to the Internet, and contact the press. I thought I could be ready in three months. We still had another five months to go before the baby was due.

I needed to write a convincing scientific paper, and for that I needed to collect various figures and statistics, so that I could illustrate my theory with demonstrations of the effects I had discovered.

There was no point me going around writing names in apples with the machine I had built into the case. People would think I was a conjurer, not a scientist. Neither could I legally use the machine to cure people. I hadn’t gone through any of the proper procedures.

In the end our baby was born before I was ready. There was far more to be done than I had anticipated. We named our son Marco, after Laura’s deceased husband.

All in all I spent eight months working feverishly to prepare for publication. At night I slept poorly. Often I woke up dreaming about dying people whom my invention could have saved, if only I had been able to tell the world about it. There was nothing to be done about the situation, horrible though that thought was. If I did not prepare an adequately persuasive paper, I would be written off as just another amateur lunatic.

Once I had uploaded the paper, I half expected to have to put in another year or more of effort attempting to convince people that I had indeed discovered something amazing, and could prove it, but that was not to be. A professor from a prestigious American university contacted me almost immediately.

Within a month my work was being tested by several different teams all over the world.

If anything I had overestimated the difficulty in conveying my theory to the scientific community. They were quick to grasp what I had discovered. My logic was irrefutable, and my experiments easy to replicate.

In the autumn of 2018, the public became aware of my work, via viral posts and videos on the Internet, created by researchers involved with the experimental tests. The world exploded with news of the discovery.

An immense clamour arose for the technique I had used on Gianna to be made available to others with similar illnesses. It was to take a further few weeks for people to realise that I had invented not just a cure for those particular conditions, but for a vast array of diseases. Practically the only common serious disorder that my machines could not cure was hemorrhagic stroke, and I had high hopes of finding a way to treat even that.

I knew that I had not found a cure for death itself. People would still grow old, and eventually something would kill them that my discovery could not fix. Probably whole new classes of diseases would arise in the very elderly; disorders of extreme old age that could simply not be fixed and that people would previously never have lived long enough to experience.

Even so, my work would almost eliminate premature death from disease in any country that could manage to assure people access to the technology. A brave new world was being ushered in.

When the first machines were placed in hospitals, immense backlogs quickly arose. In Cambridge, England, where one of the first machines was installed, the town became so packed with the terminally-ill and their families that the Government was forced to treat the situation as an emergency, as if a hurricane had levelled the town, flying in tents and food.

The same problems were to emerge at locations all over the world. The news was full of nothing else. Rioting broke out in Paris and people attempted to storm the Pitié Salpêtrière, convinced the hospital was withholding treatment for inscrutable and nefarious reasons.

Thousands of amateurs around the world, perhaps millions, began to construct their own machines in the hope of alleviating the situation, or with a view to treating an ill relative, or even themselves.

There were immediate and lasting shortages of key components required to build the machines, which aggravated the situation further.

Not for another six months or so did the situation start to be brought under proper control, with everyone who required access to the machines able to obtain access.

As for myself, I was the most famous man in the world; an overnight sensation. Still, not everyone viewed me in the best possible light. Some said I had held back my research in order to profit from it; an accusation that cut me to the quick. Everywhere I went, I found myself explaining why I had taken so long to release my results.

The sick and the dying clustered around me as though I were the second coming of Jesus. I could not legally treat any of them, and it would have been dangerous to try. My house was not a hospital, and I was not a doctor. The horrible memory of those few days when I had thought myself responsible for Gianna’s impending death was seared into my memory, and I wasn’t planning to ever put myself in such a position again.

Slowly, bit by bit, the situation calmed. I refused most invitations, wanting to be at home with Laura and Marco, but there were some obligations I could not avoid. I tried to keep them to a minimum.

The news about Blake initially simply got buried in the melee. He was one of those things that seems to creep up on you; it’s nowhere, until suddenly, it’s everywhere.

Marco was sleeping and we were enjoying a respite from a seemingly endless list of tasks, drinking tea on the sofa, when Laura told me about him.

“You haven’t heard about him?” she said.

“No.” I said. “Who is he?”

“He’s leading a political movement.” she said. “But it’s more than that. It’s way deeper than that. He has a whole philosophy of life that everyone says is amazing.”

“What kind of philosophy?”

“People won’t say. They say you have to hear it from him.”

“Let’s look up a video of him then.” I said.

“There aren’t any.” she replied. “His followers won’t allow it. If anyone makes a video they get really upset. He does livestreams but people aren’t allowed to record them.”

I sipped my tea thoughtfully.

“He has an amazing philosophy of life but we’re not allowed to know what it is.”

“Must be pretty good because half the world’s in love with him.”

“People are crazy.” I said. “Sounds like mass hysteria.”

We managed to catch one of Blake’s livestreams later that week. He spoke in platitudes that sounded like a mixture of How to Win Friends and Influence People with bits from religious texts and popular philosophy books.

“I can’t believe people are going for this rubbish.” I said.

Laura sucked on her lip.

“I don’t know, some of it’s OK.” she said.

“It’s OK but why are people going crazy over it?”

“I really have no idea.” she said, shaking her head.

Marco was crying so she went off to see what was up with him. I sat there watching the livestream, bemused.

Blake looked like a businessman more than anything else, and not a very impressive one. He seemed the sort of person who, back in the 90s, might have been selling double glazing or conservatories.

He wore a suit with a black t-shirt underneath and his hair looked like it was the victim of a cheap transplant job. And yet the camera panned around to reveal thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people, all massed around a podium in the middle of a piazza. With a start I realised it was none other than Unity Square in Trieste. If I drove into town, presumably I could see him in person, although he was surrounded by so many people that I would still only really be able to see him on the huge screens they’d put up.

I shouted to Laura. “Hey, he’s here in Trieste!”

“I think he’s from here.” she said. “He speaks here a lot.”

“I had no idea.” I said.

I thought Blake would be a flash in the pan; some fad that people got carried away with and then forgot about, but his popularity only seemed to increase.

We were round at Carmela’s one day when Gianna was back at school, and even she started going on about Blake.

“I can’t really see the appeal.” I said. “The stuff he says, I’ve heard it all before.”

“It’s not just what he says.” said Carmela. “It’s how he says it. He makes you feel … I don’t know … hope. But not only hope. Joy. He makes you feel like everything will be OK if we listen to him. Tune into his streams and you’ll understand. It took me a while to get it too. Only last week I still didn’t understand properly, but this week something clicked, and I got it. He’s a genius. Perhaps the greatest genius ever to have lived.”

Laura and I exchanged baffled glances. Since I had cured Gianna, Carmela had seemed almost starstruck around me. Before people had started talking about Blake, I had been the talk of the whole world.

It’s not that I was jealous. It was just that I couldn’t understand Blake’s appeal.

I had cured nearly all disease, and what had he done? Recycled the Bhagavad Gita?

Perhaps I was a bit jealous.

I was still being invited to speak at conferences all the time, and on the occasions when I accepted, they always asked me my opinion on Blake, and I never knew what to say. I had the feeling that criticism definitely wasn’t wanted. They all expected me to love him as much as they did.

One day I was driving home along Via Commerciale and I counted at least ten massive billboards with Blake’s face on them. It appeared they weren’t even all from the same organisation.

When I stopped off to get some petrol, some random man asked me if I’d heard Blake’s latest speech. He told me it was amazing. His eyes were moist with strong emotion.

It’s fair to say that I was getting rather freaked out. Half the people Laura and I knew had become absolute devotees of Blake’s, and half of the rest seemed like they were gradually being swept along with the tide of hysterical appreciation.

I told myself that was just how life is sometimes. Great leaders come along and people get obsessed with them. My work had caused the fear of death to recede to the back of people’s minds, and now they wanted meaning. They wanted something to cling to. They wanted someone who could make sense of it all.

It was one of those patronising potted psychology explanations that allows one to put one’s mind to rest without actually explaining anything, but what other conclusion could I have drawn? It could well be argued that, had I been more humble, less filled with a concealed sense of superiority, I could have made more of an effort to understand the appeal of Blake’s speeches and his personality. I might still have said to people, “I don’t approve of him and here are my reasons” but I might have properly understood the appeal of Blake.

Yes, that could be argued, but I was soon to discover that no matter how well I had understood Blake, no matter how much I had humbled myself, I would never have understood why people loved him anyway.

As the months went by and Marco took to crawling around, I began to hear sinister rumours about Blake. People said that those who offended him died with suspicious regularity, and it was noticeable that his ever-growing herd of admirers didn’t care at all.

Neither did the police, nor the judiciary, and what’s more, Blake seemed to carry a surprising degree of political influence. Any politician who dared speak against him quickly found his career taking a downturn, and whatever Blake advocated, numerous eager politicians would rush to implement.

Blake held no official position in politics, nor even in business, yet he was fast becoming the most powerful man on Earth, and some said he had already attained that status.

Most people were quick to dismiss the rumours of human sacrifice, when they arose. People who spoke up about it were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, capable of believing anything.

There were those who said Blake had taken to murdering his enemies in bizarre Aztec-inspired rituals, where their still-beating hearts would be plucked out of their chests by robed priests.

These rumours seemed so over-the-top that few serious people believed them, and before long the people who spread them were being hauled before the courts for slander or libel, and fast-tracked into prison. Judges all over the world gave speeches extolling Blake’s virtues and damning the accused for having tried to blacken the name of so great a force for good in our world.

It was as if criticism of Blake was treated as blasphemy against some unspoken universal religion to which half the population now secretly subscribed.

By the time Marco was two years old and prone to grilling me on all and every topic that came to his notice, governments around the world had introduced public hanging for murderers and for certain special categories of offences, which seemed to include getting on the wrong side of Blake. Italy was, by then, a police state, and those of us who still disliked the man, which accounted for perhaps a third of the population, lived in fear.

Blake didn’t seem very Italian but he had made Trieste his home, and I avoided going into town because it was always full of enormous posters and statues of the man, and organisations of all kinds promoting his various ideas.

It was then that I made the acquaintance of Rigo. What kind of name is Rigo? I still don’t even know whether it was his given name or family name, but that was how he called himself.

Laura and Marco and I were staying in an apartment we’d rented on the outskirts of town while we were having our house redecorated and the roof repaired, and I was replying to some emails, working on my laptop on the table in the kitchen, when there was a knock at the door.

I thought it must be our neighbour, who often stopped by to chat with Laura, but when I opened the door a tall thin man immediately pushed past me.

“I need to talk to you urgently.” he said. “Shut the door. Is anyone else in the house?”

He was smartly-dressed and had a short brownish beard and wore sunglasses. His posture was strikingly upright, as though he had been in the army or simply had a very high opinion of himself.

“Who are you?” I said, rather angrily. “You can’t just barge in here.”

I was more than a little bit afraid that he might be a member of the secret police, but he didn’t look much like how I’d imagined them.

“Peter Crompton?” he said.

“Yes, that’s me.” I said.

“I’m Rigo.” he said. “Please forgive my behaviour.”

He began going around the place looking in all the rooms. He saw that Laura and Marco were together in the living room. I would have stopped him had I not been afraid that he was there in some terrifying official capacity. His manner seemed to indicate that he felt he had every right to behave like that.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I said to him.

He shut the door to the living room.

“I need to discuss something with you, privately. It’s of the utmost importance. Where can we sit?”

I took him into the kitchen and we sat down. He had an odd accent, like a mixture of many different European countries. I decided to hear him out, then if he didn’t make sense within the first minute, I’d eject him.

“So?” I said.

“You’re aware, obviously, of Blake.” he said.

I nodded.

“Perhaps you’re aware that he kills his enemies with impunity and holds bizarre ceremonies at which he sacrifices human beings. He does this to help scare people into submission.”

“I don’t know about any of that.” I said.

I was very guarded, because I still thought he could be secret police, or someone sent by Blake himself to find out what I knew.

“All of this is your fault.” said Rigo.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s your fault. I mean, you’re not responsible for his actions, but you gave him the power that he has, and now you need to help me fix the problem.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

He launched into a strange story, and I still don’t know how much of it was actually true.

“Ten years ago, I was one of a small group of scientists working on a new theory at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.” he said. “We went through the same chain of reasoning that you went through. We made the same discoveries that you made. We were planning to publish our work, then one of us realised something.

“Your machines have a range of only a few metres, but if you overcharge the spin unit, cool it in liquid nitrogen and drop the frequency to eight hundred megahertz, the range extends to more than twenty thousand miles. Think about it. It’s the fourth term in your third equation.”

What he said had a horrible plausibility.

“Wait.” I said. “Wait, wait, wait.”

I grabbed some paper and a pen and made some calculations.

“You see?” he said.

I could feel the colour draining from my face.

“But this means …” I began.

“A few small modifications and you can reach into someone’s brain on the other side of the planet, find out what they are thinking, more or less, and stop them thinking it by destroying brain tissue. If you want, you can kill them. That’s why we destroyed our work, all of it, and my colleagues announced that they had been the victim of scientific fraud committed by me. I took the fallout for it. I was tired of research anyway. They paid me to be the fall guy.

After that we lived with the fear that someone could replicate what we had done. Then you came along. Before we could do anything you’d published everything. We just had to hope no-one would realise how easy it is to extend the range almost indefinitely. The problem is, someone did realise.”

“Blake.” I said.

“Blake.” he said. “It took me a year to realise what he was doing. I made some experiments myself and I was able to detect the characteristic signals of a long-range machine at work. He’s using your technology to alter people’s brains, one at a time. I believe he’s constructed a device that can brainwash more than ten thousand people per day by removing all traces of criticality towards him from their brains, all negative sentiment.”

“Ten thousand?” I said. “That wouldn’t be enough. Globally, he must have a couple of billion on his side by now.”

“That’s just my estimate.” he said. “You have to bear in mind, he doesn’t have to alter everyone’s brain in order to be as powerful as he is. He concentrates on Western thought leaders, and his critics. Other people go along with whatever they say. There is nothing to stop him soon attaining absolute power. He will rule the world like a god, and believe me, Blake is sick in the head. His rule will not be benign.”

I stood up and gazed out the window. An enormous mural of Blake’s face was visible in the distance.

“I need some time to digest this.” I said, passing a shaking hand over my face.

I could see Rigo was almost definitely right about one thing at least: the modifications he suggested would indeed greatly extend the range of the machines. The rest of what he said sounded all too believable . Perhaps I had got so carried away with the potential of my work for good that I had become blind to the potential danger of it.

“Don’t take too much time.” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before he gets round to your brain, and mine, and your wife’s brain, and your child’s brain. He will make all of us worship him. I take it you have a room with a Faraday cage?”

“Not here.” I replied. “I installed wire mesh into my entire house, which is where I developed the technology. It was the only way to stop it interfering with radio transmissions. But we’re having it refurbished. They’re removing all the wire I put up.”

“Then you’re not safe.” he said. “You could wear a tinfoil hat but good luck with that. It will attract his attention. He sees everything.”

“What can we do?” I asked.

“We can’t reach him with a machine from here.” he said. “You can check; you should check, but he will have surrounded himself with Faraday cages. You can bet on it.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?” I said. “Kill him?”

He shook his head.

“Not necessary, and virtually impossible. I’ll tell you what you have to do.”

He produced a bottle of pills from his pocket, took one out and swallowed it.

“Excuse me.” he said. “I have to take medication regularly. It’s for epilepsy. Listen, there are four things we have to do. First, you have to modify your machine to extend the range. I’ll bring you the liquid nitrogen tomorrow. That will enable us to figure out where he is, although we probably won’t be able to get at him, because he will have taken precautions. Then we need to build a device that, when placed in the room with him, can erase key memories from his brain and install a revulsion for these machines. Third, you will need to somehow get that machine into a room with him. I can’t do it, because I could have a seizure at any moment.

“Once that’s done, we come to the fourth and final item. We need to build an array of machines that can scan the brain of every single person in the entire world, make them destroy all evidence the machines ever existed, and make them forget their very existence. Then make them forget Blake too.”

“We can’t do that.” I said, horrified.

“Why not?” he asked.

“One, it’s unethical, and two, it’s not technically feasible. We’d have to erase half their brains.”

He shook his head.

“You’re wrong.” he said. “To plant a revulsion for this technology in people’s heads will be easy. We’ll need twenty or thirty powerful machines to get it done fast enough, and we’ll need to triage. A strong enough revulsion will stop them ever even remembering the existence of the machines. It’ll be like the past three years never happened. As to whether it’s ethical or not, it’s either this or someone else will soon come along and take control of the entire world, just like Blake’s doing. If you care about freedom, if you care about human life, you’ll do it.”

For some moments I stared at the mural of Blake down the road.

Finally Rigo spoke.

“I can see you’re a little shook up. Understandable. I’ll leave you to it. Discuss it with your wife. Have a drink. Do whatever you have to do. But when I come back here tomorrow morning with the liquid nitrogen, you need to be ready to start work.”

And with that, he got up and left.

You can imagine how I wrestled with myself that night. I knew Blake was right; there was no other course of action that made sense. In the end, I had to admit that to myself.

Over the next few weeks I extended the machine and we began to track Blake’s movements. I was soon in no doubt that Rigo hadn’t lied to me, at least not about his core thesis. Blake was using my invention to control people. Everywhere he went, he was well-protected by Faraday cages and interference devices, in case someone else figured out what he had figured out and tried to take his power from him.

We discovered he spent a lot of time at a mansion to the east of Trieste; it was carefully protected, of course, and only a machine placed inside it could hope to get at him.

I worked with Rigo to build a miniaturised medium-range device that could fit inside a plant pot. Our idea was that I would pretend to be delivering a plant, since Blake seemed fond of potted plants. Once inside the mansion, the machine would lock onto his brain and do some reconfiguration. Nothing major, but enough to stop him being a threat to anyone.

I put up Faraday shielding to protect Laura and Marco and myself while we slept, and Rigo and I rented a large garage where we began to build the array of devices that would wipe out all traces of my discovery. We tested one of them on a technician who worked with the machines, somewhere in Milan. The poor chap proceeded to destroy not only the machines themselves, but every trace he could find, digital, paper or mechanical, of their existence. We had to go back in and modify him again before he got himself into terrible trouble.

Our plan was to soften up some of Blake’s followers so they wouldn’t be suspicious of me, then once I’d got inside his mansion, I’d activate the machine concealed in the pot. It needed liquid nitrogen cooling but once topped up it would last for a couple of hours, which was more than long enough.

It took us six months to prepare everything. Those six months were hard. I lived in fear that Blake’s machine would catch Laura or my son, or Rigo or myself when we were walking outside from one place to another. Instead of spending time with Marco and Laura, I had to spend all my waking hours building and configuring those machines.

Finally we were ready. I took a taxi to Blake’s place, carrying a small banana tree in a pot, dressed in blue overalls. At the gate I told them I had a delivery and they let me in. We had already worked on their brains with the machines, ensuring they were not suspicious of deliveries.

Inside the high walls I discovered scenes of abject horror. There were corpses hanging from numerous gibbets, and crosses where people had seemingly been crucified. I suspect I didn’t even see the worst of it.

Why Blake did that stuff, I don’t know. He didn’t need fear to control people; he could reach into their brains and control them directly. I think he was simply a sadist, and he enjoyed seeing suffering. Free from any real danger of the law ever catching up with him, he had fully unleashed his depraved passions and had indulged his evil desires in every possible way.

I left the plant by an enormous staircase, activating the machine via a magnet concealed in my watch. We had placed a reed switch inside the pot which activated when I brushed my watch against the wooden pot.

I was about to leave when an enormous voice boomed at me from the top of the stairs.

“Who are you?” he said.

I turned around to see Blake himself staring down at me.

“Just delivering a plant.” I said. “May I say, I’m an enormous fan of your work. You have given us hope.”

He smiled indulgently.

“I love you, great teacher.” I said, hoping I wasn’t over-egging it.

“Perhaps you’d like to see my sacrificial chamber?” he asked, in the tone of voice one might use when asking if an acquaintance wanted to see your watercolours.

I wasn’t sure whether it was safer to refuse or accept. My heart was in my mouth.

“Oh, yes.” I said. “That would be a huge honour.”

“Come.” he said, and he beckoned me.

I began to climb the stairs, wondering if I was about to become a living sacrifice myself. I’ve never felt so sick with fear in my whole life.

I was halfway up the stairs when the expression on his face changed to one of confusion. The machine must have locked onto his brain.

“I … I have work to do.” he said. “Excuse me.”

Then he wandered off as if in a daze.

I bolted out of there, walking off as fast as I dared, and soon I was back at the garage.

“Well?” said Rigo.

“I did it.” I said. “I saw him with my own eyes. He was there. We got him.”

He clapped me on the shoulder.

“Well done.” he said. “Well done. And now, the real work begins. A week and we can rid the world of the entire menace.”

It actually took us only six days to reprogram everyone. We had already done the crucial work of training artificial neural networks to identify and prioritise people. One by one and soon in great masses, people began to throw out their machines and destroy all documentation they could find. Millions of books were tossed into the trash and videos deleted. Officials at every publishing house, every publisher, every social media network and every library, bookshop and newspaper stand worked tirelessly to erase all traces of the machines ever having existed.

Reverence for Blake was soon replaced by an ardent subconscious desire to never follow any train of thought that could possibly lead back to thinking about Blake or the machines.

When it was finished, this orgy of mass destruction and amnesia, Rigo said to me, “Now we need to use the smallest long range machine you have to get people to destroy the machines in the garage. Then we’ll destroy even that machine, and we’re done.”

“I modified the original prototype to have a ten-kilometre range.” I said. “We can use that.”

“Fine.” he said. “Where is it?”

“At my house.” I said.

“Then let’s go.”

I drove Rigo to my house, where Laura was painting a flower in watercolours and Marco was running around pretending to be a dinosaur.

I opened the machine, my original prototype, with a certain sense of nostalgia. I unscrewed a little cap I’d added and we carefully poured in enough liquid nitrogen to give us the range we needed.

Then we arranged for some workmen to collect our device array from the garage and dispose of it.

We were watching them from the screen built into the case with relief and satisfaction, when Rigo’s face seemed to take on a dazed, angry expression and he looked slowly around the room as if he didn’t know where he was.

“Are you OK?” I said.

He began to jerk spasmodically. I shouted to Laura to come and help me.

So he did have epilepsy. That was something else he wasn’t lying about.

He nearly flung the machine off the table with a spasmodic jerk of his arm. Laura and I lowered him carefully down onto the ground before he could fall off the chair and damage himself.

“I’ll put your machine in the other room.” she said. She handed me a cushion. “Here, put this under his head.”

After a minute the convulsions gradually ceased. For some time afterwards he seemed dazed, but eventually he said, “I’m fine. Just a fit. I’m used to it.”

I helped him back onto the chair and brought him a glass of water.

“Couldn’t the machine help fix that?” I said.

“The machine must be destroyed.” he said. “It must never be used again. And anyway, I don’t trust it with my brain. Where is it?”

“Laura moved it.” I said. “You nearly knocked it off the table. I’ll get it.”

I fetched the case and put it on the table.

Rigo finished the glass of water.

“I think I let myself get too thirsty.” he said. “Sometimes that seems to bring it on.”

He stood up and proffered his hand for me to shake.

“It’s been a pleasure working with you,” he said. “but now it’s time we part ways. I’ll take this and destroy it.”

He picked up the case from the table.

“I think we’d better destroy it together.” I said.

“Don’t worry.” he said. “I’ll see to it.”

He made to leave, but I got in front of him.

“Together.” I said.

“Don’t you trust me?” he asked.

“With this kind of power, I hardly even trust myself.” I replied.

He sighed, and his shoulders sagged. Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a pistol.

“I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this.” he said.

I raised my hands to the sides.

“What the hell, Rigo?” I said.

“Sorry, my friend.” he said. “The world can only have one ruler. I will be a much better leader than Blake ever could have been.”

“You can’t do this.”

“I can.” he said. “Back off.”

Since he was pointing the pistol at my heart, I had no choice. I stepped backwards, and he walked briskly to the door, carrying the case. At the door he stopped and turned, and said, “Don’t worry. Pretty soon, you won’t even remember this machine ever existed.” and with that he walked off out of our front door.

“He was using you all along.” said a voice.

It was Laura, standing behind me. She had seen the whole thing.

“He’ll use the machine to gain absolute power over the whole world.” I said. “How could I not have seen this coming?”

“You never should have trusted him.” said Laura.

I turned around to face her.

“We need to cover our heads in foil.” I said. “Quickly. Then we need to rebuild the Faraday cage around the entire house.”

Then a thought occurred to me and I slapped my hand against my forehead in despair.

“He’ll send people here to reprogram us.” I said.

“I wouldn’t worry too much, tesoro.” said Laura. “There’s very little he can really accomplish with a case full of paints and brushes.”

“What?” I said.

“You bought two cases, remember.” she said. “When you finished the prototype you said I could have the other one for my paints. Well, that’s the one you took. He’s got a case full of artist’s supplies. Worst he can do is paint a really angry watercolour.”

She picked up a case from behind the door and held it out to me.

“This is the prototype.” she said.

I began to laugh and she laughed too. Soon we were weeping with laughter, holding onto each other. I think it was just the huge sense of relief. Marco ran in and started laughing too, having no idea why we were laughing, and not caring.

We tracked Rigo down pretty quickly. He had wrapped his head in foil but after a week he gave up and took it off so he could take a shower. I erased his memory of all relevant events.

I never found out whether the group of scientists he had mentioned had really ever existed. I couldn’t find any trace of him ever having worked at the Max Planck Institute. I think he probably made that bit up, and had in reality hit upon the possibility of extending the machine much later than he had claimed.

Just to be sure he wouldn’t return to the topic, I instilled in him a mild revulsion for the whole subject, while leaving whatever earlier memories he had intact. Those, I didn’t bother prying into.

I kept the machine for another year. There were people the array of mind-altering machines hadn’t been able to reach, and I had to tackle them: submarine crews, people living deep inside caves and so on. Then I smashed the machine into pieces and threw it in the rubbish skip down the road.

And so, an entire episode was erased from history. An episode that had offered enormous hope, but ultimately, had given us more power than anyone could safely handle.

Carmela’s memories had been reconfigured along with everyone else’s, of course. I once tested her by asking her if she had heard of a man named Blake.

“You mean the English painter?” she said.

Obviously, many loose ends were left over. Things we couldn’t clear up. For instance, Laura and I had suspicious amounts of money in our bank account. The subconscious revulsion we’d instilled in people for ever thinking about any topic connected to my invention ensured those loose ends would never be explored by anyone who mattered.

There were a few people left who could remember everything; people who, for one reason or another, the machines hadn’t been able to reach, and I hadn’t been able to find since then either. They were simply regarded as cranks by other people; I had taken care that would happen. No-one could stand to hear them talking about the version of the past that they remembered. I felt very sorry for them.

One day I happened to take a taxi in Trieste, to get to a physics conference on the edge of the town. My driver turned out to be none other than Blake.

He didn’t seem very happy. If he recognised me, he showed no sign of it.

Ideally he should have faced justice for the horrors he had committed, but now he had no memory of them and he wasn’t the same man anymore. Can you punish someone for something they don’t remember doing?

I wondered whether traces of his terrible crimes ever rose from his subconscious and resurfaced into his dreams. I suppose I’ll never know.

And now, I must draw my account to a close. My grandchildren demand that I talk to them about important matters, such as dinosaurs and ghosts.