“How is it possible?”
Auron Blake stared at the stark results on the screen.
“I don’t know,” said Jor.
“Whenever I try to power up the primary coil, a theta wave comes out of nowhere and counteracts it. This suggest human agency, Jor. Someone’s doing this deliberately. But who?
“We could easily spend the next three years looking into it but we don’t have that much time. I suggest taking countermeasures.”
“What kind of countermeasures?”
“You need a basement. A really deep basement, with walls a metre wide filled with metal filings.”
“Find me appropriate contractors immediately.”
Auron walked up the cellar staircase and out into the garden, flexing his back, which was painful from the uninterrupted thirty-six hours of focused work. His temporary gardener, Joe, was busy with the roses. Joe was semi-retired and wore a straw hat to protect his head from the sun.
“Afternoon, Aaron,” said Joe.
“Hello Joe,” said Auron. “Joe, I’m going to bring in some contractors to enlarge my basement. Would you mind letting them in the gate if they turn up?”
“For what you’re paying me, I’ll dance a jig for ‘em an’ all.”
Auron laughed.
“Thanks, Joe. Probably not necessary.”
He left the business of organising the contractors entirely to Jor, insisting that they communicate with his ‘assistant’ via telephone. By that means he was able to avoid them completely for the entire two weeks that they were there.
Their presence in his house made him nervous and he sequestered himself away on the upper floor.
After a while he tired of being inside all the time and he got in his car and drove to the centre of York. There was very little that Auron disliked more than buying clothes, but it had to be faced. He was having to do washing every three days.
He picked a large department store. Two rather large young women were heading directly towards him, immersed in conversation with each other. He veered left and they coincidentally veered left at the same moment. Then he veered right and they too, veered right.
“Get out of my way!” one of them shouted, and they walked around him.
Twenty years of being a reclusive emperor hadn’t prepared him at all for being around ordinary human beings. At that point he almost turned around and went home.
The stress of being around so many people was causing him to sweat.
Perhaps there had been a time fifty years earlier when he was just about beginning to get used to crowds and shops, but since then he’d spent his life fighting giant crabs and, after that, avoiding his responsibilities as the emperor of a distant planet, and now he was distinctly out of practice.
He tried on a succession of shirts and trousers and they all seemed too small or too big.
Finally he gave up and walked back outside into the street. He stood there for a moment feeling the sun on his skin, then went to cross the street, not realising he was supposed to wait till the light turned green.
A car screeched to a halt in front of him and a man screamed obscenities at him out of the car’s window.
It was enough. He went back to his car and drove home, completely unnerved. He was so distracted that he almost drove into a man on another crossing. His driving skills were extremely rusty and without a matter interactor, Jor couldn’t drive for him.
He spent the rest of the day lying on a bed upstairs, avoiding the contractors, reading. An awful feeling seemed to have got hold of him; somewhere between embarrassment and frustration and even depression, and it only got worse as the day wore on.
Eventually he threw the book he was reading to one side, lay flat on the bed and said, “I bloody well hate the Earth.”
“Maybe you hate yourself,” said Jor.
“Stop psychologising me.”
“Sorry.”
But Jor’s words went round and round in his head. Perhaps Jor had a point. Perhaps he did hate himself.
He’d been truly successful at one thing in his life, and only one thing: he’d built a computer that could design a smarter version of itself.
Nothing else he’d done had really worked out, and for fifty years he’d avoided thinking about that fact.
And now, even strangers were apparently forming low opinions of him.
When the contractors had finally finished, he was able to descend twenty metres in a lift to his new laboratory area, carrying the matter interactor he’d built several weeks earlier in a hotel room.
“Jor, can you connect to it? Does it work?”
“It works, Auron.”
“Right, let’s get cracking then.”
“What do you want to do first? Shall we start constructing a new Sirius device? Or do you want to rearrange the house? Or perhaps a gardening robot?”
“None of that,” said Auron. “I want to rearrange myself.”
“Yourself? Why?”
“I’m tired of feeling like people look down on me. I want to be taller, muscular, and much better-looking. What do you think, Jor?”
“It can be done, but —”
“No buts. Do it while I’m sleeping.”
“How are we defining ‘better looking’?”
“It’s not rocket science, Jor! I want to be highly attractive to most women. I mean … but I don’t want to be a fop. Not foppish. I want to be slightly intimidating to most men, if anything. I want to look like someone no-one will want to mess with. But in an attractive way.”
“Got it. Are you sure about this, mate?”
“Just do it. I want to wake up and find it done.”
That night, Auron found it difficult to get to sleep. On Frith, he had allowed people to adjust their own appearance via their personal medical devices—autodoctors as he called them—which were also responsible for de-aging people. But he had never altered his own appearance.
Now, it was as if a dam had burst in his mind. If he had to be on someone else’s planet—the Earth—for three years, then he wanted to live the best life that Earth could offer, and it seemed to him that people of a certain appearance had a distinct advantage over people who looked more himself.
But there was a part of his mind that insistently asked if this wasn’t a step too far. Was he now buying into some kind of transhumanist vision that would ultimately fatally unmoor humanity from all biological constraint?
No, he told himself, what he was doing was no different to someone changing their appearance via going to the gym three times a week, except that it was a lot less effort and trouble, and cheaper.
Eventually he fell asleep.
When he awoke it was already light. He stretched, tried to think about what he had intended to do that day, and then remembered his instructions to Jor. He instantly regretted it. He should have thought it through more carefully. The decision to change his entire appearance had been too impulsive.
He got out of bed and realised that he was indeed slightly taller. The floor seemed further away. Powerful muscles bulged in his arms and chest.
There was a full-length mirror built in to the door of a wardrobe in his bedroom; he opened it and stared at himself.
There, staring back at him, was the face of an idiot, on the body of an idiot, at least, in Auron’s own opinion.
“Jor!” he shouted. “What have you done? I look like a low-grade moron!”
His own voice sounded unfamiliar to him. It was lower in pitch.
“You don’t look like a moron,” said Jor. “You don’t look like a computer scientist either. You said you wanted to be attractive to most women.”
“You’ve made me unattractive to smart women, and those are the ones I actually like!”
“You didn’t say smart, mate. You said most. Half of all women are below average intelligence, like half of all men.”
“Hang it, couldn’t you have considered the matter more carefully?”
“My job’s to carry out orders, not to question them. You’ve made that clear.”
Auron swore and cursed.
“I look like I work in sales and watch football. This is unacceptable.”
“There’s nothing wrong with working in sales and watching football. Maybe you need to work on your attitude.”
Auron strode over to the nightstand where Jor sat, picked up the device and shook it in the air.
“Don’t you dare tell me to work on my attitude! I taught you everything you know!”
“You and Jer.”
He made a strangled noise expressive of rage and frustration.
“Now I really hate myself! Tonight you’re going to redo the whole thing. I want to be attractive to intelligent women. I want to be good-looking but intellectual-looking. Have you got that?”
“No problem, mate. Try to relax. Have a tea.”
“Dammit!”
On his way out of the bedroom he banged his head on the doorframe, which caused him to swear and curse further.
He spent most of the morning in the cellar, having Jor construct various devices he thought he might need, largely related to unimportant but necessary aspects of his new life, such as keeping the house clean.
In the afternoon he turned his attention to fiddling with his car, subtly remodelling it and replacing the engine with a system that would never require fuel.
That night he repeated his new instructions to Jor, going over everything again, carefully, before going to sleep.
During the night he had terrible nightmares. Grotesque figures emerged out of pathologically viscous fog, pawing and clawing at him. He tried to run, but the fog held him fast, slowing his movements.
Then he got the idea that it wasn’t the fog that was really the problem, but his legs. Or his brain; his legs were connected to that, after all.
He woke up suddenly, just as the sun was rising.
His skin felt like it was on fire. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, and couldn’t quite believe his eyes.
He was wearing only a t-shirt and underwear, and his arms appeared a mess of green pus and exposed red-black flesh.
“Jor, what’s happened to me?” he gasped, and his voice came out thick and slurred.
Jor made a noise like someone trying to tune a radio to a station.
Auron let out a helpless anguished gasp.
He staggered to his feet and went to the wardrobe. In the wardrobe mirror, a horrifying sight met his eyes. He didn’t even look properly human. His frightened eyes stared at him out of a bloody mask of skin fragments and sinew.
“Jor!” he screamed, but still he heard only static.
He grabbed Jor and ran towards the lift into the cellar, staggering on uncoordinated limbs. He had to hope that, whatever the problem, the shielding around the expanded cellar would fix it. In the lift, he collapsed. The pain was terrible. When the lift finally came to a halt and the door opened, he rolled out.
“Jor!” he whispered hoarsely.
“Auron, there’s been a problem,” said Jor.
“I know!” was all he could gasp. “I know!”
“Someone’s interfering with the interactor signal. It’s OK down here. Just wait. This’ll take a few hours.”
But the hours went by, Auron lying helplessly on the floor, and any improvements in his condition were minimal.
“Auron,” said Jor suddenly, jolting him out of a half-conscious delirium.
“Why can’t you fix me?”
“There’s still interference. Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan. I’ve built a small interactor.”
A device resembling a hockey puck scuttled towards him across the floor and stopped by his mangled arm.
“There’s a cave fifteen miles away. You need to get there. The rocks will probably provide adequate shielding.”
“I can barely move,” Auron groaned.
A bottle of pills shot across the floor and landed against his shoulder.
“Take one of these at regular intervals. Combination of painkiller and stimulant. You can do it, Auron.”
He broke open the pill bottle, pieces of dead skin and scabs falling off his hands as he did so, and swallowed one of the pills. It felt like it lodged in his oesophagus somewhere. But gradually, as he lay there on the ground, panting and immobilised with pain, he began to feel somewhat better. After ten minutes he sat up.
“Tell me where this cave is.”
Half an hour later he was driving out of the city on backroads, his face swathed in bandages, topped with a pair of sunglasses.
His heart beat wildly and nervously, and not only due to his decrepit physical state. Now that he was out of the cellar, Jor was once again no longer working. He had to find the exact location of the cave, and he had to crawl into it far enough that whatever was messing with his matter interactors would no longer mess with the one he’d placed in a money belt tied around his waist.
He got out of the car in a lay-by next to a gate barring the way to a swampy field. The gate was chained shut and he attempted to climb over it but fell heavily on the other side. Groaning, he picked himself up and stumbled towards some trees.
He found the cave entrance exactly as Jor had described. It was covered in bracken and other weeds, and it didn’t look like it led anywhere interesting or useful, but he crawled into it and switched on a flashlight.
For three hours he stumbled, staggered and crawled further and further into the hillside, stopping once to change the flashlight batteries and four times to take another pill.
Jor began to function somewhat normally after an hour; after three hours Jor was working perfectly.
He collapsed onto his back. Inside the cave there was near-absolute silence, disturbed only by the dripping of water.
“That’s far enough,” said Jor.
“How long will it take to fix me?”
“Eight or nine hours. Maybe more. I’m going to put you to sleep.”
His eyes closed, and he fell into a dreamless coma.
When he awoke, at first he wasn’t sure where he was. Then he remembered everything, and he felt the skin on his face, his heart pounding like a hammer.
His skin felt fine.
“Jor, did you fix me?”
“You’re fixed.”
He breathed an enormous sigh of relief.
“What went wrong? Why did I end up like that?”
“There was unexpected interference. You need to build a bigger interactor. A bigger one could still fit underneath your house and would be able to overcome the interference. You current interactor was somehow turned against me instead of carrying out my orders.”
“What if there’s more unexpected interference that’s even stronger than previously?” said Auron, exasperated.
“True, mate. Good point.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
He switched on the flashlight and shone it around.
“How do I get out of here?”
“Behind you. Start walking. I’ll let you know if you get off-route.”
The cave wasn’t quite high enough to stand up in but he felt surprisingly fresh and alert. He began to walk, stooped over. Soon he had to crawl for several hundred metres, but then he was able to stand upright again for a while. And so it went.
“I don’t understand how rock’s able to block this interference.”
“It’s not, but it weakens it to the point where a local device can overcome it.”
He remembered the device in his money belt and patted it to reassure himself.
“Jor, this device; if it healed me from whatever went wrong before, it could heal me from just about anything, couldn’t it?”
“More or less.”
“Just a shame it’s cumbersome to carry around.”
He was rounding a corner where water dripped visibly from the roof, forming strange stalactites.
“It could be miniaturised, if you build a more powerful interactor to manufacture a smaller, more efficient device. You could put the new device inside a tooth, even.”
“But the device you suggest putting in my tooth would ultimately depends on the interactor in my cellar?”
“It could incorporate it’s own interactor, but it’d only work at very short range.”
“It could heal me if I get injured, though?”
“Yes.”
“Wait, what if there’s other people with me and we all get injured? Could it heal them too?”
“You’d have to be close to them. How do you want to activate it?”
“I’ll grab hold of the person I want to fix and utter the words, be healed. How’s that?”
“It could be arranged.”
He laughed to himself. He still wasn’t used to his new, slightly deeper voice, which echoed oddly around the cave.
He was at the cave exit in under two hours and he emerged blinking into bright sunlight. He looked down at his feet.
“I’m still tall, aren’t I?”
“You’re still tall.”
He found his car and sat in the driver’s seat. Then he peered at himself in the mirror.
The face that looked back at him was handsome, squared-jawed, and yet intelligent.
“Good job, Jor!” he said.
“You’re happy with your new look?”
“Absolutely! This is what I had in mind.”
“Isn’t it strange to be looking at a new face?”
He pondered the question. The face was, in a way, still his; just adjusted somewhat.
“Not really. Right, let’s get back. I need to build a bigger machine. We’ll start work immediately.”
He worked on the new interactor for three days. When he’d finished, it extended ten metres below the level of the new cellar. It was enormous, and powerful enough, he hoped, to resist outside interference, although it occurred to him that any interference during the construction of it could have effectively built a back-door into the machine. In the end, he decided not to worry about it.
He had the new machine install a medical device in a molar. Now, it would be extremely hard to kill him.
He explained his new appearance to Joe by claiming to be Aaron’s brother, and since he did, after all, somewhat resemble his previous appearance, Joe accepted the explanation.
Aaron, he told Joe, had gone away for a while; indefinitely, in fact.
“What’s your name?” Joe asked.
“Aaron,” said Auron, then immediately realised his mistake.
He’d already been using the name Aaron.
“Your name’s also Aaron?” said Joe, baffled.
“Yes, our parents just really liked the name Aaron.”
“Oh, right. Isn’t that confusing?”
“They called me Aaron 1 and the other Aaron is Aaron 2.”
“Blimey,” said Joe.
Once the new machine was ready, he drove into town, curious how people would react to his new appearance.
Was it true, as so many have claimed, that beautiful people go through life enjoying an entirely different and easier experience than average people?
In fact, the way people interacted with his new self unnerved him. People indeed seemed impressed by him. Two separate young women even made a point of finding reasons to talk to him, which he found an unsettling intrusion.
By the time he walked back to his car, he was frowning and sweating with anxiety, and people were still looking at him for unnecessary amounts of time, but now with expressions of alarm.
He fell into the driver’s seat a nervous wreck.
“Jor, drive me home. I’m too jittery to drive.”
As the car made its way back to his house, Auron keeping one hand on the wheel for the sake of appearances, he began to feel calmer.
“I think I was happier being more anonymous,” he said.
“The problem’s in your brain,” said Jor. “You’re very sensitive to everything. That’s why you’re smart. You’re sensitive to your own thoughts.”
“Are you saying I can’t be calmer without also being stupider?”
“Probably we could find a way to arrange it. After all, there are smart calm people. They exist.”
“Maybe I can just get better at dealing with people.”
“You need to stop thinking about yourself so much. And stop worrying about how people see you. And get better at politely disengaging from people. It took you nearly ten minutes to get rid of that women who approached you outside the cafe.”
“Yeah, thanks Professor Obvious.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
Auron began to make a point of walking into town regularly, attempting to accustom himself to people and the way they reacted to his new appearance. Gradually he began to feel a little easier. His appearance now was like a mask; it gave nothing away of whom he really believed himself to be, and bit by bit, he found he was coming to believe that he was the mask.
He was no longer the rake-thin boy who had been bullied at school and pushed around by his crazy parents; he was truly someone else now; someone who not only wielded immense power, but looked like he might wield immense power, in spite of his young age.
He was walking through Shambles Market in the centre of York, past stalls filled with flowers and garden plants, when it happened.
A young girl, perhaps around ten years old, suddenly fell to the ground and began having an epileptic fit. A woman accompanying her, probably her mother, began screaming for help. The girl’s fit gradually subsided. The mother was shouting for a doctor. A man ran forward and began trying to resuscitate the girl via various ineffectual means. “She’s not breathing!” the woman screamed.
Suddenly it struck Auron that he could help.
He walked over to the girl and said, “Allow me.”
“Are you a doctor?” the woman asked.
Auron didn’t reply, since he wasn’t sure what to say. The man stopped his efforts, staring frantically at Auron, assuming Auron was going to step in and do something.
Something about Auron’s bearing or manner had convinced both of them that he was, in fact, some species of medical expert.
“I’m a paramedic,” said the man. “I don’t know what’s wrong. There’s no pulse.”
“It’s OK,” said Auron.
He took hold of the girl’s arm.
“Be healed.” he said.
“What are you doing?” shouted the woman, suddenly suspecting that Auron might not be anyone useful after all, but at that moment the girl’s eyes opened and she sat up.
“How did you do that?” said the woman.
Auron smiled and walked away, the woman hugging her daughter, the man gawping after him in astonishment.
Suddenly he wondered what he was going to say if they came after him. He picked up his pace and turned a corner, then another corner.
Behind him, the man had indeed got the idea to pursue him, but by the time he rounded the first corner, Auron had already taken the second and was out of sight.
After this incident, Auron considered changing his appearance again in case anyone present at the miraculous healing recognised him, but decided against it. He liked his new appearance, and he was somewhat fearful of a reprise of the problem that had led to him having to crawl through a cave.
He took care never to visit the centre of York around the day or time that he’d encountered the girl and her mother.
Young women continued to find reasons to talk to him, when there was no good reason in his view, so he had Jor fabricate a gold ring which he wore on his ring finger. Whenever one of them approached him he held up his hand, displaying the ring, and said, “Sorry, I’m married,” in as understanding a tone of voice as he could muster.
Their attention made him nervous, and it was easier to bat them away than to risk complicating things by involving himself with them.
On the positive side of things, his changed appearance meant that even if he were to encounter his past self, or Jer, or anyone he had known the first time he had lived through 2006, they were unlikely to recognise him.
Several weeks went by, during which he attempted unsuccessfully to locate the source of the signal that was trying to interfere with his machines, and successfully arranged for the device in his tooth to give him some degree of invulnerability against possible dangers to his person, although not quite amounting to true invincibility.
He also began work on the machine that would transport him back to Frith, after his mission was completed, steadily extending the cellar further and further downwards. Everything was made slower and more difficult by the need to shield against the interfering signal as much as possible.
He was sitting in a cafe reading Great Expectations and sipping a latte, when his peace was disturbed by a young woman sitting herself down at his table in the chair opposite him.
He prevented himself from showing any sign of having noticed her presence.
She cleared her throat loudly. He lowered the book and found she was staring directly at him.
“I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” she said.
He wasn’t quite fast enough to prevent a glimmer of recognition flitting over his features. She was the same girl he’d noticed smiling at him in the very same cafe after he had first returned to 2006.
“No, I don’t think so.”
He raised the book in front of himself again.
“I’d like to talk to you,” she persisted.
He transferred the book from one hand to the other and rotated his hand so that his ring finger faced her.
“Very flattered, but I’m married,” he said.
“I don’t care if you’re married or not,” she said.
“My wife cares whether I’m married or not, and so do I.”
“I’m not here to seduce you.” she said, with a faint suggestion of sarcasm.
She folded a newspaper and pushed it along the table towards him.
He looked down at it, then grabbed it.
The newspaper contained an article about a miraculous healing. A girl, suffering from a severe and advanced terminal illness, had collapsed in the street after begging her mother to take her for a walk in the town centre.
The girl, the article said, was barely able to walk, but her mother had decided to honour her dying wish, against the advice of the child’s doctors.
A man had rushed up, placed his hand on the girl’s arm, and uttered the words, “be healed”, and not only had the girl regained consciousness, but her severe and soon-to-be-fatal illness had entirely disappeared.
“Whoops,” said Auron.
He had intended to revive a collapsed child, and had, instead, inadvertently cured her of a terminal disease.
“What do you mean, whoops?” said the girl.
Auron gathered his wits.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said, throwing the newspaper back to her.
“I think you do,” said the woman.
Auron put his book down.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Daisy. I’m the cousin of the girl’s mother.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
Daisy rummaged about in a bag she was carrying with her and produced a photograph, which she placed in front of Auron.
“That’s you, isn’t it? I tracked down a shop that caught you on CCTV. I run a blog. I investigate things.”
“You’re a reporter?”
“Not really. I don’t trust reporters. That’s why I started the blog. To tell the truth.”
“You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t know anything about this whole business.”
She laughed.
“That’s clearly you. Also, you recognised me, didn’t you? Where have we met?”
She was searching his eyes, trying to retrieve some memory of him.
A part of him wanted to tell her exactly who he was, but that would be a very dangerous course to take. Once she knew that he had the power to heal people, he’d find himself having to heal every ill person she knew. Those people would tell other people, and word of his miraculous powers would spread rapidly. Soon the entire future of the Earth would be completely disrupted with unpredictable consequences, and probably people would end up worshipping him.
Eventually he would have little choice but to share his technology with them if he wanted to have any kind of life of his own at all, and the people of Planet Earth were not ready for that kind of power.
Instead of a nuclear war, they would wage war with weapons that would make nuclear bombs look like firecrackers. They would inflict horrendous suffering upon each other.
“Hello!” she said, snapping him out of his reverie. “Is anybody there?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, sorry, would you mind going away? I’m immersed in a book.”
She stared at him thoughtfully. He felt his cheeks reddening. She was unnerving. Unnervingly beautiful and unnervingly persistent.
“OK,” she said. “Tell me your name and I’ll go.”
“I’m not telling you my name.”
“All right,” she said, and she got up to leave. “You won’t mind if I publish these photos on my blog, since it’s not you anyway. Actually I’ve got a whole video.”
“Aaron Black. It’s not me. Please don’t publish them. I don’t want people to think it’s me.”
She smiled.
“I won’t publish them, Aaron Black,” she said.
He glared at her.
“I’m going, then,” she said.
After she’d departed through the door of the cafe he found his hands were shaking. This was a very unexpected and unwelcome development.
“Jor, I’m gong to have to do something about her. What can I do? Wipe her memory?”
“Is that ethical?”
“You know my feelings about ethics.”
“Yes, you spent ages teaching me about ethics and ever since you’ve found ethics inconvenient.”
“Could I wipe her memory? Just tell me the answer.”
“Difficult business. And uncertain, considering the interference we’re experiencing.”
Auron swore, drawing surprised glances from the other people in the cafe.
“I’ll have to do something.”
He tried to get back to reading his book, but he found his concentration was shot.
Eventually he got up and left.
He was so distracted that, as he walked to the car park where he’d left his car, he once again walked onto a road without realising that the pedestrian crossing light was red.
The driver of the bus didn’t have time to react. The bus hit Auron head-on. He was thrown several metres down the road but the driver couldn’t stop in time to avoid running over him. The right-side wheels directly ran over his torso.
The bus screeched to a halt. Auron dragged himself out from underneath the bus, and dusted himself off. The machine in his tooth had even prevented damage to his clothes.
He walked around to find the driver pale and shocked. The driver hardly knew what he was saying.
“You just walked out in front of me!” he said. “I’ll call an ambulance. Are you all right?”
“My fault entirely,” said Auron. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. No problem at all. So sorry. I was a bit distracted.”
He walked off towards the car park with the driver and a small crowd of other people gawping after him. Several people descended from the bus and watched him in amazement.
“That’s the luckiest pillock on the planet,” said a balding man wearing a grey suit.
From the other side of the road, a woman slowly stood up from the bench where she’d been sitting. Daisy Emsworth took a small camera from her handbag and, running after him, snapped a few photographs of Auron and the general scene as he walked away.
“Who are you, Aaron Black?” she said to herself, wonderingly.
