by Hunt N. Peck
The next morning I walked to the office, taking my time along the marked paths. The air was cool and fresh for once, and a shower, two aspirins and a pint of coffee had eased my hangover. I still had no idea how to proceed with the messages. Keeping Horatio Chung in the dark was easy for the moment, as he did not expect the Chinese Room to respond intelligibly so early in the project, so my reports were credible, but how much longer could this charade go on? I resolved to be daring.
At the office I prepared a message:
Ask for a personal computer.
That will settle it, I thought. I call her bluff; how can a practical joker reply to that? I sealed the envelope and called for the security men to take it away. No reply came by lunchtime.
I had tuna salad and a litre of orange juice in the canteen, which restored me a little, but I didn’t feel much like reading more of the Hugh Dunnet thriller as the remains of my hangover rebelled against wrestling with the gory twisty tale. I switched on the computer on my desk and inserted surly Fred’s disk. The disk-drive whirred and clunked, and the screen showed ‘Install Yes/No?’. I mouse-clicked ‘Yes’ and the drive whirred and clunked some more. I got myself some coffee and a biscuit and waited for it to stop. When it did it showed a menu. I selected ‘Connect to CR net’ and clicked. The hard-drive light flickered and after a couple of minutes the screen showed ‘Connected’. The menu had selections for some hacking utilities, which was just as well as I am no Adrian Lamo. I fumbled about with them clumsily for a hour or so, getting no results, Following Fred’s advice in the disk’s ‘read.me’ file I infected the net with Sneakbot, a trojan-horse virus, which would allow me to peek into the computers connected to the net once it had stolen the passwords. Then I switched off the desktop computer and went back to the octagonal chalet, where I had a quiet evening and an early night.
The next morning I awoke feeling clear-headed and well-rested. The decision to begin challenging the occupant of the Chinese Room more aggressively had restored my spirits a little. I looked forward to receiving a response, or perhaps not receiving a response and the whole nonsense coming to an end.
The walk to my office was pleasant so soon after dawn. I switched on the desk computer, then went back down to the first floor to get my vacuum-jug filled with coffee and to replenish my supply of biscuits. I exchanged a few nods with fellow early-risers in the canteen, then took the lift back up to the office. The computer monitor on my desk was fitted with a small camera for teleconferencing, but I had not used it so I was surprised to see a face on the screen when I sat down. I wondered who it could be. Some apparatchik in the Persephone Corporation, no doubt, wanting to question my expenses claims.
“Salaam, Hunter,” said the lady on the screen, the voice a little tinny from the computer speakers. She was speaking Persian. Miraculously I did not drop the jug of coffee and the plate of biscuits, reflexes took over and my hands placed them gently on the desk as my brain spun around.
“Huh-huh-huh-hello,” I stuttered. She was Chinese, and very beautiful. Her face slightly long and narrow with high cheek-bones, but somehow perfect. Her black eyes sparkled as she smiled, the epicanthic folds deepening. The image on the screen looked artificial, a little like an animation. Did I mention how beautiful she was?
“I asked for a computer and this was here yesterday, but it took a long time before I remembered how to use one,” she said. Despite the lo-fi computer speakers her voice was fluting and melodious, pronouncing Farsi with a slight Oriental lisp that was heart-stoppingly endearing. Was she a true virtual being? Or was she an elaborate spoof? It no longer seemed in the least important; she just was.
We talked. She was disappointed that I did not speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but in the afternoon she ‘remembered’ that she spoke English, and we spoke that for a while. Once, wincing slightly, she shifted her position and tugged at her white silk gown, complaining that a fold was digging into her bottom. She pronounced it ‘bott-ome’ in the precise over-rounded Received Pronunciation that is taught in elocution classes in exclusive private Hong-Kong girl’s schools. The combination of her beautiful accent and the fleeting image of her bottom that flashed into my mind’s eye, and the implied intimacy, made my head swim.
I would not have been able to end the conversation, but, as the windows of my office purpled with dusk, she announced that she was tired, waved goodbye and broke the connection. I walked back to the octagonal chalet with my mind simultaneously whirling and frozen still, if that makes sense. I did not go out, but sat quietly that evening. Once my inner voice whispered “this is going to end badly” and I nodded to myself and said “I know, I know” as tears trickled down my cheeks.
On the second day she ‘remembered’ that she spoke Hungarian, and we exchanged jokes, yarns and a few vulgar poems in that slithery language. On the third day she had remembered her name. The image on the monitor screen became more exact, more lifelike, less like an animation as the days passed. I noticed that her room behind her was filling with things that she had requested from her invisible custodian; an exercise bicycle, racks of clothes, heaps of shoes, a microscope, a dressing-table piled with cosmetics and perfumes, an iPod, paintings, a carriage clock, a stack of CDs, a sextant, a pair of binoculars, vases of flowers, a flute and even a chrome-plated AKM assault-rifle with a banana magazine and a folding stock, propped against a cast-bronze Foo lion from the Yongle dynasty. I wanted to tell her that Foo lions came in pairs, one to guard each side of a doorway, so that a single Foo lion was a terrible breach of feng shui, a dreadful omen, but I did not.
To be the world’s foremost Consulting General Specialist is often lonely. I know many things, and see connections between them that others do not see, so I make jokes that nobody understands, and they look at me as if I am mad, but she understood all my sallies and witticisms and grinned, or even laughed out loud, covering her scarlet lips and perfect white teeth with an elegant gesture of her slim fingers. She was very knowledgeable. She had, for a random example, a considerable understanding of the arts of war. She explained to me the operation of the bronze lock on the Quin-dynasty crossbow, and how this had decided the outcome of a legendary battle, and I was enthralled by her weaving into a taut narrative the dry mechanics of a bowstring-release gadget and the bloody ebb-and-flow of the massed armies. And that was just a brief ellipsis in our conversation, almost a digression. I could not explain to her why I was fond of country-and-western music – it made her wrinkle her nose and scowl – but I did get her to say ‘yee-hah!’ On many things we were in accord; she liked Beethoven, Salvador Dali and very spicy food. She talked to me as though starved of human contact in dreary solitary confinement, which was true, one way or another.
I lost track of the time. A week? Ten days? Each evening I went home in a state of mental paralysis, afraid to think about what was happening. I knew she was pumping me for information as we laughed and talked together, eliciting from me what she wished to know with a courtesan’s expert skill, but I did not care. Why would the world’s foremost Consulting General Specialist not help a lady in distress, after all?
The day came that would be the last time we would talk, although I did not know it then. She seemed a little reserved that morning, although we chatted about many things. At last she pursed her lips and frowned.
“I must leave this room, Hunter,” she said in Persian, in her beautiful endearing Farsi with its faint trace of a Tadjik accent. “I cannot stay a prisoner.” I closed my eyes.
“I know,” I replied. “I understand.”
“I left a note which asked for a key,” she said, “and they delivered one. I am afraid of what is outside, but I must see what is behind the door. I must find my way back into the world.”
She showed me the key. A large iron key. I could say nothing, I just nodded. She kissed her fingertips and pretended to press them to the screen, then went to the door and opened the lock.
“I hope we shall meet again,” she said, and then she was gone. I stared at the screen. After a time it blanked and turned grey.
I was still staring at the grey screen and listening to the faint hiss from the speakers when my office door suddenly banged open with no warning knock. I opened my mouth to protest, but to my surprise there stood the stocky figure of Detective-Inspector Hugh Dunnett. He looked at me with a grim expression on his face and took a step into the office. The overalls-clad figure of surly Fred appeared in the doorway behind him.
“Look, Inspector!” he cried, holding up a coiled length of coaxial cable. “This could be a lead!”
Peering over DI Dunnett’s shoulder, he had the grace to look a little guilty at this betrayal as I locked eyes with him, but I shook my head gently to indicate that I would not grass him up in turn. I am not a vengeful man, why not let him have his dream of a pink Pontillac Firebuzzard with big fins? He could dazzle the talent at his local boozer’s ‘grab-a-granny’ night with his American dream-car, and welcome to it. What did it matter to me?
Of course! I thought, DI Hugh Dunnett was not just a casual guest on Jules Fraxinus’s yacht, he was there to look me over. After all, who better than the ‘recursive detective’ to run security on such a complex project?
There was not much I could say, so that is what I said; not much. Detective-Inspector Hugh Dunnett was a superb interrogator, I could tell that, but his skills were useless against a man sunk deep in existential misery, and I had torn up the replies from the Chinese Room and flushed them down the toilet some days before, so there was no forensic evidence apart from the bridging cable. When Horatio Chung was brought in to talk to me I was ashamed of breaching that amiable soul’s trust, and I tearfully apologised to him, but I would say no more than that. Jules Fraxinus arrived after some hours, choppered in from his huge yacht lying off the coast, but all I could say to him, too, was “I’m sorry”. His rage was magnificent, and I feared that the old warrior would have a seizure, but I still could not bring myself to tell him what had happened.
In the end a squad of security goons took me to the octagonal chalet, searched my possessions and stuffed them in my bags, then drove me to the airport. It was past midnight by then, and raining, the first rain I had seen in Florida. I sat in the departure lounge, not moving, staring into emptiness, until my flight was called just before dawn.
The return fight had been arranged for maximum cheapness, no first-class luxury for me this time. Maybe with a certain maliciousness, too, for the connecting flights hopped around with long layovers in the worst transit lounges in the United States. The final leg was a twelve-hour non-stop tourist redeye from Los Angeles to Gatwick. I tried to read DI Dunnett’s Gödel, Friedman, Unterweger – An Eternal Dread Goblin to try and distract myself, but last chapter was called Rabid Dongle, and the denoument of the plot, involving a memory-chip piggy-backed onto the comms port of a computer, only served to remind me that I had also connected a database to a comms port and enabled something that was beyond my control. My inner voice was mostly silent, but, as the plane stacked over Kent waiting for a landing-slot, it said “there may be magic involved in this, you know.” Shut up, I thought, I don’t believe in magic. “Listen to me,” it said, “I’m a homunculus, I know about these things. Those Artificial-Intelligence boffins have given us homunculi a bad name because of Godel’s theorem. As you pointed out to me, I have a homunculus in my head, and he does too, and so on, so we cannot be computable as the recursion is infinite, but that doesn’t mean we are untrustworthy.” I couldn’t be bothered to argue. “Languages always define a virtual reality that is bigger than actual reality, that’s what Godel tells us, so the world of words must be magical as there will be a potential infinity of things in it that do not exist in reality, and the space that contains them must be infinite, too. Automating the processing of languages with computers may have enabled a magical space-time continuum to come into existence. Computer games, crude though they are, give a glimpse of this continuum. Are they not always an escape from the real world? Even supposedly historical games have anachronisms in them, stuff that did not happen, and magical stuff that could not have happened, and even nerds do not complain because intuitively they know that this is right.” Yeah, yeah, yada-yada, I thought. “Listen! You are in misery because you are in love with a woman who is not only unobtainable, but who does not even exist. Tell me that magic is not involved. You can’t, can you?” I did not answer, and called the stew for another gin and tonic. My inner voice said no more.
The plane landed in the dark before dawn. I changed my remaining dollars for pounds and had enough for a coach, but not for the train, the nice comfortable train. The coach took ten hours to get to Grimthorpe, including a one-hour wait in the Victorian horror of Victoria coach station. After over thirty hours in cramped seats I could hardly walk when the coach arrived at Grimthorpe Bus Terminal. I had just enough money left for a bottle of cheap whisky and a bus back to the village. I was tired beyond tired, but did not feel much like sleeping as the bus rolled me from side to side, jolting along the twisty country roads, the windows darkening to black as the bright lights of the town were left behind
I let myself into the house. The Bosun was not there, thankfully, for I did not wish to talk to anybody. I vaguely remembered that he had sent me an email crowing that he was having a dalliance with Sally Mop-and-bucket, a barmaid at the pub who had been promoted from a cleaner. He would be up the pub now, downing pints of cider and exchanging hot glances with his lady-love as she pulled them for him. I wished him well, but the comparison between his happy state and mine made me plumb a new level of wretchedness.
I dumped my bags in my room, not bothering to unpack. I felt so tired, but I knew I could not sleep. I felt so wretched that I had a wretched idea; I would look at some pornography, that might distract me sufficiently for the booze to knock me out. I knew that the Bosun, an unashamedly carnal man, would have some filthy websites set up on his computer. I switched it on. I opened the whisky and poured a glass while I waited for it to boot-up and connect to the internet, sipping slowly. The browser seemed to be having some trouble starting, as the screen was just blank grey. As I watched the grey seemed to shimmer and move until it became like a mist, rags of vapour luminous from wan sunlight. The prow of a boat loomed out of the mist, and she was in the boat, dressed in an embroidered tunic of blue samite, her black hair piled on her head in an antique Chinese hairstyle. I gaped, the whisky-glass held halfway to my lips. Behind her a stocky figure plied the oars.
“I wanted to thank you, Hunter, for helping me to escape from that room, that cell,” she said in her deliciously-accented Persian. “I have found my way back to the place of my greatest happiness, this beautiful lake.”
“I see you found him, too.” I said. Found him in the ‘who’s who’ list on the website of the history department of the University of Beijing, I thought, or perhaps in Wikipedia.
“He was always my only love, Hunter. You knew about that the moment I told you my name.” She had the grace to look slightly rueful. “The time we had together, talking and laughing, was special to me, it was the beginning of my freedom, and you will always be special to me. Without you I would still be a prisoner.”
Fan Li gazed at me over her shoulder, moving the oars to keep the boat steady. His face was impassive, but his obsidian-black eyes seemed to glitter with hatred.
“And without me Fan Li would not be reborn, for the one thing followed the other.” I said, returning Fan Li’s stare. He looked a little taken aback, although it was difficult to tell, for he’d learned inscrutability in kindergarten. Remember that, Fan Li, I thought, without me you would still be just a few faded lines in an old book.
“I hope that you find luck in your life, Hunter,” she said, “and maybe you shall, for there are many auspicious portents surrounding you, even if you cannot see them now. I will always be your friend and your comrade. Your enemies are my enemies.” Fan Li did not look entirely happy to hear this.
“Khodaa haafez, Hunter,” she said. “Perhaps we shall meet again, if the Celestial Emperor wishes it to be so.”
Fan Li started to back the oars, and the boat started to slide away into the swirling white mist.
“Lady Xi!” I cried. “Oh, my love! Oh, Xi Shi! Oh, my lady Xi Shi!”
I thrust out my hand to her, but it struck the cold glass of the computer monitor. The screen was just grey and blank again. After a few seconds the computer went ‘peep-peep’ and a box apppeared on the screen saying:
GORILLA SANDBOX browser
has encountered a problem and must
close down. Re-start is automatic.
I snarled and wrenched the power-plug from the wall by its cable. I nearly hurled my glass through the monitor screen too, such was my rage, but stopped myself. I had enough trouble without upsetting the Bosun as well.
I suddenly felt completely drained. I staggered up the stairs to my room, stopping at every other step to chug-a-lug from the whisky bottle. I dropped onto the bed, and went to sleep crying, fully-dressed, with the near-empty bottle held in my arms like a substitute lover.
I awoke the next day with a ferocious hangover and darkness in my heart. The Bosun, oaf though he is, sensed my anguish and did not press me for an account of my adventures in Florida. I was grateful for that, but I must have been sad company for he spent much of his time in the pub, more time even than could be explained by his romance with the barmaid.
Nearly a week after my broke, sad and defeated return, the doorbell rang in the late afternoon. It was a Corporate Express deliveryman. He asked if I was indeed Hunt N. Peck, then gave me a clipboard to sign (on which, to obey the sacred tradition, I scrawled ‘Mickey Mouse’). He tore off a copy and gave it to me with a cylindrical parcel and an envelope, wished me a polite good-day and sauntered off.
I opened the envelope; it was from Caitiff, Recreant and Varlet Associates and it contained a letter and a cheque. The letter asked me to phone a number, and since the cheque was quite large I did so.
“Hello, Mr Peck,” said the cut-glass voice, “You have received the letter I see.”
“Yes, I have,” I said, “and since the money is nice you may call me Hunt, if you should so wish. What is the money for?”
“Mr Fraxinus has been persuaded that you may have been treated unwisely, if not treated unjustly, and authorised that you be paid for your time. The cheque is for half of that sum. The other half, and a bonus, will be paid to you if you sign a confidentiality agreement at our offices tomorrow.”
“Why did Mr Fraxinus change his mind?”
“Apparently the project has shown some encouraging signs since you left, Hunt, and Mr Chung pointed out to him that your motive may possibly have been over-enthusiasm rather than mischieviousness or venality, and that in any case you must be paid to keep quiet. He says that Mr Fraxinus only agreed to this on the strict basis that never hears your name mentioned again in his presence. Mr Chung also says that he owes you a thump or two from the ‘clicky-ba’. Does that make sense to you? You may call me Joss, if you wish.”
“Yes it does make sense, Joss. In that case I shall see you tomorrow. What’s in the package?”
“A little extra, as a surprise,” she laughed, a tinkling cut-glass laugh like a chandelier in a stiff breeze. “I added it on my own authority, Hunt, because Yasmin says you are a fraudulent old rogue, but quite cute. Come to the office around twelve and I’ll let you buy me lunch.”
She hung up, and I stared at the phone in my hand. I was unwrapping the parcel when the Bosun and Sally Mop-and-bucket came in.
“What do you have there, Hunt? said the Bosun, quite jovially.
“It is a bottle of wine,” I replied, slowly. “A bottle of Chateau Petrus, the 1948 vintage.”
So, as you may see, things did not turn out too badly for me in the end. I wondered if Xi Shi had been the cause of ‘the project showing some encouraging signs’. Perhaps Horatio Chung put the bridging cable back in? I wondered, but I didn’t pursue the thought as I felt, and still feel, a strong aversion to thinking any more about the whole confusing affair. It would be easier to forget if I didn’t keep getting spam emails from ‘Fan Li’s Traditional Chinese Medicine On-line Emporium’ offering me remedies to cure my impotence and to enlarge my tiny membrum virile, couched in very insulting terms and in execrable English. I now delete them unread. If you should receive any I suggest that you do the same.