Nymphomation, Page 20

The city was flashing with such moments; moments of relief and tenderness in the face of losing. Moments of doubt and fire, for having been so close, so tempted. Moments of pain, as the half-losers worried what effect they would feel. Those dreams that had been reported, the skeleton following you, almost catching you. The struggle to wake yourself in time…

  As somebody somewhere found themselves caught. Dropping the bad luck like a bone on fire. Running through the streets he was, hoping to escape the prize. Trying to get miles away, no direction.

  Can you guess who won? Can you guess who lost?

  Well, can you?

  It was Daisy’s first time in the cellar. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but these old Victorian houses often had extensive cellars, where the servants lived and worked. All that was gone now, just the stripped walls, piles of rubbish, broken furniture, dust and webs, a slumbering boiler, a rocking horse, worm-food. A spidered light bulb, feeble glow. Down the rickety stairs, Daisy putting her hand on the wall to steady—

  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Urgh! Lice!

  Daisy, scared of insects, didn’t let Celia see it. The young girl looking so calm, as though having been down here many times before. ‘What’s down here, Cee?’ Daisy asked. The young girl pushed aside another door, leading Daisy through. ‘This way…’

  Darkness now. Daisy keeping tight hold of Celia’s fingers, being led. Round corners and doubling back, more corners, the corners of corners (how big was this place?), turning, returning (so dark), more stairs, another level, more corridors (getting lighter now, eyes adjusting), turning corners, getting lost (must be under next door’s house by now, surely), asking what this place was and where was she being taken, getting no answer…

  Through here…

  Somewhere in the maze, a bank of computers making dull glow and static buzz, wires and leads tangled around equipment, leading off to all parts of the maze. Max and Joe and Daisy’s father; Daisy’s father getting the full Hackle treatment for being reckless. ‘We’ve got to tell her,’ Jimmy Love said. ‘She deserves to know.’

  ‘Not yet. Not all of it.’

  ‘What she needs, then. At least about Susan.’

  ‘Susan? Yes…’

  ‘It’s not fair, otherwise. Never forget, Max…she’s my daughter.’

  ‘I understand that. The time will come…’

  ‘The time for what?’ Daisy’s voice, from the darkness.

  ‘Daisy…’ Her father’s voice, in shock.

  ‘She shouldn’t be down here.’ Joe’s voice.

  ‘I brought her.’ Celia’s voice, from the darkness.

  ‘What is it I should know?’ Daisy again, stepping forward. ‘What’s this about having two samples to work from?’

  Silence.

  ‘Shall I tell her, Max?’ Her father’s voice.

  ‘No. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He turned, smiled at his daughter. ‘I’ll be upstairs, OK?’

  Daisy was scared now.

  ‘Joe?’ said Hackle. ‘Will you sort Benny out?’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Take Celia.’

  ‘I don’t want to go!’

  ‘I’m the boss round here. You go with Joe now, and stop causing trouble.’

  Joe took Celia’s hand. ‘I know the way,’ she said, pushing his hand aside. Together they followed Jimmy back through the maze.

  The two of them alone, with Daisy just standing there, with Max studying an array of numbers on the screen of a computer.

  ‘You want to win the double-six, don’t you?’ Daisy asked, trying to get him started.

  Max didn’t even look up from his workings.

  ‘Well you got a burgernote from Dopejack…’

  ‘Dopejack? How is he? Is he coming back to us?’

  Daisy shook her head. ‘He’s claiming he’s found out who Mr Million is.’

  ‘The name?’

  ‘He’s not saying. Jazir reckons he’s bluffing.’

  Max raised his hands to his face, squeezed the bridge of his nose. Daisy could really see the age of him now.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Max?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trying so hard to beat the dominoes? I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not doing any maths am I? I don’t know why I’m here.’

  ‘I’m tired, Daisy.’

  ‘Do you want to go upstairs?’

  ‘No. Please, walk with me a while.’

  ‘OK.’ She had to play this just right.

  Around the corridors they went, away from the stairs this time. Around and around…

  ‘How big is this place?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘When we started building it, only under my house. There was a doorway leading to next door’s, which we managed to open one day. Their cellar was obviously unused, but just to make sure, we sealed their entry door. That gave us twice the space. It took us four years to complete it.’

  ‘My father was involved in this?’

  ‘Not to begin with. He joined us in the late Seventies. It was me and Malthorpe, Susan and Georgie. Mainly, to be honest, just Malthorpe and Georgie; they did most of the work.’

  ‘You built a maze?’

  ‘It feels a lot more complicated than it actually is. That was the point.’

  ‘What for?’

  Hackle led her further into the turning pathways, and talked.

  Why did I build a maze? To prove something to myself, I suppose. You know that the ancients built labyrinths not to get lost in, but to find themselves. Not all mazes contain a monster, some contain treasures. It was a spiritual quest, a tool of the mystics. So maybe I was picking up on some of that feeling. You’ve read my early work, Daisy. You’ll know what the Sixties were like then; we were the mathematicians of the soul. Yes, we can laugh at ourselves now, but we really believed in those days. The idea for the Hackle Maze, that was only me trying to create a labyrinth inside the computer. A computer deals only with information, of course, so the wanderers of a Hackle Maze are not of this world. They are tireless and blind, and quite, quite stupid, which makes them excellent explorers. No petty human baggage, you see. No complications.

  Georgie Horn was like that. Sweet Blank-Blank was a tremendous help in designing the programs for the Hackle Maze. It wasn’t that he knew anything about computers, nothing at all, but his mind was full of strange twists and lateral turnings. I think I was actually trying to recreate Georgie’s mind inside the machine.

  It was a special time to be a scientist, the Sixties into the Seventies. Bliss to be alive. Lateral thinking, chaos theory, fractal dimensions, the unravelling of the double helix, cellular automata, complexity theory, the game of life. Each of these we could incorporate into the thinking of the maze.

  Eventually it got to the point where the wanderers were gaining knowledge of the computer’s pathways, which allowed us to increase the complexity of the maze, which in turn fed back into the wanderers’ bank of information. The more chaos we threw at them, the more they seemed to relish the game. Their task was very simple: merely to find their way to the centre of the system. For an incentive, we installed a prize at the centre. I say prize, I mean only the image of a treasure chest, with coins and jewels spilling out. That was Georgie’s idea.

  The maze had grown so complex by this point, and filled with so many thousands of wanderers, moving at such a speed, it became difficult to keep track of all the information. To this end we introduced the concept of the agent. These were tiny info-gathering units that would travel the pathways, keeping track of the positions of all the wanderers, and the changing nature of the maze itself.

  Oh yes, we introduced a random element to the computer. The wanderers were becoming too good, you see. They kept finding the prize. It was all we could do to stay ahead of them. Random pathways, sudden obstacles, double-headed monsters that guarded certain turnings, trapdoors, a shifting centre, dead ends, mirrors, collapsing roofs, blind spots, tightening walls.

  It was nothing, of course,
compared to today’s video games, but at the time—have no doubt it was the most complex artificial life system. I was very proud of it. Very proud. We all were, in our way: Georgie especially; he loved to watch the little dots race around the screen. He’d sit there for hours, hypnotized. Like he was trying to memorize it. An impossible task, but Georgie wasn’t to know that, was he? Susan Prentice? Well, she had her own maze to run. I’m referring to Paul Malthorpe, of course. The two of them circling around each other like snakes, in and out of their strange love for each other. But they were good; Susan at the debugging, Paul on the planning. I was in charge of the numbers, Georgie the vision, if you will.

  The vision…

  I will never forget the morning I came down early to find Georgie glued to the screen. He looked like he’d been up all night. ‘What’s happening, Blank-Blank?’ I asked him. His words…‘They’re changing, Two-Blank. Changing!’

  The wanderers had started to adapt to the system. Not in any deep sense, you must understand; merely that some of them were joining together, to make a single, more powerful entity. The agents were flying around, going crazy at this new burst of knowledge. It was Georgie, again, who had suggested the agents should look like insects, with wings.

  To think back upon that morning…

  It was the start of the second phase. Over the next year we recorded at least ten new species of wanderer. Some of them you may have read about: Chancer, Casanova, Warrior, Seducer, Cartographer, Jester, Sheep and Shepherds, Builders, Backsliders. Their names are like poetry to me now, long-lost poetry. Each amalgam would have its own unique qualities that allowed it a different way of negotiating the maze. It wasn’t long, of course, before they started fighting each other for the privilege of the centre’s prize. This was a totally unexpected outcome of the system, although inevitable in hindsight. We had created a world inside the computer. It was the law of the jungle, with its own secret dynamic.

  I think it was Susan who suggested the next step.

  Because fighting wasn’t the only thing the various wanderers were interested in. Some of them had started to reproduce. It was a basic operation, analogous to a single-cell creature splitting in two. The fascinating results were never the same; for instance the amalgam of a builder and a jester would split apart, but never into a mere builder or a mere jester. It was always some new offshoot they produced.

  It was Susan who said, ‘I think they’re trying to have sex, Max.’ And Malthorpe who said, ‘Aye, they want to fuck each other.’ And Susan who said, ‘Let’s give them some DNA.’

  That was it. The third phase. None of us was expert in that particular field, so a period of research was required. Meanwhile, we were constantly upgrading to the latest technology, to increase the complexity of the system. We managed to write a new program that copied a very simple form of genetic structure, which we introduced to a new batch of wanderers. These creatures were very quickly subsumed by the more experienced wanderers. It took only a short while for the effects to take place.

  Again, it was Georgie who first spotted the carnal act. As far as I knew, he’d never known a woman, not in the basic sense. It was like pornography to him, I think, watching a Seducer and a Cartographer come together in this blatant way. The next day they had already produced their first baby: a seductive map-making creature, who charmed his way around the pathways, recording every twist and turn as he did so. We called this new creation a Columbus unit. Why am I calling him he? Because he was! He had a capacity to inject his DNA into another creature, preferably a female unit, who had the capacity to take in the offered sperm. I’m sorry, I can’t stop using these ridiculous terms.

  There were no textbooks to consult, you see. We were on the edge of a new kind of mathematics, based on sex. It was Georgie who came up with the name for all this activity. Susan had been going on about how the information was being passed on through the genes, and Malthorpe had called one new creature a right little nymphomaniac! ‘Nymphomaniacs!’ cried out Georgie. ‘They’re doing naughty nymphomation!’

  It was my job to work out the equations of this new process, a task that pushed me to my limits. This is when your father joined us…

  ‘He told me that you’d “used” him?’ said Daisy. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Used him?’ said Hackle. ‘Yes, I suppose we did. But only for his extra knowledge. He was always the best of us, remember, despite the fact that he didn’t have our training. Maybe that gave him an advantage. And, when we found him, he was at a low ebb. No real job, no real friends. He was pleased to be part of our group. We found him a job, a wife…’

  ‘A wife? My mother, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. She was an employee at the bank where Susan employed him. We gave Jimmy a purpose in life. And he loved the work we were doing. He was excited by it.’

  They had come to another clearing in the labyrinth, where they rested. A series of painted light bulbs was strung along the passageways, giving a low, blue cast to the damp, cold space. Professor Hackle had slumped down against one wall, breathing heavily after his account. Daisy was leaning against the opposite wall, wondering if she would ever find her way back to the house.

  ‘My father worked on the nymphomation equations with you?’

  ‘Worked on them? He practically discovered them. He took the basic outline and pushed it on to the next level. He introduced the idea of the fractal maze, for instance, one with an infinite number of branching paths. Why, without him…’

  ‘Without my father…no AnnoDomino…’

  Hackle nodded, a movement Daisy could barely see in the gloom. ‘Your father joining us was the catalyst for our next phase; that, and Georgie starting on this underground maze.’

  ‘I thought you built it together?’

  ‘Georgie started it. He didn’t tell us what he was doing. He was always wandering off, anyway, and often spent time alone down here. None of us cared about where he went, so long as he came to no harm. This place was just a pit back then, full of rubbish. Over the last year or so, he’d been slowly building these partitions. See, if you knock them…’

  Daisy did so. They rang hollow.

  ‘He was building a series of false walls down here. Only when it had reached a certain complexity did he tell us about it.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘He wanted to make the Hackle Maze real. Those were his words. “Make it real, Max! Make it happen!” At first we were pleased to humour him, something we had become rather too good at over the years. Malthorpe, I remember, really threw himself into the task. He was always the most physical of us. Then Susan and I got caught up in it as well. Already I was thinking of ways of making Georgie’s dream come true.’

  ‘He wanted to be a wanderer?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘In a certain sense, he already was. Through life, I mean. And I think he quite envied the excitement he saw on the screen. Especially the sexual aspect of it. God knows what strange fevers were driving him. Your father, of course, knew nothing of this side of our work. He was not living with us, and his weekly visits were taken up with developing the artificial system, not the real one. Eventually, when we did bring him down here, again, he was the one who showed us the way. This would be 1979, when the technology to feed back into the system became available. We could link Georgie to the computer, specifically to one particular specimen.’

  ‘You actually did this?’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth, Daisy. Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We called the wanderer that Georgie was linked to the double-zero creature. Horny George, for short. All the wanderers had numbers you see, to give the agents a means of keeping tabs on them. Our first attempts were very limited; failures, actually. But slowly we found the means to allow a kind of feedback loop to occur between Georgie in real life, and Blank-Blank on the screen. We would turn all these lights out, set the system going, and then let Georgie wander around the tunnels. Georgie knew this place like the back of his hand
, of course, but that wasn’t the point; the real maze was just a symbol, a way of focusing the power. It was Georgie’s effect upon the computer’s maze we were interested in.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Astounding. Absolutely astounding. Georgie’s wanderer charged around the Hackle Maze like the Minotaur. Now, Georgie had always been good at games of chance, something in his damaged brain, I imagine, or his crazy, mixed-up genes, that made him identify with random events. His wanderer became a rampant Casanova of the system, loving the pathways.’

  ‘Which makes Georgie the original lucky bleeder? Oh, I see it. You have his genetic structure on disk. This is what Benny has been using for comparison with Celia?’

  ‘You’re getting it. Georgie had play-to-win in spades. A winner, not a loser. The experiment was so successful, we could only move on.’

  ‘What about the effect it had on George?’

  The real George?’

  ‘That’s the only one I’m interested in.’

  ‘Ah…well, he was elated, of course. Buzzing, is how he described it. He was claiming he’d actually been inside the computer, which was a nonsense. He was just connected to it by wires, nothing but wires. Immediately, he wanted to go in again. Over the next few months we experimented more and more with the Georgie-maze loop, creating ever more complex pathways. Georgie would always find his way through. He was becoming the maze. He took to spending all night linked to the machine, sometimes falling asleep while connected. Amazingly, even asleep he could still affect the outcome. His dreams were wandering the labyrinth, working the wanderers, breeding, multiplying, succumbing to the nymphomation. This had a parallel effect on his waking life. It was a two-way process.’

  ‘This must’ve worried you, Professor.’

  ‘Not at all. It was a positive effect. Georgie became more positive in real life, more vibrant and, dare I say it, more sexy. Yes, Daisy. Very much so, so how could we stop now? It was Susan who came up with the rule of not going in alone.’

  ‘She was linked up as well?’

  ‘We all were, eventually. Myself, Malthorpe, Susan, your father; each with our chosen wanderers, specially numbered. Two-Zero, Six-Six, Five-Zero, Five-Four. We all wanted a piece of this action. All of us trying to follow after Georgie’s Double-Zero. We didn’t quite make it…’