Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [198]
Wilde took his breakfast to the edge of the quay and sat down, legs dangling, and slowly ate, looking all around. The robot hunkered down beside him.
‘Time you told me things,’ Wilde said. ‘You said you made me. What did that mean?’
‘Cloned you from a cell,’ the machine said. ‘Grew you in a vat. Ran a program to put your memories back on your synapses.’ It hummed, remotely. ‘That last could get you killed, so keep it to yourself.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I needed your help,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘To fight David Reid, and to change this world.’
Wilde looked at the machine for a long time, his face as inscrutable as the machine’s blank surface.
‘You’ve already told me what you are,’ he said. ‘But who are you? The truth, this time. The whole truth.’
‘What I am,’ the machine said, so quietly that Wilde had to lean closer, his ear to a grille between its metal shells, ‘is a long and complex question. But I was you.’
4
Catch
‘If you’re interested, you’ll be there.’
The train lurched. Carlisle’s sodium-lit brown buildings began to slide by.
‘What?’ Startled out of a train-induced trance, I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed the remark. The man on the opposite side of the so-called Pullman table wore a cloth cap and a jacket of some shiny substance that might once have been corduroy. His faded check shirt looked like a pyjama-top. He’d been drinking with silent determination from a half-bottle of Bell’s all the long afternoon from Euston.
Now he rubbed a brown hand along his jaw, rasping white stubble over sallow skin, and repeated his utterance. I smiled desperately.
‘I see,’ I lied. ‘Very true.’
‘You’ll be there,’ he said. He reached for the bottle, judged its remaining contents by weight and replaced it on the table, then began to roll a cigarette with the other hand. His gaze, sharp with an occasional lapse into bleariness, stayed on me all the while.
‘Where?’ I looked away, flipped open a packet of Silk Cut (my gesture towards healthy living). My reflection flared in a brief virtual image outside the train. The sodden February countryside seeped past.
‘Disnae matter,’ the man said, exhaling smoke and the sour odour of digested whisky. ‘Wherever. Ah kin tell. You’re interested.’ He paused, cocked his head and gave me a cunning look. ‘You’re one a they international socialists. Ah kin tell.’
I smiled again and shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken, I’m –’ I stopped, helpless to explain. I’d spent a week researching in the LSE library and arguing with my father. My head was buzzing with Marxisms.
‘Ach, it’s aw right son,’ he said. ‘Ah ken youse have aw kinds i wee divisions. I dinnae bother about them. You’re an intellectual and Ah’m just a retired working man. But you’re wannay uz.’
With that he opened the bottle, took a sip from it and passed it to me, kindly wiping his hand on his thigh and then around the rim as he did so, to remove any harmful germs.
‘And then what happened?’ Reid asked.
We turned, hunched against the drizzle, into Park Road, past the pseudo-Tudor frontage of the Blythswood Cottage pub and ducked into the doorway of Voltaire & Rousseau, the best second-hand bookshop in Glasgow. I’d run into Reid at lunchtime, after not having seen him for some weeks – partly because I was working hard on my dissertation and partly because Reid was either politically active or out with Annette. In the first month of their relationship I’d once or twice had a few drinks with both of them, but I’d found it too awkward to continue.
‘He fell asleep,’ I laughed. ‘I left the bottle severely alone and woke him up at the Central. He seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. Looked like he didn’t recognise me.’
By this time we were both moving crabwise, heads tilted, systematically scanning the shelves