To whom it may concern:
There is death in this package. I send it to you because you're considered a dubious risk. Not by myself: I promise I have no notion of who you are or what you think. The address comes from a handy list compiled by our security office, a list (to put it bluntly) of potentially undesirable contacts in this part of the Thames Valley. If one of our staff were seen having a quiet drink with you, they would have been ... nudged. Of course, it's impossible to tell how reliably unreliable you are: when I look at List U and see people called Murphy and O'Shea, I can't help wondering whether any real probing was done, whether the computer just threw up its chips in horror at the name.
Well. Perhaps you're honestly outraged at the thought of being branded with a secret smear. I should tell the police if so: obviously you won't be the first. My advice in this case is not to open the sealed envelope that came with this. (Don't open it yet, in any case. This is a serious warning.) It's remotely possible that being an officious bigmouth, I mean of course a public-spirited citizen, could ease your name into a computer file much less innocuous than any list at Cambridge IV.
You could burn everything here, of course. But of course there'll be an investigation, and List U will be part of the information they work with.
All right: I hereby announce my intention of mailing this at random to only a certain number of the Listed. Should you be the person I'm aiming for ... hide this package and lie when they come to ask. You have an excellent chance of getting away with it.
The innocent can leave us now.
Still with me? Good ... but be warned. People have already died for what you're holding. Before you even think of opening the sealed envelope, you'll need some background. That isn't exactly true, but this is my last will and testament, and I make the rules. You won't be compromised, yet. The background details are harmless. It's the big picture that kills.
(For all I know, you may be on List U simply for sharing a quirk with me.)
To begin. Cambridge IV is much nearer to you than Cambridge, as you will have cleverly deduced from the postmark. This is governmental thinking: a Discreet establishment with a focus on information technology should have an oh so subtly computer-evocative name. Somebody thought of Alan Turing, the theoretical pioneer - you may have heard of his famous thought experiments, the Turing machine (an abstract universal computer) and the Turing test. He was a fellow of King's at Cambridge, and that's all the connection there is. As for I to III, they don't come into this.
So, I write from my green-walled office in a nonexistent building. The only significant items present are a graphics printout looking like a dark and hook-beaked bird; a frozen bolt of lightning in perspex on my desk; and a bottle of whisky whose level is sinking fast.
Cambridge IV funding has been steadily declining for eighteen months. As Deputy Director I have tried to keep it going, fought to keep Whitehall interested in what I told myself could be a vast new insight into minds, brains and computers. Alternatively, the hydrogen bomb of psychological weapons. I snipped at the staffing table like a surgeon determined to prove that a human being can indeed live without limbs, a stomach, one lung, one kidney, half the liver, two-thirds of the brain ... however that dreary list goes on. I fought endless rearguard actions against the cuts, because I believed in -
No.
I can be honest here. In the beginning I thought Cambridge IV was the biggest damn-fool idea since phlogiston. What I believed in was Vernon Berryman, the originator and research leader, and a man in the genius class of Turing himself. Poor Vernon.
Alan Turing committed suicide, they say, in 1954. Do you know why?
The climate is more liberal today, except in sensitive government estab-lishments. If one were different one could be blackmailed. What with? Well, one would lose one's sensitive government job if it came out. Why should that be? Because we can't have people who could be blackmailed occupying sensitive government jobs. And so on, forever.
Dr Vernon Berryman did not commit suicide. He had a regrettable accident. He had a triumphant accident. A crabbed accountant in Whitehall killed him. I killed him. Each man kills the thing he loves.
Let me tell you about the project work now.
Ceri Turner was supposed to be the physiological/neurological expert, digging out data about the brain's wiring for Berryman and his mathematical models. Smooth, blonde, heavily perfumed, the sort of overstuffed young woman who gives wet dreams to teenagers. Her legs were quite nice if you liked the type. I was unconvinced about her on the intellectual side (she came from America, where they'll hand a Ph.D to anything that can read, write and sit on its bottom for long enough). Berryman was absurdly courteous, giving her joint credit for papers which were ninety-five per cent his. If his name had been Wherryman I swear he'd even have put hers first.
She provided the input, and Berryman worked miracles. I could copy some bits out of "their" major paper here... you won't find it in Nature or New Scientist: the classification is SECRET * BASILISK, named distribution only. It's a sort of small honour for an establishment as tiny as Cambridge IV to have its own identifying marking. "Basilisk" is very much nearer the bone than the Cambridge allusion, as you'll see. An indication, perhaps, that those who hand out such labels didn't really take us seriously.
As I said, I could reprint parts of "On Thinkable Forms, with notes towards a Logical Imaging Technique" here, but if I know you - as naturally I don't - you're a practical person. You have no interest in sitting through twenty pages on the Entscheidungs Problem, Godel's Theorem, and Berryman's own unnerving theoretical extensions. Instead, there's a little indoctrination chat I know by heart and trot out for visiting dignitaries and purse-string holders. It's as practical as an Armalite rifle.
It goes like this:
Kurt Godel showed that all formal logical systems have flaws: true theorems that can't be proved, shattering paradoxes that won't go away. Alan Turing translated this into practical terms with his proof that some problems aren't computable: an ideal computer set to solve them would grind on forever. Vernon Berryman noted that the human mind can be thought of as a computer, assumed that Turing's "computability" has a parallel in human "thinkability", and set out to find the logical input which clouds the minds of men. His new insight: while the mind can always refuse to accept a problem, the pattern-handling systems of the visual cortex can instantly and willy-nilly accept huge blocks of data from the eye....
In other words, I'd say at this point as I poured out the restorative dose of single-malt, Dr Berryman thinks that with a neural computer system the size of the Supernode Plus in our basement, plus present-day knowledge of how the brain works, we have the key to "uncomputable" patterns that take advantage of the flaws which mathematics says the mind must have. A pattern which compels attention, perhaps, a pattern from which you couldn't easily look away. And depending on rather careful judgement of my audience (male? reasonably bright? sense of humour? like me or not?), I'd then produce a big card-mounted Penthouse nude and watch the sequence, Attention momentarily caught in quicklime; an artificial blink; a studied glance away, with excessive unconcern.... We're all so predictable. If I was lucky, they'd finish the sequence with a smile.
There, I'm not as old and stuffy as you'd expect of a Deputy Director. I feel I do need to wear a dark suit and waistcoat, but I draw the line at Whitehall's pinstripes. If I hadn't decided otherwise, there'd be years to go before retirement or even the big 6. Not past it at all.
Berryman was thirty-four. They say mathematicians do their best work relatively young. Turing cracked the Entscheidungs Problem in his twenties. I would never have made a fool of myself over Berryman, but...
I did, though. I made an infernal machine.
The latest round of government cuts was threatening the Supernode Plus itself: if we fired two more operators, the shift system would break down and the wretched machine wouldn't be able to handle Berryman's all-night runs.
That was the week after I knew what was wrong with me, wrong or gloriously right. Absurd to tell of it: I passed Berryman in the corridor as he padded off to the toilet in his shirt-sleeves, and something turned over inside me. Narrow-faced and intense, very white skin and very black hair, and the dark shadow of his nipples through the thin shirt. I was married for eight tolerably pleasant years, until May went down with cancer.
Nothing in those years ever hit with a lightning-flash like that.
One picks at these details, the turn of a head, the curl of a thin finger, and tries to pin down blame. The details explain nothing. It's the sum total that kills.
If Cambridge IV had to shut down, its director would be retired or just possibly transferred, while its mathematical genius carried his hat round half a dozen universities that would love to have him if only they could justify the project grants. Perhaps the Turner woman would follow him too: I felt sure she was making eyes at him. Never to pass in a corridor again.
I was very circumspect, very discreet. But I built an infernal machine. (Did a little shock of interest go through you then? Perhaps you're my man.) Nothing intricate or mechanical - I have the remnants of a science degree, but my fingers are too sausage-clumsy for work like that. No, I travelled first-class into the vast anonymity of London and bought two gadgets from a photographic outfit in the Tottenham Court Road. A cosmopolitan little shop in Soho supplied the newspaper, and I spent five pounds more on a piece of cheap plastic trash from an open suitcase on the pavement. I was insane, of course.
You might as well know the details. The "Sonic Shutter" is supposed to be for self- and group portraits: whistle or snap your fingers, and the shutter clicks, the flashgun fires. It had stuck in my mind for its sheer stupidity. Who wants to be photographed for posterity with pursed lips or cocked fingers? The electronic flashgun was the cheapest available, and the point about the trashy digital watch was its alarm. Wearing lab gloves, I taped and wired them all together, to give me a timed flash: but first I took pliers and wrenched off the flashgun's battery compartment cover. Now, as anyone could see, the battery would stay put only if wedged. A wad of paper did the trick nicely, folded from the imported Russian-language edition of Pravda.
There's no great level of internal security. Cambridge IV doesn't exist, so prowlers are not expected. Often you can pace alone through the dead light and air, listening to that feeble roar of ventilation which always makes me think "corridors of power". I paid one of my occasional visits to the computer hall, where in an unreal universe of silicon and optoelectronics a ghostly simulation of the human brain was under attack - assaulted by Berryman's image programs, and so far resisting every one. The brain's electrochemical immune system has fended off most of the conceptual viruses evolution can throw at it... though intangible things can go wrong, can't they? And do.
As always, activity stopped while I looked officiously around. Ceri Turner lay with eyes closed on the interface couch, meditating or some such nonsense while the EEG fed the simulation with her brain rhythms. Her red stockinged legs were stretched out vulgarly: the idea of her as a standard brainwave reference! The operators stared in resentment at their keyboards, unwilling to catch my eye in case I commented on paperbacks and playing cards. My package of junk went on to a high, blue bank of power conditioners. I blew my nose loudly into the handkerchief I'd wrapped round my fingers. That was all. The cleaners would be suspected, but you can't make an omelette, etc.
I was insane, of course. The miserly forces of Whitehall had made me insane. I wanted to turn their own murderous, paranoid logic against them, to jolt them into the notion that an establishment worth sabotaging must be an establishment worth preserving. But perhaps I'm being too clever for you? My infernal machine doesn't sound very deadly? Trust me.
It was far deadlier than I thought.
In a vague spirit of self-improvement I always used to skim the computer newspapers sent free throughout the trade (officially we are Amber Data Systems, to account for our purchasing pattern). One can pick up some interesting information: specifically, the reason why flash photography tends to be forbidden in major computer installations.
Next morning floppy-jowled Symond, our security chief, explained it all to me pompously, with vast technical detail about the intricate electronics that had been used. He'd become important for a day, and was savouring it ad nauseam.
The misguided saboteur, he said, must have assumed the computer hall had an old-fashioned fire protection system. Electrical fires often start with a brilliant flash. (I nodded my wise nod of total incomprehension.) Had the sensors been connected to an old-style array of sprinklers, the entire computer system could have been soaked and ruined. Luckily, the saboteur didn't know one important fact. (I managed another blank nod.) Modern defences, like ours, stop fires in their tracks by sealing all doors and driving out every trace of oxygen with a flood of fire-retardant gas.
"So no damage was done?" I said. The operators, of course, are trained to run like hell when the siren sounds.
"There'll be a manslaughter charge when we catch the bastard."
For too long I stared blankly at the fossil lightning on my desk.
Afterwards I worked out that there was no trap: Symond failed to eye me critically while tossing his thunderbolt, failed to note the whirliness and shock that drove the sense from me in a flood of inert horror. Through the churning, I dimly caught the word “Doctor". Symond bored remorselessly on about unauthorized late-night sessions (Berryman had been driving himself hard), and the picture filled itself in automatically. A visit to collect print-out or whatever; sirens, panic, a slip and fall in belated haste, a moment's dizzy confusion, and the doors are sealed....
Then Symond dropped a new word into my numbness, and curdled it into something else. The word was "she"; a doctor can be a Ph.D as well as a D.Phil. Ceri Turner had been running late that night, on into the night with one of Berryman's runs, and the idiot woman had tested a private theory that I couldn't have predicted. She died through her own fecklessness. I refuse to accept any blame. I had nothing against her, nothing serious. I hoped she and Berryman hadn't had anything between them, because if so I wouldn't be able to be sorry.
Symond departed with hints that there were international ramifications and that he had a Clue. It would have been a terrible thing, on that morning, to laugh.
What an idea, though! More sympathetic magic than science. It was in her notebook - I have it here now - a pastel thing with flowers on its cover and the austerely scientific heading THINKS. "#136, Input reference level brainwave pattems assoc. with forced loss of consciousness. Quaaludes?" And with the crazed open-mindedness of Darwin experimentally playing the trombone to his tulips she'd fed herself a safe dose of barbiturates on the couch: only, that night nothing that blocked out sirens was safe. They found her convulsed and ugly, still linked to the systems. I cannot accept -
Enough.
So I'd bought us time by the logic of Whitehall, at the cost of a sacrifice. The investigation pottered on for a while, the only result being a revised and slightly shorter List U. They might have found and deported some suspicious immigrants, or cleared others from all shadow of doubt: who knows? Funding was discreetly increased. What I'd done didn't deserve to work, but it had.
Berryman worked on furiously. He said he was sniffing on the track of something new. "Rich uncharted seas," he said. "Ceri... I'm sorry. I need time." There was a trace of guilt when he mentioned her name, as though he and I were accomplices. I didn't understand that until later.
I had to ration my contacts with Berryman, for fear of being caught staring at the fine silky hairs on the backs of his hands. Nor could I avoid him: this was no time to distort the pattern of our days at Cambridge IV, and perhaps attract attention. For almost the first time in my life I regretted my middle-class education: at a public school, I'd gathered, certain overtures are learned. Could I have picked up a body-language familiar to Dr Vernon Berryman of Winchester and (like Turing himself) King's?
Time passed. The project reports grew ever more optimistic. The mathematical brain-model took some hard knocks: but in spite of Berryman's frantic, doomed intensity, we seemed no nearer to a real-world version of the simulated success. One of the failed images is still pinned to my dingy office wall: a horrid black thing like half a Rorschach blot, a fractal shape whose outline vaguely suggested a bird. I remember the weekly Project Working Party meeting at which we solemnly discussed what safeguards should be taken against an "active" image, one that really did stab into the visual cortex with stunning or paralysing force.
The Psychiatric Liaison woman suggested the scrambler glasses used in some perception test: the things were specially made at a frightful price, and we couldn't justify the purchase at that time.
(In the early days of the Manhattan Project, did they ponder on better bullet-proof vests and stouter plate-glass to withstand the new weapon? I wonder.)
Gradually the money supply began to fall off again, not overtly cut but gently eroded by inflation. Three times a day I sighted Berryman and felt the impossible gulf widen between us. Other times, I sat at the wide mahogany desk appropriate to my rank and made wild plans. I would put forward the theory of a broad spectrum of response to the image technique. Volunteers would be called for. I would steal equipment from the optics lab that we never used. Trial viewings of test images would take place under laboratory conditions. Somehow I'd manipulate the volunteer selection process. My weak-eyed, epileptic subject would come in for test on a sunny day, wearing polaroid glasses. Unknown to anyone else, the window opening on the harmless image would conceal a polaroid sheet which a hidden motor could rotate. Gazing through glasses and window on Berryman's latest effort, my victim's field of vision would flicker on and off as the planes of polarization crossed and recrossed. The blink rate would be five times a second. Petit mal. Berryman vindicated. Roars of applause.
That was one of my more sensible schemes. I had gone so far as to check that the optics lab had stocks of polaroid plastic. It was, of course, a mere fantasy. The real end of Cambridge IV has outdone any of my fantasies.
Each man kills...
It happened between three and four hours ago. I can only write the postscript and obituary. Why did we think that when the human computer tried to tackle a visual program it could not run, the only result would be disorientation?
The nastiest of the ironies is that I, put out to grass as a mere administrator, laid the fuses of catastrophic success all by myself. Ceri Turner had a wild theory that brainwave feedback from drugged sleep would lower the Supernode simulation's defences ... later, when Berryman analysed the session records, he found something better than a digitized pattern of sleep. It could be the making of his career at her expense (and did he love the woman? Did he?). The electromagnetic signature of death.
The frozen lightning bolt sits on my desk, a souvenir from the gigavolt facility at - never mind. Most people think it's some sort of feathery white seaweed or coral, preserved in perspex. The plastic is charged to a whopping voltage throughout, and an earthed spike driven into the base. When the smoke clears, the forking, fractal paths of the discharge are captured forever. The final lightning-stroke in Turner's mind was caught like that, in silicon and optoelectronics, for Berryman to discover. Show a scientist a pattern, and he can usually work out how to reproduce it.
Oh God.
There is a grim scene I remember from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, where knight after armoured knight is felled by an electric fence. A growing heap of death as each hapless knight touches the conductive armour of the last. This, brought up to date, is the picture I saw in Vernon Berryman's workroom ... the first fruit of our collaboration. His work is a brilliant success.
The desk faces his door. The graphics display is thus not visible until, one by one, the passing project technicians go to find why Berryman is slumped in his chair, and look over his shoulder into the terminal. Only I, on my own regular tormented visit, had the faith to believe in his triumph. Instead of peeping at once, I went away and thought.
It was with closed eyes that I snapped my way through roll after roll of the Polaroid (capital P this time) film they use to record EEG displays. This is the other reason why you should not have opened the sealed envelope. It also contains a standard-format computer diskette holding the last few days' notes and programs, downloaded from a dead man's terminal. You must know a bright computer enthusiast with your own political leanings, one who can make use of Berryman's graphics algorithms.
Tell him to be very careful.
Why? Why all this? Indirectly, I killed Berryman myself. Whitehall killed him too, both through miserable funding (he might have viewed his latest, ungrateful pet through the scrambler optics we couldn't afford) and by starting a project which one might say was morally appalling. Before you sneer: these are all quibbles. I don't care about people any more.
When I began to care specially, for you know who, the relationship was killed by intolerant, paranoid policies before it could ever be born. You are my revenge. Afraid of AIDS, are they? Now there's a psychic AIDS that's no respecter of rubbery protectives.
Open the envelope with great caution. Remember, politicians don't like to fiddle round with details; they want an overview of the big picture.
Send a letter to your MP for me.
Myself ... A last glass of the pale Glenlivet, for VIP visitors only. A last walk outside Cambridge IV, briefcase bulging with Her Majesty's prepaid envelopes, to the nearby pillar-box in a crowded, sunlit High Street. And finally I'll join the sacrificial victims heaped behind my love like Egyptian servants in a noble's tomb, and before I look into the screen and over the edge I'll touch his hand at last.
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