White Matter

Imprisoned II

Tokyo, July 22

"Was that a noise?"

These were my first words for I don't know how long. My sense of time had been dragging again, pulled along only by the sound of Graeme's voice. My own had failed some while back.

I had been paying attention, or trying to. I would get up from time to time and pace the room to relieve the numbness that inactivity induced in my limbs, and I suspect I dropped off to sleep for a while. At least I recalled dreaming of a pretty girl with a bento lunchbox, though that may have been a day dream. It had been many hours – don't ask me how many – since our solitary visitation and meal.

It was bloody mindedness, I guess, that kept Graeme going. He had his own way of telling our captors he wasn't broken. Meanwhile, the thought of some poor sod at the other end of the surveillance feed having to listen to all of this, perhaps translate it for his masters, provided a small grim feeling of defiance to set against the imprimatura of anxiety.

He spoke of many things. No doubt I could have learned much, if my brain had been more sponge-like. Instead, catalysed by fear, it had set hard like a brick. Every cranny and corner of Graeme's pointy little head was being scoured out and given voice for the sole benefit of me and our invisible listener, and yet all I could do was nod from time to time. Then every so often Graeme would glance up at the camera by the ceiling, and grace it with a knowing smile.

My words had interrupted him mid-sentence. He tilted his head like a prey animal disturbed. Seconds passed in silence.

"What sort of noise?" he said.

"I don't know. You were talking. Perhaps a door opening. It sounded like somewhere in the building." In my imagination I tried to play back what it was I had heard, but the signal lacked sufficient information (a phrase James had once used, back at the Spurious lab). If there had ever been a signal. I tried to reconstruct how their arrival might sound, storing it as a template for when the time came. Would it be as a scuffing of shoes on carpet? or as a tap-tap-tap of footsteps, its volume increasing as they closed on the door of our cell?

"I never heard anything. Perhaps it was your imagination."

Graeme had been talking about brains of course. Naturally, he had a lot to say on the subject. Brains and patterns: interference patterns, people as pattern recognizers, how we define people through patterns of behaviour, stories as believable patterns. Something too about bad stories, and brains stuck in repeating patterns. Ashamed to say, I didn't have the will power to ask him what all this might mean.

"Why would I imagine a sound? They're going to be coming for us sooner or later. Maybe now's the time." I got up and walked across to the door; put my ear against it but got nothing in return, just the seashell hiss of the building's own resonance.

Sometimes there were even jokes, in his monologue, though of course they were Graeme-jokes, so more thoughtful than funny.

"It is a truth so banal," he said at one point, "as to be universally ignored, that the world would be a much nicer place if people could just learn to get along."

I came back and sat down again. We were sitting next to each other, our backs against the far wall, looking across to the door and up at the camera.

"Do you think an electronic mind would be consciously aware? If we were to take that snapshot we made of your brain, say, somehow animate it into dynamic existence. Would we have made a new you, do you think?" The diversion of the noise had erased my memory of whatever it was Graeme had been saying before. This felt like a new topic, though.