Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Neith agrees that it isn’t, and changes the subject. “If you had been in charge of the procedure,” she proposes, “what steps would you have taken to avoid this outcome?” Hinde peers at her. “I’m a coroner,” she says, as if talking to a child. “By the time I receive a patient, this outcome is a given.”

Mielikki Neith can stand still for hours. She does not get bored; her mind does not wander. She does not count seconds or wonder what will happen next. She pays attention, taking in whatever is there to be known, whatever is changing, and finds that enough. It is a trick she has learned, the projection of a quiet into which other people feel the urge to speak.

“Because you’re a detective.” “Or an artful dodger? Forgive me. I am just like you. Or, I suppose, not quite. You are explicit in the society in which you live. I am rather implied.” Long fingers stroke the cigarette. “Where there is a detective, there is a magnifying glass. Where there is a musician, there must also be a lyre.”

“You will say: ‘Did they murder her?’ ” “That’s what I’m investigating.” “No, no. At present you are merely investigating your own investigation. You are looking for the right puzzle, the thing out of place: the bed bolted to the floor, the stolen goose, the bearded lepidopterist.”

The Inspector shakes her head. “I thought we were playing straight.” “Yes, well. The mark always does.”

It hurts, but she will not die. She knows that already. Nothing in her is breaking. This, too, is a message. “It’s traditional to beat down the shamus in the first chapter,” Lönnrot says with exaggerated distaste, “but I can’t help feeling there must have been an easier way.” More boots, and finally one clips the back of her skull, yielding a kind of rest.

But elephants are not predators, and being a predator makes things bigger: conceptual mass.

You should not be distracted by anything, you infant. When you work, you work. Does fucking SEAL Team Six get distracted by Twitter? No. Why not? Because they focus. They have discipline. They know that what they do has consequences. People will die. Well, here is the news: the same is true of us. Money is life. Poverty kills. If you are going to get distracted by your computer, you don’t deserve your job.

The human mind is a device for seeing patterns.

Liquorice and sketos. It’s not bad. Actually, it’s very bad: really revolting.

I can feel it, waiting for me: the new nationality that takes you when you have become pure money.

In the corner of my eye I can see the game, my guests playing and playing. Everything is a camera in Witnessed, and the designer has done this creepy-as-shit thing where the software looks at your calendar and your recent emails and asks about them if you leave it alone for too long: surveillance simulating surveillance. Two of my guests have to make a hasty retreat after the system interrupts an argument about the relative buoyancy of David Hasselhoff and Erika Eleniak to ask, via the 21-foot plasma, if they’re sleeping together.

Governance is in the private terminals at global aviation hubs, in occasional palaces and ubiquity, in sharing a limo because you have nothing to prove. The merely rich talk about their other homes, their other houses. The gods do not. If they need somewhere, they acquire it, or someone else provides it. They do not keep track of nations or properties, because they are at home everywhere.

He’s from the church of Peter the Fisherman, what was the old Temple of Portunes, or I’m a goose. A good Christian, no doubt, if you’re prepared to stretch a point about the incomplete assimilation of small pagan gods into the canonical architecture.

Am I a fraud, then, or a scholar? I am both, of course, as we all are. Half of what I know I do not believe. Half of what I believe I cannot prove. For the rest, I hope to muddle through and my mistakes go without comment.

You could find sages and masters in Carthage then to crew a fleet of ships—though they’d all sink—but while you might without difficulty seek and receive tuition in art, literature, rhetoric (above all else, rhetoric), music, medicine and physical science, indeed you could walk a hundred miles around the city and still not find a fellow to teach you how to become a merely decent human being until you found Amatus.

And yet here it is in this room, most immanently real and beautiful, and washed, already, in the blood of a sacrifice. It is nonsense given form and weight to work upon the world.

This cannot be about me. I have no enemies so big, so wide, so wealthy. If I did, they could just snuff me out and move on. Unless, I suppose, this enemy is so vast as to see no difference between this excess and a simple knife in the gut.

Heat over a brazier. Mix. Do not melt the metal: this is not jewellery we are making. It is magic. The transformation is not chemical, it is impossible. Respect the discipline: the art of what cannot be.

“The car has over a million hours of driving experience,” he added kindly, as I peered nervously around. The steering wheel was turning one way and then the other like the keys on a pianola, the pedals drifting up and down. “The first few days, I was a bit twitchy. Then I realised: all the other cars on the road? They’re the ones driven by idiots. People on phones, people who can’t see through the screen because the blower’s out, people who just want to get home in a hurry. They do all this totally insane crap all the time. This car? This car doesn’t. It’s the most boring chauffeur in the world. It doesn’t just see the road, it sees in infrared and sonar, like that. It has real-time satellite information. And it makes decisions so fast you miss them. The law says I have to sit here, but honestly, if you see me reach for the wheel the odds are you should punch me in the face. The car is much better at this than I am. If there’s an accident, it’ll have saved us—or not—before I even know what’s going on. I’m just here in case it suddenly decides to take over the world.” He grins. “Skynet, right? Only that’s not going to happen either. It’s bollocks. Specialised intelligence. It doesn’t think. It drives.”

The question, Annie said, wasn’t whether we could have a society like the one she wanted me to imagine, it was whether we would.

Each piece was composed of five separate canvases, and to see the whole work one must look at them in whatever order and hold in the mind the impression and image of each. To look at a single one alone, or to look at all of them as if they were a panorama, was to misunderstand. The work did not—could not—exist in paint: it existed in the mind as a conjunction, and all five parts must be apprehended at once.

“Where the fuck do you even get pig’s blood after ten o’clock at night?” “I’m not sure that’s what matters,” I said. “Where? The? Fuck?” “We need to talk about personal security.” “Is there an open-all-hours wanker’s equipment shop?” “You should come and stay with me. Both of you. Or go to Michael’s.” “Because I’m a little bit hurt that no one’s ever told me about it, if there is. What if I’d needed to drown someone in fermenting sheep shit? You know, after hours? Because obviously I can get sheep shit during the day, I mean, who fucking can’t? But what if I’d had a sheep shit emergency and, just because no one mentioned to me about the wanker shop, I couldn’t drown this person at all and I had to wait until the next day and, you know, the urge had passed off? Because that would have been a tragedy.

I’m steganographically hidden in my own thoughts.

What is worse, she feels she knows Diana Hunter now, not things about her but her, the woman herself, the way she knew her own body and her own head. She knows Hunter like an old friend or an old chair, the impression of her marked as if by long acquaintance. Borrowed understanding. Stolen. Does that sort of thing have to go somewhere when it is torn away? Was it ripped away from its owner and somehow stored, mitochondrial metadata riding the signal, baked into her by the trauma of a witnessed stroke?

“Like choice architecture.” The use of big data and nuance to influence political decision-making: the attempt to corrupt the political process by deliberate manipulation of the cognitive limitations of the human mind. Almost all restaurant menus use it, and even knowing what it is, diners are still influenced: the steak or the lobster is always mountainously expensive. Once you’ve rejected that, the less expensive stew seems like a bargain, and having saved money you splash out on drinks. Subscription prices and two-for-one deals are the same.

unworldly concerns? Was the business of living not complicated enough? What if the System cannot be fixed? And what if it can, but can then once again be compromised, and so on and on and on so that one might never truly be sure whether one lived in heaven or hell? By definition: hell.

Tubman nods agreement, and Neith watches the two of them move around one another in the small galley kitchen with the ease of long understanding. A short while later, she is eating again. Between the second helping of bacon and the third, she looks around the room and then, looking back, realises that she is looking at love in its natural habitat, and that she hasn’t been in its company for years. Fernweh again, like the sudden recognition of an empty chair.

The chastity of Roman wives being legendary more as a noble ideal than a practice on the ground—or, as it might be, in the bathhouse, or on an ornamental lawn.

A finished narrative is still not a book. It must be copy-edited, typeset and proofread, printed and bound between enticing covers, and sold to the world. Thanks to everyone in that long, critical chain, but I must take a moment to mention the extraordinary Chip and his team, who produced this stunning design.