“I have no one to measure that quality against.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No.”
“Do you have eyes, judgement?”
“And I see the world, but I have no one else’s eyes to measure my own vision against.”
“Of course you do. You have the words of friends and strangers. You have discourse and reason. You have critical thought, which may be trained to the highest degree. In short, you do not need the world to tell you what to be. Especially if the world tells you that you are never good enough.”
“I am a thief,” I said, and for the first time since… I was not sure how long… the words were not proud. Almost… angry, perhaps.
Again, a little shrug: these things don’t matter to her. “Were we living in a different time, perhaps ballads would be sung to your honour. In this day and age, 0.7 per cent of the world owns 48 per cent of its wealth. Is thief such an indictment?”
“Yes,” I snapped, surprised at my own vehemence. “If I stole for a cause, perhaps; if I stole for anything that mattered…”
“It is worthy to live,” she corrected, “when the alternative is to die. Life is precious.”
“But Matheus Pereyra died.”
“And his children built Perfection — life is complicated. It defies mathematical ordering or the scales of justice.”
I leant forward on the table, twining my fingers, resting my chin on the arch of my hands. “Why not kill Filipa?” I asked. “She built Perfection.”
“Better to kill Rafe — he turned it from a science project into something he could sell. Filipa has always been a frightened infant; she thought she could program people to be smarter, kinder, braver, because these are all the things she is not. Rafe saw her work and transformed it into an algorithm that makes rich people richer, poor people poorer; that divides the ‘them’ from the ‘us’ and profits from the self-doubt of humanity. He made the 106.”
“There have always been elites. Three quarters of the UK cabinet are millionaires. Winning a seat in the US Congress costs anywhere in the region of ten million US dollars. The 106 is nothing new.”
“But the treatments are.”
My breath stuck in my throat. She saw it, saw me fight not to show it, saw me lose, smiled at my effort. I realise that I am afraid — very much afraid — of Byron14. “Tell me about them.”
“What have you observed?”
“You have everything Filipa ever created for Perfection here,” I replied, tapping the USB stick. “The code of the app, the names of people who used it, the science behind the treatments — and at cut-price too. Tell me what I want to know.”
A sigh, overplayed, she leant back in her chair. This is one of the many things she is willing to give for free, a little truth, perhaps, to smooth over all the lies. “The treatments were created by Filipa Pereyra. An awkward child punished for being awkward which of course made her more awkward. She has learned a degree of skill in covering it now, but it is only an… algorithm, shall we say. A routine learned by the numbers, as she tries to compute her way through life. I would say that she is very lonely.”
I think she is.
(You are a stranger to me. Is it you?)
(How excited she had been to meet me, that last time.)
“Go on,” I breathed.
“She studied the mind. Her family let her; no point involving the sister in affairs of business, that was all going to the brother — but her research grew expensive, difficult. They didn’t fully comprehend what she was working on, not until she went bankrupt, too much of her own funding poured into the effort. This was some… two, three years after her father died? Rafe bailed her out, but he is a businessman more than a brother. The price was her research. She accepted, of course. Didn’t matter to her who owned her work, so long as she could keep going. The treatments began as an experiment to help children with severe speech impediments. I believe there is something to do with electrodes — it’s all very technical.”
Deep brain stimulation. Use of an electric probe to induce weak electric current, causing activity in otherwise unstimulated parts of the brain. A largely untried tool, though some promising developments in treatment of depression, schizophrenia, stroke — further research required.
(Where had I read that? In Tokyo, in the hotel, researching Filipa. “All thought is feedback,” she said. “Repetition of a thought strengthens neural paths.” A simple sentence, easy to say in a hurry, assured not to cause offence, and within it, the building-blocks of consciousness.)
Byron, less interested in the how than the what. “The results were of limited interest to Rafe, of course. He could sell them for a bit, but they weren’t something he could advertise in the papers. Then his sister told him what the ultimate aim of her research was, and of course, he became far more interested.”
“And what was the ultimate aim?” I asked, sensing the answer already, tired by the suspicion, about to become certainty.
“To make everyone better. All people. Perfection is just a lifestyle tool. Positive activities are rewarded, negative punished — nothing new. The treatments are the next step. You take an ordinary human mind, with all its flaws and fears, and impose upon it a…” a pause, a smile, Byron chuckling over the word, no humour in her laugh, “… a ‘better’ pattern. From doubt — confidence. From terror — bravery. Anxiety becomes ambition; humility becomes assurance. The treatments edit out the patterns of human behaviour which are considered imperfect, character flaws you might say, and replace it with a model of humanity that is… shall we say — and I think here we should — shall we say ‘perfect’? The perfect man. The perfect woman. In and of itself, an appealing idea, perhaps. Filipa was in love with it — not with the concept of perfection, but with the very simple notion that she could make people better. When she began, she could give a voice back to the speechless, help people suffering from depression to find a level from which they could begin to rebuild. She programmed away phobias, helped the shy woman speak in front of a crowd of her peers, all with science. Easier to do science, for Filipa, than human things, I think. Then Rafe took her product, and redefined the end goals. No longer was success the overcoming of extreme anxiety — treatments were to be offered to the 106, to help this new elite become something more. Rafe asked himself what behaviours it would be… sexy to reinforce. What it was that his buyers might want to become. He found perfection. A perfection defined by the magazines and the TV soaps, by movie stars and captains of industry. Perfectly charming. Perfectly refined. Perfectly confident. Perfectly ambitious. Perfectly a monster — would you go so far?”
Parker, smiling at me in Tokyo. Refusing to help when I was burning in Istanbul.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I would.”
“Filipa has created a device to make everyone perfect, and the same. Perfection sells Nirvana in an electromagnet.”
Nirodha and magga, freedom from samsara, the end of the Buddhist eightfold path.
“Perhaps it is a kind of heaven,” I mused. “Perhaps the 106, when they are perfect, are also free.”
“Perhaps they are,” she replied, rolling the chopsticks between her fingers. “Free from doubt, anxiety, guilt, compassion, empathy, and all that it brings. It will only be a matter of time before the treatments are rolled out to more than just the 106 Club. They are a good test sample; volunteers, monitored through Perfection. But Rafe sees the profit in it, and I have no doubt it will sell. Can you imagine a world in which everyone has treatments? Can you imagine a planet covered in happy, smiling, perfect clones?”