“Filipa…”
“He shouted at me. Usually he laughs, doesn’t shout. Did you do it? You stole the base code; with the code you could do this, of course — I’m not angry. I wouldn’t have done it that way, I never would have dared, but if it works? If Rafe pulls the treatments then that’s a good thing, that’s how it should… is it you?”
She didn’t meet my eye as she asked, kept her back straight, head turned towards the sleeping figures. Bravery: courage, valour, daring, prowess, audacity, nerve, spirit, mettle, pluck.
Takes bravery not to look at a woman who you’re afraid of as you accuse her of murder, and in her way — yes — Filipa is scared of me too.
I took her hand, gently, and she looked at the floor. “I didn’t do this,” I said. “I stole Perfection for someone else.”
Her eyes, rising quickly, a woman on a mission. “Who?”
“She called herself Byron.”
“Byron? Ah, yes, of course — the woman who murdered our father.” She nodded at nothing much. “Matisse told me about her.”
“Matisse…”
“His real name is John, did you know that? But he does all this spy-stuff. I thought he had to be wrong about Byron, it was all too silly for words, but…” A half shake of her head, a different thought for another time. “And the poetry, yes? They all heard something which triggered the change, the treatments you see, an evolution from basic NLP, but better, much better. Thought is association, you anchor a concept — beauty — repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes true, you can be beauty, you are beauty, beauty beauty beauty beauty—” I gripped her hand tight, and she stopped as quickly as she’d begun, head turning up, then down again, rolling around her neck like a thing beyond her control.
We stood a little while in silence, staring at the sleepers.
Then, very quietly: “Perfection’s been hacked, you see. I knelt at Rafe’s feet, told him to stop, begged, but he wouldn’t. It’s worth too much money. Panic if it’s pulled, he said, just put the bodies away some place and fix it on the quiet, fix it! Loss of customer confidence. Small-scale incidence, a statistical blip, individual cases rather than a product issue. Not just Perfection, but the data gathered from Perfection, the marketing of course, access to phone, email, search terms, location data, eating habits, shopping, travel, ambitions, aspirations — he sells it for a fortune, in-app product placement, the hair, the clothes, the holidays, the shoes, the magazines, the make-up. He told me to go back to the lab and fix it. Go and tinker, he said. Go tinker with your toys. For a while I thought that I’d done it, that it was my fault. I thought my treatments were doing this,” a hand, taking in the room, head down again, now she is ashamed, “but I looked again and there was a hack. Two months ago, something else put into the treatments, hidden in the beauty beauty beauty beauty beauty. Hard to find; hard to fix. I think it sends people mad.”
Fact. Here is the problem, there is the truth.
You are beauty you are beauty you are beauty…
Repetition making a thing the truth.
You are beauty you are beauty you are beauty…
Can’t repeat your way out of five sleeping bodies in a house in France. I am sane I am sane I am sane I am sane…
Silence a while between us.
I said at last, “I stole it. I didn’t… do this.” My words, dead even before they were spoken.
“That’s okay.” She shrugged. “I think what you’re doing makes sense.”
“You do?”
“Of course. Perfection destroys the human soul. You know I used to help kids with brain damage find their voice? That was before Rafe made me a monster.”
“You’re not…”
“I killed humanity,” she corrected, light as a feather, before I could speak. “I gave people the tool to suck out everything that was flawed, ugly and bitter, and it turns out that all that is left is a piece of marketing. Of course I blame Rafe too — he chose the parameters, he decided that Perfection was an advertiser’s dream. If your Byron could kill Rafe, perhaps it would stop, but I doubt it. I think she probably knows that. I think maybe that’s why this makes more sense.”
“Can you fix it?” I asked. “Can you make them… better?”
Her eyes flickered fast to me, surprised. “Why on earth would I want to do that?” she breathed.
Her hand fell from my fingers. I took a step back, Filipa now meeting my eye, clear and defiant. “My work,” she explained, steady, calm, “needs to be destroyed. It is an absolutely necessity. I’m grateful to you, for stealing Perfection. It gives me hope that one day all of this will be over.”
I looked to the sleepers in their beds, five men and women who had heard some words and gone insane, looked back at Filipa, saw something that could be madness in the corner of her eye, turned to the door, to walk — to run — far away. She said, “Matisse is determined to find you, almost as much as he wants to find Byron. He wants to show that you’re real. If he finds you — if Rafe finds you — I think you may end up on the dissection table. Please be careful.”
I stopped, fingers on the doorhandle. “Don’t you want to know how I work too?”
“Yes. Of course I do. But you’re human, whole and true, and whether your condition is artificial or naturally induced, it is… extraordinary. In Tokyo I gave you my bracelet. I have no memories of you, but I can conjecture based upon the data that is given. Sometimes there is cognition without words; a reading of a situation that cannot be rationalised by the artificial merits of logic. Words complicate things, sometimes. Numbers are simpler, but only black and white. Thought is… constrained, and we never really see it. But with you, I saw myself smile. I–I sometimes make myself smile, because it’s what people expect, smile smile smile for the camera smiling all the time because it’s what… but with you it seemed real. I think, for a few hours, you may have been my friend. And even if you weren’t, you are still human, still extraordinary in being human, and human is a species which is currently under threat.”
I opened my mouth to answer, didn’t have any words, stood in front of her like a mannequin, locked in her stare.
Then she said, “Luca Evard has been looking for you.”
The words slipped out so easy, so simple, that they caught me entirely off-guard. She saw it, the slight leaning back onto my heels, the flexing of my fingers at his name, and struggled for a moment to understand. “He was sacked from Interpol,” she added. “Matisse employed him instead.”
“Why?”
“He told his bosses that a thief he was tracking had the ability to be forgotten. He thinks he may have slept with you. Did he?”
“Are you recording this?” I replied.
“No — but that’s not fair, that means you want to tell me something you know I’ll forget, that… but then I’ll forget all of this, so go on. One of us may as well have a meaningful experience tonight.”
“I slept with him.”
“Really? Why?”
“He… he’s the only man I’ve ever met who’s been interested in me.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” she tutted, turning back to the patients, a dismissal again of a silly idea, and Filipa is a woman who has no time for silly ideas. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Filipa…” The words broke on my lips before they could get out, I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, tried to find them again. “Filipa. Your treatments could make me memorable.”
Surprise; then just as quickly, rejection, a fast shaking of her head. “Oh no no no no. That’s not right at all.”
“I met someone, like me, a man from New York, only I remembered him and he was perfect—”