“And one night I left the Ministry and went home on the special train from Mornington Crescent and got off at the wrong stop. And I found myself in Brentford and I fell down on the floral clock in the Memorial Park and that was when it came to me.
“I had a sort of revelation. It was all to do with the flowers on the floral clock. It was well after midnight and as I lay there I noticed that all the flowers were still awake. They had their petals open. And I thought that’s a bit odd and then I saw the floodlights. They’re on all night, you see, to illuminate the clock and because they’re on all night the flowers stay open. The flowers never sleep. The flowers cannot dream.”
There was a pause and Icarus heard sobbing.
“Stop blubbing there,” said the other voice. “What are you crying about?”
“Because I understood it then. I understood why we could never build a computer with artificial intelligence. Because a computer cannot dream. It’s a man’s dreams that give him his ideas. A man is what he dreams.”
“Sounds like rubbish,” said the other voice. “But go on.”
“When we sleep,” said the tortured soul, “it’s only our bodies that sleep. Our brains don’t sleep. Our brains go on thinking. If we have problems, our brains go on thinking about them, trying to sort them out, trying to solve them. But the solutions our brains come up with are in the form of dreams that our waking minds cannot understand. People have tried to interpret dreams, but they can’t, dreams are too subtle for that. But the way we behave and the solutions we eventually arrive at are guided by our dreams, even though we’re not aware of it.
“I suddenly understood all this, you see. Probably because it was ultimately the solution to the problem I had. The problem with artificial intelligence. The answer was right there. In our heads, you see. The brain is the ultimate computer, you just have to know how to use it properly.”
“Which is why you came up with Red Head?”
“To enhance the intellect. To speed up the thinking processes. To create the human computer. Why bother to build machines, if the answers to the problems you would set them to solve were all inside your head anyway? Just needing a little chemical help to bring them out. But I didn’t come up with Red Head.”
“I don’t understand,” said the other voice. “Explain yourself.”
“I was lying there amongst the flowers,” said the tortured soul. “And it all became clear, like I say. And I realized that if such a drug could be formulated, it could change everything, solve all human problems. A group of human computers dedicating themselves to the good of humanity. Just think what might be achieved. I saw the big picture. The overview. But then I thought, how could I ever formulate this drug? It might take years and years. The rest of my life. What I really needed was a drug to speed up my own thinking processes, in order that I could create a drug that could speed up thinking processes. Bit of a Catch 22 situation there. But the crooked man showed me how to read the flowers and that’s how I came by the formula.”
“Crooked man?” asked the other voice. “Who is the crooked man?”
“He found me lying there on the floral clock. He helped me up and he showed me how to read the flowers. He told me that the flowers would help me, if I helped them. All they wanted was to sleep. It seemed a pretty fair deal to me.”
“You’ll have to explain this,” said the other voice.
“The crooked man helped me up. He said he’d been listening to what I’d been saying. I thought I’d only been thinking but apparently I’d been talking out loud. Or according to him I had. He said the answer was staring me right in the face, all I had to do was look at the flowers. Well, I looked at the flowers, but all I could see was the flowers. Lots of different coloured flowers in the shape of a floral clock. But he said, look at the colours. Think of the rainbow. Well, I remembered the poem we’d been taught at school, about how you remember the order of the colours in the rainbow. It’s a poem about fairies. It goes, Some came in violet, some in indigo, In blue, green, yellow, orange, red, They made a pretty row.”
“I remember that,” said the other voice.
“Yeah, well I remembered it and looked at the flowers. First the violet ones, then the indigo ones and so on. And they spelled out letters. Letters and numbers. They spelled out a chemical formula. The chemical formula for Red Head.”
“With the corner up,” said the other voice.
“It’s true. Well, the formula is true at least. The drug works. I wish to God now that it didn’t. But it does. When I’d written the formula down, I thanked the flowers and then I smashed the floodlights so that they could sleep and dream and then I walked all the way home and went to bed.”
“Incredible,” said the other voice. “Insane.”
“Oh yes,” the tortured soul agreed. “It’s quite insane. All of it. I went into the Ministry the next day. Gained access to the laboratory and mixed up a batch of the drug. It was remarkably simple and straightforward. And then of course I had to test it. See if it really worked. So I tested it upon myself.”
“And it worked?”
“It worked all right. But not in the way that I’d been expecting. I thought it would speed up my thinking. But the human brain is not a calculating machine. It functions by entirely different processes. Organically. Thinking is organic, that’s what it’s all about. The drug enhanced my thinking processes. It opened my eyes and allowed me to see clearly. To understand everything. To see things as they really are. And people as they really are. The ones who actually are people. And the ones who aren’t. The wrong’uns.”
“Careful,” said the other voice.
“Or what? You’ll kill me? You’re going to kill me anyway, aren’t you? You have to keep your secret. If humanity knew about you and your kind and what you’re up to and how to see you—”
“Careful.”
“Be damned,” said the tortured soul. “Be damned the lot of you. I know you for what you are. And I know what you want.”
“Only the formula.”
“But you won’t get it.”
“You’ll tell us what we want to know eventually.”
“Not I,” said the tortured soul. “I’ve only told you this much because I wanted to spend the last few moments of my life free from pain.”
“What?”
“The poison I’ve taken will kick in at any moment. You’ll never find the drug. But someone will and that someone will learn the truth and they’ll put paid to you and your kind. That someone will change the world for ever. That someone will make things right.”
“Perhaps you’ve told us enough anyway,” said the other voice. “We know where to find the formula. On the Memorial clock.”
“Oh yeah. Right.” A laugh came from the tortured soul. “The flowers. I got very angry over the flowers. Because of what they’d done to me. Because they’d given me the power to see something so awful that it would ultimately lead to my own destruction. As it has. So I went back there, to punish the flowers. To stamp them to oblivion. But then I thought no, it wasn’t their fault. They were quite mad, you see, the flowers. That’s what happens when you’re deprived of sleep. When you cannot dream. You go mad. The flowers couldn’t dream and so the flowers went mad.
“But I did go back. I made a kind of pilgrimage. I wanted to see whether the floodlights had been repaired. And if they had, then I would break them again. So I returned to the Memorial Park, and do you know what I found when I got there?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” said the tortured soul. “Nothing whatsoever. You see, there was no floral clock in that park. There never had been.”
“What are you saying? Speak to me.”
Another silent moment, then another voice spoke.
“Save your breath on him,” it said. “He’s dead.”