I asked if she was saying that Jack was a robot.
She coloured at this suggestion. ‘Such terms carry their own baggage and aren’t very helpful. The distinction between biological consciousness and what we still tend to think of as machines is increasingly arbitrary.’
‘Can they make one of these piano rolls out of anyone?’
‘In theory, yes, anyone can be coded.’
‘So why Johnson?’
‘A number of reasons. The fact that he authored a dictionary is of course an inestimable advantage. Also because of the abundance of written sources – first and third person. And because the hypotactic structure of his sentences lends itself to the forms of logical branching that form the basis of the code.’
‘But why involve me?’
‘From Hunter and Sinan’s point of view, you were well placed to answer the key question.’
‘Which is?’
‘Authenticity. Was he real? Did he have life, or the simulation of life? Did he merely repeat speech without comprehension, like Montaigne’s parrot, or was he an authentic, autonomous subject? The distinction is the crux of the work. It must be the real thing. Otherwise it is not obshchee delo.’
‘That’s what you wanted me for?’
‘That is what they hoped to achieve.’
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What about you?’
‘For myself … Strange as it sounds, perhaps I hoped for something very like this.’
She paused. The rainbow had vanished. A man in filthy jeans had emerged from somewhere and was spreading gravel noisily with a big spade.
‘This?’ I asked incredulously. ‘That bloke? Us sitting here? Jack’s death? The … the termination?’
‘Of course not. Not all these things. But the paper I chose was unlikely to fool a conscientious expert. And I was lucky enough to persuade Hunter to engage the services of someone who spoke Russian.’
‘You wanted me to doubt their authenticity.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I need an ally.’
I could see her watching my expression as the implications of her words unfolded. I remembered our first meeting, her feet on the staircase; ‘You pity him?’ – and her eyes averted at the thought of my compassion towards Jack; our drunken intimacy. She had drawn me into the conspiracy. I need an ally. I have been living in the shadow of those words ever since.
We sat in silence for a while. Finally, she gestured towards the rocket which rose up in front of us, topped with its tiny capsule. ‘Before Gagarin, you remember there was Laika, the dog we sent into space? Afterwards, the chief scientist, Gazenko, said, “We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.” Do you understand?’ She searched my face for a reaction. ‘Some progress has an unacceptable price. For a very long time, I believed that what we were doing was a good thing. This idea of Fedorov, obshchee delo, it offers so many possibilities, so much hope. But then we began to apply it. Gradually, I understood that what we were doing was ethically inexcusable. I saw the guilty part I was playing. I became ashamed of myself. This version of obshchee delo is wrong. Latterly, they have failed to heed even the most basic moral safeguards. I no longer ask where the bodies come from. Misha says they are using vagrants, bomzhi, and deserters. This is not what Fedorov conceived of. He called it obshchee, not tainoe delo.’ The distinction she made in Russian was between a common task and a secret one.
‘Why don’t you just write a letter to the papers?’
‘Do you believe what I have told you?’
I said nothing. It was clear that the answer was no.
She smiled. ‘So, what chance do I have to persuade another?’
25
I spent that evening in the lobby bar of my hotel, eating chilled soup made out of rye beer and cucumbers, trying to untangle the dense and scientific language of Malevin senior’s article with the help of a Russian dictionary.
In his paper, so far as I was able to understand it, Malevin argued that certain external records of brain activity could be minutely related to the biological foundations of personality and memory. With judicious and sophisticated handling, he contended, these records – in principle, various, but in practice almost exclusively linguistic – could yield codes which mapped every nuance of what he called the ‘core complex’ (in Russian, sushchestvenniy kompleks). This core complex seemed to be more or less what we consider to be human consciousness. Malevin claimed that with enough material it was theoretically possible to reconstruct the core complex in a new organism. Malevin gave the name ‘proxy complex’ (zapasnyi kompleks) to the theoretical being that would result if an exogenously derived code were inserted into a new subject; it was a cuckoo entity perching inside a new carcass.
The terms were confusing and it was slow work making sense of his argument. I knew Vera would have been horrified if she could have seen me riffling through my dictionary in a public place. It was a small but deliberate act of rebellion on my part. She had insisted on leaving the park first. I was to remain on the bench for five more minutes. I watched her walk away, with that slight limp, past the broken Friendship of the Peoples Fountain, dwarfed by its huge and obscurely sinister gold statues. Vera’s paranoia seemed to border on delusion, yet it was far from being the least credible aspect of her claims.
Even if Malevin was a real person and he had advanced his ideas with some sincerity, it seemed deeply unlikely that he could have believed in their application. In 1946, the memory of war was traumatically fresh. The Soviet Union was rebuilding itself. The country surely couldn’t afford a costly renewal of Fedorov’s flirtation with god-building. My instinct was that the man was a pure research scientist, in love with the elegance of his theories.
*
I met Vera the next day by the statue of Pushkin in Pushkin Square. It’s a traditional spot for romantic assignations, but that wasn’t why Vera had chosen it. There was a political rally taking place in a cordoned-off area inside the square.
‘More crowds,’ she said. ‘It’s better. We can hide in plain sight.’
I told her what I’d felt about the article.
She granted that I was right about Malevin, but she pointed out that from the 1930s onwards, the personality cults around Lenin and Stalin had distorted the priorities of Soviet science. The most famous example of this is Trofim Lysenko, whose ideas about genetics were championed not because they were right, but because they seemed to confirm Marxist theory.
‘And in the case of Malevin,’ she said, as we weaved through the angry pensioners waving placards, ‘his ideas seemed to offer a possibility of increasing the health and effectiveness of our leaders. As a result it suddenly generated huge interest from our top scientific cadres.’
She said that in 1951, Soviet scientists led by Malevin himself had attempted to apply the principles of his theoretical design to human subjects.
‘What happened?’
‘It’s best for you to ask him yourself.’ With a studied casualness, she handed me a small hardback book, a copy of Mandelstam’s poems that she had bought for a couple of hundred roubles in the metro. Inside was a train ticket to Arkhangelsk.
‘Is it safe for me to see him? You’re not worried?’
‘Yurii Olegovich is no longer part of this work.’ The slightly old-fashioned way she referred to him, by his first name and patronymic, suggested a deep residual respect for the man. ‘He’s retired, basically forgotten. Travelling by train there is very little risk.’
‘Will he speak to me?’
‘He’s proud of his work, he’s furious with his son. He loves an audience.’
Looking back on our conversations, I realise I had never been so comprehensively seduced. Vera not only respected and condoned my scepticism, she said that the nature of what she was telling me was so improbable that she would suspect the sanity of anyone who accepted it unquestioningly. And she was tenacious too, in the most inexorable way: apparently soft, apparently reasonable, but unwavering. She made her case as though her life depended on it. I had a half-formed misgiving about spending more time away from home, far from Lucius and Sarah, but my curiosity was such that I never really hesitated about going.