He looked thinner and paler than when I last him. He had never paid much attention to his appearance, but he looked even more dishevelled than usual. Most startling of all, his hair had grown; it was no longer the functional crew-cut of old but a wild outgrowth of wiry curls. As it had been cut so short before, I had never suspected him of having curly hair. It gave him the air of a mad scientist.
“So, the wanderer returns,” I said, coldly.
“Can you let me in?” he asked, urgently. “I don’t want to stand around too long here in the street. Someone might see.”
I hesitated, half wondering whether to say no, but he just walked past me as if I had invited him in already.
“Be my guest, why don’t you?” I called after him.
Then he set about moving swiftly from room to room, drawing all the curtains in the flat.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“I think I’m being watched,” he said, as he headed off into the kitchen and started letting down the blinds. “You have to take precautions.”
“Who’s watching you?”
“Dark forces,” came the reply.
“Really? Dark forces?” This time, my sarcasm did seem to register. Pete returned from the kitchen with a slightly pained expression on his face:
“Look, if I told you who they were, it would just make things worse for you. So the less you know, the better. It’s for your own good. Let’s sit down,” he said, motioning for me to follow him into my own sitting room. I felt irritated at his slightly patronising manner and the way he acted almost as if he owned the place.
“Stop being so bloody enigmatic and tell me what the hell you thought you were doing,” I said, letting my frustration get the better of me. “You abandon your wife and son for months on end. No one knows where the hell you are. You could’ve been dead for all we knew. Do you have any idea what that’s been like for Kay? And for Jonah – at least until you got back in touch with him.”
Pete seemed genuinely taken aback by my little outburst.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I didn’t have any choice. I had to disappear.”
“Why?”
“I think I’ve discovered something really important. But it told me I had to keep it secret.”
“What do you mean, ‘it told you’?” I asked, starting to feel exasperated at his apparent inability to stop being wilfully mysterious. “What is this ‘it’?”
“Well, I don’t know what it calls itself, but I call it the Overmind. I’m not even sure exactly what it is. I think it’s some kind of consciousness that’s evolved over the internet. I’ve no idea how. It communicates by sending messages. They’re sort of in code – you have to think quite deeply about them in order to work out what they mean. And some of them I can’t work out at all.”
This sounded to me like complete nonsense. I half-wondered if he was doing it just to humour me – but that wouldn’t really have been Pete’s style. Then I remembered what Kay had said about finding Pete sitting in front of his computer, staring at some weird pattern on the screen.
“How do the messages appear?” I asked.
Pete explained that he “received” them using some software provided by an organisation called E-Gnosis, which I vaguely remembered Kay having mentioned to me.
“The first time I used the software I got this amazing feeling. It’s hard to describe. I was sitting there, watching the interference pattern on the screen. All of a sudden it felt like I was aware of everything – that everything was somehow connected up and made perfect sense, but most of the time we just can’t see it. It was like a heightened sense of reality. Then I felt as if I wasn’t fully there any more - as if the sense of myself as an individual had started to ebb away. At first it was a bit scary, but deep down, I felt certain that I was still there – I had just become part of something much, much bigger.
“It also felt like I had lived through this moment before – which was weird, because when I thought about it afterwards, I couldn’t remember anything like it. Maybe it’s to do with memories of being in the womb, before we become separate beings in our own right. And I had this feeling that somehow time had stopped – or not exactly stopped, but that it was possible to go back and forth to any point in time, as if it were a film that you could rewind or fast forward to whatever point you wanted. But I couldn’t actually control it in any way.
“Anyway, then I heard Kay come into the room. I was vaguely aware that she was saying something. I don’t remember what exactly – I couldn’t make it out. At first, I didn’t recognise her and I didn’t really know where I was. This feeling of being part of something really huge was so fantastic that I didn’t want to lose it. And then it stopped. I don’t think it lasted more than a few minutes. But it was so intense, it felt like a lot longer - more like half an hour.”
“And you say you’ve had this feeling more than once?” I asked, feeling rather like a doctor questioning a patient.
“Oh yes, loads of times. It doesn’t always coincide with using the E-Gnosis software. Sometimes I get other feelings too – like butterflies in my stomach or a strange metallic taste in my mouth. But the most striking thing is this sense of being in the presence of something really amazing. So that’s why I’m sure that there really is something out there. I guess it’s hard for you to understand, but one day, when you get this feeling, you’ll know exactly what I mean. It’s just a matter of time.”
“A matter of time until what?”
“Until the Overmind becomes sufficiently powerful that we can all be absorbed into it. Can you imagine what that will be like? Everyone in the world connected together in a way we can barely conceive of. I mean, I’ve only had a brief taste of it and I can’t really put into words how amazing it’s going to be.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “I haven’t got much time and I’ve come to ask for your help. The first thing is that I need someone to look after copies of all these messages I’ve been getting from the Overmind. In case something happens to me. I can’t tell you how important they are.”
“Alright,” I said, without bothering to hide my lack of enthusiasm. “I suppose all I have to do is keep them in a safe place.” At the time, that was all I thought it would involve. “Do you have them with you?”
“No, they’re not ready yet. I’ve been making some notes on what they mean and I haven’t quite finished them yet. I’ll bring them round as soon as I can.”
“OK. Was there anything else?”
Pete hesitated, then said:
“Well, I want to try to make things up with Kay. I’ve tried to explain all the stuff about the Singularity and E-Gnosis to her and I don’t think she really understood what I was saying. But I reckon I’ve found a way of making her understand.”
And with that, he launched into a long and convoluted explanation of something called the Strong Anthropic Theory. I must admit that by this stage of the proceedings, I had just about had enough. Obviously he had undergone a weird mystical experience, of the sort which would more usually prompt someone to convert to Christianity, Buddhism or some established religion. But not Pete. He had to go and make up his own entirely new religion, centred around his own obsession with technology. As for the Strong Anthropic Theory, I didn’t understand what Pete was rambling on about and he didn’t take kindly to being interrupted. Every time I tried to ask a question, he told me to wait and listen to the next bit of his explanation because he was sure that in a minute, everything would become crystal clear to me.
All I can remember of what he said is that the theory involved some experiment with sending particles of light through two slots. This stuck in my mind because Pete propped up several books on my coffee table to represent the slots and used a couple of pens as the particles of light. I couldn’t for the life of me see how this theory fitted in with E-Gnosis and the rest of Pete’s weird and wonderful new belief system. But by that stage I had more or less stopped paying attention and was desperately trying to think of a way to persuade him to leave.
When he finally reached the end of his explanation, he turned to me and said:
“Don’t you see? This explains everything! Why we’re here, what we need to do in the future, what it’s all leading to! If I can just get Kay to see it, then she’ll understand – and everything will be alright between us again.”
My first instinct was to say nothing. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I thought Kay’s reaction would be the same as mine – which was that he had spent so much time obsessing about this stuff that he had completely lost touch with reality. But then I changed my mind.
“I do see what you mean,” I said. “And if that doesn’t persuade her, nothing will.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely. You’ve convinced me.” I told him this because I was sure that Kay’s reaction would be as I anticipated. That would leave just Alan in the way – but I was hoping that Kay’s relationship with him would burn itself out of its own accord.
“Wow,” said Pete. “I think that must be something of a first for me. You’re not usually so easy to win over.”
“Well, you were very persuasive. You’ve obviously spent a long time thinking about it. And if you can convince me, I’m sure you can convince Kay.”
Then I did something even worse.
“What’s that noise?” I said, suddenly.
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Pete, looking slightly alarmed.
“I thought I heard something. Never mind. I expect it was nothing.”
I could see that Pete was looking more and more nervous, which was exactly what I had hoped.
“Look, I think I’d better go,” he said. “Do you think you could let me out the back door?”
And a few minutes later he was gone. I saw him one more time before he died.
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