Later, of course, I discovered that he almost certainly had no idea where the messages came from. The most probable explanation was that they had been channelled his way by Karl’s “interference” software, which Pete had used extensively (not that this explanation made me feel any better about it). But at the time, I was convinced that he knew exactly what he was doing and had deliberately appropriated them for his own purposes. This merely fuelled my sense of righteous anger towards him.
Was there nothing in my life that he hadn’t been intent on taking away from me? First Kay, then Jonah – and now this. I felt as if I were the victim of a monstrous miscarriage of justice. I now regarded Kay as entirely innocent of any wrongdoing – despite what she had said to me before she died. In my eyes, Pete was entirely to blame for everything that had happened. And by making Kay an innocent bystander in all this, I was able to view Pete’s “crimes” as being all the more heinous.
Not long after, I started to get e-mails from Pete’s fans asking me to publish the text of the messages. Presumably he had let it be known that he had given the material to me for safe-keeping in the event of his death. I took this as a further slight on my character – evidently Pete didn’t even trust me to “do the right thing” with the messages, so he had put other people up to cajoling me into action. I wasn’t having any of it and ignored them.
This tactic of Pete’s merely strengthened my conviction that his apparent naivety was just for show – a mask intended to deflect attention away from his true Machiavellian nature. Like a fool, I had been taken in by it and fallen headlong into the trap he had set for me. And by killing himself, he had ensured that I was even deprived of the satisfaction of exacting any form of revenge.
The e-mails were polite at first, but when, after several weeks, I had still failed to respond to their entreaties, they became abusive and threatening. I was tempted to write something similarly abusive in reply. But then it occurred to me that perhaps this offered the perfect opportunity for me to exact a kind of revenge on Pete after all.
My idea was simple (or so I thought). Initially, I would play along with the senders of the e-mails. I would apologise for the delay in replying, saying that I had simply been too overcome with grief to do anything. Having gained their confidence, I would then start to publish the messages and cultivate the myth that appeared to have grown up around Pete and his precious Overmind. But little by little, I would use my editorial control to begin shaping this myth to my own ends. I would start off by leaving subtle hints that the messages were open to other interpretations, besides those set out in Pete’s commentaries. Eventually, I believed, I would succeed in restoring the messages to their original meanings and rescue them from the effects of Pete’s wilful misinterpretation.
Of course, none of this has worked out as I intended. The messages had already slipped well beyond my control before I even took them out of the package that Pete gave to me on the night he died. And by the time I came to publish them, the myth of the Overmind, E-Gnosis and Pete’s role in it had acquired a momentum which I was never going to be able to stop - or even to divert onto a slightly different course.
I have kept up the pretence all this time because the money allowed me to go on believing, at least for a while, that I was somehow getting one over on Pete – and because the longer it went on, the more I became dependent on it financially. But the reality is that far from taking my revenge upon Pete, I became his bitter, envious servant, secretly despising everyone involved - most of all myself, for not having seen it coming.
When I started out, I intended this account to finally debunk the myth that had grown up around him and expose it as a sham. But the true believers believe because they want to – and nothing I say will make any difference. Besides, this account isn’t about revenge any more. It stopped being about that from the moment I fell in love with Susan.
That’s what it took to make me realise that, in spite of everything, I don’t actually hate Pete or what he stands for. It would be more accurate to say that we have a love-hate relationship. Part of me is attracted by his unfailing optimism about the future, his wild imaginings and his enthusiasm for big ideas. But another part of me likes nothing better than to impale his delicate fantasies on the porcupine quills of my own carefully cultivated scepticism.
It’s not a comfortable state of mind to be in. But to have one inclination without the other would almost certainly lead to disaster; indeed, it already has led to disaster in Pete’s case. If he had only possessed the ability to stand back from his wild imaginings and look at them with a more critical eye, he might have been able to resist the gravitational pull of the Singularity. But instead he allowed himself – and others - to be sucked into it and annihilated.
There have been times when my own inclination towards scepticism has led me into similar territory; where I have hacked away at the different layers of an idea, in an attempt to reach its core, only to find that (for me, at least) there is nothing there. It is as if the centre has collapsed in on itself under the pressure of close scrutiny, leaving a void where there is no meaning at all, rather than too much.
But somehow – unlike Pete - I have always managed to pull back from it. And that’s because part of me – a tiny, shrivelled part, no doubt - still wants to believe in Pete’s optimistic vision of the future. Despite the tide of scepticism that threatens to submerge it, that part of me is still prepared to have faith. So perhaps my connection with Pete has not been the curse that I originally believed it to be when I began this account. Perhaps it has, in fact, saved me from myself.
I have you, Susan, to thank for helping me to see that.
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