Nothing is inflammable, p.2
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 2
Jakobsen smiled placidly. “Of course,” he said.
I rose eagerly, glad for a distraction. We left our coffee untouched on the table and he followed me down the long, thin corridor to the main research chamber. Bubbling sounds came from within, chemicals boiling themselves into bold new substances from within a small network of tubes and Pyrex pipes next to the doorway. The counters were mostly clear save for a few small experiments I had allowed to continue running and I had replaced a broken light bulb to better illuminate the place.
I had covered Judas’s cage with a large piece of black fabric and drugged the creature to avoid him interfering. I could hear his soft, labored breathing from behind the cage’s curtain.
I went straight to where the Protohuman lay chained to the wall and stood before it. Jakobsen remained on one side, always a little uneasy around the creature. His face crumpled slightly into a frown as the gaze went from me to the Protohuman and back.
I had wiped the blood from its head away and washed it as well as I could before Jakobsen’s arrival, ensuring it looked as presentable as possible.
“You are being careful with it, Dziga?”
“Of course. It’s my life’s work. It’s my life. Very careful.”
Jakobsen nodded slowly. “It wouldn’t be good to cause too much damage to . . . it.”
I was surprised that he should be concerned about such a thing. “Of course, Mr. Jakobsen. I would never harm it.”
I watched Jakobsen peer at the creature and I knew he was looking at the ice-white scar tissue visible in places.
“My experiment must continue, you realize, Mr. Jakobsen. Eggs will be broken. But I would never harm the creature beyond what is necessary.”
There was a long pause before Jakobsen turned to me, smiling now. “Of course, Dziga. I know. Forgive me.”
I shrugged, feeling in no position to offer anything but gratitude to the man. “Do you require to see my written results? I have constructed an interim report for you . . . ”
Jakobsen waved a hand as I knew he would. “That won’t be necessary. I just wished to check that you had everything that you needed. I am glad your work progresses, however.”
I nodded. “Yes, Mr. Jakobsen.”
Jakobsen frowned. “Dziga, I feel like you are wanting to tell me something. You seem . . . agitated.”
I shook my head, quickly looked elsewhere in the room. I still hadn’t decided whether to say anything to him or not for I had been told I was prone to moments of paranoia and I didn’t want to alarm my benefactor and possibly trigger my return to the hospital. But surely not all paranoia was unfounded?
“Dziga?”
“Mr. Jakobsen, I have . . . suspicions. Or . . . not suspicions. Feelings. I . . . Things . . . ”
Not making sense. Not making sense.
Act calmly, Dziga, do not give him cause for concern!
Jakobsen began to reach out to me with one long, textured hand but I withdrew instinctively as an abused dog would from its owner.
“I worry that we are not as cautious as perhaps we should be,” I finally managed. “About my work.”
“How so?”
“There are people who would see what I am doing and want it for themselves. People who would be willing to . . . do things to get it.”
“You fear for your life?”
Always I thought but did not verbalize. Shrugged instead. “It is always scientifically reasonable to assume that knowledge uncovered by one is of greater value to another just as it is of less value to the majority. And I fear my work is of more value than most.”
Jakobsen seemed unconvinced. “You are safe here, Dziga. Very few even know you are here. I brought you to this lab because of its isolation; nobody could know about your . . . work. Has something happened?”
“Nothing of noticeable import. But I worry that those who would seek to usurp my work would work in ways subtle enough that perhaps even I would not notice. Samples have gone missing. And . . . one of my equations was altered while I slept one night.”
“Are you sure?”
I sensed the tone hidden in Jakobsen’s voice, that tone of examination and assessment that was usually wrapped in a stark white lab coat and framed by wire-rimmed glasses and the jagged spikes of cranial charts.
“No. I could have been mistaken.”
Jakobsen nodded, folding his arms. “I shall look into further security measures for you, Dziga, if it will make you happier. You need not be fearful here, however. I will not let any harm come to you.”
I bowed my head, anxiety crawling within me like insect larvae. “Thank you, Mr. Jakobsen.”
As we walked to the door minutes later, the visit over, Jakobsen touched my shoulder. We stopped at the foot of the steps leading to the front exit.
“No more episodes, Dziga?”
I breathed hard because his question reminded me of before, of what he had taken me from.
“No, Mr. Jakobsen,” I lied. “No more episodes.”
The visits always left me shaken.
Being down there in the lab, so completely alone, it was like I had become utterly detached from the world, as if I were a thread unraveled from a shirt or an astronaut tumbling through space. It was so easy for me to feel that there was nothing else except me, the lab, Judas and the Protohuman but every time Jakobsen or Dmitri came to see me it brought the world and everything inside it crashing back to me.
How much further must I retreat before I felt truly safe?
I almost felt like I was back in the asylum, chained to the wall as the doctors examined me endlessly.
I emptied a brown glass jar of pills onto the counter top and popped three into my dry mouth, my hand shaking as I tried to take a sip of water from a beaker. I steadied myself against the wall and felt the pulse racing through my head slowly begin to calm down.
But it wasn’t enough.
I hated Jakobsen for showing no interest in my work. I hated the memory of a world full of noise and crowds that pressed against your ribcage and stopped you from being able to breathe. My claustrophobia began to set in like a great black spider crawling up my back and over my head.
At times like this it was like I had received a sudden dose of the world, more than even a normal, functioning being could handle and I had to retreat further. I rifled through the workbench drawers, pulling them open and slamming them shut, rattling their contents until I found a cloth bag. I took out the bag and removed from it one of several syringes filled with a viscous, faintly blue substance.
My life was one great long molecular chain, chemical after chemical after chemical.
I didn’t want to—but it was all I had ever known.
My hands still shook as I rolled up my sleeve and fought to find a vein—not difficult considering how hard my blood was pumping. I sank the needle into my arm and felt the room turn liquid.
Chapter Three
Wherein Dziga injects himself with a drug and realizes the next step in his work
When I am circuitry, every moment passes through me like a bullet and I feel myself slipping into place in the great cosmic pattern.
I am the microwave, bloated with the congealing juices of the meat I warmed several days earlier, my outer shells peeling away slightly. I am sliding along inside a rusted pipe and I am the oily water that it carries.
I merge. I supersede.
I am a claustrophobic entity yearning for the blessing of agoraphobia to necessitate my self-contamination. And I am simultaneously an agoraphobic dreaming of a three-foot box to squeeze myself into. These two fragments of a splintered being, the opposing reflections of a funhouse mirror, a spiral of confusion.
I am the wiring that feeds the laboratory, a network of plastic veins, I bleed continuously and seep into a multitude of devices otherwise dead.
I have the power of Frankenstein, the loathing of his monster.
I soar behind the walls on a tide of electrons and all at once I see the Protohuman convulsing on the floor, free of its chains, its limbs filled with the psychotic twitch of a deep sea squid’s puckered tentacles. It rolls onto its back and I stare into eyes that seem to me to have the convex of a spyglass, warping the room around it.
And then there is Judas, screeching maniacally in his cage, the sheet I had placed over it torn and discarded as he leaps from side to side, slamming against the bars. His teeth are bared as I surge and crackle around him. He feels me there, ethereal, metamorphosed by the drugs but still recognizable. Primal tears pour across his scabbed snout.
There is a burst of light and I arrive elsewhere in the complex, in a little-used room that stinks of iodine. I feel heavy, my movements regimented, occurring several moments after I wish them to. I am standing on the room’s door, the rotten wood splintered into four great fragments beneath me.
I lift my arm for balance and there is a great whirring, then some clicks. The motion is enacted for me and I become suddenly aware of the machine that I am. My body’s cells are merely nodes attached to my major components. My lungs are a set of two steel bellows welded to central nervous system that is really three coaxial wires wrapped around my spinal cord, piercing it in places. My blood is lubricant, my fears—programmed responses.
And my arm has lifted not because I wished it to, but because that is what the arm was meant to do.
Another mechanism engages and I am turning, willingly and yet without will, to the steel plate which has been hammered into a wall to cover the gaping hole rot has left in it. My hand appears before me, independent of the motor processes normally required of it and for a brief instant my awe becomes fear and I am terrified at my body’s betrayal, its sudden disloyalty.
I, this machine, wipe away a layer of grease from the steel and there I am, my reflection nothing more than my soul deconstructed then remixed into a machine-style monstrosity.
I gape at what looks back at me, sockets on my jaws extending to allow the gesture.
The drugs wear off quickly, perhaps because they are as much a part of my body as my fingernails or my shin bones. My metabolism dilutes, steals, reworks the chemicals and dumps me back into cold reality some time later with a feeling of unnatural calmness.
Unnatural or not, however, I am once again focused on my work.
I have spread out the newspapers that Jakobsen brought me on my work bench, having pushed all the clutter to the very edges to make room. I have separated some of the pages out, torn them, covering the entire worktop and spilling them onto the floor. Others I have pinned to the walls over my hastily scribbled equations and ideas.
I do this because I know there is a message waiting for me somewhere amongst them.
The drugs always left a distinctly acidic taste in my mouth and numbed my tongue and throat but I’d learned to ignore the sensations as I have so many others. My focus was the newsprint.
I spread my fingers across stories of inconsequential happenings, random events and opinions, just a mass collection of characters and digits in the end but then not really so. The mathematician Mandelbrot was right when he spoke of the existence of fractal knowledge—that perfect geometry that replicated itself to the depths of our perception and beyond. There were patterns all around us and often these patterns were so perfect that they could be seen at infinite magnifications at the same time, threaded throughout existence.
Mandelbrot identified 1.2618 as the fractal dimension of the snowflake curve and similar numbers were to be found in the curves of solar systems, stock market fluctuations and more. Everywhere.
Later it was found that the ammonites, prehistoric crustaceans, might well have become extinct not because of predators or habitat destruction but because the ratio of their ever-expanding, spiraling shell wasn’t exact enough and thus it wasn’t able to grow as successfully as its genetic cousins with the more universally-correct ratio of 1:1.618034. It sought to ignore the mathematical tendency towards a singular perfection and it suffered the penalty because of this.
I would not suffer the same.
My work would not suffer the same.
So I tore articles from the newspapers without looking to see their contents, transposing them over completely separate reports, even images. I worked for several hours, rearranging the words, subverting strap lines and sub-headings like some kind of bibliographic anarchist and the Protohuman remained silent for most of it, unaware of my search.
My theory is thus:
If there was a message for me, if there was knowledge awaiting my discovery, it would be everywhere for me to find and therefore if I selected any form of encryption, be it the arrangement of leaves in the trees, the pattern of smoke billowing from the factories or the arrangement of words on a page, the message would be there for me to decode.
I didn’t know what the message might have been, though I felt certain it had been guidance for my work. A word. A number. An entire theorem, perhaps.
I leaned on the counter, scribbling equations with a chewed pencil, trying to determine a fractal dimension which might help me but so far had had no luck.
It was there though.
Of course it was.
Before long the newspapers were nothing but shreds. I’d severed the logic of the stories and broken them down to their constituent parts—emotions, historical facts, political figureheads, terrible acts and good ones—but they had not rearranged themselves for me coherently. I made a note of the equations that hadn’t worked for me this time with a view to determining if there was pattern in their inadequacy itself later on and swept some the scraps into a cardboard box. These were the pieces that didn’t feel right, that didn’t fit.
I placed the box beside four others the same on the floor of the lab.
What was left was spread out singularly on the main, central table.
I stood back and allowed my eyes to lose focus, blurring the monochrome map work before me, letting my own inherent calculations, those that dictate the firing of neurons in my brain and the flow of blood through my arteries, discover a pattern themselves.
I stood for an age, arms crossed, letting sentences rearrange themselves before my eyes.
There was a message in there for me, somewhere, and it lurked just beneath the surface. Any problem was only one step away from its solution but the length of that step was indeterminate. I had to let it find me and soon enough it would and the key to my experiment would be in my hands.
I stared at the pieces, just pieces.
Nothing yet.
Judas was hungry, Judas was hungry.
Well, let him starve. For a while.
The Protohuman was restless and it made it difficult for me to deliver the latest round of injections to him but I managed. I stroked the thing’s face, then made notes on its pulse rate and blood pressure, adding it into a new column on my worksheets. I tracked his bodily fluctuations but only as a matter of scientific course—my real interest lay in the larger picture. I was concerned with detail only in as much as I needed to be.
I shouted at Judas to be quiet, suddenly aware of the scalpel in my left hand. “You see this? You see this?!”
Judas stared back at me and for a moment I believed he was about to say something. He bit down on the rusted metal bars of his cage, then flopped back onto the cell floor.
“Good boy.”
These vials of blood, these heart rate charts, this endless flow of statistics, were the minutiae of the greatness that I was a part of and I had to remind myself of this fact. This work must be done, I must operate microscopically as well as macroscopically. It helped to soothe my boredom to remind myself of the idea that the value and import of my work was as redolent in a single sample of plasma or measure of muscle mass as it was in my structural diagrams for the overall development of the creature.
However soon I grew weary of the routine and put my equipment down, thinking again of the newspapers. I retrieved the clippings I had put aside earlier and brought out some more older ones, arrange them haphazardly before me.
I had long ago considered that although my theories of the universality of these types of revelations implied that the message could be discovered almost anywhere if I knew how to look, newspaper print would be more likely than most to allow me to decode it. The message would hopefully already be in word form, not necessitating me to convert the signals from chemical compounds or mathematical solutions and since I had been feeling lately as if my work had reached somewhat of an impasse I decided I needed the extra impetus of whatever the universe might provide me with.
And so I arranged and re-arranged the pages.
Cut text.
Severed the heads of politicians in their photos. Plastered them onto the bodies of animals.
Created new letters by slicing existing ones in two and vertically reversing one half.
And I kept doing this.
For four hours.
My conception and birth were no miracle : they were a chemical reaction.
Like the mixtures of sugar and acid I boiled in tubs or the drugs I concocted for myself to make reality more easy to swallow. Particle met particle met particle. A mere coincidence.
As I stared at the Protohuman I was glad that this was not an experiment fuelled by passion for passion breeds scientific ineptitude. My equations should serve as the model for this inflicted evolution : they assembled themselves in uniform manner, fitting together in the only way they can. The same equation produced the same results time and time again, no deviation. If this universe was the result of an equation then it must be of one that was far beyond our own comprehension or prediction.
Perhaps this was what my work was aiming towards—the deciphering of the human equation. Sometimes I felt like this was beyond me and I was merely an operator in someone else’s experiment, as easily subtracted or reconfigured as a 1 or a 0 to complete their sum.
God the mathematician.
I listened to every sound as I sat on a bench in the lab.
