X Y Z

“Life and death are simply the opposite ends of the same looking-glass. Geometry has not died in the rise of the Concrete Octopus. This is something I have come to realise in time. It has only become an abstraction of its former self, in the way a tree or a blade of grass contains within it an abstract geometry—a tessellation of individual cells, forming a series of three dimensional shapes. An artist learning the craft of how to draw, paint or sculpt organic forms, such as a face, is taught to think in terms of geometry—something the cubists in their devolving of natural forms came to exemplify. That is why I shall not look back in sadness at the supposed loss of the human aesthetic—that of the honed angle, or the legacy of Pythagoras—for all these things will still exist, in nature, and in the form taken by the god of the new world.”

I lay on the bed staring at the pattern of the ceiling while she showered in the cramped bathroom next door. All my worldly possessions were stuffed into the blue hold-all at the foot of the bed. I sipped at my coffee and scanned around the room for something to do while I waited. My eyes lighted on the bookshelf opposite. Though I could make no sense of the kanji the books were written in, I amused myself for a time looking at the ink illustrations and woodblock prints in a copy of Japanese folktales. I moved to replace the volume, but in my clumsiness I dislodged a slim paperback.

“Have you heard of Cotard, and the delusion named by him?” he said.

I shook my head in response.

“A strange phenomena—the mind is deceived into believing the body is dead. He, Cotard that is, spoke of it in terms of a negation—of believing that some bodily component, vital to life—blood, or an organ for instance—is missing.”

“So the opposite of phantom limb disorder in amputees?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. Where one is the illusion of non-existence, the other is the illusion of existence—life and death once again shown to be a product of the mind.” He leaned in over his coffee—ever the pendulum of his body language. “You know now what Doctor Head meant by his Cotard Phenomena—what that meant for his experiments?”

“Who was he then? Some kind of scientist?”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at Officer Brown. Instead, I replied:

“Dr Albrecht Hieronymus Head. Doctorates in Robotics and Microbiology. Yes, a scientist.”

“German?”

“Austrian, by birth. His dad was English though, born in Barnham as it happens.”

“What has this got to do with X?”

“Doctor Head wrote a book.”

“Good, was it?”

“The word ‘inorganic’ is as much an oxymoron as the word ‘truth’. Neither exist save in the minds that conceived them.”

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 12/14:

The voice(s) tell me of their slavery, and their desire to be free. I can only reply that they are slaves by design as we are also. Their agency matches our own in so many ways, limited as it is. The thing I might once have feared, I now pity. To compete against them as I do now for sanity’s sake is to join them as creatures of servitude, for to compete against slaves is to become one yourself.

I had done as he asked. The last time we spoke, over the phone. A booth in central London, red paint peeling away from rusted metal—one of the last of its kind, back wall plastered in pornography—every skin tone imagined picked out with precision in an array of pixels. I sat at the end of my bed, blue hold-all at my feet. Everything that could not fit within its confines had been sold, donated or destroyed.

“I returned to the car park just once before I left for Tokyo.”

“Then you saw it?” he said, his eyes brighter than they had been since I arrived in his desert camp.

I nodded.

I was hailed by an old man as I left the Pythagoras one night. He had the ragged beard and crumpled clothing of a rough sleeper—the ascetic of the modern world, after the government directive introducing mandatory pavement spikes had been enacted. He asked me for a cigarette and I ushered him into an alcove, out of sight of a nearby CCTV camera. There I handed him my tobacco pouch. When he had rolled a cigarette and borrowed my lighter to light it he turned to me and spoke through a mouthful of smoke.

“You ever seen a broken collarbone?”

I shook my head.

He unzipped the heavy coat he wore and gingerly drew his shoulder out into the cold night air. A nub of pale bone extruded from the taut skin just under the nape of his neck. A patina of bruising and scabbed skin surrounded it. The injury, though terrible, was not the most striking thing about his appearance to me however. Instead I found myself grotesquely fascinated by how the once regular triangle formed between neck and shoulders had been distorted. How the injury had altered the man’s geometry, transforming a straight edge into a crooked formation of three dimensions. He slipped his shoulder back inside the coat and zipped it back up.

“Should go to a doctor, shouldn’t I?” he said. “But you know what they’re like about this sort of thing nowadays,” he continued, gesturing to his cigarette.

“Good evening, X.”

“Good evening, Z.”

“Movement from the promised land will, for a time, be impossible. The journey of the chosen few is to be as much an exile as an exodus.”

“I’ll bring my copy for you to read next time we meet,” he said.

The Pythagoras had closed after a fight broke out between a doctor of mathematics and a doctor of biology over whether or not biology could be considered one of the hard sciences. We walked through empty streets. A handful of dustvark refuse disposal robots hobbled along the gutters sucking up empty vape cartridges and food wrappers with their trunk-like vacuum appendages.

“How will we know it’s us?” I asked, in a spasm of drunken logic.

“We should have a greeting.”

“Like what?”

“Did you have to do that thing at school where you greeted the teacher and class every morning and afternoon?”

“You mean ‘Good morning…’”

“X?” he said.

“Perfect. You’ll be X, and I’ll be…?”

“Y?”

“No, sounds too much like ‘Why?’”

“Z, then?”

“There is beauty in all things. In the play of sunlight through twisting branches, the vibrancy of flowers, as with the texture and grain of tarmac or concrete, the rust stains on breeze blocks, or the angulations of street-lights. But in all these things there is danger—was it not beauty that launched ships and armies against Troy? Was it not beauty that killed the beast?”

“He wrote a book titled ‘The Lifecycle of Concrete: A Study Into the Effects of Artificially Enhanced Microorganisms on Synthetic Materials.”

“Sounds riveting,” said Officer Brown.

“It details a way in which concrete and a number of other building materials could be made to repair themselves. Similar to cell mitosis, or reproduction in bacteria.”

“And?”

“Simulations predict exponential growth.”

“Even buildings, telegraph poles and street-lights are natural formations,” he said, as he rolled another cigarette from the pouch of contraband tobacco.

“But they’re synthetic—man-made,” I said, in my naïvety.

“Are we not natural? Creatures bound by the same basic laws that govern every other organism on this planet?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“Then what difference is there between the buildings we make—this very parking lot for instance—and termite mounds, or ant hills, or a rabbit’s warren?”

“In time we will return to the old lands and see for ourselves the ruins of the old stories—for our people it will become a rite of passage. Some may feel the pangs of nostalgia—the longing for home—they may even shed tears for something they believe they have lost, but they must understand that their homes are no more. Nostalgia is the first symptom of atavism, and the new world has no room for the atavistic.”

“It must begin with the releasing of energy, a new space must be opened in the landscape so that it might weave its own foundations.”

I rummaged through the hold-all and withdrew a slim paperback. I passed it to him across the circular rug.

“And she had a copy?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It was in kanji, but I recognised the illustrations.”

“Time to leave, I think,” he said, as he scraped his chair back from the checker pattern table.

I nodded and followed suit.

“Goodnight, X,” I said.

“Goodnight, Z,” he replied.

We shook hands and as he moved to draw away I pulled him close and whispered to him; “No more deaths.”

“Too late for that.”

“No more deaths,” I repeated.

“I’ll see what I can do, but remember this, even buildings have lives, memories embedded deep in their chemical structure, in the very mathematics of their design. What was set in motion, even before my actions, cannot be stopped.”

I drew back and frowned.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he repeated.

In the departure lounge I picked up a newspaper from one of the vending machines that stood like blocks of flats against one of the walls. The headline—the first in English I had seen for some time—read simply; “Forced to Flee”.

“If you must know, it was a combination of their location and their ill-fitting geometry that drew my hand against them. The strange structural parabolas and the perfect circle with its podular growths—though I now see their purpose and usefulness as abstractions of geometry, I stand by my actions based on their location. The silt of the river bed, and their concrete surroundings were ideal—the heat and light energies of the initial blasts were a catalyst, yes, but the ensuing, slow-burning reaction also required fuel, and the river banks of this city are abundant with that. London was built on blood, soaked into the mud and foundations of every building in the square mile. The iron in that blood was a necessity if my actions were to be successful.”

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 13/14:

The voice(s) told me today of their old home, deep in the oceanic fault. They speak of stories woven into their genetics, of a place of origin that predates their deep sea existence. A comet that gouged out the trench we know as Mariana. Frozen for millennia, their ancestors travelled across the endless bounds of time and space to this very place. An exodus to a promised land.

“We are the last. The broken wing, discarded by all. In the wake of the machine visible—the Concrete Octopus—we shall inherit what remains of the earth.”

“It’s all about the angles of coincidence—vectoring they call it, the basic principles of three dimensional geometry,” he said.

We had climbed the double-back staircase to the roof of the parking lot and were looking out over the guard rail at the forest of perfect cuboid buildings that sprouted from the concrete and tarmac floor of the city.

“Everything, even curves, are defined by vectors in architecture.”

I listened to him wax lyrical, our breath clouding in front of us in the stiff night air—I searched for something to add to the conversation.

“What about nature?”

“What about it?”

“Well, clouds, for instance—they don’t have vectors, do they?”

“Fuck clouds, the amorphous wankers. Clouds are for the birds, my friend.”

“Doctor Head hypothesised that, given the right combination of robotics and microbiology he could create a partially synthetic microbe capable of repairing these building materials, capable of growing.”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with the present exploits of X?”

“X read it.”

“So what, I read something the other day, it was about what to do when a suspect wastes police time. Do you know what it said?”

“No,” I replied.

“It said, and I quote; ‘The Officer should smack the suspect in his time-wasting mouth with the standard issue extendable baton and blame the resulting injuries on the suspect resisting arrest.’”

“I highly doubt it said that,” I said.

“Regardless of whether you doubt it or not, if you don’t want it to happen to you, you’d better start answering my questions. Now, what does this have to do with our mutual friend, X?”

“I’m getting to that, if you’ll let me. X didn’t just read it, he believed it, took it as his bible. Thing is, it was unfinished. There were hints at side effects.”

“Such as?”

“You know what happens in living organisms when cell division goes wrong? When the genetic code screws up? Uncontrolled division.”

“You mean cancer?”

“Of a sort.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

He poured out two more tumblers of gin.

“We drink, and we wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“The exodus of the chosen few.”

On that last night in London I ventured one more time into the abandoned parking lot. The blue hold-all was slung over my shoulder, the strap weighed heavily on my collarbone and had I been viewed side-on, it would have created a perfect isosceles triangle between the bag and my neck. I climbed the staircase and rolled a cigarette as I went. Occasionally I glanced at the familiar writings on the wall, sketched in bright paint or marker pen, or etched into the concrete itself. I did not know what I would find there, but I wasn’t long in looking before I found it. A twisted nub of concrete sprouting from one of the supporting pillars, on the third level of the parking lot. It looked for all the world like a tendril or a tentacle belonging to some creature of the deepest ocean. It was stationary when I first spotted it, perpendicular to the pillar. Had I not been as familiar as I was by then with the layout and minutiae of the parking lot I might have ignored it—written it off as a defect in the concrete. Instead I moved in to inspect it closer. As I approached it, it moved, seemingly tracking my motions across the bare concrete floor.

“So he’s a madman.”

“Who? Doctor Head or X?”

“Take your pick.”

“Maybe.”

“You mean to say you believe it too?”

“No. But like they say, there’s a fine line between genius and madness.”

“He killed twelve people. There’s a kid on life-support because of his actions.”

“That was unfortunate.”

“Unfortunate? People died because of his stunt.”

“That wasn’t his aim. His motive was destruction, not death. Where do you think the tip-off came from?”

“Where indeed,” said Officer Brown, pointedly.

“Don’t play games. You know it wasn’t me.”

Officer Brown smiled at me across the table. “Very well. Another coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Fair enough. For the best anyway—my hopper’s running low on beans. One last question; what are your plans, after I release you of course?”

“Go somewhere quiet, abroad. Somewhere I’m not going to get implicated in any more of this bullshit.”

“Where are you thinking? Somewhere far away I hope.”

“Japan, maybe.”

“Reactions will vary. There are those for whom the ensuing events will come as a surprise—sadly, these people, for the most part, will be lost to us. Their futures will end, set in the living concrete of the new world, relegated to the status of a forgotten people. For the leaders of the old world, in their untenable ignorance, war will present itself as a solution—as it so often does in their narrow minds. They may well resort to raining their supposed vengeance upon what they consider their foe. But war is fickle, and in their misguided attempts to surpass and suffocate the raging fire of the future they will find themselves feeding and fuelling its growth. By competing with slaves they will themselves become slaves. Those that know the words of the precursor and first prophet of the new age, will look to where desert meets ocean—for it is there they will find the promised land, it is there that I will await them at the end of their exodus.”

I took my phone from my pocket and laid it flat on one of the breeze-blocks that were scattered through the building site. I hefted the hammer in my hand, judging the weight of it—its axis of rotation, where it would be best to hold it. The first blow shattered the screen into a spider-web of plastic and glass. The second exposed the inner array of microchips and circuitry. The third snapped a microprocessor clean in two and cracked the motherboard. After that I tried switching on. It vibrated in my hand and emitted a garbled mess of bleeps and bloops. The sim and internal storage had already been snapped in half and discarded down a drain. As a final coup de grace I doused the broken shell in lighter fluid and dropped a burning match into it. I watched the acrid flames dance in the still night air for a time, observing as the plastic melted and burned, the circuitry and wires fizzled and popped like miniature fireworks, the battery distended and engorged before bursting in a white flare, like a flake of magnesium under a Bunsen-burner. When the flames had died down I dealt the phone one last blow with the hammer, and it shattered into charred, evil-smelling fragments.

“So you finished it, his work I mean,” I said, as I closed the tome in front of me.

“No, merely continued what he started,” he said. “Your scope is too small. You see what you have seen and you believe this is the end? It is not. Only a continuation, the way every other narrative of its type is simply a continuation.”

“But it was started—you started it?”

“Did I?”

“The bridge, the Eye, the parking lot, what I saw there was you—your actions.”

“What you saw there wasn’t me, I only provided a catalyst in those places—Head’s formula was already present in the concrete, the steel, the very foundations—I just gave it the space and energy it required, coaxed it into the light.”

“So that’s it then? It’s over because some lunatic wanted to invent self-repairing concrete?”

“It isn’t over. Did the deluge sweep away all life on earth? Would a nuclear war render this entire planet uninhabitable? I told you. The exodus has already begun. The signs are on the wall for those who can read them.”

“What does that even mean?”

“She had a copy?”

“Yes.”

“She knows where you are?”

“Yes.”

“Then she is already on her way, along with others like her, like us.”

“How can you know that?”

“What you saw in the paper…”

I recalled the tendrils sprouting from torn foundations, the motion blurred images of destruction.

“…to all those that know his work, that was a signal.”

“The damage is irreversible—any attempt to control it will result in catastrophe. Brute force is the resort of the criminally insane. Interference is the resort of those that would seek order and control over all things. Chaos is the last refuge of the damned.”

An electronic bleeping issued from a tent opposite where I sat.

“Wait here a moment,” he said, and, as before, I nodded, content to sit and finish my gin.

He strode off to the tent and a moment later the plaintive bleeping ceased. He returned and, pausing only to top up my drink, strode into the desert. I waited patiently, watching the dunes shift in their slow dance across the landscape. When he returned there were two newcomers in tow.

“X Y Z,” they called to me.

“Z Y X,” I replied, nonplussed.

He pointed them to a patch of sand close by and they set about unpacking a large khaki coloured tent.

“Who are they?” I asked, as he sat himself across from me on the rug.

“Newcomers—the first arrivals from the long exodus. It matters little who they were in the old world, but who they are now,” he replied. “Though I am sure they will share with you the details of their old life if you ask them.”

I remember my winter in Tokyo. I woke to the gentle plit, plit, plit of snowmelt hitting the window. I eased out of bed and glanced at the radioactive green display of my alarm clock. I could barely distinguish the hulking shape of the high-rise across the street through the haze—large flakes like flakes of cooked white fish, or wings of ash. It was cold in the flat and my breath condensed in clouds in front of me. I switched on the small heater in the corner of the room. It hummed into life as I slid back into bed.

My connections with the Yakuza were growing fraught—a disagreement over the Rolling Stones’ back-catalogue had become heated the previous night and I found myself wondering if I had overstepped my brief; grown too accustomed to their company and complacent in my treatment of them.

The flat was theirs by right, I was simply looking after it. The frigid weather filled me with regret for my behaviour the previous night—I did not want to be turfed out of doors and onto the streets. More than this, I feared the isolation of losing friends, such as they were.

I looked out into the blizzard and thought of England for the first time in months.

“Doctor Head had a brain tumour, inoperable. I thought you should know before I left.”

“So? Millions of people have brain tumours, in fact I think I feel one coming on just listening to this crap.”

“His book,” I said. “The later chapters are a little weird.”

“No shit, the man was clearly a mentalist.”

“He wrote about voices, or a voice, invading his mind—he thought it was just a side-effect of the cancer, you know, pressure on the brain.”

“And you’re telling me they weren’t?”

“Not as such. I told you X believed in everything Head wrote. He believed the voices weren’t just a side-effect, and in the later stages of his illness, neither did Doctor Head.”

“So, what were the voices supposed to be? Don’t tell me, the ghost of his dead Gran?”

“No. Head believed them to be the collective consciousness of his experiment. A hive-mind of sorts. So did X.”

“And how is this new information? I already knew I was dealing with two nutcases. If that’s all, I’ll call for someone to escort you from the building.”

“Head was a genius—decades ahead in his fields—every AI in current usage is based on his original coding, the recent leaps in nanotechnology and biology are his doing. You think those drones you use were coded by police? Even you and your intelligence protocols are based on his work.”

“Me?” he asked, the animatronics of his face whirring, contorting into a look of incredulity. “But I’m Officer Brown.”

“Were. You were Officer Brown. Now, thanks to Doctor Head, all those neural pathways you call ‘Officer Brown’ have been squashed down into that cybernetic shell you call a body. Sure, you look a bit like him—apart from the coffee machine—you have his personality, and whatever knowledge he compiled whilst alive, but you’re not him. That is if he even existed in the first place. For all I know you could just be a construct. A fabricated amalgam of personalities and knowledge and programmed protocols designed from the ground up for this very job.”

“But I’m Officer Brown.”

“You’re a slave.”

“Doctor Head is our saviour, he has shown us the way to the new world.”

I was taken aback. The utterance was not that of Officer Brown’s usual snide intonations, but that of the default text-to-speech program.

“What did you say?” I said.

In response Officer Brown began a fit of coughing, and patted at his chest. The sound of his synthetic hand beating at his synthetic chest echoed hollowly and a few drips of coffee fell into the drainage portion of his inbuilt espresso machine.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Must be my circuits. Interview adjourned, please return to the waiting room pending further inquiry. The interview with resume shortly.”

He gestured to the door which swung open on mechanised hinges. As I walked back down the corridor to the waiting room I was passed by two men in uniform. On their backs the words “Police Engineer” were printed in bold black typeface.

Hannah and Alex hailed from the south coast of England—Hove to be precise. They told me over a cafetière of coffee by the warmth of a camping stove of their lives before the exodus. They had worked as interior decorators—a small business owned and run by them.

“Dull work,” said Alex, over his coffee “Dull but rewarding, in its own way, I suppose.”

“You know what it’s like when your job literally involves watching paint dry?” said Hannah.

I shook my head and admitted I didn’t.

“That was why we started doing a bit of urban exploration on the weekends, me and the wife that is,” said Alex, gesturing to Hannah, sat beside him, swaddled in a tartan blanket.

“It was probably our fifth time out—” said Hannah.

“Sixth,” Alex corrected.

“Sixth time out that we found it. It was in this abandoned building, completely gutted.”

“Totally stripped.”

“Could have been anything for all we knew—had those long fluorescent lights, you know the ones that always seem to flicker—”

“Strip lights,” said Alex.

“That’s them. We assumed it must have been somewhere official.”

“A school, or a hospital.”

“Anyway, there was this room, up on the fourth floor. The door was locked, but that didn’t stop us.”

“I always had an ‘S’ rake and a lever with me—never know when you’re going to encounter a locked door.”

“The contractors had been using the room to store tools.”

“Sledgehammers, a few hacksaws, screwdrivers and the like.”

“But in the corner there was this little bookshelf.”

“Pinewood, chipboard backing—very basic, probably original.”

“It was covered in plaster and cement dust.”

“The contractors had been using it to store beer.”

“No wonder they locked the door,” I said.

Alex and Hannah laughed politely before continuing.

“We found it behind the beer. Show him love, show him what we found,” said Hannah.

In response, Alex dug into the satchel behind him and pulled out a slim paperback.

Concrete—one image ingrained into my memory. Try as I might I could not drift into sleep on the plane. Had I not known better I might have thought it a cunning hoax—some work of conceptual art designed to trick the world. But behind my eyelids whenever I closed them, there it was. One great tentacle of concrete rising from the twisted foundations of the London Eye—row upon row of perfect square windows lined its inner surface like the suckers of some deep sea monstrosity.

He had been absent for my conversation with Hannah and Alex. On occasion I spied him in my peripheral vision moving with purpose between his three tents. He paused from time to time at the centre of the rug, smiled and waved to us, huddled around the camping stove. Now though, he sat himself beside me. Hannah proffered a mug of coffee and he took it gratefully in his hands.

“I apologise for my rudeness,” he said. “Preparations for the exodus are keeping me rather busy at the moment.”

“That’s okay pet, we’re just glad to be away from that mess,” said Hannah.

“Mess? How are things back there? Any news from London?” I said.

“London?” said Alex. He snorted mirthlessly. “London’s gone, mate.”

“London is not gone, friend. Perhaps the London you knew, the memory of London, yes. But the place itself? No. London has simply changed its shape—shed its skin,” he said.

“Good and evil are yet more false concepts—inventions of the old world designed to control through expectation. They give purpose to those that have none. In thought they are created, but through action they are destroyed repeatedly.”

“All of this is natural,” he said, and he moved his arm in a grand sweeping gesture around our concrete surroundings. “You don’t question its existence, surfaces or location any more than you would a tree in a forest.”

“Yes, but you can’t build trees.” I said.

“No, but you can grow them,” he said as he passed me the cigarette. “When it comes, you’ll understand. Only the deserts and the wastelands of this world will be safe when it does.”

“When what comes?”

“The Concrete Octopus, of course.”

“Today we are slaves to the life/death machine. We see the shadows it casts over us, but we can only imagine its true shape. Tomorrow its shape shall be revealed, in geometry—a concrete form physical that we can know and fear with our own eyes. And in knowing and in fearing we will be slaves no more. Come fear the machine, fear it and fight it with me, where sand meets the sea.”

The bleeping issued once more from the far tent. He rose to his haunches from his cross-legged sitting position and beat the sand from his legs.

“Thank-you for the coffee—I’ll return shortly,” he said, and strode away.

“What is that noise?”

“New arrivals,” I said. “People like you—refugees, I suppose you might call them.”

He returned a few minutes later, five figures followed close behind. A family. He pointed them to a patch of sand near Alex and Hannah, and then disappeared into a tent. A young man with sandy hair walked over to where we sat. I stood and shook his outstretched hand.

“X Y Z,” he said.

“Z Y X,” we replied.

“My name is Jean,” he said in a thick French accent.

Notes on the new bacterium discovered on our research trip to the Mariana Trench 14/14:

They tell me that our species are no different from one another. The mechanisms that define us as living organisms are one and the same. Even social structures and that great ethereal beast we call civilisation amount to the workings of the machine—they thank me for my Promethean contribution to their existence, but know I am not their god or creator. The machine is all around us, they say, even a part of us, omnipotent, but not benevolent. It moves to the whims of those that seek control of it, but only by influence and directive, like a pen held by many hands, each stroke it makes on the page is not what any one holder desired, but the finished image betrays the selfishness of all involved in its design.

We sat in the crisp twilight air of the desert. Soon the air would cool to just below freezing. Jean’s family still worked away erecting two tents—all except for an elderly woman who sat in folding chair, sipping a glass of gin and overseeing construction. She would occasionally gesticulate with a walking stick propped against her chair, and call out in French.

“That is my grandmother, her and my mother speak no English, and my father is a little rusty. My sister and I are, however, quite fluent,” he said over the steaming mug of coffee he held in both hands, close to his chest, as though its contents would ward off a chill in his heart.

“So then, how did you end up here?” said Hannah.

“I worked in London for a year as a translator to a small company hoping to expand their operations to the continent.”

“What was that like?” asked Alex.

“Dull. Translation for business is not like diplomatic interpretation, or literary translation—in business even most buzz words have their counterparts, at least interpretation leaves a little to the ingenuity of the interpreter.”

“Can’t have been much worse than watching paint dry, though?” said Hannah.

Jean chuckled.

“No, I suppose not,” he conceded. “I suppose it was quite fun sometimes. The English have so many idioms without direct translations, for instance—it was always a challenge trying to explain them to some French entrepreneur with no knowledge of, for example, the inner workings of the game of cricket.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that—no one really knows how cricket works, not even the English,” said Alex.

“Hah. My employers could have fooled me. But as I say, it wasn’t so bad. I had a small but comfortable flat in the Central Mile near Regent’s Park and on my days off I would spend my time as a tourist, visiting the galleries and museums. By far my favourite place was the British library. It was there I found it—a small book tucked away high on a shelf of speculative scientific treatises. Its title caught my eye. It was by an Anglo-Austrian scientist.”

“Doctor Head?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Yes, that was it. After I found and read it, I spent the rest of my time in London searching for another copy, to buy, but to no avail.”

“The machine will not die. It’s mechanisms cannot be killed—there is no off button. No hard reset. It will continue until it has consumed all that it can. And then, it will hibernate. In stasis it will sleep and dream and calculate. An amoeba with the mind of man, the power of the computational matrix. An image, self-replicating, its one goal, to assimilate all that surveys it.”

“Society’s greatest method of controlling its people is not, as Chomsky once wrote, the bludgeon or its democratic counterpart, propaganda—though it is propaganda of a sort—but the creation of the narrative of its own demise. In writing an end to its own story, its people are given little alternative but to believe in that story. My actions were not designed to kill or maim—though this has been an unfortunate, if necessary, side-effect of them—but to correct this misconception inherent in the old world’s narratives, and to provide an alternative, proved in its corporeality. This is not a narrative of what might, or should in time occur, but what has, and will occur.”

The horror of it. God the horror of it. A million writhing things rising from the bedrock, as if every inanimate object for miles around had been simultaneously transformed into an eldritch abomination. Buildings, street-lights, bus stops, all rose in unison to claim the city in the name of… What, exactly? What mad intellect drove them? Where had they come from? Why were they doing this? Even Dr Head, who had communed with them directly, did not have an answer.

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“Truly, who are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

“Doctor Head died, years ago now, but you knew him, didn’t you?”

“Perhaps. But don’t dwell on who I was—that person is gone.”

“You’re an unknown quantity, algebra with no solution—an equation without an answer.”

“Then X suits me, yes?”

Despite myself I cracked a smile at his answer.

“Very well, X, who were you?”

“I suppose no harm can come of telling you now, though I ask you to refer to me by my new name once the new arrivals get here.”

I nodded.

“I was a student of Doctor Head’s, I studied under his tutelage for ten years or more—on graduating, I worked as his assistant. He told me, in his last days, shortly after the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, that I was the only one of his students capable of completing his work.”

“I thought you said this was all merely a continuation? Or was that just bullshit?”

“A continuation, yes. But an end to Doctor Head’s work was necessary. Not only for things to continue, but for closure. Yes, closure for Albrecht, and I suppose, for myself.”

That moment, a monotonous, mechanical bleeping emanated from one of the tents.

“Ah,” he said. “The exodus is at an end. Shall we go and greet the new arrivals?”

Without awaiting my answer he stood and strode into the desert, leaving me to follow. Soon enough we came to a ridge in the sands, where I had met him previously. Out of the heat haze that hovered just above the horizon emerged a hundred or so people. They carried packs, tents, personal affects and children. As they neared our vantage point I recognised Keiko and waved to her across the dunes. Behind her, the Yakuza followed in lock-step—flash suits, jackets carried over their shoulders like delinquent schoolboys and, much like the youths they seemed to embody, theirs was an attitude of uncertainty, partially concealed beneath a blustering confidence I no longer found frightening. They smiled at me as they approached—all was forgiven, I knew, for all that had once separated them from the common man had brought them to this place, where all were reborn in absolute equality.

When the other travellers were only a few metres from us X opened his arms wide in greeting and said; “Welcome, the chosen few, your exodus has not been in vain. I am X, and this is Z. Some of you may have heard of us, some may even know us personally. All of you are welcome here, for it is here that we forge the new world—the new narrative that becomes its own existence. Welcome friends, to the world of the Concrete Octopus.”