BOOK 1: SERENDIPITY / CH. 10:MEMORIES AND ETHICS

“It should be in this cupboard, a big green box, as high as I can reach, but I don't see it, John.”

He got a chair to stand on so he could see better. “OK, love, but there are plenty of things up here, maybe it's just been pushed to the back.”

“Maybe. You'll help me look, John?”

“Of course, that's why I'm here.”

“All these years.... why didn't I think of it, John?”

“Maybe because of Sue's father, maybe because it was too painful a memory, and you just blotted it out?”

“Maybe. I think I'd like to read if I said anything about it on the data dump.”

“Yes. I wonder if the AI somehow convinced you it wasn't important.”

“You mean: ‘This was part of your childhood, it is sad to see it go, but all childhood things must eventually go if you are to become fully adult.’”

“Did they say that often?”

“I expect so.”

“So, how big is this box?”

“It used to fill my lap.”

“At age ten or age sixteen?”

“Good question. A very good question.”

“And it lived on this shelf?”

“It can't have done, could it? I could put it up on the shelf on tiptoes.”

“So why am I standing on this wobbly chair, Sarah?”

“Because you're taking the boxes off the wrong shelf, silly,” she laughed.

“So which shelf?”

“I guess the one underneath with all my old dolls looking out.”

“Hey, this one has a funny headpiece.”

“That's right, I'd forgotten her! She was a princess too, so Daddy made her a tiara. I think I might have nagged him rather a lot.”

“Sarah, I've got another idea. Might your dad have kept records of what he was doing?”

“But he would have password protected it, surely.”

“Maybe, but maybe we can guess a password or two.”

“Or get your pet military grade computer to have a try?”

“Hey, your pet computer now, you signed up to feed it and care for it. But look what dolly number five was sitting on: a green box!”

“It's shrunk with age.”

“Ten years is a lot of growing, my love, when you start at ten. Didn't you have neat writing for a ten year old!”

“Ooh yes, Princess Sarah's treasure. I remember. My mum wrote this on when I first went to school.”

“No wonder the box has shrunk.”

“Hmm.” She took the box to the table. “John, come and hold me as I open it up, please.”

“Of course, my love.” He stood behind her and rested his cheek against hers. [Is this good, my love? {care}]

She took out a medal [{reminiscence} My first prize from school, top of my year in sciences.]

A photo came next. [{loss} Mummy and daddy.]

[{comfort,empathy}]

Under the photo, a velvet bag [{curiosity} Is this it?, no, my rings! I'd forgotten them. Daddy made them. They're not worth much.]

[They're beautiful. Are you sure they're not real stones?]

[Oh, they're real, but sometimes to get a really excellent stone, Daddy would buy everything from a seller, so they didn't know which one he was after. He'd get them at a better rate then, or something. Then he'd get the flawed ones cut as well as the good ones, and he'd say they went to the princess for her dowry.]

[So these are “not worth much” compared to a ring that's worth more than a house, say.]

[{shock} And he let me play with them!]

[My Sarah, you might have worn a dress yesterday that was worth more than your last year's books, but I think what you're holding in that little bag might be worth more than the entire dress shop's stock.]

[But I wouldn't ever sell them.]

[No, but we should at least get them properly insured.]

[Oh. They might be...]

[{curiosity}]

[{embarrassed} John, I know I said I couldn't afford your fees when I first came, and you've been lovely and generous and giving, but...]

[My beloved lady really is a princess?]

[Not quite, but Daddy's family had been successful jewellers for generations and they knew it wasn't wise to look rich.]

[But your parents’ estate left a trust fund with a limited income, until you reached some specific age?]

[It covers basic food, so I wasn't ever going to starve. Otherwise I have to stand on my own feet until I have a real job to the satisfaction of the trustees and hold it for a year, or until I reach thirty years old. The one thing the fund would pay for was insurance for me and the house.]

[Well, my love, you have a proper job now, I think.]

[But it has some very strange aspects and the trustees are paid to be suspicious. They need to be sure that I've not somehow used my future wealth to buy myself a job.]

[Both Kate and I can swear under oath, if that's what it takes, love. I don't think I even want to know how big the fund is. I love you for being you, and money's just a distraction.]

[Thank you, John.]

She picked up the next item, an envelope, [This is it.] and she gently emptied the contents onto the table. It was in several pieces, bent and buckled. There had obviously been miniature circuits joining the pieces, and looking like gems to a child's eyes. Some were still in place, others seemed lost entirely.

“I wonder what it did.”

“Maybe someone can reverse engineer it, but with the pieces missing, unless there's some pattern, they'd have to guess a lot.”

“I can see why you thought of it as a tiara. It must have been beautiful. But Sarah, this doesn't look like a prototype. He knew what he was making. I wonder what happened to the prototypes?”

“Oh John, why am I being so dense today? Is there another box up there behind the dolls? It'll be bigger. Spotty, I think.”

“Yes, here it is. ‘Sarah's dressing up box.’”

“Let's see, one pretty crown with lots of little shiny dots inside.”

“Looks like a very beautiful version of an EEG headset.”

“I think it probably is, the sort of thing a little girl would love to wear all day long even if it wasn't very comfortable. And ooh, look what's in the centre here.”

“Isn't that a data crystal?”

“It certainly looks like one. My guess is it recorded my brain activity.”

“What else is in there?”

“Pretty hair combs. They just look nice.”

“But don't they join the crown here? Look, there are matching holes!”

“Oh yes, I remember. Daddy asked if my crown ever fell off, and said he could make it stay on better.”

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“I wonder if they're anything more than structure.”

“Well, they look quite like the tiara, but then a hair comb would, wouldn't it.”

Sarah looked again. “Ah pretty pink dress, pretty pink socks, moderately acceptable pink blouse.”

“You had lots of pink things.”

“I was a little girl. It goes with the territory.”

“Always?”

“Mostly. Depends on age, but I think so.”

“Interesting, I don't remember Sally wearing pink.”

“Well, do you remember what she wore when she was six?”

“Maybe not.”

“Ah, here it is.”

“What?”

“Possibly that prototype we're looking for.”

“A witch's hat?”

“Yes. I remember a guessing game. I had to put on the hat and they'd ask me things to see if could guess what they were thinking. Then it would be Mummy's turn to have the hat.”

“So maybe your mother...”

“I remember another game we'd play, before that one. I'd have to try and do something and mummy would guess what I was doing. I guess by picking up intentions.”

“And could she?”

“Yes, all the time, but when we swapped, sometimes I could hear what she was doing and sometimes I couldn't. She said I must try to be quieter. She could be quiet, and she said when she was really quiet she couldn't hear me and I couldn't hear her, but I didn't understand. I guess she was talking about hiding her thoughts from detection and detecting anything.”

“And a while after that they started the witch's hat game?”

“Yes. Oh, I've just remembered. Once I asked to play the hat game, after I had the tiara, and Daddy said I had to take off the tiara because you can't be a witch and a princess at the same time. So it'd make good sense if my thought of mind-reading equals witchcraft stemmed from this game.”

“Yes, it would.”

“So, Shall we try the hat?”

“I'm fairly sure I'm not going out in public with it on John.”

“True, but if it works...”

“Then it could be copied, yes, but it seemed my mum didn't need it to go out in crowds, nor do you for that matter. I can't help thinking that the hat is a dead end, John.”

“An artificial help for something you should be able to do yourself, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Sarah, there are two things here. Your mother used to be able to hide her intentions, but also you used to be able to hear your mother's intentions without touch. Now if you're listening you can hear me almost saying them.”

“My mother would probably say we're shouting them. ”

“So we're not as good as she was, I guess.”

“Or even as good as I used to be. Out of practice?”

“Ten years of not doing something is a long time, Sarah, but if we're holding hands then would you hear me if I didn’t shout?”

“That's possible. You mean rather than trying to send thoughts, we practice not sending them?”

“Yes.”

“And you'll tell me what I'm planning to do, like poke you in the side?”

“If I can.”

“John, since you can only hear me thinking at you when we're holding hands, how does this work?”

“Not just holding hands, love, kissing was even better, remember.”

“So much better that we weren't going to do it.”

“True. But right now we need some contact for it to work.”

[So all I need to do is not tell myself what I'm going to do? Hmm, pick a target... /there/!]

[Heard you.]

[How can we do this, what's the point?]

John let go of her hand. “Sarah, I think that we need to look at what you remember your mother saying. How does you being quiet stop you from hearing someone? How do you make a radio quiet? You've studied physics.”

“Well, you can turn it off to start with.”

“Since this is your brain, I really don't want to do that.”

“Well, you can do all sorts of things: you can turn down the volume; throw blankets over it or scream loud enough that you can't hear it; you can change the tuning or desensitise it with a strong signal nearby; you can stop the signal getting there in the first place, either by unplugging the antenna, making a selective notch filter or by making sure the signal doesn't get to the antenna in the first place. That last one is the Faraday cage. But that's just a simple radio. There are all sorts of spread-spectrum and duplexing things that you can do as well. But really, John, I don't believe the mind working like a radio has any chance of being true. If it were, then given the radio experiments that have been done across the years, something would have either picked up the workings of a brain, knocked people unconscious or made them go insane. Motors used to cover practically the whole radio spectrum with noise, and people regularly use radio technology, practically from zero up to light. No one has ever shown any reaction to any of it. Not even me!”

“OK, I believe you, Sarah, but please, setting all that aside, whatever your mother did stopped both directions. Which one of those things might fit?”

“John, the human brain isn't a radio! But OK, a perfect Faraday cage would work, so would detuning the radio, unplugging the antenna, the notch filter if it was good enough, or breaking the radio.

"Anticipating your next question, no, mummy didn't have a perfect Faraday cage, they're notoriously hard to get right anyway. Without an axe I don't know how to unplug the brain from a human body, which I presume is the antenna. And much as I might like to when I'm in a crowd, I don't really want to break my head open to pull the radio apart. So if my head were a simple radio, then all that's realistically left is changing the frequency. Now if you can tell me how to do that, I'd be really really appreciative, because I don't know how and I've never known.”

“I'm sorry, Sarah. I didn't want to upset you. I'm trying to understand what's going on in terms of things I vaguely understand, before you tell me the only possible way it would work is neutrinos or something.”

Sarah laughed at the thought. “Oh John, I'm sorry, but neutrinos? You really don't know much physics, do you? Neutrinos! John, you need a swimming pool in a coal mine to detect them. Not a hope in a noisy, messy brain. Sorry, that was funny. Or am I over reacting?”

“You've been under a lot of stress, love.”

“So that's a yes then?”

He kissed her. [{love,concern,confirmation} Yes.]

“I've got an idea then. I'm going to sit down here with my memories, and you can try to listen to my thoughts. I'm not going to shout. But if you guess what I want — no touching now, that'd be cheating, then I'll give you a surprise.”

“But you're the one who can do this Sarah, not me!”

“I'm the one who's just realized that I've failed to do it properly all my life, John, and I'm feeling pretty raw at the moment.”

“Can I make you a cup of tea?”

“Yes, please. I'm sure you can find your way round.”

“I'll try.”

As John wandered around the house in search of the kitchen, and then round the kitchen in search of tea, he prayed. Sarah was precious to him, and sometimes seemed so strong and wise, but now she was broken and he didn't know what to do.

As the tea brewed, he tried to explore this strange new gift he'd been given. What was it, could it be focused like eyes, could it stretch out like hands? Was hearing a good metaphor? He shut his eyes and tried slowly turning, to see if he could somehow sense Sarah's presence or thoughts, but there was nothing he could make sense of, except when he hit his knee on a cupboard. Maybe shutting eyes wasn't such a good idea. Nothing. He tried to think about how Sarah's voice or thoughts came to him, but he wasn't even sure. And then he decided to just not try anything. He leant against the counter top and just relaxed. He wasn't sure what he relaxed, but he found himself aware of Sarah's misery. She felt she'd let down everyone. She'd let down her mother by not understanding, she'd let down her father by not keeping the tiara safe, she'd let down John by hiding the trust fund and not knowing how to control her gift or how it worked. She wanted what she couldn't have — to wind back the clock, not have prayed that John would hear like her, but instead that her gift would go away, and she could just be normal Sarah, who had normal problems. John reached out towards her, he wasn't sure what with, and sent her his love and empathy. He was aware that she could feel it. He felt he wanted to wrap her up in a blanket of love so nothing could hurt her any more, and he realised that what she'd meant when she set the challenge was just that, to be wrapped in a blanket like the sad little girl she was remembering. She also wanted her old teddy, which he'd seen on the top shelf, but hadn't mentioned. He guessed she didn't know where it was.

He quickly took the tea to her room, reaching up for Mr Snuggles the bear, and presented them both to her at the same time. “If you can hold these my love, I'll just find a blanket.”

“John! How? You weren't even here!”

“I don't know, but you give Mr Snuggles here a long hug and I'll try to do it again while you're close. Maybe if you see me doing it you'll learn more than I can tell you. Oh, I don't think you let anyone down. I have a strong suspicion that your parents just wanted you to have the tiara until you'd grown up a bit, to keep you safe while you learned control, not to block your gifts well into your teens.”

And he wrapped the blanket round her and held her. It was a good thing she'd put the tea down.

[{curious} How did you know Mr Snuggles’s name?]

[I guess I picked it up from you, love.]

[And how?]

[Sometimes, we try too hard to do something, and that trying stops us. I tried all sorts of things and then I did this. {relaxed}]

He felt her try very hard to relax, which of course didn't help, and he hugged her physically and mentally. [Just settle into the blanket, love]. He felt her relax physically, then felt her awe and also felt her come aware that he was observing her. And they spent an unknown amount of time growing used to this new part of their gift. Somehow the emotional feed-back they'd found when they kissed just wasn't there, maybe simply because their mood was different, maybe because this was something different, or maybe because they were also aware that a third presence, infinitely huge, was with them, loving, teaching and leading their first explorations of this gift. This was far deeper than the mental conversations they’d had before, there could be no deceit here. Rather than a private way of speaking, this was a shared awareness of the other's thoughts, at a level not even organised enough to be called unspoken. Perhaps it was even a true mingling of minds, at least they both decided that they would withdraw at the same time. Sarah's despondency and despair had vanished and she found that she wasn't at all temped to dark thoughts any more. After some time sitting in quiet companionship, John asked, “When shall we marry, my love?”

“Aren't you supposed to ask if, rather than when?”

“But we know we will, don't we?”

“Of course, but people will ask me about how you proposed, and saying, 'oh we decided it together when our minds were in communion' just sounds a little, urm, too far outside normal life, doesn't it?”

“OK, I'll propose formally soon enough, but the more important question is when we marry, isn't it?”

“Yes. I agree. Shall we ask your pastor when he's free on Sunday?”

“Do you mean ask him on Sunday or ask him to set the time on that day?”

Sarah laughed wholeheartedly. “It was ambiguous, wasn't it? I think we should probably ask him on Sunday. It might be less of a shock after they've seen a certain ring on my finger.”

“We should probably get back to the office, shouldn't we?”

“Yes, I expect so. Shall we take the tiara and witch's hat?”

“Yes, let's. I'm pretty sure you won't need them now, but they're bound to be curious.”

“I do wonder how this thing works.”

“Well, that's why the institute has all those interesting toys. They can work out the theory. We can just hold hands.”

“Through walls if we want to, it seems.”

“Yes, I wonder how that is possible. Better contact and greater distance at the same time.”

“Well, it was more like our whole minds were thinking together rather than just a bit of us. But I'm still pretty sure it's not electromagnetism. Much more like deep prayer, however that works. Appropriate for something where we become more aware of Him, I'm sure.”

“It's interesting what He said about Kate, isn't it?”

“Her being able to join us there if she'd only believe? Yes. I wonder how long she'll continue to resist the Gospel.”

“You know, if we can be aware of other people's thoughts at that level...”

“Then we'd know truth from feeble excuses, and all sorts of things like that, and maybe even what arguments would sound convincing, and so we could become great con-artists and poker players and make ourselves rich financially and poor sinners spiritually.”

“So it's a good thing that with our salaries from the institute we've already got more money than we can use.”

“And if we misuse this gift then we'll deserve to have the world's hatred. But I think we can be careful to use it ethically, don't you?”

“Of course, we're ethical people aren't we? And our ethical God wouldn't want us to abuse this spiritual gift. But maybe we should get some others in on the discussion of what does constitute ethical spying on someone's thought processes.”

“Good point.”