The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(113)

Richard Lisle, dead at my hands, life after life. Please, I never done nothing.

Rosemary Dawsett, cut up in a bathtub.

Jenny, you should be on the news, you should.

Will you run away with me?

Do you like me?

I have always liked you, Jenny. Always.

The bride to be!

Do you approve, Harry? Isn’t she beautiful?

Akinleye. Did you know that me, Harry? Was she right to forget?

I personally favour the thigh! A bath helps, but one must make do, mustn’t one? Tra la, Dr August, so long and all that!

Virginia, striding beneath the summer sky in London. Killing kalachakra in the womb. Shaking as we made her forget.

You ever get bored of whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line!

Many, many apologies.

I’m so sorry, Harry. It’s for the best. This is how it has to be.

The quantum mirror.

To see with the eyes of God.

The world is ending.

We cannot stop it.

Now it’s up to you.

The quantum mirror.

Stay here. By my side.


Vincent, I sabotaged the quantum mirror.

It was easy to do.

I didn’t even have to be there. You had concluded that I was no scientist, that I could not help you as I had in Russia, for here was a man who didn’t even understand the thinnest Newtonian principle, let alone the technology–nearly a hundred years ahead of what it should have been–that you were unleashing in that mountain in Switzerland. I was your admin man, as I had been now for so many lives, your go-to man for trivial events. For nine months I stayed in those caves in Switzerland, watching the quantum mirror grow, listening to the roaring of the machines with every test, and knew you were close, you were so close now. Reports landed on my desk and you ignored them, believing I could not understand, but Vincent, I was the only other person there who could, every dot and every dash, every decimal point and finest permutation of the graph. It was I who, when I should have ordered thorium 234, changed a digit in the paperwork and ordered thorium 231. It was I who cut costs on the boron rods, slicing away a few vital millimetres from the specs; I who shifted the decimal point one sig fig over on the wave calculations. The document was seven pages long, and I moved the point on the very first page so that by the time the calculations had been worked through, the final answer was nine orders of magnitude out.

You will wonder why I did this.

A desire to preserve the universe? It sounds incredibly grand to say it–perhaps I should get myself a T-shirt and a cape to make clear the same? Who are you, god that you would become, to destroy the world in your search for knowledge?

Habit?

I had dedicated so many years to bringing you down, it seemed a waste not to do it.

Jealousy?

Perhaps a little.

Vengeance?

You had been such excellent company, it was sometimes hard to remember this. Centuries are a long time to hold a grudge, but then…

Remember.

Remember like a mnemonic, and here we are again, swallowing poison in Pietrok-112 and being grateful for it, feeling the electrodes press into my head, tasting electricity on my tongue, not once, but twice, and the second time you held my hand and said it was for the best, of course, but for the best. Jenny. Do you like me, Harry? Do you like me? Weeping in the cold, your private secretary, your personal dog, your pet, your whatever-it-was-you-wanted-me-to-be. I close my eyes and I remember and yes.

It is vengeance.

And perhaps a very small realisation that something inside me has died and that this is the only way I can think of to get it back. A notion of “doing the right thing”–as if that meant anything to me any more.

I sabotaged the quantum mirror, knowing full well that all these things–a decimal point, an isotope, a boron rod–would be enough. I would set your research back by fifty years, and you wouldn’t even look twice at me, never suspect that I had done it.


The test was set for a summer day, not that seasons had much relevance in the hot dampness of the caves. The excitement was palpable in the air. Vincent came into my office, face flushed from his regular jog round the facility, a substitute, I felt, for the freezing jaunts in the open air he’d subjected to me in Pietrok-112. “Are you coming?” he demanded.

I laid down my pen carefully, folded my hands, looked him in the eye and said, “Vincent, I’m very happy that you’re very happy, but as I’m sure you know, I’ve got fifty tins of out-of-date tuna in the canteen, and the passionate, dare I say fiery, letter of complaint I’m in the middle of writing is, without wanting to overblow the matter, a work of epic prose the likes of which the tuna industry has never seen, and you are rather serving as the person from Porlock.”

He blew air loudly between his lips like an irritated orca. “Harry, without wanting to demean your works in any way, when I tell you that the test today could be the beginning of a revolution in the very nature of what it is to be human, I’m sure you’ll understand that the chastising of the tuna industry can take second place. Now get your stuff together and come with me!”

“Vincent—”

“Come on!”

He hauled me by the elbow. I grumbled, grabbing my radioactivity badge as he hauled me into the corridor. All the way down into the depths of the mountain I protested about unhealthy tuna, rotting salad and the cost of maintaining the electricity supply in this place, and he exclaimed, “Harry! Future of the species, insight into the universe; ignore the salad!”