(eng) Nick Harkaway by Gnomon

Author:Gnomon [Gnomon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

voice on scratched vinyl

LEAVING GNOMON IS like pulling myself up through a vat of honey. Through the sweet meniscus I can see my body in desiccated gold, but the barrier is glutinously impenetrable. The merest touch of the other mind clogs my mouth. It is enormous. I am a grub breaking free from a single hexagonal cell, but the hive is flooded and a great wash of honey fills the spaces that should be air, a honey composed of alien flowers and flavours for which I have no names. I jar upwards, stick legs kicking, wing cases fracturing as they press away from my carapace into a medium too thick for their newborn fragility. I let them fall away into the amber deep and kick, for my life.

Gnomon does not care what is destroyed. It will do anything, anything at all, to achieve what is necessary. It’s the most powerful thing I have created inside my own head, the most heedlessly determined. I’ll have to watch it doesn’t do anything too destructive. It’s not as if I need more trouble in here. Apparently I may suffer brain damage if I continue to resist the procedure. That’s the sort of thing that can happen when someone tries to John Henry the interrogation machines.

Which reminds me that my husband and I used to sing that song. Do you know it?

The man who owned the steam drill,

he thought he was king of the mine!

John Henry drilled more than sixty feet;

the steam drill, fifty-nine!

Oh, the steam drill fifty-nine.

I love that song. I can’t generally think the words without singing them, even under my breath. I sing them in the stacks as I climb the little wooden stepladder to put an old, foxed paperback on the top shelf. This time I can’t sing, because I don’t have access to my own mouth, but I can hear a sound like someone with a very bad cold trying over and over again to say a word with lots of Ns and Ms in it. Monomaniac. Mnemonic. Noumenon. It’s a terrible noise. She should stop. She sounds like an aphasic. It’s grotesque.

I’m hearing it with my ears.

Which means I am once more plugged into my body. They have put me back.

And then, too, I know that voice – not its slurred, slurried, sullied version, but the original, clipped and clean.

It’s me. That’s me singing.

That noise, that appalling salad of sound: that is me singing.

On the screens I can see my own face, crying, and I can see the words that I don’t want to believe or even understand.

The music in me is broken.

And in the other room I can hear them saying: She had a musical talent.

She had a musical talent, but that is gone now.

Did Gnomon do that to make room for itself? Is that its tunnel through time? Through my music? Maybe it was that or the part of me that makes my heart beat. There’s not a lot of room left in here. They think

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