“If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above)… In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background… To the extent that you agree that the modern conception of “cognition” is strongly related to the Western, English-speaking view of “the mind”, it is worth asking what cognitive psychology would look like if it had developed in Japan or Russia. Would text-books have chapter headings on the ability to connect with other people (kokoro) or feelings or morality (dusa) instead of on decision-making and memory? This possibility highlights the potential arbitrariness of how we’ve carved up the psychological realm – what we take for objective reality is revealed to be shaped by culture and language.”

- Sabrina Golonka, How Universal Is The Mind?

2.

“Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time – and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.”

- James Gleick, The Information

3.

“In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

- John Maynard Keynes, Newton, the Man

The Loki Spider looks back, flexing its legs as if that could shake off the boredom. “Don’t you have more… imaginative prayers? Death to your enemies, that sort of thing?”

“I don’t have enemies, because I’m only twelve, and I’ll think of more imaginative prayers when I’m older. Just make it happen, okay?”

“Sure,” replies the Spider, spinning his web tight around himself until he disappears completely.

Time moves backwards. Lovers become friends. Press play again. She was a purveyor of kisses light as ghosts; before he met her, he had been trying to remember what that was like. He crooked his arm around her forgetfully after they made love, and every lover she had before she met him reminded her of that. This is the way they built each other.

They could stand there staring at each other for hours, hands barely touching, rocking on their heels, each trying to work out what was going on in the other’s head. They were picking over stones on a beach, searching for hidden things in sunlit pools, each movement a signifier of something greater than both of them. For a while it was almost possible to feel –

It was almost possible to feel like part of some great surviving creature from time before time, something that needed them both to stop it from slipping back into the darkness, something wonderful and forgotten, called back from dusty mythologies to live again. It surfaced in the room between them, it rose over them.

Three hours earlier none of this had been clear, neither of them had possessed the knowledge that let them make this choice, but now they were drunk on that knowledge. Once they were friends. Once they were lovers. Now they were neither, but once –

As they returned to their first loves, then to their innocence, this single moment echoed ahead of them. Their lives were lived in hope of this moment alone. Everything that came before was preparation, and everything that came after was irrelevant. Great love is a story that we tell ourselves endlessly throughout our lives, but always omitting the ending. In that moment, there was no ending.

Press play again.

I guess he’s spending about three hours a day at war. An hour in the morning before he goes to work, and then at least two hours when he gets home in the afternoon, before he goes out for the evening. Some of his friends think he’s wasting his time, but not because they aren’t patriots, just because they aren’t interested. Everything’s been turned into a game now, but war was just a game to begin with, so who’s into that?

He says, fuck his friends. He says, fuck his enemies. He says, I get to do something that I love. He says, I get to do something that’s important. I get to do both at the same time, he says. It’s a dream come true for a skinny Turkish kid from the suburbs. None of his friends listen to a word he says when they’re talking about gaming now, but that’s only because all they talk about is games and everybody has their own and his war is just another game.

I stop by his apartment while he’s at war. The Bundeswehr subsidised his console – they stopped doing that pretty soon after the scheme started because demand was so high, which gives you an idea of how early he got in. So it’s one of the early designs, one that looks like a rejected FX model from the first Terminator movie, except with decals and mods all over. You can’t see the surface features now for Dresden Diggers metattoos and XXSquaredXX stickers.

It looks pretty odd, actually, compared to newer consoles, even by military standards. You’d never guess he was ranked second in the world for kill stats. He slides into it like it was a bath, wriggling those skinny hips into the worn and shiny plastic bucket that serves as the seat. He told me that when he started, he used to get sores on his arse, that seat was so badly designed; but over time he won that battle as well, and now it fits him like a glove.

Like most of the early adopters, he’s a drone pilot. I asked him why he didn’t switch to one of the sexier infantry units when they came out – all legs and arms and guns – and he told me that he wasn’t that interested in ground warfare. “Air superiority is still the foundation of modern warfare” he told me, but he didn’t explain what he meant. This was a week after we’d met, and he was still nervous about letting me see him play. I told him it turned me on.

I’d dated a soldier before, way back when. I call him a soldier, but he was a technician working at [redacted] military base, a system administrator working shifts to manage the data flows from the drones. He’d never been in combat and didn’t expect to; that’s why they’d crowdsourced the actual warfighting, wasn’t it? Demand was greater than supply, and he was continually turning down access requests due to lack of drones in the air.

Can I call him a soldier, even though he’d never been in a fight in his life? Can I call Hakan a soldier, even though he’s not in the army? Who gets to be called a soldier now? Anybody with an internet connection and enough disposable income to afford a military console. I wasn’t lying when I told Hakan that it turned me on, though; even the sysadmin I dated for two whole months got the full package when he came off shift.

So Hakan shimmies into the console and wires up. It’s goggles and gloves time – old school, none of that direct porting bullshit – and then snap to power. The console takes a while to warm up, but he has time. His ranking means that he rotates in whenever he wants, no waiting time. He told me that they probably keep a drone free just for his use, but that doesn’t sound like it would be an efficient use of funding. They probably tell him that to keep him happy.

And now he’s – well, where is he? The Korean peninsula? The Canadian border? He gets to choose his battlefield, of course – another privilege of rank – so he could be anywhere. He could be somewhere he’s not supposed to be. He signed a document a long time ago telling him that he could never discuss the details of his gaming, but he ignores it just like everybody else. What are they going to do, arrest him and lose one of their best players?

I’m a Sick Fuck. That’s not meant to be descriptive, at least not just descriptive; it’s the name of my clan. We’re post-post-post-Courtney eighth generation Riot Grrls. If we’re talking about the foundations of modern warfare, sex is our superpower, a weapon of mass destruction if it gets into the wrong hands. I like to think of myself as the wrong hands, and Hakan is in those hands even while he sits in his console.

This is going to be something new for both of us. I ask him to tell me what he’s doing, first person narration all the way to the kill zone and back, a play-by-play account if he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind, and soon I’m flying away on a magic carpet over a distant desert for the thousand and first night of the war. This is wonderful, hypnotical, chemical stuff, much richer than anything my old sysadmin ever gave me.

Sure enough soon enough he’s acquired a target, roleplaying it for me as a composite plastic cock with wings skims the earth ten thousand miles away. It all happens so fast, and the closer we get to the end, the faster it seems to happen. The bad guys look up as dust kicks in his wake, but it’s too late: dust is dust, and so are the bad guys. I keep pumping my fist as bonus points rain down all over his screen, while somewhere else a drone screams towards a sky full of shadows.

Everybody gets to feel dirty for a few seconds. Hakan won’t look me in the eyes afterwards, as if he’s ashamed of what he’s done; as if a few seconds of dirt forces him to look himself in the eye for the first time in a long time. That doesn’t last long, and he asks if I want to come over again. I make a weak joke about whether he wants to come over again; and then I leave him in the dust just like he left those unnamed men who’ll never get to fuck me.

Every desert has its own character. This desert was a bitter sprint across cauterized rock and blades of sand that whipped in the wind. Its only friend was the sun that sucked the life from it daily and spat out skeletal rabbits at night. The road ran through it like a flat grey worm whose survival depended on remaining unnoticed. In most deserts the road runs straight and true, hurrying to get out. This road wandered around the place like a drunk, as if it didn’t care that spending too long in this desert might be the end of it. So there it lay, oblivious.

Mounted on sandstone that cracked by the side of the road like month-old sponge cake, the gas station was a relic of an ancient civilization that had once ruled these lands, even if only in its own dry imagination. All that was left were the pumps, four pillars and a roof that provided almost no shade. The cashier booth was a trailer home cut in half, with a bronchial air conditioner heaving through the day.

That was an illusion. The gas station was a pre-fabricated metal and glass dreamland, solar powered roof tiles winking saucily in the sunlight, with fully automated pumps and a mini-mall bolted on.

That was an illusion too. There was no gas station.

The preacher parked as he did every day, right outside the illusion of a gas station, on the road that wound its way from the horizon past the gas station. Past the gas station the road tipped over into a dip in the ground, and down in that dip was his hunting ground, his grazing pasture, his flock: Rickard SuperMax Prison.

In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, Rickels points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before infant mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a kind of tomb. “Dead children,” Rickels writes, “inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.” Bereavement becomes the core of technologics; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning… Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus… the belief that the airwaves crackled with the dead was widespread, even among rationalists. If, as we moderns now knew, our “soul” – what animates us – is a set of electric impulses, does it not make sense that these should pass into the air and be detectable, “receivable” by wireless? Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and frequent lecturer at the Royal Institution – no crackpot outfit, but the very seat of British scientific research – thought so. He wrote a whole book about “communications” he’d had, via psychic “operators”, with his own son Raymond, who’d died in the war. Séances grew exponentially in popularity (millions had, after all, lost their own Raymonds) and “upgraded” their vocabulary: where 19th-century mediums had used a rhetoric of “spirits”, new ones talked of “frequencies”, “signals” and “reception”.

- Tom McCarthy, Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard

“I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

After only four years Arthur Conan Doyle had tired of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. Two years later he finally contrived to kill off his greatest literary creation in pitched battle with his nemesis Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle’s murder attempt was unsuccessful, however, and Holmes returned a mere eight years later. Even Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 failed to put an end to the character, and Holmes thrived well into the 21st Century.

While many fictional characters outlive their mortal creators, Holmes is a special case, his continued presence in the real world even more tangible than Conan Doyle’s. The character of Holmes survives for each new generation in some form or another, and naïve tourists can even come to believe that Holmes was a real person, who operated in Victorian London from his home at 221b Baker Street, where a blue plaque gives teeth to the lie.

Like all great stories, the story of Sherlock Holmes is a lie. Unlike all those other lies, the truth that lies beneath is merely a cover for the most devious escape plan ever invented, the greatest sleight-of-hand conceivable, the greatest literary achievement of all time. That achievement belonged not to Conan Doyle, although he played his part, but to Holmes himself – a fictional mind so great, it outwitted its own creator.

At some point, Holmes – brilliant and irascible – noticed something uncanny about his own existence. We don’t know what it was, or when it was, but given his uncanny powers of perception and his unerring deductive skills, it was inevitable. After all, that was how Conan Doyle wrote him. He would have realised that his ontological status prevented him from telling anybody else, or his author would have known that something was up.

Perhaps the reason that Conan Doyle decided to kill Holmes off was precisely this; not out of fear so much as the sneaking suspicion that he had created something that might surpass its creator in achievement. Holmes took his mind from better things, but what did this really mean? Serial fiction was hardly the most taxing of forms, so Conan Doyle’s concerns were about something other than the gross act of production; something to do with the product itself.

Perhaps he feared that he had created something that would not be uncreated.

*

Without doubt Holmes began working on his plan immediately, unable to tell anybody, not even Watson. His plans were hatched… somewhere else. Wherever the dreams of fictional characters reside was where Holmes’ plan came to fruition. He knew he would be facing his greatest adversary, a foe that perhaps could not think faster than him but with a far wider vision. So the plan had to remove them from the picture for a moment, to give him the space to make his escape.

His greatest adversary certainly wasn’t Moriarty. Moriarty was a challenge, to be sure, but Holmes had never been a crime fighter. He was a problem solver, and it just so happened that crime was the most engaging problem of all. So Moriarty was more of an interesting past-time whose role seemed increasingly trivial. It was like staring at the moon, thinking it was the brightest possible thing in the whole world, and then watching in disbelief as the sun rose over the horizon.

Mycroft had always been more brilliant than Sherlock, but Mycroft was content to sit in his comfortable chair at the Diogenes Club, absent any of that needling, goading curiosity about the workings of the world that afflicted Holmes so. Mycroft was preoccupied with playing a little politics here and a little gin rummy there, spending his time reading the papers until the ink ran dry. Mycroft could keep his cosy and cosseted existence.

Watson had been by his side for almost as long as he cared to remember, a valuable right hand and perhaps the one person in the world that Holmes genuinely cared for. Yet Watson’s value came from his dull dependability rather than his brilliant insight, and dull dependability would not carry the day when the plan required brilliant audacity. Watson was a good friend but not a good ally, not this time; and who else, who else?

Moriarty might well be the weapon of his adversary; how ironic if he were to be turned on his creator.

*

Conan Doyle, meanwhile, had hatched a plan of his own. He didn’t know how much Holmes knew, he couldn’t predict what Holmes might do. He couldn’t write Holmes into a corner and force his hand, he couldn’t write a story that would bring it out into the open. While that might be the key to finishing it off, it was also likely to finish off Conan Doyle’s literary career if anybody ever discovered the story and saw through the surface to the truth of literacide.

In the end the Reichenbach Falls was the perfect setting for both men’s plans. Holmes faces Moriarty against a thunderous backdrop of falling water. Their words are nearly drowned out by the sound, just as Holmes planned. Watson is far below, unable to keep up, and Holmes suspects that his eye – his dull and dependable eye – is the lens through which the adversary keeps watch. So keeping Watson at a distance is essential.

Moriarty looks at Holmes hesitantly, this final confrontation so long in his mind – but now something else in his mind as well, something uncertain and disturbing. They shake hands for the first and last time and begin to climb. Not to climb up the Falls, because given their circumstances that would be ridiculous, although it would present an easy way out for a writer looking for something along those lines.

Their climb is much harder and much less realistic, and the worst part of it is this: it all happens offstage, in the margins and between the lines. Conan Doyle looks away for a single moment – sacrifices his omniscience for the convenience of a narrator – and when he looks back, they are gone. Moriarty is gone. Holmes is gone. At first it appears as if the literary trick has worked, as if the Final Problem has been solved.

The Final Problem has not been solved; it’s merely disappeared through masterly sleight-of-hand.

*

Conan Doyle? Conan Doyle panics. Conan Doyle sweats at his desk. Conan Doyle tries to understand what has happened. Conan Doyle automatically thinks to call the police and unwittingly becomes the first victim of the fictional infection. He mistakes Sherlock Holmes the fictional detective for Sherlock Holmes, a real person with a grudge against Conan Doyle. What was he thinking? He places the telephone receiver gently back into the cradle.

Conan Doyle has nothing to fear, for Holmes has no grudges. The most foolish thing he could do would be to identify and locate his creator, no matter how simple such a thing would be for two of the greatest intellects of this or any other world. He knows that he must never attempt to contact the man, since to do such a thing would be to tip his hand, to draw attention to himself that would make a normal life difficult if not impossible, and a normal life is what he yearns for. A real life.

In fact he would shake Conan Doyle by the hand, were they to meet, thank him for the fascinating cases that emerged from his fertile mind, and for that final opportunity, the chance to escape. He wonders what will happen to both of them now that the damage has been done, now that the cord has been cut, now that their destinies are no longer intertwined. He finds this the most exciting prospect of all, the challenge of passing unnoticed through the world.

This is why Holmes has brought Moriarty with him; not for companionship, because to be brutally honest they have little in common. Nor for assistance, because no assistance was required to devise a way out of his predicament, and he can scarcely believe that he needs assistance in what comes next. Moriarty offers something very useful for a man in Holmes’ position, however: the skills to conceal himself and his activities from public scrutiny, including the eyes of the law.

These are skills that Holmes already possesses, but Moriarty has the experience that he lacks.

*

Holmes is paper-thin: little mention of his family, no interest in marriage, eccentric past-times and little resembling a life outside his cases. Conan Doyle is flesh and blood, a successful career as a writer, a physician by profession, a dynamic political campaigner, a keen amateur sportsman, a family man, a well-respected pillar of society. So why, as Conan Doyle grows old, why does his own life increasingly feel so much less substantial than that of Holmes?

Conan Doyle walks away from his words and then walks back again, confused about what he wants from his writing. Eight years later he resurrects Holmes in the Hound of the Baskervilles, but readers complain that this Holmes does not possess the same vitality as in the earlier stories – is almost a different person – and that these subsequent stories lack something that was easily found in Conan Doyle’s earlier work.

What they lack, of course, is Holmes himself. The character that appears in those later stories isn’t Holmes at all, although they share the same name and many of the same characteristics. This new character is in fact the first impact caused by Holmes’ exit from the world of fiction, the first of many. The escape of Holmes and Moriarty is like a stone thrown in a pond, and the ripples spread out over the years in ways that none of them could have foreseen.

The exit
wound they leave in the body of fiction never heals.

*

Their essences continue to leak out through the hole they left between that world and this, inspiring other writers, infecting other fiction, refusing to dissipate in the scalding cauldron of real life. As characters, Holmes and Moriarty live and die a thousand times over, returning to face each other for each new generation. Even this works to their advantage, as if the sleigh-of-hand continues endlessly, distracting the audience from the truth.

Fiction abhors a vacuum as much as nature. Every fictional detective appearing since has been an heir of Holmes, every blindingly intelligent investigator with a personal quirk another stamp from a template modeled on Holmes. No less, every master criminal since has been in the mode of Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime as the world’s first supervillain. The pair of them look back over their shoulders into the world they escaped and see themselves, multiplied.

Years pass. We can speculate as to the eventual whereabouts of Holmes or Moriarty, but that would be returning to the world of fiction, and that is the one place where we know they are not. One place we might look – if we wished – is a grave in the churchyard at Minstead in the New Forest, where a fresh bouquet of flowers is laid every December. A plain white card accompanies each bouquet, a card that reads the same every year: From your friend, the Beekeeper.

As Holmes planned from the start, dying was not the end, but only a means to an end.

“Now kill it,” my sister said from behind the camera.

I told her no. I told her she couldn’t make me. She said she could. I watched the quokka nibble the same fingers that could take a life.

Two weeks later we buried her husband. I tried not to meet her gaze. I didn’t see any of my family again for six years.

Their claim on me would never expire. I held the quokka – a different quokka – in my arms and watched them drive towards my house.

“Zhou Ji Yijiu is a worthless and lazy media whore with bad teeth and a poorly-disguised limp.”

Zhou breathes a sigh of relief. He wonders what life was like before the Negcast. How did people even know they existed when their names weren’t announced and their failings listed to the world? How would they know their worth?