The Last Rational Man Page 27

practical lesson from those endless musings. I was never going to have to deal with that set of circumstances again. It looked like I would never have to deal with anything at all, ever again.

  Still, I tortured myself. Why did I pick that coffee bar? Why did I let her join me? Why didn't I sense that something was wrong? I tried to blame myself in any way that I could, but without success. I had no way of knowing how much trouble that phone number was going to be.

  There was one thing that I regretted, though. If only I had given that interrogator that number! I should have shouted it at him. They would have had no choice but to put him in prison with me. At least then I would have had a human to keep me company.

  At times I felt guilty about these thoughts. After all, the cost of having him as my partner in prison would be the loss of his freedom. What had he done to deserve that?

  I wondered what would happen if I died. I guessed that they would never know. I was sure that nobody was monitoring me. No secret cameras were watching me. Anybody who would watch me would be risking their own liberty. No, they wouldn't know if I died. I imagined that they would keep the house running, with full supplies, for two hundred and fifty years, maybe a bit longer, until they were sure that I was dead.

  What would they do with the dead house? Would they just bury it and forget that it existed? Would they incinerate the whole thing, in case I had recorded the number somewhere? Who knows?

  The years rolled by. I gave up on looking for a way to communicate. I gave up on blaming myself. I gave up on wishing that I had a partner in the prison. I gave up on just about everything.

  For a couple of decades I managed to maintain a regular schedule. Woke up at six, exercised, showered, ate, checked the news, read, watched a movie or two. Then I fell apart completely. There was in fact no day or night in this place. I fell into a completely irregular schedule. I spent years gaining obscene amounts of weight, and years starving myself to a near skeleton. I wandered around the house stark naked for a few months, then turned the air conditioner down as low as it would go and walked around in a heavy coat.

  Did I lose my mind? I suppose so. Anyone would. I often thought that it would have been kinder to kill me on the spot. I even thought of suicide. I dreamed up a hundred ways of doing it, but frankly, I was afraid. I wasn't capable of taking my own life.

  They say that 'as long as there is life, there is hope,' but it wasn't true for me. I had life, at least in the minimal biological sense, but no hope.

  Can I excuse myself by claiming insanity? I wish that I could. Others have forgiven me, but I can't forgive myself.

  As the years rolled on into decades, I began to question everything that I had ever held as true. I was no longer sure what reality was. After all, each human experiences it differently. So was there a 'real' reality? I no longer knew.

  And who said that the government was right? Maybe the rebels were right. Maybe technology was our ruin. It certainly was mine. If there were no phones, no phone numbers, then I would be leading a real life. Sure, a much shorter one than that offered by modern medical technology, but a lot happier one than the one I was leading now. Maybe even a happier one than I would have been living outside the prison. Perhaps cavemen really had had the best deal of all, and humans had been too smart for their own good.

  I began to think of the Blue and Greens as my partners. I had no idea of how far their ideology went, but my hatred of technology was as extreme as could be. I spent hours writing a thesis discussing the question of whether it was moral to use stone tools, or if man should go completely back to his animal origins. I scribbled in pencil on paper, then threw the entire thing into the incinerator, disgusted by the pencil, the paper, even the letters themselves. I took to eating my meat raw.

  I tried religion. I prayed to the modern gods that I knew of, and gradually worked my way back to more primitive gods. Ba'al was too advanced for me. I prayed to the gods of nature, the gods of streams and soil, of rock and sky. The gods of a nature that I was not experiencing.

  Inevitably the day came when I decide to smash the computer, destroying the one-way internet connection to the outside world. It was irrevocable. Nobody would come and fix the machine for me.

  I sat down in front of the screen, and watched the news for the last time. They were electing a new pope. The cardinals were meeting, and once they had made a decision, white smoke would come out of their chimney. If they had not made a decision, white smoke would signal it. I liked the smoke-signal idea. It was primitive. It required fire, but not much technology beyond that. It could only be used for simple messages, yes or no. Not much more than that.

  I sat mesmerized in front of the screen, my mind boiling. Simple. Smoke. Yes or no. Yes or no, on or off.

  All data can be reduced to yes or no, on or off. It was the basis of the digital world. Even my number could be expressed in binary code, a series of offs and ons, zeroes and ones. A quick calculation showed that I could express my number in sixty binary digits. Two months of daily smoke signals. Two months seemed like such a short time to me.

  I could send a smoke signal. I could only hope that somebody was watching, and would understand.

  I started experimenting in the kitchen, trying to find combinations of materials that would give off huge amounts of smoke. They sent me various cleaning supplies along with my food, so there were plenty of materials to use for playing amateur chemist.

  Eventually I found a combination that seemed to work, one that would give off huge amounts of smoke in the incinerator. I was pleased with myself. Until the doubts started. Maybe there was some kind of filter on the incinerator exhaust. Who said that anybody was watching my prison? Maybe the rebels didn't know where it was. If my guards figured out that the smoke was a signal, they might tighten up security even further.

  I decided that smoke signal wasn't enough. I would have to put out as many signals as possible, all at the same time, and hope that at least one of them got picked up. Smoke was one way of signaling the outside world, but I had to think of others. What else could get out that could carry the information? I racked my brain, but couldn't think of a thing.

  I had been thinking along the wrong lines. "What else could get out that could carry the information?" It took me a week to realize that I hadn't stated the problem properly. Who said that something had to come out? Maybe something coming in could be a signal. There were two things that came into my prison that responded to my demand. Water and electricity. Water coming in had the advantage of producing more sewage going out.

  At first I thought that I would alternate days. On "on" days, or "one" days, if you like, I would burn garbage that created a lot of smoke, leave all of the water faucets running, and turn on every electrical appliance in the house. On "off" or "zero" days, I would sit in the dark and cold, and not run the water at all. If anybody was watching the water or electricity consumption of my prison, they would get the message, even if the smoke didn't make it.

  It had to succeed the first time. I had to make it as easy as possible for my friends, as I now thought of them, to understand that I was sending them a message, and actually get the information out to them.

  If instead of having "one" days and "zero" days I would have "one" months and "zero" months, there could be an advantage. Maybe someone on my side was keeping an eye on the electric or water bills. If it meant that it took five years to get the message out, so be.

  It took five years. I had to ease up on the plan a little, and allow myself drinking water and toilet flushing during "zero" months. I left a small electric light as well. I would survive in the complete dark for months at a time. |Remember that the binary coded number could have several zeroes in a row, which meant several months of dark, cold, and no shower.

  Did I understand the consequences of what I was planning? To a limited extent I did. I had grown to identify with the blue and greens, but I didn't quite understand how far their ideology actually went, or that the code would really give them the a
bility to do much harm. I had been by myself for decades, and was to a large extent living in an imaginary land of my own creation.

  Would we all have been better off if they had just killed me that first day? Maybe. I at least would have been spared the years of suffering. Beyond that I do not really know.

  I had chosen a difficult path, five years of off and on, of mixing up batches of smoky garbage. I once went for six months without a shower, just to make sure that the code got out.

  Finally, I was done. Sixty insane months were over. I went back to my regular routine, showered as I liked, and wondered. Did it work? Did the rebels get the code? If they did, would I be let out? Maybe I would be left to rot in the prison, no longer of interest to anyone, forgotten in the upheavals of the revolution.

  A week after I finished transmitting, there was a knock on the door. I didn't bother answering. The door was locked from the outside, and if somebody wanted to come in they would have to let themselves in.

  The door opened, and my familiar interrogator walked in. He hadn't aged much, but there was a look of resignation on his face. I tried speaking to him. I wanted to ask what had happened, I wanted to just talk, talk to another human. I couldn't get a word out. I had gotten out of the habit of speaking. Later, it took