"The Anomaly"

[fiefoe]

Hervé Le Tellier delivered a deftly imagined thought experiment. The whole religion angle I could do without though. 

• Let’s be clear on this: he derives no pleasure from killing, from finishing off an injured animal. He’s not depraved. No, what he likes is the specialized action, the fail-safe routine that gels with frequent repetition.
• * And just then, as he stands up and admires his work, he has a sudden, overwhelming urge to pee. It would never have occurred to him. Let’s face it, assassins in films don’t pee. It’s so urgent that he even contemplates relieving himself in the toilet, at the expense of having to clean the whole thing thoroughly afterward... So, despite his pleading bladder, he continues with his plan, grimacing in agony.
• his sales have never gone beyond a few thousand copies. He’s convinced himself that there’s nothing less tragic, that disillusion is the opposite of failure. <> At forty-three, having spent fifteen years writing, he views the small literary community as a farcical train where crooks without tickets ostentatiously take first-class seats with the complicity of incompetent conductors, while modest geniuses are left on the platform—and the latter are an endangered species to which Miesel does not claim to belong.
• In memory of his father: Continuing the building process alone would have meant accepting death, just as dismantling the castle would have done.
• he’s slipped into his translations brief passages describing Ascot Racecourse or whipped cream. And it was in Gurevich’s collected articles that he started these misdemeanors: in the opening text, ““Почему нужно дать женщинам все права и свободу” (“Why women should be given freedom and all their rights”), he introduced the sentence “Freedom isn’t merely whipped cream on a chocolate cake, it is a right.” It was discreet, and who knows?
• to say that the translator’s role is to “liberate the pure language captured within a work by transposing it”; he professes limply all the fine things he doesn’t think about the American author,
• “I have never known how the world would differ had I not existed, nor toward what shores I would have driven it had I existed more intensely, and I cannot see how my passing will alter its movement. Here I am, walking along a trail whose absent pebbles lead me nowhere. I am becoming the point where life and death unite until they are indistinguishable, where the mask of the living man settles restfully in the face of the deceased. This morning, because the weather is clear, I can see all the way to me, and I am like everyone else. I am not putting an end to my existence but giving life to immortality. Ultimately, it is futile for me to write a final sentence that does not seek to change the moment.”
• * And on one of the shelves a brightly colored plaster model of Mickey Mouse. She picked up the figurine and turned it over in her hands, astonished... “I bought it so that something in my apartment defied acclimatization. You can’t get used to ugliness. It’s full of life. Ugly life, but life all the same.”
• But no, she was wrong, why revisit their lovely beginnings in the bitter light of their ending? She wasn’t the one who’d used him, he and he alone hadn’t lived up to their shared hopes.
• My God, metaphors, that’s a bad start. A little further on: “Seduction has always been a commonplace craft; breaking up a major art.” So she’s an artist, then. Let’s go with this major art.
• * In all logic, it must be possible to find a point of no return on the continuous thread of time, an irretrievable tipping point after which nothing and no one could save the ficus... the only cell that could have set the whole thing going again, the final viable eukaryote that could have rallied its neighbors—Come on, guys, let’s see some motivation, let’s have a reaction, fill yourselves up with water, don’t let yourselves go—well, the last of the last has just left us, so you’re here too late, with your pathetic little bottle, ciao ciao. Yes, somewhere on the thread of time.
• Paul puts a hand on his already absent brother’s arm, hoping this gesture will calm the icy panic sweeping over him, and he also hopes that just the touch of his hand can draw out and destroy the darkness, because it’s insane but that’s how it is, years of practice and hundreds of patients lost still haven’t stopped magical thinking from surfacing every time, even in the depths of the most rational mind, and also right now—why now?—he suddenly remembers the bowling nights in Peoria when David bowled like an idiot and still got strikes, the fucking lucky jerk of an asshole,
• There’s not just one anvil-shaped mesocyclone spiraling high up into the atmosphere, but dozens of them, as if they were being lifted by an invisible hand, and all fusing together in the tropopause. Any vessels on the ocean must be in the grips of an apocalyptic depression. Markle’s never seen anything like it in twenty years of long-haul flights. The storm of the year, at least. The stratospheric domes reach heights of sixteen kilometers. He could try to slip between two columns, but that would just mean flying straight into the one behind. The weather radar now shows a long diagonal band of red: a wall of water and ice.
• even though they know nothing about her religion, April decides that she’s Baptist, like them; well, she didn’t have a believer’s proper, immersive baptism, but she spent most of her time in water. It simplifies things. The born-again frog will go to frog heaven.
• it ended up in Thompson’s chest, giving him an opportunity to gauge just how perfectly bullets were designed for bodies, and he screamed like crazy. Thompson was a mercenary with the paramilitary firm Academi,
• The lowest trash always have the option of taking refuge in patriotism.
• but quickly lost his nerve with an indecisive client or a learner driver, and didn’t manage to hold down any job. The army gave him a framework, it restored his pride.
• In a few years, when the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a huge ice cube two kilometers thick and the size of Florida, has calved and started to melt, the house will be paddling in the ocean. But she and Clark couldn’t really know this, and they straightened out the whole place,
• Despite the differences between them—thirty-three years, two billion dollars in stock options, and a set of sparkling veneers—they both make profligate use of each other’s first names when they talk, and this colors their conversations with a refined touch of venomous hypocrisy. If the English language had such niceties, they would use the familiar “you” singular, rather than the more formal “you” plural.
• Most of all she knows that for this Hexachlorion lawsuit—in which many of the affected workers are women, almost all of them of color—a black female lawyer as pugnacious as she is will move the goalposts and temper the opponents’ aggression. That’s what Prior’s banking on, anyway.
• * Prior likes to quote. In a managerial world where any literary erudition is incongruous, he has made it a powerful instrument of symbolic domination. And when the threat loomed of a criminal case over Hexachlorion, an insecticide released on the market before all the tests were validated, when the board of directors showed signs of anxiety, Prior masterfully pulverized their precautionary approach: “My dear fellow board members, I often think of that magnificent poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that ends with these words: ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’ So yes, in the endless struggle to feed the human race, we will leave a trail.”
• in an exquisite rewriting of their not very glorious relationship, Ms. Leskov gradually raises herself to the tragic yet dignified status of official widow. <> Clémence Balmer watches all this fall into place with detachment and an obscure feeling of distaste. Achieving success at the age of fifty is a little like finally being served the mustard when you’re on to dessert,
• “The African Dubai, as they say,” Hélène Charrier adds. “They’ve even raised it by several meters in anticipation of rising sea levels. And from the top of its luxury tower blocks you’ll be able to see Lagos and watch its forty million inhabitants drown,
• * For a statistician, he’s a dreamer. He has green eyes that make him look like a number theorist, even though he has long hair like a game theorist, and wears the Trotskytizing small steel-rimmed glasses of a logician and the holey old T-shirts of an algebraist—the one he’s wearing at the moment is especially shapeless and ridiculous. She guesses that he’s brilliant. If he were bad at heart, he’d have headed off into finance long ago. Brilliant but shy,
• the kid with the schoolboy humor that he was twenty years ago, who chose this truncated quote from The Wizard of Oz, never guessing that he’d one day have to complete it to confirm his identity. And for twenty years now he’s had this smartphone, which is upgraded for him regularly, this smartphone, which in exchange for a thousand dollars a month, he must keep on the whole time, must take with him everywhere, so that in any circumstances—absolutely any, as the present situation proves—he can pick up and instantly be available. It’s never rung before.
• to make a long story short, he was interested in the statistics of waiting in line. He was especially fond of Little’s law, which states that the average number of units in a stable system is equal to their average arrival frequency multiplied by the time they spend in the system.
• a demonstration of know-how and aesthetics: an eighty-meter building in glass and bamboo, reinforced in strategic places by long lines of steel. The northern facade condenses the water streaming over it and irrigates the plant wall on the eastern side, while the southwestern wall alternates between light wells and solar panels—because Surya means sun—and supplies the building with electricity.
• His longing, his sadness, and his fears gradually made André lose all caution, and more than once he was insensitively insistent, but is there such a thing as sensitive insistence? Denied in person, frustrated physically, he didn’t know where to find a second center of gravity. How long did he have left as a man?
• *SINCE KING ARTHUR and his knights, if not before, military types have liked gathering in the round, most likely because circles profess equality while doing nothing to hide the true hierarchy. The McGuire base therefore has its statutory big round table in the middle of the underground command center
• * “Protocol 42 has been set in motion because today’s Air France 006 flight already landed at JFK more than four hours ago, at the scheduled time of 16:35 hours. But it was a different aircraft, with a different captain and copilot. On the other hand, an Air France Boeing 787, with the same reference Air France 006, with exactly the same damage as this one, piloted by the same Commander Markle, copiloted by the same Favereaux, and manned by the same crew and with the same passengers, in other words the exact same plane as this one you see here, this same plane, then, landed at JFK Airport, but at 17:17 hours on March 10. Precisely one hundred six days ago.”
• The NSA has geolocated most of the passengers and crew members from the Paris–New York flight of March 10. Around one hundred of them are already under house arrest with police surveillance. Biologists compare their DNA with that of their counterparts being held in the hangar: they are absolutely identical.
• * “We’ll give you a list of scientists in thirty minutes,” Tina Brewster-Wang adds. “Two or three philosophers as well.” “Really? Why?” Silveria asks. “Why should scientists always be the only people woken in the night?”
• Wesley says, amused. “If the artificial intelligence that’s simulating us states that a ‘simulated human’ is going to observe the world on a microscopic level, it just needs to supply that individual with enough simulated details. And in the event of any errors, it would just have to reprogram any ‘virtual brains’ that might have noticed an anomaly. Or maybe just rewind by a few seconds, with a sort of ‘undo,’ you see, and relaunch the simulation in such a way as to avoid any problems…”
• * “a hypertechnical civilization can simulate a thousand times more ‘false civilizations’ than there are real ones. Which means that if we take a ‘thinking brain’ at random, mine or yours, it has nine hundred ninety-nine chances in a thousand of being virtual and one chance in a thousand of being a real brain. In other words, the ‘I think therefore I am’ of Descartes’s Discourse on Method is obsolete. It’s more like: ‘I think therefore I’m almost certainly a program.’ Descartes 2.0,
• * Victor writes unhurriedly, mechanically. Having read a lot, translated a lot, and seen too much nonsense beneath surface prettiness, he would think it indecent to inflict yet more inanity on the world. He really couldn’t care less that extravagant prose emerges from the simple “displacement of a pen on the page,” he doesn’t believe he is “all-powerful in the face of every sentence,” ... Besides, he doesn’t trust metaphors. The Trojan War must have started like that. Still, he knows that it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.
• Nostalgia is a scoundrel. It allows us to believe life has some meaning. Victor sits down next to her, irresistibly drawn: it is characteristic of attraction to want to constantly reduce distances.
• * The direct route hates a pothole, and the obscure professes hatred of the inexplicable. The immutability of the law keeps crashing up against the constantly shifting cosmos and the advancement of knowledge. Where in the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, or any other text can anyone identify the least sentence, ambiguous sura, or obscure verse that predicts or justifies a plane looming out of the azure skies and turning out to be in every way identical to one that landed three months earlier?
• * Karl Popper as the leading light of his epistemology studies—the stalwart Popper, who felt a theory could be attributed no scientific weight if there was nothing to refute it…But Adrian can look at this question from every angle as much as he likes: all things being equal, the simplest explanation is often the right one. The simplest but the most uncomfortable: this plane’s appearance can’t be a bungle in the simulation—it would have been so easy to “erase” it,.. No, it’s obviously a test: How will billions of virtual individuals react when confronted with their own virtuality?
• * What difference would it make for them, after all? Simulated or not, we all live, feel, love, suffer, create, and die, each leaving our own tiny trace in the simulation. What point is there in knowing? We should always favor mystery over science. Ignorance is a good traveling companion, and the truth never produces happiness. We might as well be simulated and happy.
• he starts singing to the tune of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: I can’t be no simulation / No, no, no / ’Cause I cry and I cry and I cry! / I can’t be no, no, no
• He had hundreds of ginkgo trees planted all along its banks, so that he can gaze at them and meditate. He’s always been fascinated by these primitive trees. Their ancestors existed millions of years before even the dinosaurs appeared, and will outlive the human race. A plant version of a memento mori.
• * “There are three hundred twenty-two of them, Comrade President,” says a general. “Most of them are still at the Huiyang military air base.” <> “Should we tell the Americans about that flight?” asks a woman in civilian dress.
• You can keep the shirt, of course. You’ll also find a sweatshirt with a White House logo on it. The president insisted on autographing it for you personally.” <> Adrian doesn’t have time to get a word in before the head of protocol adds a straight-faced, “Don’t worry, Professor. We gave him a water-based pen,
• Do you have a problem with that, Jamy?” “Not at all, General. I know no problem that can resist the absence of a solution.”
• No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common. —The anomaly, Victør Miesel
• * The two men eye each other for a long time. Blake June studies his prisoner. For three days now he’s been thinking, pondering, without finding an explanation. But the absurdity of it didn’t preclude his pragmatism, and he set his trap. There was no other option. The fly never asks to see the spider... “I’m not going to make any speeches,” he says flatly into March’s ear. “You don’t understand what’s going on, and neither do I. That doesn’t matter. I’m you and you’re me. That’s one too many, there can’t be two of us. You understand that.”
• No pointless suffering, Blake doesn’t hate himself that much. A minute later, an injection of curare stops March’s heart. Sleep and death are twin brothers. Homer was already saying that in his day.
• “My dear fellow citizens, in August 1945, after the Hiroshima bombing, when the world tipped into the nuclear age and fear of annihilation, the writer Albert Camus wrote: ‘We’re being presented with a new source of anguish here, and it has every chance of being definitive. Humanity is perhaps being offered its last chance. And, yes, that could be a good pretext for a special edition. But it’s more likely to be a topic for some reflection and a great deal of silence.’ We must take inspiration from these fine words.
• Here, though, the camera is incorruptible, there’s no indulgence in its high definition, no courtesy in its angle: this is an old man he’s seeing. A tired, worn, unattractive man. He scours “his” face for the immutable seal of youthfulness that he sometimes believes he incarnates, but can’t find it. Old age is in every detail, like a straitjacket of filth.
• Competing with himself would be a novelty. But then again…one André is a thirty-year age gap, two Andrés and it’s a senior living facility. She’s bound to run for the hills, it’s obvious. He’d do better to wish André June good luck.
• “By the way, the other house, the old coaching inn in Montjoux that I couldn’t make up my mind about, it’s still for sale,” says André March. “I’ll buy it, whether or not we can get this idea of a ‘virtual disaster’ to work. We’d have a house each, ten kilometers apart. The friends who used to come to stay for vacations can share themselves between the two of us. We’ll see which of us is nicer.”
• Sophia March and Sophia June are lying on the floor playing. At their age, the behaviorists reckoned, they’re not afraid of new things: an Other isn’t yet an enemy. Between the two of them, Betty’s no longer an amphibian but a transitional object, croaking very appropriately.
• Over the years, the curse has mutated into a reverence, a cult. The fact is that among people of Yoruba ethnicity the rate of twin births is, uniquely, one in twenty; the village of Igbo-Ora has even proclaimed itself the twin capital of the world, and the names Taiwo (First) and Kehinde (Second) are common. So yes, why shouldn’t Slimboy have a twin brother, a brother he lost and has found again? No one would be surprised.
  “We’d need to fake the personal records,” June suggests.
  “It’s just a question of money,” March agrees.
  The MI6 agent takes notes as if taking orders for pizzas.
• “We’ll try a different treatment. You were your own guinea pig; at least we know what won’t work.”
• * There’s no legal precedent, the other is about to say but immediately thinks, Fuck, that really is me all over, straight to the legal position. She remembers the Martin Guerre trial in France in the sixteenth century. An impostor called Arnaud du Tilh comes “home” to the village where Guerre was born, passes himself off as him, lives with his wife, and convinces anyone prepared to be convinced that he is who he claims to be.
• Without thinking, she reaches her hand to Aby, who takes it, also without thinking. Seeing this small gesture, the other Joanna finds there’s no air to breathe, the pain crushes her chest. Her sister will always be her sister, but she has only one Aby. There are some loves that can be added together, and others that can never be divided.
• Total war. As soon as Lucie June was back in France she knew she couldn’t avoid it, and Lucie March is equally determined. Her son, their son, the apartment, the films currently being edited, even down to clothes—a succession of elemental struggles and pointless battles.
• * And now Lucie must negotiate with this other “her,” and meekly accept unbearable separations? Neither of them is prepared to sacrifice herself on the altar of the child’s sacrosanct “emotional stability” that the child psychologists keep trumpeting, but what do they know? In a mother’s love, the darkest selfishness battles furiously with the most dazzling generosity.
• Louis was such an essential element in his mother’s life, but from the child’s point of view the arrival of this white-haired, slightly mischievous beanpole of a man had come as a relief. It broke up the rut they were in, and Louis had enjoyed the calm, the laughter, and that thoughtful look his mother sometimes got. A less omnipresent mother had her advantages, and when Lucie broke up with André, and Louis was restored to his central position, the child took no pleasure in resuming their routines like an old married couple.
• * she so loved Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man, a cult classic from the ’70s in which a psychiatrist mired in boredom and dissatisfaction starts throwing dice to make his every decision in life. Mostly, she admires Louis’s intelligence in adopting this strategy to avoid enormous tension, the spontaneous irony that proves his maturity. Then, in a flash, she realizes it’s staggeringly obvious: Louis’s right. That’s what he needs to do to ensure he’s still in control of his life but doesn’t have to bear the weight of a decision.
• “I thought of it ’cause of Dungeons and Dragons,” Louis says, breaking the silence, and he smiles proudly, as if this explains everything. At this point both women nod their heads, resigned to his idea. Sometimes the worst solution is the best.
• There’s a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what’s going on in this world he created.
• Victor read The anomaly at Évreux base this morning. He recognized his style but couldn’t find himself in it. He doesn’t appreciate that formulaic sort of art and has no fascination for aphorisms. The enthusiasm generated by the book is beyond him.
• * “Livio’s always liked funerals. Eulogies are his absolute niche, he gets to be both modest and generous-hearted.”
• “Thank goodness for Latin to make use of that amo. The only good language is a dead language, as General Sheridan might say. But joking aside, I have no idea why he did it. I’m not suicidal. Mind you, I’d gladly kill myself, especially as later will already be too late.”
  “Aha!” exclaims Clémence, opening her tablet again, scrolling through it feverishly and triumphantly showing Victor a phrase from The anomaly.
  “You’ve just quoted from Victør Miesel.”
• * two soft spotlights pick out the Adrianas, beaming red light on one of them and blue on the other, canceling out their differences. It was the production team’s idea to play on the colors like this. Vinícius de Moraes once said that his song is just about time passing, the sad sort of beauty that belongs to everyone and no one, and the melancholy ebb and flow of waves. Ipanema Beach takes over the stage of The Late Show as one Adriana starts, joined in the second bar by her twin: “Tall and tan and young and lovely…”
• The two Adrianas sing as a perfect duo about that graceful Ipanema siren walking over the fine sand toward the sea. One of them starts a phrase and the other completes it, they make a point of being a whole and yet apart, there’s something almost magical about their harmonies, the effect is dizzying. And every frisson produced by this giddy-making loveliness comprises a homeopathic dose of terror.
  “Fuck, this is good TV,” says the director in the control room. “Fucking good TV.”
• And by then thousands of people with Adriana June’s red-dyed bangs will be marching in the streets, from Paris to Rio and Hong Kong to New York. Their message is obscure, but freedom of thought on the internet is all the more complete now that it’s clear that people have stopped thinking. <> Empathy, emotion, and the absurd sell well, so within a few hours stalls will be offering T-shirts with the slogans “Stimulate me, don’t simulate me,” “I’m a program, reset me,” and “I am 1, U are 2, we are free.”
• I’ve forgotten which is which, and I’ve clicked them together. I couldn’t tell you what they mean, but I feel as if I have more options, I’m freer than ever. But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.” <> In the studio audience, Anne Vasseur from the Times Literary Supplement is privately amused. She prefers the other joke that says that if an arrow is to hit the target, it needs to have missed everything else first.
• Take climate change. We never listen to the scientists. We spew out virtual carbon unchecked from fossil fuels that may or may not be virtual, heating up our atmosphere, that may or may not be virtual. And our species, which again may or may not be virtual, will be wiped out. Nothing’s changed. The rich fly in the face of common sense and reckon they can save themselves, and themselves alone, and everyone else is reduced to living in hope.”
• “That evil was Elpis, the expectation of good—hope. It’s the most destructive of all evils. It is hope that stops us being proactive and hope that prolongs people’s suffering because, as they always say and in spite of all the evidence, ‘it will all come right in the end.’ What is not meant to be cannot be…
• *  “And, Philomedius, would you say that this is what’s happening now, that each of us finds our own way of accommodating the reality we’re being offered, is that it?” <> “Yes. Absolutely. I’d like to remind you of something Nietzsche said: ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’
• The irony is that the very fact of being virtual may give us even more of a duty toward our fellow human beings and our planet. And most significantly, it’s a collective duty.” ... “Because—and a mathematician has already made this point—this test hasn’t been set for us as individuals. This simulation is thinking on the level of an ocean, it couldn’t care less about what each water molecule does. The simulation is waiting for a reaction from the entire human race. There won’t be a supreme savior. We need to save ourselves.”
• Not because I was scared but because jealousy and pain were making me so hideous and I could see that ugliness all over you, plain as plain can be. <> I don’t know where I’m going. But I know that if I’m a long way away from you, from both of you, I still have a chance of remembering who I am and who I want to be.
• * In order to leave the man she loves a woman must dismantle the world. Joanna June had to rewrite their story, had to dig up doubts that she’d buried and exhaust the attraction she felt for Aby in the same way that she could rob a word of all meaning if she repeated it dozens of times. She’d learned to unlove his too-blond curls, his bootlicking goody-two-shoes act, his skinny-boy awkwardness, his slightly snobby clothes,
• * The lawyer had become the prosecutor; she mercilessly put all her intelligence into serving the crime, and the prosecutor took this Aby with his thousand perfections, this simple branch on which Joanna’s love had crystalized endless glittering, shifting diamonds of salt and poured the rain of indifference over it. And then the crystals dissolved and the charmless, leafless branch reappeared, dull enough and ordinary enough to make her weep.
• Dear Lucie,
  I’m writing from my new email address to yours because the old ones belong to other people, and, like you, I’ve added a J for June. Why are we the ones who have to adapt? I suppose those four months that you and I haven’t lived give the other André and Lucie the advantage.
  We now both know what happened to “us.” “You” left me, tired of my eagerness and impatience.
• When he was told that a third Air France Flight 006 had loomed into the Atlantic skies with the same Captain Markle at the controls, assisted by the same Favereaux and with the same passengers on board, the president gave the order for the aircraft to be destroyed. We really can’t keep letting this same plane land.