Ayer woke up from a sunbeam, coming from a window with rounded corners. He opened his eyes realising that he had fallen asleep in the train and that he was probably miles away from the city. At first, he didn’t attach any emotions to that fact, but after several seconds the serenity with which he woke up dissolved and he felt overwhelmed by a nameless and mysterious thread which suddenly coloured all of his surroundings with hostility.
He turned to the people positioned closest to him, several travellers who were sitting next to him and talking so loudly that he wondered how he managed to fall asleep - and scanned them one by one planning to fill his brain with information until he felt calm again. But that did not happen - through the people next to him looked like easy targets, the observations he made did not reveal almost anything about any of them.
He got up swiftly and observed them more carefully in order to see if they themselves were the cause of his worries but quickly realised that no, there wasn’t anything special about his companions which were standing half-seated half-lying, laughing at each other’s jokes. The issue was with him - his abilities had just halted. He had stopped being able to read peoples emotions and motivations. For him, this was the equivalent of going blind while crossing the street.
Ayer did not stop staring at his neighbours, and soon one of them noticed him.
“What are you looking at?” she said.
“Hey, don’t be an asshole,” another one said, “The bloke is probably bored to death at this point and he is just in search of someone to talk to, right mate?”
Ayer nodded.
“Yeah, it sucks travelling alone, right? I keep telling them this. My name is Charlie by the way, glad to meet you, the guys over there also are, they are just a little nervous as usual. Come sit with us if you want.”
Ayer got up from his chair, shook hands with each of the people and presented himself with a fake name. Charlie asked him where he was from. Ayer said he was from London and asked him in return. “So, me I was born around 10 kilometres from where we stand.” Charlie started, “but I spent the last five years in London also. Now I am bringing these two Londoners here to show them what is like being outside.”
Ayer did not need to scan him again to verify his words - he’d already noticed the confidence with which he spoke of the hills and mountains which were displayed before him, as well as the shyness with which he responded to some of their witty remarks, related to the life in the city. He’d seen his clothing style, which was nothing more than a replica of theirs but viewed from a more down-to-earth, not to mention naive, perspective. He’d seen all of these signs, therefore, he concluded, he hadn’t lost his attentiveness. The issue was that his brain was no longer willing to take the leap of faith required for it to see beyond what was presented before it.
He revisited the events from the previous day and started piecing together what had happened to him. It seemed like the mistakes he had made in judging Kei must have shaken his confidence up to the point where he stopped trusting his own judgement. In short, he had screwed up everything. And the disappearance of his abilities was was his brain’s way of telling him: “Timeout - from now on we cannot be sure about anything.”
Ayer closed his eyes and tried to resume his inner monologue and regain the voice of confidence which had always kept him calm and in control:
“You see Watson, it is obvious from the way that this person is copying the clothing style of his acquaintances, that he is just trying to fit in, rather unsuccessfully, if I may add. Now, a blind man can see that they are Londoners, so the question is only where he is from. That is not so easy to guess, but still, he looks like he knows his way around here, so I might make an educated guess that he is a local,” he continued speaking to himself but his confidence was still gone. He felt as if he was about to have a panic attack. He took a few steps back and headed to the train door, which was opened at that moment.
“Hey, where are you going?!”
“This is my stop,” he said and left, ignoring everyone’s baffled reactions.
After taking a glance at his surroundings, he immediately realised why his action caused bafflement - he had departed in the middle of nowhere, “his stop” consisted of a little wooden shed with two benches stuck to it and was surrounded from all sides by thick trees. A few meters from it, there was a trail, that followed a small river. When looking at it, Ayer felt like he could take it, and walk all his life without meeting anybody.
This illusion, however, lasted for no more than a few minutes, after which Ayer heard a loud noise coming from the direction opposite to the one he came from - the train to London was coming. He stood next to the rails looking through the train’s windows as it stopped, stood in one place, and then started gaining speed again. His initial urge to hop on it was strong but he resisted it - he wouldn’t go back to London before sorting this out. He couldn’t.
A few days ago, Jane had spoken with her friends about Ayer’s inability to show emotions. She described by means of jokes, but they became very serious at trying to analyse it.
“Maybe he is fearful,” one of her friends had said. “That is usually it, right?”
“But does he do it in a condescending manner?” Another had asked, “like, he is trying to say ‘You are not good enough to evoke emotions in me.’”
“I’d say a little of the two, although more of the first one.” Jane had responded, “He cried that one time, remember?”
“Yeah, I almost forgot about that.”
“Yes, probably because the crying incident does not fit, you know? He is a self-proclaimed master of his craft, a savant, so to say, and he has impostor syndrome…”
“Maybe he really is an impostor,” said one of her friends who had a history of producing abstract phrases which were turning out to be correct in the most peculiar way, “just not in the respect in which you view him.”
A few days before, when Ayer had broken into Kei’s apartment and thus committing his first registered crime, the Detective had unlocked the ability to search for information under his name in the only database of public records that was illegal to access without a reason - the database of the National Institute for Mental Health. The next day Vince, Jane and half a dozen other Yard executives received a notification that a new file for a Yard employee has been found. Later, a parcel was delivered, containing six or seven folders describing the long treatment of the severely damaged 10-year-old boy named Ayer Cadman.
His abilities didn’t start emerging until he was as old as twelve. Still, he had little memories of the time before he had them - mostly he had spent it trying to make sense of things as simple as a spoon while circling around the two rooms in which he was permitted to enter. All that he truly remembered from that time was a vague feeling of abuse. He didn’t have any specific recollections of its source, it was just there in the background throughout most of his childhood. This was the environment in which his abilities flourished.
The first thing which he started observing were changes in the behaviour of his nanny - he had started noticing that once in around 28 days there was one day when she would put him to sleep some 10 minutes earlier than usual and would also deny him at least two things that she usually allowed him. He could guess when one of these days was coming from the way her lips were pointing downwards when she was speaking, as he had already learned to look at the person’s mouth for indications of his behaviour. About once each week (but at different day each week) she would do the exact opposite - she would allow him to do everything that he pleased, During these days her lips were pointing upwards. Sometimes she acted in ways different than those two, but soon he discovered that almost all of these “emotions”, as they were called, were described in a little book written by Charles Darwin, which he found accidentally. He also learned that when knowing an emotion’s origin (which was described in the same book) he was also able to influence it by changing his own behaviour. And not long after he started doing that, his nanny and his parents started allowing him to go out and to do more things by himself. With his new found knowledge, he concluded that it made them happy.
When they sent him to school it was much easier for him to integrate - by that time he had become an expert in reading emotions and there everybody had them and everybody were influenced by them for each and everything that they did. He got along quite well with his classmates and all of this made everyone around him even happier, and for the first time it made him happy too. At that time, and perhaps also in the present day, he defined happiness as the feeling of recognition that you are a person and there are other people like you. His parents had even started giving him missions which they wanted him to accomplish like having better grades or befriending specific people. They were very happy when he did well in these missions, but when he didn’t, or when he wouldn’t want to put the effort in accomplishing them, all of them would make them mad, which was bad for his freedom. Gradually, their feelings had started shifting more and more in the negative spectre. With the help of his abilities, he immediately recognised both the tendency itself and its cause - he had started reading things which they didn’t want him to read - his abilities had surpassed the level which was needed to serve their original purpose and he was picking up not only the people’s personas, but was going deep into their inner selves. He understood that this was not desired, neither by his parents nor by anyone else.
This was how he came to know the difference between the person’s facade and the things that laid behind it. He started noticing the secret world which laid hidden behind people’s everyday interactions. He noticed that many people who were almost as observant as him in other situations chose to play dumb when being lied to, or to purposefully remain ignorant, so as not to put in a situation where their own facade would be in jeopardy. He came to realise that people’s facades consistent not of one, but of several levels, the deepest of which had already started appearing in his classmates’ behaviour, who gradually came to realize that they shouldn’t be acting according to what they really knew and felt, but by what they should be knowing and feeling. Gradually, and in most cases involuntary, they started concealing their true emotions and building facades. And their facades were their cages too, for once they had built them, they could never escape.
Suddenly, he was alone again, trapped in a world which seemed pointless and unrewarding. He had no desire to have a facade, to begin with, so the only way for him to establish contacts with his peers was to give voice to their inner selves. And the more they tried to prevent him from doing that, the more motivated he was to go there and find out why. But he never did. And soon he was back in his tiny little balloon, except neither he nor his parents wanted him out. They were now his enemies. And his abilities - the weapon which he used to keep them away.
What had happened after that? He had never really asked himself that question. He preferred to tell himself and everyone else that he just liked the detective work per se, rather than admit that he used it as a way to protect and to establish himself in the hostile environment which he was forced to inhabit. In retrospect, he was a fraud. In retrospect, there was no other facade so intricate and so complex as his. And he had succeeded to keep it for “all the people all the time”. Until he’d met a person who had created the same set of facades and who, therefore, could read him in the same way as he read everyone else. Kei.
Vince and Jane dialled Ayer’s number. On the screen, they saw a boy which they could hardly recognise. He really looked like a child and the resemblance was not only metaphorical - he wore his shirt dirty and unbuttoned, he walked as he spoke, and his expression which was usually hard to read was now primal in its display of determination and satisfaction.
“Hello Ayer,” Vince, who insisted that he should do the talking, said. “So, before you say anything, I’d like to tell you a few things myself. Firstly, about this so-called crime of yours - you should know that I talked to Kei personally and can assure you she has no interest in pursuing her allegations any further. And between you and me, even if she did I’d still find a way to get you out. Because, Ayer, you were correct. And I don’t know how I haven’t seen it earlier.” Vince waited for Ayer to react but he did nothing as if he wasn’t listening at all. “Surely you remember what you said, right? About all crimes being related to one another.”
“But Den Lee did kill herself,” Ayer said.
“Yes, she really did. I am glad that we are on the same page about that. But the fact that these so-called “odd crimes” are organised centrally, and everything else that you said, is true. And now when we too are aware of that, together we could concentrate on finding the root cause of all that.”
“I am not coming back,” Ayer said.
“Why?”
“We both know that I am not the person you need. You need synchronisation, teamwork, standards - all things which I am not very good at.”
“Is that the real reason?” Vince said.
Ayer did not respond.
“Ayer, you don’t need to pretend,” Vince continued, “We know the truth now. We know who you really are.”
“Stop it,” Jane said, “allow him to process it.”
Ayer turned off his phone, threw it in the river and continued on his way forward.
Vince watched the screen as Ayer’s phone fled through the air, without making a sound. The transmission finished with a loud splash after which the speakers were also silent. Jane got up and began stretching her arms, but Vince still stood motionless like a person who finally finds his car keys only to discover, a second later, that his vehicle is stolen.
“You happy?” Vince said finally.
“What?” Jane asked and approached him, positioning herself between him and the blank screen.
“All you did was to encourage him. Right from the start. I suppose this is what you wanted. So this is why I am asking you if you are happy-“
Vince couldn’t finish his sentence, as Jane interrupted him with a strong kick in his chest, which caused him to fall back in his chair. He rolled on the floor once or twice holding his belly and got up on his knees.
“Why?” He said and then stared at her with amazement, expecting to see distress or anger on her face, but the only emotion he could read was vague awkwardness.
“Didn’t you once say that I should hit you if you if you start saying such stuff?” she said.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“Oh, must have been someone else, then.”
“But what did I say? What stuff?” Vince was still trying to take a breath.
“Intolerant, ignorant, treating people as if you own them.”
“But he-“
“What he did was completely normal given what he has been through and the way you approached him.”
“What the hell do you mean the way I approached him. I saw the files alright. So what if he had some mental problems when he was a kid? He still has no right to lie to us. Plus he resolved those when he was 7.”
“No, rather this was when they began. If you were aware with his condition you’d know that there was no cure for it, neither there is there a way for him to magically turn into a normal dumb kid. He had to learn how to act like one. All of the things that we do naturally, he had to learn. Why do you think that he is so good at reading people? It is because he had to study most of the things that we say and do without even paying attention to them, so he can replicate them.”
“Imagine being in his place,” she continued, “where the only way for you to fit in is to pretend you are someone else.”
“See, you are making it sound so dramatic. Nobody is born as a perfect cog in society’s machine. The big difference is not in how hard it is for someone to comply, but how willing he is to do so. Some of us just choose not to complain and to make an extra effort to confront our weaknesses. And some of us are making a fuss about it.”
“You are not a non-conformist, Vince!” Jane said. “And if you were in the habit of making an extra effort, it would have been better, as you would probably read the hard copy of Ayer’s archives, not just the digital summary!”
Fifteen minutes before the end of his workday, Vince took one of the big notebooks which were delivered in his office a few days ago and opened it with the intention of going through so to convince himself that he hadn’t missed anything. He skimmed through the beginning rather quickly, reading the first sentences of each of the (rather long) paragraphs, complimenting himself for how closely he followed the thoughts of the author. This all changed when he got to the first appendix - a page which was structured like a dialogue between people:
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“Hi, Ayer.”
“Morning, Cadman.”
“Hi, Sir.
“Ayer, how are you?”
“Pretty good, you?
“After seeing you, better!”
“Good to hear.”
The last line was marked with a red question mark.
Vince turned to the next page.
“Ayer, are you ready for the next round of the Olympics?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Are you excited about it?”
“No.” This line was also marked red.
“And why is that Ayer?”
“Because I am almost certain I will be better than everyone, except for Phillip, of course.”
“You shouldn’t be so confident in yourself, Ayer.”
This was where the document ended. Vince left it and picked up another one.
“Do you like me, Ayer?”
“I like all girls.”
“Yes, but do you like me more than others, right?”
“I like all girls.”
“Then why are you buying me sweets?”
“Because I wanted to make you happy. Because I know that you are not happy.”
“But everyone else likes me!”
“Hi, sir.”
“Ayer, I want to talk to you. I saw that you submitted an empty sheet at the Olympics. Why? I guess it wasn’t so easy after all, was it?”
“It was, I could solve all the tasks, I did not do it. Did not feel like it.”
“And don’t you like other people to know that you can solve them? Your classmates for example?”
“Is this about my public image?”
“First question: do you know why are you here? Do you know why are you at the principle’s office?”
“No.”
“Quit it, boy. Vanessa came to me crying today and told me that you hit her.”
“I did not hit her.”
“But you don’t seem very surprised by her accusations.”
“I am not, because I know that she is a manipulative person. She likes me and she wants me to be her boyfriend. But I don’t. This is the reason why she was crying.”
“So you are saying she is doing this just to hurt you?”
“No, she just cannot handle negative feedback in any other way than the one you observe now.”
“What makes you think I would believe this ridiculous story?”
“Nothing. I know that you wouldn’t. Because you did not believe any of the other stories. Because you don’t know Jessica. Because you think I am crazy. Does not matter which one.”
“Now, Ayer, I did not say you are crazy.”
“Even though this has happened before you wouldn’t believe me. Even though you have every second of my life written down, and can check what I said and did at any time, you still wouldn’t believe me.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about. That thing on your wrist, its for the doctors only. Noone but they can see what’s in there.”
Vince started turning the pages faster, reading through all conversations which Ayer had ever held with anyone. From first glance, it looked like his whole persona was recorded there, at least that would be the case had it been anyone else who was wearing the parole bracelet. But upon going further, Vince came to the conclusion that there actually wasn’t anything about Ayer that he could learn from these books - at least there wasn’t anything more truthful than his made-up stories about how solving crimes was a passion of his and how he went to the Asian district to pursue it. All this was an intricately-built mythology, superficially based on facts but extremely deceiving at every level that was important.
Vince continued to skim through the pages until a differently-formatted document caught his attention.
“12-th of October. Patient name: Ayer Cadman. You can begin.”
“OK, what do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know, just tell me what’s happening with you. How is school?”
“You are supposed to know the answer to that question.”
“I do, but I want to hear your opinion.”
“Bad.”
“What does bad mean to you?
“Bad is when people are not happy with you because you did not meet their expectations.”
“But do you know why is it bad? Have you ever been in a situation where people don’t meet your expectations?
“No. Because I just know what to expect.”
“OK, Ayer, you want us to go through your transcripts? We have the empty sheet at that test of yours. We talked about consistency of behaviour, right? And the incident with the girl? You really shouldn’t have put your principal in a situation where he needs to apologise to you.”
“You cannot hold me accountable for his reactions.”
“Ayer, we discussed this, we are not holding you accountable for anything, we are just trying to help you get along.
“But I am getting along just fine.”
“No, you are not, Ayer, and the fact that you are not realising it does not speak well for our progress. Why were you at the principal’s office again? I know that you were not to blame but I cannot really interfere with that, as we’ve discussed several times. It is against the law.”
“So is recording a person’s life, without their permission.”
“Poor thing. But we are doing it for your own good. How else are you gonna become a normal boy? How else are you going to become like us.
“Besides, how can it be against the law, when we are doing it, and we are the police.”
At this point, Vince would close the notebook. He would try to contact Jane, so he can discuss what he saw, only discover that she had long left (and to further realise that having her with him wouldn’t make things any different). Then, desperate for closure, he would reach out for Ayer’s personal contacts and (not realising that his phone was laying at the bottom of the river) would write him a long and melodramatic letter, containing multiple occurrences of phrases like “sorry” and “I had no idea”, in which he would promise that the Scotland Yard, now a new and much more tolerant organisation having nothing to do with the people who approved the program would find a way to compensate him and would help him overcome his trauma.
Then he would call his best friend, who was a former colleague of his and he would have a long and reluctant conversation about the moral aspects of the implementation of surveillance technologies in society, during which his friend would not realise where exactly is Vince going with this.
After talking for half an hour Vince would hang up the phone and for a moment he would feel like he was imagining Ayer had been feeling - not belonging to anything and not relating to anyone. The next day he would go to see his parents and he would feel a little better, but it would take him a full week to fully rationalise Ayer’s reports.
Ayer had no idea where this route was going to take him but that did not bother him - he was walking next to a river so drinking water was a non-issue, and he knew that he could go for 2-3 days without food. His only concern was to find a place for the night, as he felt that he was getting sleepy. The initial shock from the events in the past days had passed, and now he actually felt relief about the upcoming changes - he had realised that there was nothing in his life which was his personal choice, nothing about it which he fancied. And this was hardly surprising, as he did not even remember an instance where the aim, or hope, of happiness, was to influence any of the decisions which shaped his life - rather he had constructed it to be a facade which looked as much as possible like the real thing, without actually being it. The resemblance was so striking that he had fooled even himself to thinking it was real. But when other people had seen through it, he immediately uncovered his mistake - his life was not a palace, but a fortress. Not a display, but a hiding place, and a depressing one at that.
But he no longer needed to hide from anybody - he was no longer a child - so the fact that they uncovered his file was probably a good reason to leave his current life for something else. And the possibilities filled him with excitement…
At some point, while walking, Ayer had stopped paying attention to his surroundings - it was getting too dark to see, and even if he made an effort to keep his eyes opened, what he registered was too boring and repetitive to justify the effort. So although his body was walking with approximately 6 kilometres an hour (and has been doing so for at least 8 hours), in his mind, Ayer was in his office, lying on his chair and contemplating his future endeavours while observing his book collection.
At one point, however, he heard a loud noise, which made him jump from his seat and rejoin his body in an instant - it was a roar, which was coming from somewhere really close. And although it came completely unexpected, considering it a product of his imagination, a nightmare which he was having as he was going asleep, was hard - looking at its direction, he could clearly see two glowing eyes.
He could not determine the species of the beast that stood in front of him (for some reason he thought it was a wolf, although he had never seen one before), but he saw enough of it to start running away. After a second, he heard the roar again, coming from really close by and, shortly, he felt a bite on his elbow. The shock made him immune to pain and even to fear, and he kept running for an indefinite period of time before seeing a big tree which he could climb. He hoped on the lowest branch and then to another. His mind did not come back to his body until he was a couple of meters from the ground. He looked backwards - the beast was nowhere to be seen. It looked like it had stopped following him before at least half a kilometre. He guessed that it had probably happened right after it took a bite from his leg, because, after analysing their initial distance, he saw that it if it wanted, it could have caught him at any time.
He laid down with his leg above his head and while watching blood drops fall to the ground, he tried to resume his previous line of thought and to decide what was he going to do with his life. His speculative abilities were so advanced that he felt like he could take any idea and instantly visualise what would happen should he choose to pursue it. As if all he needed was ask himself, say, “What will happen if I decide to have a family?”, and he could already see the bedroom with a double bed, as clearly as if it was standing before his eyes. He could see his wife decorating the living room, and feel the thoughts running through his head when putting his child to sleep. He could see him and his wife taking walks together, growing old together… He could see everything, and everything seemed perfect. However there was one huge problem - he did not feel any enthusiasm about doing any of these things. And without enthusiasm (he realized that just then) the sparks of light which came from good experiences would never be enough to compensate for the eternal darkness of which everything else consisted of. For even his happiest fantasies at that moment seemed detached, as if in them he was bound to inhibit the brain and body of another person.
But why, then, was he having these fantasies? Trying to step outside of them so he could understand what they really consisted of he began changing elements randomly - one minute he and his family were chilling at a house by the seaside, the other they were preparing for a night out in the city. One minute his wife looked like a blond runway model, the other she was a university professor.
Suddenly, he pictured Kei in the role of his wife. He did that involuntarily and he instantly knew that she did not belong in his dreams but his attempts to erase her were unsuccessful - from the moment she appeared, her presence was pervasive in each and every one of them even when every other aspect of them was changing as if her face was drawn with a thick pen in what was otherwise a pencil sketch. At one time he was meeting her accidentally in the middle of a crowded street, dropping his coffee cup as he walked by, at another both of them were being imprisoned by the Scotland Yard and were being held in one room.
His fantasies gradually became more and more realistic as they developed, and with that, he had to admit more and more of his persona into them. The event of their meeting was so perfectly entangled with just those past experiences that he was trying to put behind his back, that even if time itself was contained in his notebook, he could not have written any of them off. Ironically, those very walls which both of them created to defend themselves from other people were what connected them: He could not have seen through her facade if it weren’t for his abilities… She would not have sparked his interest if it weren’t for her defence mechanisms…
They wouldn’t be attached to each other if they weren’t both broken.
At this point, fantasy and reality merged and he saw himself feeling for Kei a new kind of deep love which was redefining everything that he ever knew. For the first time, he felt a genuine connection with another human being. And the positive emotions that came pouring out of that connection immediately solved all his problems like an equation term which, when expanded, makes all unknowns cancel each other out. It was then he realised that he needed to go back. It was true that he didn’t feel like the life he was living was his own, but now he had a chance to make it his own. He realised that his persona does not have to play the role of a shield - it can be a work of art, more beautiful and than any picture or novel, illustrating who he was inside, and inspiring others to do the same.
As soon as he managed to get to a phone, he dialled Kei’s number, which he had remembered ever since he saw it and didn’t release his breath until he heard her voice:
“Hello,” she sounded as reserved as when he met her for the first time. There were
“Hi. It’s me, Ayer. Are you still here? Are you still in the country?”
“I knew you would call.”
“Yes, I thought a lot about you since we last met. And I want to get to know you. I want you to get to know me… eventually. I want us to be friends. I want to help you find out what happened to your sister.”
“My sister? But why?”
“Because I want it. Because you too want it. Because it’s important.”
“No doubt that it is important. But I have the feeling that I would be happier if I did not know.”
“Why? Do you think they are happier than us?” he said when she didn’t respond, “you know, people who think that life has some intrinsic meaning by itself and are waiting for stuff to happen to them. Do you think they are happier than people like us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. But I wouldn’t be happier in their place. You?”