Dark Matter by Brett Adams

computer. Key-presses and mouse-clicks punctuated the silence,
followed by Jordy’s murmuring. A moment later his head poked around the hallway
door.
    “Tell me that bit about the brothers
again.”
    Rasputin did.
    Jordy disappeared again. When he reappeared
seconds later, he said, “I thought so. It’s word for word from the web page.”
    Rasputin was dumbstruck. “Sue me. I’ll
footnote it next time.”
    “Word for word, from a document you read—what?—nine
months ago, on the other side of a broken skull.” He stopped abruptly. His
shoulders sagged. “Wait. You didn’t just cut and paste it somewhere? Again and
again, got saturated with it?”
    Rasputin shook his head, still wondering
where relaxed, beer-drinking Jordy had gone.
    Jordy began to pace. The room was small,
and Rasputin wondered if this was what Japanese boot scooting looked like.
    “I swear you did the same thing a week ago,
on the phone to Dee, the whole takeaway menu.”
    Rasputin shrugged. “So I have a good—”
    “Empiricism.”
    “—memory—What?”
    “British Empiricism. You visited that wiki
page too. It’s in your browser cache. What is it?”
    Rasputin flushed. He was supposed to be
studying philosophy at university level. He had only checked the wiki for a
birth date.
    “Why do you want to know?” Rasputin said.
“Not your cup of tea, is it. You can’t program a Briton.”
    “Humour me.”
    “Fine. In philosophy generally, empiricism
is a theory of knowledge emphasising the role of experience, especially sensory
perception, in the formation of ideas—”
    Jordy cut in again. “Word for word.”
    Rasputin couldn’t remember ever seeing him
this animated before.
    Jordy turned to the bookshelf nestled in a
corner of the lounge room. He scanned it, then jabbed a finger at the lowest
shelf. He turned his gaze on Rasputin, and said, “Churchill’s History of World
War II. You read it last year, right?”
    He had. How could he forget? He suspected
the dirty, jacketless tomes, which smelt of mildew, had given him carpal tunnel
syndrome.
    “One doesn’t read Churchill. One chews
him.”
    “Whatever. You kept quoting bits of its
preface to me. Do you remember it?”
    “The whole preface?”
    Jordy nodded.
    Fine. Another test. He might as well ace
it.
    But he wanted something more than the
answer, because Jordy was right to be reeling. The feat of memory Rasputin had
performed had been accompanied by a prescient sense of certainty. He had not
needed to wait for confirmation to know he was right, word for word. Fear crept
into his mind. Had he stumbled across a trace of Thorpe’s time bomb? Who knew
what feats a mind might perform if conscious of its own fabric fraying?
    So as he framed the request—the preface to
Churchill’s history of World War II—he bent his concentration to observe, to
introspect, to espy his sleight-of-mind. To catch his thought in flight.
    The effect of this scrutiny surpassed all
expectation.
    He grasped the split-second in which his
mind went after memory—a process so fleeting it barely leaves a trace on the
conscious mind—and fashioned a world from it.
    He entered that world.
    He could not say whether his attention sank
within his mind, or if his imagination reached out to swallow him, extruding
into the real world like an Octopus’s stomach. He hoped, at any rate, not to be
bathed in the mental equivalent of digestive juices.
    Colour whorled about him before the vision
resolved into a place. He was standing in a hall. Its walls were wood-panelled,
like those that connect rooms in museums and old libraries. The smell of
formaldehyde and mouldering paper mingled in the air. As he watched, a door
burst open and a clerkish-looking man appeared. The clerk wore a starched shirt
and suspenders, and pre-occupation wrinkled his brow. He scurried away without
a glance at Rasputin, fixed upon his errand: to find the preface.
    On instinct, Rasputin, the Rasputin within,
sped after him and pressed