Red Caps

Outside any collection of houses, we find a small group of farm buildings, hidden and sheltering under the steep slopes of towering northern hills. It is colder up here than it is in town; the frost from the night still remains, nurtured by the heavy shadow of this valley. Where the wall of the farm garden ends, there is a gate leading to a dark path which follows the contours of one of the hills up into the featureless winter green. We take this path, puffing up and up to find some view across the lake, some sun to tell us that the day has started. High up we eventually see water, smooth as ice, stretching round the curve of the valley into the misty distance. And now we are warmed by the sun as it raises with us over the hill. The sound here is almost nothing, a sort of absence of sound to make us aware of the tiny noises still left reaching us from the villages and big town below us.

My guidance is internal, a poetic collection of equations, balancing me, moving me forward, telling me which way is up and which way is home. They tell me when to eat and when to sleep, when to fall in love and when to act on it. This sounds like voices in my head, a madness of broken computer code, mixed up in the mush of my brain like the dreams of robots. The hawk up there has the same code but loads in different data, the actions and assembler for raptor and prey. I might think I have free will but within the framework of me as a human being, I cannot break out and behave unerringly like a hawk. The black shapes swoop down on us and I feel some link there, "hawkiness" streaming across the gap between us like chemicals across a synapse. Sometime, when asleep of awake for what a robot might term "self-cleaning", The maths comes out of the shadows of the glutinous mass and forms dancing visions of algebra and calculus in my head. All of this can be determined somehow; we just cannot put it together to form any meaningful device. And in the sounds and music, we find the same. Hear those earworms, the irritating tunes that get stuck on loop, the eight-track of the mind turning forever. Count backwards from 100 and it will stop.

We are at the top of the hill now. There is the house we are staying in, alone like most of them around here, but close enough to neighbours to feel safe and comfortable. There is the station in the town a dozen miles away, marked by steam rising from the yards and platforms and by the thin black of the cuttings that reveal the path of the invisible tracks. In a few days we will be back there, off to work and school with our flashy possessions in this austere time. I love this place. There is no outside here. And that is funny for I know that there must be an outside - I know I have to leave here but I have no memory of where I have to go. I know who I am and almost know ehere we are now but there is nothing inside my head outside what I can see from this summit. Now I realise that this is literally true. I can see say twenty miles down the railway line and that is where my memory goes back to. But down by the farm buildings I could only know the few hundred yards of road that I could see. But this is different, what I can see, I know one hundred percent, the location of every tree and road, of every house and every room within those houses. I can tell you the names of every person out there from my friends beside me to the stationmaster blowing his whistle in that distant town to the tramp looking in the bins outside the pub, to the unborn baby. And there - that tells me more. No only do I know the present of what I can see but all of history from conception to death and beyond in both directions. This is a sort of compression of memory into that of experience, time extended to fill in the gaps so that time gone and time to come leap in to meet the time now.

Now I worry about sleeping, what happens when I close my eyes and see nothing and know nothing? Do I turn into an inanimate thing? What will wake me up? But somehow the privilege of this change in memory is compensation for any lack of possible futures.

I wake up in this sunny room. I know it has snowed for my sleep has told me more of the future and this is some indication that I know more outside of what I can see. My sleep was empty of experience but has somehow told me things I need to know.

Again, we are on the hill and I can see what must be the entire county. I know how to fly and could at any time raise myself to orbit and know half a world and every location and person within it. I can see every grave, every lost person in this brown-green sward in front of me. Winter has come hard but covers nothing with its snows and ice.