Finding Arcadia Read online

  “Good, good,” the other her, Moira, nods. “Empathise with your captor. Build an emotional connection. Are you going to do the full Stockholm syndrome and pretend you’re now on my side?”

  “I don’t know about sides,” Arcadia says, “but it sounds like you’ve been wronged.”

  “I don’t care about wrong or right. I just want a life. And I’m afraid that the most efficient path to such a life is by taking yours. Literally and metaphorically, as it were.” Another frown. “I’ve already talked about the ‘efficient path’, haven’t I?”

  Let that pass also. “Someone did this to you, Moira. Someone reduced you to a number. Maybe I can help you.”

  “Two heads are better than one? That’s only true if what you want is a concussion. Oh Arky, as your little friend once told you, you can’t even help yourself.”

  Henry. Was that in a report? Or might Henry have told her? “You’ve seen Henry?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen your doting little puppy. He’s quite sweet if you go for that kind of thing. If music be the food of love, play on and all that. I suppose I’ll have to carry your relationship to its natural conclusion and have sex with him eventually. Or do you think we should wait until we’re married?”

  Now she is lost for words herself. Henry is a friend and— And— Leave Henry aside and deal with the quote. Is it a verbal tick? “You seem to quote Twelfth Night a lot.”

  “Only to you, Arky. Did you like the ‘greatness’ line when I sent the diary? Did you get the twin reference? Not identical, I grant you, but Comedy of Errors would have been too obvious. One set of identical twins is dubious enough as a plot device. Two is absurd.” Moira shakes her head as if to throw the idea clear. “But as far as Shakespeare goes I’m more of a Macbeth person anyway. Tell me: when you came in, after the Casablanca gin-joint quote, would it have been better to say ‘is this a dagger which I see before me’ than use the line from The Untouchables?” Moira pauses, apparently interested in her opinion.

  “Let me see,” she says, trying to ignore the absurdity of the situation, “Macbeth is contemplating a murder when he gives his speech; the Untouchables line is a more literal reference to me bringing a knife when you had a gun.”

  Moira nods thoughtfully. “Yes, I think that’s right. In fact, I couldn’t agree with myself more! Now, where were we?” Another shake of the head. “Ah yes. Your Oxford adventures are containable and so we can proceed with killing you and disposing of your body. If I keep your corpse in here with the heating low then it would be a few days before you start to smell, so either tonight or tomorrow night I could drag you out to the forest and a fitting burial. But don’t worry, Arky, good girls go to heaven. Bad girls, of course—bad girls go everywhere. Now, any final words?”

  There is an element of unreality to all this, but she has no doubt that Moira can and will follow through on her threat. She needs more time.

  “Just help me understand,” she says, “what makes you think you have the right to do this to me?”

  “Because I’ve suffered!”

  The words are said with passion, but even Moira’s grief is derivative—shades of Phineas, who fell from a tree in A Separate Peace.

  “But who, who made you suffer?”

  Moira’s whole body now jerks, stepping around the room as she speaks, talking to herself as much as to Arcadia. “They did. They did this to me.”

  “So punish them, not me.”

  “I’m getting to that, don’t worry.”

  “Who are ‘they’, anyway? I think I have the right to know that, at least.”

  A look of incredulity spreads across Moira’s face. “O. M. G. Ring, ring.” Moira takes an imaginary phone from her pocket and pretends to answer it. “Arky, that’s your village calling: they want their idiot back. You really are dumber than a bag of hammers.”

  Despite herself, she tries not to sound defensive. “Well, I know that the former Headmaster, Milton, was involved, together with Sophia Alderman. And clearly Lysander Starr is part of it also.”

  “‘It’? Do you even have any idea what ‘it’ is?”

  “Some kind of experiment to test the intellectual and other abilities of children. To construct an environment in which they could be monitored, controlled. We’re both part of it.”

  This causes Moira to bring a palm to her forehead in disbelief. “For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise. OK, so maybe you get a gentleman’s D for writing your name correctly on the paper and working out that the topic is intelligence. But tell me, what is your IQ?”

  Intelligence quotient tests are at best a rough guide to actual intelligence. Some criticise the figure as only measuring how good one is at completing IQ tests. Apart from its accuracy as a measure, a general consensus lies against revealing the number to children. Such numbers have a way of becoming labels that may depress them if it is low, or demotivate them if it is high.

  It is only half a second but Moira is already impatient for her answer: “Yes, I know IQ tests are dubious and you aren’t meant to know your score. However, I also know that you do know your score from when you read your own file. Congratulations: it’s 161. That puts you firmly in the genius category. Well done, Einstein. Not bad for a bag of hammers.”

  Moira takes a long drink from the bottle around her neck. Is it water? Slightly opaque. A solution of some sort?

  “And?” the other her continues. “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  There seems little point, as the answer is about to be revealed.

  Another drink, then Moira says: “Mine is 243. After I got a perfect score on every test they gave me, they had to invent a new expanded one. To be honest, the number is almost meaningless—what does it mean to be more than nine standard deviations above average? Bottom line: I’m quite literally off the chart. And that’s what the experiment is about. Evolving. Biology catching up with a world in which the only thing that matters is information. And, to come back to the topic of tonight’s seminar, that’s why you die and I live.”

  From a duffel bag, Moira produces a thick plastic bag and a roll of tape. Planning on asphyxiation, it seems. Should she scream for help? During the day the dormitory is largely deserted, but someone might hear. Yet she senses that shouting might be less effective than continuing to engage the other her. If Moira had simply wanted her dead, she would be dead already.

  “I die and you live because you have a higher IQ than me? That makes you morally superior? Please enlighten me. My mere genius brain doesn’t understand.”

  Moira takes the question seriously. “It’s not that I’m morally superior—any more than humans ten thousand years ago who could run faster or fight better were morally superior. But they were more likely to survive. And so am I.”

  “Hang on,” Arcadia says. “There’s one more thing I don’t understand.”

  “Trust me, there are many.”

  “If we are twins—identical twins, by the look of it—why are you so much smarter than me? IQ is only partly inherited, but the difference between us is significant.”

  “How could she see anything but the shadows if she was never allowed to move her head?” Moira asks, looking at the ceiling. “Slowly, slowly, Arky crawls out of the cave and into the light.” Another drink nearly finishes the liquid in her bottle. “That was the experiment.”

  “Look, we’ve both been hurt by these people. I lost my father; my mother’s in a coma. Surely we should be working together, against them? I was part of this experiment too.”

  At this Moira laughs out loud for the first time, but it is a darker sound than her own laugh. “You?” Moira asks, incredulity on her face. “You really are dim, Arky. Back into the cave you go. I can’t believe that you are actually my sister. A couple of extra questions on your exams, a puzzle on the weekend from mummy, and a bully at school? I was the one in the petri dish, Arky. Experiment? You were just the control.”

  The control? A scientific control is an experiment in which a variable is
tested. To see the effect of changing it, there must be a parallel experiment in which it is not changed. Giving sick people a new drug and comparing them with an untreated group is not a proper test. The untreated group must be given something else—a sugar pill, for example. Her life, her entire life is a placebo?

  A creak on the floorboard, a knock on the door. The cavalry has arrived. The door is shut but not locked. Before Moira can stop her she calls: “Come in!”

  Yet it is not Lestrange and Bradstreet, or Miss Alderman, but Henry. No cavalry, then, but the court jester.

  “Arcadia, what’s—” he begins, then his eyes take in the Arcadia tied to the chair, and another Arcadia standing near the window. His mouth remains open but no sound comes out.

  “How nice to see you again, sweetie-pie,” Moira says. In her hand, she already holds the tranquilliser gun once more. She shoots him in the thigh.

  “Get out!” she, Arcadia, cries.

  Looking at her in confusion, Henry tries to turn but stumbles. “Who the— Why did you shoot me?” He sinks further to the ground, almost collapsing on top of the dart.

  Moira steps around him and shuts the door once more, locking it for good measure. “To sleep, perchance—” she cuts herself off. “I’ve used that, haven’t I? How about: ‘Young son, it argues a distemper’d head so soon to bid good morrow to thy bed.’ Yes, that’s better. Goodnight, Henry.”

  On the ground, Henry’s eyes move from one Arcadia to the other in fading puzzlement, before rolling back as his lids come crashing down.

  10

  TROUBLE

  “Well,” the other her says, “isn’t this a fine kettle of fish? What a threesome we would make. Poor Henry won’t know what to do with the pair of us.” Moira leans down and strokes Henry’s cheek with the back of her hand. “But it does pose a problem. We can’t both be Arcadia Greentree—one of us doesn’t exist. All things being equal, I’d prefer that one to be you.”

  Arcadia looks at Henry also. If Moira really wanted to kill her, then she would be dead by now. Is it possible that her twin wants to be talked out of that path—or is this another test? “There must be another way. I can help you. I can convince Henry that he—that he hit his head on the door and was seeing things. You can slip away.”

  “Nice try,” Moira replies. “Tell me about the rabbits, Arky! Even Henry will work out that the puncture wound on his leg wasn’t caused by hitting his head on a door. And I’m afraid that, as Ben Franklin once wrote, three 197 people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead.”

  “I don’t think he was advocating murder, Moira.”

  “You might be correct,” the other her concedes—a first. “He did also say that early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Demonstrably false in each respect—especially for teenagers, as the maturation of the endocrine system has been shown to benefit from a late-to-bed, late-to-rise cycle.” For a moment, Moira ceases her movement to focus solely on Arcadia: “A piece of advice for you, Arky: it’s important to keep an open mind about things—but not so open that your brains fall out.”

  “Yes—yes, Moira. In the same sense that you now need a new plan. You can’t anticipate all scenarios. You need to be able to adapt. There’s always a certain amount of uncertainty in the world.” An opportunity presents itself. Perhaps best dressed in quotes? That seems to be Moira’s primary medium. “Didn’t Heisenberg once say that if we knew the present, we could predict the future; the reason it is impossible to predict the future is that we can never completely know the present.”

  Moira’s restless movements resume, prowling around the room. “Oh, a pox on Heisenberg—and Schrödinger, for that matter. Him and his blasted cat. Quantum uncertainty and a vial of poison—is the cat alive or dead? It’s pointless: the cat always dies. If the box is airtight, it suffocates immediately. But otherwise it dies of dehydration or starvation eventually.”

  It is not clear whether Moira is joking; she does not appear to have a traditional sense of humour. “I don’t think Schrödinger’s experiment was meant to involve an actual cat,” Arcadia says at last.

  “Why not? I could get anything I wanted. Anything except freedom. So I said I needed ten cats and ten small boxes and they gave them to me. The hydrocyanic acid, Geiger counter, and caesium took a little longer, but they got that too.”

  A strange look—nostalgia?—now crosses Moira’s face. “That was when I began planning my escape. I wasn’t going to die like the cats. So I fooled them. I asked for some nitrous oxide—laughing gas—which seemed harmless enough. I giggled and put on a good show. But break it down into nitric acid, add some urea, and you get a handy little explosive. Stockpile enough urea nitrate and you get a very big explosive. Not quite ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, but good enough for my purposes. Boom! No more petri dish.”

  Again Moira shakes her head to clear an image. “But now, out here, you can buy anything on the Internet. C-4, detonators. So much simpler. But I suppose if I had taken your identity then I would have had to follow a straight and narrow path. Another piece of advice, Arky, this time courtesy of the great Tom Lehrer: Life is like a sewer—what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”

  Why the switch in verb form? If she had taken Arcadia’s identity—

  Moira is watching her expression, draining the remaining contents of the bottle hanging from her neck. “You appreciate the grammatical shift to past unreal conditional? Yes, killing you would have been manageable—but to get rid of or silence Henry is impractical. Well, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Arky. You get the chance to live!” Moira’s demeanour now resembles an enthusiastic gameshow host offering a prize, though there is a catch: “There’s just one final test to pass. For this examination, we travel back in time to the Wild West.”

  Pacing around the room, Moira paints the scene: “Arky, Becky, and Candy are three gunslingers in a duel. Though since there are three of them, it should really be called a ‘truel’. There are strict rules in this truel: they take turns to shoot and only get to shoot one bullet each time. They can choose where to aim, but they always have the same chance of hitting their target. Arky hits it one-third of the time, Becky hits it two-thirds of the time, and dead-eye Candy hits it every single time. Arky shoots first, then Becky, then Candy, then back to Arky and so on until only one of them is standing.”

  More game theory than spaghetti western, it is another of Moira’s puzzles. No bomb this time—is the consequence of failing now a plastic bag over the head? As if having the same thought, Moira folds the plastic bag, placing it and the tape into her backpack. Rummaging around, she produces a revolver.

  “So, Arky,” Moira is setting up the final details of the test, “you have been randomly chosen to play the character of… Arky! And your question is: what do you do on your first turn to maximise the chances of survival?” The other her opens the barrel of the revolver and gives it a spin. All six chambers appear to have bullets in them. “Shall we say one minute? Go!”

  No timer is started but Arcadia does not doubt that Moira can keep an accurate track of seconds counting down. Now it is she who must keep track of probabilities in a game to the death. The revolver looks antique; the wood inlay on the handle is well-worn. Firing mechanisms on such weapons are simple, however: as long as the hammer causes the firing pin to strike the cartridge, its propellant will be ignited and the bullet will be thrust down the barrel and into whatever object stands in its path.

  She has a one-third chance of hitting her target, so aim at Becky or Candy? No discussion of wounding—a shot either kills or misses completely.

  If she shoots at Becky, then she has a one-in-three chance of hitting. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is Candy’s shot next and Candy never misses. So one-third of the time she dies.

  “Tick, tock, Arky,” Moira says.

  She has a two-thirds chance of missing Becky, though. In that case, Becky would almost certainly aim at Ca
ndy, who is the most dangerous. Two-thirds of the time Becky will hit. Then it’s back to Arky and Becky. Still preferable to being left with Candy.

  “Thirty seconds.” Moira is clearly enjoying herself.

  What if she aims at Candy? A one-third chance of hitting, in which case Becky gets a free shot back at her. If she misses, Becky will probably also aim at Candy.

  Because it is possible that Arky and Becky might go on missing each other for some time, the maths are complicated—but in either scenario almost three-quarters of the time she would end up dead. The odds are only fractionally better if she aims at Candy first. There has to be something more.

  “Fifteen seconds,” chimes Moira.

  Another option. She has the advantage of firing first—or does she? If she hits a target, it doesn’t seem to help. If she hits Becky, Candy gets her every time. If she hits Candy, Becky has a free shot at her. Unless—

  “Five…” Moira cocks the revolver, storing up potential energy in the hammer.

  “I shoot at the ground,” Arcadia says. She finishes the calculations in her head as Moira uncocks the gun, hammer gently guided back into position. “The odds of dying are still high, but my chance of survival goes up from just over twenty-five percent to just under forty percent.”

  “Very good, Arky!” The revolver goes into the backpack also. “Don’t you think A-levels would be much more fun if all the exams were like mine, with real-world consequences when you make an error? Like blowing up a hospital or taking a bullet. Who knows, we might even do our bit for evolution that way!”

  It is not clear that this is entirely a joke, but Arcadia laughs anyway—a useful mask for the relief she now feels.

  The levity is interrupted by a pinging sound. Moira takes an iPhone from her pocket. Arcadia cannot see from the chair, but the phone is showing some sort of video feed.

  “I’ve tapped into the school CCTV network, with an alert when vehicles enter the school grounds,” Moira explains. Is she just showing off? “The security here is truly abysmal. I’ve got half a mind to have a word with the Acting Headmaster. Oh, hello.” She peers at the screen more closely. “It’s our old friends Officer Crabtree and Mr. Plod. What are they doing here?”