Free If Then by Matthew De Abaitua

them because the implant prevented Angus from letting them through the gates.
    Edith sought more opinions from around the table. The manufacture of the stretcher bearer may seem to be an affront to the virtue of frugality, but to question the Process was to return to the whinging of democracy, and that made them uneasy.
    “He speaks too,” said James.
    Alex leant forward. “He actually spoke to you?”
    “He said he was a pacifist.”
    Edith was moved by the thought of a pacifist soldier. She came around from behind the table to take Hector’s hands in hers.
    “Poor, poor boy,” she comforted him. He did not respond to her touch.
    From the other side of the door came an urgent knocking and a plea to know what was going on in the meeting.
    “The ombudsmen are impatient for the eviction list,” said James.
    “They want to be put out of their misery,” said the baron.
    Edith let go of Hector’s hands. She opened the doors to the ombudsmen. The room filled up with the representatives of the districts, and they were, with one exception from Southover, Lewesians who could trace their ancestry in the town back four or five generations – at least. By contrast, the council was mostly made up of outsiders, people who had chosen to live in Lewes rather than being born into it.
    The douanier secured the door while James seated himself before the ledger of the evicted, fountain pen in hand. Alex and the doctor set about preparing him. Alex whispered an unlocking sequence into his ear while the doctor took out his syringe case and administered neuroceuticals to make the data flow more easily.
    Edith, the incorrigible old hippy, took James’ hands in hers as the Process began. He heard algorithms in the heft of the table and flickering in the gaslight. The implant made him into a pantheist, aware of the spirit in each and every material thing. The moon defined and initialized the beliefspace of the algorithm. And as his mother used to say, If beliefspace = 1 then mutate_with_inf (candidate, beliefs, minmax) else halt. If g is greater than or less than six then halt.
    Decoherence.
    G drew its value from the number of stars visible through the small black window in his bedroom and from the first vector of the last known location of his mother.
    Def update_beliefspace.
    The substance of his consciousness and the stuff of the universe were revealed portions of the absolute. Godstuff flowed out of the implant and his fingertips trembled with interconnections between himself, other people and the land. The approach of something transcendental. A shell explosion is a flash of inspiration. The undulation of long grass in the night wind. A father’s intemperate chastisement of his son. A man in short trousers and a hooded jerkin walking alone across the Downs, whistling a hiking tune. The vast current of things. The trenches to come, marks in the earth where the future will break. Interconnections vaguely apprehended. Deeper than the soul of individuals lie thoughts too vast for language. Evil will excavate the truth more rapidly than Good. A dirge sung over the ruins.
    He was staring into Edith Von Pallandt’s face and she was afraid.
    Mutate a factor and run the algorithm again.
    The names of the evicted flowed from his pen. A quick act of automatic writing, his hand moving steadily, one name to a line, twelve lines in all. Ruth’s needles knitted him together. It was over, the implant shut down and the tendrils of god stuff slithered out of him.
    The ombudsmen shifted anxiously: they had been drawn from the ranks of truculent and sceptical dissenters, chatboard trolls, market gossips, and barroom nihilists whose role was now to witness the giving of the names. The room was heady with their beefy odour of homemade soap and damp woollens.
    Twelve names in the ledger.
    The Cliffe ombudsman cried out.
    “But this one is a child!”
    There, his finger on the page, smudging still-wet ink. Agnes Bowles. She was to be evicted along with