‘My father worked on the nymphomation equations with you?’
‘Worked on them? He practically discovered them. He took the basic outline and pushed it on to the next level. He introduced the idea of the fractal maze, for instance, one with an infinite number of branching paths. Why, without him…’
‘Without my father… no AnnoDomino…’
Hackle nodded, a movement Daisy could barely see in the gloom. ‘Your father joining us was the catalyst for our next phase; that, and Georgie starting on this underground maze.’
‘I thought you built it together?’
‘Georgie started it. He didn’t tell us what he was doing. He was always wandering off, anyway, and often spent time alone down here. None of us cared about where he went, so long as he came to no harm. This place was just a pit back then, full of rubbish. Over the last year or so, he’d been slowly building these partitions. See, if you knock them…’
Daisy did so. They rang hollow.
‘He was building a series of false walls down here. Only when it had reached a certain complexity did he tell us about it.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘He wanted to make the Hackle Maze real. Those were his words. “Make it real, Max! Make it happen!” At first we were pleased to humour him, something we had become rather too good at over the years. Malthorpe, I remember, really threw himself into the task. He was always the most physical of us. Then Susan and I got caught up in it as well. Already I was thinking of ways of making Georgie’s dream come true.’
‘He wanted to be a wanderer?’ Daisy asked.
‘In a certain sense, he already was. Through life, I mean. And I think he quite envied the excitement he saw on the screen. Especially the sexual aspect of it. God knows what strange fevers were driving him. Your father, of course, knew nothing of this side of our work. He was not living with us, and his weekly visits were taken up with developing the artificial system, not the real one. Eventually, when we did bring him down here, again, he was the one who showed us the way. This would be 1979, when the technology to feed back into the system became available. We could link Georgie to the computer, specifically to one particular specimen.’
‘You actually did this?’
‘I’m telling you the truth, Daisy. Do you want to hear it?’
‘Go on.’
‘We called the wanderer that Georgie was linked to the double-zero creature. Horny George, for short. All the wanderers had numbers you see, to give the agents a means of keeping tabs on them. Our first attempts were very limited; failures, actually. But slowly we found the means to allow a kind of feedback loop to occur between Georgie in real life, and Blank-Blank on the screen. We would turn all these lights out, set the system going, and then let Georgie wander around the tunnels. Georgie knew this place like the back of his hand, of course, but that wasn’t the point; the real maze was just a symbol, a way of focusing the power. It was Georgie’s effect upon the computer’s maze we were interested in.’
‘Which was?’
‘Astounding. Absolutely astounding. Georgie’s wanderer charged around the Hackle Maze like the Minotaur. Now, Georgie had always been good at games of chance, something in his damaged brain, I imagine, or his crazy, mixed-up genes, that made him identify with random events. His wanderer became a rampant Casanova of the system, loving the pathways.’
‘Which makes Georgie the original lucky bleeder? Oh, I see it. You have his genetic structure on disk. This is what Benny has been using for comparison with Celia?’
‘You’re getting it. Georgie had play-to-win in spades. A winner, not a loser. The experiment was so successful, we could only move on.’
‘What about the effect it had on George?’
The real George?’
‘That’s the only one I’m interested in.’
‘Ah… well, he was elated, of course. Buzzing, is how he described it. He was claiming he’d actually been inside the computer, which was a nonsense. He was just connected to it by wires, nothing but wires. Immediately, he wanted to go in again. Over the next few months we experimented more and more with the Georgie-maze loop, creating ever more complex pathways. Georgie would always find his way through. He was becoming the maze. He took to spending all night linked to the machine, sometimes falling asleep while connected. Amazingly, even asleep he could still affect the outcome. His dreams were wandering the labyrinth, working the wanderers, breeding, multiplying, succumbing to the nymphomation. This had a parallel effect on his waking life. It was a two-way process.’
‘This must’ve worried you, Professor.’