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Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 020
Chapter 20: CAMBRIDGEI notice that I can feel my heart beating unusually fast. Partly, I know, it's anticipation of her arrival. Plain old schoolboy excitement. But partly also it's the anxiety that this might be the year that she doesn't come.Outside the thin nylon walls of my tent I can hear a buzz of light-hearted conversations mixed with a few distant singing voices, and musicians tuning up their instruments. Not the professionals who will be playing on the Festival stages of course, their campsite is elsewhere, but hundreds of amateurs carrying on a tradition that was already ancient when King David was learning to play his harp. There will be barbecues tonight, and throughout the four days of the Festival, and endless informal jamming sessions, and lovers will fall asleep to the same melodies that buskers played to the queues outside Shakespeare's Globe.I recognise the chords of When Johnny Comes Marching Home and something that might be The Banks of the Ohio. An American inf
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 021
Chapter 21: CELIA'S SHRINEI'm glad you like the bungalow. I would like it to go to a happy young couple like you. We were always very happy here. Well, as happy as anybody ever is... you know what I mean. Why don't you sit down and I'll make the two of you a cup of tea?This was out in the country when we first moved here you know. Fields and sheep and cows. You couldn't call it the country now, could you? Times change. The city grows. We still have the field at the back, of course. Well, we always called it a field. Just a bit of rough meadow, really. We never did very much with it. The idea was that we would have a pony when our boy got a bit bigger. We would build a stable at one end. We never did, of course.No, it wasn't that. More that... our boy never did get big.I don't mind talking about it. It's a very long time ago now. Emily and I married quite late in life. When Emily had Charlie she was forty-one years old. We were one of the unlucky ones. The one in twelve. Charlie wa
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 022
Chapter 22: COLLATERAL DAMAGEHe had no idea where the rest of the squad was now. Mickey Levitt had obviously bought it, he had felt the blood splatter his own face when the side of Mickey's head had exploded. At least it had been quick for him. The sergeant had shouted something but his voice had been lost in the explosion of a shell behind them. By the light of the same shell he had seen them veer off to the right, maybe towards a bunker that he hadn't spotted himself. If there was a bunker he hadn't been able to find it.Moving blindly forward he trod on something soft and yielding. It was a human arm inside the sleeve of a uniform. It might still be connected to its owner's body, there was so little light it was difficult to tell, and in any case it made no real difference. He paused and looked furtively from side to side into the darkness, every inch of him trembling as he tried feverishly to come up with a sensible course of action.Two enormous flashes lit up the horizon ahead
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 023
Chapter 23: THE BATTLEFIELD PHILOSOPHERIt wouldn't be entirely true to say that I had arrived at this airport by chance. There were many routes that I could have chosen to get home to London from the Far East, stop-overs at Bucharest or Abbu Dhabi, Vienna or Cairo, but I had chosen this obscure little Central European capital because as soon as I had seen its name I had remembered my old friend of University days, Oliver McClure. Oliver had been my favourite teacher, a charming and eccentric Irish ex-priest, not a great deal older than his students, who lectured to the trainee teachers on the esoteric subject of "Philosophy of Education". I had never forgotten his answer to a young girl's question in the very first lecture that he had given to my group: it was an answer that had seized my attention and led me into an obsession with philosophy which came to rule my life. "Will studying philosophy make it any easier for us in the classroom?" she had asked. "Only if I fail," Oliver had
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 024
Chapter 24: INTELLIGENT DESIGNHyphialta surfaced a long way out to sea, and taking a moment to relax and catch her breath, scanned the familiar outline of her private harbour. Alrik was there as usual, sitting in the deckchair by the slipway, beneath the arm of her personal hoist. A family of sea lions sunned themselves on the jetty by his side, while a few lazy marine iguanas slid into the sea one by one from the rocks at his feet. Behind him the wind turbine turned slowly above the angular arrays of solar panels and the enormous mesh satellite dish – human intrusions gleaming in the morning sunshine. He seemed to be reading a book, or perhaps making notes. She swam back slowly, wondering if he would notice her approach."Welcome back, Alta. That was a long dive.""Was it? It's beautiful out there. Dolphins, rays, turtles, hundreds of sea lions… why don't you join me? You haven't dived yet and this is one of the best locations in the whole world.""Maybe later. I don't do much divin
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 025
Chapter 25: FULL-FIGURED WOMAN, 29Dear full-figured woman, 29I too like sports. I used to play in the Sunday League, and was a keen member of the Neasden Swimming Club, but these days I have to make do with a weekly visit to the gym. Like you I enjoy foreign travel.I work for Southern Roll which is a firm of merchant bankers (that is not rhyming slang). I'm one of the IT support team. That means I try to fix any problems that come up with the computers and and get the system working again. As you can imagine, I'm a very busy man.I'm surprised you don't use the Internet to meet people. I use it a lot. Although maybe it's not a great place to find a deep meaningful relationship, but there are DMR websites. You can put up a photograph, which always grabs people's attention. You should put a picture in your Metro advert.I'm a slim 39-year-old, 5 foot 11 inches, slightly receding hair, great teeth. I dress smart casual and I drive a BMW Z4 SE. You're probably wondering why a young spo
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 026
Chapter 26: FLAT MATEBenny came in, hung up his wet plastic mack, and went at once to the wall mirror in the sitting room. He stood in front of it and looked at his reflection.“Raining outside?” his reflection asked.“Of course it’s raining. You’re not going to tell me that it isn’t raining on your side, are you?”His reflection paused. “No. You’re quite right. If it’s raining on your side it must be raining on my side too.”“Must? Is that a logical must? Are you trying to pretend that there’s some kind of sense to all this?”“You’re in a bad mood tonight. Why are you in a bad mood?”“You know perfectly well why. Stop pretending.”His reflection frowned. “So it didn’t go all that well with Sharon. You didn’t manage to press the right buttons.”Benny turned away from the mirror and sat down. He could still hear his reflection’s voice. There was no need to see him. “You were with her as well tonight. How did you get on with your Sharon?” He glanced towards the inhabitant of the mirror
Inevitable Blind Man Chapter 027
Chapter 27: THE MIND'SThis is a bit of philosophizing of the kind that an academic philosopher might do in the pub after the seminar. Philosophizing with a claw hammer, so to speak. Ever since seeing "2001: A Space Odyssey" in the late 1960s I have been fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence (or "machine intelligence" or "electronic intelligence" or "machine consciousness" or any of the other names by which it goes). I wrote a number of short stories about it, eventually a novel called "SIRAT", and more recently was invited to deliver a lecture on it (a very basic introduction to the subject) at an American university. I can't claim to be a genuine worker in the field but I am a very enthusiastic amateur.The notion of creating some kind of a machine that can think, a conscious computer presumably, collides head on with a genuine and deep philosophical problem. The oldest one in Western philosophy, perhaps. The relationship between the inner world of the mind in which we a
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