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The problem, Q’s found, is that once you start talking to computers, humans seem a little simplistic. Not all computers, obviously – his school calculator, for instance, left a lot to be desired, uncannily similar to the girls gossiping with shrieked laughter at the back of the classroom. But for the most part, he has had a greater number of intelligent conversations with machines in the last week than he has with humans in the last year.
He usually doesn’t say this out loud, for obvious reasons. While he’s an adult now, he knows all too well that that still doesn’t rule out psychiatrists. After all, there’s a long history of technopaths disconnecting from reality, dotted repeatedly with words like ‘sociopathy’ and ‘suicide’ (shorthand for a body wasting away after the mind escapes forever). Q knows he’s not as grounded as the shrinks at MI6 think – they might be telepaths, but he’s fairly practised by now in the art of shaping his thoughts the way they want, right down to enough flaws to avoid suspicion – but he’s not that bad (yet). He makes sure he leaves the building, for instance, temporarily abandoning the cooling hum of refined machinery to go sit in a park or by the river and remind himself there’s a world out here too. It’s disgusting and cold and miserable, and it makes the computers all the more inviting to him once he returns, but he forces himself to do it because people are finally paying him to do what he wants to do anyway.
Q branch get it, at least. They don’t talk out loud around there, preferring to sink into the technology and send excited buzzes of instant messages and direct uploads of data. Q isn’t used to the company, yet he finds other people who speak binary surprisingly comforting. It’s not the solid point most would recommend to him, and he doesn’t care. They should be glad that he’s talking to anybody.
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There’s Eve as well, a telepath who used to fight so hard to reach a double-oh’s capability of making other people’s heads explode, long into the night, and now uses her natural tendency towards the more empathic arts to terrify people in preparation for M. After she shot the wrong man and felt the piercing agony in her mind and body, enough to take her offline for weeks, she wandered the hallways of MI6 doing oddjobs here and there, and seemed to make it her mission in particular to force everybody out of their respective comfort zones.
She forced Q to do paperwork by hand – “What’s the point?” he had demanded, human speech oddly heavy in his mouth, “somebody’ll type it up anyway” – with nothing but persistence and a smile that could somehow say so much. He had let his guard down because he knew that for the moment she couldn’t read his mind, and by the time that changed, it was too late. She makes him feel naked and human, and he doesn’t much care for either.
The mugs of tea were appreciated. The times that she unplugged him by force were not.
“You do know,” he tells her, still staring at the black screen, “that one of these days you’re going to kill me.”
Not only is she unrepentant, she acts as if he should be thanking her. “If I do, it’s because you were in too deep.”
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Too deep.
The whole of Q branch knows about that, same as every technopath should. Cyberspace is so vast and incredible that you can get lost down there. It’s not just about not connecting with humanity anymore: it’s about losing your whole sense of self, your mind dissipating into nothing but stray scraps of data, ghosts haunting information highways, static on televisions and glitches on your screen. Q tried to decipher what they were saying, once. He never speaks of it, but sometimes at night he can still hear the sound of a virtual scream.
So for all that he resents it, he can’t argue with Eve on that point, and she knows it.
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When Eve announces that she has a surprise for him, he can’t help but feel apprehensive.
“Bond’s alive,” she tells him, and he think he still remembers enough about what smiles look like not to scare her (not that he could, but HR are a different story). Logic tells him that this is good for her, so he reckons he could almost pass for human.
However, her phrasing doesn’t make sense. “It’s not that surprising,” he tells her, apologetically (he hopes). “I have heard he’s hard to kill. Good effort though.”
She ignores him, in favour of telling him, “You’re meeting him tomorrow.”
He feels his face twist into incredulous unimpressed confusion. “Hooray?”
“Trust me,” she tells him, before finally turning the power back on, “whatever you’re expecting, you’re not even close.”
That makes no sense, and he tells her as much. And it continues not to make sense right up until he sits down on a bench in the National Gallery, and abruptly the entire world goes silent.
Not in the way most people imagine, 28 Days Later and a deserted London; but the entire background hum of the room – the chattering mobiles and the calmer radios and the calm patience of the security system and the stop-start-stop of i-Pods and the sophisticated smugness of i-Phones – in a single moment all of it vanishes.
People are talking softly all around him, and yet it feels like he’s gone deaf.
He focuses enough to deliver the speech he’d had planned all the way up until this moment, the commentary on the painting and the quip about pyjamas and Earl Grey and handing over equipment that suddenly feels dead in his hands. He’s quite proud of himself, even if his apparent calm is attributable more to his rusty facial skills than anything else.
There’s a scream building up inside his head though. Panic waiting at the edges for the moment he runs out of a script.
And then 007 stands up and walks away, and everything is so loud it sends the room into a spin around him.
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“Care to explain?” he demands of Eve through her mobile, for once not caring that unless he’s really trying his voice sounds dull and mechanical through her speakers.
“You mean you haven’t figured it out yet?”
He has. He just doesn’t believe it.
007’s file is there in his head – encrypted firewalls just take a little extra thinking to get around – and he still doesn’t believe it.
“No magic.”
“Try again.”
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As ever – as far as Q can tell about the man from running 007’s file through his mind again and again – it’s much more complicated than you’d think. More than having nothing, drifting through life knowing there’s something you’re missing. 007 isn’t so much an absence as he is an opposite.
Anti-magic.
The bogeyman mothers use to stop their children setting fire to the curtains or giving their siblings nightmares: Keep that up and a man will come and take all your magic away.
001 can make you do whatever she wants, just by saying it; 009 and 004 are telepathic; 003 heals; 006 can change his/her appearances however he/she wants; 008 has quite a gift for starting fires; 005 never ever misses; 002 is a technopath like Q, albeit far blunter and frankly best limited to viruses. Q had always assumed that 007 was another healer or another natural-born-killer. This is something else altogether.
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If Q wants to speak to 007, he has to find the microphone somewhere buried under a stack of dusty paperwork and Chinese cartons. He can see him through cameras but he can’t trace the technology on his body – if he wants something more specific, he has to look for the negative space, the gap where it should be. It’s fiddly and it’s inconvenient and it gives Q a savage pleasure to announce that he can’t stop the train because 007’s in the way.
Really, 007 should be grateful that Q’s talking to him at all, running around down there, trying to clear up the mess he brought back with him. Silva’s virus took out the rest of Q Branch in one fell swoop of overloaded data and enticing promises. Most of them are recovering under telepathic guidance, but a few were lost forever to the data trap he’d laid.
Q was lucky. He’d had Eve.
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Q, he’d heard down there in the sparkling majesty of everything, Come home.
This is where I belong.
No. This is just where you feel safe.
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He lays the trail for 007 and M, knowing that Silva will be able to see the moving hole in the world, counting on it. 007 says he’s heading for somewhere so backward Silva will have nothing to work with, in the middle of nowhere.
“Sounds like Scotland to me.”
“Shut up.”
Q smiles at the witty rejoinder, and gets to work.
Silva’s voice is there in the ether. He grits his teeth and for once tries to focus on being something solid, something real.
He thinks of Eve, and 007, and something clicks into place.
Silva falls away, and Q is a man underground, the computers at his fingertips and his mind his own.
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After Skyfall, Q steels his nerve and steps into the same room as 007. He flinches but he stands his ground, and the man nods in recognition.
“I would have thought you’d want to stay far away from me. Most people do.”
“I’m not ‘most people’, and I’m offended by the insinuation.”
007 – Bond – laughs. It sounds better than Q’s, but that’s extremely relative.
“Thankyou.”
Fairly certain that gratitude is being treated as some incredible honour here, Q just rolls his eyes.
It makes sense, in a horrible way that’s fairly typical of MI6. You can be the most powerful man in the planet, but if you’re in the same room as Bond, you’re just a man. In many ways, he’s the perfect weapon, and you don’t have to know him all that well to tell that that’s precisely how they’ve trained him to see himself. Idly, Q wonders how long he’d had at Skyfall before he was given the choice to either be a freak or a killer.
“You can go if you want.”
The silence is ringing in his mind, yet Q shakes his head. “It’s a little noisy out there,” he says, and it’s not a lie or an exaggeration. It’s the background of his entire life. It’s only being with Bond that makes him appreciate just how loud it is.
Bond nods, then asks, “I don’t suppose you play poker?”
“Only online.”
Bond’s smile is not a natural one, but then, neither is Q’s.
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Eve joins them later; brings beer – ignoring Bond’s glare – and pizza; fights bravely for every last penny. She doesn’t do all that badly, considering her technical handicap, and Q realises that Bond’s talent forces them all onto a level playing-field. Without powers, they’re whoever they really are.
It becomes a ‘thing’ whilst Bond’s waiting to be cleared by the shrinks again – they don’t trust a man whose mind they can’t read, don’t know when he’s lying and don’t know when he wants to shoot them – and after he’s finally out on active duty again, they come together whenever he’s home. Q thinks Eve enjoys being able to focus on physical for a change, reading body language rather than minds; he thinks Bond enjoys human interaction that isn’t constantly mixed with pure fear.
As for Q, well, it’s hard to be more grounded in reality than being stranded there on purpose. Even without those nights, there’s the fact that he has to design gadgets to defend Bond when he obviously can’t, creating something to do the job he wants so much to succeed in.
He feels more human than he has since he was five.
It’s not as unpleasant as he’d feared.