He was a very modern genie. Once he’d recovered from the psychic shock of being wrenched from perpetual slumber in the astral realm, he beheld himself naked and dressed in the manner of the century he found himself in. He chose a well-cut cream linen suit (it was summer), brogues, a plum tie, a pink silk handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. And he declared himself to be the slave of one Tyrell Morris, a customer service adviser at Vodafone UK.
Tyrell – shocked, fearful, lying in the wreckage of his office chair – had just received an email requesting that all employees change their computer passwords because of an increased risk of hacking. The IT department insisted that new passwords should be a long sequence of unrelated letters, numbers and symbols.
As Tyrell mouthed the last letter of his new password, the genie had exploded into being like a bubble popping but backwards, and informed Tyrell that what he’d just said constituted the genie’s ancient and irrevocable name, and therefore the genie was formally summoned. As Tyrell’s slave, the genie would answer a single question. It could be anything that Tyrell wanted, and the genie would answer immediately and truthfully.
‘Is a fortnight reasonable?’
Tyrell nodded.
‘You’ll know where to find me,’ the genie said and then vanished.
Naturally this was a big media event. Some of Tyrell’s colleagues were already tweeting about the genie. Smartphone footage of the genie’s disappearance was shown on news channels around the world. The genie took up residence in the middle of St James's Park, creating a vast tented palace protected by an invisible force that kept at a distance the crowds who gathered to watch as he sat under a parasol and drank wine or swam backstroke in the lake or rode back and forth on his unicycle.
Tyrell Morris’s small terraced house was besieged by journalists and TV cameras. ‘What are you going to ask, Tyrell?’ the journalists shouted.
‘What are you going to ask?’ Tyrell’s wife said.
‘I don’t know,’ Tyrell said.
The next morning, a black limousine pulled up outside Tyrell’s house to take him to meet the Prime Minister.
‘This is very important,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘Important to Britain, important to the whole world. We’re putting together a committee. We strongly hope you’ll listen to the committee’s advice. This is a very big and important decision.’ Serious-looking men stood behind the Prime Minister and nodded their heads.
When the black limousine dropped Tyrell back at his terraced house, the journalists yelled, ‘What did the Prime Minister say to you, Tyrell?’
Inside, Tyrell’s wife handed him the phone. ‘It’s Simon Cowell,’ she said.
‘Hello, mate,’ Simon Cowell said. ‘Look, this is big. It’s huge, mate. We’ll run specials over the next two Saturday evenings. 7pm. We’ll call it “The Big Q”. The contestants think they know what the question should be, and they have to make their case. And there’s only one judge, and it’s you, mate. It’s Tyrell Morris. What do you think?’
They gave Tyrell a makeover and taught him how to appear natural on TV. They filmed sequences of Tyrell walking in the countryside looking pensive and in the Bodleian library, consulting vast encyclopedias and the works of great moral thinkers. A team gave live updates from the genie’s palace, but the genie didn’t seem to do much except sunbathe and ride his unicycle and drink wine. The cameraman zoomed in on the wine bottle so the viewers could read the label: Chateaux Margaux, 1982.
The first contestant was an evangelical Christian who said that Tyrell should ask the genie if God existed.
‘Why do you want to know?’ Tyrell said.
‘When we’ve shown that God exists then all the world will worship him,’ the evangelical Christian said.
‘What if he says that God doesn’t exist?’ Tyrell said.
‘He definitely won’t,’ the evangelical Christian said.
The second contestant was bright young mathematician who said that Tyrell should ask the genie if the Riemann hypothesis was correct.
Tyrell said, ‘What’s the Riemann hypothesis?’
The young mathematician explained about Zeta Function zeroes and Prime Number distribution and the many far-reaching implications in number theory until Simon Cowell interrupted him and said, ‘Sorry, mate, no one cares.’
The third contestant was a thirteen year-old girl with a bald head. She wheeled herself onto stage in a wheelchair covered with badges and furry toys. The audience hushed as she rolled forward.
The girl told Tyrell that she had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and that her chemotherapy and stem cell transplant hadn’t been successful and she had only a few weeks to live. She wanted Tyrell to ask the genie what the cure for cancer was, so that the lives of other children could be saved.
The fourth contestant was a philosopher who insisted that Tyrell should ask the genie whether consciousness was a purely material phenomenon. He explained that the problem of consciousness was otherwise insoluble because there was no way of obtaining experimental information or comparing data. But no one listened to him because they were all still feeling sad about the bald girl with cancer.
Simon Cowell hugged Tyrell and slapped him on the back and told him he was a star.
Afterwards, Tyrell’s oldest friend came round with a four-pack of beers and told Tyrell that he should ask the genie the next winner of the Grand National. His plan was to remortgage his house and his mother’s house and put all the money on whatever horse the genie named, and he would give Tyrell sixty percent of the profit. Meanwhile on the news, they had footage of the genie on his unicycle, juggling empty wine bottles.
The second edition of ‘The Big Q’ opened with a Cambridge professor of physics arguing that Tyrell should ask why the universe had more matter than antimatter when the standard model of particle physics predicted that there should be exactly the same amount of both. He said it was the most important problem in science.
Then the Bishop of Norwich told Tyrell that he disagreed with the evangelical Christian from the previous week. He would rather Tyrell did not ask the genie whether God existed. He said that faith required doubt and that doubt required uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty then there could be no doubt, no doubt no faith, no faith no salvation, no salvation no life hereafter. Simon Cowell asked the Bishop of Norwich what his question for the genie actually was. The Bishop of Norwich suggested Tyrell might ask how to achieve world peace.
A woman with spiky hair held a beautiful blown-glass model of the earth. She said the most pressing question was how to reverse global warming and to ask any other question would be irresponsible. To emphasize her point, she dropped the glass globe, and it smashed into glittering pieces.
‘Do we want this to happen to the world?’ she said.
The final contestant was an expert on pre-Islamic Arabian mythology. He said that genies were bitter, deceitful creatures, resentful of their human masters but compelled to tell the truth. He said Tyrell should ask how they could summon another genie, in the hope that they’d get one with more questions next time, or perhaps even some wishes.
‘What are you going to ask?’ Tyrell’s wife said when he got back from the TV studio. Tyrell said he didn’t know.
The next day, the fortnight was up. The Prime Minister’s black limousine collected Tyrell to take him to the genie’s palace in St James's Park. The Prime Minister sat beside him.
‘We think you should go with cancer,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘That’s what the committee recommends. It’ll play well.’ She handed him a folder. ‘There’s the report, but top line – cancer.’
The limousine pulled up at the edge of the force field and Tyrell got out. Simon Cowell was there to greet him with all the contestants from ‘The Big Q’ behind him. He thrust a microphone under Tyrell’s nose. ‘How’re you feeling, Tyrell?’
‘Nervous,’ Tyrell said. ‘This is it.’
‘Are you going to let us know what you’ve chosen?’ Simon Cowell said.
Tyrell shook his head.
Simon Cowell gave him a fist bump. ‘We understand, mate,’ he said. ‘We’ll be waiting out here for you. We’ll be rooting for you, mate.’
Tyrell stepped towards the force field and found that he could walk straight through it. Once inside, the sound of the crowd died away almost to nothing. There was no sign of the genie. The unicycle lay discarded next to a broken wine bottle. On a table underneath the parasol, a half-eaten Camembert was melting in the sun. Now that he was close, Tyrell could see the palace was made of pink billowing silk stretched over angled tent poles.
He stepped through the single dark doorway and found himself in a small circular room. In the far wall, the material had been parted to make another doorway, through which was a room as featureless as the last. In the next room, there were two doorways. Tyrell peered through each but they both led to identical pink rooms with walls of silk. He chose the door that seemed to take him further into the structure. In the centre of this room, on the floor, he found a toy racing car that seemed to him unaccountably familiar. He remembered that as a child he’d had a similar car. As he ran his thumb over the plastic interior, he noticed the driver’s head was missing, just as it had been all those years ago. In the next room was a perfectly fresh beef and avocado sandwich of a type that Tyrell had regularly ordered from a cafe he frequented several years previously. In the next room was his marriage certificate. In the next, the mug he used at work. And so it continued: in each room a tiny, sometimes trivial, aspect of Tyrell’s life.
Now he could hear a piano playing light cocktail-bar jazz. He used the music to guide him through the labyrinth of tents until at last he found himself in a great circular dome supported by an enormous central pole with pleated pink silk wrapped around it. The floor was covered with thick overlapping Persian rugs. An immense table held a banquet of ripe fruit, cheeses, succulent meats, sweet pastries and piles of Turkish Delight. The genie sat at a golden grand piano. He was dressed in his linen suit but had discarded his tie. His hair was uncombed and his handkerchief was falling out of his breast pocket. Tyrell wondered if he was drunk.
‘Try this,’ the genie said and poured a glass of wine. ‘It’s Lafite. ’88. Extraordinarily difficult to get hold of.’
Tyrell understood that this was a trick. He said nothing, until he had thoroughly composed himself.
‘Unless you’re a genie,’ the genie said. ‘Easy if you’re a genie.’
Tyrell cleared his throat and counted to ten in his head. ‘What should I say that I asked?’ he said.
The genie raised his left eyebrow. ‘Is that the question?’
Tyrell nodded. ‘What should I say that I asked?’
‘Tell them you asked whether the Riemann hypothesis is correct, and that I answered “Yes!”’ the genie said.
‘Is it correct?’ Tyrell said.
But the genie had vanished. And the tents made of pink silk had vanished. And the swimming pool and the unicycle and the Persian rugs had vanished.
Tyrell was standing alone in the middle of St James's Park, and Simon Cowell and the contestants and the journalists and the vast crowd of spectators rushed towards him.
(c) Tom Heaton, 2017
Tom Heaton is a writer and videogame designer. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Ambit, MIR, Confingo and Dream Catcher. This is his third story for the Liars’ League.
Tim Larkfield trained at The Poor School. He regularly performs with Improvisation group Three Worlds. He has also worked at the BBC as a broadcast journalist. Recent credits include WeAreHere for the National Theatre, and a Nazi officer in low-budget horror movie Werewolves of the Third Reich.
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