Ever heard of pattern recognition?
Even if you haven’t, you’ve experienced it. It’s how we recognise faces, read writing, appreciate music. The human brain loves patterns, sorting and systemising and categorising them. We know that smiles are meant to signal friendliness, that grey skies mean rain like as not. We even see patterns where there aren’t any – shapes in clouds, faces in burnt toast, connections between unrelated events and coincidences. Pattern recognition is what the human brain is built for.
To be frank, I don’t know why me and Mike ever became friends in the first place.
We met in Freshers’ Week, that time when just about anyone can get into a party, and just about everyone does. Me being the socially maladjusted type that I was of course, I’d spent most of this one quietly milling about, sipping beer and hovering around conversations before ultimately relegating myself to an empty corner with a houseplant for company. Somehow it took me at least five minutes to notice I wasn’t alone.
That was thing with Mike: he stood out when you were looking for him, and when you weren’t he may as well have been invisible. This was a student party just running past midnight, and the guy was wearing a wrap-around sunglasses and a suit. Combine that with the undertones of a frankly dubious smell, and you can imagine the first impression to come to mind.
Maybe that was what drew me toward him. We were both outsiders in our own way, and I was far from the sort of person who could afford to be prejudiced. If he barely moved, barely spoke, and when doing either left me with a deep sense of discomfort, who was I to judge? It wasn’t as though I was a people-person either, and if my new acquaintance’s social skills were still less up to par then we at least had more in common than with any of the other people partying in that room.
I didn’t go to many more parties after that, but I kept in touch with Mike. I never stopped feeling that sense of discomfort around him, but I did start to see myself as his friend – maybe his only friend. Wasn’t I doing the right thing?
I once heard that gut instinct is pattern recognition on the subconscious level. Hell, some guy even wrote a book on it. Ever had a time when you just knew something was deeply, deeply wrong? A person, a place, a situation where nothing should’ve seemed amiss, yet you couldn’t help but feel the fear?
That’s pattern recognition. You might not notice these things, but your subconscious does. Those little social cues, strange details, signals from inside your body; the brain sees them, correlates them, and tells you to run. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll listen.
I know I should’ve done.
Things started to go wrong around the time Mia Greene disappeared.
I hadn’t known her all that well – a blonde sociology student, she’d shared a class with me, and we’d spoken every now and again. Still, it was enough to notice when she stopped turning up to seminars, and to be truly concerned when the missing person’s report got publicised.
Mike entered the cafe at exactly 1 PM, as he always did, dressed in black suit, black gloves, black sunglasses, as he always was. He moved to my table with a smooth, clean stride; graceful I suppose you’d call it, but not in a pleasant way. Perfectly regular, no twitches, no hesitation, no tics or taps or tumbles – he moved when he meant to, and once settled was still as a puppet whose strings have been cut.
We ordered, the same coffee and same sandwiches as ever. He flicked something off his shoulder.
“You aren’t talking.”
God, even his voice was deliberate. Utterly even, a perfect recreation.
I shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, bit distracted. You saw the news, right?”
“The disappearance? She’ll be fine, she’ll come back sooner or later.”
“Yeah, maybe, but how can you be sure?”
A fluid shrug. “They always do.”
Mike stood and left, coffee and sandwich untouched as always. There was something else left on the table though; almost invisible, yet impossibly eye-catching. Gut feeling I suppose you’d say. I picked it up.
It was a long, thin strand of blonde hair.
Pattern recognition isn’t always reliable of course. A gut feeling might save your life, but anyone with an anxiety disorder isn’t likely to be too thankful for one. The gambler, the conspiracy theorist, the cargo cultist – all are served by the patterns they see. A million years of evolution has made us able to recognise them. A million years of evolution has made us able to ignore them. Even when we shouldn’t.
Mike started getting worse after that. Not that he had ever been well of course, but as my first year wore on, those distinct feelings grew steadily stronger. His movements were fewer, still perfect and deliberate, but now with an added stiff artificiality to them. He spoke less, and when he did our conversations only ever followed the same well-worn patterns, patterns which grew still less varied. He smelled worse.
The disappearances didn’t stop with Mia. The university found its excuses – drunk students drowning in the river was the new talk of all the PSAs – but that didn’t stop the rumours. They talked about gangs, or trafficking, or a serial killer. Myself, I figured I had too much work to think about as is to worry, and too little of a social life to be much at risk in any case.
Then Mike disappeared.
I tried to report it, but they said there wasn’t anyone by that name and description living here; not in the university, not in the town. No one I’ve talked to remembers him. I tried looking online, but the closest match was a rather literal dead-end.
And sometimes I think back to that final night, the one I tried to tell myself was only a nightmare. How I bumped into my friend in the sunglasses on the way back from a long stay at the library. How we were joined by his friends, as quiet as he. How cold it was, how I only ever saw the fog of my own breath. How we passed under a streetlight, and how I looked into the eyes of a woman with blonde hair.
How I screamed. How I ran.
You might not have heard of pattern recognition, but you’ve probably heard of the uncanny valley. People on the internet make a big deal out of it, but the answer is really quite mundane. Nature doesn’t want you interacting with the diseased. It doesn’t want you breeding with the deformed. And it most certainly doesn’t want you hanging around the dead.
Pattern recognition. There’s a hundred little signs of life we never notice, and a dead body has none of them. It won’t move, it won’t blink, it certainly won’t breathe.
That was the problem with Mike. It always had been.
I’d been talking to a corpse.