The Storykeeper

Chapter Five: The Villain's Predicament

Villainy is an interesting proposition for a character. They are, after all, in many ways assigned to it. Most stories have heroes, and so most stories also have villains. Some of these villains are misunderstood; some of them are victims in their own right, twisted by personal trauma or a drive for revenge. Then there are those villains that enjoy their role. James Moriarty is one such example. The spider in the centre of the web; the Napoleon of crime; the man cast as Sherlock's Holmes greatest and most infamous rival.

He was extremely taller and thin, even more so than the consulting detective, and was clear-shaved, gauntly pale and ascetic-looking. "Ascetic" here suggestive of someone who abstains from pleasure or indulgence including, it would seem, anything of nutritional value. His forehead domes out into a white curve, he has deeply sunken eyes and shoulders rounded from too much study. His face protrudes forward, and continuously scans his surroundings in a curiously reptilian fashion. He also possesses a singular mind and one, most notably, endowed with phenomenal mathematical faculty.

Which was how he first began to notice what he called The Abnormality. Such an idea is not unprecedent; after all, we have a similar theory in the 21stCentury. The Simulation Hypothesis had been utilised in movies such as The Matrix and Inception, and advocated by high-profile proponents like Elon Musk. It holds that everything around us, from the stars above our heads, to the ground beneath our feet, to the people around us, and even our own bodies and minds, are all a hyper-realistic illusion. In 2003, Nick Bostrom seminal article in Philosophical Quarterly contended that living in a simulation is not just possible but entirely likely; if humans do not go extinct before a posthuman civilisation is born then "we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation". The ramifications of this are immense and – if it is the first time that you have heard of or considered this theory, you may now have more of an inkling of what poor Holmes and Watson have been through in these first few chapters.

At any rate, Bostrom's theory was published in Philosophical Quarterly precisely because, in our mode of reality, this idea remains purely theoretical – and therefore a question best suited for a field of study accustomed to deal with questions and not answers. For Moriarty, however, the constraints on the physical remit of the universe had unfolded through a calculation he had stumbled upon as part of a cubic space-time lattice b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV. For those of us who are not criminal mastermind that double as mathematical whizzes (which I don't need a fancy equation to know is statistically dubious), this is better explained as a means of detecting the fall of high energy cosmic rays which, as Moriarty discovered, weren't quite behaving correctly.

A question perhaps less covered by those keen to discuss The Simulation Hypothesis is that, assuming you determine that you are living in some sort of superimposed or artificial reality; what do you do with that information? After the existential crisis that proceeds, what is the next step? For Moriarty that answer was simple. After all, he was the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of men and nations and entire worlds. If there's a glitch in reality, then that for him that meant there was system to exploit. Where there is a vulnerable system, there's power to be gained. And, if there's one thing that Conan Arthur Doyle had bestowed upon his consultant criminal, it was an unrivalled lust for power.

In our 1893, Doyle decided that the frivolous writing of silly detective stories – fun but unlikely to cement his long-term literary reputation – meant that he ought to kill of Holmes to put an end to all the fan's expectations for more of the great detective's adventures. He wanted to focus more on his scientific and historical novels, including Professor Challenger who, as his name unsubtly suggests, is a rather aggressive and hot-tempered fellow. But that's unimportant because, despite Doyle's preferences, Professor Challenger never reached the kind of literary acclaim to make an appearance in this book.

The lesson here is that the author isn't really fully in control. And just as Doyle was prepared to bury Holmes beneath a cascading waterfall in the Alps after a final collision with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls, the clamouring of the readers meant that the great detective made a miraculous reappearance in the next instalment. Some things trump the will of the creator; one of these is commercial pressure and public opinion. The other is that it is difficult to override certain fundamental literary precepts; one is that heroes must often win, and villains should always lose.

Moriarty is an Irish surname meaning "navigator" or, more literally "sea-worthy". A traveller of the unknown, unafraid to venture out into deep, dark waters and traverse stormy seas. If his people were explorers, James Moriarty had done them one better. He had gone where no villain – nor character – had gone before. Into the threads of a story. There, he started to unravel it and, in his spider-like fashion, begun to spin something anew. Until, once and for all, he could do what even their creator could not. He could kill Sherlock Holmes.