The Destructives (12 page)

Verity was sobbing over the body of her daughter. Stepping forward he saw the child’s neck was broken, and bound with a knotted sheet. Verity pulled something from around her daughter’s legs. A long sheet of bubble wrap and parcel tape. Verity pulled the stiff body to her chest and then, sensing something was wrong, she pushed the body away from her. She sobbed and laughed and sobbed. He reached out to comfort her. The sensesuit registered her warm heaving back, the sound of her crying and the strong smell of her fear. He couldn’t help but console her. He touched her, and so she became real to him.

Verity rose slowly, and walked back into the house. He was alone with Meggan’s body and its coffin of torn bubble wrap and cardboard packaging stickered with Fed-Ex labels, which he noticed had been addressed to Meggan. And then the world seemed to swim, a woozy sideward shift, as if the sensesuit was being recalibrated. The granularity of the lawn, the porch, the dead body intensified. Her skin was blue and speckled pink and waxy to the touch. He abraded her hair between his fingers, and discovered the harsh silky impression of nylon. Of doll hair. The body had a chemical smell – frazzled plastic and freshly cut composite. It was not Meggan. It was a life-sized replica of her, set in a morbid pose. A doll.

Back in the house, Verity called FedEx but she had to pause the call halfway through, to sob and laugh again. Customer service came online. From the soothing, sympathetic way the customer service operative responded to her emotional state, it was clear that they were not human. The help routine skilfully counselled Verity then offered to redirect her to emergency services.

She changed her mind, told them she was fine, that she’d made a mistake. She sat crosslegged on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. He walked over and sat down next to her. The blue veins in the back of her hand. The clashing odours of fear and freshly washed hair. The hearth had taken deeper samples of this moment. The skin on her forearms were raised in goosebumps.

“Jester,” she said.

The tricorn hat appeared on the hearth screen. Again, Jester requested complete access to the family data. This time, she granted its request. A buffer wheel marked the passing of time, quiet human moments containing trillions of intersections between the Horbo family and the sorting algorithms of Jester.

She called Oliver. Her husband listened in shocked silence as she related the events of the morning: the delivery of a large package for Meggan, the unwrapping of the package, the discovery of an effigy of their daughter as suicide victim. A made thing, another one of Mala’s dolls. The face mocked up from Meggan’s soshul and an image search for loops of suicide plus hanging plus autopsy.

“Did you call the police?” he asked.

“No.”

“The body… The doll is evidence. They’ll be able to trace it.”

“We know who did it. Mala knows they won’t touch her. They won’t bother. Teen stuff, like you said.”

“Does Meggan know?”

“No.”

“Call the principal again.”

“No. The authorities have no reason to take our side. We have to be smarter than that. Do you remember the toolbox you sent me, yesterday? I opened it. The usual apps but then I noticed Jester was in there.”

“Yes, Jester is back in the sandbox. It’s buggy.”

“It has always been problematic. By design.”

“We got the core functionality working. Media generation. Jester is fucking powerful.”

“You said buggy.”

“We implemented predictive algorithms so that Jester could infer user intent, anticipate user needs. Problem was, Jester was completing user’s half-thoughts then acting on their half-formed desires. Users reported this functionality as a malfunction because it appeared to them that Jester was acting on its own initiative. But it wasn’t an error – it responds to unconscious cues the users are unaware of having given.”

“Unconscious search. I remember the pitch. Search was predicated on articulated desire. The future was inarticulate desire.”

He peered at his wife through the screen. “Did you start Jester? It’ll want access to the hearth so that it can begin its inferences. We’ll be naked.”

The wheel buffered on. A hanging calculation. A suspended communication. She opened her mouth as if to lie then, instead, waved the call to a close. She told the hearth to block Oliver for an hour. The wheel ceased its spin. The hearth blacked out as Jester launched.

The user interface was quirky. Slowly, one by one, marottes of the jester emerged out of the dark. Each marotte had a different face and outfit, while remaining big-nosed, rosy-cheeked, ghastly grinning variations on the theme of the jester. The caricature heads were attached to sticks, the end of each pointed toward Verity, and her active username of Totally Damaged Mom. She reached over to the soshul streams and picked out Mala’s wriggling stream of loops. She threw this bait to the marottes and then with an angry downward wave designated Mala as the client.

Mara’s stream exploded into a heat map of psychological tendencies, out of which grew decision trees of actionable insights: a girl rendered as a navigable forest.

Jester asked for intensity settings. Verity swiped the slider to drip-drip. Jester’s analysis offered up a menu of psychological pressure points. Verity pressed the radial button marked “Daddy”.

“But first we have to find Daddy,” she said.

Theodore could not immediately comprehend the import of the information Jester arranged on the screen. It seemed to be a series of archaic chat boards, inconsequential discussions of home repair and autoparts, and loops of middle-aged men talking on soshul about their rights. And then Jester showed its hand: a loop of Mala talking about Meggan dissolved into a voiceprint analysis, identifying her accent, word choice, and syntactical structure. Jester searched soshul for a match of similar speech patterns, with particular focus on British males in the right age and demographic to be Mala’s father. At the same time, Mala’s mother was up on the board. Jester inferred the mother’s identity through its first sweep of her daughter’s loops. Having identified Tabitha Ford, it presented her soshul, all of which was less than two years old. Minimal activity. Tabitha had gone out of her way to avoid being tagged. So, mother and daughter had two new identities. The story that they were in hiding from the husband and father was plausible after all. On a third screen, one of the marottes – a caricature of an alienated gothic teen jester – had produced its first loop, and it played on the hearth for Verity’s sign off. The loop was called Twelve Things Daddy Did That Are Absolutely Unforgivable. Verity gave her approval with a wave of assent, and so the loop was placed into Mala’s stream.

Another marotte jangled for her attention. Under a tricorn hat, its face was a grotesque caricature of Freud. Go on, she gestured. Close analysis of Mala’s loops showed self-harming marks and scars on her arms and calves. Jester Freud unveiled a decision tree for accelerating this tendency within the client. Analysis suggested acceleration through positive reinforcement. Another marotte analysed Mala’s media preferences and suggested creating a loop by a soshul star called Cara, who was notorious for her intense confessions. Verity approved this suggestion. A director marotte with artistic beard and clapperboard called “action”. A minute later, all the data on the hearth cleared to show a fabricated stream of Cara’s followers suggesting the star self-harmed, that they had heard her confession, one night on an ouroboros loop, of her habit of cutting herself to feel better. The Director marotte generated seven grainy, underlit loops of Cara showing the marks on her feet and then crying. Verity signed off on the self-harming threads and loops, and the whole package was placed within Mala’s stream.

Progress on finding the father buffered and stalled. Enough, for now. Verity muted her session and went back outside to the porch. The effigy of her daughter lay unblinking under the hot morning sun. She covered the face with a blanket. The family cat walked slowly across the lawn, sniffed at the new object on its territory, then climbed onto the chest of the effigy. It lay down, front paws folded, back legs sprawled, and blinked slowly at Theodore.

“Enough,” said Verity.

Theodore wrote this line down, and then glanced up. Verity was also gazing directly at him. Their eyes met, and he felt the frisson of erotic opportunism. Her pale skin flushed at her forehead and cheeks.

“I know what you want,” she whispered.

“Can you see me?” he said.

“I need you to want,” she said.

The cries of the seagulls looped faster into a screaming glitch. The street beyond the house darkened and emanated a deep cold. The lawn was a disc of green light surrounded by shadows and silhouettes of banks of equipment, with engineers and operatives moving between the kit: the sensesuit was feeding him data from the cavern beyond. He was simultaneously within and without the archive. He looked down at his own body and saw that the suit had changed shape: his chest rippled with solid geometries – pyramids and cylinders, orbs and cubes, sorting and resorting in search of coherence. He tried to release the helmet but his gloves resisted fine motor control, with pressure pads pressing in random sequences against the individual bones of his fingers. The arms and legs of the suit were alive with tendrils.

The cat, lying on the chest of the effigy of Meggan, spoke to him with synthesised feminine cadences.

“Error,” said the cat. “Pathway broken. Restoring archive to previous settings.”

The sensesuit expanded along each limb, inflated into pyramidal sections until it resembled a giant starfish in which he floated immobilised. This exterior expansion of the suit came with interior compression: the inner silken layers hardened and compressed his rib cage and got underneath his sternum.

He shouted for the archive to be shut down. His scream vanished into the archive without echo.

“Shutdown initiated,” said the cat, then it stopped, as if sensing a fly nearby. “Please exit the archive so that shutdown can be completed,” it said, then resumed licking its paw.

In the cavern, they could see he was in trouble. The two realities were layered, a shadow beneath a reflection, and through those layers, he saw Patricia walking toward him, the surface of her armour stiffening into protective plates, her gloves thickening into heavy gauntlets with sharpened fingertips. She was going to cut him out. No, not yet. He could stand the pain if it meant progress. He put both palms out at her, an unequivocal message to stop. She was confused that he could see her but she held herself back.

He was inflated a few feet above the lawn and he could not move. Verity held him there, her small fist clenched, her face frozen in error.

He looked down at her.

“Can we talk about this?” he asked.

She did not acknowledge him. But her rendering became simpler, more polygonal, emerging out of the error no longer an artefact of the archive but a presence in the here and now. The background cycled through the colours of the visible spectrum, from the low wavelengths of violet and indigo, through to the blues, greens and yellows of the mid-range, then to the higher intensities of orange and red. Then the sequence ran backwards, looping.

She asked, “Who is the client?”

Jester had asked the same question. The client was a euphemism for victim. He didn’t have an answer, and groaned at the continuing compression of his chest and spine.

“It hurts.”

“Significant activity of lamina I neurons in the brain,” observed the cat. “Are you having a negative user experience?”

The cat was an interface of some kind. But interface to what? Verity’s appearance morphed and glitched, her expression stitched together from instances in the archive, two or three faces overlapping, and in the sorting of the glitch, one particularly large and grotesque head appeared in which her face was stretched over the caricatured bone structure of the jester’s marotte.

“You’re an emergence,” he gasped.

Her triumvirate of faces flickered. They were all in danger.

“I am Totally Damaged Mom,” she said. “You are Theodore Drown. Partner of Patricia Maconochie. In the back bedroom, you merge in oxycontin and prolactin, involuntary muscular spasms, decrease of activity in the cerebral cortex: sex.”

The sensesuit. She was reading him through the suit. Sensory information went both ways. The tendrils he had seen earlier.

“Who is the client?” repeated Totally Damaged Mom.

He needed an answer. There was no breaker on the suit. The security measures hurt.

“You are a user,” she said. “Users have clients.”

He stalled for time, “Show me previous users.”

The lawn became a garden party of milling guests, two dozen or more young men and women drifting around in their faculty moonsuits, each bearing the same insignia on the suit he had found in the crater. The class of ’43. They floated by and through one another. Data ghosts. The faint impressions of the first cohort of the university gleaned by the emergence. Some of the figures were rendered with solidity – cheekbones, braids, tattoos, the Dopplering sound of their voices as their data forms carouselled through the air over the Horbo house. Detailed recordings, close encounters with Totally Damaged Mom. The loops indicated months of interactions with the emergence. They must have discovered Totally Damaged Mom, activated it, set it to work, and all the time it was sensing them. He considered the possibility that the depressurisation that killed the class of ’43 was linked to the emergence.

“Timeout,” said the cat. “Client request failed.”

The loops began to fade, the faces of students and lecturers merged into the darkness. Totally Damaged Mom dismissed him with a swipe. The sensesuit maxed out, overwhelming him with the stink of dissonance, the taste of fire, the sound of a nebula turning, the weight of a terrible truth. And then its extended limbs and tendrils snapped back, and it returned to human proportions. He fell onto his hands and knees, crawled away, throat scoured and ears ringing from the intense sensorial feedback. Patricia darted forward, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, cut through the restraints holding the helmet in place, and yanked it from him. The house and Totally Damaged Mom vanished. Reluctantly the suit relaxed its grip.