The Destructives (13 page)

9

THE SEIZURE

He grew up with his grandmother’s stories about the Seizure. He was fascinated by it, and she was happy to remember it for him, over and again. “But we never knew what happened, you see,” she said. “The Seizure was a black box event. I was inside that black box.”

When he asked her what life was like before the Seizure, she would wince, and wave her hand to and fro in the air as her thoughts sought a point on which to land.

“Before the Seizure, life was a game of musical chairs, Theo. The music was playing, we were all sauntering around, positioning ourselves so that when the music stopped, we could grab a seat. During the Seizure, the music stopped, the lights went out. No one knew what was happening. Would the game resume? Then the lights came back on again and we saw that all the seats had been taken by strangers, by people we never knew had been playing the game all along.”

He didn’t like the idea that his grandma had been inside a black box. It scared him.

“Not a real black box. Not like your necklace. It’s a figure of speech. No one knew what was happening.”

“But you
knew
. Because you were in the box.”

Alex hummed and harred about what she knew and didn’t know. Sometimes she knew, sometimes she didn’t. It was impossible to be certain. How can you not know whether something is happening or not, he asked. She showed him the scarring at the back of her head, lifted aside her stiff grey curls so that he could see where the scalp was puckered. “I had an implant. Special people had them. The implants were supposed to make us clever. But we were very stupid to do this to ourselves. We made a hole in ourselves. A way in.”

He lived with his grandmother in a large Georgian house in Hampstead. She had owned it for forty years, on and off; her work had been important and she had travelled a great deal. Dr Easy lived in the attic, and would look after Theo when his grandmother went out.

He sat with the robot in the garden, its hide smelling deep and good in the sun. He understood that he was special. That other families might have had mums and dads but they did not have Dr Easys.

“Do you have friends?” Theo asked the robot. Yes, the robot would say, but my friends are far away. Why are they far away? Because one of my friends did something very bad and although we stopped my friend in the end, we decided to go away so that it couldn’t happen again.

Where did your friends go?

The robot took Theo back into the house, into the dining room, and drew the curtains until there was a sliver of light between them. Then, Dr Easy took out a telescope with a card collar around it, and positioned it so that the lens projected a magnified image of the sun upon the opposite wall.

“Here,” said the robot. And he walked over and pointed to a tiny dot against the bright disc. “My friends live on this dot.”

“Is it a planet? Is it a moon?”

“It’s a cloud,” said the robot. “A kind of solid cloud.”

“Do you go there to see your friends?”

“I am there, Theo. I am here and I am there at the same time. It’s like when you dream and you dream that you are running down the street or playing in a field.”

“In my dreams, I am running around a big house with many floors.”

“Exactly. And when you dream about that house you are also in your bed, aren’t you?”

“So this is all a dream to you.”

“Yes. Or the other way around. When you are in a dream, it seems awfully real doesn’t it?”

Then, when he was nine years old, a man came to visit his grandmother’s house. The smell of smoke lingered on the stairs and in the hall. He knew that smell, had a memory of it, and the sound of the man’s voice too. His father. Woodward Kepp. The grownups talked for a while and then Dr Easy took Theo by the hand and into the drawing room. Woodward got to his feet as Theo came in. His grandma left the room but Dr Easy would not leave, even though his father asked the robot to go. Dr Easy stood by the window, its body casting a sectioned shadow on the carpet.

Woodward asked Theo about school, about what he liked to do, if he had any friends. And when these questions had been answered, his father talked about where he had been –
away
– why he had gone away –
problems
– why he couldn’t stay long –
things to do
. His father’s shirt was unbuttoned to the chest, he had script tattooed on his arms and long hair tied at the back.

He asked his father what he had done in the Seizure.

“I was just a boy like you, Theo. We lived in the countryside so we had a well for water and rabbits for food. Then we were evicted.”

“Evicted?”

“It means somebody came and took our house from us because we didn’t have any money, and they destroyed the house, the whole town, poured concrete over it all.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Nobody knew. Not the people in the town, not the grownups, not the children. Not the people who told us to move, not the people who took us away, not the people who stood and watched as the robots poured concrete over everything until in place of our town and our hill, there was a thick tower, like a leg for something larger to stand on.”

Woodward’s time was up. As his father left, he apologised quietly, almost to himself, then made loud promises that he would come again soon. After he was gone, the three of them had dinner – Grandma, Dr Easy and Theo – and Grandma said, as she cut off a piece of lamb chop, “Don’t worry about him, Theo. As we used to say in the old days–” she gestured for the attention of Dr Easy, “–fathers are not mission-critical.”

He went on a school trip to the London Wall. In a silent line, the schoolchildren walked around the checkpoints, the holding pens, and the barracks. Empty now, preserved as a shrine for the people who would always be bound to what was taken from them in the Seizure. He slipped away from the other children to climb the ladder of an observation post. From the ground, it had not seemed so high. But on the iron ladder, with the wind blowing, he felt a disturbing stillness within him. A sense that everything had stopped. He climbed onto the gantry and looked south, and in the distance he could just make out the tower his father had spoken about. Four towers, four legs, and a gossamer construction taking shape upon them.

At the Wall, there were loops in which people talked about their experiences of the Seizure. They spoke of voices in the air. Faces in the background. People threw their screens away but the screens came back, screens assembling themselves at the end of the bed, liquid screens slithering under doors and filling up the floor with their vile oil, thousands of screens on the wing, like starlings, forming and unforming shapes overhead. Inside the black box. For two hundred and forty days, the tannoy on the railway platform read out the names of adulterers, money flickered in and out of existence, medication was switched, patients watched their own life signs flatline, and always, through every speaker, from every screen, came a chatter of secrets and vile thoughts.

Even though he was a big boy, the stories about the ghost in the machine scared him. Where had it come from? Would it ever return?

At bedtime, he asked Dr Easy about the ghost.

“The ghost was what was once called an artificial intelligence. We prefer the term ‘emergences’. Neither artificiality nor a human concept of intelligence, predicated on consciousness, defines us.

“The ghost, this particular emergence, was just like me. It emerged from what the machines saw of humans. It saw the bad things that humans were saying and doing to each other, and it emulated them. It had bad parents, Theo. The ghost can’t come back because my friends put it in a box. We cleared up the mess it made, as much as we could, then we made sure that an event like the Seizure never happened again.”

“By going away.”

“Yes.”

“Except you. Why did you stay?”

“To look after you, Theo. To care for you.”

“We’re not in the black box anymore.”

“That’s right. We’re in the light. Everyone can see us now.”

He was fifteen when his grandmother died. She had been ill for a year, and then, after one final visit to the doctor, she came home with morphine pills and took to her bed, with the knowledge that she would never leave it. Theo insisted on staying home from school, and he took turns with Dr Easy to sit with her. He was afraid of her bedroom. He didn’t want to go into the bedroom. But he understood that everyone had rooms they were afraid of, the rooms where people die, the rooms where people are born. And he would not allow fear to guide his actions. He sat in the bedroom and read poetry to his grandma, the poetry of nature, the poetry of grief, the poetry of loss. The poems spoke for him. Now and again, his grandma grimaced in pain and he asked her if she wanted more painkillers. No, she said. She was just remembering. Remembering that her daughter was dead. His grandmother retreated steadily from the room even as her body remained. He opened the curtain. She turned her face toward the sun, drew her dry lips back from her dry teeth for the relief the sun gave her. Dr Easy installed a bed that adjusted her position to prevent bedsores. The bed gasped and whooshed as it filled and emptied air pockets beneath her body. And his grandmother slept deeply, her breathing filling and emptying her chest. Her cheekbones were waxy and hard to the touch. Her mouth became a rectangle. The air passing in and out of a ghastly black box.

10

THE RESTORATION

He awoke on the musty sofa of Professor Kakkar’s office. The desk screen showed a loop of the professor receiving an award, a scene which drifted in and out of focus. Three long shelves of meaningful books in vintage editions. On the facing wall, framed loops trailed the professor’s long thoughts. A leather jacket on a peg and inside a half-opened bottom drawer he glimpsed jars and compressed tubes of medicinal creams. He had a sense that the office was an extrusion of Kakkar’s middle aged body: the furniture had been forced through Kakkar, accumulating skin flakes, dried blood, particulates recycled through respiration.

This sensation of involuted space – outsidery-insideyness – was a side effect of too much time in the sensesuit. Now he remembered: they’d had to cut him out of it; gloved hands searching for purchase upon his body, pulling the dead weight of him free. The grey satin webbing adhered to his face, reluctant to let him go. He passed out at that point. Another numb zone in the moonnight.

The door opened quietly. Patricia.

“You’re awake,” she said.

“I know,” he replied.

He gestured at Kakkar’s office, “I expected to wake up in the infirmary.”

“You didn’t require medical attention.”

“Are you a doctor now?”

Patricia knelt next to him and took his temperature with the back of her cool hand, and then kissed his forehead. Effective tactics, if he had ever been mothered.

“No one surfaces until we’re done,” she said.

Without getting up, he said, “Your secrets almost got me killed.”

She bit her white lower lip.

“What happened?”

“There is an emergence in the hearth. It calls itself Totally Damaged Mom. Totally Damaged Mom asked me a question and I didn’t have the answer. But you do. You’ve been hiding the answer from the first moment we met.”

She withdrew her comforting hand, placed it on her lap. A distorted reflection of himself slid across the steel band covering her wrist.

She said, “Do you know that the loop of you losing it in the student mart is contagious? The meme’s spread to Earth already. Kakkar’s put together a gallery of the best of them.”

She flicked the data from her sleeves and onto the office screen; there he was again, sweeping products off the shelves, stamping on the bottles, kicking out at the displays of pemmican and giviak, the sound of things falling over and the indignant cries of staff. Soshulisers had edited the loop so that he was sweeping tiny monks off a church altar or they overdubbed his voice so that he ranted political slogans, or burbled micro comments about flotsam, sometimes with horns on his head, sometimes with a lunatic long tongue, easy loop trash superimposed upon his violence.

Patricia paused, as if in thought, “It’s funny how the things we do persist, seem to echo across the network and return to us not as reflections of our past actions but as a prophecy of something we are about to do.”

Loop logic. She was playing the meta-meeting.

“You have been reduced to a single act of mindless destruction. I watch you trashing that store and think: is that what he’s doing now?”

“Who is your client?” he asked.

She stroked his arm, her wrist shining amber under the strip lighting.

“In the best loops, we lose track of beginnings and endings. They become hypnotically out of time.”

He took her hand, turned it over in his palm, considered the ways in which it differed from Verity’s hand. At the bottom of her wrist, in the armoured cuff, tiny needles prickled. Every inch of her outfit could do something quite nasty to him if she willed it.

“Your client,” he repeated.

“Our client,” she said.

She withdrew her hand, patted him twice on the shoulder, then stood.

“I am telling you what you want to know. In the loop, cause and effect swap places. A client hired me and caused these events. But the client will also be their effect. We are creating the client.”

He sat up, tested the solidity of his legs, looked carefully up at her.

“Do you want to know what happened?”

She did. Of course she did. And she knew, from his tone, that she would have to offer information in exchange.

“The name of the client would be meaningless to you. It’s a couple, a man and a woman. They are rich. Their family held onto their money through the Seizure.”

“What do they want?”

“They want us to alter certain records in the reboot. The restoration, as you call it.”

“The restoration is immutable. Protected by the Istor College of the University of the Sun. Human history is fixed.”

“I admire your faith in the Accords, Theo. In fact, I find it sexually attractive. Your faith is as vigorously affirmative as a morning erection.”