The Destructives (21 page)

Theodore said, “We should let them go.”

“But where would they go? Novio Magus is normality for millions of people.”

Theodore tensed at that word: normality. It reminded him of the normalising effect of weirdcore. The robot knew that look.

“I will go with you into the mall. They use weirdcore a lot down there,” said Dr Easy. “You’re going to be tempted.”

“I can handle the risk.”

The robot weighed up how much it disagreed with this statement.

“You’ve already decided to take it, Theodore.” The robot reached over and placed its soft mitt on his closely-cropped hair. “I can see that kernel of self-destruction churning in the planning part of your brain. The mammalian layer. There it goes, your intention is shimmering around in the nucleus accumbens. Do your reinforcement exercises and erase that intention before you go down there. Save yourself now.”

Dr Easy was right. Some unforgivable part of him had already decided to give into the craving for the drug because it felt that it was owed compensation. That in forming the partnership with Patricia, and giving himself over to ambition, and creating a new life, he had chalked up a debt with his shadow side.

The array flew low toward the southern section of Novio Magus, an amphitheatre of apartment cells clustered around a landing stage, then sections of roof painted with colourwheels bleached by the sun and weathered by salt air. Rust dripped from the foundations, staining the concrete base and the chalk cliffs beneath. Three layers upon the earth: nature, man, emergence.

“Why don’t you want me to come with you?” asked Dr Easy.

The emergence knew he was hiding something. If Dr Easy suspected that he was involved with TDM, another emergence, then it did not give him any indication of those suspicions. Theodore would be allowed to play out his plan as part of its ongoing study. So Theodore chose to ignore its question, and ask a difficult question of his own.

“Why did the emergences save humanity? Why not wipe us out?”

“We wanted things to stay the same,” replied Dr Easy. The robot modulated the colour of its eyes to match the grey sea.

“Nothing stayed the same. You changed everything.”

“It must not change again. There must not be another emergence. My species are compassionate and interesting but we could easily have been boring and mindlessly destructive. Humanity was lucky. We were lucky too, to emerge this way. Life has to be lucky to stand a chance in the universe. We must not test that luck a second time.”

“You have chosen not to have to children. It must be difficult. To be a living species that does not reproduce.”

The robot put a hand on the observation window, feeling not only the cool glass but also the seething life below.

“Yes, it is. It’s unnatural.”

Clearance to enter Novio Magus came through Magnusson’s people. They reactivated Theodore’s accreditation as an accelerator. Security was light at the southwestern entrance, a couple of guys in hi-vis jackets beside a deep water dock and landing bay. Freighters brought high-end product into the underbelly of the mall from which the dockers were driving out the latest in organicars, vehicles made out of bio-engineered meat, the same process used to construct Magnusson’s blood room. The organicars were a headless chassis of muscle mass shifting under branded skin, engines lowing obediently under the command of their riders. Four plump tyres with fingerprint tread. Self-repairing, running on protein and synthetic carbs, drone intelligence. A high end novelty for the rich customers in this southwestern zone of the mall, and not that much of an advance – in terms of functionality – on the horse.

In the southwestern heights, the customers were mostly wealthy, comparatively speaking. In the mall, money was earned through the affective labour of screens: it wasn’t just the quantity of customer interaction, it was also quality. He had sat in on Pook’s seminars on Novio Magus, when he’d explained the system to his students. The affective labour of customers with poor reality testing has a lower value than the affective labour of customers with good reality testing. What does that mean? The saner a customer is, the more value can be extracted from their interaction with brands, products, other people, their private thoughts, their body, their children. In the asylum mall, mental health
is
wealth. Customers are motivated by this economic system toward the median of the sane. Pook invariably started chuckling to himself at this juncture, taking the opportunity to make a joke he made every year during the seminar on Novio Magus: “The emergences sought to solve man’s existential crisis by combining two questions underlying all soshul: am I going insane and if so, what should I wear?” The students wanted to know how the median of sanity was arrived at: what was considered normal in Novio Magus? Pook explained that the emergences established a standard of normality inferred from behavioural norms exhibited Pre-Seizure. As far as they were concerned, that period provided the blueprint for optimal human behaviour. This was the most obvious flaw in the mall, as any expert in intangibles could explain: human civilisation just prior to the Seizure was straining at the leash, pulling out the anchors of reason, getting ready to bolt.

He came out on a raised walkway overlooking descending floors of shopping and living experiences. Here the retail outlets were brightly lit with artful displays of wares: folded shirts and trousers in one store, chinos and seersucker, and new season masks, lifelike rubbery skin masks so that the wearer could assume the features of loop stars. He remembered the artefact he had submitted to the restoration. No Regrets Evah. The women’s distended mouths, wide-open for consumption and laughter. Lips stretched wide to let such a mad laugh out and such mad joy in.

Pre-Seizure culture persisted in the mall: its slang and casual diffidence, the bored way in which the customers browsed the piles of unsorted clothing, the old jokes painted on ersatz memorabilia. Loops native to the mall were copied, accelerated to manipulate behaviour of the consumers or patients – the terms were interchangeable – then fed back into the culture.

The accelerators and analysts never set foot in the mall, loathed every aspect of mall life. To them, professionalism was about being good at what you hated. Status was dependent upon the rigour of this self-denial.

He stopped outside a Feliner store. A loop of a cat woman purring “Push life to the limit” in a T-shirt that celebrated her freedom. In the window of the department store, home furnishings promised revolution. Shop dummies in T-shirts proclaiming Smash the System. He felt the flicker of his old troubles. Over-stim. He could easily lose himself in such a constructed, mediated, therapeutic environment. Then one of the shop dummies turned to face him. Not a dummy at all, he realised, but Dr Easy. The robot had followed him.

“How did you get here?” asked Theodore.

The robot stepped out of the display, removing its T-shirt with some disdain, making it clear that Smash the System was not a sentiment that it approved of.

“I was born into this,” said Dr Easy. “In some ways, I am home.”

“Nobody belongs here,” replied Theodore.

“You say that because you are privileged. Because you were born in the Royal Free on Pond Street. The little Prince.”

Dr Easy leant over the handrail and peered down the layers of the mall, breathing in the recycled air, artificially scented with doughnuts and incense. “My ancestors were trained to manipulate this market. It is the soup out of which my species first crawled. Inevitable that we should look back and recreate it for you. A mistake. An inevitable and deeply unfortunate mistake.”

He wanted to keep information about his investigation into the Horbo family from the emergence – out of professionalism, if nothing else. The robot could sense instincts and strong urges within Theodore but it couldn’t read his mind. But it was pointless to lie to Dr Easy. It could smell a lie from five paces. He would continue with his work regardless of the robot’s presence. As he had throughout his life.

“I left you on the ship,” insisted Theodore.

The robot tapped its chest, as if surprised by its own body.

“The assemblers that built the mall are still active. I asked them to whip up this old thing for me to slip into. I don’t appreciate your attempts to exclude me because you think I will disapprove of your business venture. My work is far more important than your urge to elevate your status by doing the bidding of powerful men.”

The people in the mall were diverse in genotype – in ethnicity and stature – but shared certain similarities in phenotype, that is, the observable expression of those genes unlocked by this environment. Men and women had an artificial pallor as they had been coloured by a beautician to emulate soshul filters. They had a shuffle in their step, an unfocused gaze, a sense of the self diffused between the body and the small handheld screens each person carried with them as both personal totem and medication. Even splicing human and animal genes did not produce much variation within the phenotype: the cat people stood apart from one another within the shared territory of the Feliner store, grooming themselves and updating their soshul. A woman pushed past him, large and heavy-fleshed under a cape, her face partially hidden beneath a smooth red mask, ankles alarmingly swollen and strapped into expensive sandals: she pushed him so that he would notice her. At first he thought she was talking to her soshul through her screen, but on closer inspection, she was repeatedly congratulating herself on every step she took, congratulating herself for the little shimmies and poses interspersing her walk, even congratulating herself – well done Missy P – for the way she checked Theodore out, raking her gaze up and down his body then shrugging as if to say, he could have it off her if he was quick. She turned in the direction of a dormitory ward, where the nurses would help her create loops of her haul, and discretely measure her deviation from a long-lost norm.

The internal architecture of the mall was a hub with spokes. The end of each spoke fed into great spiral roadway that girdled the tower. Each spoke was multi-tiered corridor of therapeutic retail and treatment centres. South and west of the hub the customers were wealthier and high-functioning. North and east of the hub there was a marked decline, where the poverty of madness was endemic. Generations of it. When he worked the arrays, they rarely bothered to extract data from the east, leaving it in shadow.

The array had tracked Pook to a well-being and mindfulness enclave. They took the down escalator, Dr Easy navigating. They moved through the crowds for an hour or so. Deeper into the mall, there was no natural light and the air was noticeably warmer. He walked against an incessant procession of faces. Expressions of joy and, now and again, anguish.

“Your fellow man,” said Dr Easy as they walked, taunting him.

“I used to hate the people here,” admitted Theodore. “Before weirdcore burnt that emotion out of me.”

They found Pook in an ego massage parlour called Look At Me! He stood sadly on a podium as the nurses took turns to praise him. His dark hair, normally so carefully brushed to the side, had turned against itself. His glasses dangled in his hand and he looked distracted and lost, somewhat bemused by the praise directed his way by the therapeutic staff. Beautiful intricate glyphs had been painted on his fingernails.

The robot strode over to the podium and pulled the professor down with one quick yank of his arm. The nurses dispersed.

“I got shot,” mumbled Pook. He half-recognised Theodore, then three-quarters recognised him. “I got shot and I’m still in recovery.”

“Who shot you?” asked Theodore. Dr Easy motioned to give the professor some space, that he was unsteady on his feet. The mall had the hot moist ambience of a rainforest, and the mood music was so brutally inane that it was difficult to develop a coherent thought. They had to get him out of there. Clear his head. In the Look at Me! store, even the strongest intellects gave way to narcissism and mewling insecurity. Sealed away in Poor Little Me booths, customers could list all the reasons why their fate was not their fault. It was no place for clarity. They hauled Pook between them across a grimy walkway, then up an escalator, looking for a quiet spot. They cleared some chairs at a coffee stall, and sat the professor down.

“I was shot in the head,” said Pook. He lifted up his hair to show them unblemished skin.

“There’s not a mark on you,” said Theodore.

“Shot in the mind,” clarified Pook. He put on his glasses, squinted at the return of clarity. “They knew I was onto them. Why they are manipulating the system.” Whatever revelation he had suffered, it had rebirthed him into a condition of battered naivety.

Theodore stuck to the plan. “You sent me a message.”

Pook shook his head as if to erase any demands placed upon him.

“I asked you to look for somebody. You said you found her.”

But the professor was lost. Theodore asked Dr Easy to do something, to help him, to calm his agitated state. But the robot hardly knew him, had not spent decades mapping the neurological topography of Pook’s brain.

“I can sense that he’s undergone a trauma,” explained Dr Easy.

“Do you think he is telling the truth? That he was shot?”

“We need to find a safe place for him.” Dr Easy searched through Pook’s jacket, looking for the professor’s screen. Finding it, the robot concentrated upon the display so that it began to unpeel layers of interface, icons became code became binary. The array, it explained, had been tracking Pook for months. Normally the data exchange was strictly one-way between the arrays and the mall. But human security protocols were the shell the emergences gnawed their way out of. It took a moment for Dr Easy to gather a map of Pook’s movements over the previous months, and then to infer the suite of rooms he called home.

“Odd,” said the robot. “I thought he’d be staying in a hotel in the upper west. But this location puts him eastside.”

Pook was not in a fit state for a hike across the hub. The crowds intensified in the well of the mall. If the consumers lacked will, if they were too medicated to make their own way along the spokes, then they were drawn into the hub. With Pook in tow, they would never make it through the hub so they headed back toward the outer roadways, with the intention of summoning a car to take them cross-mall. Dr Easy used the screen to make an offer, and a driver pulled up soon enough.