The Destructives (23 page)

“We live in the traditional manner,” said William Pook. “The old ways. As it should be. Chicken on a Friday night. Proper jobs. Books of literature and science and philosophy – not your
intangibles
. Conversation and community life, not just soshul.”

“I like it,” said Theodore. “It’s got texture.”

William Pook unwrapped the shiny sincerity of that remark to reveal the insult within. In the hazy meta-meeting between the two men, William interpreted Theodore’s reply thusly: if I was you then I would like your life. But because I’m me, and I come from better, and deserve better, then this life would be a terrible fate for me, and that I would in all likelihood take my own life rather than prolong such a desperate existence. William Pook slid down in his seat as if fitting into the grooves of this grievance. Theodore considered pointing out that he was not as privileged as he might appear to them: life as an orphan and an addict is hard regardless of inheritance. If things had gone differently, he would have ended up in the asylum mall. Life on the Narrowway wasn’t so bad. When he’d been tucked up on a distant array, flying around weightlessly above the mall, analytics streaming through him, then he had believed himself omniscient. Now, at street level, he realised he knew nothing of life here and that ignorance felt good, it felt right.

After dinner, Professor Pook suggested they head out for drinks, leaving his parents to clear away the cardboard debris of dinner. The sky was a dark curvature of blocks, new apartments tightly packed and looking down upon Eastside. There was a rowdy Irish pub on the corner. The football was on. A game from sixty years earlier. The sunlight on the pitch made it seem like it was being played on another planet. The robot got the drinks in.

“I missed your wedding,” said Pook.

“You introduced us, in a way.”

“Did you get my present?”

“That’s why we’re here.”

“Meggan Horbo. I found her. Patricia sent me a tranche of data about Meggan and I dropped it into the tracking matrix. Highly granular quantitative self stuff. Never seen it before. Pre-Seizure. How did you get it?”

“NDA,” said Theodore: experience had told him to honour the terms of nondisclosure agreements.

“I had to extrapolate physiological markers from the quantification of her younger self. It took time but I found her.”

Dr Easy placed a pint of ale and a sparkling mineral water on the table, and then the robot went off for a wander around the establishment. Deliberately giving the lunar academics a chance to talk. Even before the Seizure, this kind of pub was culturally residual – deliberately so. Pubs were old-fashioned to normalise the consumption of alcohol. By surrounding drinkers with evidence that people had always drunk, the pub reassured its customers that their alcoholism was a timeless quirk. Or, as the faded gold-lettering above the bar put it, a craic.

Pook peered up through a grimy sash window.

“They’re building on the ceiling now. Like hutches. Cramming people together into smaller and smaller spaces. You wonder if there is some hidden design to it. The Oof suicides indicate manipulation of mall life on a deep level.”

The robot delivered a second pint to their table, then returned to the regulars at the bar. Counselling them, no doubt. The early Dr Easys had acted as caseworkers for the marginalised and depressed. Machine bodies used for emotional labour, powered by expert systems. Still in the prototype stage when the Seizure began.

The beer was helping Pook. It settled his anxiety.

“I studied the array data of the Oof suicides. Their behaviour in the run up to the suicide was within standard deviation.”

“Normal for suicidal people?”

“Normal for the asylum mall. They went to work, they picked their kids up from school, they put in their screen time. A lot of screen time. I looked at the screen history for insight into their state of mind. But the browser history had the same address in it, over and again.”

He took a rolled screen out of his pocket and unfurled it upon the bar table. A loop appeared on the screen, showing a white ziggurat rising to the iron plated ceiling of the mall.

“This is the site they were all looking at. It’s not on the restoration network. You can only access it within the mall.”

“What’s on the site?”

The two men stared at the loop of the ziggurat, filmed as pale mall day turned to a jaundiced mall night. Lights in the windows of the ziggurat flickering red, here and there, on and off, across the storeys.

“Do you see the sequence of lights?” asked Pook.

“I do.”

“Subliminal messaging. Patches of neurons in the hippocampus can be made photosensitive. The hippocampus holds memories. Particular sequences of light can stimulate certain types of memory. Or new memories can be implanted in this way. These light sequences appear on the screens, on billboards, all over the mall. I’ve started noticing the effects on myself. Memories of terrible things that I feel responsible for but don’t actually remember doing – followed by a craving for Oof cakes.”

“Why would do they want to make people depressed?”

“I think it’s an error. Death Ray wanted to create positive associations with Oof and someone has targeted the wrong neuronal sequence. But it’s about more than accelerating Oof, I think. At the same time I was working on tracing Meggan. Imagine my surprise when I discovered her location.”

Pook placed his finger onto the loop of the ziggurat.

“I went to look for her and that’s when I ran into Death Ray. They made me decohere. They are hiding something in the ziggurat, and your Meggan is at the heart of it.”

Pook turned slowly around. Dr Easy was sat at the bar, one arm around a drunken patron, whispering to him.

“Why are you mixed up in all this, Theodore?”

“Patricia and I have gone into business together.”

Pook was surprised, “Your own agency. What’s it called?”

“We don’t have a name yet.”

“Staff?”

“A network of consultants. Like yourself.”

“Clients?”

“One. But a big one.”

“Why has she gone in with you?”

“I’m her husband.”

“Don’t be naive. What did you do for her on the moon? What are you mixed up in?”

“I’m back in the game.”

“You want to be employed. You want to be used. It’s a dangerous path,” said Pook.

Theodore accepted this. Dr Easy had warned him against it too. A player of a game or a piece in a game for another player to use. To use and be used. The robot had tapped him on the head and told him it was inevitable he would take weirdcore again.

Pook asked, “What happened on the moon?”

“There was an accident. Kakkar’s dead. A bunch of other people too. I’m on compassionate leave but I’m not going back.”

“Accidents follow Patricia around. She’s been digging into emergence for years. Death Ray too. We’re all looking for ways around the Cantor Accords. We can’t live like this any longer.”

“There are worse fates than the Narrowway,” said Theodore.

“You say that because you can leave. The rest of us are stuck here. Worse, our children are stuck here, our grandchildren too. We need real change, not the tired novelties served by the accelerators.”

Magnusson had said something similar. Theodore quoted his client. “We need to break the ark.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

Across the bar, Dr Easy leant with one elbow on the wooden bar, watching inmates play darts. Arsenal scored but no one cheered. They’d all seen this game before. A Vietnamese man went through the crowd, offering pirated loops from a plastic bag. Here, the mall acted as a storage medium for a lost way of life for its customers, its patients, its inmates.

Theodore got the attention of Dr Easy, and raised an invisible pint glass to his lips. The robot sauntered back to the bar, its eyes the livid green of the pasture of County Kerry. Dr Easy enjoyed the old rituals. The instinct to preserve that had first created the asylum mall. As if humanity was a giant data set the emergences could not bear to delete.

Pook said, “If you’re starting an agency, you’re going to need an evil name if you want to be taken seriously.”

“I was thinking ‘Black Box’.”

“OK. But Black Box is a static thing. You want to suggest process.” Pook worked his lips appreciatively at the flavour of his beer, savouring his own insight. “They used to say that capitalism runs on cycles of creation and destruction. The old accelerators used to call themselves ‘creatives’, but no one creates anyone. You could be the Destructives instead.”

They stayed in the pub for a couple more drinks while Dr Easy counselled the alcoholics at the bar. When it was time to leave, the robot held the door open for Pook, and asked if he wanted to talk to somebody about his problem drinking.

Pook stumbled ahead on automatic pilot. Overhead, the apartment lights were going out one by one. It was like living inside a barrel.

The robot sauntered down the Narrowway, taking the slowing pulse of the street.

“Did you get any more information?” asked Dr Easy.

“He thinks Death Ray are brainwashing people using light sequences.”

“Optogenetics. Interesting, but evil,” said Dr Easy.

“All our leads point to a single location, a ziggurat in the northwest side of the mall.”

“Convenient,” observed the robot. They paused on the Narrowway. Sirens Dopplering around the district. Surveillance drones overhead, a sound like the air was being unzipped.

“You think somebody is drawing us in?”

“Yes,” said the robot. “We’ve been observed since our arrival. They will make their move soon enough.”

Back at Pook’s flat, Theodore was allocated the sofa. He undressed and then lay under a thin grey duvet. Dr Easy sat silent and inert. The lounge was dark and dusty. Always the sound of sirens on distant streets. Cops pursuing robbers, nurses chasing down patients. The temperature dropped noticeably as the garbage atmosphere was vented.

He drifted into sleep just long enough to hear himself snore a single note, and then he was aware of somebody close by. He opened his eyes. It was Pook’s mother, Hannah Brook. She was kneeling at the edge of the sofa, still dressed in her trouser suit. She held out her palm. On it, two coils of weirdcore.

“I wondered,” she said, “if you’d like to share a shift with me.”

The brown furred coils, like the discarded tails of a large rodent. Weirdcore offered a shallow inner peace. Weirdcore was the universe patting you on the head and saying “there, there”. Weirdcore was a cocktail party where matter gathered to gossip.

It was tempting. Too tempting. No. He wanted to say no. But the word would not come. He told himself that he didn’t say no because he didn’t want to bring her down in that way. She didn’t deserve that. He kept quiet about his indecisiveness.

The coils of weirdcore rustled upon her yellow palm. He craved it. And with the craving came the simple action of reaching over, and cracking the coil and breathing in the dusty intense normalcy of the drug.

Yet he did not reach for it. For a moment, he wondered if he was extracting erotic pleasure from this exquisite withholding. No, it was more fundamental than that.

Dr Easy told him that he had already decided to take the drug – what an insidious thing to say to an addict, handing out the excuse of predestination. The emergence had acted as his enabler. Yes,
acted
. Not a mere observer at all. A truly impartial position was an impossibility. Of course it was. The observer alters the observed. What if influencing Theodore was not an inadvertent consequence of the study but in fact its main purpose? He should consider the possibility that Dr Easy’s research was not the study of a human life from beginning to end but the engineering of one.

The robot suggested he undertake the hike on the moon and then changed its mind, caught between preserving Theodore as he was, and exploring the new life to come. This change of heart was very parental. Parents find themselves torn between interfering in the lives of their offspring or letting them make their own mistakes. Dr Easy’s behaviour may be no more malignant than that of a concerned parent.

Perhaps the robot had told him that he would take the weirdcore knowing that this would inspire him not to take it.

The decision to take the weirdcore was his alone.

If he was made only of meat and metrics then he would take the drug, impelled by the craving of cells and the established patterns of former behaviour. He wondered if there might be more to him than calculation. What would that feel like? A soul filled with belief, faith, hope – filled with
the intangibles
.

He reached over to Hannah’s palm and gently closed her fingers around the coils of weirdcore. She slipped back into the dark room. Hannah took the weirdcore on her own, sat upright at the kitchen table, communing with the molecules that made up the furniture.

16

DEATH RAY

The ziggurat stood on parkland under a light well, northwest of the hub. Pook even knew Meggan’s apartment number. Theodore was keen to set off first thing in the morning; having refused the offer of weirdcore from Pook’s mother once, he would not have the strength to do so again. The mall’s culture was pervasive: you could easily forget the reasons why you were considered superior to its desperate souls.

He would burn through the project and go home. More than that, as he lay on the sofa, waiting for dawn, he felt
something
about finding Meggan. A feeling of anticipation; given the dialled-down nature of his emotional responses, anticipation was the tip of something much greater. Could it even be excitement? Yes, he was excited – conceptually so, let’s not get ahead of ourselves – to discover what had happened to the girl in the Horbo loop. Also, with Meggan, he had a reason to go back, wander the Horbo house, visit Verity. Be the ghost from the future, haunting the last few weeks of the Pre-Seizure. That term, Pre-Seizure. It was a hell of a dividing line to draw within the annals of human history, smooching together everything that came before the second decade of the twenty-first century – Neolithic etc, antiquity etc, Egyptians, Romans, Christians, Muhammad, Incas, Aztecs, Americas, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Era, the world wars etc, the rise of the consumer, the Brand Age, the Unreal Age – under one category. The Seizure was the abrupt end to humanity’s interminable middle-age. It had been a mortal shock, like a cardiac event or a solemn diagnosis, that presaged – at best – a fearful obedient dotage. In his sensesuit, with Meggan, he could escape his liver-spotted, hunched species and stand in the simulated sunlight of a youth he had never known.