The Destructives (25 page)

Dr Easy had been destroyed. But the robot’s body was merely a vessel for the pure form of its intelligence, that network of superheated nerve endings growing out of the blindingly reflective surface of the University of the Sun. Dr Easy would be back as soon as it could assemble a suitable form on Earth.

The two men caught their breath, hands on hips, gasping. Pook offered him another restorative sip from his flask, which he accepted.

Pook said, “When we find Meggan, then what?”

“I ask for her help.”

“And if she refuses?”

He hadn’t considered that possibility.

“She won’t refuse.”

“But if she does, you’ll persuade her?”

He hadn’t done the sums on persuasion.

“I’m offering her the chance to speak to her mother. How could she refuse?”

“You’re presuming she has a good relationship with her mother. That’s a big assumption. The kind of assumption only someone who doesn’t have a mother would make.”

They set off again, walking briskly but not running, avoiding open ground, keeping as much as possible to tree cover. Heady-smelling ferns underfoot, the latticed bark of tall fast-growing sweet chestnut trees, their roots deep in the earth; he wondered if the roots pushed through the floor of the mall to spill out across the ceiling of another level, or if the woodland had been planted upon a chamber of rock and soil that reached all the way to the chalk downland beneath.

The path was dotted with the cracked seedpods of the chestnut trees and the leaves were a striking abundance of fiery yellow and orange. Autumn. Circadian rhythms, even here. The mall was over thirty years old, and nature filled the gaps in its disrepair: mould patterns on the wet plaster walls and weeds in the cracks like grey tufts in the ears of old men. The treatment administered to the consumer-patients had degenerated to the point of becoming a ritual: pharmaceuticals prescribed as a rite of passage, electroshock therapy at the close of the marriage ceremony. He had taken a terrible risk coming here. He could be trapped in the mall for the rest of his life.

No. Patricia would come for him. Their array was still in the airspace above Novio Magus, waiting for his signal.

Theodore climbed up a tree; from the vantage point of its branches, the scale of the ziggurat was apparent. A massive base rising in squat terraces to a height of about eighty metres and topped by a platform, with a treatment temple at its centre. The upper storeys glinted in the morning sunlight, the bright reflections of glass and steel seemed to form a meaningful syntax. Light as communication. Light as coercion.

He signalled to Pook that the approach to the ziggurat was deserted, and then climbed down the tree. The two men walked briskly out of the woods, climbing over a fence, feet landing hard against the concrete concourse that formed the hinterland of the ziggurat. There were thousands of apartments in the ziggurat. Faces here and there in the windows.

Pook had the number of Meggan’s apartment. The heavy entrance doors required a keycode. Pook gazed steeply upward at the blinking reflections in the windows of the ziggurat, either remembering or taking instruction. Then he inputted a keycode. The door opened onto a small empty lobby that smelt of damp and dusty; the lobby had been designed as a communal space, or at least, someone had left some beanbags lying around. The bilious smell of paint mixed with the odour of drains. If this was a break-out space, then it was thoroughly broken.

They took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Theodore stepped out into a narrow hallway with no natural light and a stultifying ambient temperature. Pook fanned himself, his expression registering the too-lived-in odours of the place, its decrepit public spaces and over-inhabited private ones. A serious little boy, shoeless and brown-eyed, watched them from a doorway. Theodore smiled reassuringly at the boy. The boy ignored this sentiment, his expression somewhere between doubtful and fearful. As if the child knew more than he did.

Pook walked ahead, his stride long and professorial, checking the door numbers in turn until he was satisfied that they had arrived at their destination. It was a pale blue door, the paint chipped and scored. Theodore was impatient to enter, find Meggan, get it over with. Death Ray were closing in, time was tight. Pook knocked twice on the door. The sound of unlocking and then the door was opened by an agent of Death Ray: a bald man in black goggles, a polar-necked black jacket with a white trim, holding a vintage raygun. Theodore had time for an oh of surprise before the raygun’s transparent red barrel crackled and gave off the scent of fresh iron filings. Theodore glimpsed the light of a synthetic fire, then he was filled up with Death Ray’s corporate loop, the infinity symbol formed out of client and agency hands curving in search of one another. His legs gave way and he heard – from some distance away – Pook apologising for this helpless act of betrayal.

He was in the car park with Alex. She knew she was dead and yet there she was, his grandmother. The ziggurat loomed above them both. She had come to warn him but he could not hear her over the snoring of the parked cars. He knew he was asleep. He was not stupid.

In the weeks after her funeral, Alex came to him in his dreams with a presence that was so vivid, it was like a visitation. She would lay a hand on his head and the reassurance and peace was more than he could bear. He wailed and cried in his sleep, and grieved because he could still
feel
in his sleep. And he felt loss. His sense of accountability, his connection to society – lost. Without her counsel, he did not know when to stop.

She had been dead so long that her presence, in his dreams, was diminished. A faint echo of the dream encounters they had once shared. Sometimes she just scuttled past him, on her way to some appointment, and he called her name once, and then let her go.

A red storm overhead, silent capillaries of lightning. There was not enough left of Alex to speak. She offered him a drink from a small metal flask. He took it from her, and realised that it was Pook’s flask, the one he had drunk from in the car. And then he remembered the danger he was in, and he woke at a scramble.

The man from Death Ray had the most convoluted posture. His right arm was crooked behind his head where it knotted around his left arm, which he held straight upward. He was bald with uncorrected teeth, goggles pulled up onto his forehead, a faintly medicated weight to his left eyelid. He was a black geek. Church upbringing, no doubt. Books had run amok in his bedroom. He introduced himself as Matthias, his arms crooked behind his head were a convoluted thought he could barely restrain. The flat had a musty uncleanliness. The wallpaper was peeling out of the corners, damp with the steam from family cooking. A big pot of something on the stove. They’d cleared out whatever family normally lived here. Toys pushed into a pile at the skirtingboard. An ersatz desk made from the kitchen table. The windows were sealed, the vents malfunctioning, the ceiling low.

Pook was gone. Of course he was.

“Can I leave?” asked Theodore.

Matthias bared his crooked front teeth.

“You are in a lot of trouble, Theodore Drown.”

The bedroom door opened. Agency security. Two of them, carrying rayguns.

“Answer my questions.” Matthias was comfortable in his convoluted posture, his legs crossed, his arms knotted behind his head. “Patricia Maconochie engaged you in a project on the moon. A couple of our consultants were involved. Now they are dead, and we are none the wiser. Tell me about the project.”

“It was an archive from a quantified family. Pre-Seizure. My area of expertise. I unlocked it but it had some kind of security attached to it. People died.”

“Afterwards, you asked Pook to find a woman for you in the mall. Meggan Horbo. The girl in the Horbo loop. Was this connected to the moon project?”

“Yes.”

Theodore surprised Matthias with compliance. Inches of truth could buy him time to figure out his play in the meta-meeting. He was still coming round. They could hit him with the death ray at any time. They might kill him. An agency embedded this deep in the asylum mall could get away with anything.

“How is she connected? What did you find?”

“I want reassurances,” said Theodore.

“If I like what you tell me, I’ll offer you a job. If I don’t like what you tell me, we put you back in the mall insane. You will never leave. An inmate in a prison run by me.”

“What about Pook?” Stalling.

“You have stumbled into red water. Where the sharks come to feed. Freelancers like Pook are sprats. The mall is our territory.”

“His family live here.”

Matthias shook his head, bored of Theodore’s stalling. He slipped his goggles back on, and grinned with black-eyed malice. He held up a thin optical fibre. A burst of light, pulsing in sequence. Theodore did not lose consciousness. Rather, his consciousness diffused. Instead of a tightly bonded ball of self, it was like the two hemispheres of his brain had to play a lazy tennis rally just to come to a consensus. He was aware of his head lolling back on his neck, a faint gargling noise coming from somewhere. Coming from himself. At the edges of his awareness, sense impressions and memories and desires that were not his own.

Matthias lowered the optical fibre. The light ceased. Reality found its familiar rhythm. Theodore’s tongue felt thick. The decoherence was not like dying, it was like all his wires had been pulled out and reconnected to something larger than himself. When they first found Pook in Look At Me!, he was suffering the effects of this particular torture.

“You brought an emergence into our mall,” said Matthias.

Theodore shook his head.

“It came of its free will.”

“Why?”

Theodore shook his head, as amused as is possible for a man undergoing torture.

“It observes me.”

Matthias took out a small black-and-white orb, all that remained of Dr Easy after they had shrinkwrapped it. He rolled it between his hands, across the desk.

“Not any more.”

“You were ready for it,” said Theodore. “You had a weapon.”

“A containment sheet.”

“It’s not a human weapon, is it?”

Matthias sensed something in this remark that amused him.

“You’ve seen an orb like this before. So you
did
find it. You know, I was a student at the University of the Moon. Before your time. Emergence studies. One particular emergence. Did you make contact?”

“I did.”

“Did you use the code?”

“No, the sensesuit.”

A momentary look of confusion on Matthias’ face. He said, “I established contact. We communicated through code but the emergence was compliant. Through it, we were able to access the tech we needed.”

“I saw a uniform,” said Theodore. “Scraps of one, on the lunar surface.”

Matthias ignored this observation, continued with his line of questioning. “Why are you looking for Meggan Horbo?”

Matthias didn’t know how Meggan was involved. He had used the emergence as a backdoor, so that he could access other tech. So he missed it. Totally Damaged Mom, Verity, the whole archive. He’d found a different way of logging requests and securing responses from the emergence. Of course. There was no reason for the emergence to present one consistent identity to users. Jester had many faces.

“Answer the question,” said Matthias. “You are in a lot of trouble, Theodore Drown. Life or death. I will do you the courtesy of informing you that you should be terrified of what could happen to you.”

Theodore touched his weirdcore scars.

“I burnt out all my fear.”

“Did you? Did you
really
?”

“Your fellow students. The staff. They survived too?”

Matthias smiled.

“The future is at stake. We are engaged in a struggle to determine what will happen to all living things. You have chosen one side, I have chosen another.”

Matthias unfolded his arms, leant forward.

“Our clients want the same thing but they want it for themselves. Emergence took away humanity’s control over its own future. Whoever takes back that control has first mover advantage. You found the emergence on the moon. Tell me, what did you discover that could possibly be worth the risk of a trip to the asylum mall?”

“I need assurances.”

Matthias leant back, resumed his puzzling posture.

“I assure you that soon you will tell me everything I want to know.”

Matthias popped the goggles back on. Two security agents hefted Theodore up to his feet. He struggled. A flash of light. The last thing he remembered, as he decohered, was what Pook had said, when they first found him. The group suicide by Oof cake. People acting as if of one mind. The feeling of individuality replaced by the whisperings of other people.

17

ZIGGURAT

He lay on a thin mat, skimming through dream. Another dream of Alex, her nearness in his heart. Briefly. And that brevity was cruel.

They were in the car park of the ziggurat, though this being a dream the ziggurat was at the end of their street in Hampstead. Overhead, the nerve-endings of a red storm pulsed speculatively. He had questions for her but before he could speak, he was aware of a few people standing nearby. And like Alex, he could feel them in his heart too. He had never met them before but his heart thrilled as if they were old friends. His emotions were so powerful in his dreams. More people came streaming into the car park, quite determined in their movements, and then the crowd stood waiting, in expectation of the idea that had compelled them to gather.

Then he was awake again. The cell was a dark warm sphere with a flat platform, containing a mat, a toilet and sink. The surface of the sphere was a hard organic material made of tightly interwoven fibres and in the roof, there was a coil of muscle, which dilated to open or close, like the doorways in Magnusson’s bloodroom. The way in or out. The curved walls were as translucent as an eyelid, and soft red light pressed through them. The red storm of his dream. The cell had the same smell as the bloodroom, like skin on a summer’s day.

He had been in the cell for two days. Or thirty hours. Somewhere in between. Normally, on waking, he would come out of the atemporality of a dream and know exactly where in time and space his body rested. Even when he was on the moon, he lived in rhythm with distant seasons. He lay on the mat and from the feeling in his bowel, from the tightness in his balls, tried to estimate when he first entered the cell. But his body was empty. Voided in the last bout of decoherence. Twice the red light had blinked off, and the hatch opened. They used the light to paralyse him and so he had only stared at the hatch when it opened, a black circle within the blood darkness of the cell.