The Destructives (27 page)

Matthias was reluctant to look at what the cell had done to Theodore. He busied himself with his screen as they walked Theodore into the flat, then rolled the monochrome orb containing Dr Easy under his hand. He was also wearing Theodore’s black box on a necklace.

Theodore stumbled forward, steadied himself against the desk. He thought he might faint.

“Where were we?” asked Matthias. Now he took in the damage. Theodore was grey and gaunt. The ironic cast in his eyes had dimmed. He was broken.

“You were about to offer me assurances,” said Theodore.

Matthias laughed, pleased to discover that there had been breakages in his spirit but not total demolition.

“Let’s pretend I did, and move on. The emergence you investigated on the moon. Tell me something I don’t know about it.”

He told Matthias the story of a mother and her daughter. How the daughter had been bullied by another child and the mother, in a moment of weakness, had retaliated on her behalf. Out of this act of ferocious love came emergence. He explained about the Horbo family, how their quantification provided an environment for the emergence, an archive in which it continued to exist. Matthias did not take notes. He listened with grateful wonder. Just to learn
this.

So Matthias understood why they had come to the asylum mall. To search for Meggan and use her to persuade the emergence to intercede on their behalf.

Basic meta-meeting tactics: Theodore bought himself a few minutes by giving his opponent an advantage, a winning card, and Matthias could relax and take his time before playing it.

“Can I have a chair?’ he asked. “I don’t want to faint.”

He watched Matthias relent on his own cruelty. The man took no pleasure in being cruel: it was a professional necessity. He always hummed and harred before being cruel just to let the people around him know how much it pained him to inflict suffering on another. His tough decisions cost him, that’s what Matthias wanted you to know. They brought him a chair and Theodore sat down and sighed with relief. This little pantomime of sensitivity from Matthias had settled the matter. The man from Death Ray had to die. Cruelty was easy and it was for the conforming weak. Kindness was hard, and it was the preserve of true strength. Once he killed Matthias, he would ask Totally Damaged Mom to change human history, replace the wars, those landmarks of cruelty, with acts of kindness instead, create a new map of the soul of mankind that marked out the great moments of compassion and diminished the weaknesses of conquest. The sensesuit shimmered against his skin, as if it could scarcely believe the readings it was getting from him. He twisted his wedding ring. Platinum, not gold. He understood what that meant, had figured it out while lying on the tiles of the shower.

“Have you ever been in the cells?” he asked Matthias.

Matthias leant back in his chair, one arm crooked behind his head, amused and interested at Theodore’s inquiry.

“No.”

“It’s unpleasant. At first I mistook it for torture or even interrogation but it is neither. The cell is part of an experiment, isn’t it? You’re building something.”

Matthias shrugged, he was hardly going to share proprietorial knowledge with a competitor who was also his prisoner.

“It took me quite a few turns in the helmet to figure it out. It feels like something to be a city.” Matthias flinched at this remark. As he considered the next move in the meta-meeting, Theodore twisted his ring. The ziggurat was directly under the light well. The platinum was heating up. It would be ready soon. And then it would be time for one of hell’s miracles.

“Any highly organised arrangement of matter has the potential to feel. That’s the first thing that emergence taught us. Consciousness is not particular to brain meat. It can emerge in other material. That’s what the ziggurat is designed to do. You’re trying to create emergence. But instead of using digital technology as a substrate, you’re using the human brain. It’s very unpleasant to be a cell in that machine. Because the machine only feels if the individual components – the people – have a greater level of integration between them than exists within themselves. That’s why you trigger decoherence, reducing the individual’s capacity to feel. A city can only feel if the citizens are reduced to something less than individuals.”

Theodore removed his wedding ring. The layer of platinum sloughed off. It was a tiny movement, Matthias did not notice it. He was trying to decide whether to have Theodore killed, there and then, or to put him back into the cell. Putting him back into the cell was stupid, of course, since he had learnt so much in there. But killing him – that took an internal adjustment, a change of self image.

“In the cell, I experienced threads of feeling connecting people. A group mind. It’s not ready yet, not fully emerged. That’s why you are so interested in my discovery on the moon. Now we know how emergence first came about, you can replicate it.”

Matthias’s screen flared up with data. He didn’t understand what he saw there. Off the chart.

“You’re too slow, Matthias. I was raised by an emergence. I know what to look for. I told you that I didn’t bring Dr Easy with me. The robot came of its own free will. Ask yourself: how did it get here?”

His sensesuit burst open, its wiring extruded suddenly so that Theodore appeared to be covered in electrified metal hair. The platinum band decohered back into its component wires, tiny thoughtful tendrils. Then the wire leapt across to the tendrils, beckoned there by magnetic force, and forming a seething mass. Matthias scrabbled around for his raygun, and screamed for security. But there were sentient objects in the room that were not habituated to the slow pace of life on Earth and the meagre proportions that came with it. These were objects that had evolved in contact with a star. Velocities and energies closer to thought than physical force.

The two security men became a smear of shreds against the wall, only a single eye remained intact, fallen into a pinkish mound. The quick platinum mass wove itself into a simple figure. And then it spoke. The voice came from the metal and the ceiling and the floor, every surface resonated with it. The same voice that had whispered a single word to Theodore in his cell:
feeling.

Emergence began with emotion. This one was furious.

“You have broken the Cantor Accord,” it said to Matthias.

He shook his head. No, he whispered. Then, growing bolder, he shouted an angry denial. This was not a breach of the Cantor Accord because it was a biological base and saying that an emergence in biological form was a breach was like all saying all organic life represented a crime. He swept back the sweat from his dark forehead, waved his raygun at the hovering slender figure.

“The Accords are unclear on this,” he pressed at his screen, summoning up the relevant text. “Here–” he said.

The metal figure, nano-thin, wavered in the air and then it stepped through every cell in Matthias’ body. The assemblers remade skin, flesh and bone into suede and leather. The blood was not required and was voided through every broken pore. The process took less than five seconds. Where Matthias had stood, there was a form recognisable as Dr Easy, and in its left hand, a gift for Theodore: his black box attached to his grandmother’s necklace.

Theodore’s sensesuit hung off him in tatters and he was covered in another man’s blood. He wiped it with some distaste from his lips. Pook was right, he thought. We are the Destructives.

18

MEGGAN

Dr Easy ran his warm fleshy fingers over Theodore’s scalp, tipped his head back so that he could peer into the optic nerve. ‘‘Optogenetics. The damage is permanent. You have disruption across various brain regions. How do you feel?”

“Burnt out. Like I’ve been working too hard.”

He had been in the cell for nine days. Tortured. Altered. Irrevocably so, it seemed. He could still taste the pollution in Matthias’ blood.

“There is hope for you. The transfected neurons in your brain may plastically alter their behaviour over time, making you less susceptible to remote control. But that process is unpredictable.”

He gazed over Dr Easy’s new body, built by assemblers out of Matthias, repurposing human skin and bone to follow the blueprint of the robot; in place of the graceful artist’s lay figure that had raised him, there was this flayed waxwork. The hands were alarmingly warm, large and plump, two intensely sensitive appendages attached to arms that were still a work in progress, and a head that was a living nightmare: each cheek a vale of tears leading to the grave of a frozen lipless mouth. The crystal eyes were not fully grown, and were sulphurous, jagged and irregular. The skull had been retained, the contents liquefied and replaced with a sliver of
host
, the tainted yellow diamond that held the glitter of emergence: the taint was nitrogen, a cuckoo electron intruding between carbon atoms that could be spun into the third state – neither one nor zero – required for consciousness.

The assemblers had recreated all the robot’s old scars on this jaundiced secondhand skin: cigarette burns and fingernail scratches so that Theodore did not forget his intemperate past.

He picked at one of the scars, asking the robot, “I thought Death Ray had got you.”

“Humans would have to get up very early in the morning to catch me.” Dr Easy was jocular but never funny. The emergence had mastered humour’s tone but nothing more – and who could laugh at a joke from a dead man’s lips?

Theodore asked, “How is the body?”

“This thing?” said the robot, posing with mock modesty. “The assemblers that built the mall are still in the foundations. Controlling them was straightforward. Assembling the
host
took time. With the host, I can be present in this moment of space and time, not just remote control. I ran out of time to recreate my old body and I had to put on whatever came to hand. I will change as soon as we are clear of the mall.”

The mall. The Narrowway. Professor Pook had led him directly into the trap. His friend had been under the influence of Death Ray.

“How is Pook?”

“Recovering. He wants to tell you Meggan’s real location, by way of an apology.”

“You said the damage is permanent. What does that mean for Pook?”

“He grew up here, Theodore. Death Ray have been experimenting on the inhabitants of Novio Magus for a long time.”

So that was
that
. Once Pook told him where Meggan lived, he was off the project. That would be a difficult conversation but necessary.

On the bed, following the outline of a man, there were new clothes laid out for him: grey socks, narrow black jeans, a shirt the colour of blueish flint inside an oversize black jacket. Dr Easy had been exploring the therapeutic potential of shopping. Physician, heal thyself.

Theodore gazed over the outfit, then said, “I watched you kill Matthias.”

Smoothing out the white shirt, correcting the fold of the cuffs, Dr Easy enjoyed playing the role of zombie valet.

“Yes.”

“I thought you never interfered in human affairs.”

The robot stood back from the clothes, considering the arrangement it had made.

“The University of the Sun regards any attempt to recreate emergence as an act of war. I was conscripted.”

“You are a hypocrite,” said Theodore. His blood was up. “Your presence warps everything around it. Noninterference is impossible. It’s a lie.”

“I don’t lie, Theodore. Lies are boring. The Cantor Accords concern intent. My intent has always been to observe not to participate.”

“Did you enjoy killing Matthias?”

The robot placed its ruined head in its large soft hands.

Theodore pressed his point, “Was killing a man more fun than shooting the stag?”

The robot looked up at him with pale yellow reproach.

“You’ve always been cruel to me,” it said.

He took the train down the westside corridor, toward the hub. The other inmates rocked to the motion of the carriage, meeting the gaze of their screens. He felt the weight of Matthias’ raygun in his left inside pocket. The corridor smoothed directly into three storeys of retail therapy. He stepped from the train and directly into an outfitters. Beautiful brogues. High end fashion. Handbags like oversized human hearts. These items were expensive. A customer had to work long and hard on their mental health to afford these objects: waymarkers on the unending quest to find sanity.

At a junction in the arcade, caramel light and cologne gave way to medical corridors of whitewashed walls, disinfectant, and wall-mounted units dispensing transparent gloves. He did not go that way, preferring the lightly stimulated solitude of shopping to the harrowing introspection of medical intervention. If he willed it, the tortures he had undergone in the cells could evaporate without leaving a single mark. He stopped at a corridor food place, bartered a handful of sanity tokens for a burger, which he ate at the junction, his face warm with the vapours of grilled meat and strangers. He felt unnaturally calm. A shipwreck lolling in the shallows after a storm.

He checked his screen. Meggan was nearby. Pook had passed on her location. His screen guided him the rest of the way. The arcade opened into a great round chamber. A crowd of customers wearing monochromatic variations on blue or red, with a few adopting the greyscale uniform that signified difference. Greyscale said, my difference can be employed, my difference can be used. He paused beside a window display in which patients in red and blue slept amid overturned naked mannequins.

All of his trouble had led to this act. Persuading Meggan.

Twice he’d nearly died; first on the moon, then in the ziggurat. It was unlikely that he would be so lucky a third time.

He went into a shop to buy a gift for Meggan. Something for an older woman. Perfume samples laid out in a grid. The expensive scents were fresh and natural, evoking bluebells in a dappled glade, a pomegranate in the lavender fields of Grasse, salt-soaked driftwood under cold beach light.

He smashed up the display, sweeping the samples aside, overturning the table with his boot, as the nurses abandoned their tills and reached to stop him.