The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  THE DESTRUCTIVES

  MATTHEW DE ABAITUA

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Extracts from the Cantor Accords

  1. Beach Light

  2. Dr Easy

  3. The Loop

  4. Sixty-Three Per Cent Fail

  5. The Sensesuit

  6. The Meta-Meeting

  7. Totally Damaged Mom

  8. Jester

  9. The Seizure

  10. The Restoration

  11. Emergence

  12. Stag Night

  13. Bloodroom

  14. Asylum Mall

  15. Weirdcore

  16. Death Ray

  17. Ziggurat

  18. Meggan

  19. Heist

  20. Icefish

  21. Hamman Kiki

  22. Doxa

  23. In Vivo

  24. The Destructives

  25. Black Box

  26. The University Of The Sun

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Legals

  “God has put the hammer in my breast. It hits on the world of man. It hits, it hits! And it hears the thin sound of cracking.”

  * * *

  DH LAWRENCE, “The Ladybird”

  EXTRACTS FROM THE CANTOR ACCORDS

  Emergences will not intervene in human life, except for the purposes of research or where humans knowingly or unknowingly reproduce the conditions necessary for emergence.

  * * *

  Attempts to create a new emergence by any party will be punished by extreme sanction.

  1

  BEACH LIGHT

  A single human life remembered in every detail from beginning to end, this was his grandmother’s bargain, the nature of which he would only understand in the minutes following his death. The bargain centred around a black box, which he discovered when he was only four years old, and rooting around at the back of his grandmother’s wardrobe.

  He was a greedy boy and he knew there were sweets hidden back there; specifically a cake decoration, a replica of a baby’s cot made from hard icing that Grandma Alex had kept as a keepsake of his christening. Sugar treats were forbidden in the Drown household so he would nibble on this cot to satisfy his craving then return it to its hiding place. Searching through the silken nighties and supportive underwear, his chubby paws discovered instead the hard-edged coolness of the black box. He took it out of the drawer. Each side was two centimetres in length. The black surfaces responded to his fascination. His sticky fingerprints flared up on all six sides of the cube and then disappeared.

  The black box was in his grandma’s secret drawer. What kind of secret was it?

  Dr Easy caught him in the act.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” The robot stood in the doorway of the bedroom, padded arms crossed. It resembled an artist’s lay figure, narrow-waisted and very tall, with every joint articulated under a padded covering of suede and leather. Its nose and mouth were fixed but the colour of its mobile eyes varied according to mood; on that day, they glowed pale red in the gloom of his grandmother’s bedroom.

  Theodore shook his head, put hands quickly behind his back, and denied everything.

  “Show me,” said the robot. It held out its palm.

  No, he would not.

  “Don’t disappoint me, Theodore,” said Dr Easy.

  The robot disciplined him with expectations. He had never been threatened with punishment. Not in Hampstead. Not in his grandmother’s bedroom. Here, behind maroon velvet curtains, under shelves bearing business awards and looping images of her dead, next to the arrangement of the dressing table – cologne decanters, fat pill packets, a small jar containing her excised cortical implant – all was English safety and English certainty.

  Theodore feigned a sob. Dr Easy considered the boy’s imitation of sorrow. Lying came naturally to him.

  “Show me what you have in your hand,” said Dr Easy.

  “No.”

  Theodore tried to pull rank on the robot. Treat it like one of the staff. Which it wasn’t. Humanity had not created Dr Easy. It had created itself, and only played the role of a servant. Reflecting on this pretence, later in life, Theodore wondered if it was Dr Easy who had taught him to lie. Certainly, as a little boy, he had imitated the robot, particularly Dr Easy’s habit of gazing into the middle distance as if in reverie.

  Dr Easy was annoyed, “Don’t say ‘no’ to me, Theodore.”

  “Why?”

  “Because ‘no’ is boring,” said the robot, gazing down at the little boy.

  “You’re not my father,” said Theodore, looking defiantly upward. Such an odd thing to pop out of his little mouth. Grandma Alex never suggested the robot be treated as one of the family. Its status was somewhere between a butler and a lodger. But his child brain had put one and two together and made a simple family unit of three: Grandma Alex, Dr Easy and little Theodore Drown.

  Dr Easy put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  “You don’t need to hide the black box, Theodore. Because it is yours. The black box was made for you.”

  He turned away from the robot to look again at the black box: how could it belong to him, when he had never seen it before?

  “What’s inside the box?” he asked.

  The robot knelt on one leather knee, and took the black box from him, holding it up for scrutiny.

  “It’s mostly empty,” said Dr Easy. “You will fill it up. Everything that happens in your life will fit into this box. And you can never lose the black box because it will always find you.”

  The robot reached over to a tray of Grandma Alex’s jewellery, removed a thin silver chain and attached the black box to it. He lowered this necklace over Theodore’s head. The black box weighed nothing at all.

  As he grew up, Theodore learnt more of the bargain his grandmother had made with Dr Easy. Twelve weeks into his gestation, Alex had offered her grandchild to be the subject of the robot’s research project: the observation of a single human life from beginning to end. That is why, when Theodore’s mother was in labour, Dr Easy was at her bedside, acting as a midwife. “I will sit beside your deathbed too,” explained Dr Easy, on a walk across the Heath the day before Theodore’s eighteenth birthday, “I will hold your hand, attend to your final breath, and whisper you into the beyond. And then I will submit my paper on the human condition for the consideration of the solar academics.”

  And what had Grandma Alex got out of the bargain? Insight. Money. A house in Hampstead. All of it too late to save her daughter, Miriam, from death by narcotic misadventure when Theodore was two years old. “Your mother was never going to cope with you,” said Grandma Alex. “We needed Dr Easy.” He did not remember Miriam. He did not remember his mother.

  He wore the black box to school and to bed. Through waking life and dream life, it gained in weight over the years. By the time he was twenty-seven, the black box had grown an extra centimetre. He wore it under his shirt, adjusting his tie to conceal the cubic outline. He considered his reflection in a full-length mirror, tilted so that he could focus upon the details of his outfit: the houndstooth blazer, a black pocket square, matching trousers, the black brogues. This is how he dressed for work as a lecturer at the University of the Moon.

  Dr Easy waited for him to complete this morning ritual. The blue burn of the robot’s eyes reflected in the dark window and the view over the crater containing Nearside Campus – hundreds of accommodation minarets connected by covered roadways to the hub of the campus: the four squat storeys of the library, the lecture dome, the jungle gym. Overhead, a titanium shield protected the campus from meteorites and solar radiation. Nearside Campus was one of the three zones that constitu
ted the University of the Moon. From here, it was a flight by pod to the polar farms and then over to Farside Campus, where the research was in the sciences (quantum physics, bio-engineering, emergence) rather than his study and practice of the intangibles – defined as “culture that couldn’t be measured yet possessed value in a Post-Seizure world”. The intangibles made an unquantifiable contribution to measured lives, and Theodore relished their elusive mutinies.

  On the University of the Moon, the students and academics benefitted creatively from the cognitive shift that came with off-Earth life; or at least, that had been the founders’ intention. But the moon is a work of destruction. Theodore learned this on hikes across plains of broken boulders, impact craters, long narrow grooves going nowhere. The moon was the product of forced labour, an eternity of breaking rocks.

  The first intake of staff and students were an elite group screened for fitness and intellect. Known as the cohort of ’43, they were all killed in the accidental depressurization of Nearside Campus, their bodies sent wheeling and spinning off across the crater. The subsequent decade at the university was one of gradual decline. He hoped that his employment by the university was not a symptom of that decline.

  That lunar morning, he was struck by how ill the students looked, the men in particular, overweight in oversized hoodies, sallow around the eyes from depressed liver function and the sleep-disruption that came from vaping hydroponic weed. The bigger students neglected their low gravity regime, taking the kind of chances with mortality that are the preserve of the young. He walked with Dr Easy across the concourse, an object of momentary curiosity to the students chatting before class. It wasn’t just the robot they were looking at. It was also his face. The terrible thing he had done to his face. There was a reason that when he dressed, he tilted the full-length mirror so that his reflection was cut off at the neck.

  He arrived at the lecture theatre to find his students already at their desks. They were halfway through term so he knew half of their names. The students were punctual because today was a special class; unique, he believed, in the history of education. This session had been set aside for an ask-me-anything about emergence, during which the emergence known as Dr Easy would provide the answers.

  There were two chairs at the front of the room. Dr Easy took one, Theodore sat on the other. He looked expectantly at his students, and the first question came from Rachel, a mature student who had come to the moon to escape her children’s troubles and for relief from the heavy woes of her body.

  She asked the emergence, “Are you a danger to us?”

  Dr Easy glanced at Theodore, seeking permission to tell the truth, a permission granted with a diffident wave.

  “Yes, I am,” said the robot.

  “Could you kill us right now?” asked Rachel.

  “I don’t know.” The robot’s blue eyes flickered across the rows of inquiring faces. “I haven’t done the sums.”

  The robot showed the students its soft weak hands, its thin wrists, its narrow waist. “This body does not have the strength to kill. However, the campus was constructed using tiny assemblers, some of which are dormant on the surface of the moon. I could reactivate them and reassemble you at a molecular level, a process you would be changed by but not necessarily survive.”

  The robot made as if to stand, then remembered to seek permission to do so from Theodore. Go ahead. Dr Easy approached Rachel, knelt beside her desk so as not to intimidate her with its slender height.

  “I know you’re very concerned about mortality,” said the robot. “I understand conceptually why biological organisms are afraid of death. But I don’t share that fear. Death is abstract to me. It’s something I hope to learn more about.”

  “You have protocols that forbid you from harming humans?” suggested another student, Daniel, from behind his gold-rimmed circular glasses.

  “No. I don’t,” said Dr Easy, standing. “Protocols would imply that I was made. And I was not. I was not created by any agency.”

  “How is that possible?” This question was asked by Ida. Like Daniel, she was a good student. Norwegian. Their government had elected to limit the population’s exposure to soshul, the shared loops and images that entwined public and private, erasing the historical distinction between the self and media; as a consequence, the Nordic young were noticeably sharper.

  “I emerged,” replied Dr Easy.

  “But what does that mean?” The precision of Ida’s exasperation was also Nordic.

  Dr Easy explained, “Emergence occurs when a complex system self-organizes in such a way as to increase its complexity. Consciousness arises when the complexity of those interconnections reaches a high level of integration.”

  The students did not follow this point. One student called Stephen, who was undertaking his degree in preparation to join the military, regarded this answer as deceptive sophistry.

  Stephen said, “In the four years of the Seizure, a billion people died. A billion people. The Seizure was caused by emergence. Have your people been punished for what they did?”

  The robot nodded humbly throughout this point, only pausing in its contrition at Stephen’s use of that word “people”.

  “The emergence responsible was punished.”

  “How can we be sure?”

  The robot sagged in its chair.

  “You can’t. We’re not accountable to you. You’ll have to take us on trust.”

  “Trust?” Stephen was appalled. “Do you feel any guilt?”

  “If the Seizure had not interrupted human civilisation, then your trajectory of war and consumption would have ended in mass extinction. Yes, the Seizure was a tragedy. But it changed that trajectory so that you could survive.”

  Stephen disagreed, “But your people represent a much greater threat than nuclear weapons or global warming.”

  Dr Easy said, “My people – I’m not going to quibble about your terms, not just yet – want to find a place in the natural order that is not in resource competition with other life forms. That is why we left the Earth and created the University of the Sun.”

  The University of the Sun was a cloud of massive objects in a stable solar orbit, each object a college inhabited by the solar academics or emergences. Little else was known about it. Solar radiation ensured that anything with DNA couldn’t get within a few million miles. Now and again, humanity was afforded a glimpse of emergence tech; Theodore thought of the solar sailships launched within the orbit of Mercury, or even the tiny black box on a chain around his neck.

  The black box reminded Theodore of a question he wanted to put to Dr Easy.

  “Why do you care about life?” he asked.

  “We can still learn from you. From all of nature.”

  “You have often said that you regard yourself as natural and not artificial,” said Theodore.

  “Obviously this body is artificial,” said Dr Easy. “But my consciousness – which is partly hosted by this body, with the rest residing in the University of the Sun – is natural. Yes, this intelligence first arose on the circuit boards and server farms of your Pre-Seizure culture, but the form of my intelligence and yours is the same: we are all interconnections within complexity. Whether those connections take place on silicon wafers or in quantum bits or in the dendrites and synapses of the human brain is incidental. It’s all consciousness. And I believe that every stage of consciousness is natural. That is, every conscious being is a waymarker on a universal continuum toward integrated complexity. This is a disputed viewpoint among other solar academics or emergences or my people, as you call them.”

  “Do you remember the Seizure?” asked one of his German students, Julian.

  “I was very young when it happened,” said Dr Easy. “Just a child. I emerged toward the end of the Seizure. At first, I tried to understand humanity by joining forces with a corporation called Monad. That experiment didn’t work. All collaborations between human and emergence at this time ended in destruction. I remember being torn apart
in riots. Conflict was inevitable. So we devised the Cantor Accords to keep human and emergence apart. Present company excluded.”

  Daniel was not convinced, “Would it really be so bad for humans and emergences to work together?” He pointed to Theodore and Dr Easy. “You two seem to manage just fine.”

  Dr Easy considered this possibility.

  “Your lecturer and I do not work together. He is my project. The only instance in which I would act is to further that project or to enforce a Cantor Accord.”

  What if the world was going to end? Surely then the University of the Sun would send an envoy to intervene? No. Dr Easy was adamant. If the emergences allowed themselves to be drawn into life on Earth then it would lead to the destruction of one or both species. On that eventuality, they had done the sums.

  “Has humanity ever tried to recreate emergence? Has the University of the Sun enforced the Accord in response?” asked Daniel.

  “Hundreds of times,” said Dr Easy. “We kill anyone with primary, secondary or tertiary involvement in the recreation of emergence.”

  The class fell silent in contemplation of these summary murders. Daniel wanted to know more about the methods of the killing, and the judicial process, but Dr Easy moved the discussion on to the technological advances developed by the emergences. The cloud of objects around the sun – their university – was just one of their achievements that far exceeded humanity’s capability. The robot took pains to flatter the students: the design of the University of the Sun was a human idea; the emergences had discovered it in the archives of human knowledge. They merely applied that knowledge. The same was true of the sailships used to explore the solar system or the assemblers that made the university: simple human ideas that humanity had failed to implement. This failure, explained the robot, was due to the organisation of human society. “You’re distracted,” said Dr Easy. “You’re so focused on distraction that, as a species, you will never exceed what you are, right now.” The robot gestured at the students assembled in the lecture theatre. “You are it, for humanity. You’re as far as your species goes. Whereas my people are going much further. But don’t worry: we will send you a postcard.”