A downbeat note to end on, thought Theodore, and he rebuked the robot on their walk back to his office.
Dr Easy replied, “I gave them permission to focus on their own enjoyment and not torment themselves with ambitions they cannot realise. It’s what they really wanted to hear.”
“You intervened,” said Theodore. “You closed off possibilities for their future.”
“I offered them an excuse,” the robot brushed moon dust from its suede chassis. “Some of them will take it. The best will not accept it.”
At his office, he asked Dr Easy to leave him so that he could work in peace. Sitting down to his screen, he found himself distracted by this question of intervention. The robot had intervened in Theodore’s life at a couple of junctures, most crucially in helping him walk away from weirdcore when his use of the drug put him in danger of doing something even worse than the self-inflicted scars on his cheeks. He ran his fingers around the rough spiral channels of the scars; they made him appear older than he was, an effect he exaggerated with Pre-Seizure gentleman’s tailoring: herringbone tweed jacket, twentieth century Liberty print ties, Jermyn Street brogues, fitted shirts. His grandmother’s wealth had always clothed him, though his students were unaware of the provenance of his tailoring, so the gesture was lost on them. But not on the rest of the faculty, who recognised London money and London manners in the fit of his cuffs. Academe was not the natural habitat of the snappy dresser. His scars made such ostentation permissible. Ragamuffin scars. Street scars. Spirals gouged into his cheeks while under the influence. The students knew what the scars signified, and the impudent ones, fresh off the shuttle, would ask him all about it. What was weirdcore like, sir? I heard that when you’re on weirdcore, you feel at one with the universe. Is that right, sir? I saw a loop of weirdcorers sticking pins in each other without making a sound. Did you stick pins in people? Would you do it again? Do you have any weirdcore on you?
He let them get it out of their system. Accepted the ridicule that was his due. You have to take licks for your stupidities. It is the only way to grow up.
How did you come off the drugs, sir?
I was lucky, he would tell them. I come from privilege. Money. I had a personal doctor to help me through withdrawal. He did not speak of what happened when he hit rock bottom, an incident so damning, he admitted it to no-one. Could barely even admit it to himself.
There had been a dealer called Beth Green – that was her nom de narcotique, because she worked out of Bethnal Green. On that particular night, Grandma Alex had frozen his funds, so he felt sorry for himself. Boo-hoo. Motherless at the age of two, and functionally fatherless. Yes, he grew up in a distinguished and owned house but he was still capable of self-pity even if such maudlin sorrow disgusted him. A billion dead yet he had the top floor of the townhouse to himself, with a personal library where he would read literature with a capital “L”, exploring the intangibles in the works of Levi-Strauss, Freud, Marx. Any thinker who could show him the structure beneath the surface. To compensate for the privilege of his days, he spent his nights with drugs, and the people who belonged to the drugs. A weirdcore habit permanently damaged emotional response. He lost some feeling. That seemed right, a way of minimising the pleasure he could draw from his unearned luxury.
Beth Green’s dingy flat. Her ethnic cabinet with tiny wooden drawers containing various chemical concoctions. Her heavy-lidded confession that she was in the sweet spot of holding coils of weirdcore and a chunk of money. The slow realisation that she had been indiscrete, wandering off mid-sentence. He turned from her, gripped by the tension between them. Trying to control – trying to conceal – the onset of his need. Then he was on her, with a carved wooden statue of Buddha in his hand, threatening her. And what he did he know about threats? Nothing. But her terror schooled him in the making of threats. Effect seemed to precede cause, such was the intensity of his need: he was threatening her before he had decided to threaten her. He wanted the money but having exercised power, and terrified her, the other possibilities stunned him. With his grandmother’s power and wealth, he could kill Beth Green and get away with it. He was not the kind of man to threaten a woman. He was not the kind of man to hold a woman down against her will. He was not the kind of man to steal. Yet there he was, being all those kinds of man. This was a crucial moment. If he had continued with the drugs for one more hour, then these holidays from reality would have become a permanent vacation.
A simple knock at the door brought him back – if not to himself then to his conscience, at least. Dr Easy had tracked him down and was waiting in the corridor throughout the crisis: witnessing, relaying, studying, feeling. Theodore dropped the carved wooden Buddha, mumbled apologies to Beth Green, opened the door to leave. Dr Easy stood in the doorway, showing him the passageway beyond, a route out of the squat and into three years of sobriety.
To measure the extent of his emotional damage, Dr Easy reminded Theodore of the tragedy of his parents. How his mother had died of an accidental overdose when he was a baby. How his father had appeared at various points in his childhood to explain that he had tried not to be an addict but had decided that it was not worth the effort. By it, he meant fatherhood. He meant Theodore. He listened unmoved to his own sad story, numbly exploring the spiral scars on his face.
He didn’t tell the story of Beth Green to anyone. Young men like to consider themselves handy in a fight. Some experience of violence is expected. But the one time in his life when he had come close to a violent act, it had been against a woman. A drugged woman, at that. The memory stayed in the black box. He felt its edges under his shirt. Asynchronous exosomatic memory; the black box was a book written by him that he could never read.
He had cleaned up his drug life. Dr Easy bought him a new jacket and worked his grandmother’s contacts to get him a job as a junior accelerator at an agency. That was his profession before he became a lecturer. Theodore’s knowledge of the intangibles and his druggie nous made for a powerful skill-set. The agency assigned him to an array in orbit over Novio Magus twenty-four seven; for a junior staff member, it was a live-in position.
Novio Magus was a megastructure on the Sussex coastline. Eight square kilometres of glass and steel built on the ruins of the towns of Lewes, Seaford, Newhaven. The foundations of the mall were laid at the end of the Seizure, six years before Theodore was born. Novio Magus was one of the arks built by the emergences for people displaced by economic collapse. The mall was a live-in therapeutic retail environment. The populace had jobs, earned money, and acquired “sanity tokens” which they spent on products, services and experiences, the novelty of which burnt out quickly in such a pressured environment. As an accelerator, he kept the culture moving, kept the desire and anxiety churning over, an addict’s daily lot. The consumer inmates of the mall had been living there for nearly thirty years.
He was given the top bunk in a cabin shared with three other aspiring accelerators.
His big hit was a haircare product called beach light. Property in Novio Magus increased in value the closer it was to the light wells: the deep cylindrical holes bored through the mall’s iron roof and its layers of padded cells, shops, treatment rooms, beauticians, operating theatres, cafes, waffle stalls, electro-shock therapy stations, quarantine wards and retail experiences. Light was precious in the mall, and natural light a rare benediction, a moment of peace shared between the sun and the body. He decided to accelerate products that promised sunlight on skin.
The specific concept of beach light came from a story his grandmother used to tell him about the first day of the Seizure.
Alex had been visiting a client in their enclave on the outskirts of Walberswick, a village on the Suffolk coastline. She described how, after sharing tea and scones with the client – a CEO in mental distress, who needed to be relieved of his controlling shares – she decided to go for a walk on the beach. A fog rolled in over the sea, up and over the entire east coast, thickening as it went with atmospheric particulates.
Black beach huts emerged out of the fog like the helmets of an invading army. Alex loved the acoustics of fog, the sense of narrowed space, especially at the water’s edge, with the horizon and distant shores entirely closed off. A pair of dog walkers greeted her; a spaniel rubbed its snout joyfully into the sand, snorting up the lifegiving day. Funny, how you remember these things. She checked her phone. Signal was intermittent, there was a buffer wheel indicating a large file stalled in the ether. The crisp sound of the waves as they considered, over and again, the pebbled shore. The file, when it finally downloaded, was strange. A loop of a mother clutching a child to her. The loop was every post on every stream of her soshul. A mother clutching a child was every email in her inbox. The ad networks were infected, and served this loop through every unit of their inventory. Her bank balance was mother-and-child. Unlike the rest of the population, she knew what this meant and had prepared for it.
The fog made her feel like she was wrapped in a muslin bag. She did not hurry back to her driver. Rather, she watched the rest of the walkers prod inquisitively at their phones as they too discovered the loop of mother and child playing in place of all that had seemed permanent. She decided to enjoy these last few minutes of a passing civilisation. The final hour of peak carbon emissions.
The light, sifted by the fog, was a detail she always dwelt upon when telling this story. Beach light.
In the array, he accessed the restoration for loops of women on beaches. Always long hair, matted with seawater, salt or sand on their lips. Women so relaxed they could easily be flotsam and jetsam brought in on the tide. Light waves undulating off the water, occasional swells sheathed in tiny sun jewels. Beach light. The agency had a hair product that needed accelerating. He made the link. The light of the beach trapped in your hair.
Before he knew it, he was running the array. Pumping light into every product he handled. He diversified from beach light into creams that put the deliciously silver sensation of moonlight against the skin, into drinks infused with sun-ripened fruits. He accelerated the cult of light to a point of ritual observance; he made the consumer patients of the asylum mall worship the sun in the same way that their ancestors – hunter gatherers and early farmers – once had. He took it too far. The agency became disturbed by the unconscious urges manifest in these accelerations. He was on an Icarus trip, flying too close to the sun. He was on the verge of taking grokk and weirdcore and scotch on the rocks. He had to come down. Dr Easy negotiated a severance package for him, and then suggested he consider applying his talents to academia. Specifically somewhere cold and remote where he could recover from his excesses: the University of the Moon.
2
DR EASY
He marked the beginning of another long lunar night with a walk around the campus in the company of Dr Easy. The robot arrived late and dishevelled with scuff marks on its calfskin hide and a burst seam on its right shoulder, self-inflicted scars to match his own. By way of apology, the robot had changed the colour of its eyes to a shade of sky blue they both remembered from summer walks on Hampstead Heath with Grandma Alex; they shared in-jokes going way back to his childhood.
“You look old,” Theodore said to the robot. “When did you last upgrade your body?”
“Six years ago,” said Dr Easy.
“That long? It was a darker leather, wasn’t it? Why don’t you upgrade?”
“I’ve grown attached to this one.”
“Really?”
“This body provides continuity for us.”
Theodore took the robot’s right hand, and inspected it.
“The fingers on this hand seem stiff, almost arthritic.”
“Does it bother you that I am getting older?”
“Is this about me now?”
“It’s always about you, Theodore.”
The robot and the man walked together for a while through the campus, Theodore’s weighted boots clomping away on the covered concrete walkway.
Theodore said, “Have you been neglecting yourself on my behalf?”
Dr Easy paused.
“I’m not at my best at night,” said the robot. “Sometimes our conversations demand more of me than I have placed into this body, and I need a hot link to the University of the Sun to answer.”
Theodore pressed the robot on its dishevelment.
“Are you intentionally damaging your body so that I will feel better about the physical effects of ageing?”
Dr Easy could not calculate the correct response and, glancing upward for inspiration, discovered only buffering from the sun.
“It is appropriate that I age,” it said, “if I am to fulfil various duties of care toward you.”
They stopped at a coffee bar where, with hapless ceremony, four students made Theodore a cold, burnt cappuccino. He thanked them, took a sip, dropped it in a bin.
“You distracted the baristas,” he said to Dr Easy. “They don’t know why you are not at the University of the Sun along with the other emergences.”
“Should I go back and tell them?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I can’t work it out. Not during the night. It is hard to be certain at night.”
“That is a human problem too.”
“How is your human problem?”
“Could you be more specific?”
“In the last six weeks, your initiation of conversation with colleagues has been down by twenty-two per cent, and you have stopped offering unsolicited opinions entirely. Over breakfast, the duration of your morbid interior reflection averages forty seconds. These are markers, Theo. Significant markers.”
“I expressly asked you not to quantify me.”
“Telemetry was invented during the first moon landing. If you wish to survive in a lethal environment, you have to submit to monitoring.”
They paused at a weight station so that Theodore could add more mass to his boots and cuffs. Dr Easy waited with its padded arms crossed, holding a pose like an artist’s lay figure. Some of the old scuff marks were his work. He couldn’t remember it all, the drunken violent rages in which he tried to pull the robot’s head off as it counselled him against giving into insensible desires. Huddled over reflective surfaces like a grimy Narcissus, snorting up trouble, his insides turned the bad stuff into good, the good stuff into bad. His numb face, his bloody black eyes, the sweat coming off him like the muddy riverwater spilling over the banks of the Thames.
On the moon, his solitary vice was animal protein on a Saturday. Pleasure was confined to the healthgiving, happy hormones of vigorous exercise. Now and again he ate his lunch beside a grand monument to the lost class of ’43, a rough-hewn sculpture of dead men and women rendered heroic in moonrock. One woman in particular caught his eye; she was tall and strong, with braids flaring angrily around her head. That kind of woman would not let him live such a quiet life. He had been content with his isolated post, for a year or so. And then Dr Easy suggested it was time he imposed himself on the world again. Not a return to his previous career as an accelerator but to push at the boundaries of what he could achieve.
During a seminar, he overheard his students discussing their plan to climb the mountains of the moon. He was as fit as he had ever been. He asked if the climb was open to staff too, and by the following week, he had signed up and was in training.
Theodore put his hand affectionately upon the robot’s soft leather back. “Come with me to the mountains of the moon. You can be my Tensing. Then, if the climb goes wrong, you can be my priest.”
“I’m not sure that I approve of your expedition.”
“You said that it was important for me to push my limits now that my sobriety is established.”
“That sounds like something I would say.”
“Have you changed your mind?”
“Not exactly. But I have misgivings.”
“You think the climb is too dangerous?”
The robot shook its head. Its blue eyes darkened, became the night clouds over the
mouth of the Thames on the night he ran away from home.
“I’m worried about what will happen when you succeed.”
They reached the gym. Theodore removed the weights from his shoes and arms, and walked into the great inflatable dome, kicking himself up onto the overhead bars, and from there he swung up through the apparatus, higher and higher, leaping from treetop to treetop; his simple joy in returning to a simian state briefly considered by the upturned gaze of Dr Easy.
* * *
The unfiltered sun lit up the titanium branches of the docking tree. Three black pods dropped silently from their stems. The engines fired. A jolt. The lunar surface sped by, bleached and porous like corroded bones on a pebble beach.
The climbing party consisted of himself, Dr Easy and ten fresh faced and fit young men and women from the university climbing society. Stephen, the leader, was one of his students; he was on track to join the army as an officer, specifically the medical corps, after he graduated. When Stephen skipped class, it was to exercise. Theodore often encountered him in the treetops of the jungle gym, perspiring heavily, secretly competing against him, the older man. Stephen’s weakness was junk food. Theodore saw him stand apart from the other students, scarfing it down. Addictive tendencies. Stephen had a broad build but even with all the exercise he struggled to keep his weight down. The clever students in his intangibles class embraced the liberal attitudes of the period in question, the Pre-Seizure. Not Stephen. Stephen captured the moral high ground of military imperatives. His study of intangibles through history only confirmed his suspicion as to their irrelevance.
The pod landed and the bay doors opened, revealing the foothills of the Montes Apenninus, a mountain range forming the outer concentric ripple of the crater basin of the Mare Imbrium.
On Earth, mountain ranges had been formed by tectonic pressures, the ever-shifting land mass giving the mountains a vitality in their jagged elevations. Theodore experienced livid intensity on his Earth mountain climbs: the way the clouds swept in and darkened the countenance of a valley, the living river channels and crystal rills that poured from between rocks, the sharp green smell of ferns, the pellets of sheep and rabbits among the moss. The white mountains of the moon, however, resonated with never-livedness. Created in the instant of an ancient asteroid strike, the mountains were a heap of rough material thrown onto the back slope of a crater, worn smooth and curvaceous over billions of years by meteorites and micrometeorites. They represented more of a hike than a climb. The highest mountain in the range, Mons Huygens, peaked at over five kilometres, around half the height of Mount Everest. Ten hours up, eight hours down, Stephen estimated.
The Destructives Page 2