The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

His quarters contained a bedroom, a living room and a staircase up to his study, a flat-bottomed tulip bulb with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the grey favela of the university spread across the crater floor. Other tulip offices rose out of the favela and up toward the titanium shield, some silvered for privacy, others empty, a few illuminated from within to reveal their occupants.

  His office contained a faun-coloured chaise longue, a resting screen, a bookshelf, and a vintage Möbius-strip desk, at which, after showering then dressing in a narrow brown suit, striped shirt, thin vintage red-and-gold tie and pointed brogue boots, he filed a report on the lunar expedition for the office of student well-being. He was interrupted by a message from Professor Pook, drawing his attention to a new appointment, scheduled for the following day. It was a meeting on the Farside campus with Professor Kakkar from the School of Emergences and a consultant called Patricia Maconochie. His next message was an etiquette loop from her. She praised him in the customary manner, emptying stock adjectives all over his work in Intangibles and as a cultural accelerator. He noticed a meta-level to her communication consisting of fleeting smiles, the glint in her eye and meaningful hesitations. There was more to Patricia Maconochie than the usual corporate boilerplate. Her message gave away no details. He inferred that she was a lone agent. A freelancer on the make. An opportunist. He liked her immediately.

  Then there was an ouroboros loop from Professor Kakkar. This self-consuming audio loop ordered Theodore to be strictly punctual and to travel without Dr Easy. Nothing unusual about that request; corporate types liked to keep their intellectual property away from the robot. He accepted the meeting request, and decided he would discuss it with Pook in person.

  Dr Easy climbed up into the office but did not interrupt Theodore. The robot reclined on the chaise longue, and inspected the supple foil covering the severed edge of its wrist.

  “I’m going out,” said Theodore.

  “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  It had been two weeks since the hike. The day after their return, Theodore had an outburst in the student mart. He swept products off the shelves. Anger coursed through him before he was even aware of it. He had not believed himself capable of such powerful emotion.

  Dr Easy had diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “The trauma of nearly dying,” explained the robot.

  “Or the trauma of you letting me die,” replied Theodore.

  The robot had not offered a satisfactory explanation for its actions during the lunar climb; first it had failed to warn the party of the moonquake, and then it had been reluctant to locate intact air supplies within the rock slide.

  Theodore corrected his cuffs.

  “You should rest,” said Dr Easy.

  “The anger caught me by surprise,” said Theodore. “Cause seemed to follow effect. I’ll see it coming next time.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” said Theodore. “I think not. We should spend some time apart.”

  He went to see Professor Pook, his line manager, in his office. Pook wore black-framed glasses, his dark hair was flat and neat, his muzzle and upper neck were invariably dark with the beginnings of a beard. He was younger than Theodore by two years yet he was already a professor, due to the success of his long thought We Are Spent: Fifteen Reasons Why We Should Splice the Human Genome to Create New Consumers. The Moral Arguments Involved Will Surprise You. In Spent, Pook argued that the accelerators had run out of meaningful innovations and as a consequence, people were sad: or, as he put it, the tapering metrics of positive sentiment among consumers was due to a rise in resistance to the promise of novelty. In Spent, Pook argued that change – change as a promise, not actual social change – had been so thoroughly mined that humanity had lost faith in it. His evidence came from Novio Magus, where Pook lived among the consumer patients of the asylum malls for months at a time, noting their culture, the loops they clipped, the way they posed for images, the filters they used for their soshul memories, the choco-chuck they ate, the empty wrappers they chose to smooth out and neatly fold; he catalogued their expressions of awe and fear under the vaulted ceiling of the asylum mall; he assembled a taxonomy of yearning – the twelve different ways in which a woman touches a dress on a rack – and ranked the tells of desire. He tracked despair in the asylum malls, anger and hatred in the countless transactions of the ultramarkets, measured inertia and boredom in the demographic reservations, and decided that the answer to the overwhelming evidence that humanity was sick of itself was to loosen legal constraints on splicing the human genome – starting with cats, dogs and jellyfish. The cover of his long thought was a faked loop of a black boy in school uniform, left eye human, right eye cat. Consumers with animal traits would require new product categories. And so life could go on.

  We Are Spent was, in Theodore’s opinion, admirably opportunistic in its scholarship. When the university awarded Pook his professorship, it paid the ultimate compliment a scholar can make to his fellow: they feared him.

  “You set a meeting for me with a consultant. Maconochie.”

  “At her request. But I want to check that you are up to it. How is your wellbeing? Have you recovered from your hike yet?”

  “I had a touch of PTSD. I found myself sweeping products off the shelves in the student mart before I even realised what I was doing.”

  “I saw the loop. Interesting.”

  “I think it was anger. But I can’t be certain of my own feelings.”

  “Your quick thinking saved the lives of your students. Perhaps you are experiencing a feeling of triumph. Have you ever known success?”

  “Kind of. I invented a product called beach light. But I wouldn’t describe the feeling as one of triumph.”

  “After Spent dropped, and I was getting all the acclaim – finally, evidence to marketise human genetic experimentation – I had a day of thrillingly cold happiness. And then I realised that I had merely reached a plateau in terms of success, and a whole new range of peaks lay ahead. I had to recalibrate my goals, seize the opportunity for greater transgression.”

  Theodore remembered queuing in the student market. Brands shifting in his peripheral vision, the flickering of their holographic loops reminding him of the loose scree that had rapped against his visor during the moonquake. The next moment, he had found himself trashing a display of virility serums, then stamping upon the racks of artisan gingerbread men with their tiny icing beards; in the brushed stainless steel cabinets, a smeared reflection of his face. Before he began destroying the stock, he was aware of no intention to do it. The only correlative to the impulse that he could think of – and this was a thought that occurred to him mid-act, as he hefted a three litre jar of psychofuel above his head, the top of his skull lifted off, holes drilled in his spine, anger playing him like a flute – was when he was a recidivist in his addictions, and would find himself honking up the grokk without really wanting it.

  Loops of Theodore losing it in the mart were eyeballed by the students before he had even stopped losing it.

  He noticed that Pook was packing a bag.

  “I’m going on a research trip to Novio Magus.”

  “Sussex?”

  Professor Pook considered for a moment. “I think Sussex is the name of the car park.”

  “We used to drop the array over Novio Magus to accelerate its culture.”

  “You’ve never been inside, have you? Analytics cannot capture the first hand experience of the asylum mall. To inhabit art twenty-four-seven. It’s magical. During my last research trip, I drank every night in a bar called Everyone Likes Me and ate silver love glumph from a tub noon and night.”

  “What’s your brief?”

  “Group suicide. Thirty-five people killed themselves with poisoned Oof cakes. Oof have commissioned me to find out why they used their cakes to do it. What is the intangible link between Oof and a desire for death? It represents an opportunity for insight into our dark times.”

  �
��A desire for death could be an intensification of addiction.”

  “Addiction is my meat and drink. I think that’s why you first piqued my interest. Before you committed yourself to being boring.”

  Theodore inspected Pook’s book shelves.

  “Be thankful you didn’t know me when I was interesting.”

  4

  SIXTY-THREE PER CENT FAIL

  The far side of the moon was thoroughly pockmarked. Daedelus crater, nearly a hundred kay in diameter, came up through the porthole, and then the pod nudged over the rim and raced low toward the hub of Farside Campus. It reminded him of Vegas in the desert, a city bounded on all sides by a lethal landscape. The skyline here was a spiky array of probes, the great dish of a radio telescope and adjoining cylindrical barrel of an optical telescope.

  Alongside the campus, moonbots were constructing the outline of a leviathan: Gulliver perhaps, or Mothra, or an effigy of the loop star Dog Head Girl with her Labrador chops and polka dot skirt. The landing stage had been constructed by mooncrafters out of thousands of pale blocks; it was a bright white cephalopod, buried head first in the rock, with every white tentacle tipped – as the name suggested – by a pod. Low faculty buildings clutched the crater floor like roots.

  On disembarkation, a tracked sled took him and the other passengers down into the body of the campus. The atmosphere was muted, the students lean and dour; on the sled, he passed the airlocks of the departments of astrophysics and of biotech, the School of Genetic Engineering, the School of Off-Earth Medicine, the great shipyards of Rocket Science, until he came to a beige bay door marked Emergence Studies, and there the sled waited for him to depart.

  Muted lighting in reception, just enough for an empty building. Idly, he inspected various flyers, warnings, notices, passive-aggressive codes of conduct printed out and pinned up on a felt noticeboard. The coffee machine plipped then plopped. Then he heard her approach from down the corridors and through the doors, had time to adjust his cuffs and straighten his tie, correct his hair, before she walked in.

  Patricia Maconochie wore executive armour, grey hardfoam mail over a breathable body sheath, carbon fibre gauntlets and sabatons over her boots. Her high rimmed collar could spin out a protective helmet if required. They exchanged pleasantries. He looked for signs of who she might be without the armour. As if answering his thought, she removed her gauntlets. Her nails were enamel white to match her lipstick and she did not wear any rings. Her bone structure was strong and assertive, her way of speaking also. They shook hands, skin on skin.

  “Professor Pook recommended you,” she said. “I’ve worked with him on half a dozen occasions. He’s very insightful.” She paused before insightful, suggesting a silent conspiracy with Theodore concerning other words she could have used.

  “But Pook is a generalist and I require a specialist,” she smiled whitely. “Your areas of expertise meet our requirements.”

  “Requirements?”

  She smiled. “Let’s jump right in.”

  Her male assistant politely requested Theodore’s screen, and having placed it in a secure box, rattled back the door of a caged elevator. The three of them rode down in silence. Arriving, they passed through another corridor and came to a thick set of vault doors, also manually operated, requiring the assistant to hunch over a wheel lock and exert considerable effort. The door opened onto a large echoing cavern with a rough damp moonrock ceiling. At the heart of this lunar vault lay the dark outline of a large suburban house.

  As they walked closer, low lighting revealed a grey American townhouse with an attic and neo-classical portico, driveway and garage. He became aware of other people working in the shadows at the back of the room behind large banks of antique equipment and cables. Patricia took a set of keys from her armour and together they walked up to the front door, which she unlocked, showing him into an open-plan kitchen and living room. The house was new, and smelt of varnish, sawdust and paint.

  “What do you think?” she asked, laying the keys on the breakfast bar.

  He tapped the heel of his heavy shoe against the varnished floor.

  “Judging from the large cooker hood and hardwood flooring, I would say this house is a new-build, 2009.” He squinted at the piano in the corner, the television screen above the fireplace.

  She gestured for him to continue.

  “The clock on the wall has roman numerals. The vases are tapered. It’s a show home to evoke Pre-Seizure middle class codes concerning authenticity. Authenticity in the standard two categories: to evoke a usable past and to signify closeness to nature.”

  “And who lives here?”

  “Nobody lives here. There is no softening of the auditory and visual brightness.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But do you find it convincing?”

  “Convincingly period? There’s no tech. These people had smartphones, games consoles, laptops.” He took the house keys from the breakfast bar and threw them across the room. The keys glided and slowly fell.

  “Moon gravity. A bit of a giveaway.”

  He pointed at the TV.

  “Is there a remote for this?”

  Patricia waved at the TV and it came on. He shook his head.

  “Gestural control comes later. This should have a remote to control it, which is like a small stick with rubber buttons on it, that you press.”

  “The house is from 2009. Most of the furnishings also date from around that period. But not all of them. You see, the timeframe we are concerned with is eleven years later. 2020.”

  Theodore gestured for the menu and called up the news. A financial expert discussing unexpected gains on the stock market, tickertape prices running along the bottom of the screen. An outside broadcast with a CEO. The backdrop was sunny. New York, June 2020. So close to the onset of the Seizure. The audio dropped in and out. Glitchy blocky artefacts in the sunlight reflecting off the skyscrapers. Hard to say if they were flaws in the archive, a low-bit rate in the video sample, or early tells of the oncoming corruption.

  “Any expert in the period will detect flaws in this restoration. We know what to look out for, the points at which everyday life began to degrade. Keeping the old furnishings in the house is a nice touch – the middle classes were poorer and couldn’t afford to replace big ticket items. Your problem is the sheer profusion of data. You can’t replicate the constant stream of selfies, memes, and status updates: the soshul. After the Seizure, only a tiny percentage was recoverable. Replicating the physical environment of the time is one thing, but the true character of the age rested in its intangibles.”

  He tapped his foot on the floor again, questioning the substance of this reality.

  “Who is this meant to fool?”

  “It’s a set. The school have recovered an exciting cache of data from just before the Seizure. We have recreated the house in which that data was generated. We want you to help us understand it.”

  He was aware of the technicians outside the house. The hubbub of their activity. No comms, no signal. The insistence that he came alone, without Dr Easy. The underground cavern. The dark chamber. These were significant.

  “Whose house was this?”

  “We don’t know.” Patricia rapped against the window, and gave a signal to the engineers to begin. He was aware of an increase in temperature, and a faint whirring, and then the projections began: upon the surface of the breakfast bar, holograms of a few dirty bowls, a shimmering cereal pack; a two-dimensional patterned rug under his feet; daylight from outside, motes rising in the idle curiosity of the morning sun. At the front door, the glitchy shimmering projection of a woman leaning over a child. He moved closer. The holograms did not include renderings of the front of their bodies, so they were faceless and chestless. The child was a slender girl in school blazer and grey skirt, the blazer markedly too big for her, eleven or twelve years old with a blonde ponytail. The mother’s hair – he assumed it was the mother – was experienced blonde, dark with time. She was three inches taller
than her daughter, engagement and wedding rings on her neat outstretched hand. She wore a green dress with a white pattern, a calf-length hem, with a cut that accentuated a vintage body shape.

  “They were a quantified family,” said Patricia.

  Theodore gestured at the flickering static projections.

  “Is this all you have?”

  “We’re making progress. But we’ve only scraped the surface. There is a lot of weird and cranky security around a vast data mine.”

  “Privacy,” he said. “The quantification movement was designed to obviate risk by monitoring every aspect of the family’s psychological and physiological well-being. But it came with its own dangers.” He leaned over and peered into the gaps in the rendering of the woman: as he suspected, he could see into the layers of her circulatory and nervous system, flesh, organs, skeleton. Tumour watch. The hourly bloods. The restoration held three surviving episodes of a sitcom about the quantification movement, Sixty-Three Per Cent Fail. A quantified husband and wife, two kids, one measured, one free range. The husband was the overweight dumb idealist typical of the period’s representations of masculinity, the wife an eye-rolling realist. The end of each episode delivered the metrics of success or otherwise of the male protagonist.

  “A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech,” said Theodore. “Their employers would have required it.” Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion.

  “This is the hearth,” he said. “The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being.” He squinted at the screen. “Can you bring this into resolution?”

  Patricia checked her watch, smooth and grey and set to moontime, then looked up.

  “What you see is what we have, at the moment. With your help, we hope to uncover more.”

  He stood at the window. The driveway was paved by projection and surrounded by the lush thickened green light of a lawn. He heard the craak-craak-craak of seagulls.