The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “I’ll need a sensesuit, with haptic and olfactory feedback,” he said.

  Patricia pointed her index finger upward, a gesture assenting to his request, made for the benefit of the engineers monitoring the meeting. He turned back into the house and became aware of the presence of a new projection, over by the large vase, of a wooden blanket box. The box was old, with felt tip scrawls all over the lid and scratches all down one side where the family cat had marked its territory. He crouched down, went to open the lid but his hands went right through the projection. When they brought him a sensesuit, he would be able to open it.

  Patricia said, “So you will help us.” It was an observation rather than a question. She had seen how curious he was.

  “Can you take care of my Nearside commitments? My students, my classes. This might take some time.”

  She nodded.

  “We have until sun up.”

  * * *

  They asked him to do it and he agreed without condition or hesitation. Nor did he ask any questions as to Patricia’s professional interest in this reluctant archive. When he realised that his lack of curiosity gave Patricia pause, he explained to her, “You get the first hit free. If you want to go again, that will cost you.”

  She brought in a psychologist to appraise him. Maybe because he used junkie slang.

  The psychologist asked if he had any experience inhabiting simulated environments. He did not. Did he have any history of mental illness? Yes, he did. From the age of sixteen until twenty-five, he had been an addict of various substances: alcohol, cocaine, opium, grokk and weirdcore, all for quite different reasons. Sometimes the world was boring and needed shaking up. Sometimes the world was too intense in its ceaseless demands, and he required a sense of normalcy. Weirdcore made the world seem normal.

  “Are you in a recovery program?” asked the psychologist.

  “I have a private doctor,” he replied. “He’s got my best interests at heart.”

  “How is your health?”

  “I had a touch of PTSD after an accident during a hike on the moon. But I think it’s abating.”

  The psychologist scrolled through Theodore’s medical history and said, “There’s no mention of PTSD.”

  “You’re only the second person I’ve mentioned it to.”

  Theodore regarded the psychologist with baleful hooded eyes. Something about the scenario reminded him of a junkie score. The underlying continuum between the rituals of the medical profession and the rituals of drug addiction.

  They brought in the head of emergence studies, Professor Kakkar, a big man in casual branded sportswear and a dark leather jacket. Mumbai style. The meeting dragged on as the Professor had boilerplate cant to get through, legalese composed by algorithms. They all suffered in silence as Kakkar delivered the ritual language. “This is a freelance research project,” he said, enfolding his thick fingers. “The university will not be liable if you incur any physical or psychological injuries while pursuing this collaboration with our private partners.”

  “I understand,” said Theodore.

  “You are aware that this project may entail risk?”

  He shrugged. He had decided not to ask any questions. Not yet. Let them tell him what they want him to know.

  Professor Kakkar relaxed. “After the signing of the Cantor Accords, many data caches were put into storage in this facility. The far side of the moon was chosen because without a relay satellite, it is cut off from electromagnetic communication from Earth.”

  “Just in case there is a breach of security,” explained Patricia.

  “This is a breach of security,” observed Theodore.

  “We are applying pressure to the surface of the data cache,” said Patricia. “Not a breach, as such.”

  He looked at Patricia for an indication as to why they were taking this risk. He looked for her secrets in the way she adjusted her bob, in the way she went over the paperwork. Her body language was trained and deliberate, alluringly so. Her white lipstick disavowed the sensuousness of her lips, denied the redness of the body, and in drawing attention to its absence, evoked it. Every utterance conceals. Every gesture hides. Every silence calls attention to itself.

  “I spent the evening going through the notes on your various problems,” said the psychologist. “I’m pleased to discover that you are candid about them. You were raised by your grandmother and because of that you hold opinions and views that derive from her world, formed from before the Seizure. Combined with your study of the period, and your experience with emergences, we are hopeful that you are the right supplier to help us unlock more of the data.”

  “You’re saying I’m old-fashioned,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Patricia. “And for once you might be able to use that to your advantage.”

  * * *

  He slept in the house. He was so exhausted that he awoke within his dream, and finding his body locked, tried to scream to wake himself. He managed a strained yet barely audible mewling before eventually gaining consciousness. He padded to the toilet. The floorboards were cold. The shelves of the bathroom had been filled with projections of the various creams and lotions of the period: the ritual of shampoo then conditioner, hair gel, bacterial soap, body butter, moisturising cream. These consumer objects required a particular behaviour from users and informed them of their obligations through advertising. It was a more wasteful system than his work as an accelerator.

  He opened the medicine cabinet and inspected the household gods: aspirin, paracetamol, then further up, Levora, a contraceptive pill, and Zoloft, for the treatment of depression and anxiety in adolescence. The incomplete girl in the projection. About twelve years old. If they could unlock more of the family data, then it would be possible to recreate the mother and daughter in finer physical detail. And their psychology also, if Kakkar was in possession of cognitive algorithms.

  Downstairs, he discovered that the furnishing of the house had proceeded while he slept: some of the projections had been replaced by physical replicas. A hearty rug was in the middle of the living room, and the white shelving units were now filled with family bric-a-brac: a varsity trophy of a bronze American football on a wooden plinth, ethnic objects acquired on holiday – Peruvian? Not his specialty – and framed needlepoint on the wall, perhaps from a grandmother. In the kitchen, the hearth screen continued to flicker and fluctuate: at any time of the day, wherever they were in the world, the mother could gauge exactly what her husband or daughter was feeling, could plot the precise change in mood over the course of the day. And inspect her own data too, to answer the pressing questions of the age: How am I feeling? Is this normal? Are we dying yet? Can I be saved?

  He opened the front door and stood on the porch in his shorts, gazing across the driveway to the dark banks of observers beyond. He heard the gulls cry again – craaak-craaak-craaak – and he realised that he had been listening to that cry all night. The house was locked in the scant seconds of the recording whereas his time flowed on. He felt the duration of it as an ongoing loss. He called out into the shadows for Patricia, asked for her by name twice, three times. The dark banks shifted, and for a time did not answer. And then a man’s voice told him to go back to bed, and so he padded through the lounge, aware that in his wake silhouettes continued to fill the house with the replicas of lost things.

  5

  THE SENSESUIT

  The next morning, he found an old sensesuit folded over a chair in the bedroom. At first glance, the suit was similar to the one he had worn while climbing Mons Huygens. But this visor was opaque, the grimy and worn surface of the suit made out of hundreds of tiny pressurised patches. His grandmother had an implant so that she could be immersed into data environments. She had suffered accordingly. The sensesuit was safer and it confined the input to the six senses. There was no memory insertion, no cognitive overlay, no direct emotional stimulus. He could wear the sensesuit and remain himself, for what that was worth.

  He went to the bathroom,
took care of his body, went to the breakfast bar, was gratified to find that a bowl of cereal and a bottle of polar milk had been provided for him. Fauna and flora could be raised in the polar campus under that zone’s solar exposure. Life needs the light. He turned the spoon around between his fingers. Why did the school of emergence have a chamber this deep under the surface, away from the light? Why go to the trouble of digging down when there was so much unclaimed real estate on the surface? For shielding from radiation? For protection from meteorites? Or for secrecy? And if so, what were the school hiding in an underground chamber on the farside of the moon and from whom?

  Once he was ready, the engineers helped him into the sensesuit. They opened the back up and connected tubes and antennae for air and data intake, slid on the boots, clipped on the helmet and fired him up. He stumbled to his feet. To the engineers, he must look like a mummified puppet on cut strings, stumbling around their replica of the house. He gazed down at his own body. From inside the simulation, the suit appeared white and clean, as it had been back in the days before the Seizure. Everything he sensed in this environment had been quantified; therefore this suit must have belonged to the family. They would have used it to wander around simulated environments themselves, perhaps used it for enhanced telepresence or for sexual recreation. He turned around: the tubes and spiny wires attached to the back of the suit were invisible; they had not been quantified and so were not part of the sensory simulation. He felt their weight at his back but could not see or touch them.

  He moved closer to the mother and child at the doorway. Their faces remained blurred and unrecognisable. Thanks to the suit’s olfactory interface, he could smell beeswax floor polish. He leant over, took a sheaf of the mother’s hair in his glove, and smelt it too: freshly washed, chemical products with a tang to simulate something organic. He didn’t know what. The artificial flavourings and odours of the era were lost associations and evocations: to this woman, her hair may have smelt of aloe vera or strawberries or the pine-strewn floor of the forest, but these associations had been constructed by contemporary advertising; without exposure to that cultural engineering, the chemicals evoked only a memory of his grandmother’s hand cream, which had also been impregnated with an essence that remained enigmatic yet magical.

  He knelt before the mother and with both hands felt her thighs and calves, her backside and belly, her breasts and face; no physical implants, and muscle tone consistent with contemporary habits of exercise, further confirmation of the family’s middle class status. The daughter’s hips were prepubescent and she had breast buds. She wore her long blonde hair in a plait. He weighed the end of the plait in his glove, and then he saw, on the back of her blazer, a different coloured hair. A strand of ginger hair, not human. Cat hair. The front of the mother and daughter were concealed by the privacy protocol. If he could find out who they were, then the engineers would be able to infer their way into the next tranche of the simulation. It would unlock more data. And he dearly wanted to sense more of their lives.

  From the lips of the mother, he felt a single exhalation on his cheek. The quant sensors had caught her in the act of expelling a breath. Toothpaste and coffee – a unit of soul. The polish on her fingernails was chipped, and her hair was not recently styled. A martyr to motherhood.

  Theodore padded outside. He heard the seagulls call again and again, in a loop, and saw them glide forward and disappear, forward and disappear overhead. The lawn shimmered with dew, a dampness between his toes. Around the back of the house, the grass was longer, and in the shadows the yard was unkempt. Someone’s responsibility, someone’s chore, remaining undone. It was colder here under the branches of half an oak tree. Half the leaves tremored in the breeze, but the other half of the tree had not been quantified because it lay on a neighbouring property; that unquantified half was represented by a static polygon rendering of a photograph. He tested the tree trunk, was pleased to discover that it had been included as part of the stage set, and so he was able to climb up and look out over the fence. The rest of the neighbourhood was similarly blunt in its rendering, unquantified, and so filled in with data from a drone flyby. The branch he used to lever himself up into the tree was rendered vibrantly, smelling greenly and creaking under his weight. He noticed scoring marks on the bark, similar to those he had seen on the projection of the blanket box in the house. Territorial markings. The cat.

  So where was the cat?

  He climbed down off the tree and waded through the long grass. His grandmother’s cats had liked to sleep at the edge of their territory in sunlit patches. He crouched down so that he could peer inside the overgrowth. He found a ginger cat asleep in the dappled light. A vivid and detailed rendering of a cat, its ears rotating and twitching at every noise in its surroundings even as its head was turned delicately toward its back legs. And yet, and yet… the cat yawned, eyes closed, and the twitching of its ears resumed. But they did not loop. Not right away. The cat’s data stream was ongoing, and it was a rich seam of data. For a quantified family, being able to slip on a sensesuit and experience what their cat had been up to that day was a selling point of the technology. The mother and daughter were hidden from him. But the cat – white whiskers, tiger-striping, green iris and sharp oval pupils – the cat was open source.

  The distant purring glide of electric cars, the salt tang carried in from the harbour.

  He took off the helmet. He stood in the dark cavern surrounding the grounds of the house. The projection of the long grass came up to his knees, and the cat glowed contentedly at his feet. He saw a projection of himself in the broken window of the shed. The suit was included but where his face would have been, the gap in the data showed up as the projection of a featureless blue chromakey head. In this other world, he was a ghost from the future. A blue man.

  * * *

  “The cat is the back door into the family hearth,” he explained to Patricia and Professor Kakkar. “It is not confined to the one second loop of the mother and daughter. The stream runs for seven minutes. Seven minutes in which the cat sleeps and responds at an ambient level to the environment. And then the loop is cut off. I believe the loop is cut because one of the other family members interacts with the cat, and so at that point, the cat’s data falls under the hearth’s security lockdown.”

  Patricia leant back in her chair, considering. “Family interactions with the cat are private?”

  “Yes. Of course. The only reason why the cat is not locked down across its entire data set is because it was part of the social aspect of quantification. People shared their cat journeys with one another. Cat time was a major incentive for people to submit to quantification. Children wore sense suits to share in their cat’s umwelt.”

  The term was unfamiliar to Patricia but not to Professor Kakkar. He smoothed his hand over the braille of his stubbly brown pate.

  “The umwelt is the name for the subset of reality an organism is able to sense,” Kakkar explained. “Different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals.”

  Theodore said, “There is so much more information within this data set than I can sense or your system can project. Including seven minutes of sensorium which make the cat’s ears twitch while it is sleeping.”

  “So what are you saying?” asked Patricia.

  Theodore shook his head.

  “I don’t know. Not yet. Except, the data is richer than your projections allow. And that you’re not entirely locked out. There’s a backdoor for you.”

  Professor Kakkar disagreed.

  “Backdoors and encryption belong to the age of hacking. No one has successfully hacked a system since the Cantor Accords.”

  “This encryption is old,” said Patricia. “From before the Seizure.”

  “Yes. Your engineers need to go back and study how to exploit this back door into the hearth. This cat flap. Dr Easy could do it.”

  He had avoided mentioning Dr Easy until then, just so he could catch them unawares. Sure enough, P
atricia’s face went into lockdown, her lips parted around silence. Professor Kakkar looked down at his large white trainers, mentally sorting through his procedural cant to find the correct response.

  “We can’t allow Dr Easy here,” said Patricia.

  The professor seemed relieved that she had taken this approach. He took up her point.

  “We hold many data caches in the cave. For security reasons we have to control access to each and every one with discrete wired connections. We cannot have a wireless intelligence walking around. The risk of infection is too great.”

  “Then we take the data to the robot.”

  “The data doesn’t surface and it certainly doesn’t leave Farside,” said Kakkar.

  Theodore didn’t want to push his luck. If he made them too uncomfortable then he would be taken off the project, and he was keen to remain involved. He had kept himself apart from the world for too long. Kept talents and powers dormant. Patricia watched him withdraw his objections, and she seemed relieved. Not because she had felt threatened – he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he wielded any power – but because by choosing to not question them further, he made it possible for her to retain his services. She stood up and prepared to leave. At the door, she turned around.

  “About the cat,” she said. “Good work.”

  * * *

  The story of how life became data is also the story of how data became alive.

  The quantified self movement had used scent receptors, embedded cameras and microphones, galvanic skin sensors, micro-GPS, temperature and pressure gauges, spectrometers across the wavelength of light from gamma rays and x-rays to the far infrared to infer an approximate translation of the ceaseless immeasurable experience contained within a single bubble of reality. A river became a seething geometric undulation of data. Every beat of the heart was tagged with a probability that it would be the last beat of that heart. Algorithms inferred likely outcomes from patterns within the stream, and initiated the appropriate stimulation to the subject. To the user. (Although this term “user” was misleading as it suggested agency on behalf of the subject.) The user was encouraged to adjust their behaviour to lift their metrics out of the orange banded zones of risk, the blue bands of unhappiness, and into the pale cream zones of safety and the whiteness of happiness.