The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  Solitary women adopted different expressions for their loops. These expressions were learned young and were also performative. The soshul streams monitored by Verity Horbo showed solitary girls trying on all manner of faces. Solitary but not alone. Because the girls were looking into the black compound eye of soshul, a hundred million girls reflected on individual obsidian orbs, some pouting in ironic imitation of other girls on adjacent orbs, or making the ugly face against expectations of beauty, making the blowfish face, the pout, the askance tongue. All these faces had to be learned and they were all performative and they were all units of communication. In soshul, the face became an emoticon.

  In “No Regrets Evah”, the models clutched their shopping bags to their breasts, to get them in shot. The restoration had preserved thousands of bags from the period: luxury bags fashioned from alligator hide, canvas backpacks, golden purses, hessian sacks. Bags remained status symbols in the asylum malls; at the extreme edge of the trend, rituals surrounding the bag had metastasised into diamond-studded exteriorised wombs.

  He walked slowly down the staircase. Verity pushed fronds of white hair behind a red ear as she gazed at the hearth.

  “Your father is in traffic again,” she said. “I’ll tell him to relax.” And this she did with a gesture that was somewhere between a caress and a warning.

  “And does the hearth say what I should do?” asked Meggan.

  “I don’t think the hearth is calibrated for teenage emotions.”

  Meggan winced at the attempt at parental humour.

  “Please, I don’t want you spying on me. I can cope.”

  Verity sat back and placed her spoon deliberately beside her bowl.

  “You’re still a child. I have to look after you.”

  Meggan went to reply but chose not to speak. Just left the unsaid in her open mouth. Speaking the zero.

  Insolence. That was part of the emotion in “No Regrets Evah”. Defiance of custom. The rapacious open mouth moving through the crowd like a tank through traffic. No regrets meant being defiant in the face of the past, defiant in the face of memory. The mouth wide in horror. Self-horror. Pre-Seizure culture insisted upon the now to prepare for the amnesia to come. The Seizure erased humanity’s data, yes, but it was aided by a wilful refusal to admit to any sort of reckoning. So much had to be forgotten, deleted, erased.

  There were thousands of Diet Joozah artefacts tagged as “intangibles” in the restoration. The brand represented substantial capital. Yet it wore the guise of young women. And this… this… humility was not the right word… no, it was not an emotion that caused their mouths to gape so. This had been an error in his long thought. Power could be recognised by its imitations of silence. In the same way that Meggan held her mouth open but did not speak back to her mother. Perhaps power was a careful absence at the heart of every artefact. A white zero.

  Meggan put on her school blazer, finished packing her bag and submitted to her mother’s kiss at the door. Verity let her daughter go, watched her walk away, the gulls cried twice, and then she turned back to the data of the hearth.

  Verity reached into an invisible bag and pulled out the stream of her daughter’s soshul, the loops of Meggan’s friends and frenemies beseeching, performing, ignoring, acting out. Then she extracted her daughter’s mood feed going back weeks. Sliding this data to one side, she plotted the blue zones of the mood feed against the soshul activity, found a correlation: the posts of Mala the Maladroit. The girl with the young-old face playing with her Meggan doll. Calmer this time, Verity looped Mala playing with the dolls, Mala mimicking her daughter’s precise enunciation. Acting out old goody-two-shoes then slipping back into protomallisms. Much of the slang was unfamiliar to Theodore. A lot of bay-sounds. Basic bitch and bae and babe. She said Meggan was moist. What did that mean? Sometimes her accent was Californian, sometimes East London. Either a function of too much time spent on soshul or a marker of psychological instability. Mala also had dolls of men dressed in suits and ties and these men fawned over then fucked the doll of Meggan. The male dolls could have represented teachers or parents. Authority figures.

  Verity paused Mala’s obscene loop, intoned the word school and there was a minute of questioning beeps until the school accepted her call. She was forceful and effective in the way she engaged with the gatekeepers of the institution, skills from her time at work, before she became a mother. She made her way through the layers of admin until, finally, the principal appeared on screen, a black woman in an open-necked orange shirt, slicked back hair and power jewellery. Brief pleasantries and then Verity shared Mala’s soshul with her, the game with the dolls, the mimicking of Meggan’s voice.

  “It’s bullying,” said Verity,

  “We monitor all the children’s soshul. I can’t believe we’ve missed this.”

  “It’s ouroboros. The loop lasts for ten seconds and then it consumes itself.”

  “But you can see them.”

  “Yes. I have tools that can reconstruct destroyed loops.”

  “But they weren’t meant for you to see.”

  “They were meant for my daughter to see.”

  The principal shook her head.

  “If Mala only intended for them to last for ten seconds then–”

  “What are you saying?”

  “By reconstructing the loops you are contravening her privacy.”

  “That’s a side issue. Her behaviour is unacceptable. I insist you sanction her.”

  “We don’t sanction children on the insistence of other children’s parents, Ms Horbo.”

  Verity accepted that she had overstepped the mark.

  “I’m upset. I’m bringing this to your attention.”

  The principal made gestures of supplication and reassurance, and then she drew Verity into her confidence.

  “Mala is a challenger child,” she said. “She’s had a very disruptive upbringing and the school has taken on her case because of our excellent track record in improving the metrics of challenger children. The more children like Mala we turn around, the more funding we get to support the excellence of children like Meggan. That is the reality that I must act within.”

  “You will speak to her?”

  “I certainly will.”

  “And her parents?”

  “Yes,” said the principal.

  After the call, Verity prodded around the civil registry looking for traces of Mala and her parents. She called up the class photograph. Mala was not in it.

  Verity paced around the kitchen, thinking through her problem. She opened up her daughter’s timeline again, isolated school leaving times. She fed the parameters of Mala’s face into the hearth and it searched for matches around the entering and leaving of school. The hearth took samples of first person viewpoint rather than continuous stream, the intermittence a legal workaround. Also, Meggan could opt out of first person at any time with a trigger word. Early iterations had used constant first person streaming and that had upset unquantified people.

  The search criteria were not met: according to the samples held on the hearth, Mala and Meggan had never actually spoken to one another face-to-face. Mala had been glimpsed at the back of class. Or skulking around the playground. Being accompanied from class by a teacher. But there was no data on face-to-face communication.

  Verity took a range of samples of Mala’s voice, and ran a hearth search for that audioprint. No matches came back. So – no catcalling in the playground. Next, she ran an audio search for Mala’s name and that brought up a large cache of conversations and remarks between Verity and her friends. For the rest of the morning, Verity listened to these conversations. Theodore drew up a chair, and did likewise. Mala, it seemed, had a past.

  She had told some girls that she lived in sheltered housing with her mother. That they were in hiding from her father. He was violent. Had threatened to kill them both if he ever found them. Mala can’t even look at men, say the girls. Her father is English but she doesn’t want anyone to know tha
t, so that’s why her accent is so weird. Other girls say that Mala is a liar and that her mother and father split up, and that Mala gets moved from schools not to protect her from her father but because she is a fantasist: the insecure new girl telling stories to get attention.

  Verity summoned up the class photograph on the hearth again. The date on the photograph indicated Mala was in the class at that time, there was crossover with her soshul posts. With both hands, Verity gathered together all the followers of Mala and all the people and bots she followed, then began segmentation, in each instance cross-referencing usernames with other web presences to infer real names, real identities. This segmentation was run through a series of lenses to detect groupings. It took a while for Theodore to figure out what she was looking for. She plotted the followers geographically, and then searched for congregations in the UK. If Mala had left England on the run from her father, would she sever all contact, or would she still follow her old British friends?

  No, nothing significant in the UK. Verity checked the startup date of Mala’s account. It had been set up only a month before she joined Meggan’s class. Odd, most girls had soshul from eight or nine years old onward. She must have purged her old soshul. Would a thirteen year-old girl really be capable of making such a clean break if she wasn’t in danger?

  Verity drew her lips back and tapped thoughtfully at her teeth.

  What was Verity looking for?

  Verity got up, stood in front of the mirror, then she went to the bathroom. He had no idea what decision she had come to, or what she was going to do next. He was stuck in real-time with her. He needed a way of moving through the archive in the same way that Verity controlled the hearth. While she was gone, he put down his pen and paper, and imitated some of the gestures that Verity had made. The hearth did not respond. He tried voice command. He tried writing commands down on the paper. Nothing. The hearth seemed like the natural interface with the archive. But it did not accept his input. It might not be capable of running any searches other than the ones within its history.

  Verity returned from the bathroom and called her husband, Oliver Horbo. A loop of Oliver in happier times trailed his presence, in corduroys and fleece and hiking boots, mock heroic among redwoods; then the live feed connected and he appeared – judging from the unflattering lighting and angle of the video – older and in a cubicle at work.

  She told Oliver that their daughter was being bullied by a girl in her class, and that she wasn’t sure that the school were going to deal with it effectively. His body language indicated that he would have preferred to discuss this matter at home, that it was insufficiently urgent for work; tiny tells of reluctance that he stifled. Oliver counselled caution.

  “No,” said Verity. “This is damage, Olly. This girl is psychologically damaging our daughter.”

  “It might just be teen stuff. We have to let it run its course.”

  “Soshul puts the bully in our house. In her bedroom. She can’t get away from Mala. Every time she goes on soshul another loop appears and then it is destroyed before she can respond. It’s like someone is hiding in her wardrobe and they disappear every time she opens the door.”

  “We should limit her exposure to soshul.”

  “And punish her for the actions of this girl?”

  Oliver, the weary husband, remembered that this was a domestic problem, and not a work one, so he did not have to come up with a solution. His manner shifted, and he adopted a slanted, listening posture.

  “What do you want to do?” he said.

  This approach annoyed his wife.

  “You don’t have an opinion on this? Really?”

  “I’m trying not to be angry about it.”

  “We should be angry.”

  “This girl sounds troubled.”

  “Yes. Murderers are troubled. Thieves are troubled. Bullies are troubled.”

  “Let the principal speak to her. Then we’ll see if the loops stop.”

  “You should see the way Meggan’s data aggregates on the hearth. It’s deep blue.”

  “I’ll take you all out at the weekend. Dim Sum. She’ll eat that.”

  A flicker of distraction on her husband’s face, something in the office wanting his attention.

  “How’s the team?” she said.

  “Still missing you,” he replied.

  “I want to come back to work,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been feeling so off the pace I couldn’t imagine coming back to Monad. Motherhood wrecks you, physically and mentally. But since we got the hearth, I can feel my mental muscles hardening up. I got my pelvic floor back and now I need to work on my psychic floor.”

  “We could do with another income again.”

  “I’m interested in some of the newer mining and pattern matching tools. Could you upgrade my permission? I’d like to train myself up.”

  He was distracted. He did it. Verity took the permission and turned it into an icon, then placed the icon in her invisible bag.

  “Give my best to everyone there,” she said, smiling. “And tell them to watch out. I’ll be back on campus kicking ass before they know it.”

  * * *

  She smiled all the way to the end of the call, and then as soon as her husband was off the line, she reached into the invisible bag and removed the icon he had given her. She opened it up on the hearth. A toolkit. One tool in particular caught her eye. A tricorn hat. Jester. She initiated the program. Jester asked her to select a username. She slouched back in her seat, thought for a moment, and then keyed in her new name. Totally Damaged Mom.

  * * *

  At midnight, with all the family members sleeping, Theodore returned to the guest bedroom, took off his sensesuit and gathered his notes. He was reviewing them when Patricia visited. She opened the bedroom door, said hi, removed her comms from her earlobes and fingers, unclipped her protective collar, sat lightly on the edge of the bed, and hefted off her boots.

  “Productive day?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Do you want to go over my notes?”

  She went through his notes.

  “And what happened after she chose her username?”

  “Jester requested access to the hearth. She refused. The program booted her out again. A dead end. Then she went through her own soshul, made herself a salad, and went out. The hearth went to sleep so I couldn’t follow her. I waited in the house alone all afternoon, and then she returned with Meggan. Clearly something had gone on at school. The daughter could barely look at her mother. A general air of shame. Verity ate alone, watched TV, went to bed. Her husband came back about an hour ago. He went straight to bed. I knocked off.”

  “We have a hundred hours until sun up. Just in case you are losing track of time.”

  “Why don’t we mothball the house and pick up the project on the next lunar night.”

  She stretched and pointed her bare feet.

  “I don’t think so. I can’t keep this locked down. Kakkar and his team are leaky.”

  He sat up on his elbows. Part of him was prepared to argue with her. But he didn’t want to jeopardise the sex. In her sheer black body suit, she was irresistible. It was more than he could stand. She liked it when he bit her, when he gave every sign of not being able to control himself. What began as the imitation of savagery became the real thing; he went at her quickly, then reared back to recover. He fed on her delight in controlling him, because that control would mean nothing to her unless he was strong and worthy and difficult. Still, in this moment of recovery, he chose to remind her, in the way he stopped and touched her forehead, and kissed her, and moved deeper within her, that he was indulging her fantasy of controlling him just for the duration of the sex, and that it meant nothing in what remained of their real lives.

  Afterwards, he went to the bathroom and washed his face. He didn’t like the house when he was out of his sensesuit, its flimsy fixtures and fittings, and artificial light illuminating the moon cave. The wind
ows still had tape on them. A nagging sense that their sex had been indecently loud. That he might have woken the Horbos. A sense he could not shake even though he knew they existed only in a deep and encrypted past.

  He went back into the bedroom.

  “What is our metric of success?” he asked Patricia.

  “Orgasm,” she replied.

  “I mean, for the project. How will I know when I’m done?”

  She sat naked on the bed, her knees pulled under her chin. She was always stretching, never dormant.

  “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

  “If time is short then I need to know specifically what I’m looking for.”

  Patricia reached over the side of the bed, and pulled out his notes from the day. She plucked out one in particular, concerning Verity’s acquisition of the Jester program.

  “This is what we’re interested in,” she said. “Focus on this.”

  He took the paper from her, read his own handwriting.

  “Totally Damaged Mom.”

  “The username appears in the metadata of the Horbo loop.”

  “I didn’t know the Horbo loop had metadata.”

  “It has taken years for Kakkar to reconstruct it.”

  She found her underwear and pulled it on, shivering as she did so. “You’ve made progress. But there is more to learn. I don’t want to speculate what exactly because speculation can determine discovery. But this is our glimpse into the black box moment of the emergence. If we can reconstruct a chain of causality then we don’t have to think of them as emergences any longer. We will know who made them. Where they came from. How they happened. This knowledge could be highly valuable.”

  “Valuable to who?”

  “Valuable to anyone with dealings with the emergences.”

  He looked quizzically at her, weighing up the slight naked female form on his bed.

  “The Cantor Accords forbid collaboration between humans and emergences.”