The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “Yet you have a relationship with Dr Easy.”

  “The doctor is merely an observer.”

  “You know that there is no such thing as mere observation. I mean, I set out to dispassionately observe your work and look at the mess we’ve got into.”

  She pressed her feet into her boots and adjusted the scales of her armoured legs. Her breasts and arms remained naked. She climbed onto him. The pressure between their bodies was the same as the pressure he had felt through the sensesuit, just before he was expelled from the archive.

  “I will take risks for you,” he said.

  She pulled on a sheer black top, and then something amusing occurred to her. “Should I be jealous of Verity Horbo? Are you developing feelings for her too?” She felt him, weighed up any passion that remained within him. “You are keeping two women in the same house. Now that is risky.”

  “You’re trying to distract me, are you afraid of my questions?”

  “No, I’m bored of them. I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.” She climbed off him and resumed dressing. “Anything more will prejudice your work. In this particular case, speculation could obscure discovery, it’s as simple as that. Another hundred hours in the sensesuit. Don’t waste time sleeping. We’ve both got work to do.”

  She closed the bedroom door behind her, and he listened to her walk through the house, how it sounded so brittle and hollow compared to the deep woody tones from within the sensesuit.

  8

  JESTER

  He was alone again in the Horbo house. He lay on the bed, closed his eyes, felt the pull of sleep, resisted it, consoled himself with memory. He remembered talking to his grandmother about her implant. With the implant she did not need a sensesuit. Archives unfurled directly into her consciousness. He knew that during the Seizure, she had lost control of her implant and had a reality imposed upon her. She did not share the specifics with him, except to say that in this imposed reality she had played the role of a nurse in a lost battle and that even though it was scary, when it was over, and she came out of that living story, the separation was painful. “The unhappening of it all made me peculiarly unhappy,” she explained.

  Her generation told stories about the Seizure. They told them to one another late at night and in confidence, stories pockmarked with hesitancy and shared allusions that made them difficult for outsiders to follow. As a boy he was surprised by this reluctance to share; if he had a war story like they did, then he would make loops of it all day long.

  “Not everyone is proud of what they did in the Seizure,” said his grandmother. “It made people realise they weren’t as good or as right as they thought they were.”

  “Were people punished for what they did?”

  “No. We chose restoration over retribution. A veil was drawn. The emergences helped us forget.”

  His remembering became dreaming. Conversations he might have once had. He was saying “But what happens if you lose yourself, Grandma?” and she replied “But that begs the question: what is there to lose?” And then Dr Easy was there, long leather arms reaching out for him with thick seams like the surface of his sensesuit. “What are you?” said Dr Easy, with such urgency that he awoke, in order to answer that question.

  Headless in the gloom, the sensesuit reclined, partially inflated, on a chair. Along the seam of the neck section, there were several dark tendrils, each about ten centimetres in length, flexing in the air, like tar underwater. This was new. He raised himself on his elbow to take a closer look and the tendrils quickly withdrew. He got out of bed to inspect the suit more closely. The exterior of the suit was crisscrossed with seams forming a surface of quilted panels. The interior was a rubber-like satin so soft it was almost liquid. Between this layer and his skin the air could be heated or chilled to match simulated atmospheres; or, if the suit was tasked with simulating human touch, this layer of liquid satin could emulate the gentle compress of lips, fingertips, or a firm handshake. He hadn’t seen this layer move outside the suit before. He turned the suit around, looking for more of these tendrils but they had vanished without trace.

  He put the sensesuit back on and sat on the edge of the bed, holding the empty helmet in his hands as if contemplating his own decapitation. The exterior of the helmet was inflated in various sections, and beneath these large bubbles, he felt a resin shell, the only hard piece in the armour, for protection if he banged into something while moving around the archive. Early sensesuits had not been designed for movement, so the user experience omitted proprioception – the sense of the body moving through space – preventing full immersion into archives. Because he could walk around the physical replica of the Horbo house as he explored the archive, then his experience of that archive was rich and granular, but that veracity came at a price; although rationally he could easily tell the real from the merely preserved, more primitive aspects of him were fooled by the archive.

  He sniffed the helmet. The padded headband was musky. He engaged the sensory feed of the suit without putting the helmet on. His legs felt the warmth of sunlight upon them. He was halved – his body enjoying morning light in the archive, his head bowed under the weight of moonnight.

  Patricia had teased him about his feelings for Verity. He was developing an attachment to her, a feeling he had not yet calibrated: the mother thing. His mother had died when he was two years old. He could not remember what it was like to be mothered. He turned the helmet over. It was protective, intimate. The front interior was a holographic theatre. His grandmother Alex had used her money and social power to raise him; she was fond of him, he was sure of that, but he knew that she would never have sacrificed anything for him. In the minutes of unshakeable dread that constituted a weirdcore hangover, he would think badly of his grandmother, convince himself that Alex had taken him in due to her guilt over the narcotic misadventure that killed his mother.

  He had talked to Patricia about her upbringing. She mentioned the attributes of her father that she had internalised – discipline, self-reliance, humour – and the attributes of her mother that she had externalised, the faults and failings that were to be avoided. Patricia spoke like a man and walked like a woman. Verity was more maternal, and in observing her, he was also discovering the counterpoints or paradoxes of mothers, their ruthless compassion, fierce tiredness, passive strife.

  Verity demonstrated these complex virtues but there was something else within the archive, alive to his presence, a gravitational pull, not Verity but something like her, an untempered emotional intensity that he could feel through the layers of the simulation. He felt its presence in the way the cat moved around him, the way the encryption opened up, the selection of quantified moments he wandered through. The archive wanted him to use it.

  He put his head into the helmet. The satin drifted away from his skin leaving behind the smell of floor wax, dust motes, and the vented detergent vapours of a clothes dryer drifting back into the house through an open window. Layers of encryption shifted and then he was back in the archive.

  A scream from downstairs. Not a good-time scream. Verity screaming, what did you do, what did you do? A mother’s fierce fragility. Crisis in the house.

  Acting on instinct, he ran from the bedroom, down the stairs. The front door was open and on the porch he could see Verity Horbo’s sobbing back. She was kneeling over a body. Meggan. Her daughter. Theodore felt uncertainty in his chest and fingertips, the instinct to flee bad news before he became infected by it. He stood fast. This wasn’t his life. It was an archive. All over long ago. And so he had to look.

  Verity was sobbing over the body of her daughter. Stepping forward he saw the child’s neck was broken, and bound with a knotted sheet. Verity pulled something from around her daughter’s legs. A long sheet of bubble wrap and parcel tape. Verity pulled the stiff body to her chest and then, sensing something was wrong, she pushed the body away from her. She sobbed and laughed and sobbed. He reached out to comfort her. The sensesuit registered her
warm heaving back, the sound of her crying and the strong smell of her fear. He couldn’t help but console her. He touched her, and so she became real to him.

  Verity rose slowly, and walked back into the house. He was alone with Meggan’s body and its coffin of torn bubble wrap and cardboard packaging stickered with Fed-Ex labels, which he noticed had been addressed to Meggan. And then the world seemed to swim, a woozy sideward shift, as if the sensesuit was being recalibrated. The granularity of the lawn, the porch, the dead body intensified. Her skin was blue and speckled pink and waxy to the touch. He abraded her hair between his fingers, and discovered the harsh silky impression of nylon. Of doll hair. The body had a chemical smell – frazzled plastic and freshly cut composite. It was not Meggan. It was a life-sized replica of her, set in a morbid pose. A doll.

  Back in the house, Verity called FedEx but she had to pause the call halfway through, to sob and laugh again. Customer service came online. From the soothing, sympathetic way the customer service operative responded to her emotional state, it was clear that they were not human. The help routine skilfully counselled Verity then offered to redirect her to emergency services.

  She changed her mind, told them she was fine, that she’d made a mistake. She sat crosslegged on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. He walked over and sat down next to her. The blue veins in the back of her hand. The clashing odours of fear and freshly washed hair. The hearth had taken deeper samples of this moment. The skin on her forearms were raised in goosebumps.

  “Jester,” she said.

  The tricorn hat appeared on the hearth screen. Again, Jester requested complete access to the family data. This time, she granted its request. A buffer wheel marked the passing of time, quiet human moments containing trillions of intersections between the Horbo family and the sorting algorithms of Jester.

  She called Oliver. Her husband listened in shocked silence as she related the events of the morning: the delivery of a large package for Meggan, the unwrapping of the package, the discovery of an effigy of their daughter as suicide victim. A made thing, another one of Mala’s dolls. The face mocked up from Meggan’s soshul and an image search for loops of suicide plus hanging plus autopsy.

  “Did you call the police?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “The body… The doll is evidence. They’ll be able to trace it.”

  “We know who did it. Mala knows they won’t touch her. They won’t bother. Teen stuff, like you said.”

  “Does Meggan know?”

  “No.”

  “Call the principal again.”

  “No. The authorities have no reason to take our side. We have to be smarter than that. Do you remember the toolbox you sent me, yesterday? I opened it. The usual apps but then I noticed Jester was in there.”

  “Yes, Jester is back in the sandbox. It’s buggy.”

  “It has always been problematic. By design.”

  “We got the core functionality working. Media generation. Jester is fucking powerful.”

  “You said buggy.”

  “We implemented predictive algorithms so that Jester could infer user intent, anticipate user needs. Problem was, Jester was completing user’s half-thoughts then acting on their half-formed desires. Users reported this functionality as a malfunction because it appeared to them that Jester was acting on its own initiative. But it wasn’t an error – it responds to unconscious cues the users are unaware of having given.”

  “Unconscious search. I remember the pitch. Search was predicated on articulated desire. The future was inarticulate desire.”

  He peered at his wife through the screen. “Did you start Jester? It’ll want access to the hearth so that it can begin its inferences. We’ll be naked.”

  The wheel buffered on. A hanging calculation. A suspended communication. She opened her mouth as if to lie then, instead, waved the call to a close. She told the hearth to block Oliver for an hour. The wheel ceased its spin. The hearth blacked out as Jester launched.

  The user interface was quirky. Slowly, one by one, marottes of the jester emerged out of the dark. Each marotte had a different face and outfit, while remaining big-nosed, rosy-cheeked, ghastly grinning variations on the theme of the jester. The caricature heads were attached to sticks, the end of each pointed toward Verity, and her active username of Totally Damaged Mom. She reached over to the soshul streams and picked out Mala’s wriggling stream of loops. She threw this bait to the marottes and then with an angry downward wave designated Mala as the client.

  Mara’s stream exploded into a heat map of psychological tendencies, out of which grew decision trees of actionable insights: a girl rendered as a navigable forest.

  Jester asked for intensity settings. Verity swiped the slider to drip-drip. Jester’s analysis offered up a menu of psychological pressure points. Verity pressed the radial button marked “Daddy”.

  “But first we have to find Daddy,” she said.

  Theodore could not immediately comprehend the import of the information Jester arranged on the screen. It seemed to be a series of archaic chat boards, inconsequential discussions of home repair and autoparts, and loops of middle-aged men talking on soshul about their rights. And then Jester showed its hand: a loop of Mala talking about Meggan dissolved into a voiceprint analysis, identifying her accent, word choice, and syntactical structure. Jester searched soshul for a match of similar speech patterns, with particular focus on British males in the right age and demographic to be Mala’s father. At the same time, Mala’s mother was up on the board. Jester inferred the mother’s identity through its first sweep of her daughter’s loops. Having identified Tabitha Ford, it presented her soshul, all of which was less than two years old. Minimal activity. Tabitha had gone out of her way to avoid being tagged. So, mother and daughter had two new identities. The story that they were in hiding from the husband and father was plausible after all. On a third screen, one of the marottes – a caricature of an alienated gothic teen jester – had produced its first loop, and it played on the hearth for Verity’s sign off. The loop was called Twelve Things Daddy Did That Are Absolutely Unforgivable. Verity gave her approval with a wave of assent, and so the loop was placed into Mala’s stream.

  Another marotte jangled for her attention. Under a tricorn hat, its face was a grotesque caricature of Freud. Go on, she gestured. Close analysis of Mala’s loops showed self-harming marks and scars on her arms and calves. Jester Freud unveiled a decision tree for accelerating this tendency within the client. Analysis suggested acceleration through positive reinforcement. Another marotte analysed Mala’s media preferences and suggested creating a loop by a soshul star called Cara, who was notorious for her intense confessions. Verity approved this suggestion. A director marotte with artistic beard and clapperboard called “action”. A minute later, all the data on the hearth cleared to show a fabricated stream of Cara’s followers suggesting the star self-harmed, that they had heard her confession, one night on an ouroboros loop, of her habit of cutting herself to feel better. The Director marotte generated seven grainy, underlit loops of Cara showing the marks on her feet and then crying. Verity signed off on the self-harming threads and loops, and the whole package was placed within Mala’s stream.

  Progress on finding the father buffered and stalled. Enough, for now. Verity muted her session and went back outside to the porch. The effigy of her daughter lay unblinking under the hot morning sun. She covered the face with a blanket. The family cat walked slowly across the lawn, sniffed at the new object on its territory, then climbed onto the chest of the effigy. It lay down, front paws folded, back legs sprawled, and blinked slowly at Theodore.

  “Enough,” said Verity.

  Theodore wrote this line down, and then glanced up. Verity was also gazing directly at him. Their eyes met, and he felt the frisson of erotic opportunism. Her pale skin flushed at her forehead and cheeks.

  “I know what you want,” she whispered.

  “Can you see me?” he said.

  “
I need you to want,” she said.

  The cries of the seagulls looped faster into a screaming glitch. The street beyond the house darkened and emanated a deep cold. The lawn was a disc of green light surrounded by shadows and silhouettes of banks of equipment, with engineers and operatives moving between the kit: the sensesuit was feeding him data from the cavern beyond. He was simultaneously within and without the archive. He looked down at his own body and saw that the suit had changed shape: his chest rippled with solid geometries – pyramids and cylinders, orbs and cubes, sorting and resorting in search of coherence. He tried to release the helmet but his gloves resisted fine motor control, with pressure pads pressing in random sequences against the individual bones of his fingers. The arms and legs of the suit were alive with tendrils.

  The cat, lying on the chest of the effigy of Meggan, spoke to him with synthesised feminine cadences.

  “Error,” said the cat. “Pathway broken. Restoring archive to previous settings.”

  The sensesuit expanded along each limb, inflated into pyramidal sections until it resembled a giant starfish in which he floated immobilised. This exterior expansion of the suit came with interior compression: the inner silken layers hardened and compressed his rib cage and got underneath his sternum.

  He shouted for the archive to be shut down. His scream vanished into the archive without echo.

  “Shutdown initiated,” said the cat, then it stopped, as if sensing a fly nearby. “Please exit the archive so that shutdown can be completed,” it said, then resumed licking its paw.

  In the cavern, they could see he was in trouble. The two realities were layered, a shadow beneath a reflection, and through those layers, he saw Patricia walking toward him, the surface of her armour stiffening into protective plates, her gloves thickening into heavy gauntlets with sharpened fingertips. She was going to cut him out. No, not yet. He could stand the pain if it meant progress. He put both palms out at her, an unequivocal message to stop. She was confused that he could see her but she held herself back.