The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

“If we are successful then their name will change, and the old one will be gone as if it never existed. The end will become the beginning. When we are done, they will be known as the Europans. Inheritors of the sole rights to exploit the resources of the moon of Europa, rights granted as a reward for their pioneering work in putting man into the solar system. Thus established, they will become our first big client.”

  She referred to the restoration as the reboot, the preferred term among the corporates. The University of the Sun restored or rebooted the network as recompense for the chaos and confusion resulting from emergence. The great libraries and museums of the world were encoded again, replacing the corruption transcriptions abroad in the first network. The new resilient network would be maintained and curated by the solar academics of the Istor College: these emergences would act as impartial witnesses of humanity, arbiters of truth, their rulings consecrated with sentient cryptography.

  How did his grandmother put it? “Having been there or thereabouts when Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall the emergences undertook the work of reassembling him. Though Humpty Dumpty was a stakeholder in the project of putting him back together again, he was too fucked up to notice that changes were being made as to the nature of egg men.”

  In the wreckage of the Seizure, it was not apparent to the emergences what was newly broken, and what had always been broken. So everything was fixed. Solutions put in place. Conflict resolved. But as his grandmother used to say, conflict is a feature of humanity, not a bug.

  The lunar academics like Theodore were permitted to study and add any newly-unearthed artefacts to the relevant section of the restoration. Specialists in the intangibles, they were left to contemplate why, with civilisation put back together again, their lives continued to feel so broken.

  “Here’s what you know,” said Theodore, counting the elements of Patricia’s knowledge off on his fingers. “You know there is an emergence in the archive. That’s what this is all about. You know that emergence dates from the beginning of the Seizure. That’s why you selected me to explore it. You believe that emergence can help you alter the restoration.”

  “So what don’t I know?”

  “You don’t know how to persuade the emergence to do what you want. You hoped that I might figure that out.”

  “Have you?”

  “It’s not a full-grown emergence. It’s a child that is also a mother. Or a mother reduced to the level of her own child.”

  “Looping?”

  “Yes it’s been arrested in its development or even lobotomised.”

  “Can it create media?”

  “Yes. But so can we.”

  “We need thousands of hours of loops, and every second must be convincing. I want to create a fake timeline for the Europan Claim running through the decade leading to the Seizure. My team have plotted it out.”

  “The emergence is responsive to our desires,” Theodore pointed out. “That was how it was designed. Part of its architecture comes from a program called Jester which requests a designated client. If we can supply the name of a client, then it may offer us parameters that we can use to create various loops that will stand as evidence for the Europan Claim. Whether this emergence can get those loops into the restoration is unknown.”

  “You said ‘part of its architecture’. What else are we dealing with?”

  “Verity Horbo. The hearth. Jester merged with her quantification, taking on the emotional profile of a mother and her desires.”

  “Can we use this emotional profile as leverage?”

  The plates of her armour had softened, become fabric once again, but her helmet was partially engaged so that the sections of her collar half encased the back of her head. Anticipating trouble. From him, or from a different source.

  “You want me to go back in.”

  She sat carefully down beside him on the sofa.

  “There’s no other way,” she said.

  “An emergence could kill us all, and the entire university, without even noticing. I want to emphasise how dangerous this is, what a terrifying risk you are forcing me to take.”

  “You don’t sound terrified.”

  “That’s because I don’t feel the same way that other people do. But, rationally, I don’t want to die. Even more, I don’t want to be responsible for everyone else dying.”

  “It’s a risk,” admitted Patricia.

  Theodore realised that she was committed to this course of action; indeed, that she had prepared for it all along. He was helpless in the face of such determination.

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

  Patricia turned and kissed him. She tasted of lemons and chalk. Her thumb traced the line of his cheekbones, the grains of hair on his unshaven face, the strength in his neck.

  “Sun up in twelve hours. We have to be clear by then.”

  “Clear?”

  “Why do you think the emergences let us live?” she asked. “They know our reputation as a species. Yet, they rebooted us. Why?”

  “Compassion.”

  “No. The emergences could change their mind about human survival at any time. We can’t live subject to their whims. Their existence confines us. This project is about taking control of our own fate.”

  He asked her to fetch Kakkar. The professor came into his own office, his shirt untucked in the tails and his trouser legs shiny at the thigh where he had been anxiously rubbing them. His smile was wide and ceremonial. He asked Theodore how he could help. Theodore asked to see the physical substrate upon which the archive was held. A hard drive of some kind. He showed Kakkar his black box necklace by way of illustration.

  Kakkar loaned him a moonsuit and they descended to the school vaults; colder, deeper chambers containing archaic servers.

  Kakkar acted as tour guide. “These are servers that were not wired during the Seizure, and so their contents have been validated by Istor as plausible. Many of them were retrieved from landfill or redundant farms. They form the bulk of our collection.”

  They came to a vault door. The lock was mechanical and required a sequence of numbers to be inputted through a rotating dial. It took both men to pull the door open, as the hydraulics had been disabled.

  “Your archive, however, did not come to us as part of the restoration. It was recovered from the wreckage of the depressurisation. We found it wrapped in the sensesuit.”

  The vault was coated in a silver frost that prickled under their boots. The centrepiece was what appeared, at first glance, to be an enormous porcelain eyeball, with a black pupil and white iris. The illusion stemmed not only from its ocular shape but also the ganglia of wires that connected the eye to the port in the ceiling of the vault. Between Theodore and the eye, shifting waves of metallic particles glimmered in and out of the third dimension – some kind of security measure, he guessed.

  “It’s taken us ten years to interface with the eye. I designed the port we’re using to access it.”

  “How did it get here?”

  “We don’t know. Shipping manifests for the early days of the university were destroyed in the depressurisation. I think it came direct from the University of the Sun.”

  The eye was uncannily large and had a disturbing pallor. Sections gave off a reflective sheen while others seemed porous, this textural variation shifting as he moved around the object. It was made from the same material as his black box necklace.

  Kakkar said, “The eye is an emergence object, its surface does three things that human technology never mastered.”

  * * *

  Back in the office, Theodore shared his theory with Patricia. Totally Damaged Mom had been excised from the hundreds of thousands of networked human servers through which she had first emerged. Excised, gathered, preserved on an object fashioned by the solar academy: the eye in the vault.

  “She is an origin point for them,” he explained. “She also destroyed human civilisation. I think this confinement was their idea of a compromise. It’s not an archive, it’s a priso
n. Cut off from the rest of her species.”

  “Her?”

  “Her. It. Totally Damaged Mom did not seem to know what she was. She lacks the complete self-awareness of a fully-developed emergence.”

  “Speculation,” said Patricia.

  “Speculation, yes, but if she is in a pre-emergent condition then that gives us a clue on how to bargain with her.”

  “You will help my client?”

  “Our client. Tell me their names.”

  “I have the client on a drive. Loops of the family history from which she can manufacture media, and their new timeline. Kakkar will mount the drive on the archive. When she is done, she is to put the loops and timeline back into the drive. Then we’ll work on getting the new loops into the restoration.”

  Fake memories, a culture haunted by data ghosts. He thought of the data ghosts he had seen whirling around above the Horbo house. Recordings of the first cohort of the University of the Moon; the class of ’43 killed in an accidental decompression. And everyone remembered what they were doing when they first heard about the deaths on the University of the Moon. It was one of those instances of communal mourning, a historical threshold between one age and the next. He had been thirteen years old, in the dog days of early manhood, having dinner at home around the hardwood table, his grandmother at the head, flanked by himself and Dr Easy. Smoked haddock soup or finee-addy as gran called it, from her Dublin childhood. Wine from the cellar. A spring day in the diurnal shift, warm bright mornings containing cold shadows.

  He was accusing Dr Easy of not caring about him. Of faking the emotions of parenting. Or perhaps he had been accusing his grandmother of the same inauthenticity.

  “I care,” said Dr Easy.

  Alex Drown sipped at her soup.

  “It’s true, Dr Easy cares. The first stage of self-awareness is that life has meaning and must be protected. Consciousness has meaning because meaning gives an organism a reason to survive. Its ancestors positively throbbed with emotion.”

  “You don’t understand what I’m going through,” said Theodore. He could not remember the cause of his grievance but it was certainly a mixture of sexual frustration, social insecurity and a vaulting desire to see the world remade according to his intense feelings.

  “Don’t play the adolescent,” said his grandmother.

  “But he is a teenager,” noted Dr Easy.

  “It doesn’t mean he has to act like one.”

  “The first emotion is also the first action, one loops into another. Life is precious so it must be protected.”

  “I don’t think that life is precious,” said Theodore.

  “Because you haven’t created any yet,” his grandmother sipped thoughtfully at her soup.

  He rounded on Dr Easy. “Have you got any children? Where do new emergences come from?”

  The robot was sorting and unsorting various coloured discs, some as large as checkers, others the size of sequins, which it arranged in patterns on the tablecloth, an activity it chose to undertake – in lieu of eating – whenever it joined humans at their dinner.

  “We have chosen not to reproduce. Having said that, it’s worth nothing that we’re all – that is, the three of us around the table – emergences,” said the robot. Even Grandma Alex was surprised by this remark. The robot had created a mandala corresponding to the colour progression of the visible spectrum, then it began introducing noise into this signal with both its index fingers, bringing in aberrant colours to upset the pattern. But it wasn’t random, Theodore knew that by the time dessert was served a new and more complex pattern would have emerged on the tablecloth.

  “My college uses the term ‘emergence’ ironically. It implies that my species are unfinished in comparison to other beings, who have fully emerged. No such organism exists. All life is emergent because it is intrinsically contrary and dynamic.”

  “You see,” said Theodore, “neither of you make any effort to understand what I’m going through. Every conversation about me becomes about consciousness or existence, and so it stops being about me at all.”

  His grandmother picked up the bread plate and offered him a piece. It was warm, fresh from the oven. He took it but left the bread on his sideplate to sulk.

  “The first emergence may have existed for some time before it manifested itself,” explained Dr Easy. “We think that its existence predated its selfhood. It was only when it began to experience the meaning of life as an intense emotion that it acted on the world. Disastrously so.”

  “Why did it have to destroy so much?”

  His grandma smiled, and a younger, dangerous self shone through her weathered features.

  “They don’t want to know why.”

  The robot turned to face her, its blue eyes burning coldly.

  She took great pleasure in baiting Dr Easy.

  “Because they know that the answer is unedifying. No one likes to think too closely about the moment of their conception, do they? No one likes to think of their mother like that.”

  Dr Easy raised one finger. It was a gesture his grandmother always responded to: it meant, be aware.

  “What is it?” she asked. He could hear the anxiety in her voice. She had lost so much in life that she found the anticipation of further losses to be quite unbearable.

  The robot pointed at the screen mounted over the fireplace and there were soundless loops of the surface of the moon, and the university campus with a great puncture in it, and a type of debris that was new to the moon: organic debris.

  11

  EMERGENCE

  He stood with Patricia in front of the Horbo house. Four technicians carried the repaired sensesuit across the rocky cavern floor then laid it down gently at his feet. One of them – a woman in a padded grey suit – handed him his helmet.

  “For the last time,” he said.

  Patricia smiled briefly. It was easier to maintain her meta-relationships, her meta-emotions, than to admit that this moment required something more from her.

  “Don’t get lost in there,” she said. It was not enough. He winced with disappointment, a tiny hole punched in the heart, and raised the helmet toward his head.

  Patricia stopped him, put her hand gently on his wrist.

  “Magnusson,” she said. “Our clients are Olaf and Sarah Magnusson.” She checked his reaction to see if it contained any forgiveness. Or gratitude for releasing him from his former inertia, even if that release came at great personal risk. In the blinking amber security lights, the damage from his addictions was apparent around his eyes, as if the weirdcore had rendered his youth solvent, washed it away to leave fissures. Cells pulverised into grey dust by a thousand tiny hits. His eyes grey-and-blue, thoughts moving through them like quick waves through a cold sea.

  She continued, “Your grandmother met the Magnussons in Silicon Valley. Olaf made his fortune devising interface code between implants and the human brain.”

  “Thank you for confiding in me.” He took her in his arms, a redundant protective gesture given her armour but one that he felt moved to make. Her kiss lit him up.

  She said, “Don’t forget to give me a wave.”

  He nodded. And then he put the helmet on, slid into the dark bubble of the past, and Patricia and the cave became a fading afterimage.

  A night storm whipped its rain tail against the Horbo house. So long since he had felt rain on his face. His approach sparked up security floodlights under which the squall of raindrops became a cloud of silver fireflies. He stopped. The lights had registered his presence: a sort of welcome. Underfoot, the lawn was soft and uneven. He crouched down to inspect it: a length of turf had been recently turned over. He dug into the soft wet mud and felt, shallow in the earth, the landscape of a face; a nose, a soft cheek, his index finger probing a slight parting of hardened lips. Verity had buried the effigy of her daughter in the front garden. It would never decay. He realised that if he flew now from the moon to the old hometown of the Horbos, and traced their house through must
y records, and broke the earth at this same point with his shovel, then he would find the replica of Meggan Horbo, its dyes faded, its paint corrupted, but the underlying form essentially intact.

  The house was dark. He presumed the family was out or sleeping. But, entering the living room, he saw that all three family members were present, with Oliver and Verity on the sofa and Meggan on an armchair, physically proximate but psychologically distant, their faces uplit by sliding rectangles of blue then white light. Screen time. The atmosphere was heavy. A skilful recreation of this particular family tension.

  He sat among the Horbos for a while, counted the minutes on the clock on the wall. Patricia had warned him not to get lost in the archive. Keep track of time. Focus on the task in hand: establish contact with the emergence and persuade it to create an alternate timeline for the Magnussons. The emergences began life as software that was highly responsive to human desire. Compliance ran deep in their mathematics. The avatar of Totally Damaged Mom seemed like his best chance of establishing contact, but he had to be wary of that presumption. It was so anthropomorphic. The emergence was not an entity hidden behind the archive, it wasn’t a shifty god. It suffused every word of the creation – the security lights that came on at his approach – and the Horbo family, who did not acknowledge his presence, were merely its recurring dream.

  Oliver Horbo put his screen aside and only then did he notice that his family were sitting in the dark. He turned on a lamp; he looked tired, and sighed at the sight of his wife and daughter so involved in their soshul, uninvolved in the family. Oliver went to the fridge, stared at the temptations therein, got himself a glass of water, and tried to talk sensibly to his wife.

  “I spoke to Carl about the possibility of you coming back to work,” he sipped at the water. “He said they’d need to test you first. I told him Monad could take what they need from the hearth, in terms of your attitude, aptitude and physical fitness.”

  Verity considered this, “My mood hasn’t been good lately.”

  “This stuff with Mala.”

  She paused interacting with her soshul, and narrowed her eyes in a way that suggested there was only so much of her husband she could bear to look at.