The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “I want to resolve our dispute with Mala before Monad personnel open up my data.”

  “You talk like I’m a problem that needs solving,” said Meggan, sitting up, ready for an easy confrontation.

  “Don’t talk to us like we’re soshul,” said Oliver. “We just want to help.”

  He stood at the large panes of the patio doors, and nibbled at a cracker, barefoot in jeans and an untucked T-shirt. Rain lashed silently against the glass and the shadows of trees and ferns seethed and shook in the wind.

  “Awesome,” he whispered.

  “You are helpless,” said Meggan. “Mala won’t stop. That’s part of the game. Not stopping is what makes it funny.”

  “I’m not laughing,” said Verity.

  “It’s not the kind of joke you laugh it. It’s the kind of joke that hurts.”

  “I’ve got a new joke too,” said her mother. She lifted an image from her screen and threw it onto the hearth wall. It was a loop of Verity staring into the camera and there, skulking in the background, outside the mall, was Mala, unaware of being filmed as she picked fronds of fringe from her face, and fiddled with her braces.

  “Mom, you shouldn’t have done that! We’re not allowed to make loops of her in case her father sees them.”

  “I know. She sneaks around with her self-destructive loops. This loop is permanent and it has EXIF data on it. Geo-tagged. If I send it to him, he’ll know she’s here.”

  “He said he’d kill them.”

  “Good,”

  Oliver turned away from the storm and reached toward his wife, “Don’t, Verity, don’t.”

  “Good that she might die and be out of our lives.”

  “Meggan, can you give your mother and me a moment together?”

  Meggan thought about protesting that it was her life and that she should be present when it was being discussed but her father was in earnest. Without looking up from her screen, Meggan trotted obediently up the stairs, and off to bed.

  Oliver came and sat opposite Verity. She considered taking up her screen of soshul again.

  “You’re too involved in this,” said Oliver.

  Her reply was sullen, almost childish in its resigned tone of doing-the-right-thing.

  “I’m not going to send the loop to Mala’s father.”

  “Because no one knows where he is?”

  “Oh, we do. Jester found him.”

  Oliver sat down, shook his head. “We disabled that functionality.”

  “You removed the on switch but you left the functionality in place. I know how lazy you can be. We extrapolated a footprint of behavioural, cultural and genetic markers from Mala’s soshul. We isolated the aspects of the footprint that we could attribute to her mother, and pushed what remained onto a gender and demographic profiling trajectory, extrapolating the face of a little girl into the features of her old man. Then Jester made a leap. I’m still reverse engineering the leap to work out how it refined a very wide footprint into a coherent profile. But we found him.”

  “We?” said Oliver. “You need to rein it in.”

  She looked shocked. And then her mouth closed around another unexpressed thought. She loosed her hair, put the band between her lips, then retied it back.

  “Mala pushed me over a line. I can’t get back. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love my daughter.”

  She walked over to the hearth, and a live feed of her physiological and psychological condition flared up.

  “The data of my heart,” she said. “Jester, isolate my love for Meggan.” The heartstream became entwined serpents, reciprocal strands coloured in gradients like ocean waters.

  “Mala’s doll fooled my body into thinking that my daughter is dead. I can’t unthink it. I can’t quite believe that she’s still alive.”

  She reached out and cradled the holographic coils of love in her arms, then held up blackened portions for her husband’s inspection.

  “Look at the damage she did.”

  “It’s not permanent,” said Oliver.

  “Girls like Mala pass on damage. It’s the only way they know how to communicate.”

  “Show some compassion.”

  “I can’t.” Verity flexed her hands as if to work some feeling into her fingertips. “Compassion is the part of me that she burnt out.”

  Theodore checked the clock on the wall. It had become six in the morning. In the archive, time moved around him at intervals he did not control. Now the living room was empty, and the Horbos had gone. Don’t lose yourself, he thought. These recreations of the past were not another reality; rather they were syntactical units, a way of speaking and thinking particular to this emergence.

  He stood up and it was dusk outside. The cat hopped in through the kitchen window and blinked lovingly at him. Verity stood before the hearth, shaping parameters with her hands.

  On the screen, the director marotte was showing her a loop it had created: a man sat before his screen with laundry drying on a rack behind him. The man leaned forward to adjust his seat and the high-definition camera rendered futile the exertions of his middle-aged masculine vanity: a pale field of scalp under thinning back-combed dyed black hair, a face that never entirely snapped back into shape upon waking, a patchily-bristled underjowl, Hazmat-yellow teeth quarantining a diseased tongue. A face heavy with the long boredom of being run out of the game in the first round.

  “Script,” said Verity. The man said hello to his daughter. She revised the script.

  “Hello, Mala,” said the man.

  She used her fingertips to tweak the accent of this avatar, flattening the vowels.

  “Script,” she repeated, and summoned highlighted keywords extracted from the father’s soshul: recurring phrases, scope of vocabulary, known use of idioms. The avatar glitched as it reset, once again regarding itself in the camera, backcombing its hair, not liking what it saw but resolved to put this face out into the world as an act of defiance.

  The middle-aged avatar said, “I’m coming to see you, Mala. You don’t need to be worried, I know things turned sour between me and your mother.”

  Verity nodded with satisfaction at this line.

  “Good, Jester. Tonal supportive, tonal apologetic.”

  The avatar said, in quick succession, good stuff, loving this, don’t put your head over the parapet, cheers, mustn’t grumble LOL, stick it and top marks and nice one – Pre-Seizure phrases that suffused Theodore with a nostalgic ache for the time before his birth.

  “More phatic,” said Verity. She listened with her back turned to the avatar as it hummed and harred and hesitated its way through its speech. When it was done, Verity called up other loops of Mala’s father, tagged with his soshul username, RobberBands, a phonetic concealment of his real identity of Robert Bounds. His passport, driving license, and restraining order were all displayed on the hearth.

  Verity collaborated with Jester to mutate samples of the real into a fiction. The avatar read from their script.

  “Things were hard for me. But I’m going to make things right,” said the avatar. Or was this a loop taken from soshul of the real Robert Bounds? Theodore could no longer tell. The in-progress loop of the avatar and the found loops of Robert Bounds shifted position, moved around one another then glitched into sequence. RobberBands said he had money now and Robert Bounds promised that he was going to buy Mala a horse just like she always wanted. The mutation was complete, the real looped into the unreal and back again until the distinction became irrelevant. RobberBands smiled, and it was an uncanny smile, a queasy simulation of a father’s quiet pleasure at offering his daughter her heart’s desire. Theodore wondered if this disturbing facial expression was not a flaw in the simulation but a glitch in the man himself, in his flawed emulation of a good man.

  Verity sighed, let her head nod forward, massaged the tension at the base of her neck. She asked Jester to open up a new scenario, a second loop. She set tonal parameters at mild paranoia and accusatory.

  In this second loo
p, RobberBands told his daughter that she did not care for him, no matter what he did for her. That she was selfish, and even when she spent time with him, he knew that she would have preferred to be somewhere else. Verity tapped her way through the narrative, altering vocabulary, dialling down the aggression. Once the loop was complete, she played it through, and took momentary satisfaction in its verisimilitude. She quelled the hearth and went out into the garden, and when Theodore went to follow her, half-hoping to find that she was once again aware of his presence, he walked across another time shift; the screen door opened onto night, and the night sky was not the view from Earth but the unfiltered starfield visible from the surface of the moon, the lethal void that would be his ultimate destination, a place in time that he would know intimately in his final moments, the black box.

  He backed away, closed the door, and turned back into the room. Verity was asleep on the sofa, her coat held to her as a blanket, as if she were aware of being observed. She had grown uncertain of her beauty, did not know if it had survived motherhood intact. It was a different kind of beauty, shaped by experiences unknown to him. He could picture her in the advertising loops of the period, dressed in a white trouser suit, promoting digestive aids. Not quite his type, her American virtues distinctly other to his dissolute English tradition. He inhaled her warm sleepy odour to preview what it would be like when he was older and in love with someone like her.

  The hearth flickered into life. Verity’s data, her steady heartbeat, lowered blood pressure, the slow thick delta waves of deep sleep. Then, her data minimised as a new window opened up. The loop of RobberBounds taking his seat in his hallway office, combing back his dyed black hair, readying to speak, even as she slept.

  “I have a loop of you,” said RobberBounds into the screen. “Somebody sent it to me. I used it to find you.” The script was part of Verity’s scenario. Make Mala and her mother think that Robert had located them through a stray geo-tagged loop. “Let me show you,” said RobberBounds. But the loop that played on the screen was not the clandestine one that Verity had filmed of Mala outside the mall. No, it was the loop of Theodore trashing the student mart, snatching up bags of glunk and tubes of Try and stamping on them until they burst. The security cams identifying and tagging his face, vectorised close-up, coiled scars and a blankness in the eyes that Theodore did not recognise as himself.

  * * *

  Verity woke up, and rain lashed against the patio door, entreaties against the quarantine of the night. She padded sleepily into the bathroom. Theodore went to follow her, but dawn raged through the house, and the timeshift made him stagger. Verity jogged down the staircase, freshly showered, holding an urgently trilling screen. On the run, she flicked her personal screen at the hearth, mirroring the displays: a map of a Boston suburb; a blue concentric circle showing a trace; and Jester’s summary of recent flagged activity: contact with the local police, inquiries placed with a removals firm, soshul activity tagged with pain, self harm, daddy issues.

  “Play Mala timeline,” said Verity, pinching one particular loop out of the stream and then expanding it. Here was Mala with fairy lights wrapped tightly around her throat, uplighting her grief. It was difficult for Theodore to distinguish between the genuine emotions of these people and their self-dramatization – if indeed any distinction remained. A noose of fairy lights, head bowed, as if her neck was broken, with her dark hair brushed over her face to form a veil of mourning. The end of the loop crackled with the approach of self-destruction. The ouroboros loop. But Verity’s expertise held it in suspension, stopped the mouth from consuming the tail. She picked up the next loop, and it was Mala repeating over and again, as she pulled the fairy lights so tight against her larynx that her voice cracked, “Daddy’s coming, Daddy’s coming.” The child showed the scars on her wrists as if to welcome her father home in damaged arms. Verity was unmoved by the drama. She grabbed her bag and keys and ran out of the house, leaving Theodore contemplating Mala’s loops: the girl spun her cocoon of soshul to the exclusion of everything else. She could not respond to events outside the cocoon without mediating them first, and so the clarity of her fear was subsumed beneath echoes and filters. Off-camera, her mother’s voice calling her, telling her it was time to go, time to switch off. The fairy lights at her throat. Her coloured braces, her sallow cheekbones, her stunned expression at her own reflection.

  Car doors slamming outside, and then the screen door flung back as Meggan stormed through the house, her mother following at an inscrutable lope.

  “She left, mom. The police picked her up from school.” Meggan went through the cupboards in search of processed food, and not finding any, opened up a box of Cheerios and took out a handful of gaudily coloured hoops. Verity considered objecting but decided against it.

  “They are out of our lives now.”

  “You can’t do that to people,” said Meggan. “It’s evil.”

  “It was the least worst option.”

  Meggan considered her retort, decided it was worth saying after all.

  “Well, this is my least worst life.”

  A genuinely hurtful response, in that it undermined all her hard work. Meggan ran upstairs with her handful of cereal. Verity watched her go, stood at the bottom of the stairs considering whether to go after her. No, she had done enough. She had instructed her daughter to disregard the classroom rhetoric of tolerance and equality, provided a preview of the morality of the adult world. She went over to the hearth and instructed Jester to delete the projects. She crumpled up loops, streams and documents and threw them into an invisible wastepaper basket. But the stream of deleted files merely looped weightlessly back from the garbage and onto the hearth screen. She repeated the action with the same result: the evidence stuck. She asked Jester why she couldn’t delete the projects. A marotte appeared, a polygonal caricature of Verity wearing a hood with asses ears.

  “The project cannot be deleted because the project is still being used,” said the marotte.

  “Close the project,” insisted Verity.

  “Project cannot be closed,” replied the marotte.

  “No. Stop project.” She clapped her hands together to bring it to an end.

  The marotte blinked but remained. Verity looked up at this depiction of her as a fool, and she was afraid. Her heart rate quickened, her skin temperature grew elevated. Something was deeply wrong with the app. She had overlooked it while she was dealing with Mala, in the way that one overlooks a nagging pain that may or may not turn out to be indicative of something terminal. Angry gestures at the hearth could not erase the evidence of what she had done. So she concealed the project, starting other dummy projects in which she buried this one, inserting the invented loops of Mala’s father into images from the family archive, changing file names to random number sequences. She tried to insert noise and emptiness into the loops themselves but Jester locked her out from editing privileges. She asked Jester for a self-diagnosis. The marotte merely insisted that the project could not be stopped because it was still initiating. She grabbed more images from her personal stream to conceal the incriminating loops of Mala: a loop of Oliver dancing at a Christmas party; a loop of baby Meggan on her playmat; a loop of Verity and Meggan together, mother in her tracksuit and white hair tied back, daughter smiling awkwardly with one arm tucked protectively across her midriff. The beginning of the Horbo loop.

  It was over, Theodore had come to the end of this section of the archive.

  The front door opened. He went outside. Totally Damaged Mom was waiting for him. She wore a white cotton trouser suit that was translucent in the morning sun, the outline of her body within the cotton was faintly polygonal from low-fi rendering. She wore the same perfume as Verity, and her voice was warm with self-assurance and an undertone of blissful acceptance: Verity at her most spiritual, her most phlegmatic.

  “Who is the client?” asked Totally Damaged Mom.

  It was the phrase he had been waiting for: he raised his hands and waved in a preo
rdained sequence. This was an agreed signal to Patricia and the technicians waiting in the cave to begin transferring the new timeline.

  “The name of the clients are Olaf and Sarah Magnusson,” he said.

  Totally Damaged Mom looked around the garden and the road beyond as if seeing it for the first time.

  “The clients are unknown to me,” she said.

  “We are transferring their story to you now. With your permission?”

  She shrugged. Professor Kakkar would be down in the vault, lowering the drive containing the Magnusson timeline into the black-and-white eyeball that held the archive. They were breaking quarantine and that was risky. Kakkar had assured them that the facility was secure. But Theodore suspected emergences had ways of shifting their data through space that had long since outgrown wires and radio transmitters.

  The cat strolled over to her feet, and blinked slowly and lovingly at her.

  “New drive mounted,” noted the cat, as it abraded its whiskers against her calves. “Upload accepted,” it said.

  The expression on Totally Damaged Mom’s face changed as she absorbed the new data. She recognised the garden now, it was all familiar to her.

  “New project,” she said, fondly to herself, as if remembering the summer fields of her childhood.

  “Yes, new project,” said Theodore.

  “Working,” said the cat.

  “Estimated time of delivery?” asked Theodore. The sensesuit felt hot and heavy under suburban sunlight. He was tired and hungry.

  “Estimating,” said the cat. It licked its paws and turned that paw over its ears and back for further licking, a little loop of self-love, and each time the loop reset, the cat repeated “Estimating”.

  “I like new projects,” said Totally Damaged Mom. “I’ve been on maternity leave for so long.”

  The last time he had stood on this lawn she had shown him images of previous users, the class of ’43, the doomed first intake of the University of the Moon. She had wanted a client and he had been unable to give her one, and her anger had scoured him with feedback. This time he had given her a client: Patricia had organised the Magnusson timeline according to Verity’s example, setting keywords, tonal parameters and narrative trajectories on which the emergence could plot new content. Totally Damaged Mom was a self-generated iteration of Jester: in its interaction with Verity, the application had discovered improved functionality and so it folded the quantification of her body, her self, her desires, her actions into its toolbox. Somewhere within this synthesis, a leap occurred. The kind of self-awareness that comes from staring into the data of your heart. Emergence.