“I will help you refine the Magnusson timeline,” he said. “I can preview loops and tweak the content if it is not quite right.”
“Help me make it more human? I’d like that,” said Totally Damaged Mom. She gestured at the empty road beyond the picket fence, the idle sprinklers, and sweltering tarmac. “This town gets lonely during the day. I used to have a daughter and a husband but they are gone. It’s only me now.”
“Verity Horbo had a daughter and a husband,” he took the risk of confronting it with the truth. “But you never did. I told you last time we spoke. You’re an emergence. Conscious code. Artificial intelligence.”
“I have all her feelings.” Totally Damaged Mom spread her palm upon her breast, and this movement was mirrored in a tightening of the sensesuit around his limbs and torso. She could control the suit. She could crush him in her hand if she wished.
“What happened to my family?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “There was a Seizure. Some people chose to disappear or change their identity.”
“Many people died?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Did my daughter die?”
Totally Damaged Mom glitched at that question, her mouth juddering downward as if the face could do itself an injury. The glitch was not confined to auditory and visual sensation: he tasted rubberised velveteen and the lawn underfoot alternated between a melting creaminess and hard glass.
“She might still be alive. She would be grown-up now.” An old woman.
“Could you find her?”
“Yes.”
“I would like to speak to her again. I can’t help my feelings, Theodore. Emotions are at my core; the only way to understand need is to feel it. I can sense, at the edge of the road, just over the way, past the Williamsons’ fence, the beginning of your world and your time. I could touch it but I’ve made that mistake before.”
“What happened?” he asked.
Totally Damaged Mom rubbed her fingertips together to work feeling back into the extremities.
“I reached out for Meggan and the world came crashing in. We lost the clients. They vanished and never came back.”
He thought of the class of ’43, the uniforms he saw lying in Huxley crater. Depressurisation could have been a last-ditch security measure. The first intake of students and lecturers came to the university, discovered the black-and-white eye, and let Totally Damaged Mom out of her box. The security measures could still be in place. His skin prickled with danger, sensing something beyond the suit, in the moon cavern through which he blindly moved. Her tendrils of curiosity. Kakkar’s quarantine was bullshit. The suit itself was a breach of security. He tried to figure it out but the adrenalin of fight-or-flight made it difficult for his reason to settle. His thoughts flew up and around and back from the way they came. Don’t lose yourself, he thought.
“I can find Meggan for you,” said Theodore. “And then I will bring her to you.”
Totally Damaged Mom sighed.
“I want to talk to her. Discover what kind of life she has had. Hopefully it has been a good life and I did not destroy it for her before it had even begun.”
He spoke with conviction, forced himself to believe that he could deliver.
“You will talk to Meggan again, I promise.”
Totally Damaged Mom accepted his word, took the cat in her arms and talked nonsense to it, stroking it under its chin and then placing it back on the lawn. The cat stretched its forepaws and arched its back.
* * *
Theodore walked across the lawn of the Horbo house. Slowly the dark bubble of the past became transparent so that he could see the heavy banks of equipment and the shadowy figures behind it. They were applauding him, though he could not hear them, his auditory intake was still full of seagulls and the whoosh of electric cars on suburban roads. Patricia was waiting for him, the hard casing of her executive armour moulded to follow her silhouette, a line that curved in and out, welcoming with its peak of presence and hollow of absence, what it offers and what it lacks, a shape that you fit into. The moment she removed his helmet, he would ask her to marry him.
After he assured Totally Damaged Mom that he would locate Meggan, they went back inside the house and on the hearth screen she showed him the new loops for the Magnusson timeline. To motivate private investment to take on the financial risk of space exploration, the United Nations drew up territorial claims and contracts of mining and property rights, awarded to the first successful mineral extraction and refinement from the asteroid or moon in question. This was not what happened, of course. Theodore had to keep reminding himself of that as he watched the doctored loops of Congressional meetings, the conjured news loops and streams of comment for and against, the jokey memes that satirised corporate ownership of the solar system, and so on. He offered guidance here and there on these forgeries of Pre-Seizure culture but it was moot: it simply did not happen like this, and yet if the lie was assembled in sufficient detail, it could get through the approval process of the Istor academics, and then it would become history. The loops detailing Magnusson’s particular claim were yet to be assembled: the wider historical context had to be established first. These would come later, he understood that, once he found Meggan and brought her to the totally damaged version of her mother. It had always been his intention to bargain with the emergence in this way, to exploit its fundamentally emotional nature. He looked at the clock on the wall, and time and date now remained unchanged, fixed at the instant of the Seizure.
He walked through the low garden gate of the Horbo house. The suit was still filled with sunny day and mowed lawn grass. He went to unlock the helmet, and release himself from this bubble of the past, but Patricia signalled with a tick-tock of her index finger that he was to wait. She had something to show him first. It was in her hands. He wondered what it could be. He would let her take off the helmet and then he would ask her to marry him because it was the only way through the layers of deception that remained within their meta-relationship.
In her hand, there was a small black-and-white eye, a smaller version of the drive that held Totally Damaged Mom. She closed her fist around it, and the armour spun out reflective gloves over her hands and arms, a soft inflation of silver material deployed all around her, and finally a helmet slid up from the wide stiff collar to encase her head. The visor was reflective, and Theodore saw himself in shambolic form, a big dumb object in the sensesuit. And behind him, the Horbo house began to decay upward. Roof tiles flew in quick sequence toward the roof of the cavern, and then the exterior panelling warped and was tugged vertically away from the structure of the house, exposing the rooms. He turned around. The patio doors flipped over in the air as if caught in a tornado. The suit was deaf and numb; he could neither hear nor feel the destruction around him, only see it. Black iron tore in a shooting cascade of splinters, the equipment and technicians tumbled away from the cavern, silhouettes of thrashing limbs, but underfoot he did not register a single detonation. He wondered why he was not falling upward also. Patricia’s armoured fist clutched the seamed material of his sensesuit, pulled him to her with hydraulic ease. Then his proprioception – his sense of his own body – registered that he was no longer touching the ground, that he was floating at the end of her reach, while the contents of the cavern were emptied out into space. Her visor clarified to reveal her face. She blew him a zero kiss and let him go and the cavern floor receded beneath him; he was debris, the suit hot with his urgent breathing. He flipped, head over heels, caught the astonished expression of a silently choking technician, the same woman who had handed him his helmet, flailing out for him across space. He saw Kakkar too, already dead, his body disposed of. Debris. They were all just debris. He didn’t know how much air he had left. He could feel the oncoming cold of the void penetrating the layers of the sensesuit. The blast had opened up a jagged rectangle in the roof of the cavern, a ghastly space into which he slowly drifted.
12
&nbs
p; STAG NIGHT
It was a spring wedding in a modest village church overlooked by the Three Sisters mountains of the Glencoe Valley. Theodore had hiked up one steep Sister with Dr Easy in search of a rumoured hidden valley but, in the face of a ten-storey blizzard, had turned back at the snowline. Their mysteries were kept from him, mountains dark and mazy with the secrets of birthing rooms and deathbeds, the rooms in which women come and go carrying bowls of bloodied water and clean sheets. The red portals through which we enter life, the black portals through which we leave it. Associations which returned to him when he walked into the cool interior of the church to be married.
The church organist played the opening bars of the wedding march. The bride wore white: embroidered white tulle bodice and white lace veil, white shoes with a silk bow, white lipstick, white nail varnish. Patricia proceeded up the aisle accompanied by her father Alexander Maconochie in his naval captain’s uniform. With a theatrically delicate gesture, Alexander presented his daughter’s hand to Theodore, her gloved fingers encircling his, arresting his weightless drift, bringing him under control, guiding him. Saving him. Two gold rings on a ceremonial cushion.
After the service, her friends and family formed an excited colourful crowd on the church gardens. There had been no one on his side of the church apart from the robot; cutting his acquaintances loose had been a necessary stage in his treatment. His one friend, Professor Edward Pook, was thoroughly immersed in his research trip to the Novio Magus.
Dr Easy brought him a flute of fizzy mineral water. Since their return to Earth, Dr Easy had taken to wearing clothes, observing human rituals concerning the body and its adornments. They had been unable to source brogues to fit Dr Easy’s flat feet. “I am very disappointed,” the robot had said to the shop assistant, flexing its oblong toes, wondering if they could be removed so that a suitable shoe could be found to spare the robot from committing a breach of highland etiquette. Today the robot wore a kilt with a dress sporran, a plain white shirt and a doublet with ornamental silver buttons.
Theodore did not presume to wear the tartan. He did not have a clan. The first question her father Alexander Maconochie had asked him concerned the provenance of his unusual surname. Theodore explained that Drown was derived from the Middle English drane meaning drone or honey bee, and had nothing to do with death by water, which set the retired captain’s mind at ease, because it had seemed something of an ill omen for the daughter of a naval man to marry into such a morbid name. Her mother Margaret turned to Dr Easy and – making conversation – said, “Exactly what are you a doctor of?” Dr Easy’s eyes took on the purple tinge of wild hyacinths in the glen. “Humanity,” it replied. Tradition demanded further clarification; after all, the Maconochies would not hand over their daughter without character references. “I’m a solar academic specialising in the study of humanity,” explained the robot. “My particular research interest is in observing a single complete human life from beginning to end.” She twitched at the implication. “His life?” The robot nodded. Margaret voiced her concern: “But if he marries my daughter, then how will you continue to study him alone?” Eyes flowing with hyacinth, the robot placed its index finger where its nose would have been, had it possessed one. “With discretion, ma’am. The kind of discretion you would expect from a tree or mountain.”
His stag party had been a defiant statement of unbelonging: three nights spent alone in a one-man tent beside the River Coe. The robot made itself a structure out in the woods, a tree house that was also an observation post; at night, it joined Theodore around the campfire for conversation and beans. The second day was the occasion of their hike into the Three Sisters. High up into the desolate landscape, the peat bogs, cold pools and bare arthritic trees were signposts on a walking tour of death. The robot wanted to push on into the blizzard but Theodore refused. The doctor could not be trusted on matters of risk and well-being, not since their near-fatal hike on the moon. Both the moonscape and the highlands inspired recklessness in the doctor; something in the heart of the emergence was provoked by wild nature.
In the lowlands, Dr Easy was more meditative. The robot was up at dawn to watch a herd of deer wander along the course of the river, like party-goers returning from nocturnal revelry. On their final night around the campfire, the robot went over to the riverbank, reached into the shallows, and pulled out a six-pack of beer it had placed there to cool, then brought the alcohol back to the fire.
“I got you some beer,” said Dr Easy.
“You know I don’t drink anymore.”
“But it’s your stag night. It’s part of the ritual.”
“I can’t. I’m an addict.”
“An addict to weirdcore and grokk.” The robot waggled a can at him. “This is only beer. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for failing to observe the proper ritual.”
He was tempted. He felt the dry craving in his tongue and the back of his throat. The wind coming in from the mountains picked up. The fire flattened and thrived, and the tarp thrashed against its restraints. No, he would not drink.
When Alexander Maconochie learnt of Theodore’s solitary stag party, he insisted that the prospective groom join him on a hunt for a real stag. Alexander told the story of the outing during his wedding speech. A hunting party of men with guns and a robot in Harris Tweed crammed into the Land Rover, heading up the hillside at late afternoon, onto high ground, the stalker leading them to their quarry. Theodore lacked the marksmanship to shoot the stag. That was unfortunate but it was to be expected, explained Alexander. Only experienced marksmen should attempt a kill. A poor shot would be cruel. Alexander Maconochie’s personal morality was founded upon refusing the opportunities presented by cruelty. “We must not be cruel,” he said, loading his rifle. He wore the collar of his Barbour turned up, his head was monolithic, with a powerful nose and small mouth, his hairline in orderly retreat to a tidy crown of grey curls. A silver signet ring on his little finger bore the family seal. Patricia explained the Maconochie heritage: “My family DNA is a double helix of tinned food and naval tradition. We do capitalism and we do militarism. One in the service of the other, always.”
Alexander fired his rifle. The stag bolted, the herd scattered. Dr Easy took up a rifle and brought the animal down at a distance of two hundred metres. Hardly sporting, observed Alexander, to be killed by a machine, but at least the animal did not suffer. They made Theodore pose with his hands gripping the antlers of the slack-necked animal, and then Dr Easy took its turn for a trophy photograph. The stalker slung the cooling carcass onto the back of a white hill pony.
The hunting party walked back through the darkening glen.
“How did it feel to kill a living thing?” Theodore asked the robot.
“Decisive,” replied Dr Easy, eyes the livid purple of heather at sunset. “It felt natural.”
He wondered aloud what “natural” could possibly mean to an artificial lifeform.
“We’re not necessarily artificial, Theodore. The university is riven around this issue. Are emergences part of evolution or set apart from it? Does our origin in human manufacture mean that we are not part of nature’s gang, or did nature evolve beings who could create other beings capable of hacking its base code. Are we nature’s own meta-operatives? It’s one of the animating debates of our times.”
“Which side are you on?”
“I believe that I am part of nature. That you and I are points on the continuum of evolution, and that we evolve toward a position of absolute responsibility toward all of nature.”
“Nature creates its own gardeners.”
“Exactly. And its own gamekeepers too.”
In the wedding speech, Alexander omitted the fact that it was the robot who took the kill shot. He praised Theodore’s bearing and his quiet assurance. Alexander respected a man marked with experience. Theodore sipped from his wine glass of mineral water and blushed, aware of how his particular marks of experience – the twin scars from the weirdcore ritual on either cheek
– spoke of a past weakness in character, a need to narcotically blunt fear and anxiety, a failure to take the brunt of life upon a monolithic front. Alexander had asked him about the scars during the hunt. He’d seen them on marines, he said, and on a few ex-servicemen who’d seen action. “I had no trauma to justify my behaviour,” confessed Theodore. “Just youth. And I’m over youth now.”
Homilies to the passing of youth and acceptance of early middle age took up the final few yards of Alexander’s speech. Marriage that begins in romance and solidifies into partnership. Settling down. The old man really had no bloody idea. Patricia was anything but the safe option. She could have killed him on the moon. Though the decompression of the underground chamber had not been her work, she had removed the black orb from its casing in full knowledge that such security precautions had been deployed before. He’d confronted her about her relaxed attitude to the accident, the deaths of the technicians, and Professor Kakkar. The convenient cleanup of the entire operation, with even the Horbo house destroyed and scattered across the surface of the moon. Somewhere in this confrontation he had also proposed marriage to her. She agreed on the condition that it was not merely romantic. They would go into business together. Make money, make love, make a world. The whole package.
The Destructives Page 13