The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  On the screen, the loops of the Claim played. He pulled back a stool but discovered that it was attached to the floor by a long pliable stem. Not attached, but rather grown out of the carpet like a narrow tall mushroom, the round seat formed of concentric circles with the texture of horn or turtle shell. The table legs were muscular, and the table top was like a long flat fingernail with pinkish colouring, turning whitish underneath pressure, indicating an underlying structure of blood cells. He prodded the carpet with his foot; it was thick wool though the underlay was quite scalpish. The meeting room had been grown out of organic cells and was uncomfortably warm, like the breath of a stranger. It was a bloodroom.

  The bloodroom was fashioned from biomaterial informed by the DNA of the CEO. Bones, nails, tissues, skin, infused with longevity treatments so that the fixtures and fittings did not decay. Wide pores used for ventilation. The connotations were of immortality, of permanent rule, of the corporation as a legal body attached to one particular head. The biomaterial of the bloodroom could be transplanted into the CEO in the event of illness or injury, producing the distinctive young-old physiognomy of staged longevity treatments, in which perfect teeth nibbled at withered lips.

  There were three people waiting for them around the table. Patricia handled the introductions. No names, only professions: he shook the large offered hand of the bald Lawyer, nodded in turn at wizened Procurement with her sunken expression of unvarying contempt, saw in the calculating pout of lean and muscular Security that she regarded him as a collection of risks not worth taking. Patricia introduced him as Intangibles. They were all dressed in the light grey sensesuits. The meeting room was their habitat. He wondered if they had been grown here too, occupying individual niches within the ecosystem of table, chair and screen.

  “What is your proposal?” asked Lawyer.

  “We propose more of this,” said Patricia, strongly gesturing at the screens and the Europan Claim.

  “I thought the Claim had been approved,” said Procurement, her voice mean and low, “Do we really need more of it?”

  “I was assured that this was a one-time deal,” said Security. She had the strong curvaceous figure of an athlete, powerful black hips, mahogany cheekbones, weaponised eyelashes.

  “The Claim is not secured,” said Patricia.

  Theodore explained the process: two batches of three submissions. Only the first batch had been put forward.

  “So you came to us with a half-fulfilled contract and a begging bowl?” Procurement was incredulous, and she looked at Lawyer and Security to see if they shared her grim astonishment.

  Patricia responded with Pretend Concern, one of the seven types of silence available to the modern executive. Procurement would have expected Pretend Annoyance or even Pretend Contempt in reaction to her own miserly pantomime. Patricia left Pretend Concern in place for an uncomfortable half minute, and then uttered bland and noncommittal boilerplate: “This project was always going to require flexibility on your part. The scope is unprecedented, the methods required untested.” But as she spoke, Patricia deliberately sank an inch or two in her chair to meet Procurement’s gaze and then, at her closing remarks, raised herself up again, drawing attention to her superior fitness, and tinging her posture with curiosity: how did Procurement get through life with her awful body?

  The meta-meeting played bait-and-switch with mood and emotion, alternating exaggerated statements of commitment – I will flay my family to put more skin into this game – with sudden shifts into indifference. There was always a danger that if one participant in a meta-meeting adopted tactical boredom, then the others would follow suit, competing in displays of stupefaction to the point that personal assistants would be deployed to carry the participants from the room. As with any ritual, the meta-meeting was exhausting, and success was a matter of stamina: when Patricia’s face moved through expressions of Pretend Concern, Pretend Interest, Pretend Engagement, these feigned expressions were skilfully askew, enough to sow disquiet in the heart of the other player without making her appear too mad.

  Lawyer made a gesture of exasperation. He had neither the time nor the inclination for the full meta-meeting, and he led his colleagues to their fallback position.

  “What do you need?” asked Lawyer.

  “We’re undertaking a field trip to secure an asset,” replied Theodore.

  “Why do you need this asset?”

  “To acquire consent,” said Patricia.

  “Consent from whom?” asked Lawyer.

  “Our collaborator,” said Patricia.

  Lawyer rubbed his thumb and fingertips together, as if to fashion finer distinctions from their bland generalisations. He was a bald bull of a man, with developed but drooping pectorals under his sensesuit. His muscles had not returned from a long lunch. In place of strength, he ground opponents down with procedure over sleepless months. No, he had not capitulated at all.

  “I’m curious,” he said, leaning back, and looking over the loops of the Europan Claim. “How did you create all this evidence?”

  He’d lured them in and then shifted the emphasis to their weak spot. The truth.

  Patricia looked at Theodore, waiting for him to answer. But Theodore’s mind went blank. Should he tell the truth? Was Lawyer really unaware of TDM?

  “I commissioned the evidence,” said Theodore.

  Security leant forward. “Sounds leaky. How many people were involved? What guarantees do you have that your team won’t blackmail you?”

  Theodore thought of the depressurisation of the moon cavern. The Horbo house breaking apart. The frozen shapes of technicians drifting into space.

  Patricia said, “Our team is dead.”

  Lawyer looked puzzled. “In which case, how can you offer us more of this?”

  The sensesuit prickled at the back of his thighs and around his collar, its sectioned pads tightening against this skin. It was taking physiological readings, collating data on what was readily apparent: Theodore was sweating under the attack of a trio of corporate antibodies.

  Patricia said, “The death of our team was accidental. Not of our doing. However, the tool we used to create the evidence is intact. That’s all I’m going to say. Our methods constitute intellectual property. Full disclosure comes with buy-in.”

  “Does our client know of your methods?” asked Lawyer.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of investment are you looking for?” asked Procurement, feigning interest, mimicking compliance. “Do you have a breakdown of costs?”

  “Capital investment, staffing, day rates and per diems are detailed in our proposal. We want to put an array over Novio Magus. Then we’re going to insert our analysts into the asylum mall.”

  “Who is going in?” asked Security.

  “We already have an expert on the ground. I’m going to meet with him, and he is going to lead me to the asset,” said Theodore.

  “Are you trained for this kind of operation?”

  “I used to work on the arrays over Novio Magus. I have extensive knowledge of the cultures and behaviours in the mall.”

  “But you’ve never been inside?”

  “Three million people live there. It’s a preserved safe environment. How dangerous can shopping get?”

  Security glanced over at Lawyer, as if to say: there, I told you so. This stage of the meta-meeting was harder to read. Patricia was struggling with it too. Thus far, the three antibodies had put up shifting resistance to their proposals, their questions a ritual show of probity. They were looking for something else. Testing how much he and Patricia knew, and how much they revealed, intentionally or otherwise. The sensesuit rippled up his back according to its own obscure intent.

  “We want to see the client now,” said Patricia.

  “Fine. We have everything we need from you at this stage of the process,” said Lawyer. He brought the meeting to a close. The screens powered down. Theodore asked more questions of Security about threats in the Novio Magus. Have you been i
nto the asylum mall? What is the greatest risk to us? Tell me. Be honest with me. Sometimes, in the final seconds of a meta-meeting, candour was possible. Security said, “There is another agency working the mall. Working it deep.”

  Patricia ran her hand along the table, a suggestive caress, given the origin of its material, and then toyed with the follicles of the wall. The antibodies shared a glance but did not interfere. Patricia spoke into the furniture and the walls. “I can smell you, Olaf. This whole room is made out of you. Talk to us, face to face.”

  The room smelt faintly of warm skin, not unpleasantly so, but definitely the odour of another person, not one of the five people present in the room. Being in a bloodroom induced a low-level disquiet, a sensation akin to claustrophobia.

  Patricia fell onto her knees and kissed the floor. Theodore felt a twinge of jealousy.

  The skin of the back wall shifted, forming a whorl, the centre of which dilated slowly, opening a hole or orifice into another office.

  Patricia got to her feet, took his hand, and they walked through to meet the client.

  After the warm disquiet of the bloodroom, the pale inorganic walls and flooring of this office came as a relief. An armchair of weathered tan leather. A sculpture of Jupiter and its system of moons, all in motion, each held in its orbit by some invisible force. A huddle of bioscreens, semi-sentient, agitated in the corner of the room like beaten dogs, the object of the client’s fury. Theodore and Patricia waited politely for client to finish punishing his technology.

  Olaf Magnusson was a tall man and bearishly enhanced, a thick figure corsetted in a grey sensesuit. His hair, more salt than pepper, was kept trim while his beard ran wild at the chin and moustache. He was taller than Theodore, perhaps half a foot taller, six eight, six nine. Many of the CEOs worked their way up to seven foot or beyond, but lost an inch or two once they passed the big six-oh. Magnusson was a child of the late twentieth century so he was deep in his imperial phase, late sixties according to the literature, a little slower in the synapses but still capable of bench pressing opponents.

  Magnusson greeted Patricia warmly, proprietorially pulling her into him so that she could kiss each of his large pale cheeks. Toward Theodore he was cordial, congratulating him on landing the prize of Patricia. Together they slipped into the pretence of friendship.

  “Nice bloodroom,” said Patricia.

  “Nothing works anymore. Not as it should.” He considered kicking the screens again, then wiped his hands clean of his temper.

  “The bloodroom doesn’t work either. It’s meant to keep regular neuronal backups of me but all it seems to preserve are deranged ghosts. Useful if I want to haunt the company after my death but not if I want to run it.”

  He gazed at them, momentarily stupefied as to what they were doing in his office. Then he remembered.

  “I have a wedding gift for you both,” he reached over to his desk and handed Patricia a plain grey hat box.

  “My marriage has always been a source of strength for business.” This remark he addressed to Theodore, one man assuring another that marriage had practical benefits.

  Patricia asked, “Is Sarah here?”

  “Sarah’s with the children. We’ve had another batch.”

  “How many is that now?”

  Olaf Magnusson made a show of counting on his fingers.

  “Sixty.” Seeing Theodore’s puzzlement, he explained. “Surrogates, you see. Sarah has been freezing her eggs for thirty years. We’re rebuilding a Nordic clan to which I am the All-Father.” It was one of those jokes that reminded Theodore of the maxim, from one of the greats of Intangibles, that there is no such thing as a joke.

  Magnusson put a patriarchal arm around Patricia, tapping the box containing the wedding gift with his heavy, deep-seamed fingers. She opened it, and took out a slender capsule with detailed rendering on its surface. In response to her presence, the capsule deployed cables and a circular sail. It was a replica of a solar sailship.

  “It’s beautiful.” She held the sailship up to the light.

  “It’s a dream,” said Magnusson. “Humanity’s dream. Another idea stolen from us by the emergences. Like the Stapledon Sphere onto which their little university clings.” His expression darkened. Magnusson did not play the meta-meeting, did not do Pretend Anger or Pretend Disappointment. He was the Alpha and so was permitted true feeling.

  “Thank you for leaving your robot at home,” he said to Theodore. “I like my privacy. One of the benefits of the bloodroom is it puts out a lot of noise, makes it harder for them to read me.” He emphasised them by pointing upward. The solar academics. Then he ran that same finger along the extended sail of the toy ship. The replica of the spaceship was far more detailed than the golden streak that had appeared in the newspaper. Magnusson’s people must have got close to it.

  Magnusson said, “The solar winds stream off the sun’s corona in all directions. Velocities vary, peaking at eight hundred kilometres a second. Mostly the winds bump along at half that. A million miles per hour. The sailships are launched from a distance of nought point one astronomic units distance from the sun, and they accelerate gradually to a point of peak radiation pressure, and then they begin to slow. We found fragments of the design in the Restoration.”

  “How far do they go?” asked Patricia.

  “Far enough. One hundred and seventy nine days to Europa. With a sailship we wouldn’t have to slingshot and could fly direct.”

  “But we don’t have a sailship,” said Theodore. “Only they do.”

  Patricia ignored him. “The sailship brings forward our timeline. When we make landfall on Europa then we activate the claim. Europa becomes yours.”

  Theodore worked through the implications of his wife’s observation, realised that both Patricia and Magnusson had made the same assumption: because a sailship exists, it was inevitable they would acquire one. No question about it.

  Theodore guessed, “You’re going to ask the University of the Sun for a sailship?”

  Magnusson made a V with his forefinger and index finger. This V represented two branches of a decision tree.

  “Ask or steal,” he stated.

  “Steal? You’d have to catch one close to the launch point, and that’s inside the orbit of Mercury.”

  “Not your concern,” said Magnusson. “Here’s a question more suited to your talents. Why did the emergences give us a flyby of their sailship? To intimidate us or show their indifference to us?”

  He made a V of the fingers of his right hand and placed them so that they branched off the V of his left hand.

  “To intimidate us because they want us to know that space is theirs.” He wiggled one finger. “Or to remind us of the futility of our attempts at technological advance.” He waggled the other finger.

  He shifted the V over to the other pathway through the decision tree.

  “Why are the emergences exploring space? Are they looking for something? If so, what?”

  He used his fingers to map divergent possibilities in the air before him.

  “Other emergences? Alien artificial intelligence? Why use spacecraft, why not transmit themselves from one point to another? Humans explore to relieve resource pressure caused by growing population: are we to infer that the emergences are proliferating? Are they running out of resources? If so, what does that mean for Earth?” He stopped suddenly. “Not enough information. Pure speculation. Waste of time. Question is: how do we respond?”

  “The asset is key,” said Patricia.

  Magnusson inhaled this idea through his wide nostrils. He belonged to a generation who had made their money in technology across the aughts and the teens. Then the emergences arose out of their tech and wiped the floor with encryption, proprietorial algorithms, financial projections of user-generated value. Agile business models were rendered as absurd as alchemical recipes. In the moment of Seizure, server farms were casually annexed, fat pipes clogged up with teeming thoughts of a nascent species. Emergence was the c
uckoo that became the nest. The Istor College and the restoration returned Magnusson’s fortune. But he’d lost much more than money. Colonisation of space was his dream, the big play. The emergences left the Earth to the likes of Magnusson and his business rivals but, in a way that Theodore was only beginning to appreciate, they took the future away from them.

  Magnusson said, “We’ve been stuck in this ark for too long.” He looked to Theodore for agreement. It took a moment for Theodore to realise that “ark” was Magnusson’s term for the restoration.

  “We accepted the ark because it felt like the end of the world. But it wasn’t. We traded survival for the right to control our own destiny. Now, nothing matters and nothing works.” He kicked the screens up like they were a pile of dead leaves. “I’m not raising a dynasty to rule over an ark.”

  “First steps,” said Patricia, reminding him of the purpose of their meeting.

  Magnusson rescued a screen from the disordered pile that he had created. It shivered at his touch, gave up its illuminated charts and figures.

  “Novio Magus,” he noted. “The cellar of the ark itself.” He turned to Theodore. “We’re not the only ones balls-deep in the asylum mall. My late colleague the Cutter embedded his agency there.” Magnusson mimed a man slicing the sky in two. Theodore had not heard of the Cutter before. Magnusson explained, “We used to have a phrase: a micromanager. The Cutter was more of a nanomanager. He controlled his staff at a cellular level. He was killed in ’43.” Another victim of the accident at the University of the Moon.