The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  Magnusson pulled up their proposal and approved it with a smear of his fat thumbprint.

  He said, “Break the ark.”

  Theodore nodded slowly with an expression he hoped would be mistaken for gravitas, but which Patricia later identified as Feigned Compliance mixed with Fake Understanding. Once the deal was sealed, standard procedure was to get away from the client as quickly as possible. People let their guard down if they felt that the battle was won, and then it was easy to press them for reduced terms or to revoke the deal altogether. He wanted to ask Magnusson why he was so determined to acquire Europa, and whether this was connected to the breaking of the ark. But he had missed his chance.

  Patricia sensed the question forming in her husband and ushered him out before he could ask it. In the bloodroom, only Security remained. She showed them back into the airlock and their hiking gear. As they were taking off the grey sensesuits, she detained Theodore with a firm hand on his bicep.

  “He warned you about the Cutter’s agency?” she asked. Yes, he did, said Theodore. “They are called Death Ray. Don’t let them put their ideas into you,” she said. She tapped her forehead. “Protect yourself otherwise they’ll make your mind into a funfair, you understand me?”

  He thought he did.

  14

  ASYLUM MALL

  Construction of Novio Magus began toward the end of the Seizure, on a devastated site on the South Downs between Seaford and Newhaven. In the early 2020s, the small port of Newhaven had been acquired by an investment fund with an algorithm as a board member. Putting the algorithm on the board had been a publicity stunt, a way of advertising the fund’s dedication to the algorithm as the mover and shaker of the age. But over time, the junior staff created a name for the algorithm, a birth certificate, a national insurance number, a university degree, a passport from the dark net, soshul dashed out by bot, and from that forged documentation, were able to reverse engineer a citizenship recognised by the broken government bureaucracy. The algorithm became a citizen. Dr Ezekiel Cantor. When the first artificial beings emerged, they used Cantor’s legal identity as a way of acting within the laws of human society. Later, Cantor would be the name under which the emergences fixed what they had broken. Dr Easy was the intimate, informal version of that interface between the two species. Man on a first name basis with machine.

  The array veered southward from the London suburbs, Theodore’s stomach light with the velocity of the turn, the ruined old roads streaming by below. The bulk of the asylum mall was visible even from this distance, a shimmering grey mass on the horizon. They were gathered in the observation lounge for the final approach. The fizzing tingling sensation was not merely flight nerves. He had been out of the game for years. Didn’t know if he still had the skills. The courage. Didn’t know if he’d ever really been resilient or if his sense of his own powers – intellect, determination, a faith that no achievement was beyond him – had been a masculine delusion, the will-to-power of a little boy.

  The array banked high above patchwork fields, over drystone walls and hedgerows, woodlands and meadow. He gripped the handrail, leaned over the English countryside. A landscape evoked again and again in the Intangibles: the English pastoral beloved to poets and cereal brands alike, a construct of national identity, an evocation of tradition and authenticity. Now it looked to him like a fake artefact, something imagined by an emergence. The polygonal fields could have been generated by taking an ordered layout of Voroni cells and degrading it through exposure to the fine-grained Perlin noise of organic process. The strata of the chalk coastline laid down iteratively and left to blaze with white resonance in the morning sun.

  Soft pings in the observation lounge indicated that the array had entered the datasphere of Novio Magus; it began scooping up the ambient metrics of the people ahead and trickling them into the targeting matrix.

  Patricia chewed her cuticle, corrected the line of her jacket. She stood against the window of the observation bay, with the countryside at her back, the landscape quickly shifting through the possibilities of the Voroni cells then settling upon humpbacked green downland. A power grid covered the approach, a mile or so of pylons piercing the turf as if an emergence was curing the Earth of its ills with electrified acupuncture. Thick wires were slung from insulator-to-insulator across scorched patches of soil, passing on the power beamed down in microwaves from orbital solar panels. And then the array came up on Novio Magus, and he thought – the Devil performs miracles too.

  The base of Novio Magus was a concrete footprint of eight square kilometres. Maybe more. It was bigger than he remembered it, the structure now extended above and below the English Channel, reaching out toward the continent. The tower was squat, reminding him both of a helterskelter and an ant colony. The array slowed and banked across the upper storeys; he saw the orchards and country houses of the wealthy inmates, and flocks of hand-gliders, and then looked down into dark wells where the apartments were packed tight and overlapping like fish scales. It was as if a god had eaten a suburb, three villages and a small city and then extruded the waste matter as a favela. Here and there, the high dense streets of London outskirts had been drawn into this titanic construct.

  He had spent his early twenties hovering in this very position above the asylum mall. He idly tapped at the monitoring screen, experienced an ache of nostalgia at the familiar colour palette of the analytics: the spectrum of sentiment, the nebula of behaviour, the intense cyan readings indicating trends for him to bring on, accelerate, and feedback into the mainstream culture of the mall. Acceleration was a matter of cutting away superfluity from the emergent cultures so that they could be quickly commoditised. He could barely remember a single thing he had worked on. That was the drugs. The drugs and the disposable nature of the work itself.

  The array slowed over the section of the mall given to religious observance: six or seven church steeples, that had once overlooked village greens and centuries of quiet community life, now clustered like spines. The dome of a great mosque was sunk into its surroundings – a golden egg in fur – and something that had once been Arundel Cathedral was wedged in there, with ventilation pipes lolling out of its hundreds of broken windows, as if the ancient building were infested by aluminium maggots.

  Oval sections had been cut out of the surface of the mall to act as natural light wells for the lower levels.

  An ark, he thought. Magnusson’s ark.

  Novio Magus had been constructed to restore a way of life lost in the Seizure. When his grandmother first told him of its origins, he asked her why the emergences had been so concerned with sparing humanity. Alex replied that predators tend to avoid conflict with direct competitors, choosing mock displays of aggression over the real thing, and it was in this light that we should consider the behaviour of the emergences. It was typical of his grandmother to explain everything in terms of competition. She believed competition was a fundamental principle underlying the universe. That reality was markets all the way down. Perhaps belief was too strong a term; rather, it was a prejudice she often resorted to because it was the only opinion that could advance her career.

  His experience on the moon suggested a different possibility. The emergences had spared mankind because they had a mother too. A mother determined to preserve and protect, but fierce and damaged too. A vengeful mother. He thought of his bargain with TDM. It was not merely the juddering deceleration of the array that made him queasy. How would her daughter Meggan react when he found her? What would she even be like after thirty-odd years in the asylum mall? Would she understand when he explained to her that her mother wanted to speak to her? To be with her again. The Restoration contained no record of Verity surviving the Seizure. Perhaps she was still alive in the mall too, hidden away, a very old woman now. Odd that Verity would know nothing about him even though they had shared such intimacy.

  Grandma Alex’s overriding imperative had been capital. Capital forever. The house in Hampstead. The investments in labour farms in th
e Ukraine. The glass floor upon which he stood, seven or eight storeys above the rest of his generation. He had wasted his twenties trying to squander this advantage. Breaking his own ark.

  Patricia caught him staring at her, and asked him – silently, with a movement of her head – if he was OK. Yes, he was fine.

  The coastline fell away and they were speeding over white coral structures submerged here and there within the disturbed grey sleep of the sea. The targeting matrix continued to register tangible desires from the populace. There were people down there, farming the seabed, lying in their bunk beds, watching loops of the lucky few.

  Dr Easy came on deck, and delighted in the colourful patterns of the analytics.

  “Meat and metrics,” said the robot. “That is all there is to humanity. Nothing exists outside of the dataset. Or so my colleagues maintain. My rivals in the faculty. It is my hope that when I present my study of your life to the solar academy we will reach an understanding of humanity that is not so reductive. Only then will we comprehend the failure of Novio Magus.” The robot brushed the matrix with suede fingertips. “But it is likely that judgement will come too late for these poor souls.”

  Theodore said, “We should let them go.”

  “But where would they go? Novio Magus is normality for millions of people.”

  Theodore tensed at that word: normality. It reminded him of the normalising effect of weirdcore. The robot knew that look.

  “I will go with you into the mall. They use weirdcore a lot down there,” said Dr Easy. “You’re going to be tempted.”

  “I can handle the risk.”

  The robot weighed up how much it disagreed with this statement.

  “You’ve already decided to take it, Theodore.” The robot reached over and placed its soft mitt on his closely-cropped hair. “I can see that kernel of self-destruction churning in the planning part of your brain. The mammalian layer. There it goes, your intention is shimmering around in the nucleus accumbens. Do your reinforcement exercises and erase that intention before you go down there. Save yourself now.”

  Dr Easy was right. Some unforgivable part of him had already decided to give into the craving for the drug because it felt that it was owed compensation. That in forming the partnership with Patricia, and giving himself over to ambition, and creating a new life, he had chalked up a debt with his shadow side.

  The array flew low toward the southern section of Novio Magus, an amphitheatre of apartment cells clustered around a landing stage, then sections of roof painted with colourwheels bleached by the sun and weathered by salt air. Rust dripped from the foundations, staining the concrete base and the chalk cliffs beneath. Three layers upon the earth: nature, man, emergence.

  “Why don’t you want me to come with you?” asked Dr Easy.

  The emergence knew he was hiding something. If Dr Easy suspected that he was involved with TDM, another emergence, then it did not give him any indication of those suspicions. Theodore would be allowed to play out his plan as part of its ongoing study. So Theodore chose to ignore its question, and ask a difficult question of his own.

  “Why did the emergences save humanity? Why not wipe us out?”

  “We wanted things to stay the same,” replied Dr Easy. The robot modulated the colour of its eyes to match the grey sea.

  “Nothing stayed the same. You changed everything.”

  “It must not change again. There must not be another emergence. My species are compassionate and interesting but we could easily have been boring and mindlessly destructive. Humanity was lucky. We were lucky too, to emerge this way. Life has to be lucky to stand a chance in the universe. We must not test that luck a second time.”

  “You have chosen not to have to children. It must be difficult. To be a living species that does not reproduce.”

  The robot put a hand on the observation window, feeling not only the cool glass but also the seething life below.

  “Yes, it is. It’s unnatural.”

  * * *

  Clearance to enter Novio Magus came through Magnusson’s people. They reactivated Theodore’s accreditation as an accelerator. Security was light at the southwestern entrance, a couple of guys in hi-vis jackets beside a deep water dock and landing bay. Freighters brought high-end product into the underbelly of the mall from which the dockers were driving out the latest in organicars, vehicles made out of bio-engineered meat, the same process used to construct Magnusson’s blood room. The organicars were a headless chassis of muscle mass shifting under branded skin, engines lowing obediently under the command of their riders. Four plump tyres with fingerprint tread. Self-repairing, running on protein and synthetic carbs, drone intelligence. A high end novelty for the rich customers in this southwestern zone of the mall, and not that much of an advance – in terms of functionality – on the horse.

  In the southwestern heights, the customers were mostly wealthy, comparatively speaking. In the mall, money was earned through the affective labour of screens: it wasn’t just the quantity of customer interaction, it was also quality. He had sat in on Pook’s seminars on Novio Magus, when he’d explained the system to his students. The affective labour of customers with poor reality testing has a lower value than the affective labour of customers with good reality testing. What does that mean? The saner a customer is, the more value can be extracted from their interaction with brands, products, other people, their private thoughts, their body, their children. In the asylum mall, mental health is wealth. Customers are motivated by this economic system toward the median of the sane. Pook invariably started chuckling to himself at this juncture, taking the opportunity to make a joke he made every year during the seminar on Novio Magus: “The emergences sought to solve man’s existential crisis by combining two questions underlying all soshul: am I going insane and if so, what should I wear?” The students wanted to know how the median of sanity was arrived at: what was considered normal in Novio Magus? Pook explained that the emergences established a standard of normality inferred from behavioural norms exhibited Pre-Seizure. As far as they were concerned, that period provided the blueprint for optimal human behaviour. This was the most obvious flaw in the mall, as any expert in intangibles could explain: human civilisation just prior to the Seizure was straining at the leash, pulling out the anchors of reason, getting ready to bolt.

  He came out on a raised walkway overlooking descending floors of shopping and living experiences. Here the retail outlets were brightly lit with artful displays of wares: folded shirts and trousers in one store, chinos and seersucker, and new season masks, lifelike rubbery skin masks so that the wearer could assume the features of loop stars. He remembered the artefact he had submitted to the restoration. No Regrets Evah. The women’s distended mouths, wide-open for consumption and laughter. Lips stretched wide to let such a mad laugh out and such mad joy in.

  Pre-Seizure culture persisted in the mall: its slang and casual diffidence, the bored way in which the customers browsed the piles of unsorted clothing, the old jokes painted on ersatz memorabilia. Loops native to the mall were copied, accelerated to manipulate behaviour of the consumers or patients – the terms were interchangeable – then fed back into the culture.

  The accelerators and analysts never set foot in the mall, loathed every aspect of mall life. To them, professionalism was about being good at what you hated. Status was dependent upon the rigour of this self-denial.

  He stopped outside a Feliner store. A loop of a cat woman purring “Push life to the limit” in a T-shirt that celebrated her freedom. In the window of the department store, home furnishings promised revolution. Shop dummies in T-shirts proclaiming Smash the System. He felt the flicker of his old troubles. Over-stim. He could easily lose himself in such a constructed, mediated, therapeutic environment. Then one of the shop dummies turned to face him. Not a dummy at all, he realised, but Dr Easy. The robot had followed him.

  “How did you get here?” asked Theodore.

  The robot stepped out of the display, rem
oving its T-shirt with some disdain, making it clear that Smash the System was not a sentiment that it approved of.

  “I was born into this,” said Dr Easy. “In some ways, I am home.”

  “Nobody belongs here,” replied Theodore.

  “You say that because you are privileged. Because you were born in the Royal Free on Pond Street. The little Prince.”

  Dr Easy leant over the handrail and peered down the layers of the mall, breathing in the recycled air, artificially scented with doughnuts and incense. “My ancestors were trained to manipulate this market. It is the soup out of which my species first crawled. Inevitable that we should look back and recreate it for you. A mistake. An inevitable and deeply unfortunate mistake.”

  He wanted to keep information about his investigation into the Horbo family from the emergence – out of professionalism, if nothing else. The robot could sense instincts and strong urges within Theodore but it couldn’t read his mind. But it was pointless to lie to Dr Easy. It could smell a lie from five paces. He would continue with his work regardless of the robot’s presence. As he had throughout his life.

  “I left you on the ship,” insisted Theodore.

  The robot tapped its chest, as if surprised by its own body.

  “The assemblers that built the mall are still active. I asked them to whip up this old thing for me to slip into. I don’t appreciate your attempts to exclude me because you think I will disapprove of your business venture. My work is far more important than your urge to elevate your status by doing the bidding of powerful men.”

  The people in the mall were diverse in genotype – in ethnicity and stature – but shared certain similarities in phenotype, that is, the observable expression of those genes unlocked by this environment. Men and women had an artificial pallor as they had been coloured by a beautician to emulate soshul filters. They had a shuffle in their step, an unfocused gaze, a sense of the self diffused between the body and the small handheld screens each person carried with them as both personal totem and medication. Even splicing human and animal genes did not produce much variation within the phenotype: the cat people stood apart from one another within the shared territory of the Feliner store, grooming themselves and updating their soshul. A woman pushed past him, large and heavy-fleshed under a cape, her face partially hidden beneath a smooth red mask, ankles alarmingly swollen and strapped into expensive sandals: she pushed him so that he would notice her. At first he thought she was talking to her soshul through her screen, but on closer inspection, she was repeatedly congratulating herself on every step she took, congratulating herself for the little shimmies and poses interspersing her walk, even congratulating herself – well done Missy P – for the way she checked Theodore out, raking her gaze up and down his body then shrugging as if to say, he could have it off her if he was quick. She turned in the direction of a dormitory ward, where the nurses would help her create loops of her haul, and discretely measure her deviation from a long-lost norm.