The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  Dr Easy suggested they take the orbital motorway but the car pulled downward toward the undermall, where the foundations merged into the cliffs and the sea roiled into the abandoned lower levels. Theodore noticed, on the approach to the sliproad, warning signs of a steep descent ahead. Heavy freight should take another route. Faint of heart are advised turn back now. The Windhund was arrogant. He respected that. He put his foot down, burning up the reserves of fat in the wide trunk.

  The road was as steep as a mountainside, the Windhund the advancing line of an avalanche, and then they levelled off, taking the bridge at speed, its tubular arches snaking either side of the road; through the sunroof, the arch of latticed girders was like the onrushing track of a rollercoaster. He tasted salt in the air.

  The sea washed into the undermall, surf breakers channelled through the harbour. The tide foamed through the rotten front of abandoned shops, and then withdrew. The undermall had the damp, soft lines of a limestone cavern. Spray wiggled against the windscreen, and sunlight – beach light, he noted – blazed through the gap between the sea and the outer shell of the dome. Then they were outside. Then they were inside a tunnel. Then there were outside again. The speedometer blew him a kiss, and a flock of birds – with one thought – veered away from the speeding car. Dr Easy nudged him to take the next turning. The road back up the mall hub was steep and Theodore backed off the accelerator, not wanting to give the Windhund a heart attack.

  Pook lolled around in the back seat. He had woken up hungover, and was treating himself to something from his own flask.

  “What’re you drinking?” asked Theodore.

  “Smart berries. Good for a hangover. Have some.”

  He accepted the flask from Pook, the familiar taste of thin red flavouring.

  The sliproad led into two tight lanes of traffic. The Windhund sidled among ranks of vintage mechanicals; Toyotas and Fords and Audis, their metal masks limited to a single expression. The restoration held an archive of car advertising. Theodore’s students wrote dissertations on car loops, analysing how the loops were constructed to evoke particular emotions: envy in the gaze of the pedestrian toward the passing car; satisfaction in the way a driver strokes the dashboard, as if thanking a horse; the promise of freedom on empty winding roads; the defiant self-expression of splashing a 4x4 through mud; and the promise of luxurious safety in the leather-and-wood lined executive cocoon, the car a bubble of self percolating through the city. In Pre-Seizure culture, loops only mattered if they evoked a heightened emotional response; sometimes this maximalism would be played for irony, compensating for an absence of freedom, emotional intensity, certainty.

  Historically, vehicles were invested with animal spirits – the Jaguar, the Beetle – and the organic form of the Windhund was an attempt to make the car feel new again on those terms. What Theodore enjoyed most about Pre-Seizure culture was the ease in which people accepted the paradox of using mass-produced objects to express their individuality. It must have taken generations of acceleration to instil such instinctive compliance, to make the people accept a culture reduced to a single question – who am I – and a million wrong answers.

  “The ziggurat is under the northern light well,” said Dr Easy. “We should be coming up on it soon.”

  The cars ahead filtered out of their lane to take a lefthand turning back toward the hub of the mall. He inched the Windhund forward, peering up through the windscreen at the open ellipse of the light well, medication drones to-ing and fro-ing in its airy reaches. The boutique windows and cafe fronts caught full reflections of sunlight. The pavements were crammed with consumer patients, better-off types, saner than most, going about their treatment regime of mild exercise and morning purchases. Their faces passed too quick to register. In each, the concentration of an objective: I long, I want, I crave, I need, I will, I won’t, I give, I take, I sicken, I refuse, I accept. Stuck in traffic, he watched how the flow of people up the street curved around the flow of people coming down the street. At the junction, four contrary currents of people streamed in and around one another, and this went on for the five or six minutes that they were stalled in traffic, a flow of people that blurred into an anonymous current. Hypnotised by the phenomenon, he wondered if the loss of individuality in the crowd made it possible for some awareness to emerge in the crowd itself.

  A speed camera flashed. But the Windhund was only moving at a crawl. He engaged the clutch so that the car drifted up to the traffic lights. The speed camera flashed again; he thought it might have been a reflection of sunlight but the flash was brittle and artificial, and vaguely depressing. The speed camera was a grimy white box. Even in this sane district of the mall, there was an air of neglect; the signage on the fashion boutiques and delicatessens was old-fashioned – italic serif script, pastel palettes, lace and fussiness in the furnishings, yesterday’s idea of luxury. The area had not been recently accelerated and so was lagging behind the rest of the culture. Out-of-date signage and font crimes made him feel sick, decelerated loops were like the taint of corruption in old meat. The speed camera flashed again. Under the glare of the white box, the interior of the mall was showing its age; the scuffed and peeling linoleum covering that passed for asphalt on the pavements, and workmen putting down cones where the floor had collapsed into the storey below. It became an effort to steer. To even want to steer. The traffic light remained on red. The rest of the cars continued to filter leftward.

  “Did you notice the speed camera?” asked Dr Easy. Theodore turned around. The robot seemed startled, whereas Pook’s expression was pale and immobile. “The camera flashed in a sequence,” observed Dr Easy. “Imperceptible to humans but not to me.”

  In the side mirror, the faces of the crowd kept coming, wincing at each flash of the speed camera: I despaired, I lost, I couldn’t, I failed, I was not enough, I am never enough. Faces turned downward, heels scuffing, here and there, a man or woman going down onto their knees. The flow of people became a stalled crowd of bewildered individuals. Three men pushed their way through the crowd toward the Windhund. Agents of Death Ray, they wore tight black uniforms with white piping, helmets and protective visors. Stylish. The leader held a raygun in his hand, a vintage piece with a single sight, red insulators and a vacuum tube barrel.

  Dr Easy touched the consultant’s face, and when Pook did not respond, the robot reached forward and gripped Theodore’s shoulder.

  “Pook is stunned.”

  The red traffic light blinked off. Theodore released the handbrake, looked up, and saw that the red light was on. It was as if the traffic lights had run through their colour sequence when he blinked, and all he saw was an after-image of amber and green fading in his optical cortex.

  Dr Easy recommended that he drive.

  “But the light is red,” said Theodore, despairing.

  “They’re coming for us,” said the robot, turning back to gauge the intent of the advancing agents.

  Theodore idled the Windhund into the junction. The rest of the traffic watched and waited. The agents of Death Ray crossed the road toward them. The car wanted to go. The Windhund’s urge to move was infectious. He put the car back into gear and spun it out toward a side street; it was marked no entry, he had to risk it. The agents of Death Ray running now. He spun the car around and it leapt across the junction, back end skidding out. He accelerated into the open road ahead, through flashing red light after flashing red light. He saw people kneeling in the road ahead, and instinctively he steered to avoid them, taking the car over a traffic island. The unpleasant impact of the Windhund’s undercarriage against a high kerb. Each flash of the traffic lights put black frames in his perception, interrupting the normal sequence of time. He spun the car back the way they had come. The lead agent stood in the road, aiming his raygun directly at him. A blinding flash and then Theodore’s face rubbed against the steering wheel, and he was full of loop, as if something glimpsed on a billboard expanded to fill up his entire being.

  The loop spoke wi
th the friendly voice of a young female, perky and regional, in the modern fashion. She said, “We are Death Ray, here are our five principles that inform the way we work with our clients”, and then he remembered images of demographically engineered young people tippy-tapping away in an open plan office, and so on, an agency mission statement over which he barely registered the sensation of being upended, of his feet raised over his head and the interior of the car swelling to absorb impact, the windscreen creasing up as the frame collapsed under the weight of the overturned vehicle. The loop settled into an infinity symbol, two loops joined with a handshake, the eternal bond between client and agency.

  He woke up. He was lying on the road next to Pook. The car was overturned, its innards steaming. Dr Easy had pulled them free, then roused him by shaking him. The robot’s head was violently ripped and its plastic skull was visible. “You and Pook have been infected with a virus that makes your neurons photosensitive,” Dr Easy walked toward the agents. “Get clear of the lights. I’ll take care of Death Ray.”

  Theodore hefted Pook to his feet. The noise of the mall resumed, a rolling echo of voices and vehicles. The lights turned to green and the traffic rushed either side of them. Through the blaring car horns and veering motorbikes he saw Dr Easy raise a hand toward the three agents from Death Ray, either making a plea for calm or a veiled threat, it was hard to tell at this distance. Without breaking stride, the lead agent pulled out a length of dark tarpaulin, then shook it so that the tarpaulin winnowed out into an irregular polygon about the size of a yacht sail. He held this stiff polygon out at arm’s length, and then snapped it suddenly forward, covering the head and upper body of Dr Easy in a rippling layer of muscular black plastic. This layer moved down over the rest of the robot, then it began to shrink. Dr Easy’s form was recognisable within the taut layer, like the outline of an antelope being digested by a python. Then the robot’s neck broke, its head collapsed into the chest cavity, its legs pushed up into its stomach, and the outline become something more like an abstract expression of agony. Something fundamental within the robot’s molecular structure gave way, and the atoms compressed until all that remained was a small black and white orb. He had seen that orb before. In Patricia’s hand at the very moment the moon cavern decompressed. A vessel for an emergence. Or a prison for one.

  He found a break in the traffic, then dragged Pook with him to the roadside. Heathland lay under the light well, a hill and a copse, ornamental ponds, flats beside a lake. Wild gardens. They ran up a path, dodging through patients in shorts and with towels tucked under the arms, on their way to a morning sun bath under the light well. He hopscotched over little dogs on leads, grabbed Pook, and then went flailing leftwards through a thicket. He saw, in Pook’s pale expression, agreement with this course of action. The professor was also spry and yoga-fit, his black hair plastered to his scalp as he sweated out his hangover. He felt exposed, expecting at any moment to be zapped.

  The thicket ended in a shallow sculpted pond. To the north, there was parkland, a chain-link fence, and then the ziggurat. He recognised it from the site Pook had shown him in the pub. The white ziggurat with its terraced apartments.

  “There,” said Pook. “That’s where I found Meggan.”

  They would have to risk open ground, directly under the light well. Drones in the air, surveillance nodules lining the ceiling, and above them, an array monitoring the data in his heart and evaporating off his skin. There was no place to hide. So he would have to be quick instead. Security had warned him about Death Ray. She said that they would put ideas into him, make his mind into a funfair. And so they had. Agencies were always on the lookout for ways to subliminally drive behaviour. Dr Easy called it optogenetics. They had infected him with a virus that made some of his neurons susceptible to light. They could be put into an active or inactive state. He blinked. This is what it felt like to be meat and metrics, to be turned on or off at the whim of another agency. Mind control embedded in the infrastructure of the mall.

  Dr Easy had been destroyed. But the robot’s body was merely a vessel for the pure form of its intelligence, that network of superheated nerve endings growing out of the blindingly reflective surface of the University of the Sun. Dr Easy would be back as soon as it could assemble a suitable form on Earth.

  The two men caught their breath, hands on hips, gasping. Pook offered him another restorative sip from his flask, which he accepted.

  Pook said, “When we find Meggan, then what?”

  “I ask for her help.”

  “And if she refuses?”

  He hadn’t considered that possibility.

  “She won’t refuse.”

  “But if she does, you’ll persuade her?”

  He hadn’t done the sums on persuasion.

  “I’m offering her the chance to speak to her mother. How could she refuse?”

  “You’re presuming she has a good relationship with her mother. That’s a big assumption. The kind of assumption only someone who doesn’t have a mother would make.”

  They set off again, walking briskly but not running, avoiding open ground, keeping as much as possible to tree cover. Heady-smelling ferns underfoot, the latticed bark of tall fast-growing sweet chestnut trees, their roots deep in the earth; he wondered if the roots pushed through the floor of the mall to spill out across the ceiling of another level, or if the woodland had been planted upon a chamber of rock and soil that reached all the way to the chalk downland beneath.

  The path was dotted with the cracked seedpods of the chestnut trees and the leaves were a striking abundance of fiery yellow and orange. Autumn. Circadian rhythms, even here. The mall was over thirty years old, and nature filled the gaps in its disrepair: mould patterns on the wet plaster walls and weeds in the cracks like grey tufts in the ears of old men. The treatment administered to the consumer-patients had degenerated to the point of becoming a ritual: pharmaceuticals prescribed as a rite of passage, electroshock therapy at the close of the marriage ceremony. He had taken a terrible risk coming here. He could be trapped in the mall for the rest of his life.

  No. Patricia would come for him. Their array was still in the airspace above Novio Magus, waiting for his signal.

  Theodore climbed up a tree; from the vantage point of its branches, the scale of the ziggurat was apparent. A massive base rising in squat terraces to a height of about eighty metres and topped by a platform, with a treatment temple at its centre. The upper storeys glinted in the morning sunlight, the bright reflections of glass and steel seemed to form a meaningful syntax. Light as communication. Light as coercion.

  He signalled to Pook that the approach to the ziggurat was deserted, and then climbed down the tree. The two men walked briskly out of the woods, climbing over a fence, feet landing hard against the concrete concourse that formed the hinterland of the ziggurat. There were thousands of apartments in the ziggurat. Faces here and there in the windows.

  Pook had the number of Meggan’s apartment. The heavy entrance doors required a keycode. Pook gazed steeply upward at the blinking reflections in the windows of the ziggurat, either remembering or taking instruction. Then he inputted a keycode. The door opened onto a small empty lobby that smelt of damp and dusty; the lobby had been designed as a communal space, or at least, someone had left some beanbags lying around. The bilious smell of paint mixed with the odour of drains. If this was a break-out space, then it was thoroughly broken.

  They took the elevator to the sixteenth floor. Theodore stepped out into a narrow hallway with no natural light and a stultifying ambient temperature. Pook fanned himself, his expression registering the too-lived-in odours of the place, its decrepit public spaces and over-inhabited private ones. A serious little boy, shoeless and brown-eyed, watched them from a doorway. Theodore smiled reassuringly at the boy. The boy ignored this sentiment, his expression somewhere between doubtful and fearful. As if the child knew more than he did.

  Pook walked ahead, his stride long and professorial, checking the door
numbers in turn until he was satisfied that they had arrived at their destination. It was a pale blue door, the paint chipped and scored. Theodore was impatient to enter, find Meggan, get it over with. Death Ray were closing in, time was tight. Pook knocked twice on the door. The sound of unlocking and then the door was opened by an agent of Death Ray: a bald man in black goggles, a polar-necked black jacket with a white trim, holding a vintage raygun. Theodore had time for an oh of surprise before the raygun’s transparent red barrel crackled and gave off the scent of fresh iron filings. Theodore glimpsed the light of a synthetic fire, then he was filled up with Death Ray’s corporate loop, the infinity symbol formed out of client and agency hands curving in search of one another. His legs gave way and he heard – from some distance away – Pook apologising for this helpless act of betrayal.

  * * *

  He was in the car park with Alex. She knew she was dead and yet there she was, his grandmother. The ziggurat loomed above them both. She had come to warn him but he could not hear her over the snoring of the parked cars. He knew he was asleep. He was not stupid.

  In the weeks after her funeral, Alex came to him in his dreams with a presence that was so vivid, it was like a visitation. She would lay a hand on his head and the reassurance and peace was more than he could bear. He wailed and cried in his sleep, and grieved because he could still feel in his sleep. And he felt loss. His sense of accountability, his connection to society – lost. Without her counsel, he did not know when to stop.