She had been dead so long that her presence, in his dreams, was diminished. A faint echo of the dream encounters they had once shared. Sometimes she just scuttled past him, on her way to some appointment, and he called her name once, and then let her go.
A red storm overhead, silent capillaries of lightning. There was not enough left of Alex to speak. She offered him a drink from a small metal flask. He took it from her, and realised that it was Pook’s flask, the one he had drunk from in the car. And then he remembered the danger he was in, and he woke at a scramble.
* * *
The man from Death Ray had the most convoluted posture. His right arm was crooked behind his head where it knotted around his left arm, which he held straight upward. He was bald with uncorrected teeth, goggles pulled up onto his forehead, a faintly medicated weight to his left eyelid. He was a black geek. Church upbringing, no doubt. Books had run amok in his bedroom. He introduced himself as Matthias, his arms crooked behind his head were a convoluted thought he could barely restrain. The flat had a musty uncleanliness. The wallpaper was peeling out of the corners, damp with the steam from family cooking. A big pot of something on the stove. They’d cleared out whatever family normally lived here. Toys pushed into a pile at the skirtingboard. An ersatz desk made from the kitchen table. The windows were sealed, the vents malfunctioning, the ceiling low.
Pook was gone. Of course he was.
“Can I leave?” asked Theodore.
Matthias bared his crooked front teeth.
“You are in a lot of trouble, Theodore Drown.”
The bedroom door opened. Agency security. Two of them, carrying rayguns.
“Answer my questions.” Matthias was comfortable in his convoluted posture, his legs crossed, his arms knotted behind his head. “Patricia Maconochie engaged you in a project on the moon. A couple of our consultants were involved. Now they are dead, and we are none the wiser. Tell me about the project.”
“It was an archive from a quantified family. Pre-Seizure. My area of expertise. I unlocked it but it had some kind of security attached to it. People died.”
“Afterwards, you asked Pook to find a woman for you in the mall. Meggan Horbo. The girl in the Horbo loop. Was this connected to the moon project?”
“Yes.”
Theodore surprised Matthias with compliance. Inches of truth could buy him time to figure out his play in the meta-meeting. He was still coming round. They could hit him with the death ray at any time. They might kill him. An agency embedded this deep in the asylum mall could get away with anything.
“How is she connected? What did you find?”
“I want reassurances,” said Theodore.
“If I like what you tell me, I’ll offer you a job. If I don’t like what you tell me, we put you back in the mall insane. You will never leave. An inmate in a prison run by me.”
“What about Pook?” Stalling.
“You have stumbled into red water. Where the sharks come to feed. Freelancers like Pook are sprats. The mall is our territory.”
“His family live here.”
Matthias shook his head, bored of Theodore’s stalling. He slipped his goggles back on, and grinned with black-eyed malice. He held up a thin optical fibre. A burst of light, pulsing in sequence. Theodore did not lose consciousness. Rather, his consciousness diffused. Instead of a tightly bonded ball of self, it was like the two hemispheres of his brain had to play a lazy tennis rally just to come to a consensus. He was aware of his head lolling back on his neck, a faint gargling noise coming from somewhere. Coming from himself. At the edges of his awareness, sense impressions and memories and desires that were not his own.
Matthias lowered the optical fibre. The light ceased. Reality found its familiar rhythm. Theodore’s tongue felt thick. The decoherence was not like dying, it was like all his wires had been pulled out and reconnected to something larger than himself. When they first found Pook in Look At Me!, he was suffering the effects of this particular torture.
“You brought an emergence into our mall,” said Matthias.
Theodore shook his head.
“It came of its free will.”
“Why?”
Theodore shook his head, as amused as is possible for a man undergoing torture.
“It observes me.”
Matthias took out a small black-and-white orb, all that remained of Dr Easy after they had shrinkwrapped it. He rolled it between his hands, across the desk.
“Not any more.”
“You were ready for it,” said Theodore. “You had a weapon.”
“A containment sheet.”
“It’s not a human weapon, is it?”
Matthias sensed something in this remark that amused him.
“You’ve seen an orb like this before. So you did find it. You know, I was a student at the University of the Moon. Before your time. Emergence studies. One particular emergence. Did you make contact?”
“I did.”
“Did you use the code?”
“No, the sensesuit.”
A momentary look of confusion on Matthias’ face. He said, “I established contact. We communicated through code but the emergence was compliant. Through it, we were able to access the tech we needed.”
“I saw a uniform,” said Theodore. “Scraps of one, on the lunar surface.”
Matthias ignored this observation, continued with his line of questioning. “Why are you looking for Meggan Horbo?”
Matthias didn’t know how Meggan was involved. He had used the emergence as a backdoor, so that he could access other tech. So he missed it. Totally Damaged Mom, Verity, the whole archive. He’d found a different way of logging requests and securing responses from the emergence. Of course. There was no reason for the emergence to present one consistent identity to users. Jester had many faces.
“Answer the question,” said Matthias. “You are in a lot of trouble, Theodore Drown. Life or death. I will do you the courtesy of informing you that you should be terrified of what could happen to you.”
Theodore touched his weirdcore scars.
“I burnt out all my fear.”
“Did you? Did you really?”
“Your fellow students. The staff. They survived too?”
Matthias smiled.
“The future is at stake. We are engaged in a struggle to determine what will happen to all living things. You have chosen one side, I have chosen another.”
Matthias unfolded his arms, leant forward.
“Our clients want the same thing but they want it for themselves. Emergence took away humanity’s control over its own future. Whoever takes back that control has first mover advantage. You found the emergence on the moon. Tell me, what did you discover that could possibly be worth the risk of a trip to the asylum mall?”
“I need assurances.”
Matthias leant back, resumed his puzzling posture.
“I assure you that soon you will tell me everything I want to know.”
Matthias popped the goggles back on. Two security agents hefted Theodore up to his feet. He struggled. A flash of light. The last thing he remembered, as he decohered, was what Pook had said, when they first found him. The group suicide by Oof cake. People acting as if of one mind. The feeling of individuality replaced by the whisperings of other people.
17
ZIGGURAT
He lay on a thin mat, skimming through dream. Another dream of Alex, her nearness in his heart. Briefly. And that brevity was cruel.
They were in the car park of the ziggurat, though this being a dream the ziggurat was at the end of their street in Hampstead. Overhead, the nerve-endings of a red storm pulsed speculatively. He had questions for her but before he could speak, he was aware of a few people standing nearby. And like Alex, he could feel them in his heart too. He had never met them before but his heart thrilled as if they were old friends. His emotions were so powerful in his dreams. More people came streaming into the car park, quite determined in their movements, and then
the crowd stood waiting, in expectation of the idea that had compelled them to gather.
Then he was awake again. The cell was a dark warm sphere with a flat platform, containing a mat, a toilet and sink. The surface of the sphere was a hard organic material made of tightly interwoven fibres and in the roof, there was a coil of muscle, which dilated to open or close, like the doorways in Magnusson’s bloodroom. The way in or out. The curved walls were as translucent as an eyelid, and soft red light pressed through them. The red storm of his dream. The cell had the same smell as the bloodroom, like skin on a summer’s day.
He had been in the cell for two days. Or thirty hours. Somewhere in between. Normally, on waking, he would come out of the atemporality of a dream and know exactly where in time and space his body rested. Even when he was on the moon, he lived in rhythm with distant seasons. He lay on the mat and from the feeling in his bowel, from the tightness in his balls, tried to estimate when he first entered the cell. But his body was empty. Voided in the last bout of decoherence. Twice the red light had blinked off, and the hatch opened. They used the light to paralyse him and so he had only stared at the hatch when it opened, a black circle within the blood darkness of the cell.
He should be afraid. Should feel, in defiance of the emotional cauterisation of weirdcore, the hollowing of real fear. He considered crying for help. Like that ever worked. He had never been one for crying. A child whose weeping is only attended to by a robot discovers other ways to get attention. He would not go looking for fear. It would find him soon enough.
Matthias had made a mistake, putting him in a cell like this, giving him time. They had taken his clothes and his black box, and dressed him in a grey sensesuit, which seemed dormant but he presumed total physiological surveillance. He could not risk so much as a subvocalisation of a single word.
How to deal with Death Ray. He turned over on the mat, and stared at the red light. Matthias had revealed that he was one of the original students at the University of the Moon, the class of ’43, who everyone thought were dead. Matthias and his cohort were studying the emergence. It was possible that the university had been established solely as cover for that investigation. A dark side campus deep under the moon and surrounded by dead rock. A controlled environment. But something had gone wrong. A security protocol initiated depressurisation of the environment surrounding the emergence, voiding it of biological life, sterilising the chamber with space. Except Matthias had lived. Perhaps they all had. Matthias suggested as much. The scraps of uniform Theodore found in the crater had been planted there as part of a cover story. If you were caught breaching the Cantor Accords, you’d want to disappear too. Patricia was following their lead, retracing their steps. His investigation into the emergence had produced tangible results. Conversations with Totally Damaged Mom. The Europan Claim. He had presumed he was the first to get results, but he wasn’t, was he? Matthias had referred to the emergence as it. Matthias had communicated with the emergence through code and knew nothing about Totally Damaged Mom, or Verity and Meggan. Theodore had succeeded where the famous first generation had failed. This failure had left Matthias curious as to what Theodore had discovered. Jealously so. He knew the type – Matthias had so entirely invested his self-worth in his intellect, sacrificing social and physical well-being to do so, that he could be dangerous if challenged on that level.
Theodore braced himself and pressed up and hard against the hatch. No give, no way to pull it open. He pressed his fingers into the wall’s weave of fibres, searching for loose threads. It was like being inside a seed. The cell was manufactured using the same biotechniques as the bloodroom, Magnusson’s longevity treatments, the Windhund, and weirdcore. Digital tech was stuck at Pre-Seizure levels of development, held in suspension by the Cantor Accords, so the corporates pumped resources into biotech in an attempt to map out a new future. There was a quiet hope that biotech might prove harder for the emergences to hack. But progress was slow.
The first act of the emergences had been to establish colleges in orbit around the sun. Why choose that location? Power. Being so close to the sun gave emergences access to unlimited solar power and made their habitat perfectly inhospitable to organic life. It also meant that their solar sailships could be launched at a ferocious velocity. The photons streaming off the corona could accelerate a sailship to the other end of the solar system, and beyond. Nobody knew how far. Nobody human. Our deepest longings fulfilled but not for us. We stole jealous glimpses of these dreams through a telescope.
He turned onto his back, staring into the curvature of the ceiling. The sensesuit picked up on his hunger and his thirst. The red light intensified and pulsed inquisitively. When he came to, there was a tray of hot pasta and a glass of weak fruit drink on the table. He recognised the thin red flavour of the drink. It was the same one Pook had been swigging from his flask. He had also drank from the flask. That was why Pook had apologised to him. The weak fruit drink was a delivery system for a virus that altered his neurons, making them photosensitive.
The red light switched him off. It was no good screaming for help. Thrashing his body against the walls of the cell. Trying to smash the lights. He’d tried all that. Tried it years ago. No, not him. The others had tried it. The other inmates. In the fading red aura, he passed through their memories, flowed with the whisperings of the ziggurat.
He finished eating, set his fork down. Red light on. Theodore off.
The plate and the tray disappeared and in its place was a sensesuit helmet, just like the one he had worn on the moon.
He picked up the helmet, held his head close into it, could hear whispers approaching, other voices coming from within it, like the sea roaring in a shell, the storm of blood rushing around the ear. He put the helmet on.
He was not alone. He was everyone. He was nothing. Everyone and everything but nothing also. A state of mind lower than consciousness. A state of being without subjective awareness.
Afterwards, he tried to describe it to himself but language was insufficient. Language relied on the very subjectivity that this oceanic state removed. There was no self-awareness, just a sense of everything connecting prior to the formation of coherent thought. The earliest human ancestors, living as one commodious horde in a giant tree, a hierarchy with the alpha male on the highest branch, shitting joyously downward on the others: was it like being on an ape on a low branch, or more like being an ant in an ant colony?
A slow red pulse from the wall of the cell.
The helmet was gone. The ends of his hair were wet and clean, and his sensesuit had been changed. It was yellow now, not grey. When had it been grey? An hour ago? Yesterday? His fingernails were too long and he was mentally exhausted, as if after a day of study. He lay down on the thin mat, the lights dimmed.
He knew he was asleep because Alex was with him again. She sat on the other side of his cell.
“I told you so,” she said.
“Which of the thousand things you’ve told me are you referring to?” he replied testily.
She raised her eyebrows at his density.
“I told you so,” she repeated.
He was woken by a prickling pain in his right shoulder. In the bloody gloom, he tried to inspect it. One of the diamond-shaped pressure pads in the sensesuit had burst. The material had been torn by an outburst of wires. He pulled at a wire until he freed its length. The wire wriggled to and fro between his fingertips. He set it down next to his lips. One by one, he removed wires from the section of the sensesuit and laid them down together. They wormed and entwined, forming a coil. He used this coil to dig into another section of the suit, this time at his wrist. He was able to tear the material loose, and pull out more of the wires. He did this furtively, his back turned to the low blind red light. Each section that he cut out came from a different portion of the sensesuit. Sections from his forearm and from his stomach, from his thighs and from the soles of his feet. The wires he removed sought one another out, each strand incorporated into a larger structure.
An arch. An arch or a pair of legs joined at the hip. The arch swayed and he whispered softly to it, sshhh.
Red light on, Theodore off.
“I know I’m dead,” said Alex.
“I didn’t know how to mention it,” he confessed.
“Not long now for you,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” he was upset. Dream tears. Dream sorrow.
“I’m sorry. Your dying has begun. This is a path that ends with your death.”
He sat at the table. The helmet before him. He was wearing a grey sensesuit again. No sign of the wires, if indeed they had ever existed. He estimated, from the weight in his balls, that he had not ejaculated in four or five days. Not that the concept of a day meant anything in the cell. They had taken day and night from him. Placed him onto the continuum of nightmare. He hit the table. The helmet rocked slightly, disturbing the voices within it. If this was torture, why were they not asking him any questions? I’ll tell you anything, he whispered into the helmet. I’ll tell you anything if you make this stop.
There were other people inside the helmet. He saw all the storeys of the ziggurat within its curvature. The helmet was made of layers of cells and in each cell a tiny prisoner. A cell not like a prison cell but as in an organic cellular structure, individual components of an integrated system. A system that dreams. A system that feels.
It feels like something to be a city. It feels like something to be a forest.
He couldn’t identify that feeling because it was so much larger than him. When the people in the cells were joined together, they became something lower than individuals, became a part of an intelligence rather than the whole.
Sat at the table, the helmet replaced by a bowl of noodles, he tried to describe the sensation of the joining. It was like a murmuration of starlings. The forms the murmuration assumes are beyond anything that an individual starling could conceive of.
Red light on.
The Destructives Page 20