The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “Extermination of the infected would be contracted out to the uninfected, historically that’s how it works with humans. I’d engage an array and a team of accelerators to create the inciting loops, the intangible justifications, and perform the necessary persuasions. Perhaps your Destructives would be interested in pitching for the contract?”

  “It’s an extreme solution.”

  “But safer for humanity in the medium term.”

  “What about in the long term?”

  “There is no long term for humanity. You know that.”

  “So you’re a killer now. A doctor of death.”

  The robot sighed.

  “I’m an academic. I prefer abstractions. This situation is rather messy.”

  “So be an academic. Don’t wipe the mess away. Study it.”

  The robot tapped at its rough yellow eye so that it flickered through the colour cycle then settled again upon yellow.

  “You’re saying that I should undertake another research project even though my study of you is incomplete.”

  * * *

  He spent his last night at the mall moving through a night city of basement bars and cellar cafes. Going dark. He left his screen behind and sought safety in the heaving anonymity of the clubs. The music was deep weirdcore, based on the cosmic sounds of the early universe, when space was sufficiently dense to resound with the cataclysm of astronomical events. One track opened with a protostar pulling loose of its gas cloud, a roaring tearing sound, then the rush of infalling matter toward the protostar and the spiralling rhythm of gases whirling around its accretion disk. Bass, like gravity, was used to warp space. The dancers, bare-chested, hands in the air, exulted in the heat of a new-born star. It was too loud to think. He danced. It didn’t matter that he was sober while everyone else was undertaking a weirdcore shift. It was a party after the end of the world.

  On the pavement outside the club, he borrowed a screen from a wasted punter and called Pook. The Professor was bleary-eyed, just woken up in the family seat. The call was brief. You’re out, he told Pook. You’re compromised. Pook was confused, thinking the call was an anxiety dream. I love you, said Theodore, but this is business. You’ve used me, said Pook. Used me for your own advantage. Theodore accepted that as a compliment.

  Theodore told him he would have to leave the mall, for good. He explained that if he stayed, it was likely that Pook would be purged along with the other infected patients. A single cell, removed from the others, could not be used for emergences, so Pook should be safe back among the faculty on the moon.

  There was one other call to make. Dr Easy. He wanted to say goodbye to the emergence that had reared him. He wanted to honour that kindness, even if the kindness had been undertaken as part of an academic study and so born out of self-interest. Regardless of intent, they had shared a life together. If he could only shake the robot by the hand, and leave it at that. But the way the emergence had spoken about killing the patients only confirmed his suspicions: that his upbringing had shaped Theodore in the image of the emergence. Weirdcore was his way of emulating the dispassionate and cruel attitude of the emergence – his idolisation of his surrogate father. God knows what Faustian pact his grandmother had made to offer him up in that way.

  Dr Easy should never have been part of his life. He wanted to say to Dr Easy, “All along you’ve been pretending not to interfere but I copied you. Now it’s time to revoke the terms and conditions of our deal. Children leave their parents behind, their paths diverge, and that is how it should be. This is natural. If you really are part of nature, and not just an artificial fluke, then you will let me go.” He decided to record this as a message, and send it once he was clear of the mall.

  Gradually, under the ceiling of the asylum mall, night lights gave way to day lights and the reflection of dawn. After breakfast, he called in at a screen store, and under the pretence of trying out the latest model, he sent a signal to Patricia on the array, triggering the exit strategy. He had not slept and that made it easier to act like an automaton. As if fate had already decided his actions and he was merely acting them out. His ears were still ringing from the weirdcore music.

  He called at Meggan’s flat. He knew, from her reluctance, that she had decided to stay. He lied to her – pretended a compromise could be made, with her working from home – until she let him into the building. He entered the hot elevator, and it accelerated up the spiral. His conscience took the stairs, and so he arrived ahead of it. She opened the door to him, was already apologising for her decision, citing her children and the lives they would have to leave behind. She had a dozen excuses all ready for him. He didn’t want to hear excuses. He had to act before his conscience caught up. He took out the raygun and shot her. Her face softened, and she drifted back a step or two and then she would do anything he asked, because the devil performs miracles too.

  19

  HEIST

  To accompany the stratospheric ascent of the array, she selected the allegro of Bach’s Violin Concerto #2 in E and a flute of biscuit-dry Krug. Below, the outline of the south coast, the tracings of a rotten motorway, the soft ridge of the South Downs, the dark heads of thunderclouds over the English Channel with their minuscule notions of lightning. Even from this height, Novio Magus was visible, though receding with every sip of champagne.

  Patricia was celebrating alone, a bitter pleasure – like the champagne. She had offered but Theodore was not in the mood. He came back from the mall in a fright with Meggan in tow. Patricia shook her hand, welcomed her on board, said how excited she was to be working with her, then stowed Meggan with Magnusson’s therapeutic team.

  Theodore’s presence evened her out. She missed him in the two weeks he was in the mall. For nine of those days he had been untraceable. She had put on her armour then ordered the array into position over the northern light well. She would turn the place upside down until she found him. There would not have been a shred of reason in that act, and her authority as leader of the Destructives would be fatally compromised by it. Security saved her from it.

  She drained the last of the Krug, her flute of sour gold. Nine days was too long to be in that much pain, and it had undermined her love. Shook it. Weakened it. She would not give so much of herself to another person if there was a risk of that happening again.

  When Theodore returned, dishevelled and – in a way she sensed but could not diagnose – humbled, she broke quarantine to hold him. He was taller than her and though she held him, her hands clutching at his back, her head against his chest, he seemed remote. He apologised for his disappearance, explained that he had been tortured. Dr Easy had diagnosed permanent neuronal damage. The robot had not returned with Theodore.

  “We are on different paths,” said Theodore. “I have a life to live, and Dr Easy has people to slaughter.” Security wanted to take him away for a debrief. You were right, Theodore told her, Death Ray did use my mind as a funfair. But he refused to go with her, insisting upon an hour of rest.

  Patricia joined him in bed, in her base layers and underwear, lying against him, waiting for him. He was tired and silent. There was an awkwardness between them. They did not know how to be weak with one another. The last time he had been traumatised, back on the moon, when TDM gripped him through his sensesuit, Patricia was blithe about it. Now that she was his wife, it fell to her to be more sympathetic. She stroked his chest, and said, “The human brain has neurons to burn.” That didn’t come out right at all.

  She asked him to join her on the observation lounge for a glass of Krug, and placed – within this offer – the promise of survival sex. Fuck like you just made it out alive. He shifted away from her. Withdrawal. So she left him to his numb hour, decided on her own private party: a second glass of Krug and a change of music, an old favourite of hers called War on Consciousness, layers of pastoral electronica, the machine that teaches you how to feel.

  The array drifted over the night and toward dawn, a tremoring meniscus of silent orange and pal
e red in the troposphere.

  The debrief was in the bloodroom, which slotted right into the command deck of the array. Security wore blue lipstick and data dots on her varnished cheekbones to match the sigils painted on her long nails, and her sensesuit was tight against her powerful hips, giving off an odour of acetone and sandalwood. Her expression was bored. Security was bored by how frequently her suspicions were confirmed. Theodore told her about what had happened in the asylum mall. Another of her unheeded warnings had come to pass. She let him talk until he came to Matthias. Her fingernails were an encrypted user interface; the sigil on her left forefinger brought up a set of files Patricia had never seen before. The cohort of ’43. The faces of the presumed dead. Security reached over, extracted the loop of Matthias so that it glowed in her palm.

  “This him?” she said, presenting the loop to Theodore for his inspection. Yes, this is the man who tortured me. He looked to Patricia, to measure what his wife made of his suffering. Self-pity made him passive. He made martyr’s eyes at her. He’d only just recovered from the years of acting out that followed the death of his grandmother; she would not encourage him to wallow in his damage.

  Patricia asked, “Do you think Matthias was the only survivor of ’43?”

  Security said, “In the fifteen years since the disaster, we’ve never found a single trace from any of the cohort. We searched for years after the accident. No bodies were found. That was what made us suspicious. But the trail went cold long ago. It’s not easy to hide that many people on Earth for that long – particularly scientists and academics. But Magnusson never stopped believing that they were still alive. It has been his obsession.” Security looked intently at Patricia. “It is why he hired you.”

  This surprised Theodore. Patricia had not shared the initial briefing with him, the one she had received before coming to the moon and engaging his services. Now he was suspicious of her. Misunderstandings in the marriage, no matter what she did.

  He asked, “Why does Magnusson care about Matthias?”

  “The cohort of ’43 were working with Magnusson on a projected mission to Europa when the accident on the moon stopped everything. We had sunk a lot of resources into the mission and were financially wiped out by the disaster. Magnusson suspected the leader of the cohort, a man called Simon Elisson aka the Cutter, had betrayed him but there was no evidence, and some of us put those suspicions down to the big man’s paranoia. That one of the cohort, Matthias, is alive and working with all of Death Ray’s resources at his disposal, makes us reconsider.”

  “Matthias is not alive anymore,” said Theodore.

  “How did he die?”

  “Unpleasantly. He was found in violation of the Cantor Accords. Dr Easy executed him.”

  Theodore explained about the ziggurat, how his torture had been part of an experiment in recreating emergence within collective human consciousness. Security took detailed notes on this. The crucial detail came at the end: Dr Easy’s belief that the ziggurat itself was not the host for emergence; rather, it was generating the architecture for a remote artificial brain. Finding that brain-in-a-jar was Dr Easy’s priority, as it had not been found in the mall.

  “Everything that was done to me and the hundreds of other people in the ziggurat was being turned into data to provide this psychic architecture,” said Theodore. “The question is: how was Matthias transferring that data? Who was at the other end?”

  Patricia put her hand on his, pleased that he was engaged.

  “You think he was in contact with the missing cohort?”

  “Yes. We find them, we find the artificial brain, we have a bargaining chip with emergence.”

  Patricia said, “I will call a meeting with Death Ray. Request access to their records. If Matthias was in communication with the rest of the cohort, or resourcing them in anyway, it should show up in the accounts.”

  Security was sceptical, “And Death Ray will cooperate with your request?”

  Patricia felt giddy with champagne. “I will ask nicely,” she said.

  * * *

  Magnusson’s wedding gift was a corked bottle containing a replica of a solar sailship. She uncorked the bottle, and the ship drifted out across the room. The great circular sail deployed, held in position by tethers, and the capsule – a golden vase in three sections, with discrete areas for the sail, for cargo and for passengers – looped slowly around the observation deck. She wondered if the sailships were crewed, perhaps by robots. Or did the very walls of the ship resonate with consciousness? The emergences chose embodiment when signals from the University of the Sun were too disrupted or delayed for effective action. Yellow diamonds could store the subtleties of their intelligence, acting as what Theodore had called the host. In theory, emergences could travel through space as pure signal. And perhaps some did. But embodiment was part of their culture. They had need of physical presence and raw materials: the cargo bay on their sailship indicated as much.

  She selected algorithmically-generated music made for the lobby of an automated hotel. Among the glassy repetitive rhythms, shards of the organic: overheard conversation and human noises, taken from the lobby, the restaurant, the rest rooms, the bedrooms. To the hotel, the sounds of people were infrastructural noises. The music reminded her that emergences were not entirely inhuman, not merely numbers dreaming of other numbers, but they contained eavesdroppings of humanity. The solar sailship was based on a human idea. The University of the Sun was not only a retreat for the emergences, safe from biological incursion; it was also an aerie from which to observe human creativity, just in case we created something new that they could use.

  The model of the sailship responded to her. She was able to twist it around her little finger, send it on concentric loops of the observation lounge, and this made her wonder: if the sailship was propelled by photons flaring off the sun, what force propelled it on its return trip? She would ask Security to look into that: examine all known loops of the sailship to determine if they ever came back.

  Magnusson had given her the sailship to focus her ambition. There was a message in that bottle too; that having assembled the Europan Claim, there was no reason for her drop out of the project. She could be along for the ride, all the way to the end, if she wanted.

  If she wanted to steal a solar sailship.

  * * *

  Patricia had a ten o’clock meeting scheduled with Julia K, Chief Executive Officer of Death Ray. Julia K was unaware of the appointment.

  The head office of Death Ray was in a floating city or Lilypad, which was moored, that week, off the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. Off-shore living. The Lilypad was home to hundreds of companies, a live-work environment that sailed from territory to territory, securing concessions from local governments before letting its inhabitants – twelve thousand wealthy executives – take shore leave in the local economy.

  The array dropped through white stratospheric layers over the scuffed surface of the Atlantic, speeding low and westward toward the inner arc of the leeward islands. Nevis was dominated by a forested volcano, its caldera plugged by cloud. Patricia stood on the observation platform, helmet off, eyes closed, face flecked with saltwater, inhaling the island’s green perfumes. She waited until the array was over the island, climbed onto the security railing, ran one final check through her systems, engaged her helmet, and then leaped headfirst toward Nevis, deploying a glider so that the rising thermals slowed her descent. She dropped through the upper tree canopy and then landed in a clearing. A swarm of monarch butterflies, startled by her impact, panicked around her. As her helmet unfurled, and the glider sections folded away, she offered her index finger as a perch for the butterflies. Her first product success had been the flutterby, a self-propelled airborne protein snack for feliners. These monarch butterflies were not edible; their diet as caterpillars rendered each butterfly a luxuriant poison.

  She powered down and unclipped her armour then cached it in the forest. She changed into a wrap dress and sandals. On the hik
e to Charlestown, she picked a flamboyant bloom from a Poinciana and fixed its vermillion petals in her white hair.

  She’d called Daddy to ask for him advice on the mission, and he offered to send his people if she wanted to go in hot. Security insisted her people were up to it, and she was more tempted by that offer, as it would allow her to merge Magnusson’s senior staff with her own fledgling agency, and so embed the Destructives within his organisation.

  In the end, she declined both offers of muscle. She would go in cold and use the meta-meeting to get what she wanted. She knew all about Julia K and her weakness: her two boys, fourteen and sixteen years of age. Their school summered in the Caribbean. Her analysts monitored school comms until they got a travel itinerary for the boys, and found the date on which they were going to Nevis to visit Mom. A plantation inn, outside of the lockdown of the Lilypad.

  Patricia took a table at a cafe overlooking the sea walls, the deepening blue waters of the bay, then the enormity of Lilypad, its airspace noisy with drones, its white curves glinting in the sun. It had a deep central lagoon to act as ballast, with three leaves of ascending height, each edged with solar cells and wind turbines. A greenhouse ecosystem pressed against its curved transparent walls, whereas the exterior bristled with the fake plastic trees of radar and missile defence. Datawise, the Lilypad was a shifting glitching nowhere – the array’s analytics were blocked, the opposite of the asylum mall, which had placed the privacy of its inmates on an open, begging palm. She ordered a fruit juice but it had fermented in the heat, and was faintly alcoholic. She sent it back and requested tea instead.

  In late afternoon, an armed speedboat and formation of drones bolted from the Lilypad. Right on time. She added a final layer of suntan lotion to her bare arms. The speedboat bounced into harbour, drones forming a security umbrella under which the passengers disembarked. Three men, two women. Five limousines waiting to take them to various assignations. She waited until Julia K lowered herself into the limousine, and then she paid the bill and called her own driver, a godfearing local man, smartly dressed, with a careworn Toyota MPV. The roads of Nevis looped around the volcano; there were two ways around the island, clockwise or anticlockwise. Her driver was hardly discreet – he honked and waved at every passing bus. The buses were named after Christian homilies: Jealousy is a Boss, Pride is a Sin. They made dusty progress alongside fields of sugar cane, and were overtaken by shore leave lunatics in an open jeep. Patricia adjusted the vermillion bloom in her hair.