The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  He was telling the truth, she was convinced of it. The kindness of Doxa could be overwhelming.

  “We will seal Dream 6 tunnel,” said Hamman. “The fishers will defend the colony. Nothing will get through.”

  The fishers were strong of arm, and had formed a cult around their fortitude. But she wondered if they were all that tough. Because of Doxa, none of them had so much as punched another man on the nose. Whereas Theodore – while not a violent man – had a hard indifferent sheen to which morality did not adhere. God knows what his friends were capable of.

  Ballurian turned to Reckon. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Reckon. “I think he will betray us despite his best intentions. It’s in his nature.” This hurt him, she saw that on his face: What are we to each other? How did love bring me to this despair?

  She was curious to see if she could break his heart.

  “The question is,” she said to the room, “will Theodore still betray us when he finds out that I am pregnant?”

  She watched Theodore expression turn inward with calculation. Do those sums, you bastard. His eyes tremored, thinking through all the variables. But then his expression changed. The numbers evaporated.

  “Will the child live?” he asked.

  Ballurian wanted an answer to this question too.

  “It has a chance,” she said. “Presuming we are not wiped out by the emergences first.”

  She considered Theodore, shabby in his seat.

  “If this child makes it to term, you will not be its father. It will be raised by us all. By Doxa.”

  From deep below the base, came the creak and moan of the moon as it was stretched and compressed by competing gravities. Through the deep water came the squeak and whine of thick ice under pressure. A whine that intensified, echoing down the air vents. A variation on the usual geological tensions. The fishers gathered at the window looking out over the seabed and there, in place of the grey dark, there was a new colour. Whorls of red. Jovian light.

  “The ice sheet must have cracked,” said Hamman. The base shook and through the window the waters whirled and churned in a fierce upward current. She reached out to steady herself and Theodore caught her.

  Ballurian summoned a hologram of the surface of Europa. Together they watched as the ice fissured in the chaos regions, and plumes of lakewater poured forth, boiling out into the vacuum of space. Not a waterfall but a waterrise, like a tower rising from out of the moon, an edifice a hundred kilometres long, lethal rainbows of Jovian radiation shimmering within its outpouring. Blocks of surface ice moved around and against one another. Fresh rolls of ice formed on the plains, metre by metre closing up the new vent, diminishing the stream of the waterrise, until the gush was cut off and the tower drifted apart in a cloud of glittering icicles.

  The view of the hologram shifted to Lake Tethys. Objects speeding with intent through the drift of thousands of chunks of glacial debris. Pods.

  “That’ll be my wife,” said Theodore.

  24

  THE DESTRUCTIVES

  This is what Doxa did to him. It gave him a new perspective on the story of his life, and forced him to accept what a mean tight little story it had been. The kindnesses he blithely accepted as his right, the loving gestures he had forgotten about, if he had ever noticed them; overlooked compassions were more formative than his scant experience with weirdcore. It was his choice to be defined by his damage, by his scars.

  On the arrays, no one analysed compassion because it did not lead to purchase. Compassion was omitted from the metrics. Reckon, angry, had told him what a reduction of human potential he represented but it took the integration with Doxa for him to admit that failure in his heart. He was ashamed of all the missed opportunities to do or say something helpful to the people he loved. Yes, he had lost his mother at an early age but how much worse had it been for Alex to lose her daughter. Through Doxa, he was privileged to experience a mother’s loss and then have that loss healed. Now he understood the strength Alex must have mustered to turn her grief into kindness toward her grandson. This was the kind of heroism that deserved monuments. Even Beth Green was trying to be kind to him. On the night he hit rock bottom. Her careless confession to him was because she was fond of Theodore, trusted him, and he had seized on this trust as a moment of weakness. Doxa took the kinks out of memories twisted by bitter recollection, and showed him the kindness he had never noticed. He could have been a better man. The night he sat with Grandma Alex as she died, and ministered to her, and stared into the black sun of her dying; that experience should have set him on a different path.

  He stood on the edge of the moon pool, waiting for his wife to arrive. A holographic display showed pods descending through a field of ice fragments, and seven silver capsules streaking ahead. The colony defences had been set up around the narrow cavern exit of the tunnel. So Patricia had created a new tunnel, cutting through two kilometres of ice just to surprise everyone. He was scared of his wife. Perhaps he had been scared of her all along, and due to his emotional incapacity, had numbly mistaken that fear for love.

  Waiting beside the moon pools, he shivered with adrenaline and the chill rising from the Europan waters. He wanted everyone to be safe. Doxa was too important, Reckon and his unborn child were worth more than his heart could contain. Like all converts, he felt an urgent shame at coming to the truth too late in life.

  The memory blocks were degrading. Security had promised him that they would. He flexed his fingertips, shaking out the numbness. He now remembered everything from the moment he shot Meggan in the doorway of her asylum mall apartment to the beating Security administered to him before bundling him into a pod and firing him at Europa. And what a series of raw deals, betrayals and bad behaviour the last two years had been, punctuated with acts of destruction. Justifications for these acts were Patricia’s forte, and he had let her talk him around. He was culpable.

  The base was in lockdown. On the way to the dock, he had walked through crowds of agitated colonists. Reckon ran to her lab to secure her work. She had used him to impregnate her and test her theories on gestation. His first child. No, not a child yet. It was barely an embryo. If did get a chance to speak to Reckon, before the end, then he would tell her that he was sorry: I am sorry I allowed myself to become this man.

  It was wrong to put all the blame onto Patricia. He wanted status, and had inherited his ambition from Grandma Alex, who had worked her way up from the terraced streets of Belfast to Cambridge and beyond. Her mother, his great-grandmother, had been an alcoholic, and he’d inherited that too. Without parents, he had no fixed position in society, experimented with low life and then swung to the other end of the axis, for an elite life with Patricia and Magnusson. Wanting social status in a Post-Seizure world was like scrabbling for loose change flung across the deck of the Titanic.

  Patricia, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have achieved our client’s primary goal. I found the brain in a jar. The bad news is that. The bad news. The bad.

  He belonged in the asylum mall for what he had done.

  The surface of the moon pool plopped and whitened with bubbles of carbon dioxide, and then his black box surfaced. He reached out for it and the black box leapt into his hand. He had removed it before coming to Europa to conceal his connection with emergence. He fastened the necklace and tucked the black box under his shirt. When he was a boy, Dr Easy told him that his whole life would be recorded on that box, and that it would follow him wherever he went. Only with the breaking of the surface ice had it been able to locate him. His revelation with Doxa, his relationship with Reckon, all of that went unrecorded, and the creation of this gap in the data felt like a victory.

  The doors to the dock slid open and there was Hamman Kiki, holding a harpoon and, in his belt, a curved gutting knife. Hamman knelt to measure the vibrations of the approaching pods then, at his instruction, fishers took up positions around the moon pool, their angling equipment directed
at the seething, rising waters.

  The colony was in a state of emergency but there was no klaxon. That was a shame. The arrival of his wife warranted a klaxon.

  “My wife has come to negotiate,” said Theodore, calling out over the churning waters. “But if you give her an excuse to hurt you, she will take it.”

  The first pod erupted out of the moon pool, stopped in midair, drawing the fire of the fishers. The pod opened slowly. It was empty. Then his wife leapt out from under the pod, her executive armour deployed, limbs and torso encased in hard cylinders, her small fierce fists powering outsize weaponised gauntlets. Her helmet was massive and shielded for combat and radiation. How long could the fishers last in a room with his wife, when she was in this kind of mood? She adhered to the ceiling, took a microsecond to work the room, then her gauntlets deployed rolling banks of suppressor foam. The fishers were doused in its hardening gum. Her armour was designed to contain angry shareholders and break-up employee uprisings; the fishers had knives, but Patricia had riot control. Hamman leapt across the dock and landed beside her, thrusting his harpoon downward against the armour, not penetrating it, but enough to knock her across the bay. She skidded to a halt against the wrought iron walkway. Hamman was adept at moving in low gravity, knew how to focus his strength. He covered the distance in a single leap, raked the harpoon point down the front of her armour, ripping through the outer layer, then bringing up the blade for a second swipe.

  She tasered him in the seven chakras; the telemetry on his wetsuit erupted in mandalas, and then he was on the floor twitching with enlightenment.

  Patricia leapt back onto her feet, turned her blank faceplate toward her husband. Looked right at Theodore. He gave her a little wave, which she returned with a flutter of her armoured fingertips.

  Other pods surfaced throughout the dock, bringing in Magnusson, flanked by the tall strong figure of Security and her detail of armoured guards, and some tech guys with boxes of hardware.

  Patricia slid back her faceplate. White lipstick, dusted cheekbones, not so thick as to conceal the flush of exertion. They kissed so that she could take the words right out of his mouth.

  “Good news and bad news,” he said.

  “Give me the bad news first,” she said.

  “We’re finished. You and I,” he replied.

  She touched his cheek with the back of her gauntlet.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

  “The good news is that the client is going to be happy.”

  He gestured at the tech boys bringing up their gear.

  “But you can’t do this.”

  Patricia closed her eyes and massaged her forehead. She directed Security to collect Hamman Kiki’s twitching body, then ordered the med-team to begin prepping the boy for interface. She turned back to Theodore, calculating if there was time to address this unexpected item of personal business.

  “We aren’t finished,” she said. “We’ve barely started.”

  He was going to tell her the bald fact of his infidelity, but then he wondered if that really was the cause or merely a symptom. He hesitated, and they were interrupted by Magnusson, who unclipped his helmet and ostentatiously sampled the air of his rival. He gestured expansively; in his armour, he looked like a bear wearing its own trap. He let out a motivational bellow, the rest of the team responded with hoo-rahs.

  “What happened to you?” asked Patricia.

  “I remembered,” said Theodore.

  The memory blocks were considered necessary by Security. From Death Ray’s files, they knew that the colony was based on some form of communal thought. “The blocks will put doubt in their minds,” Security had explained, “If you achieve mission objectives, the blocks will degrade, and you will remember just enough to call us in.” Security swiped through his file. He signed away his right to legal compensation. “You’ll need an alibi,” she said. “One that even you will believe.” He signed the various pieces of paperwork that Procurement put in front of him. Once he completed the waiver, Security said they would now begin preparing his alibi. She shoved him off the chair and kicked him in the midriff three times, enunciating contractual disclaimers with each kick, then she turned to her team and said, “Throw him overboard.”

  Patricia unclipped the torso of her armour. Translucent streaks of perspiration on her vest, her chest heaving under the constricting weight of emotion, a shiver across her narrow shoulders.

  In this moment of casual intimacy, he said, “What kind of woman marries a man whose emotional centres are burnt out?”

  She wouldn’t admit fault.

  “You weren’t burnt out. You were just low key.”

  “I’m different now. I’m healed.”

  Yes, he was. She heard it in the timbre of his voice.

  “Good,” she said. “Who healed you?”

  “A scientist. She helped me.”

  There – he placed the fact of his adultery within the meta-meeting. Patricia saw it, did not want to believe it.

  “Is she part of the bad news too?”

  “You killed Kakkar,” he said. “And the others.”

  “What happened on the moon was an accident.” She was distracted by the approach of her anger.

  “An accident you knew would happen.”

  “You married me. Was that an accident too?”

  “I married you out of calculation and ambition because that was all I was capable of. I feel differently now.”

  “You feel?”

  Patricia clutched at his shirt.

  “This is the damage talking,” she said.

  “No. This is me.”

  “Because you’ve discovered a moral code,” she said. “Via the surprising route of sleeping with another woman. Did she have a particularly moral vagina?”

  This wasn’t the conversation she wanted at all. She waved her own sour joke away, and then, as he went to tell her about the pregnancy, his confession was curtailed by a heavy backhand from Patricia’s gauntlet; it was like being hit with an iron bar. He collapsed in physical crisis, weak with the shock and pain of it, more than he had known. She backed away from what she had done. The strong light of the quarantine room glinted off her retinas. She tried to slow her breathing, and bring herself under control; she turned away from him, did not want to risk being near to him.

  Patricia took up a disinfectant hose and sluiced his blood off her gauntlet, not looking at him, as if he had ceased to exist.

  Staying conscious was the trick, he thought. I might have a better chance of staying awake if I’m on my feet. He tried to stand but the soles of his feet could get no purchase on the tiled floor.

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” he mumbled through the blood. “That was selfish of me.”

  She put the hose back in its socket, pulled out a dryer nozzle, and wafted the hot air over her armoured sleeve. Her profile: small nose, set pale lips, platinum hair flattened and angular with sweat.

  “I should have found another way,” he spat out a clot, “to convince you to stop.”

  She put the dryer nozzle back.

  “We’ve come half a billion miles. We can’t stop now.”

  “The brain in a jar. They call it Doxa. I touched it. It helped me understand goodness.”

  She glanced at his bloody face. “I could forgive you, you know, for the adultery. Memory blocks are a good excuse for forgetting your wedding vows.”

  He rolled over on his side, got up onto his hands and knees. But his strength had gone, and he would soon lose consciousness.

  She said, “You’re trying to save your soul at the eleventh hour. I’m tired of pretending that’s possible for you.” And then she left.

  * * *

  The Destructives made their way through the base. The fishers slipped back into the shadows. Reckon felt their anger cool and harden into resolve: they would loot what they needed, load up the submarines, and retreat deeper into Europa, travelling through the chasm into the unexplored reaches of Oceanus. Doxa
would help the fishers to establish a fall-back position, providing an oxygenised environment, emotional resilience, and a knowledge base.

  There was to be no fallback position for Reckon. She was in the welcoming committee. Platters of food and drink were laid out for the Destructives: pemmican, dried and spiced sea greens, sour, chalky hydroponic fruits. Goblets of creamy, citrus-tinged alcoholic foam. Ballurian had a bottle of vintage single malt. Something saved for a special occasion. He poured himself two fingers and added a little water to loosen the flavour, savoured each stage of its salty complexity, then turned to Reckon.

  “You should go with the fishers,” he said.

  “I will protect Doxa,” she replied.

  “That’s a battle we might have to lose.”

  Did she trust his leadership? The Destructives had Ballurian’s son. What would he give up to save Hamman? He was compromised.

  The Destructives entered the room. A man and woman in executive armour followed by a tall powerful black woman with the trained posture of a security agent, and the rest of her detail. The tall broad armoured man was Magnusson, and the slight woman beside him was Theodore’s wife, Patricia. But no Theodore. Why had he not come? Reckon reached into Doxa for his whereabouts – glimpsed an argument between Theodore and Patricia, an argument curtailed by a blow.

  Ballurian and Magnusson embraced awkwardly; two giant men, enhanced to the limit, who had outgrown bonhomie. Magnusson’s smile was like an unzipped sports bag; leathery at the edges, and crooked along the seam. Patricia gave Ballurian a quick respectful nod but did not offer up a hand to be shaken or a cheek to be kissed; her gaze, tight and penetrating, fixed upon Reckon. How much did she know about Reckon and Theodore? Too early to say.

  “What an achievement!” Magnusson walked around the meeting room with arms raised, taking in all that the colony had created.

  Ballurian accepted the compliment, “We have exceeded our own expectations.”

  “We’ve all come a long way from Silicon Valley,” laughed Magnusson. They met as equals, even though Magnusson’s barrel-chested armour gave him the physical advantage. She was reminded of the armour of Henry VIII in the Tower of London, broad across the middle and with an absurd cod-piece. Ballurian, in his layered pastel robes, looked out of sorts in this ritual of aggression. He winced at having to run through the repertoire of antiquated corporate moves: a handshake like a wrestling hold, suppressive hugs, every touch an act of possession rather than compassion. Magnusson smelt like a butcher’s shop, of steel and meat.