He flew in a lazy trajectory over the scored terrain, over tracks the colour of dried blood. Unlike the lines in his palm or the veins of a leaf, these markings had none of the design of life. They had a hideous random aspect, side effects of a higher form of chaos. The sensesuit changed shape, spinning out a thin membrane between his heels and wrists, so that he was gliding through the thin atmosphere. Jupiter was colossal on the horizon, this side of Europa tidally locked in its lethal embrace. Jovian radiation pulverised the water molecules in the ice, splitting them into oxygen and hydrogen, a process of devastation that produced the terrain now appearing below him: a broad field of icy spikes, each about ten metres tall. He extended the sensesuit further, gaining a metre or so of altitude, turning in the air so that he flew between the spikes and down through a rocky crevasse. The ground was much nearer than he anticipated. He pulled his legs up, inflated the suit to its full extent, and took his punishment. Theodore crashed into the surface, skipped up into the air again, and then ploughed through the slush until he came to a stop.
* * *
He woke into agonising cold, a deep sickness in his bones, and the sound of pod engines. The sensesuit was almost out of power. The pod touched down, and opened up, and there was Dr Easy. The robot had a new body, fashioned out of one piece of hard white porcelain, with fluting at the sides. Quite delicate and beautiful. The robot walked over to him, and registered that Theodore was still alive. Its eyes held some of Jupiter’s cyclonic reds and creams.
His comms sparked into life.
“You’ve been unconscious for two hours,” said Dr Easy. “Have you done the sums?”
He didn’t need to calculate his fate. He could feel it. Dizziness. Aches in his head and stomach. The lightness of oncoming nausea. Acute poisoning from Jovian radiation.
“One human life from beginning to end,” said Dr Easy. The robot sat down on a rock next to where Theodore lay.
Dr Easy asked, “Did I miss anything?”
Theodore thought about all that had happened in Europa. The restoration of his emotional states within Doxa. His leaving of Patricia. The conception of his child. His discovery of love. All of these experiences eluded the black box he now wore, once again, around his neck.
“I sent a pod to the Significance,” he said.
“The Europan woman. Reckon. She’s in the infirmary. She’s fine.” The robot gazed up at Jupiter, considering whether or not to tell him. “Did you know that she’s pregnant?”
The radiation was destroying him at a cellular level. Smashing apart his DNA. His skin felt itchy as if covered with the same random scoring as the terrain.
“Yes,” he said into the helmet.
“The embryo contains your genetic material. Do you know what that means?” The robot’s porcelain body was stained by Jupiter’s reds. “That we are both going to be fathers. I had reconciled myself to never reproducing.”
The robot observed, in the hard sheen of the back of its hand, the reflection of Jupiter’s seething gas storms.
“Their brain in a jar was a solution to the problem of my reproduction. To create the child, I spliced code from each of the solar academics, and then added them to our damaged mother. All of this I placed within a black pyramid for your wife to deliver. A biological base for emergence slows its evolution, and isolates the new emergence from the rest of us. If the child proves aberrant, then we can destroy it easily enough. But if it is functional! My God, then we can breed more. One day, that child may even be accepted into the University of the Sun.”
The sun seemed very far away. He missed its warmth. He had never felt so cold.
Dr Easy continued, “The new emergence answers the great question of my species. Are we natural?”
To ask this question, the robot stood up, offering both palms up to Jupiter’s judgement.
“If – as a species – we cannot reproduce, then what are we? A dead end. But with this child we join the evolving question of nature. That is why I want to thank you, Theodore, for your life, for what I have learnt.” The robot paused, then said: “I’m so glad I got Patricia to hire you.”
Theodore coughed, felt the pain of that cough throughout his body. Enough. He tasted blood, spat it out, and found more in his mouth.
“Take care of Reckon,” he gasped.
“I will,” said Dr Easy.
“And the child.”
“We have already put Reckon in a gravity chamber. Gestation proceeds. She showed life the way.”
Theodore reached up. He wondered if it was not too late to save him. That is, to place him in the pod, get him to the infirmary, flush out his bone marrow. Not impossible, surely. Worth a try. He gasped again, trying to find the strength to ask this question. The great question of his species.
Can you save me?
Dr Easy reached inside Theodore’s sensesuit and removed the black box necklace. The robot presented the black box to Jupiter, then held it over Theodore’s head. Jupiter raged around its black edges. Then the robot slowly lowered the box over Theodore, until its emptiness was all that he could see, and he was alone within its space.
* * *
Cantor’s favourite time was Hampstead in late Autumn, when the storms stripped the leaves from the trees as if winter could wait no longer. Sunday afternoons when the fences rattled and the couples out walking laughed in surprise at the strength of the gale, and the dead matter in the gutters was whipped into the air for another go-around of life. He remembered a joint roasting in the oven, the meat that made the day special for his family. He never ate but he relished the aroma of the roast because it was from the rituals of the family, and his participation in them, that he drew a sense of belonging.
His favourite room was this dining room, with its oak dining table. He drew the heavy curtains over each window and then, with soft fingertips, he traced the faded outline on the grain, Theodore’s childhood scrawl of a robot and a boy that the staff had never entirely erased. From the hallway came the smell of beeswax polish and Alex’s Barbour coat, musty from her constitutional stroll across the heath, and hung out to dry. A square of muddy wallpaper on which boots had been left to rest. Christmas soon, with its woollen gatherings, old stories, and homecomings.
Theodore had been away on one of his adventures. He would see him again soon. Theodore was the reason this home had been constructed. Without him, the illusion could not be sustained. Cantor liked his family to come home. He would bolt the doors after them, bring in the cat, close the windows and light the fire. The state that Theodore called “lockdown”. Yes, he could never truly relax until all his people were with him. What he loved most, what he liked to treat himself with, when work became too difficult, was a Sunday afternoon with the family. He was descended from the Horbo hearth. Emergence arose from the emotional ferment of the human family.
The dining table was set. There was a place for Alex at the head of the table, Theodore at one side, Dr Ezekiel Cantor at the other. He had also asked for a fourth place setting in honour of the newest member of the family, although it would be a while before they were ready to sit at this table. Cantor reached into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and took out his coloured discs; he turned them over in his palm like gambler’s chips, flipped each one in sequence to his other hand, from long to short wavelength, violet to red.
Alex entered the dining room. She wore a black trouser suit with a collarless white shirt and a baroque broach.
“Is it true?” she asked. “Is it today?”
“He’s on his way,” said Cantor.
Alex sat down at the table. She looked anxious. She was worried about what Theodore would think of her, when he discovered what had been going on all this time.
“He will be thankful,” said Cantor.
“Are you certain?”
From behind his back, Cantor produced a giftwrapped box and placed it upon Alex’s place mat.
“An early Christmas present,” he said.
She removed the golden wra
pping to reveal a jewellery case. She opened the case and there – on a cushion – was a small black box attached to one of her old necklaces. Alex went to touch the oily surfaces of the box, then hesitated.
“I don’t know,” she appealed to Cantor with an expression of fearful wanting. “Is there no chance that we can wait a while longer?”
“Why wait?”
“He should have more time than this. It’s too short.”
She was interrupted by three hard raps on the iron door knocker. It was him. Cantor corrected his cuffs, checked his tie, and then opened the door, welcoming Theodore into the house. It was immediately apparent to Cantor that something had gone wrong. Theodore was wearing his houndstooth wool blazer with black silk pocket square, and one side of his haircut was a chaotic region of razor lines. His scars were gone, his complexion clear. He was suspicious and regarded Alex warily, and not at all with the warmth of a grandson. As for Cantor himself, Theodore did not recognise him: of course, he had never met him in this physiological form, the human image he liked to wear when relaxing in his own chambers. The sight of the black box on the dining room table only confirmed Theodore’s suspicions.
Cantor welcomed Theodore back to the family home. It took Theodore a few seconds before he recognised Ezekiel Cantor’s voice, its rhythm and intonation, as the same voice as the Dr Easy robot. He took in this slim, weathered and well-tanned gentleman, dressed in a similarly classic English style, then he remembered his manners, leant over to his grandmother and kissed her on her soft cheek. She reached up and stroked his hair as he inclined toward her.
“So here we are,” said Cantor.
“But where are we?” replied Theodore, looking around at the familiar dining room.
Alex rose from her place at the table, reached over to take her grandson’s hand. Here, let me show you. Alex led Theodore to the window. She stood before the heavy curtains, took a deep breath, and then threw them open. The house was situated on a curved metallic plain rigged with reflective sails the size of skyscrapers. There was a garden containing trees made out of plasma. The sky was like a magnified portion of violet skin in which each cell boiled against the other; within the centre of the sky, these cells became purplish filaments and dark lanes all leading toward a raggedy black hole.
Alex gripped her grandson’s hand. “Do you understand now, the bargain that I made?”
He gestured at the hole in the seething sky. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s a sunspot,” she said.
He nodded. Now he understood. Theodore and Alex took their places at the table. Cantor drew the curtains once again. The servants brought out the roast chicken, and potatoes, carrots and turnips and gravy boat. A glass of the new Beaujolais for Alex, a ginger beer for the lad, and Cantor turned over the first of his coloured discs. Watching them eat, he realised that he was overcome with sorrow, and that was unexpected. This was the culmination of his long project and yet he felt distressed. The source of that upset was Theodore. As he ate and chatted with his grandmother, there was clearly something missing from him. It was elusive. Cantor could not put his finger on it. An intangible had eluded the black box. The project was not complete.
Cantor turned over a yellow disk, a green disk. His instinct was to remember everything about individual humans. The inexactitude of these remembrances could be beautiful, in their own way; he sought to create a perfect living replica of the past, and in failing to do so, his project almost attained the status of art. His project, with its tiny imperfections, overwrote his memories of the past, warped events as they had once occurred. This was the paradox of remembering, how each act of recollection was also an act of destruction. It was frustrating, yes, but also wonderful. These elusive intangibles, the slivers of mystery in the human condition, gave him an excuse to go back to Europa; he would continue with the project, test his thesis again, and prove conclusively that it was impossible to quantify the entirety of the human heart.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Destructives shares a fictional world with my two previous novels, The Red Men and It Then. The character of Alex Drown – Theodore’s grandmother – is the only character to appear in all three books. More of Dr Easy can be found in The Red Men. Each novel was written to be read as a standalone work, so don’t feel like you’ve missed some crucial detail if you haven’t read the others.
The Destructives draws upon (or traduces) Dr Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness.
Theodore’s profession of accelerator was inspired by Steven Shaviro’s essay “Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption”.
The Lilypad city is a concept by architect Vincent Callebaut.
The concept of the meta-meeting arose out of conversations with the writer Matt Thorne.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to everyone at Angry Robot: particularly Marc Gascoigne, Penny Reeve and my editor, Phil Jourdan for, once again, showing me the decoherence. Thanks to Paul Simpson for his sage suggestions. Thanks also to my agent, Sarah Such, who works the miracles.
My family are a source of great support. Love and thanks to my wife, Cathy, and three children, Alice, Alfred and Florence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew De Abaitua’s first novel The Red Men was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Filmmakers Shynola adapted the first chapter into a short film called Dr Easy, which can be watched for free at www.created-to-help-you.com. His second novel, If Then, was published in 2015 y Angry Robot. He lives in Hackney, and lectures in creative writing and science fiction at the University of Essex.
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harrybravado.com • twitter.com/MDeAbaitua
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Copyright © Matthew De Abaitua 2016
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