The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  I returned to the hotel, veering away from the drunken entourage, as I did not want them to see me in such a state.

  I woke not long after dawn. My room was inside a cloud. Heavy vapours pressed against the window of the hotel bedroom. Rain drifted up through the village. The community went about its ablutions, the washing of selves and sacred vessels. I coughed and it was as incongruous on this silent isle as it would be in a theatre.

  Someone had pushed a card under my door. A silver card embossed with the same symbol which had greeted us at Glasgow airport, what I would come to know as the Monad brand. On the reverse, a handwritten note invited me to attend a meeting at noon at the abbey.

  I was halfway through breakfast when Bougas stumbled into the dining room, clutching his curls back from his brow, frowning as he tried to solve the long division of his hangover. The hotel conservatory, which normally afforded sea views, was also swaddled in cloud. Instinctively, everyone spoke in whispers. Bougas dropped himself into a seat opposite. I could hear his internal organs grumbling over the menu, arguing over what they would accept and what they would reject out of hand. There was a unanimous vote for a cigarette. After that, the council of guts fell into in-fighting.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘It was a long day. I turned in at midnight.’

  ‘You missed things.’

  ‘Really?’

  Bougas was having some trouble with speaking. I consoled the bedraggled consultant with tea, before mentioning the card which I had received that morning.

  Bougas tapped the symbolic figure. ‘That’s the Hieroglyphic Monad of John Dee. Devised in twelve days it revolutionized astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, linguistics, mechanics, music, magic – according to Dee anyway. I gave a presentation about how occult sigils provide a pre-Enlightenment precursor to brands. Spence must have taken it seriously.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  Bougas winced and feigned utter exhaustion, crumpling up until his brow lay on the starched table cloth. ‘Too complicated.’

  Bougas swayed over to a serving table to pour himself a glass of milk, which he drank before returning. Taking the card, he traced a finger over the symbol.

  He explained, after numerous false starts, that the horns are a crescent moon – the one eye is in fact the Earth, the head the Sun. The horns – recalling the cuckold – therefore imply some conjugal relationship between the heavens. The body is a cross – four lines intersecting as the four elements do. It also exemplifies Pythagorean principles of mathematics, ‘taking us into the Gnostic mysteries’. The feet are the symbol for Aries, the fire sign.

  ‘There is more to it than this. Dee felt he had devised a sigil which could be unpacked to explain the universe. Sigils take a desire and fold it down, repressing it within lines. Like brands, they are symbols charged with want. I was working on using occult principles for one of my clients when unfortunately we had to part by mutual consent – by which I mean, they asked me to fuck off, and I agreed to. Anyway, Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad is a mutation of the symbol for the planet Mercury, who was the Roman version of the Greek god, Hermes. So I would hazard a guess that Mr Hermes Spence has taken this symbol as the logo for his new enterprise, whatever that may be.’

  Whatever pride Bougas felt at this symbol of his enduring influence over Spence was tempered with concern, for the Monad did not represent an accessible mainstream proposition. Was Hermes Spence about to launch the world’s first Gnostic consultancy?

  ‘We need money, Nelson.’ Bougas was still worrying about the Monad on our walk up to the noon appointment at the abbey. ‘I want Hermes to open his mouth and gold sovereigns come tumbling out. It has to be something big. He wouldn’t have called us otherwise. Unless he’s lost it. If he comes out holding an acoustic guitar, I’m going to wrap it around his head.’

  The sun burned away the mist and unwrapped a clear cold day. The sea licked contentedly at the red rocks, which lay diced along the coast like a few tonnes of raw steak. The court made its way to the abbey. Ahead of us, Christine and Janis made their way over the peaty ground in unsuitable shoes, and I noticed how Bougas artfully guided our stroll to keep us at a safe distance from the Stokers, the lean graphite stroke of Jonathan Jnr, the stocky ink blot of his father. A large weathered Celtic cross marked the entrance of the abbey and a crescent of chairs had been arranged around it.

  By the time Bougas and I took our seats, the court was all assembled and waiting for the arrival of its prince. I shared pleasantries with Morton Eakins. He spoke about his recent wedding and I suffered an account of the stag party. He was just describing how he and his friends all wore Hawaiian shirts at the karaoke bar when Bougas, mercifully, nudged him quiet.

  ‘Here comes Hermes,’ he whispered. The saviour had returned at last. After 9/11, Bougas had studied the portents and the scriptures in his country retreat, seeking cultural and numerological synchronicities which would reveal the character of the age. Cold quiet nights out in the back garden inquiring bent into a telescope in search of the orbit of a comet which augured a new spin on the cultural cycle. He mapped sunspot activity against the trends in the pop charts and could demonstrate how the commissioning tastes of TV executives were essentially tidal. Under deep hypnosis, Cornish youths presented him with the cat litter of their unconscious. He rummaged through this filth to create graphs of prevalent obsessions, from adolescent body horror to the first flowering of homosexuality, and it was these charts which he presented to the product development units of major international corporations. But it was not the same as working for someone who really believed in you. Bougas was convinced that his work uncovered an underlying pattern to the behaviour of mankind. Hermes Spence made the addled consultant feel like the Mage of a King. He never lost faith that his patron would return and call upon his knowledge once again.

  Hermes Spence took the podium. ‘I am not going to say any hellos.’ He gazed into the middle distance, resisting the imploring faces sat obediently before him, their expressions yearning to see some mirroring in his own. When I first met him all those years earlier in the Liberal Club, he was two generations ahead of me. I had since gained on him. By hiding away during the downturn, Spence had spared his body years of punishing wear and tear. He was tight around the jaw. He was not merely gym-fit; he was lit up from within by faith and temperance. Before committing himself to each sentence, Hermes tilted his head through various aspects as if taking advice from an inner council. The effect of this gesture was to convince you, even before he spoke, that his words had been challenged, revised and finally approved by a special committee: a host of angels with MBAs.

  ‘I want you to name something for me.’ He went to speak again, stopped. He was not coming to us with news of a recent triumph. He was coming to us with a brief. No one was going to be welcomed back into the circle until they proved that they shared his vision.

  ‘What if it were possible to copy the contents of our minds onto a computer? Copy, not transfer. I would still be walking and talking in the real world, in front of all you. This uploaded self would be a hypothesis based on readings of the neural activity of the brain combined with observations of my behaviour. Just enough to capture the pattern of my identity and not necessarily every single detail of me. This hypothesis is then plugged into existing routines for simulating chemical, cellular and hormonal influences on brain activity. Once created, it is animated and placed in a community of other hypothetical beings, similar to the island community you can see here.

  ‘I don’t want you to dwell on the feasibility of this. My question is: what do we call these other selves? Whatever term you come up with must be a forward-facing mainstream consumer proposition. Imagine this technology percolating into society much as the mobile phone did. Beginning with a rich executive elite and over time drilling all the way through the demographic bands. We’ll discuss your conclusions at sundown.’

  Hermes strode away and up the Street of the Dead. Bougas shifted in
his seat to follow him, a needle seeking its magnetic north. To have been lumped in with the rest of the court, its former mistresses, its functionaries, and the chisellers of margin, was an affront to Bruno Bougas. Relegated from consigliore to mere contributor. Who needs an ideas man once you’ve stolen all his ideas? His fury was implied by his silence. He withdrew and took himself off into the island to deliberate alone.

  Let me explain about my role in the court of Hermes Spence. I was rarely consulted by the prince himself; rather I was a resource exploited by those further up the hierarchy than myself. The Stokers called on me, Eakins pestered me, Alex Drown engaged me now and again to devise this or that. This was how I made my money while Drug Porn limped on from one financial crisis to the next. A few days a month, in secret from my paranoid Drug Porn colleagues, I created products and adverts for the enemy. Sold them ideas and dreams. To be a corporate artist, one must train the imagination to contort itself to pass beneath a bar, which is set lower and lower as the job progresses. Talent, innately given to wild and queer creations, is forced to cramp itself and scuttle backwards, painfully contorted. Working with this court was like performing a limbo dance in every sense of the word. I danced under a low bar on the border of hell. In Drug Porn, I ran an article by a science fiction writer who argued that complicity was the theme of the age. ‘The modern condition determines that there is nothing you despise that you do not contribute to,’ he wrote. Instead of taking his argument as a spur to the Great Refusal, the denial of every incursion of consumerism, I convinced myself that my work with the Spence Consultancy made me representative of this compromised age and therefore gifted any insights with a certain relevancy.

  If I could do it all again I would edit that science fiction writer’s article. Complicity was the tragedy of the age. I thought I was only loaning out a talent but it returned to me warped, fit for the limbo dance but only the limbo dance.

  On the abbey lawns, the court made hesitant alliances as they prepared to work on Hermes’ question. The young Jonathan Stoker appeared at my arm. ‘Do you want to work together on this one?’

  He nodded over to his adoptive father. ‘Dad has been visiting Hermes out in Nevis. We can give you a few pointers.’

  ‘Like, what is this for? Why drag us all out to a remote island to set a thought experiment?’

  Jonathan Stoker Jnr shrugged. He watched me want to reject him. He watched my face struggle as I thought of all the things I would rather do than sit down and have to solve this riddle. He waited for my greed, my need, to assert itself.

  The Stokers took me to a back room of the Argyll hotel and went to work on me with a shoebox of cash. I free-associated, putting on a show for my fee.

  ‘If you were going to upload yourself then you would presumably be able to customize this new version to be an ideal representation of yourself.’

  ‘The uploaded you would be like a celebrity of yourself, a distillation or perfection. But what does it actually do? Can it have sex? Could you pay to watch a perfect version of yourself have sex?’

  ‘You’re thinking porno. We need mainstream,’ said Stoker Snr.

  ‘If it’s a celebrity version of yourself living an idealised life then it is your own personal hype. Also a hypothesis based on your consciousness. We could call them hypes.’

  ‘Write that down,’ said Stoker Snr. He sanctioned the first payment. His son handed me a hundred and fifty quid. I pocketed it.

  ‘OK. Let’s move beyond the obvious. Not everyone wants celebrity. This could be an expensive product. You don’t want to fold adolescent values into it. Think global executive culture. A personal digital assistant. A company with one employee infinitely duplicated. A corporation of You. Why can’t it take your name? Why can’t it be “digital Stoker” – no, “digital” is not right. It’s like your son. Senior and Junior. In Japan, the surname takes a title depending on who you are addressing. To a superior from whom I am receiving instruction it would Stoker-sensei. If you were a child or very close to me, you would be Stoker-chan. More neutrally, Stoker-san. We should add these titles to the names of our simulations. Yes, sims. Stoker-sim. Spence-sim. It says who they are and what they are.’

  ‘Write that down,’ said Stoker Snr. His son went to hand me another hundred and fifty quid, but I held out for three hundred, arguing that I had cracked it.

  ‘One more,’ said Stoker Snr. ‘Friendlier. Less formal.’

  ‘A Whole New You. That’s the promise isn’t it? Especially for women, the shame toward the self, desiring complete self-immolation and reconstruction. It’s a new you. An iteration. Like in software, it’s You 4.1, 4.2, whatever. If you have a number in the name it makes it sound nice and sci-fi, it signals that you are talking about the future and science and maths. It’s a second version of me. It’s Me2. Me Too. Yeah. There you go. Makes a nice logo and an intimate brand. You could really market Me2.’

  ‘I am not sure about the numeral,’ said Jonathan Stoker Snr.

  His father chipped in, ‘It needs more urgency. More excitement.’

  ‘OK. But let’s keep that thought about self-immolation and reconstruction. It’s like fire. Fire changes through destruction. Now you can’t call them firemen. How about we just take the colour of fire. Not orange. They can’t be Orangemen, that’s taken. Red. Red men. Red is the colour of danger but also the colour of power. Everyone wants more power, don’t they? Redboys and redgirls. Like a younger self. What sells better than youth? You would pay to have your younger fitter self hanging around, wouldn’t you? Maybe not. We should stick with red men, regardless of whether they are based on a man or a woman. Just forget gender. We are talking about a new species.’

  I walked out a grand richer. As they paid me, I noticed there was plenty more left in the shoebox. Stoker Snr patted me firmly on the back. ‘Good work, big man.’

  Jonathan was more solicitous and reassuring. ‘We’ll make sure Hermes knows it came from you originally,’ he smiled. They would as well; it was more important to be seen as being capable of extracting useful work from creative people than being seen as creative themselves. ‘And if this concept flies, of course we’ll retain you to develop it further.’

  The Stokers departed to work up the ideas; by dusk, the concepts of ‘Me2, ‘-sim’ and ‘red men’ would be rendered in 24-point text on horizontal PowerPoint slides. I took the first of their tenners to the bar. Retiring to the conservatory with a bottle of Skye bitter, I found Bruno Bougas hunched over a table, a large sheet of paper before him upon which he had doodled dozens of Dr John Dee’s monads. Etiquette suggested that we should not speak while we were still meant to be devising our responses to the brief. But I was smug with fresh invention. He looked like he was working on an entirely different problem altogether.

  ‘Did you come up with anything?’ I asked. He leant back to show me the battalion of bull-headed stick men he had scrawled.

  ‘Did you?’ he asked.

  ‘I gave the Stokers one or two ideas.’

  ‘You know what the answer is, don’t you?’

  Could there really have been one correct answer?

  ‘The soul, Nelson. That’s what you call the copy. If such a technology existed, it would be so advanced that the only way you could explain it to people would be to use magical or religious paradigms.’

  I disagreed. You could not sell a product called ‘soul’.

  ‘You are confusing marketing with satire. Also, religion is not a useful frame of reference for the mainstream. The soul is just hyperbole. You have to think in terms of celebrity and self-improvement.’

  ‘No. Advanced technology will be sold as magic because it’s too complicated for people to understand and so they must simply have faith in it. Unfortunately this product doesn’t exist. We are not at a new business meeting, we’re at a school reunion.’

  He ground his index finger into the monads. ‘What this hieroglyph really represents is the complete detachment of Hermes Spence from any useful reality. It�
�s a symbol of folly and madness. Somebody better show me a paying client soon or I am going home to kill myself.’

  ‘You are missing it. Hermes is asking us to think about utopias. About assuming the right to dream again. He wants us to think out of the box.’

  ‘Why must it be a box?’ replied Bougas, his odd smile revealing two pronounced incisors.

  Come sundown, the court reconvened on the crescent of chairs outside the abbey. The grass was cut long enough to flatten into swirls and whorls under the sea wind. Sitting out as the last of the light lurked above the distant hills of Mull, I felt negligible, a bystander in the eternal war between the sea, the sky and the rock, that red rock. There was a lot of flesh in the rock. The Kings of Ireland, Scotland and Norway were buried here. The island was a grave, the last call before the great void of the Atlantic.

  Hermes did not return.

  Stoker Jnr came out to collect our work. He let us know that we would be expected to leave the island in the morning.

  ‘Is that it?’ Morton Eakins spoke for us all.

  ‘We’ll review your work and contact you soon,’ replied Stoker. That swine already had his feet under the table. I looked around for Bougas, to see what he made of Spence’s absence, but the maverick consultant was gone.

  The court sat in silence. The dusk thickened into night. Janis was first to lose her calm, mouthing off that she was going to get Spence right now and let him know in no uncertain terms precisely how out of order he had been. Christine looked pained. Had she been invited only to be humiliated like this? There was misogyny in the soil. St Columba forbade woman and cows from setting foot on Iona, saying, ‘Where there is a cow there is a woman, and where there is a woman there is mischief.’ A community is as much about who you keep out as who you welcome in. This thought experiment had been set to determine who could stay in the circle and who was to be rejected. The Stokers had convinced me not only that was I staying in the court, but that I would enjoy a greater status than previously. That was why, as the court walked disconsolately back to the hotel, their faces faintly luminescent in the overwhelming dark, I refused to move. Alone in the crescent of empty and tipped chairs, I waited for them to come and get me.