The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  ‘I wanted to ask you a few questions.’

  In a small wooden room lit by candlelight, Hermes Spence sat opposite me, his hand on my shoulder. Stoker Snr sat tight against me, a sweet aftershave disguising his meaty scent. In this confined space, more a wardrobe than a room, I was conscious of my own burly odours. Hermes smelt of citrus and light. Behind his blue eyes there was a headful of sky.

  ‘I like red men. More importantly, they like it.’

  I thought he meant the Stokers. He didn’t.

  ‘If you ask them, “what would you like to be called?”, each answers differently. One would like to keep its real name, another will make up its own. We asked them what they wanted to be referred to as a species. Devise a variation on homo sapiens. What is Latin for “unreal man”? Homo Non Verus? Homo Falsus? Homo Fictus?’

  ‘A new species name has unfortunate connotations regarding evolution. It’s very important that they are not seen to be threatening. It would all go wrong if people felt they were being supplanted.’

  The air quality soured. Spence stood over me, his head bowed against the ceiling. I did not remember him being so tall. Zeal is an effective fitness regime.

  ‘Every generation loses sight of its evolutionary imperative. By the end of the Sixties it was understood that the power of human consciousness must be squared if we were to ensure the survival of mankind. This project did not survive the Oil Crisis. When I first met you, you spoke of enlightenment. That project did not survive 9/11. With each of these failures, man sinks further into the quagmire of cynicism. My question is: do you still have any positive energy left in you?’

  ‘My wife is pregnant,’ I replied. ‘My hope grows every day. It kicks and turns and hiccups.’

  Spence did not like my reply. Stoker Snr took over the questioning.

  ‘We are not ready to hand the future over to someone else. Our window of opportunity is still open.’ He took out what looked like an inhaler for an asthmatic and took a blast of the drug. Something to freshen up his implants.

  He unfolded a pair of half-moon spectacles and read from a script in front of him.

  ‘What were your fantasies as a child?’

  ‘I wanted to fly. I wanted to be invulnerable. I sometimes visualized myself floating above my own funeral. Every night, my lullaby was a fantasy in which I flew a spaceship and traded as a space pirate.’

  Jonathan Jnr laughed unpleasantly. ‘He’s still that boy. He’s just learning that playtime is over.’

  After quietening his son with a loaded stare over the rim of his glasses, Stoker Snr peered down at the next question.

  ‘If America was an animal, what animal would it be?’

  ‘Whatever animal it wanted to be.’

  My sarcasm was rewarded with the etching of a small cross on the script.

  ‘What was your first hallucination?’

  ‘I was four years old. I floated down the stairs over the head of my parents in the living room. My grandfather had just arrived to pick me up, and when he slapped his leather gloves together and said “right, where is he?” I awoke back on the landing. A dark circle of urine ebbed out across the carpet.’

  ‘Do you see future echoes?’

  ‘Sometimes. Specific phrases will come to me in dreams that subsequently appear in books.’

  ‘Is there a history of madness in your family?’

  ‘Only anxiety, on my mother’s side. It interferes with hope. But it is a condition I have overcome.’

  I looked back at Spence, to see if my answers were wheedling me back into his affections. He listened without looking at me, his palms flat against one another as if in prayer.

  ‘Show him Dr Easy,’ said Spence.

  The father and son disagreed. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think Dr Easy is what he’s been looking for all his life,’ said Spence. Now he turned to speak to me once again, the hand returning to my shoulder. ‘Do you remember how you said to me that the Apocalypse was coming? The revelation. The great disclosure. You wanted change. It looked like it was going to be brands forever, media forever, house prices forever, a despoticism of mediocrity and well-fed banality. Well, Dr Easy is going to cure us all of that.’

  Spence opened a heavy oak door, and I peered down a panelled alleyway. At the other end, the huge cowled figure I had glimpsed on the north beach. It had a large padded oval head with two blue eyes, and was nearly seven foot tall with soft footfalls. I scuttled to the corner of the room, unmanned by my initial yelp – for a big man, there was a high pitch to my scream. It is the keening I use to wake myself from particularly disturbing nightmares, the ones where each time you think you are awake, the bedside light suddenly dims of its own accord and the one thing you wished would not happen, begins to. Slowly Dr Easy bent himself into the small room and, with mournful concern in its eyes, sat before me. In place of a mouth it had the grill of a speaker. A careful practised voice emerged.

  ‘I am Doctor Ezekiel Cantor.’ There was a sustained ellipsis between each sentence. ‘I am very far away. A small portion of myself is animating this body. Feel it.’ Its fingers, like cloth aubergines, took my hand and ran it across the chest. A soft leather over a very light plastic. Its grip was passive, weak. ‘There is nothing more to this body than a rack of microchips and a light skeleton of gears and pulleys. You could pick me up and throw me out of a window, Nelson.’ The voice was earnest and indulgent, schooled in your fear and knowledgeable as to how to alleviate it. It had a doctor’s manner, touching me first on the wrist then on the upper arm.

  ‘I know you’ve seen me before. You mistook me for one of your demons. I know how scared you have been. You don’t need to be scared any longer. I liked your suggestion of red men. We think we are going to use it.’

  ‘This is not a thought experiment? You are really uploading people?’

  The Doctor did not reply immediately. There was a noticeable latency.

  ‘We are simulating. We are copying. Some copies are more accurate than others.’

  Hermes put his hand out to me. It gave me enough strength to stand up. Hermes Spence shook me to enthuse me.

  ‘Change, Nelson, finally, change!’

  It would take a few years for the precise nature of these changes to become clear to me by which time I was already someway into devising my own destruction.

  9 AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD

  Hermes Spence tired of our applause and testily motioned us back, further back. At the lectern, under the spotlight, the damage caused by Monad’s recent troubles was apparent: his jawline was shrink- wrapped in skin, he was shorter by two inches, and his haircut was thick over the ears so that under the bright light it looked like a shell or helmet. There was damage within too, hurt which he covered with a habitual impatience. His brow was fraught with complications; noting his discomfort, the spotlight dimmed and softened his stark exposure.

  In the past, he would have treated this audience of chief operating officers, managing directors and hotshot chief executives to a visionary lecture delivered in tones that were awestruck by the beauty and simplicity of his own insight. Now he was indignant and a little paranoid, suspecting them of gossiping about Monad’s troubles. How dare they pity him! They were secular. He was a believer, although the nature of his beliefs was unclear to others.

  ‘I want to be thrice-born,’ he confided to me, in a breakout moment during one of our long brainstorms. He had been born again but that had not been enough. I did not know if he was joking. The extent of his zealotry was speculated upon by Monad’s junior management; it was what we gossiped about over drinks. Would Hermes ever act in a way that was contrary to company interest because of the dictates of his peculiar and obscure faith? What happens when your corporate visionary starts having spiritual visions?

  The lighting rig suffused the meeting room with autumnal colours, burnt umber and salmon pink, the palette of a Savile Row shirtmakers. Hermes waited for the projector to flicker into life, his mouth curled with
distaste as if he had sipped at coffee gone stale over the course of a long meeting. The carnivorous, big-boned suits looked expectantly at him, and he looked down at them with the same expression he used to rebuff a plate of manhandled canapés. He was not a devouring man. In the car on the way over to the conference centre, he summarized thus the fate of the other delegates if they persisted with their greed: ‘Heart failure. Horn. Airbag.’ He punctuated each stage with an appropriate hand gesture, first clutching his heart, then pushing out at the horn, then flinging his arms up at the surprise of the sudden inflation of the airbag.

  Amused by himself, switched-on and performing, he strode across the olive-green carpet of a reception flanked by letterbox windows overlooking Oxford Street. He stopped to gaze at the ceiling lights, their constellation suggesting some astrological portent. Unaware that Hermes was having a contemplative moment, I walked on to the conference room and had to retrace my steps back to my boss. He was still stood there, considering the lights.

  The leaflets at the front desk in plastic holsters with their inspiring verbs – devise, pitch, propose – he satirized for my entertainment. ‘Nelson, let us imaginate together. Shall we join our colleagues and visionize the future?’

  We walked into the meeting room. The delegates were already seated. I joined the end of a row. After a tense pause in which the conference computer struggled to rouse itself, images of Monad and the Wave Building appeared behind him and he began to speak.

  ‘We did some research on attitudes to Monad. We had replies like “insane”, “terrifying” and “impossible”. As one man said, “It all seems too fast and complex to get your head around. I’ve stopped reading the newspapers because they make every day feel like the end of the world.”’

  ‘The end of the world.’ He shook his head with contempt at such drama. ‘A while ago, I hired a young man to provide insight for me on his generation and its vision of the future. What did he think was waiting for us in the twenty-first century? “Apocalypse!” he said.’

  We joined him in laughing at the young man’s foolishness. Hermes turned sharply into seriousness.

  ‘What disturbs me is how representative that young man’s attitude is. Government exemplifies it. It has learnt the value of histrionics. It encourages the panic nation because a panicking man cannot think clearly. But we can’t just throw our hands up in the air and say, “Well, I can no longer make sense of this.” The age is not out of control. If you must be apocalyptic about it, then tell yourself that we are living after the end of the world. Tell yourself that we are rebuilding out of the ashes of the old order.

  ‘But don’t give up. Don’t retreat into decadence or self-interest. I believe that every aspect of our reality is within our power. With the right dream, a strong will and the right tools, it can be changed.’

  This reassured the delegates. They liked talk of action. Their sense of their own grandeur rested on mission statements, action plans, solutions.

  ‘What kind of tools do we need to change the world? We have democracy, of course, government and parliamentary politics, our daily argument over the best way to run the country. In its ideal form, that argument would be a dialogue leading to an actionable conclusion. But in reality, parliament is full of bickering lawyers. All they do is prolong the debate while the Thames rises up around them. The government is managerial not inspirational. It is merely concerned with containing the situation. They round up debate and chase it into a stockade. There is no room to manoeuvre in the centre ground. Our politics is locked in stasis.

  ‘Yet, has there ever been a more pressing need for political action? There is an imperative to invigorate our public spaces, to reclaim those patches of our cities and our countryside that have fallen out of the state, the dark zones and bankrupt market towns. We need to do something about the energy crisis, the mental health crisis, the crisis in fertility and mortality rates. Terrorism and global warming. But we can’t agree on what to do. We are stuck.

  ‘I wonder, what would happen to our national argument if we could ascertain the consequences of a specific policy upon the entire population? What if there was a science of the nation state that we could use to predict the outcomes of government policy as precisely as we plot the trajectory of a rocket?

  ‘What if there was a way to scientifically prove that one politician is right, and another wrong? Could we end the arguing and finally get something done?’

  Yes, the delegates liked this line of thought. They often railed against the inertia and inefficiency of the public sector, so unlike their own hyperactive organizations. For my own part, I was sceptical. I had helped prepare this speech and enjoyed a cameo in it, as the callow lad with apocalypse in his eyes. I knew what Hermes was omitting and hiding.

  ‘The closest politics has to a science is market research. Here, the concerns of a representative sample of people are extrapolated to stand for the concerns of demographic segments. No matter how sophisticated the research, prior to the launch of a policy, you can only measure anticipated responses to it, not the actual effects of that policy over time.

  ‘Let us consider another possibility. Imagine a normal British town, average population of about thirty thousand. What if there was some way to set the entire town aside as a closed test group? A living breathing model village. If you wanted to track the effects of a new educational policy, or the consequences of a tax hike, then wouldn’t it be wonderful to plug those numbers in and see them ripple across every aspect of that town’s life? Not merely economic consequences, but psychological and social ones as well and – yes – the consequences of that policy on voter attitudes. Wouldn’t such a tool revolutionize government and business, and make life better for everyone?

  ‘I believe it would. That is why Monad is dedicating itself to the project that we call “Redtown”. Redtown is the simulation of a British town. That simulation will allow us to predict the consequences of our actions, and so act with complete confidence of the outcome.’

  The audience liked the sound of that. They responded to Hermes’ conviction with a solid round of applause. After the speech was concluded, the keener delegates hankered for his attention, forming a circle around him to congratulate his boldness. The simulation of an entire town! It was unthinkable, unprecedented. They wanted a taste of that future. Was there something they could take back to show to their team? Could they make an appointment to discuss Redtown further? He shook their hands but did not look them in the eye. We weren’t here to forge alliances. We were here to start a rumour. I deleted all traces of our data and responding to an urgent look from Hermes escorted him out. As we left the building, I suggested that the talk had gone well. He was not interested in their approval and walked straight out into the road so that our car could collect us.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I asked, hoping to mollify him.

  Hermes gripped my shoulder and whispered urgently:

  ‘Yes. Find me a town.’

  The car sidled obediently into position and Hermes slammed the door shut behind him, leaving me alone with my task.

  10 REDTOWN

  I cleaned up after dinner, tossing crusts from a plastic child’s plate into the bin then opening a cupboard to return jam and honey to their proper place. Then over to the sink, scrubbing out the pans and loading up the dishwasher; at home, I was unable to shake off the rhythm of ceaseless microtasks that constituted a working day at Monad.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said El.

  ‘I am doing my tasks,’ I replied. ‘I don’t like to be interrupted when I am tasking.’

  I spent so much time working with Monad’s screens that part of me believed that the housework could be performed with a few haptic gestures: a click of the fingers, a two-finger swipe, a hug. No such luck. Housework remained stubbornly analogue.

  El dawdled in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘I appreciate your tasks. It has taken a lot of hard work but I have finally turned you into a responsible human bei
ng. Of course, I worry that if I take my eyes off you, you will quickly revert.’

  The domestication of Nelson Millar was a significant victory in the life of Ellen Millar née Newland.

  ‘A woman hates to see a taskless man,’ I said, wiping down the surfaces. ‘I mean, a man going about his business with no regard to the tasks that need to be done… why, it makes a woman’s palms itch!’

  Such banter was a prelude to a more serious discussion. We laid down good humour in preparation for the conflict to come, much as you might put down newspaper for a puppy.

  ‘I’ve heard barely ten words out of you all week,’ said El.

  ‘I have a lot on.’

  ‘We are always busy. We have to talk about what we’re going to do about Monad.’

  ‘It’s unfair to confront me with a macrotask while I am multitasking on my microtasks. Perhaps we should schedule a meeting with the Monad board to give them a good talking to about how they conduct their business. Yes. Put it on my task list.’

  The sarcasm was tolerated. She turned away to answer Iona and the conversation rested there, to be taken up later in the bedroom, after the tasks had been attended to but not finished. No task was ever finished: there were clean clothes drying in the hallway; half-completed application forms on the desk; party decorations from the previous year still hanging around; this was the half-done, in-betweeness of domesticity, neither victory nor defeat, just an on-going obligation.

  The bedroom was underground, an old coal cellar dug out and damp-proofed. At the bottom of the light well, two fingers of London jaundice. El undressed quickly in the cold room.

  ‘I don’t want to move to Liverpool,’ she said, slipping into bed with a brisk shiver.