The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

‘You’re not moving to Liverpool,’ I replied. ‘I am.’

  Instinctively, her hands covered her eyes.

  ‘I will be on my own during the week. We’re just about managing as it is. The tasks. More than that. Me… Iona… our life here.’

  El curled up around her unspoken needs and clutched the duvet to her mouth. I would have to join up the dots of her ellipsis if I wished to discover the true shape of her feelings. About eighty per cent of our conversations are about people who are not there at the time. I guess the remaining twenty per cent of meaningful face-to face, heart-to-heart stuff is mostly composed of the charged syntax of silences.

  Should I comfort or persuade El? I could not decide, and so withdrew into a silence of my own, an unfeeling silence. Her silence was suggestive, a finger on the lips, easy to break. My silence began halfway down my throat. It seemed possible that I might never speak again. A decision was before me, one so intricate I could spend hours chasing down its corridors and staircases, its turrets and tunnels.

  After a month of research, I had discovered a fit model for Redtown, a dormitory suburb outside Liverpool called Maghull.

  ‘I want you and Morton Eakins to work on this,’ said Hermes.

  I was shocked.

  ‘I don’t know anything about simulating towns.’

  ‘Who does?’ smiled Hermes.

  ‘You could ask town planners, psychologists, sociologists…’

  ‘They would give me reports, present options, display expertise. I don’t need that. I need to get it done. Quickly. We must start immediately. The crucial learnings come from the Red Men project, not some pointy-headed social policy. You and Morton did good work with the red men. I don’t blame you for what happened to Harold Blasebalk.’

  I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that I bore any responsibility for what happened in the graveyard, with the gun, the robot and the dead man.

  ‘I had nothing to do with that,’ I replied.

  ‘Even so,’ said Hermes. His implication was a hollow black orb into which I was expected to peer. It did not make pleasant viewing.

  Hermes asked, ‘Have the police interviewed you about the murder yet?’

  ‘Yes. They came to my house. Raymond had been calling me in the days running up to the murder, but the calls were diverted.’

  Hermes shook his head wearily.

  ‘It will be a difficult investigation. There is no real appetite within the police to dig into our business. They may accept a scapegoat. Raymond Chase was your friend. You were his referee. We only hired him because of that recommendation. Even worse, you were overhead talking in an animated fashion to his girlfriend in the staff canteen on the day of the killing. Florence has already gone, of course. The board is not forensic in its decision-making. We like to clean out the whole wound.’

  ‘This is insane. I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Even so.’

  Again, the smooth, round silence.

  ‘The alternative to working on Redtown is to resign, of course, although that may be taken as an admission of guilt. Certainly, I would not be able to protect you if you left the company. No, resignation would be a colossal mistake. Take this offer instead. Time away from the Wave will benefit you. Out of sight. Out of mind. If I was in your position, I would jump at the chance to go to Liverpool.’

  He spied my reluctance and diagnosed its cause.

  ‘Of course, you’ll struggle to sell this to your wife. Simply, she will have to accept that her needs must fit around our imperatives. This is a moral education for you, Nelson, a chance to learn what success really involves. Building Redtown will demand sacrifices and not just from yourself. You will be working at a much higher level than previously. Results will be expected. This is where we ask you to step up and actually achieve something. Do you know what it feels like to win a big one?’

  I didn’t. My leaps for success had always ended in inglorious plummets. As I lay in bed, hunting my way through this big decision, anticipating what victory might feel like, El waited for me to comfort her.

  Let us be clear about this: I wanted the victory. My only experience of victory came after meaningless battles on the chessboard. Most weekends, my friends and I watched football just to taste victory at one remove. Not yet corrupt enough for the triumphs of adultery, we played games like boys until dinner when each of us would return to their respective homes. Hermes’ opinion was that this immaturity came from our domesticity, which suppressed the competitive instinct. Even though I was a husband and a father, true maturity – to Hermes – lay in sacrificing your personal life to achieve a profitable one. Because he was the employer and I was the employee, I had to listen to his theories on these matters, and mostly I would faithfully record his words so that I could parody them later for the entertainment of El. On this occasion I chose not to because that would set her face against Monad once and for all. Then there would no victory and no defeat, just the long slow undulations of mediocrity.

  I tried reasoning with my wife.

  ‘Liverpool is only a couple of hours away by train. I’ll be back all the time. And you can come and visit.’

  ‘A family should live together,’ replied El, and this was her closing statement on the matter. She refused to accept Monad’s hold over us. Stubbornly she hunkered down as power strode by, hoping to hide from it, hoping that it would ignore us. I told her of Hermes’ insinuated threats, that I might be implicated in the investigation of Harold Blasebalk’s death.

  ‘Just quit,’ she said.

  ‘They would make me the scapegoat,’ I replied.

  El did not want to follow my argument and instead vaulted directly to her hurt.

  ‘Why do you want to leave us, Nelson? Why are you letting this happen?’

  ‘It’s temporary. In the grand scheme of our lives, it’s only six months.’

  I could say no more. My silence was as broad as the course of a river.

  When it was time to tell Iona that her father was going away, the plan was to do it together. But El stopped halfway down the stairs, suddenly overwhelmed with tears. One hand gestured ahead to the child’s bedroom, the other suppressed her sobs. I went on alone. Iona was sitting in bed, dressed in her cotton nightie and reading a story. As she had not yet learnt to read, this storytelling involved remembering and improvising a tale based on the pictures upon the page. I had tried to teach her to recognize a few words, with little success. Iona was convinced this improvising was reading and did not need my help. She had inherited El’s stubbornness. As I waited for her to finish the story, I looked around the room, at the diminutive blue book shelf with its dishevelled ranks, the red crate of soft toys, the diorama of knights and princesses and dragons poised mid-fight, the small plastic glass of water next to the bed, which she never drank from but insisted upon nonetheless, because her father kept a pint glass of water next to his bed too.

  Iona was becoming like me. Because she loved me. Because I was around. What would she learn from me? How to fit your desires around those of the world? I could teach her the manners of the reality principle. Hold classes in how to respond to the fierce urgent will of the world with polite supplication. With her stubbornness, Iona was certainly born into the spirit of the age, the Great Refusal. To some people, the Great Refusal was the stamping foot of a spoilt bourgeoisie; to others, it reclaimed the right to dream. Myself, I longed for it but had no faith in it. I had tried defiance. It was futile. Of late, I had learnt the rewards of doing what I was told.

  I sat on the edge of her bed, found Iona’s teddy tucked up in the bedclothes, and passed it over to her.

  ‘I am going away. I’ll not be around for a long time.’

  ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Another city. I have to go there to do my job. When I am finished, I will come back.’

  ‘Why do you have to do your job?’

  ‘Because that’s how Mummy and Daddy get money, which we need for this house and for food and toys.’

/>   ‘And chocolate.’

  ‘That too, yes.’

  She nodded, as if she understood. Iona liked to ask questions but was too young to understand the answers. Sometimes she would ask me how things get dead and give a considered nod at my answer, as if she was content that finally all this mortality business had been cleared up for her. She was four years old. She didn’t have a clue. I did not press the point home. I kissed her warm, tired cheeks good night and, looking back at her from the bedroom door, made a conscious effort to fix this moment in my memory.

  I spent the next six months supervising the simulation of the citizens of Maghull. Monad set up an office between a disused library and the car park of the local supermarket, a stack of prefabricated trailers for Morton, Dr Easy and me to work in. Monad used the Lockdown project management system which forbade team members from undertaking any activity outside of the project. Only once we’d completed the initial burn-down list was I permitted a family visit.

  The last item on the burn-down list was an upload interview with a Maghullian called Don Lunt. His charts did not promise an easy session. The scans were livid with aggressive tendencies. His police record filled in the details. Two counts of actual bodily harm, one dogfighting misdemeanour and a fine for ‘watching and besetting’, which was an offence to do with aggressive picketing.

  Dr Easy sat in on the interview sessions, poised awkwardly on a small wooden chair. Whenever it spoke to me, it put its soft paw on my thigh, like I was a patient who needed comforting.

  When he took his seat, Don Lunt shrugged to show that he was not intimidated by the robot. A grizzly bear in a Hawaiian shirt and leather jacket, the big man slumped down in the seat with his legs parted, airing his crotch. He let out a big fat grin.

  ‘Do you have my money?’ he asked.

  Lunt had logged three requests for advances on his fee. Dr Easy had predicted this would be his first question and so we had prepared an appropriate script.

  ‘Let me suggest a deal,’ I said. ‘I could give you five hundred now, with another grand on your completion of the course to our satisfaction. Then, we will give you a third and final payment of five hundred when your simulation comes into being – effectively we would be advancing you out of that final chunk.’

  Lunt scrutinized the ceiling tiles. The movement of his eyes, first upward, and then to the right, showed he was calculating, mentally allocating the money we had promised him. He maintained a sullen noncommittal front, as civilians feel they must during negotiation.

  ‘That sounds on the right track.’ The access cue was the word ‘sounds’, indicating that his calculation was associated with his auditory faculties and that the decision was being made on emotional grounds. He was pleased with himself for bullying some advantage out of us. The Cantor intelligence, eavesdropping on the interview from within the lumbering form of the Dr Easy, would know for sure. Whereas I could only discern the broad themes of body language, Cantor’s experience, the trillions of interactions between humanity and its algorithms, the thousands of men and women it had intimately counselled, their minds copied and bobbing upon the waves of its imagination, meant that it could hypothesize the character of a subject from a few minor hand gestures.

  Don Lunt finished his calculation and showed us how much we bored him by our presence.

  ‘I asked for three grand.’

  ‘You don’t think two thousand pounds is a fair price?’

  A quick look to the right revealed that he did think it was fair. But he was in the building trade and was used to hiking up his price at the last minute.

  I took out an envelope.

  ‘This is an advance of one thousand pounds.’ Double what I had promised.

  Would he take the money now, and by doing so tacitly accede to our terms, or was he capable of resisting immediate reward in the hope of securing a bigger fee further down the line?

  He slipped his thumb into the envelope, ripped it open, and looked at the money.

  Then he folded it and put it into his back pocket.

  ‘Go on then.’

  Dr Easy put his hand on my leg and patted it twice. A signal to move on to the next stage of the interview.

  ‘Actually, we’re done Mr Lunt.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to ask me some questions.’

  ‘We have.’

  ‘The thing with the money?’

  ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ said Dr Easy.

  ‘What about my memories, all that stuff in the questionnaire about my Dad?’

  ‘We are not preserving you for posterity, Mr Lunt. We are merely taking a reading of you so that we can predict how you will act in certain situations.’

  I made him sign away the copyright to the contents of his mind and asked him casually if he had any questions for us. The interview seemingly adjourned; he relaxed. He asked what his red man would do all day in the Monad.

  ‘It will not exist in Monad. This particular batch of simulations will inhabit another workspace.’

  We were now onto the second script, a three-stage process in which the subject was disorientated and regressed so that they deferred their volition to a parental figure, in this case the comforting figure of Dr Easy.

  ‘The red man will live in this town,’ I said, pointing firmly at the floor.

  ‘In Maghull?’ he looked confused.

  ‘In our simulation of Maghull.’

  Dr Easy interrupted me.

  ‘Don, can you see yourself imagining a simulation of Maghull inhabited by simulations of its citizens who are unaware of the unreality of their existence?’

  The question was designed to disorientate him. Dr Easy asked Don Lunt to imagine himself imagining, setting him on a Möbius strip of thinking about the shape of his own thoughts. On a screen in the palm of my hand, I checked the readings coming in from his mind. They had lost their strong vivid bands. By removing the noise of his aggression, we had cleared our way to the good stuff buried far within.

  ‘Let me put it another way,’ continued Dr Easy. ‘A copy of Maghull will exist in my head. A large sample of its citizens will live there too, and so will you. It is an incredible opportunity. We call it Redtown.’

  ‘In there, will I know what I am?’ Lunt was regressing nicely, his voice softening and taking on the childish higher registers.

  ‘It will have the same level of self-awareness as you do,’ said Dr Easy. I nodded, as the script indicated I must. The trick was to feign complete understanding of Dr Easy and not to attempt to follow what it was saying.

  ‘Will I be able to speak to myself… to it… in there?’

  ‘Redtown is a quarantined reality,’ said Dr Easy.

  ‘That means no,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t want to anyway. Allowing people and their simulations any contact causes all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘How will I know if you start doing weird things to this other me?’

  ‘That shouldn’t bother you.’ Dr Easy prodded the air. ‘Are you the kind of man who worries about the well-being of a tooth after it has been extracted?’

  Don Lunt squinted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you woke up tomorrow and discovered that you are the type of man who worries about the well-being of a tooth after it has been extracted, would that worry you?’

  Don Lunt squinted.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why are you worried about what happens to our copy of you?’

  He had a nagging sense of being shilled, but no evidence of it. After all, the money was still in his back pocket.

  ‘I’m not worried,’ he said finally. His expression said otherwise.

  ‘Good,’ said Dr Easy. It stood up and Don Lunt instinctively rose also. Once he was standing, the kinks in his posture made it clear that he had a pressing, uncomfortable concern.

  How long would it be before he asked the question? The one they all ask.

  ‘You did very well,’ said Dr Easy, ushering Don Lunt to the door. ‘In fact,’ it said
, looking back to me, ‘I am proud of both of you.’

  ‘Wait.’ Don Lunt rubbed his palm over his face. His hand was over his mouth, then it wasn’t. ‘These thoughts of mine, the memories and the dreams, you will keep them to yourself won’t you? Not even tell him.’ He pointed at me.

  ‘I’m not human, Mr Lunt. Your secrets are as safe with me as they would be with the trees or the rocks.’

  ‘Other people can’t just look at them?’

  ‘Your memories are not home videos. Only I understand the information that is you.’

  Dr Easy put its paws on the big man’s shoulders and gave him a reassuring shake.

  ‘Just call if there is anything else you need to know.’

  I stood at the window with the robot. We watched Lunt walk over to his jeep.

  ‘Was there anything interesting in his head?’ I asked.

  Dr Easy nodded., ‘He used to stand on the balcony of his apartment in Johannesburg and urinate on the heads of the black people queuing at the bus stop. As a child, he found a large concrete ball which he rolled down Mount Pleasant in Liverpool, causing quite serious damage. Once he discovered the wicked sensation of letting the ball go and watching it accelerate down the hill, he became who he is.’

  ‘You never have managed that whole client confidentiality thing, have you?’

  ‘Privacy is absurd. Information wants to be shared.’

  Dr Easy massaged its temples, a sign that the Cantor intelligence was overworked. The robot moved past me, searching for somewhere to sit down. This Dr Easy had taken some punishment. The suede skin of its left arm was repaired with tan patches and thick scars of black stitching. On its torso, someone had burnt a crude ‘D’, the letter formed out of charred holes each the circumference of a cigarette end. ‘The initial of a particularly abusive patient,’ said Dr Easy, when I ran my fingers across the fused ruptured material. A few years working the drop-in centres and outpatient programmes in Liverpool had left this particular avatar with numerous battle scars. There were dents in its head and yellow foam spilt out of a razor-slash on the back of its thighs.

  Dr Easy waved me away, its large soft head between its knees, its attention required elsewhere. The avatar fell silent as the speck of Cantor which animated it withdrew. There were limits to Dr Ezekiel Cantor’s omnipotence. The fierce beam of its consciousness was dispersed into a hundred thousand spotlights, raking across inner and outer continents, real and unreal lands. The more of Maghull’s citizenry we copied into Cantor’s imagination, the more frequent these interruptions became.