The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  I opened up a spreadsheet and logged the completion of the Lunt interview. Our target was twenty-two thousand people, about eighty per cent of the entire town, making the total copyright grab in the region of forty-four million quid. Maghull had a nationally representative standard of living but was not so rich that any of its citizenry would turn their nose up at a couple of grand for doing little more than sitting in a chair chatting to me and my robot. The Stokers had wanted to upload Hampstead, which was blatantly impractical, given the number of powerful people there who put a high price on their psychological privacy. Also Hampstead has a degree of ethnic diversity, a sampling of the executive class of every nation. Although there is homogeneity to the world’s bourgeoisie, agglomerating around values of education and status, the underlying differences of religion, culture and immigrant experience would require different base algorithms, taking up too much of Cantor’s mind.

  Maghull had almost no ethnic diversity. The ward came out at ninety-eight per cent white British, predominately protestant, two generations and seven and a half miles away from Liverpool. The town’s nature was suitably straightforward. Formerly a parish on the south-west Lancashire plain, it was transformed in the late 1950s to house the displaced population of Liverpool’s slums. Much of the population moved in then, young couples just married, and stayed for the rest of their lives.

  The creation of Redtown followed the same process as the creation of a red man. We began by making a mindmap, plotting the landmarks of the town as if they were key psychological influences. Being at mother’s bedside as she dies corresponds to the central business district. A teacher praising a precocious reader matches up to the canal, the construction of which accelerated the growth of the town. The recognition that you will never fulfil your promise is a new housing estate on an old school field. Guilt at abandoning your family, the overgrown marshland beside the railway station. Each of these places exerts a continuing influence upon the citizenry; like a traumatic memory, their subtle pressure persists.

  It was already past five so I hurried to meet El and Iona at the train station. Dr Easy drove me in a hire car as far as St George’s Hall. With its grand neoclassical architecture and windblown plaza, the landmark kept a solitary vigil on a low hill, one of Liverpool’s numerous ridges on the rise up from the eastern bank of the Mersey. I stomped across the plaza contrary to gusts of sea wind. At the crossing, I saw the hire car again, Dr Easy at the wheel. This was as close as the robot was getting to El. I couldn’t bear the thought of it glimpsing her innermost feelings. Dr Easy would know immediately of her doubts, her spasms of hatred toward me, any unfaithful thoughts or indiscreet actions. The robot would read it all from her body language. She did not deserve such exposure, nor could I stand to discover her secrets.

  I bounded up the stairs at the entrance of Lime Street station and went directly to the concourse. El was looking out for me, Iona dangling idly off her hand. She smiled when my familiar shape came into view. She had a lowdown London pallor, and was sallow around the eyes, tired from the unending, unshared tasks.

  ‘Iona slept on the train. I had time to think. Do you remember the Drug Porn parties you used to run? There is a photograph somewhere of the two of us at a masked ball. You are wearing a blue moleskin suit and a samurai helmet. I am in my fur and serial killer’s rubber mask. There are plastic palm trees behind us, a screen showing a film of a beach. On the train, I tried to remember all the parties you held but it was hard to tell them apart. Before Iona was born, the years concertina into four or five memories, of being in bars, watching films, dancing, lying in the sun. Anyway, I was thinking about Drug Porn and what a different phase that was for you, how innocent it was, commercially I mean, how absurdly impractical. I went along with it. I’ve always supported you. But I was thinking how different you must have been then. Do you think you’ve changed? You don’t play the fool so much.’

  I hefted Iona up in arms so that she could see across the Mersey. ‘Iona is the fool now. I am just her straight man.’

  In the form of our child, the physical disparity between El and myself had produced a pleasing average. I was a wardrobe of a man, an overweight brick. El was petite and did not so much stand beside her husband as shelter in the lee of him. Raymond used to make fun of us. ‘Did you steal her from a neighbouring tribe,’ he’d say, eyeing her up as being better matched to his tidy stature. After a month apart, I really felt head-and-shoulders above her. A gap in the relationship had appeared; she was all the way down there, I was all the way up here. Domesticity had given me a kind of radar sense that regularly swept across my wife and child, revealing their mood and location so that I was always reassured as to their happiness and safety. My time in Liverpool switched off that sense. My efforts to please them failed. We went to the wrong café and ordered the wrong food. Affectionately, I bit Iona on her upper arm and she screamed, furious and wounded. El did not know what to make of my action.

  ‘I was being a monster,’ I explained. ‘She used to like it.’

  El rolled up the child’s sleeve and rubbed gently at the bite mark.

  ‘I am not doing very well, am I?’

  El did not my catch my disconsolate mournful expression; we were out of sync when it came to reading one another’s faces.

  The café was a student haunt at the top of Bold Street, and we were hemmed in by the loud theorizing of the other patrons. They weren’t other people to me. They were a contingent bundle of genetic traits, psychological tendencies, environmental impacts, social conditioning, received ideas, cultural norms and so forth. The things they spoke so forcefully about were mere ticker tape running in and out of an arbitrarily composed consciousness sited within a brain evolved to evade predators on the African plains.

  ‘You aren’t even listening to me,’ said El.

  ‘Sorry,’ I replied. ‘I was miles away.’

  El helped Iona into her duffle coat, ensuring her hat was pulled down over her ears.

  ‘What were we talking about?’ I asked.

  ‘We weren’t,’ said El, not turning to face me, staying determined that Iona fasten each of the toggles. Here were two silences for me to decipher: firstly my daughter’s uncomplaining compliance to her mother’s will, who she sensed was in no mood for a whinge; secondly, my wife’s averted gaze, an ostentatious signal, an overstated subtlety, if one can live with that paradox, if one can live with it and marry it. Back home, we did not need to articulate our feelings, the air we shared was scented with our respective moods which filled the house like the smell of beeswax polish upon varnished floorboards. Now we were apart, we could not rely upon finessed silences.

  I asked El to stay. To try again. The menu had two things she liked. There were cakes in a glass cabinet. Iona could barter good behaviour for one. If they left now, the day would be lost mutely wandering the windblown streets in search of the right thing to say, the right place to say it, and we would find neither. I promised to focus and not be so distracted.

  ‘I just want you to come back,’ she said, unbuttoning Iona’s duffel coat. ‘You handed me the baton and ran off into the distance. That’s not what we agreed. We didn’t agree to any of this.’

  ‘Where is Daddy running to?’ asked Iona.

  ‘I am not running anywhere,’ I said, answering my daughter directly, my wife obliquely. With a wan smile, I showed Iona the various words on the menu that corresponded to her favourite foods. She shook her head. She wasn’t eating them anymore. Fish fingers were for babies, she pointed out. El took over, resolved the issue, and after the waitress took our order, she leant over to me and said, ‘On the train, I was also thinking about what you are doing here. There was an article about Redtown in the paper. People are shocked that you are involved in it.’

  ‘There are always sceptics.’

  ‘You don’t think there is something immoral about simulating people, buying up the copyright to their minds?’

  ‘It’s not like they are monetizing that content
themselves. It’s an unexploited surplus resource. The process takes nothing from them; rather we are adding them to the global knowledge base.’

  ‘While we’re here, you could simulate me and Iona. Have you thought about that? You would always have us to hand. Or you could simulate yourself, so that we could have a piece of you.’

  ‘And what would you do with my simulation?’

  El had thought about this one.

  ‘I would ask it why you were so keen to leave us.’

  That was unfair.

  ‘Why is the idea of simulating us so horrible, yet it is acceptable to copy thousands of people from Maghull? Can you explain that to me?’

  Selves will be the last territory to be mined, stripped, sold.

  ‘I am old-fashioned. I believe in secrets.’

  ‘And the people of Maghull don’t deserve their secrets?’ replied El.

  ‘Confession is an urgent need for them. They are caught up in a cult for self-exposure.’

  ‘You are a hypocrite,’ said El.

  ‘I don’t believe in what I do for a living. So what? My hypocrisy is the only thing which makes me demographically representative.’

  ‘How do you know something won’t go wrong again, like it did with Harry Bravado? Next time, it might be you in a graveyard with a bullet in your face.’

  ‘Why would Daddy be in a graveyard?’ interrupted Iona, indicating she had enough understanding of our conversation for El to back off the subject.

  For El’s visit, I booked a room in a hotel by the Pier Head. This arrangement spared her the parody of domesticity Morton Eakins and I had in our apartment. Also, the prospect of my vile colleague overhearing the conjugal visit – albeit, its ecstasies muffled by the presence of a sleeping child on an adjacent mattress – gave me an excuse to spring for the penthouse suite. The sex was urgent and silent. When it was time for El and Iona to return to London, I walked them across the city to the station. If we had not resolved the big issues between us, at least we had reaffirmed physical desire.

  She was right to be suspicious of Monad. The corporation and the family are rivals. Capital is our lord, exercising droit de seigneur over its subjects. For all its power, Monad was a possessive and insecure lover.

  Don’t be good at things you hate. All of this was my doing. In the empty suite, I flicked through my initial presentation for Redtown. Hermes asked me to find him a town so I found Maghull and then pitched it to the board. In the underground boardroom of the Wave, I screened films of the town and preliminary interviews with council leaders, summarized the census findings, and presented brief interviews with a cross section of the citizenry. My presentation summarized Maghull as representing a goldilocks gene pool and meme pool, that is, not too hot and not too cold.

  The management sat around the table in various defensive and offensive postures. Bruno Bougas was distracted by his body, picking out a rogue hair, rubbing at a dry patch of skin, wincing and nursing kidney pain. Jonathan Stoker Snr reddened his jowls every time I caught his eye. Across from him sat Morton Eakins, surreptitiously watching the reactions of his colleagues to determine his own opinion. At the head of the table was Hermes Spence, chin forward, keen to hear anything positive after a few very difficult months.

  Harold Blasebalk’s death was a continuing inconvenience. Neither of the two official theories surrounding Blasebalk’s death, suicide or murder by Monad employee Raymond Chase, were PR victories for the company. Under the low light, the damage to Spence’s zealous complexion was apparent; a V of sweat-damp stress lines was engraved into his brow. Blasebalk’s death was a gift to Monad’s enemies in government, business and the press, exposing Hermes Spence to the jackals of the British establishment. There were questions from across the Atlantic too, from Monad’s Texan backers, cowboys of beef and oil, whose families had been wringing money out of the earth for five generations. All our fates were bound to Hermes. If he went, the whole court went with him. At the meeting, I felt like I was chairing a group therapy session for the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

  ‘Interaction between the real and the unreal caused dysfunction in red men and their subscribers. Cantor proposes we develop a quarantined reality for our next project. I was set the challenge of finding the right community to upload. Our first instinct was to look at elites, following similar revenue streams to the red men. A tailor-made digital heaven for the super-rich.’

  ‘It’s still the way forward,’ said Stoker Snr. ‘I’ve had some interesting meetings with the prime minister of Nevis.’

  ‘What happened to the Venice plan?’ said Bougas.

  ‘The conservation of Venice in a Monad is a viable commercial project,’ said Morton. ‘The Italian government and the European commission would fund it. Cantor is less keen.’

  ‘It has no artistic vitality,’ I said.

  ‘And your poundland outside Liverpool does?’ Stoker Snr was up out of his chair. ‘You want us to preserve the dullest town and upload scousers when there are people who will pay millions... it was your friend that got the company into this mess.’

  He turned to the others.

  ‘Why is this man still working here?’

  I was used to his outbursts. ‘Cantor is engaged in a study of humanity. It allows us to work with it solely to pay its way. There are two metaphors for Cantor; we can view it either as God, or as an artist. What it is not, Jonathan, is your employee, or your car, or your mistress. You can’t bully it.’

  ‘We must collaborate with it,’ said Spence, ‘just as we must work with each other.’

  Bougas shrugged. ‘Cantor has been spending so much time in the underclass in the form of Dr Easy that it’s acquiring a messiah complex. It is content to walk among the huddled poor. I am not. Maghull feels beneath us, too provincial. As a focus group it’s of use to domestic clients but their opinions and behaviour will mean nothing in Buttfuck, Arizona.’

  I disagreed, feeling Bougas’ advice was a generalization of his own self-interest. ‘Redtown is not a consumer focus group. It’s a testing ground for policy.’

  Spence agreed. ‘The individual consumer is debt-ridden and exhausted. Future revenues will flow from the state provided we have a convincing narrative that our involvement reduces overall state expenditure. We can run Redtown through a decade of social engineering in a week, saving the government billions. That’s our story. Cantor willing, I am ready to throw my weight behind this proposal.’

  Morton Eakins also agreed. ‘It’s better that we go up North. Less media. It will help us move Monad off page two and back into the business section.’

  Bougas had his head in his hands.

  ‘Why can’t we just let the whole Blasebalk thing blow over and carry on as before?’

  In the three months since Raymond went missing, I’d kept my thoughts about what happened between him, Harry Bravado and Harold Blasebalk to myself. I did not want to be labelled as an apologist for Raymond. Still, the question had to be raised:

  ‘Has Cantor revealed what happened in the graveyard?’

  ‘If Cantor knows who killed Blasebalk, it’s not telling,’ replied Morton. ‘For our part, we have to be seen to react. Otherwise the investigation and pressure will grind on and on. We could lose our licence. We could lose Cantor.’

  Stoker Snr had completely shredded my handout.

  ‘Raymond Chase will show up. I know he’s guilty.’

  The old businessman got out of his seat and came over to me. ‘You know where he is, don’t you? He’s your friend. You got him his job here. He’s been in touch hasn’t he?’

  ‘He has gone dark,’ said Morton. ‘We’ve sent people to look for him. The police have circulated his description across the grid.’

  ‘I find it very upsetting that Cantor is withholding information from us,’ said Hermes.

  Eakins explained. ‘Cantor thought the killing was one of Bravado’s fantasies. It realized too late that the murder in the graveyard was actually taking place.’ None of u
s wanted to explore the implications of Cantor’s failure in this matter.

  ‘The investigation into the death of Harold Blasebalk will unfold at its own pace,’ Hermes Spence moved on. ‘Right now, Redtown is the future of Monad and that future starts in Maghull.’

  The meeting was adjourned. No one congratulated me on the success of my proposal. From their experience, they knew the trouble that came with meeting the expectations of a successful pitch.

  It was the first victory of my corporate career, my first terrible mistake.

  Morton Eakins called, demanding I help him set up an observation post in Maghull. He was responsible for the Redtown habitat, the mapping and cataloguing of every house and street in Maghull, its parks, pubs and shops. While I sat in on the uploading of the citizenry, he measured the town with his team of surveyors. He took care of nurture, I oversaw nature.

  Unfortunately his use of neuroceuticals had given him perfect recall, making it hard for him to generalize. His fussing over detail was agonizing. I found him worrying in the gardens of St Andrew’s Church. A team of builders were packing up their tools, while their foreman dodged past the pleading, stooped figure of Dr Easy. A half-completed scaffold had been erected alongside the square tower of the Victorian church, not quite to Eakins’ satisfaction. He showed me the problem.

  ‘Shoddy,’ he said. With both hands, he gripped a supporting scaffold pole and shook it. ‘Even at this height, it’s not properly secure. When it’s finished, it will be taller than the church. If it’s not fixed now, how unstable will it be at its full height?’

  ‘Why do we need an observational tower?’ I asked. We used balloons with mounted cameras to get aerial details of the town, supplemented with satellite imagery.