The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  ‘Two reasons,’ said Eakins. ‘First, so we can monitor the decay of the church itself, the effects of pollution upon its brickwork, the rusting of the weather vane. Secondly, St Andrew’s is one of the cardinal hotspots in the town’s mind, demanding the most intensive observation. The chapel has been here since the twelfth century; psychogeographically speaking, it is the centre of town’s religiosity.’

  ‘Maghull is not religious.’

  ‘The observance of Christianity is in a lull, admittedly. But I think it will pick up in the future.’

  ‘Surely we have other priorities.’

  Morton hated being questioned, and immediately affected an aggressive impatience.

  ‘I know what your priority is. Spending the weekend in bed with your wife. We’ve lost two days because of her!’

  The environmental routines for Redtown for gravity, light and time, the wind, the rain and sun came off the shelf from Monad. Morton wanted to examine Maghull’s peculiar mindset and how that was influenced by the topography. Certain hotspots in the town emanated influence. That was why he was so obsessed with St Andrew’s Church. The crenelations of its tower were visible from much of the town, a comforting symbol of the town’s parish past. Accurately capturing the circuit flowing between landscape and mind was crucial to the simulation. Cantor never grasped the human unconscious; the red men were utterly secular, that is, temporal, their selves partaking of none of the archetypal, eternal patterns encoded deep within the human brain. In crafting Redtown, Morton and I decided that landmarks would take the role of these unconscious impulses. The marshland around Maghull railway station, the secluded set of swings in Glenn Park, the disused tracts of the Cheshire Lines would emanate their own dark music.

  Dr Easy failed to persuade the builders to return. It watched their van skid out of the church car park. The robot’s eyes were luminescent blue in the dusk, hovering in its silhouette like a pair of irradiated hummingbirds.

  ‘Did you come to some arrangement with the builders?’ asked Eakins. The robot appeared distracted, strumming its fat caterpillar fingers against its grill of a mouth, an arch mannerism it had picked up from Morton Eakins.

  ‘They won’t come back. If I was to explain why, then I am afraid I would have to relate certain opinions of theirs that would offend you.’

  ‘We can finish it ourselves,’ said Morton. ‘Now. Tonight. Get some torches and some tools.’

  Dr Easy shook its head.

  ‘This body does not have the physical strength to hammer in a single nail.’

  Morton looked expectantly at me. I was having none of it. I suggested he hire a new team of builders instead and he begrudgingly agreed.

  Dr Easy and I helped Morton take some readings from the grounds of the church. The ancient chapel was in the graveyard, a dank hollow shrouded by trees. I moved among the gravestones, recording the evidence of clandestine activity in this sacred place. Upon the grave of Frank Hornby, a local character famous for his exemplary miniature worlds, I found three used condoms. I logged it as three separate incidences of al fresco intercourse; here on the sunken moss, her buttocks rocked back and forth, whoever she was. The canal was visible through a thicket. A barge was tied up there, its windows boarded up, and roof patched with tarpaulin. Where the canal backed onto the cricket ground, I noted more dark places of sexual opportunity, and even the barge struck me as a loitering, disreputable phallus. Morton’s observation post would scare away the blasphemous activities in this secret place. The observer alters the observed.

  Then, in turn, I had the feeling of being watched. Something was lurking in the trees. I looked quickly around me. Nothing. Wait, there was something. A rustle through the leaves ahead. An animal? No, I saw the silhouettes of two men. Their faces were wrong. A reflective glint suggested two large glass discs where their eyes should have been. One of them hissed my name with a muffled voice and that was enough for me. I staggered quickly over the humps and hollows of the graves, rounded the church and returned breathless to the half-completed scaffold observation post.

  There was no sign of Morton or Dr Easy. Suddenly, El’s warning came back to me. What if I ended up in a graveyard like Raymond? I ran away from the church and down toward the dual carriageway. There were no other pedestrians. It was teatime in Maghull. The town was desolate. I ran along the carriageway, then across it, toward our base around the back of the library. The upload centre was on fire, its stack of prefabricated trailers entirely engulfed by blazing boa constrictors of flame which coiled up and around the office, crushing its frame before swallowing it whole. The blaze ignited flammable emotions within me, aggressive joy, ecstatic shock. Waving my arms in the air, I skipped briefly. Released! Set free from my tasks! The arsonists had waited until we were out of the building before torching it. It was just a warning. Stop the upload. Leave Liverpool. Yes, they were right, we would do as we were told. We couldn’t stay here. It wasn’t safe. It was over. Redtown was finished. No one would expect us to stick around in the face of such a threat! I took out my phone and went to call El there and then, to share the excitement of the fire.

  Then I saw Dr Easy and Morton silhouetted against the blaze. The robot had its arm around him; he was out of breath and almost sobbing. The sight of my colleagues returned me to my senses. I put the phone back in my pocket. No, it would not end this easily. The fire was a setback, that was all. Hermes would demand courage. Stoker Snr would tell his anecdote about the time he drove between meetings in Lagos with an armed guard. These are the risks you must face to achieve victory, they would say, from their boardroom in the bedrock of the Thames. Work never ends. The tasks accumulate. Never be good at things you hate.

  ‘What happened here?’ I asked.

  ‘I saw them on the security camera,’ replied Dr Easy. ‘Men in gas masks. They rode by on a motorbike and sidecar and firebombed the upload centre.’

  ‘What does this mean?’ asked Morton, as if the fire was a challenging art installation.

  ‘It means we have an enemy,’ said Dr Easy, and there was tangible relish in the robot’s voice at that prospect.

  11 INTO THE DYAD

  We reported the attack to Monad. After a week of deliberation, they sent Bruno Bougas to help us. I met him at Lime Street station, picking him out among the disembarking crowd. He wore a crumpled linen jacket over a collarless cotton tunic, untucked with an archipelago of stains down the front. His head was a bush with sunglasses. I had not spent much time with him since the trip to Iona, four years earlier. There had been meetings, presentations, but my family life kept me out of Bougas’ circle of hedonists.

  Bougas laid down his tattered leather satchel and rooted around in his pockets for a cigarette. He took a couple of drags upon it and wrinkled his nose.

  ‘So this is the North, then. I had hoped to avoid this part of the world. I blame you entirely. Maghull was your idea and now you’ve fucked it up and I have to come and sort it out.’

  Our car took us down to Wapping basin beside the Dock Road. Morton Eakins and myself were staying in a penthouse while we worked on Redtown. Bougas wasted no time in upsetting our domesticity. After a shower, he sat shirtless smoking a cigarette. Morton furiously opened a window.

  ‘You have the smallest ashtray I have ever seen,’ said Bougas waving the offending Perspex dish at me.

  ‘We don’t smoke,’ said Eakins.

  ‘You two are turning into the Ladies of Llangollen.’

  Bougas put his feet up on the glass surface of the occasional table. There was fresh scarring just above his love handles. He caught me staring and turned to show me the stitching.

  ‘New kidney. I’ve reached that age.’

  ‘Is it a pig organ?’ I asked.

  ‘I am now part pork,’ he confirmed. ‘They put me on drugs to prevent rejection. I am being altered at a molecular level to make me more like a pig.’

  He peered at himself in the surface of the table, wrinkling up his nose.

  ‘It is m
aking me quite snouty.’ He grunted twice then held his hands out, turning them over for us to inspect.

  ‘Do these look like trotters to you?’ Then he started to snuffle around Eakins, revelling in the disgust he aroused in my colleague.

  ‘I am a capitalist pig, oink oink, where’s my money snort snort.’

  Morton batted him out of his personal space. ‘Is this why Monad sent you? To annoy us?’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have some of this?’ He held the smouldering cigarette under Morton’s nose. ‘Or are you worried it might interfere with those smart drugs you’ve been ordering off the internet?’

  Morton didn’t like his tone. He looked at me for support.

  ‘They’re performance enhancers,’ he said.

  ‘Well you should ask for your money back,’ snarled Bougas, ‘because your performance stinks. I’ve been speaking to Cantor. It thinks the neuroceuticals are affecting your ability to make a decision. Too much micromanagement, not enough big picture. That’s what they are saying about you back at the Wave.’

  Bougas slipped on a fresh shirt and fastened each button with a contemptuous flourish. Morton sat on his easy chair, his arms hooked protectively about his knees, tucking himself into a foetal position. He zipped the company fleece up tight, the movement of his eyes revealing that his heightened cognition was conceiving all manner of responses and counter-arguments to Bougas. The neuroceuticals speeded up his thoughts until they were too fast to express. So we never got to hear Morton Eakins’ side of the argument.

  Bougas turned on me instead.

  ‘What is all this I hear about him copying nature and you dealing with nurture? You two are living in fantasy land! It’s middle management egotism run amok.’

  ‘Are we really in trouble, or is the board suffering a wobble in confidence?’ I countered. ‘I mean, is this a reality problem or a perception problem?’

  Bougas looked shocked. He walked over and slapped me across the face.

  ‘Would you describe that as a reality or a perception problem?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘A reality problem?’

  Bougas nodded. He walked around the apartment, loosening his belt to tuck in the tails of his shirt. From his pocket, he removed a leopard-skin cravat. He stood before the mirror, tucking it underneath his collar. The apartment was now his. Morton was balled up, brain cells erupting. I was weak with upset, wondering whether I should strike him back.

  ‘We’ve encountered a lot of local resistance,’ I said.

  ‘The first thing you should have done was set up a fake grass roots movement against Redtown. There is always opposition to novelty. Anticipate it, fake it, control it. Instead of setting up even a basic astroturf, you decided to become the gods of nature and nurture.’

  ‘They firebombed our upload centre,’ I whined. There are times when you realize that you are in fact a child and not fit to share the company of grown-ups. Morton was sucking his thumb. How had we so completely lost our way?

  ‘Come on,’ said Bougas. ‘We’re going out. There are some people I want you to meet.’

  I couldn’t muster the anger to hit him, and reason alone throws weak punches. I followed Bougas to the car. Morton refused to come, his response limited to two tense shakes of the head.

  Under Bougas’ direction, we drove away from the city centre, heading north along the Dock Road. I sulked by the window, nodding in time to the staccato pulse of fence slats. Rain washed over the bonnet and individual drops wiggled on the windscreen. The street lamps, shaped like shepherd’s crooks, guided the traffic home. Cars were the sole inhabitants of this part of town; the cafés and newsagents were boarded up and covered with bill posters advertising discontinued alcopops, the concerts of long-dead rock stars and sun-bleached brands from the previous decade.

  Our car pulled up outside the King Edward on Great Howard Street. We stepped out into the remorseless rain. The scarlet, gilt and navy livery of the disused pub was peeling, and the windows had been replaced with wooden boards.

  ‘This is it,’ said Bougas. ‘Leave your phone in the car.’

  At the door, two fresh-faced young men searched us. The lads, dressed in baggy oaten trousers and plain single-breasted suit jackets, went through our pockets and then inspected our clothing for RFID tags, finding one in the crown of my Tibetan alpaca wool hat.

  ‘That’s very careless, mate,’ he said, sliding the filament out of the material and placing it against a large black magnet.

  We moved into the stink of a crowd, making straight for the bar. The barmaid was a derelict Olive Oyl. There was no electricity, so we bought flat ale by candlelight. In the shadows, teenagers dressed like their great-grandparents stared balefully at us. We were pot-bellied interlopers from the future and they were the meagre generation, a demographic sliver squashed beneath the fat arse of an ageing population.

  A small stage was set up in the corner of the pub with a bedsheet as a backdrop. ‘The Great Refusal’ was spray-painted upon it. The band tuned their instruments: a fiddle with barbed wire strings; a gasping pub piano that had to be beaten into tune; drums made out of oil cans; a penny whistle and a pair of spoons.

  I manoeuvred over to Bougas.

  ‘What are we here for?’

  ‘I’m here to score,’ he said. ‘You’re here to watch.’

  Bougas moved over to the stage, peered behind the Great Refusal bedsheet and stepped through it. He was gone.

  Alone, I felt twice as conspicuous. The waterproof fabric of my black windcheater glimmered in the half-light, its plasticity contrasting with the permeable woollens of the youngsters. The boys looked paramilitary and freshly shaven with their hair slicked back. Rationing chic was more than just a refusal of the twenty-first century, it was the uniform of a generation under attack. A woman wearing a blue pillbox hat eyed me suspiciously from behind a scrap of black veil. She was wearing a powder-blue mac, a subtle applique fleur-de-lis on her right breast. The coat was too big for her. She adjusted a pencil-slim skirt, pulled its hem down to her calves where lines from an eyebrow pencil masqueraded as stockings. I knew her. It was Florence. I hadn’t seen her since the day after Raymond’s disappearance, when she was fired. She caught sight of me. I tried to turn back into the crowd but she strode forward and pressed her flat-heeled shoe against my toe to hold me in place.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ I lied.

  ‘But I’ve found you,’ she replied. She was not pleased to see me. ‘I should tell everyone here what you do for a living,’ the idea excited her. ‘They’d tear you apart.’

  ‘Are you after an apology?’ I asked.

  ‘Did you quit Monad?’ she responded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’re the enemy,’ she hissed.

  ‘The police are looking for Raymond. Have you seen him?’

  She stepped back, wary of my motivation.

  ‘I’m going to announce to everyone that the very people who sold out humanity are in the house. I think you deserve that.’

  ‘What have I done? I want to know. Tell me exactly.’

  ‘You’re a collaborator. You work for a corporation from the future who have bought up the governments of the world with promises of immortality.’

  She knocked her fist against my chest.

  ‘Do you have pig’s heart in there too?’

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened but there was nothing we could do. We paused the red men project. We took care of the mess. Don’t pretend you’re annoyed because we fired you.’

  Florence shook her head and leant in so that I could hear her above the hubbub. She smelt of apple juice and coal tar soap.

  ‘Monad is the start of a dynasty,’ she whispered. ‘It is the cover behind which an elite will free themselves from death to rule over us forever. They have already succeeded in the future, and now they are sending the means to conquer us back to their younger selves. That is what upsets me, not the loss of that shitty job.’

  S
he stood back to show me her smile, satisfied that she had plotted the exact co-ordinates of my evil. There was a touch of mania to her, and behind the accusations I glimpsed the watermark of Raymond’s crazed theorizing and conspiracy chit-chat.

  ‘Is Raymond alright?’ I really wanted to know.

  ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘The police want to believe that Raymond killed Blasebalk because the alternative of prosecuting a simulated person for murdering themselves would be like hanging a horse. Monad want to believe Raymond did it too. But I know that Raymond is innocent.’

  ‘They’ll destroy him regardless though, won’t they?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Would you stand up for Raymond, if he returned? Would you defend him against Monad?’

  ‘If I thought it would make a difference I would, even if that meant losing my job.’

  My opinion would not make a difference, and any sacrifice I made would be fruitless.

  Florence returned to her friends. On stage, figures moved behind the Great Refusal banner then two men in plain demob suits appeared, each wearing a gas mask and gloves. They carried a figure between them, a body of some sort. I moved forward to get a better view in the half-light. It was Dr Easy. Its eyes had been burnt out with a hot iron. The robot struggled in their arms. Cantor stubbornly inhabited this tortured, wrecked avatar. The two men hauled Dr Easy up between them. A candelabra was passed along to illuminate the damaged robot, the crowd cheering as the candlelight revealed first its charred eyeless face, then the weak resistance of a broken arm, fingers missing, servos exposed, and finally that its legs had been sheared off at the thigh. I glimpsed a charred D on its chest. This was the same Dr Easy that had been helping me with the uploading of Maghull, my companion of six months. Even though Cantor’s bodies were as expendable as cars, I was attached to this one. I raised my arm in protest, catching the eye of one of gas-masked men up on stage. He gave me a long hard stare, then pulled out a noose, slipped it over the head of the robot and heaved it from the stage.