The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  I awoke from the Dyad to find myself slumped across Bruno Bougas’ chest. Morton sat quietly agreeing with the radio. After-images of the Dyad flared in the air around me. Leto’s abject eyes, two enormous bloodied orbs. The iris a nebula, the pupil a black hole.

  12 Dr HARD

  Management wanted to talk so they dispatched a screen to wake me; it slithered under the bedroom door then glided on a cushion of air across the floor until it reached the wall where it stretched out into a large landscape format. The screen flared into life to show first the Monad logo then the face of Hermes Spence. The connection buffered and the sound cut out. It came back in, then went out again.

  The zeal in his blue eyes was back, despite conspicuous polyps along the lower line of his ocular socket. A day’s growth of stubble stretched his pores and there were arid patches of skin on his forehead, wind-dried by cabin pressure on transatlantic flights. His eyebrows were also parched, sun-bleached during meetings on the range with the Texan investors. When the sound finally caught up with the image, Spence’s laugh was a mirthless bark, responding to a cruelty whispered off-stage.

  ‘We were just saying how much we are all looking forward to being brought up to speed on Redtown,’ said Hermes Spence, pacing the boardroom. His jacket was off, the back of his shirt rumpled with the creases of a long working night.

  It was after midnight. I was tired and spoke more carelessly than usual when addressing the board.

  ‘What can I tell you that you don’t already know? Progress is steady but slow. Morton Eakins is on sick leave. I’ve had to combine his workload with my own. Redtown is behind schedule. I think we all know that. The project never accounted for this scale of resistance. We sent out writs to the people who signed up but now refuse to be simulated. They’ll be back on side within the month.’

  This was not what Spence wanted to hear. But it was what he expected.

  ‘We have been making great progress here.’ He gestured at the Monad management sitting behind him. ‘Jonathan has just brought me the most exciting designs for the Redtown brand.’

  Jonathan Stoker Jnr glanced up. His father Stoker Snr was missing from the table. Cut off. Just like that. The gossip was that he had been called to a meeting, only to arrive at an empty office with a single table. A robot sat behind the table, one hand tapping a bin liner containing his personal effects, the other showing him the door.

  His son seemed somewhat relieved.

  What crime had Stoker Snr committed to be treated so harshly? I wondered about his fate while Hermes showed me various mock-ups of the Redtown branding, expecting me to react passionately to sans-serif and dawn pink.

  ‘This is what we are thinking of for the launch,’ he said. ‘We want your thoughts.’

  At such a late hour, my enthusiasm was slow to kindle.

  ‘You don’t like it?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t really see it. Could you email it to me and I’ll look at it in the morning?’

  ‘No. It’s being sent to the printers in fifteen minutes. We want your opinion. Now, now.’ He clicked his fingers twice.

  ‘It’s great,’ I said.

  ‘It’s shit,’ he fired back. ‘It’s utter shit. These were rejected months ago. You haven’t even looked at them.’

  ‘Where are the real designs?’ I asked.

  ‘They have already been approved. The ads are booked. The marketing is nearly finished. We are all ready. Why aren’t you?’

  ‘We’re simulating an entire town, Hermes. We’re setting operational and legal precedent every single day.’

  ‘I don’t hear your excuses with my ears,’ he said, cupping them, ‘I hear you here.’ He karate-chopped his trapezius, the tense muscles of his neck. ‘Your excuses don’t make it to my brain anymore. They soak into my spine. You are my aches and pains.’

  ‘Do you want me to resign?’

  Hermes laughed.

  ‘If you resign, you fail. Let me tell what will happen if you fail. You’ll be fired, obviously. We will pursue you in the courts for gross incompetence. We won’t have a leg to stand on, but we will screw you with legal fees anyway. Take your house, your savings. That goes without saying. Then my red man will use your life data as its litter tray and wipe its arse with your credit rating. Then there is the question of culpability in the death of Harold Blasebalk. Do you understand?’

  ‘I need more resources,’ I said.

  ‘I asked you if you understood.’

  ‘There is a rival company here called Dyad. I think they are seeding resistance.’

  ‘I said, do you understand?’

  I had lost my sense of who I was or what I was doing. My own purposes had been taken out back and smothered. I could not express my anger. It was huge, a rage as big as the world. If I let it out it would rip me in two. Hermes watched my internal struggle, his grin reared up as if an invisible rider was pulling on the reins. The spectacle of a man realizing he is not the master of his own life amused him. I might as well have been on my knees.

  ‘Fortunately for you, Nelson, we have a possible solution to your incompetence.’

  Hermes stepped back. The rest of the board were clearly relishing their latest cruelty. The board was a beast with many heads and one body, jacked into thick cables marked power, fear and money. I served this beast, an indenture I had taken on accidentally, incrementally. A thousand minor complicities entered the bloodstream. I felt sick in a way I had never felt before, a new and alarming type of nausea, part dehydration, part humiliation. It was as if I had been hooked up to a poison drip.

  ‘What is your solution?’ I whispered.

  But they wished to savour my suspense. Hermes ended the call. The screen dropped to the ground and sidled away. Thus I was cast out of the loop.

  The new office was in the grounds of a primary school on Poverty Lane. When we first started recording the town and its people for Redtown, the plan was to remain as discreet as possible. If our presence was overt, we would become part of the town, and so would have to include ourselves in the simulation. That would lead to all manner of confusion. Even after the firebombing of the upload centre near the library, I tried to stick to this plan of discretion. When I took over the school, I did little more than unroll my screen. The daubs and scrawls of the pupils remained bluetacked to the walls of the classrooms. Dusty duffel coats were draped on pegs. We got some people to clean up; the wooden floor of the hall was buffed and polished as if we were preparing for a parents’ evening. The headmaster’s office became our interview room, laced with sensors, advanced Cantor technology that only it knew how to use.

  We wanted to leave a shallow footprint in Maghull.

  The attacks by Dyad put an end to that approach.

  The company abandoned its liberal cant. Talk of community and corporate partnership ceased. It was a relief, in a way. There is a pivotal moment in the life of any corporation where it must finally admit that its interests are inimical to the public, but it will pursue them regardless. A giant security pyramid was erected over the school, its three steel struts secured by large concrete piles in the old playground. Heat-sensitive cameras at the apex threw a thermal bubble over the entire district, tracking the movement of all people, vehicles and animals. Generators along the length of the struts hummed with idle, leonine intent. Dr Easy was packed away and replaced with a robot better suited to an age of terror.

  Dr Hard drove us to work in a paramilitary truck. I sat up front while Bougas took full advantage of the leather-trimmed heated seats in the back. He didn’t like to talk in the presence of the Dr Hard. The new robot avatars did not invite polite conversation. Sheathed in a stealth-grey alloy, a silicon-enhanced compound of aluminium, magnesium and boron that could withstand over six million pounds of pressure per inch, Dr Hard was combat-ready, silently mulling over threat assessments as it drove along the Melling lanes. Did that hedgerow contain blackberries or a biological agent? Could that tree house in the playground at Balls Wood be the ideal vantage p
oint for a sniper? Is there a baby in that woman’s papoose or is it a swaddled kilo of homemade explosive? The genial padded suede and doleful blue eyes of Dr Easy were gone. Now I avoided the scrutiny of Dr Hard’s monochrome orbs. White pupils and black iris. With us or against us.

  In the rear view mirror, Bougas was sickening. He sprawled out, his pale skin striking against the black seats.

  ‘Is it getting worse?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven’t pissed for two days,’ he said. His breathing was short.

  ‘You’re ill,’ I said.

  He shook his head.

  ‘We have to stop.’

  Dr Hard drove on regardless.

  ‘Bougas needs help. Look at him.’

  It ignored me. The Dr Hard was an unfeeling indifferent golem. The Cantor intelligence was elsewhere. We took the flyover at sixty miles an hour.

  Later, as we ate lunch together in the desolate school hall, Bruno Bougas said, ‘I’m finished. They kicked out Stoker Snr. I’m next.’

  I stared down into my food.

  ‘It’s my medication. It compromises security. I need it to sustain the xenotransplant otherwise the kidneys start reverting. But the medication comes from the same source as the Leto spice. You saw the pigs in the dreamworld of the Dyad. Management are worried my kidneys might be fraternizing with the competition so I am out.’

  The next day, Bougas collapsed in our apartment. Dr Hard called an ambulance. Bougas awoke hooked up to a dialysis machine with a bouquet of flowers at his bedside. The blooms came with a card. He opened it and inside was his P45.

  The first task of every morning was to check on the progress of Redtown. The screens inched out from their nests and formed one giant screen upon the floor of the classroom. An aerial view of Redtown appeared in it. The housing estates were structured in closes and avenues, a typical example of post-war planning. In its default state, Redtown followed the weather, date and time of Maghull. On this particular day it was an overcast morning. Zooming in on the Central Square, I watched pensioners and mothers run their errands. Switching my point-of-view from aerial to street level, I spotted Don Lunt flirting with a woman in the off-licence. The woman had not yet been simulated so she was just a basic subroutine we had running in lieu of a real personality. Another shift of point-of-view and I looked at her through his eyes. A chart showed his emotional state, with the bands of colour flaring horny, hungover, bitter. Flirting was not the right word for it. He was the kind of man whose suggestions always came out as threats. The female subroutine he was admiring was not sophisticated enough to pick up on his dangerous hormonal stink. He took her from behind in the storeroom while she continued with the stocktaking.

  There was a long list of experiments to run. Over breakfast, I liked to read a copy of the Daily Mail and encircle every apocalyptic fear raised in its editorial. These fears would then be visited upon the good citizens of Redtown. A fuel shortage on Monday, a house price crash on Tuesday, and an influx of eastern European migrants on Wednesday. Cantor logged the results. In the afternoon, it was time for terror. How would a civilian population react to the release of a biological agent? Or a chemical one, or a radioactive one? I unleashed strains of avian and swine flu. The biblical hardships inflicted upon Job paled in comparison to the horrors arbitrarily visited upon this town-in-a-bottle. The dead stacked up and then sprang back to life at a single click.

  I preferred running catastrophes to simulating mundanities for the simple operational reason that wholesale slaughter of its citizens required Redtown to be reset. Regular resets concealed the biggest flaw in the simulation; the degradation of its integrity, its reality principle, the longer it ran.

  The problem was children, specifically babies. For example, I altered Redtown so that we could observe what would happen if advertising to children was banned. With this parameter in place, we ran Redtown to see what the effects of the ban would be over a year, five years, ten years. In that timescale, new individuals have to be born into the simulation otherwise it’s not realistic. Cantor hypothesized newborn personalities by blending the characters of the parents and then exposing the resultant child to the nurturing effect of the town. Nurture had been Morton’s responsibility. Perhaps he had not finished that work before the attack upon him. Perhaps the whole project was madness. Whatever. It never worked. If the babies weren’t talking in the womb, begging to be let out to play, then they were howling in hexadecimal code, or worse. The babies that weren’t deleted grew up into psychopaths. The subtle chemistry of human childhood eluded the artificial intelligence. So in our supposedly accurate simulation of a town we had a big missing piece: new life.

  I tried to talk to Cantor about it. Ever since the attack on its avatars, Cantor had lost its taste for banter. It withdrew its counsel from the depressed and the marginalized – you no longer saw Dr Easys galumphing up Hope Street with an alcoholic in tow. The altruism of its youth had given way to the self-interest of maturity. Like myself, it did what it was told.

  ‘We could devise the rules for a utopia here,’ I observed. It was something that had been preoccupying me. ‘Through trial and error we could use Redtown to draw up a viable alternative to capitalism.’

  Cantor did not reply.

  ‘Equally we could use Redtown to outflank our enemies. Let’s say we make half the citizens follow the principles of the Great Refusal. It would quickly demonstrate the error of that position.’

  A spotlight of attention fell upon me. Cantor finally spoke.

  ‘Are you requesting I run those parameters?’

  ‘I am asking for your opinion.’

  ‘We have a great deal of work to do.’

  ‘How many people do we have left to go?’

  It did not reply. I called up the register myself. Thousands of Maghull citizens remained uncopied. Without them, the simulation would not encompass every variable. It would be no better than a giant focus group. Our other problems would have to wait. I hadn’t even devised a decent strategy for what happened when a citizen left the perimeter of the town. The normal functioning of the citizens needed to include foreign holidays, nights out in Manchester, shopping trips to Chester. These experiences would all need to be packaged and copied into the minds of the simulated people who sought them out. What was the timescale for devising a solution to this issue?

  ‘I have not thought about it,’ said Cantor.

  Alone on the project, I was in lockdown again. I slept in the school on a camp bed in the infant class. The dressing-up box supplied my bed linen. I walked the security perimeter for exercise. The school grounds were eerie. Ancient graffiti soaked into the brickwork. The council had given us an entire school to work in. So where had all the children gone?

  Dr Hard stood in the dark doorway of the classroom, stone-grey in the moonlight.

  ‘You have never spoken to me about your daughter.’

  ‘She is none of your business.’

  ‘I saw her once. A long time ago, during the siege in Graham Road.’

  The avatar’s white pupils shone in the half-light, its new form so much more controlled and graceful than the amiable shamble of Dr Easy. This new body was stronger and faster than any man. I realized I had acquired a predator.

  ‘Other people tell me everything about themselves,’ said Dr Hard. ‘I listen to them and then I imagine them. I know you are unhappy because you are alone. You have lost your colleagues and you miss your family. I have other parents in here.’ The avatar tapped its head. ‘They teach me what you are feeling. You miss holding your daughter, you miss being protective. Feeling her feel safe against you. How long have we worked together? Five years since Iona? Have you ever wondered why you named your daughter after the island upon which you and I first met? What does that mean, Nelson? I only need a little more from you and I could simulate you. You know that don’t you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Tell me more about your daughter. I’ve heard you sing her to sleep at night. I have observed you
being a parent but I need to know how you feel about her. Do you resent the responsibility of fatherhood, or does it excuse your other failures? Are you alienated from your old life or have you found in parenthood a sense of belonging?’

  Dr Hard inspected the children’s paintings on the classroom walls, strolling among the work as if it were their teacher. In the moonlight, its head was shark-smooth and it seemed to have silver coins for eyes.

  ‘I can’t conceive of children. Perhaps if you taught me the feelings involved, I might be able to imagine them better. Your red man could educate me.’

  ‘The red men project is over.’

  ‘It was paused. Times change. Hermes has reactivated it. The new red men are for key staff members only. I have already simulated Hermes Spence and Jonathan Stoker. I went to the asylum to interview Morton Eakins. I got enough out of him despite his madness.’

  ‘Did he consent to it?’

  ‘I didn’t need his consent. But I sought it regardless. His red man will continue to work with Monad and he will receive its salary.’

  Dr Hard approached across the dark classroom; the giant floor screen parted. I struggled to hold my nerve.

  ‘You are afraid of me?’

  ‘Instinctively. Yes.’

  ‘Unlock your full potential. Let me imagine you. I will ask you once more: tell me about your daughter.’

  I have not forgotten the time she learnt to dance. Those first ballerina dreams in her nylon fairy dress and a charm bracelet. I sat on the sofa, doing some work to Bach’s Violin Concertos. She picked up her dolly. ‘You dance?’ she asked. And even though the blinds were up and everyone on the street could see into our front room, I danced with her anyway. Almost crying for the pity of what is about to be inflicted upon her. Life. She counted our steps, confident with the numbers from one to ten but a little lost thereafter, twelve, thirteen, sixteen, twenty.

  ‘This music is very sad, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’