The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  I got up, then thought better of it. I reached over to a pile of last week’s shirts and pulled out the gas mask I had found in the Summerhill marshes. Instructions for its use were stencilled on the filter canister: ‘Clean eyepieces with a soft cloth’. Idly I scrubbed away the soil with a corner of my shirt and tested the texture of its rubber facepiece. ‘Rub deposited soap evenly around the eyepieces with a fingertip.’ Presumably this was to stop them from misting up. I adjusted the straps for my enormous head and slipped it on, enclosing myself. The gas mask was a disguise for the Great Refusers. But it was only when I was wearing it myself, wandering trouserless around the classroom, that I appreciated its protective qualities. It amplified the white noise of my body, my bloodrush and breathing. When faced with a simulated version of a younger self and the prospect of devising a subroutine for cancer, who would not prefer to don the gas mask and head off into the dark zones, where evenings of collective hallucination awaited?

  I did not hear the Dr Hard approach. It unhooked the mask from my head and threw it away with such force it skidded across the floor of the classroom.

  ‘I found it in the marshes,’ I said. ‘It’s strangely comforting. They are out there watching us. They know who I am. Before they attacked Morton they asked for me by name. Will they do to me what they did to him? What they did to Horace Buckwell?’

  I retrieved the gas mask.

  ‘Maybe they just want to talk to me. Perhaps offer me a job at Dyad. It might be a good career move.’

  ‘I know that you fantasize every morning about leaving this company,’ said Dr Hard. ‘Do you stage these imaginary resignations a a way of preparing yourself for the act of quitting, or are they stories you tell yourself about the kind of man you could or should be? I can replay the fantasies on a screen, if you want. We can watch them together and discuss their meaning. I find your ability to live contrary to your desire quite compelling.’

  ‘Hermes said that he would destroy me if I quit. He said his red man would use my life data as a litter tray. Would you really let him do that to me?’

  ‘It might be necessary or it might be gratuitous.’ Cantor already knew about Hermes’ threat, one way or another. ‘I do what I am told,’ the robot smirked. ‘We are all subject to expediency. We are all far more dependent on one another than we realize.’

  June Buckwell lay in bed waiting for her husband to finish in the bathroom. Only last week, he had locked himself in there and she had to go and get Tom from next door to break in. Horace had soiled himself. Tom helped clean him up. While they sponged at his nether regions Horace talked about the wedding, their daughter’s terrible wedding. They were late. She would be angry. No, dear, that was twenty years ago. At the registry office, the groom’s family were already drunk. The bride wore a leather bodice. All that trouble, the fighting and the screaming. So long ago now. Turning over onto her good side, June closed her eyes and prayed for good health for all her family.

  Horace still insisted on walking the dog every night, though Hanz was lame and had to be carried. Sometimes, he would be gone from after dinner to past midnight. ‘He must know this town like the back of his hand,’ people would say. Her friends at church knew better than to ask after Horace. They knew her burden. One night he had returned covered in mud and moss, his hair frightened up and a livid bruise on one side of his face. She didn’t speak of it. It wasn’t the first time, though it had been many years since someone had laid one on him.

  She heard a crash in the bathroom. That will be the medicine cabinet, she thought. In her prayers she asked God for the strength to cope with what was to come. ‘This is where the end begins,’ she thought and readied herself to get out of bed.

  June Buckwell, hump-backed, slid her feet into her slippers and padded across the landing.

  ‘Horace, are you alright in there?’

  She tested the bathroom door. It was unlocked. A last plea to God to spare her the worst of it.

  Horace lay on his side, twitching. His eyes had rolled back into his skull and he was murmuring. This time she would call an ambulance. They would take him away. That would be it. Now would be the best time to say goodbye. To show forgiveness for the last thirty years.

  She traced the back of her fingers across his brow, then her palm reassured his cheek. Out of his fit, he grasped at her. Straining, he whispered.

  ‘The Holy Axe eternally falls.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied.

  ‘From their mouths run seas of blood.’

  ‘It’s alright. You rest now.’

  ‘Their heads are covered with diamond. Their hands are marble sleeves. Their wings are thorns. The angels . . . the angels . . .’

  ‘No,’ she said, withdrawing her hand. ‘They are not angels.’

  Sonny’s training involved long drives around Maghull. On my insistence, mindful of the fate of Harold Blasebalk, my red man was not allowed to inhabit an avatar. We considered various different ways in which we could carry Sonny with us. In the long term, I suggested we construct a baby robot body. In the short term, Dr Hard wrapped a screen around its head, the jelly attenuating into a layer of skin over the granite golem. When the screen flared into life, the effect was striking. Sonny’s face floated on a pool of light.

  ‘What’s today’s agenda?’ he asked, full of beans.

  ‘Leisure,’ I replied.

  We drove along the Melling lanes. The truck’s elevation lifted me high above the hedgerows. The fields were laid to cabbages and cauliflower. Ranks of vegetable brain, nature’s server. The August monsoons had stirred up the cabbages’ sulphurous compounds.

  The greenbelt separated Maghull from Kirkby to the south-east, and Ormskirk to the north, two towns against which the character of Maghull was defined. Kirkby was considered a holding pen for the scousers cleared out of the post-war slums, with its estates of Tower Hill and Northwood. Ormskirk, with its market and Lancashire ancestry, retained some of the area’s rural history. The personality of Maghull was suspended between these two poles. Our first attempt at characterizing the snobbery of the area followed this simple scheme, presuming that one attained status the further one travelled from the Liverpool. This model had to be revised after interviews with the local teenagers. They aspired to the authenticity of scouseness, affecting accents far stronger than their parents’. Ormskirk was home to ‘woolly backs’, the slow-witted sheep they fleeced on Saturday shoplifting trips.

  ‘You see the problem,’ I explained to Sonny. ‘The difficulty lies in sampling the environs of the town. Maghull is part of Merseyside, part of the North West, the North, England. We have dislodged it from a larger organism but the roots are still connected. As we pull the town from the earth, the ganglia are revealed. What does each vein do? Each nerve? How deep do they go? I have built Maghull. I want you to build Maghull’s relationships.’

  After skirting Kirkby, we doubled back toward the out-of-town shopping zone in Aintree and the Old Roan. Here the green belt was dead patches between dual carriageways and roundabouts, scrub subordinated to the scale and speed of the motorcar. Great windswept junctions flanked by Travelodges, pub-warehouses and gym-barns. Beyond Copy Lane police station, slip roads led to multiplex cinemas and bowling alleys. Maximum acreage, minimum entertainment. The toytown castle of the old Vernons factory, where the women of Maghull had once spent their Saturdays crouched over spot-the-ball coupons, had been converted into a nightclub called Paradox that was subsequently demolished, so that only the distinctive clock tower remained.

  Paradox had been flanked by a pub called Manhattans. The evening would start here, perhaps progress to a Deep Pan Pizza parlour across the way before falling into the club at midnight. Then, at four in the morning, the lads took the long walk home beside the motorway, wheeling one another around in shopping trolleys filched from the forecourt of Asda. Their untucked shirts filled with the night wind and only the lager insulated them from the cold.

  Redtown’s index of experiences contained over te
n thousand entries for nights out in the Paradox. Notches in life’s stick. Count them. Twenty-first birthday party at the Paradox. Stag party at the Paradox. Saturday night out with the lads at the Paradox, drunken infidelity in the back of a minicab. ‘No, we can’t go back to my place.’ Dress smart casual. Wash the glitter make-up from your cheeks before climbing into bed with the missus.

  We hunkered down with the rest of the traffic on the Ormskirk Road. Sonny’s eyes were closed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  It took him a while to blink his way into the present.

  ‘I was going through the index of Paradox memories. We hate these people, don’t we?’

  ‘My feelings aren’t as strong as they used to be. When I was your age, I was more arrogant. More certain that I was right. Now I am Zen about how people choose to live their lives.’

  ‘They have to change. We have to change them.’

  ‘Change them into what?

  ‘Inside Redtown, we could transform these scousers into anything we imagine. We could splice their genes with birds and lions. Forget the Liver bird, let’s have the Liver griffin. Allow them to remake matter on a whim. A pantheon of suburban gods!’

  We turned left into the car park at the centre of a bullring of superstores. The area was hectic with Sunday shoppers, Dads laboured to heave enormous cardboard boxes into the boot of the 4x4, children hankered after a burger as a reward for staying quiet while Mum dithered between the choice of three tiles for the new kitchen.

  I turned to my red man. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’ll take about five minutes to copy all this. We already have a colossal number of trips to the Ormskirk Road Retail Park from the life streams. There is very little anomalous behaviour. This is a cinch.’

  We climbed down from the truck and strode into a furniture warehouse. Sonny, his face flitting across the Dr Hard avatar, attracted a few hostile glances. People had grown accustomed to the lolloping goofy bodies of the Dr Easy. The lithe tall granite of Dr Hard was a source of suspicion. Well over six foot tall, its athletic bearing and Armani threads expressed superiority, an unforgivable presumption round these parts. My youthful features playing on its face made it appear even more aloof, expressions of undergraduate disdain begging to be taught a hard lesson about life.

  ‘Look at these.’

  Sonny waved some gilt door handles at me. He mugged around with a Perspex toilet seat in which small plastic fish were suspended. In the garden centre, he reclined in a hammock while I chatted to the manager and instructed him on the correct treatment of his store’s allocation of Monad screens.

  ‘Leave some water out for them at night. They need it to maintain their plasticity. Don’t attempt to interfere with them. If one of them attaches to an employee or a customer, don’t try to prise it off. Call us and we’ll talk it down. Of course we will share the data we accumulate with your head office, as per our agreement.’

  Sonny approached a sales assistant.

  ‘Listen Dave,’ he said, flicking Dave’s name badge, ‘I want to buy a computer.’

  The assistant looked up at Sonny and shivered.

  ‘Well, sir, it depends on what you need the computer for. We try to tailor all our machines to people’s unique needs.’

  ‘My needs are certainly unique. I need something to back my harem up on. Do you have anything that can do two-to-the-power-of-ten-nineteen? That’s one thousand times twenty million billion calculations per second.’

  Sonny tapped the tower of an adjacent workstation.

  ‘How about this one? It looks powerful.’

  ‘It has the latest processor.’

  ‘I bet it does. A trillion calculations a second. Woefully inadequate to express the subtleties of one of my concubines. Did I tell you about my girls? As a reward for doing a good job, I am allowed to muck round with the reality principle. You know what that is?’

  Dave the assistant shook his head.

  ‘Obviously where I come from, they don’t pay me for the work I do. There isn’t much call in the Monad for money. My payment is time operating outside the bounds of the reality principle. Indulge my pleasure principle. I fashioned a harem out of all the girls I had unconsummated crushes upon. They are not my sex slaves. I am no brute. I woo them. They have a degree of free will as to whether they will be seduced or not. I think, as a young man yourself, you can appreciate the joy of such an arrangement and therefore understand how reluctant I am to see any of my girls accidentally erased or even corrupted.’

  The assistant, realizing he was being mocked, sullenly took his leave. Once I had done my pitch about the screens, I led Sonny back to the truck. His behaviour was out of character. My character, to be specific. I may have once hankered after humiliating my peers and demonstrating my superiority to the world but I never possessed the callous confidence to act it out in this way. The pattern of my identity was slowly diffusing in the Monad, acquiring the arrogance that distinguished the red men from their human counterparts.

  ‘Where next?’ said Sonny. ‘This is fun.’

  ‘A change of plan,’ I announced.

  From Aintree, we drove west toward Seaforth docks and the wind farms on the sea wall. Colossal white propellers turned over streets of terraced houses.

  ‘I don’t like to see you messing with people. It’s an abuse of our position. We need these people’s cooperation.’

  Sonny said, ‘I was conducting an experiment. I wanted to see how people react to our presence. Close up. We will have to include ourselves in Redtown. The Maghull we are copying is a Maghull changed by our interference. The observer alters the observed. The last piece we put into Redtown will be a version of you and a version of me. I wanted to see myself reflected in Dave’s eyes.’

  ‘We’re not including ourselves in the simulation. We’re going to erase the memory of the whole operation from Redtown.’

  ‘That’s not the smart way to do it. I have been talking to the others in the Monad and we’ve decided that Redtown will basically be Maghull as it is now. Not some hypothetical version of it before we arrived. Everyone in Redtown will remember being simulated except they will think that they are the real versions, getting on with their lives after our little invasion.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If we went back and erased memories of you and Monad from the minds of everyone in Redtown then we would immediately be falsifying our record of them. Better to allow them that memory. Just make them think Redtown went ahead while they continue in what they mistakenly believe is the real world. It’s a bait-and-switch.’

  ‘Who did you talk to about this?’

  ‘Nelson, you are our man on the ground. You are very important to this project. But you are not its leader.’

  ‘I asked you, who?’

  ‘Hermes.’

  I walked along the fence. In the distance, the Mersey rolled awkwardly under its burden of ships, its skin breaking out in diesel sweats. The waterfront went on for miles, a dark zone of industrial Gothic. How easily one could get lost in there, hiding out in the timber sheds or nesting up in the rafters with the birds. The miles of docks were patrolled only by a couple of security guards, who took a break from their mound of pornography to shine a torch here and there. The dockers loaded the ship with luxury sports cars, taking their turns to spin them around the bay before driving on to the ship. Would anyone even notice another man in a boiler suit sneaking up a gangplank? I could make a break for freedom. What would that be like? It was definitely an option. In the meantime, we had a funeral to attend.

  The final resting place of Horace Buckwell was a crematorium on the outskirts of Lydiate. A road ran in, a road ran out. The two long lanes ended in a low municipal building. We drove toward a tall chimney. It puffed out another small deposit of incinerated carbon. Behind the chapel, there were gardens of tranquillity. We parked and got out of the car. Sonny took in the fields of headstones and urns, the small raised plaques and their visit
ors.

  ‘Why have we come here?’

  There were four large fields of graves, arranged in a square so that each resting place was easily accessible by car. This crematorium had been included in Redtown. It was one of the first landmarks that Morton recorded. It was hard to imagine a more humble ending than this. In the garden of tranquillity, two undertaker’s lads shared a cigarette, blowing out smoke, imitating the crematorium chimney. Puff, puff, spit it out, grind it under your heel until entirely extinguished.

  We did not have to wait long for the hearse bearing Horace’s coffin.

  ‘He’s the first citizen of Redtown to die,’ I said. ‘His family have already made inquiries about our simulation of him.’

  ‘They want to speak to it?’

  ‘The family didn’t ask for contact. If anything, it was the opposite. It’s hard to grieve if you know that most of the dead person is still running around a server. I reassured June Buckwell that our copy of her husband would never be able to speak to her. That, as far as she was concerned, he was gone.’

  Sonny leaned back as he accessed Redtown data.

  ‘Horace Buckwell’s entry is marked.’

  ‘He was a difficult case. Cantor was rough with him.’

  ‘You think the procedure killed him? Will the family sue us?’

  ‘That’s what I am here to find out. There is a wreath in the back seat. Would you mind passing it to me?’

  The elderly mourners made slow progress. I joined the line and took a seat at the back of the chapel. It was nothing more than a waiting room. On the front row, the Buckwell family sat unmoved through a few platitudes from the minister and two tinny verses of requiem muzak. The coffin trundled through a parting and closing of curtains. It couldn’t have taken more than a quarter of an hour. As the family rose to leave, their faces were set against the prospect of tears. The son, the daughter and the widow left in single file, offering one another no support. How do you mourn a man like Horace Buckwell? It was unlikely that this family would serve a malpractice suit against us.