The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  On the steps outside, the mourners spoke only of the drive home, sorting themselves into car loads. June thanked for me for coming. The thought of Horace’s soul persisting in Redtown troubled her. It troubled me too, although I did not tell her why we were so concerned about Horace Buckwell; that his simulation had been quarantined because it contained treacherous information concealed as the Enochian language, the magical tongue of angels first set down in the Elizabethan age. I considered asking her if her late husband had any interest in the occult but decided, in the interest of propriety, to offer my condolences instead. I walked back to the truck. Her son was dawdling around the car park, smoking a cigarette away from the rest of the party.

  ‘Would you like me to take that?’ he said, pointing at the wreath I was still carrying.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Matthew Buckwell. The son.’ A tall intelligent young man with a mop of blonde hair, there was little physical resemblance between Matthew and his father.

  ‘I know who you are.’

  He stared at a burial in progress on the other side of the cemetery. I wondered if the Buckwell family had chosen cremation, the thorough atomization of Horace, because the thought of his rotting body only made him even more monstrous. Matthew Buckwell couldn’t look at me. I understood why. As far as he knew, I spent my evenings eating popcorn watching re-runs of his childhood.

  Finally, he asked the question.

  ‘So you know everything about us then?’

  ‘It is not like that. Whoever your father was, it’s between him and Cantor now. How did your father die?’

  ‘The doctor said it was a severe stroke. Mum found him. He was talking about angels. A Holy Axe falling. Then he was gone.’

  These dying words troubled me. I made a note of them.

  ‘Could I ask you a question? Are you a religious man?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘In your work, have you come across anything like a soul?’

  ‘We’re not looking for that kind of thing.’ This was my stock response to any metaphysical question.

  Matthew Buckwell said, ‘The soul should be a comforting prospect but ever since my father died, my sister has had nightmares about him. I’m sure you know the kind of man he was, what a cosmic injustice it would be if his soul persisted. The thought that he is still out there, drifting around in your computers just waiting for you to flick the switch . . .’ He shivered at the thought. ‘When will your work be done?’

  ‘Very soon.’

  ‘Could you promise me something? Erase my father the first chance you get.’

  15 THE GREAT REFUSAL

  ‘Wake up. We have something we want to show you.’

  A large screen had settled over my camp bed and Sonny’s face illuminated one corner of the classroom.

  ‘Come on, Nelson. Keep up.’

  On the screen, Sonny was joined by Morty, the red man of Morton Eakins. The old team together again, in simulated form.

  In the weeks following the funeral of Horace Buckwell, Sonny and Morty had taken over the Redtown project, working at an accelerated pace that far outstripped my own. Out of courtesy, they occasionally revealed the fruits of their work to me, like child prodigies showing off their latest trick.

  I asked, ‘What do you have for me today?’

  Morty grinned at the creases on my morning face.

  ‘We want your opinion on this.’

  Morty reached into a cardboard box and took out a newborn baby. It squinted to be brought out into the light.

  ‘Has it said anything yet?’ I asked. All the experimental babies created in Monad tended to premature cognition.

  ‘We tried a different approach. The baby’s body is, as usual, a fuzzy synthesis of both parents’ genetic material.’

  Sonny lifted the baby’s chubby arm to demonstrate this point.

  ‘We’ve held off hypothesizing its personality. That comes later. For now, the baby is powered by simple subroutines of comfort. Food, sleep, warmth: it is a survival machine. Simplest code there is. We won’t transfer the personality until it’s about six months old. Does it look realistic to you? I mean, you’re the one with parental experience.’

  The baby’s head lolled over the edge of Morty’s arm, its black eyes urgent in search of a breast. It made me anxious. I wanted to take it from its unsuitable stepfathers and care for it.

  ‘It needs a mother,’ I said.

  ‘It has one in Redtown. If you sign off on the baby we’ll transmit it into her womb. Then we’ll all watch the birth.’

  I got out of bed and walked over to the screen. It was a little baby girl, grizzly with hunger and wrapped in a towel.

  I said, ‘The baby is hungry now. You should feed it.’

  Morty was incredulous. ‘The baby is a string of numbers. We modelled it last night.’

  My instinct to protect the unreal baby confirmed my redundancy. I was saddled with antiquated emotional programming. I was yesterday’s man.

  ‘It’s not even based on a real baby,’ said Morty.

  ‘Please. It’s very early and I’m too fragile for this.’

  ‘It’s just a piece a code we evolved. I’ll show you.’

  Morty put the baby down on the edge of the desk and I knew that he was going to do something terrible to it to prove his point. I pleaded with Sonny to stop him and my younger self took pity on me and returned the baby unharmed to its cardboard box.

  ‘This is a weakness you should work on, Nelson.’

  Morty was pleased at my shortcoming. I had not seen the real Morton Eakins since he was attacked in our apartment on the night we first encountered the strange forces of the Dyad. The attack, a psychic rape, was similar to that inflicted on Horace Buckwell; in both cases, the victim’s mind was penetrated with an undecipherable thought. In imagining Morty, Cantor must have worked around that implant, methodically restoring the personality defaced by the violent daubing of alien information. You had to admire the artistry. He had captured Eakins’ distinctive venality, his delight in the snakes and ladders of management politics. Nominally, the two red men were my assistants. In practice, they had become my superiors. The sham of seeking approval gave them the chance to demonstrate this.

  ‘What are you working on for the rest of the day?’ I asked.

  Morty shrugged. ‘Death is the next on the agenda. Our screens in Woodlands hospice have been capturing fascinating stuff.’

  To spare myself from a day studying the data from a children’s hospice, I headed off into Liverpool. I promised to take preliminary readings of the St Johns shopping centre, but that was just an excuse. I was exhausted by Morty and Sonny. Also I desperately needed some new clothes. A clean pair of trousers would do wonders for my ego.

  It was short walk from Summerhill school to Maghull station, which consisted of two opposite platforms, one for passengers going to Ormskirk, the other for passengers to Liverpool. The trains were the same rolling stock that trundled past the back of my house in Hackney, yellow-fronted suburban carriages that ran on a third electrified rail. This was 1970s technology given a new lick of paint every time the franchise changed hands.

  The railway line ran high above the scrubland between Maghull and the Old Roan, then on past Aintree racecourse and the scrap yards of Kirkdale to Sandhills, where flatpack housing shivered under a hunting wind. The estate was new, about ten years old, surrounded by the burnt-out churches and abandoned warehouses of the city’s industrial slump. The sugar silo on Huskisson dock made the air sickeningly sweet. Then the railway line descended into a ring of underground stations. I saw seats that were brown shoehorns of moulded plastic, relics of a bygone futurism. At Liverpool Central, the end of the line, water dripped from the ceiling through exposed rafters of wiring. The announcement boards were on the blink. I took the escalator.

  From Bold Street, I walked to the student market to buy four pairs of tan combat trousers with elasticated waists. Among stalls hawkin
g cannabis seeds, rare vinyl and tour T-shirts, vintage clothing and rationing chic for the Great Refusers, I noticed a woman trying on a woollen coat, the stallholder tilting the mirror so that she could check, front and back, its condition. It was Florence. I had not seen her since the night they hanged Dr Easy. My first instinct was to throw my arms around her. What a relief her company would be! But I had to be cautious. After all, she had threatened me that night, pressed her heel against my toe and told me of her contempt toward my work with Monad. In her eyes, I was a collaborator. The enemy.

  It was easier just to follow her.

  I shadowed Florence, careful to keep to the opposite pavement, hanging back when she turned the corner. Hood up, I checked her progress with sly glances. She walked up Bold Street to the bombed-out ruin of St Luke’s church, where she met two ratty boys. The trio shared a clandestine conversation. She palmed a baggy and passed it on. In return, they handed her a plastic bag into which both boys dropped their mobile phones. So she was a dealer, but of what? On she walked up Berry Street where she turned into the cage of an off-licence, then emerged with a pack of tobacco. I hung back while she rolled a cigarette, her coat drawn close against the wind.

  She made a further delivery, this time to two students in the gardens of the Anglican cathedral. Although the students affected long hair and unwashed skinny jeans, their complexions betrayed them as dilettantes of the hard life. I couldn’t get close enough to see what she was selling. Again the students handed over a bag weighed down with a hunk of something to which they added their phones.

  Her rounds completed, she walked back to the train station. I settled in the next carriage, risking a look at her face through the partition doors. Her rationing diet had sharpened the blades of her bone structure. She sat tight up against the window, preserving a muted dignity from the raucous families unpacking their shopping around her, the children already ripping new toys from their packaging.

  The line diverged at Sandhills. Our journey took us away from Maghull and alongside the Mersey, passing first Bootle and Seaforth docks then on to the suburbs of Hightown and Freshfield, looking down onto gardens lit by conservatories. The train pulled into Formby station. She ambled over to the doors. I waited for her to get off and then followed discreetly behind.

  Throughout the journey, I had puzzled over what exactly Florence could be dealing. It had to be the Leto spice. That night at the King Edward, I never asked Bougas from whom he had bought the drug. Perhaps he had dealt with Florence. Perhaps she was our way into the Dyad. I would have to be careful.

  Once out of the station, she took a path to the Sefton coast. The autumn afternoon was already fading and the sand dunes of Formby Point were waves of grainy blue and speckled grey. Wrapping her woollen coat tight about her, Florence galloped up the flank of a dune, steadying herself with handfuls of marram grass until she gained the peak. She stretched her arms out for balance, waved exultantly, then stumbled quickly down the other side. I snuck between sand waveforms in a crouching run. I thought I saw her looking my way and fell quickly to the ground, spiking my palms on prickly saltwort and sea holly. The landscape was a labyrinth of peaks and troughs. I climbed to the top of a dune to see if I could spot her. Across the wide expanse of the beach, the grey silhouettes of dog-walkers and joggers. No sign. Looking back inland toward the pine woodlands I saw a more purposeful trio. They were running toward me. I skidded back down the dune.

  The last of the sunset brought out the reds in the vegetation. Heather massed in an empurpled impersonation of brain tissue. In the half-light, I saw faces in the random tangle of nature. Pine trees twisted by the sea wind became a coven. A bush became a Buddha. So the fear began. Black rats scuttled away at my approach. No, not rats. Rabbits. I had to focus. Find Florence. I went off in search of the people I had glimpsed running. They might have seen her. The two men dawdled on a path and I was almost upon them when I saw they were wrong-faced and alien-featured. No. They wore gas masks which whipped around in my direction. Then one of the men was on me. His speed against my weight. We wrestled in the sand. Grabbing at one another’s shoulders we scuttled sideways. He kicked out at my shins and kneecaps. I threw a punch. The gas mask blinded him to its approach and he went down flat on his backside. I turned round in expectation of his friend’s attack. No sign. Not immediately.

  ‘Nelson!’

  The other man stood atop the dune, the first stars of the evening shining overhead. He removed his gas mask.

  ‘Nelson. Stop. It’s me. It’s Raymond.’

  I was shook my head with disbelief and then the other man got up and hit me back, hard. I was too astonished to even consider falling down. There are some advantages to being a stoic, unfeeling lump of a man. He too had removed his gas mask, revealing a long merciless face with a pitted complexion, one side of which was held together by a ladder of piercings. My attacker was the salesman I had encountered on my hallucinatory trip into Dyad. The Elk.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ said Raymond.

  It was too dark to read his expression and I didn’t want to take my eyes off The Elk who swayed on his front foot, his hands experimenting with threatening martial arts configurations.

  ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’ said Raymond. ‘I mean, to see that I’m alive. The last time I spoke to you . . . I mean, the real you, not a red man pretending to be you . . . you told me to calm down, to not let all the madness get inside me. You told me that my reality filters were broken, that I was blowing it out of all proportion. How are my reality filters now?’

  When we were younger, I used to say that Raymond was my performer, and I was his audience, a poet to my patron, even that I was his confessor and he was my sinner. Now he had something to teach me. There was, in his rhetorical question about reality filters, a signal that our relationship had altered. Fundamentally, Raymond had been right and I had been wrong, wrong to insist on normality, wrong to work for Monad, wrong to ignore the bizarre turn the world took when Dr Ezekiel Cantor appeared. Then, to compound the error, I had spread the propaganda of business-as-usual. These were my crimes. Whether you called it collusion, collaboration or complicity, it went right to the heart of me. I wondered then if I was to be punished with the same psychic violence they had inflicted upon Morton Eakins and Horace Buckwell. If so, did I deserve it?

  ‘We didn’t lure you out here to reprogram you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ve wanted to talk to you all year. We need to catch up.’

  Florence emerged from her hiding place. She came over to me and held open her plastic bag of deactivated phones and what appeared to be packs of meat. I took my phone from my pocket, unclipped the battery, and threw it into the bag.

  Around a blaze of diesel-soaked driftwood, Raymond told his story.

  ‘Whenever I got involved with shadiness, my Dad would say, “Raymond, you’re a natural born patsy, a fall guy.” My dear Dad was right. Harry Bravado played me. I was furious with Blasebalk but I had no intention of killing the guy. You told me to take a gun. You are a paragon of virtue, a family man, I let you take my moral decisions in this regard. But it wasn’t you. It was Bravado pretending to be you. I will never forget, after he shot Blasebalk, how the robot became hysterical. Crying one moment, holding the blasted face to its chest, then laughing and sticking its fingers into the exit wound.

  ‘I was next. No doubt about that. Employee kills client then turns gun on himself. Have you ever been less than five seconds from death? I have to say, I really let myself down as a man. Wailing, begging, squeaking. Then, silence. It stopped. The robots went dead. Like that, snap! They slumped onto the ground. One moment they were killers, the next they were furniture. I ran back through the graveyard and got into Blasebalk’s van. I knew that it was over for me. As long as Monad existed, they would never leave me alone. I was a witness to a major flaw in their business plan. So I went dark.’

  The fire flattened and flared against the sea wind, the elements thriving upon mutual antago
nism. Water seethed out of the grain of the driftwood, the pressure relieved here and there by pops of embers. Raymond paused to watch the upward drift of fire seeds. The Elk was on the loose, ostensibly to gather wood. I had been granted a reprieve. Raymond was giving me a chance to redeem myself, though he had not explained exactly what that would involve.

  ‘It was The Elk who saved me. He knew what to do. I couldn’t call my mother, I couldn’t speak to Florence. We got her out later. I hoped that if we told our story to the press then Monad would be exposed. The Elk was distributing anti-Monad pamphlets and I got my story in those.

  ‘Blasebalk’s murder galvanized the Great Refusal. Before his death, the Great Refusal was a disparate feuding movement. I holed up in The Elk’s haunted house and together we slowly pulled it together. My story brought some sanity to bear. People stopped conflating Monad with the Illuminati, or seeing the Monad as an end-point of history into which the elite of the New World Order would retreat, abandoning the rest of humanity to a devastated polluted planet. You know how they think. Connecting everything together until nothing makes any sense.

  Blasebalk’s murder sobered the movement. He was the first martyr of the unreal wars. Part-time dissidence was no longer an option. We are the new resistance.’

  The Elk stepped out of the dark. He threw an armful of wood onto the fire, which explored it lustily.

  ‘You know the world is evil but you turn your face from it and hope you will endure. You know that what you do contributes to that evil but you hope that you will never be held to account for those actions. Do you know why they call me The Elk? Because I used to bang my head against the wall. Bang. Bang. Bang. Nothing ever changed, and then one day, I met my doppelgänger, and it was like I had finally broken through the screen dividing me from the world as it truly is.