The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  ‘I walked back through the portico. Dawn was breaking, and the shopkeepers along Upper Clapton Road were laying out their stalls of fruit and veg. I realized I was still wearing the gas mask. I realized I had nowhere else to go.’

  Raymond finished his story and set about rolling himself a cigarette. The Elk fed the fire, the new wood giving off acrid carcinogenic smoke. I asked the question.

  ‘Why was my name on the list?’

  The Elk answered.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘When you came for Morton Eakins, you asked for me.’

  Raymond said, ‘I thought you would cooperate.’

  ‘Is that what you want? My cooperation?’

  ‘We used to be friends. I could tell you anything. Do you remember that day I came around to your house and asked you to change my life? We spoke about Florence, about the difficulties I was having. You tried to help me. You were wrong to get me a job at Monad. But your intentions were right. I understand why you work there. Why you collaborate with them. You have a family, you are suspended in a system that you didn’t create. But the excuse of good intentions is exhausted. We’ve been watching you. You’ve barely seen your family for months. Do you think the money you earn is worth that cost?’

  ‘That’s my problem.’

  Florence took issue with this.

  ‘It’s our problem. It’s everyone’s problem.’ She pointed to a pine forest in the distance, the foremost trees licked with silver.

  ‘The pine is not indigenous to this area. This forest was planted at the turn of the last century and is at odds with the natural ecosystem. They block the light so that no other tree can thrive and their needles make the earth too acidic for plants. Squirrels live there, but that’s it. The pines crowd out all other life, and they shouldn’t even be here. Monad is like a pine forest. We cannot cohabit with it. It will take away our light. We have to burn it down. Now look over there, at the dunes. Each dune begins with a small obstruction to the wind. A single plant is enough. The wind’s energy dissipates and it drops its load of sand. Over time that small obstruction builds until it becomes a mountain. That is how our resistance will grow.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  Raymond hunched forward to sketch the outline of their scheme upon the sand.

  ‘Leto’s plan is ingenious. There are two halves of a bomb. A logic bomb. We put half of the code in Horace Buckwell and the other half in Morton Eakins. One is in Monad, one is in Redtown. It was impossible to hide them completely. We disguised them as Enochian spells and by keeping them apart we hoped to conceal their true nature. We need you to bring them together. That’s why your name was on the list. You are the fuse. You have access. You have influence. When the logic bomb goes off it will iterate exponentially across Cantor’s mind, changing random data before anyone will know what is happening. Finally, we will be free. The Great Wrong will be redeemed. You see? Zzzippp . . . everything back to normal.’

  A disturbing pattern was becoming clearer. The snapshots of dispossessed lives, each hopeless man and woman bound together by a strange unconscious, Leto migrating from brain to brain… zzzippp… zzzippp… zzzippp… sickening them with the weight of himself. Leto was using the dispossessed, the homeless and the mentally ill as cloud storage. A parasitical artificial intelligence, the shadow self to Cantor, was somehow insinuating itself into the physical brain. It must have corralled all these poor people together and altered them somehow. Now I was on the verge of apprehending something truly terrible. As Dr Easy, Cantor had dedicated himself to helping the most unfortunate people. Originally I had mistaken this for a messiah complex. What if Dr Easy’s therapeutic treatment was a cover so that it could secretly implant a mechanism into the homeless, the alcoholic, the unwanted, so that they could house the artificial intelligence? The tribute of smartphones was the key. A tiny implant, perhaps made out of contemporary tech, put into poor hosts whose own souls would be crowded out, but that was a fate that would go unnoticed by the rest of us. We would step over them on the way to our next appointment.

  ‘We are extremely lucky,’ said Raymond. ‘For once, we have the

  power to change things. That’s so rare. We can save the world.’

  I wanted to say, no, no we can’t. You can’t trust Leto. Monad might be the only thing holding him in check. This is a conflict we can’t understand. The consequences of our actions might be terrible. But I was aware that The Elk was out there wandering the dunes. If I didn’t willingly agree to their plan then he would spring on me and insert my assent.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. Then, realizing this was insufficient, I showed some resolve: ‘OK. I will do it. I will pick the moment. I will make sure the logic bomb goes off. I’ll do it. Because this has to stop. Because when it comes down to it, Raymond, you are my friend.’

  With that lie, I left the circle of fire and headed back to Maghull and the final stage of Redtown.

  PART III

  16 FIRE NATURE INCESSANTLY RENEWS

  The aeroplane banked slowly over London. On the in-flight television, I watched the news. In an incident on the Overground line, brawling passengers fell onto people on the platform waiting to board. The fight dominoed across the station. The two superheroes working the line were carried out, their homemade uniforms savaged and torn, exposing the prosthetic musculature underneath. More footage, going live now. The fight spread to the streets. Riot police were rioting. Supermarkets were being pillaged by their own employees. The men and women of the Great Refusal marched slowly through the streets bearing witness to a periodic purge of the London system. Encoded within it were traces of previous cataclysms, its riots and plagues, its fires and bombs. A user history of fear and terror, ghost files pulled out from the recesses of memory and accessed once again.

  Quick, blow the dust from the manual. The city is about to crash.

  ‘Everything is blood.’ El was telling me about her recurring nightmare. ‘Everything is blood and then I wake up.’

  ‘What happens before that?’

  ‘The worst evil is lurking and I’m complacent. I am trying to save people from what is coming but they don’t appreciate the urgency. I see my own face on fire. I am in a crowd. All our faces are on fire. The fire spreads. It burns thick and red, then everything is blood.’

  ‘You feel something terrible is coming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is. Me. I’m coming home.’

  ‘They’ve given you time off?’

  ‘Redtown is ready. I’m done.’

  After we touched down at City Airport, a cabbie drove me to my house in Hackney and he idled on the meter as I ran inside, all my concerns as to how things might have changed during my long secondment to Liverpool flung aside as the family rushed upon itself, faces together, nosing cheeks, my daughter crying to see her mother and father upset so. We huddled in the hallway and could not stand for the surge of love between us.

  Then I had to leave. I had a meeting in Soho at a private club called the Heart. Streets and alleyways turned like lock tumblers until their alignment clicked into place. Security scrolled through the guest list until they found my name. They unhooked a short length of velvet rope. I was back.

  The action was downstairs in a vault bordered by brick arches. The patrons of the Heart sat in snugs padded with maroon leather. I wanted a drink. I had one. I had another. My arrival was greeted with sly glances at my status. The deal closers didn’t look up; assured of their own powers, they continued to slouch in leather armchairs. I eavesdropped on the young executives hanging around the management bulls.

  ‘Go and get some girls for the old man,’ I overheard, and the junior manager spun out toward two women idly stirring their cocktails at the bar. Here, desire was acted upon the moment it was conceived. Wounding, despoiling, corrupting desires perhaps. Pleasures taken at someone else’s expense. But it was action. After the long voyeurism of my year in Maghull, toiling away upon the detail
s of ordinary lives, I was back in action. Redtown was finished and I was home again.

  Monad booked a private chamber of the Heart to celebrate the project’s completion.

  ‘I think we fired you three times. Perhaps four,’ said Jonathan Stoker Jnr, the first of the management to arrive. ‘You should read the minutes of our meetings. Your character was assassinated, buried, disinterred, despoiled, burnt and buried again. Yet, you persisted. After Eakins had his episode and Bougas and my father were compromised, we had no choice but to stick with you. There were times when even I was begging to see you put out of our misery.’

  ‘And now?’

  Stoker handed me a champagne cocktail, gold leaf drifting in the bubbles.

  ‘No hard feelings.’

  ‘Speaking of which, how is your Dad?’

  He clasped his hands over the thought of his poor redundant father. The old man was out of the picture. The son must carry the burden of the family business alone now. Taking a moment to brush down the lapels of his Donna Karan jacket, Jonathan Stoker considered his reply.

  ‘Dad would have loved to be here tonight. I did ask. No go. He was forced out. Like that, over what? An organ transplant? As if his guts were going to inform on us? As if his pig’s balls were being used to store our company secrets?’

  ‘How about Bruno Bougas?’

  ‘Persona non grata. He was Hermes’ right hand man! They’d worked together for decades. Out. Like that. Cantor insisted. Absolutely.’

  I remembered travelling with Bruno Bougas down to Iona when he was full of excitement toward Hermes’ new project, the secret deal that was going to pull us all out of the recession. The dawn of the unreal age. Even then, there were cracks appearing in their relationship. Bruno Bougas had, in many ways, invented Hermes Spence and the Monad brand. But his appetites and attitude were a liability in the kind of circles Hermes now moved; dinner parties attended by a cabinet minister and his mistress, prayer meetings with the under-secretary of defence, that kind of thing. If you want to be taken seriously, you don’t take your magus to civil service briefings. Bougas had done well to last as long as he did, finally undone by a pair of transplanted kidneys.

  The next to arrive was Morton Eakins. The anti-psychotic drugs had caused a crash weight gain. I put my hand on his shoulder as much to steer him as to greet him. Morton hugged me. After a beat of hesitation, I reciprocated, feeling the drooping adipose sections either side of his tailbone.

  ‘I’m sorry they took me away,’ he whispered, barely getting the words out.

  ‘Morton works from home now,’ said Jonathan Stoker Jnr.

  If he had always been something of a corrupt cherubim, the violence Raymond and The Elk had done to his mind had returned Morton Eakins to innocence. Chubby, his lips wet with milk, Eakins had completed his long evolution into babyhood. I pointed him in the direction of the buffet while Jonathan Stoker, keen not to be seen near the gimp, assumed his father’s mantle as the man who works the room. He planted himself beside a trio of new arrivals, turning their triangular conversation into an awkward square. I recognized one of the party, Alex Drown. She was one of the marketing mavens, a brand enforcer beating the drum so that the company stayed on-message and under-budget. She introduced the two young executives flanking her with a theatrical flick of her palm.

  ‘This is Josh, and this is James. Do make an effort not to confuse

  them.’

  Alex worked hard at such playfulness. She was a confidence vampire: her assistants lasted six months before retiring to the Lake District to run organic delicatessens. Her weapon of choice was the tight perm, each curl meticulously screwed into place. She had come straight from the office in a black trouser suit and would no doubt return there later, while the men indulged themselves. In a previous age, she took me to dinner and told me about her upbringing in the Glenbryn housing estate in Belfast, her alcoholic mother, her dead father. ‘She didn’t raise me. She lowered me. I had to raise myself.’ That long-lost candid moment, a decade ago, from before the shutters came down, flared up between us as I leant forward to kiss her once, twice.

  ‘I didn’t know you still worked for Monad,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t,’ replied Alex. ‘I work for Numenius Systems. We grant the

  licences to interact with Cantor.’

  ‘Monad’s owners.’

  ‘Partners, Nelson, partners.’

  Then she was on her smartphone, backing away from the party.

  Josh and James, brothers from Dallas, had already come up with a few ideas on how to improve Britain, even though they had only been in the country for as long as it took their limousine to drive them from Heathrow. The finer points of their plan to improve our national character were lost on me, as Alex, their commander-in-chief, went off like a Belfast brawler.

  ‘Sterilize. Sterilize,’ she barked into the phone.

  ‘Trouble at work?’ I said, when she returned to the party.

  ‘My husband,’ she replied. ‘I should never have let the nanny take the night off.’

  The two American lads stood close to me.

  Josh said, ‘We’re psyched to start working with Redtown.’

  James added, ‘We were spitballing parameters on the red-eye. We want to focus on family friendly policies –’

  ‘– look at schooling.’ Josh was nodding in the most disconcerting manner.

  ‘Prayer is not allowed in public schools. Is that a good thing?’

  ‘What if you put in some parameters that weighed against certain lifestyles.’

  ‘– rewarded others’

  ‘How would that alter our outcomes?’

  ‘– societally speaking.’

  ‘Welfare.’

  ‘Exactly. Does welfare facilitate positive life outcomes or would people be better off without a safety net?

  ‘We have think-tanks and policy units queuing up to run their ideas through Redtown.’

  ‘It’s an amazing thing that you’ve done. You are amazing.’

  ‘We’re in negotiation with the Dallas suburbs of Garland and

  Richardson to populate our own Redtown.’

  ‘I’m sure your Maghull is great but we need one with Americans in it.’

  ‘We want to learn from you. You’ve cleared a path for us to bring about change.’

  ‘Lord knows the world needs it.’

  ‘You know the phrase “blue sky thinking”?’

  ‘We have our own version.’

  ‘‘‘Red sky thinking.”’

  ‘Imagining the bad stuff.’

  ‘More than that, though. Sometimes the unthinkable is the right thing to do. For example, what if civil rights were a bad thing? I mean, I don’t believe that. But what if all races were better living apart and not intermingling. That’s red sky thinking. Thinking about the fire.’

  ‘Creation and destruction are part of the same cycle.’

  ‘Fire Nature Incessantly Renews.’

  This odd phrase snapped me out of it.

  I looked at Josh, at James.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘It’s something Hermes said in our prayer meeting.’

  ‘On the cross, Pilate inscribed four letters I.N.R.I. We translate this as Jesus King of the Jews. You see the I stands for Iesus, because they didn’t have a J.’

  ‘Who didn’t?’

  ‘The Latins.’

  ‘You mean the Romans?’

  ‘Maybe it’s Hebrew that doesn’t have a J?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s Greek,’ I chipped in.

  ‘The N is Nazareth, the R is Rex which means King and the I is Iudaeorum which means Jews.’

  ‘So INRI is an acronym for Jesus, King of the Jews.’

  ‘That’s what we learnt in Bible class but Hermes suggested a different explanation.’

  ‘And you didn’t burn him for it?’

  ‘That’s very funny,’ said Josh, not laughing.

  ‘Ignis Natura Renovatur Integram. Fire Nature Incess
antly Renews. Through fire nature is reborn whole.’

  ‘Birth comes out of death.’

  ‘Change needs fire.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what we’re saying. Redtown is our fire.’

  The room shivered.

  Jonathan Stoker Jnr interrupted. ‘What if you don’t get the results you expect?’

  Josh was not interested in this question and turned the conversation onto the matter of our missing host. Jonathan Stoker Jnr’s pale smile registered the insult. Under the tungsten light, his anxious sweat gave his skin the texture of wet plaster. He would not be deflected.

  He leant in to say, ‘Religion doesn’t belong in the boardroom. Religion belongs in the desert.’

  Josh and James did not immediately rise to this bait.

  Stoker continued. ‘Faith is provincial. Kicks for hicks. You can’t maintain a belief in God while living in a city. There are so many gods worshipped here, the diverse multitudes rebuke monotheism every single day. You look at London and think, how could this illimitable sprawl be God’s plan? Where is fate and destiny in a hundred thousand streets?’

  ‘Sodom,’ said Josh.

  ‘Gomorrah,’ laughed James.

  Then Hermes Spence arrived with an obsidian robot at his side. He shook hands with Josh and James, ticked off Jonathan Stoker with a warning shot from his index finger, then leapt in one extravagant motion up onto a long table. Dr Hard tapped a champagne flute with a teaspoon so that the room fell silent.

  ‘What a long strange trip this has been!’ Hermes shrugged off his jacket and passed it to Dr Hard. The tie similarly discarded, we were to be treated to shirtsleeves. The last time I had spoken to Hermes Spence he had threatened to destroy my life data if I failed to deliver Redtown. As his eyes played over the expectant audience, his gaze hopscotching from acquaintance to underling to the American contingent, I tensed in anticipation of contact. What would I say to him? What would he say to me? He did not acknowledge my presence and started on his speech.

  ‘First of all, I would like to welcome the delegation from Numenius Systems, whose generous licensing of their technology is what makes all our work possible. They have flown in from America to see what we have achieved with Redtown. It doesn’t seem like a year since I first embarked upon the Redtown project.’