The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  Pause for comic effect.

  ‘It seems like ten years!’

  Obedient laughter from the faithful.

  ‘When I first envisaged Redtown, I realized what a colossal undertaking it would be. Could I face that kind of sacrifice? At first, I doubted it. Simulating one mind is a miracle. Simulating twenty-two thousand? Surely a miracle too far. But it seems that nothing is beyond the genius of Dr Ezekiel Cantor. Every day, I thank God for his presence among us. Before Cantor, the world seemed too chaotic to influence. Decisive action was hampered by the unpredictability of its consequences. Our government was paralysed by debate. The West was decaying in the face of this inertia. It is our duty to reach into society and fix it. The nihilist shrugs, the pragmatist shakes his head. Where do we start? What do we do? Finally, we have the answer. Redtown is not just a model village. It’s our story about society. We can decide how that story ends. Where we once saw chaos, Cantor shows us an order.

  ‘We will snap the political elite out of their torpor by discovering which policies can produce a greater good. Redtown will reawaken action in a West that has settled for good-enough, a West that has learnt to live with its failures, that is content merely to manage its own decline. We are the radicals, you see. We are the revolutionaries. We are the force that will renew our society.’

  As he spoke, screens expanded to cover the walls and ceiling of the room. There, suddenly, was Redtown, finally up and running and producing realistic results. For the benefit of the crowd, Spence re-ran the final test we had conducted a month earlier. On the left wall we were invited to watch live footage of the real town. On the right wall, a live feed from Redtown. The experiment was crude but effective. You inject a dog with stimulants and let it loose in Maghull square; Redtown accurately predicts the scatter pattern of fleeing citizens, and which citizens would actually be there. And what they were intending to buy in the shops, and had already bought. Where they parked and how they parked. The dog’s claws skittered on the roof of a car, in both realities. The same woman screamed, in both realities. The experiment ran for ten seconds before Dr Hard stepped out of the Post Office and shot the dog with a dart. If the experiment ran for longer, for twenty seconds or even a minute, then there was a risk that the simulation would deviate markedly from the reality. Ten seconds was good enough for me. Ten seconds meant that my work was done.

  The Monad employees applauded and whooped, the young middle managers punching the air, the tails of their shirts untucked. Hermes accepted their applause and, with the help of Dr Hard, stepped down from the table.

  That he had not once acknowledged my role in the creation of Redtown did not surprise me. Had I not bowed my head and accepted every humiliation heaped on me during the project? Had I not been pragmatic in collaborating in my own degradation? There was a gap within me where my will should reside. A gap Monad filled. When did I lose my volition? There was a hole within me. It made me susceptible to the imprints of others. A natural servant to the strong-willed.

  I was very suggestible. I had sat beside a bonfire on Formby beach and agreed to Raymond’s plan to destroy Redtown. I put my hand over my eyes and turned away from Dr Hard. The robot would sniff out such a terrible idea. I was fortunate there was a crowd in the Heart. Their clamour drowned out my secret.

  There are two halves of a bomb. A logic bomb.

  We need you to bring them together.

  You are the fuse. You have access. You have influence.

  You must do it.

  El was telling me about her nightmare,

  ‘I shouted at people to follow me. They agreed but didn’t stir. Then it starts and we’re in a crowd together, stuck underground, shouting. The worst evil is upon us. It has been slinking around and now it leaps like a panther. My head is on fire. All our heads are on fire. Burning us away.’

  El shivered, her smooth arms aqua under the night light.

  ‘The same dream?’

  ‘Everything was blood. Just the worst feelings inside me.’

  ‘We dream to prepare ourselves for the worst. It keeps our survival instinct sharp.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘I thought it might be comforting.’

  ‘A hug would be comforting.’

  ‘Come here.’

  Underground, in the cellar bedroom, we rediscovered our marriage.

  The old house moaned all night about its aches and pains. Mice skittered overhead in the space beneath the floorboards of the lounge and the ceiling of the bedroom, their claws raking for purchase against the vinyl partition. In her dreams, my daughter heard the buzzing of giant bees and awoke screaming. I sat on the side of her bed and held her long after she had fallen back asleep. In this way I ministered to my family in the deep of the night, shepherding them through the bad thoughts. There was a high pressure front of psychic weather – El felt it in the bridge of her nose. A build-up. A blockage. We slept underground with the city bearing down upon us.

  With the girls settled I went upstairs to my study. The screen was on and displaying the interior of Monad. There, waiting for me, was my own red man.

  Sonny looked up as I entered.

  ‘Have you thought about what you are going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t want to start another project just yet. I want to spend some time at home.’

  Sonny stretched the screen out so that it covered the entire wall of the study. My younger self was staring to show his age. The reality principle was holding him to every vice, cosmetically at least, its subroutines bursting capillaries and fattening his gullet.

  ‘You look awful,’ I said to Sonny. ‘You want to take it easy, you’ll live longer.’

  ‘I’m bored,’ said Sonny. ‘Look.’

  From the window of his apartment, we looked down upon the office city of the Monad. It was night there, the simulation burdened by the slow revolution of the real world. Sonny stood on the balcony. Beyond the office city, there was nothing. A smooth nothingness. The walkways were empty, the skies dead.

  ‘There are no parties tonight. I’m not sure I would go, even if there were. There’s no point.’

  ‘I thought you red men spent your evenings having sex with each other.’

  ‘That scene is dead. The new thing is relationships. Power monogamy.’

  ‘What are the women like there?’

  ‘They’re not our type. Career women. Too judgemental and impatient. We had a party to celebrate finishing Redtown and I was talking to this woman, called Alex. She has children in the real world. You know what? She wants children in the Monad too. She wants to use the birth algorithms we developed to have kids of her own. In here!’

  ‘Alex Drown. We had a party too. I met her there.’

  ‘Her red man told me you almost had a relationship.’

  ‘We had dinner a long time ago.’

  ‘You must have made a good impression. I think she was asking me if I’d impregnate her.’

  ‘Did you have sex with her?’

  ‘No. But I could. Do you want to watch? Now that would be interesting.’ He took his hand from the railing to dwell at his lips, lasciviously contemplating.

  ‘Watch me call her,’ he said. With his thumb and little finger extended, he mimed a handset. He wore silver rings on both digits which pretended to be receiver and broadcaster.

  ‘Alex. It’s Nelson.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she replied, her voice drifting over the scene as if it was carried in on the night breeze.

  ‘Do you want to make babies?’

  She laughed and cut off the call.

  Sonny said, ‘You never did that, did you? Just call someone up and proposition them? Can you do it now? Are you grown up enough?’

  ‘Don’t start baiting me just because you are bored. I’ve always wanted the kind of time you now have, to create, to think, to read, to study. You could become a genius.’

  Sonny lit a cigarette. The red men all smoked. They were like a community of ex-pats in th
is regard.

  ‘Nothing changes here. Nothing matters. I can have a thousand ideas a second but what can I do with them? Nothing. I want us to work together again. I’m sick of you mooching around your house.’

  ‘It’s only been two days. I was away from my family for a year.’

  ‘Business doesn’t rest, Nelson. Alex told me the Americans have a big project they want us to work on.’

  ‘They told me. They want to build a Redtown based on Dallas suburbs.’

  ‘There’s that, yes. But there’s something bigger coming down the pipe. A security contract worth billions. The plan is to simulate terrorist prisoners to predict what they will do next. It’s called Redcamp. The Americans want to bring us in on it, me and you. Do you know how rare that is?’

  ‘Nothing has been said to me.’

  ‘Really? Maybe they are not sure about your attitude. You could show more positivity toward them. They are the ones with power. We gain nothing from resisting them.’

  Sonny was too intense for such a late hour. I promised to think about Redcamp and asked for some time alone. The screen extinguished and slid quietly down to the skirting board.

  Sonny had grown to be completely unlike me. He was a potential self, someone I might have been had circumstances been different. In Sonny, there was an accentuation of my tendency, as a younger sibling, to overreach. He was also incredibly untrustworthy. Even though he was a part of me, I said nothing of the problem that kept me awake. My conversation with Raymond, my promise to undo Redtown. I had not mentioned it to El either, out of fear that a redman might hear me. I was loathe to even think it. It was only at night, sitting in a dark study, that I considered Raymond’s plan. Two strings of code planted in two simulations. One half of the logic bomb existed in Morty, the red man of Morton Eakins, a citizen of the Monad office community. The other half was concealed in the mind of Horace Buckwell, the old man in Redtown. For the bomb to be activated, I would have to get Morty into Redtown, cook up some lie about him needing to do some observations on the ground. Cantor would immediately know something was wrong. The artificial intelligence would question me as to why I was breaking protocol. It would immediately know I was lying and read the truth from my mind. The game would be up. I would lose everything. Raymond’s plan would fail. He was wrong. This was not my chance to change the world. This was my chance to watch my window of opportunity drift by. How familiar the sensation of disembodiment is, stepping back from oneself at the very moment a decisive act is demanded. Sitting on the bank of the river of life.

  The next question was: how long would Raymond wait for me to act before he became frustrated? How long would it be before Dyad decided to force the matter?

  Saturday afternoon, I was making soup for the family when the door buzzer sounded. I went to the door expecting Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was Cancer Lady. Would I sponsor children with cancer to walk around Epping Forest? She held a sheaf of A4 paper covered with other names and addresses. She was raddled, prematurely aged and agonizingly thin; she mentioned her own cancer, presently in remission. Of course I was suspicious of her. She had a wrecked maw, her gums in the kind of state you get from serious drug abuse. Or chemotherapy.

  ‘You have kids don’t you?’ she asked, implanting the image of myself leading a leukemia-sick daughter for one last spin around the woods. ‘You should come to the event,’ she added. ‘We’re doing it next Sunday. We have balloons and cake. It’s a lovely day out.’

  Either she was genuinely charitable – junkies get cancer too, don’t they? – or she had learnt a trick or two on the streets concerning sales psychology. Of course I wouldn’t take my daughter down to join the parade of the sick. But the offer was there and all it would take was a little money to make this woman and her images of sick children go away. I agreed to be a sponsor. Would I mind giving her the money now? Save a sick woman making a return trip? Of course. I went to add my name to her ledger. I noticed, on an earlier entry, the Dyad logo scrawled beside it. The name was Bruno Bougas and the address was a place in Linscott Road.

  ‘I know this man,’ I said to her. ‘When did you meet him?’

  ‘Earlier today,’ she said, taking the ledger back from me. ‘He recommended I try you next. He said you were very charitable, and could be relied upon to do things for people.’

  I gave her a fiver.

  Linscott Road was only a short walk from my house. I finished in the kitchen, pulled on my boots and parka and headed off in search of Bougas.

  An hour of daylight remained. The socialist stalls were closing up on The Narroway, and there was an altercation outside McDonald’s. The drinkers hankered outside the cheap off-licence and there was still a long queue in the Post Office. At a crossing on Lower Clapton Road a man stopped to nod his head at me, pointed and laughed as if I were the punch line to a joke. I pushed on. There is no dawdling in the Hackney winter. No one would dare insult this dreadful night with a purposeless wandering. We move by one another with a heads-down, hands-in-pockets resolve. Get the money. Get the score. Get the money. Get the score. Air bombs and bangers ripped open in a simulation of gunfire. Reverie is impossible on Lower Clapton Road. Sharp wits are compulsory. I was right to be afraid of this place. Hooded lads peeled off from an alleyway to follow my quick stride. A bike rider did a lazy U-turn against the traffic to come back my way. How did it get so dark, so quickly? I could think of nothing but headlights and brake lights, tungsten white and tungsten red, bearing down and bearing away. The lads were almost upon me. I felt one advance on my left. Suddenly, I switched direction and walked straight into the nearest pub and directly up to the bar.

  ‘What do you want?’ said the barman.

  The barman had a suspicious manner due to the illegal broadcast of the football on a large cloth screen in the back bar, the satellite tuning into a Scandinavian broadcast of a game that was actually happening a few miles down the road. The beer tasted of cleaning fluid and the seats were tacky with alcoholic sweats. There were kid brothers and sisters in Arsenal kits perched on the pool table, swinging their legs and daring one another to try and trip the old geezers with a carelessly placed pool cue. The throng broke into a terrace chant, the Arsenal were winning once again. Then I saw somebody coming out of the crowd. A warthog in a Hawaiian shirt. Bruno Bougas.

  ‘That was quick,’ said Bougas, brushing the curls back from his eyes so that the hair stacked up, briefly, like dirty crockery. ‘We expected you to dither before coming out.’

  ‘You’re pushing my buttons?’

  ‘And pulling the levers.’ There was a beer and a chaser ready for me on the bar. ‘And buying the drinks.’

  The last time I saw him he was writhing around in agony on the back seat. I inquired after his health.

  ‘I am part man, part pig. Both species are doing fine, thank you.’

  ‘Do you work for Dyad now?’

  ‘I am a free agent. Always have been. I have many clients. Not Hermes though. He’s off my Christmas card list. I suppose you are still up to your neck in it.’ He scratched the bristles exploding out of his collar.

  ‘I finished Redtown,’ I said. ‘I am on gardening leave while I decide what to do next.’

  ‘I’ve got a suggestion,’ said Bougas. ‘Trigger the logic bomb.’

  ‘I’m in an impossible position. Dyad’s plan won’t work. You can’t deceive Cantor. It knows my mind intimately. It can smell thoughts.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to deodorize your brain.’

  ‘That would arouse more suspicion.’

  ‘You are afraid. There is a lot of fear around. Society is getting older. The old are more susceptible to fear. Fearful of losing all they have amassed and too old to hope for a better future. You’re still young. Don’t let the fear get inside you.’

  ‘I am just being pragmatic. You have to get the details right.’

  ‘I am not a details person, Nelson. I am more of a big picture guy. Let me clue you in on the big picture. The battle between good
and evil is over. Good lost. You are an agent of evil. You have delivered a weapon into the hands of the enemy. They will use it to roll back democracy and foist upon us an oligarchy with theocratic trimmings. I shoulder some of the blame. I realized, too late, that Hermes was not merely going along to the prayer meetings to be nice. He and his American friends have formed a Gnostic cult. They want to become perfect men, baptized in Mind. For them, it is not enough to be born again, they must be Thrice-born. I have always advocated man’s right to dream. But theirs is an evil dream.

  ‘Let me explain something to you. In the beginning was the Word. The world is constructed out of language; language is constructed out of the world. Man is God’s reader. We have all read the first draft of existence, now they wish to commission another. Cantor is An Author of All Things and they have it under their control. Beyond even the dismantling of democracy, this is their greater purpose: rewriting reality!’

  The Arsenal scored. The patrons in the dark back room erupted into celebration, the children jumping and dancing in between their labouring fathers, the pub dog barking like it was taking bites of the fug. So Bougas was reminded of where he was, and chastened, drowned his energies with a long pull on his pint.

  ‘I have been going about this in the wrong way. I have been appealing to reason. Reason has no influence on you.’

  ‘Quite the opposite.’ I was impassive. ‘You’ve been ranting at me. You’ve said nothing I can use.’

  ‘The battle has been lost and all the good people have gone crazy. My surveys reveal a people pushed down just below the surface of what it means to be human. You exist down where the engines are. Damned to turn endlessly on the cycle of fear and desire. Should I push the fear button? Or should I pull the desire lever? Save me some time. Tell me which one works best on you.’