‘Don’t insult me.’
‘Suggest an alternative.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Could Dyad create a distraction? Cantor is hooked up to Monad security. Could you stir up a sufficiently complex event to occupy Cantor’s attention, especially one that threatens the Wave building?’
‘This sounds like a plan,’ said Bougas.
‘A distraction would make my task marginally less impossible.’
In this way, I bought myself some more time. I suggested one more drink for old time’s sake and asked Bougas whether he was enjoying Dyad.
‘I’m in hog heaven,’ he laughed. He had hooked up with Jonathan Stoker Snr and the two of them were bringing their branding and merchandising expertise to bear on the nascent counter-culture of Dyad.
‘By day, we explore investment opportunities for the revenue stream from the pig organs; by night we take spice and enter the communal dreamworld of Leto’s unconscious, where I get more pussy than Zeus. I could not be happier.’
‘Do you speak to Raymond Chase?’
‘Mad little Raymond. There are factions within Dyad. Raymond is more aligned with the Great Refusers. I’ve never got on with ascetics. We agree on the destruction of Monad – once that is achieved, then things will get Machiavellian.’
How long could Raymond’s counter-culture withstand the corrupting cuckoos of Stoker and Bougas? Wasn’t it always thus? Idealism undone by power-mongers. For all his occult hedonism, Bruno Bougas liked to stand in the shadow of power. I thought about sharing my theory about Dyad with him, that Dyad was the unconscious creation of Cantor who needed a competitor to ensure the artificial intelligence’s continuing evolution. If the logic bomb deleted Cantor, it would also erase Dyad. In that eventuality, the xenotransplant technology would stop working, the spice would lose its potency, and Bougas’ body would reject the pig organs. I imagined him haemorrhaging in the pub toilets.
When I said goodbye to Bruno Bougas, I knew that I would never see him again.
I returned to Lower Clapton Road. The hooded lads who had earlier circled me so threateningly now tipped me the wink and paid me mock-respect. Who knew whether the plan would work? I wouldn’t risk a tenner on it, never mind my job, my house, my life. Dyad could threaten me in Hackney but their reach was limited. Monad could destroy my life data, effectively removing me from the Western world. If I was to act solely out of self-interest, there was no contest. The question was whether I could act outside of my own interest; that is, act for a greater good. Even here, the good in question was not apparent. I was not certain Monad was evil, for all Bougas’ deranged propaganda. Even my personal experience of the company, as terrible as it had been, was not a rare one. Monad was no worse than the oil companies or the arms dealers and less socially destructive than offshore banking. These were macro problems far exceeding the remit of my micro-existence. To risk everything to correct such an evil, when the momentum of the entire world was taking it toward self-destruction and self-interest, would be both heroic and delusional. And yet, what was that urge lurking way down below? An urge to be free. An urge to destroy what I had built. To create freedom out of the destruction of all that oppressed me. I would have to watch that instinct. Who knew where it might lead?
At the sound of El’s scream, I bolted down the stairs to the bedroom. Her nightmares were increasing in frequency and intensity.
She described it to me. ‘A tidal wave of fire rolled down Mare Street. The flames coiled in and around one another. The smoke within its mass formed black scales upon a slithering head of fire. The ash outline of a mother with a push chair combusts in the snap and bite of a flame serpent. I see them toiling toward us, through the window of a Vietnamese restaurant. You are paying the bill and won’t listen to my screams until you have finished calculating the tip. I am crying and trying to get Iona out of the door. There is a crowd there now. We’re all trying to get out at once. Our hair is on fire. Our eyes are on fire. You are screaming at the sight of me burning. Then the main wave breaks over us and our bodies meld into one another until everything is blood red fire.’
‘Then you wake up?’
‘Yes.’ El got out of bed and shook on her kimono. ‘There is something more, though. We have an argument. When you are getting the bill, you are ignoring me because we’ve been fighting.’
A light well brought the streetlights into the underground room.
‘What were we fighting about?’
‘I wanted you to do something. You had promised me, “I’ll do it.” It was very important. To do with the fire, I think.’
Then El recoiled with a look of disbelief at the next mental image.
‘Something to do with an elk?’
Dyad’s reach was longer than I had anticipated.
17 A BILLION MURDERS
I did not discuss the plan with El. I told her, as she cooked dinner, that I would be returning to the office for a late meeting. I omitted any mention of the logic bomb and my plan to trigger it. The house was monitored. We would be found out. Then there was her sacrifice of a year of our family life so that I could build Redtown, an achievement I now intended to undo. I had no stomach for explaining how wrong I had been. So, all good reasons for not discussing the plan. But not the main one. Most of all, it was likely that I would fail, through either cowardice or incompetence, and I did not want her to know that I had failed.
She didn’t want me to go and we argued about it. There were already news reports of unrest east of Stratford and the kitchen was overrun with mice. The mice streamed across the floor as if they were being driven ahead of a coming wave. She threw the dinner in the bin and insisted I help clean the kitchen. I could not. I had to go to Monad. The most important act of my entire life was waiting for me. She sent me out of the door with curses.
It was one of those winter evenings when you wear the dark on your shoulders like a heavy coat. At Hackney Station, the railway line was alive with rats. On the platform, lads guffawed at the vermin stream and threw stones at their seething exodus. The train to Stratford rolled past the estates of Hackney Wick, which fizzed and rocked with fireworks. There is an urban myth that tells of drug dealers letting off fireworks to inform their customers that the new supplies have arrived. If there was any truth to this, then Hackney was in for a hell of an evening.
From Stratford, I caught the robot train to the Wave. I was the only passenger. Everyone was going in the opposite direction. At Canary Wharf station, a disembodied, synthesized voice apologized for the performance of its human employees. Down on the deserted pavements, the office city chatted to itself. I bolted over a footbridge, triggering a delicate simulation of wind chimes. Rumours of a mob skimmed over the river. I turned, alarmed. But it was just the echoing enthusiasm of an automated pub quiz carried on the wind.
The walkways were meaningful pauses in this monologue, interludes of cold black Thames. Night clouds chugged overhead. I quickened my pace, feeling exposed. Outside Fast-Tan-Tastic, a video loop showed bronzed, toned thighs. I huddled beside these images for warmth. A masseuse kneaded the naked gluteus maximus and minimus of a raven-haired beauty, and the camera caught her faked ‘o’ of saucy pleasure in close-up. I was anxious. My senses were acute. I felt like prey that had caught whiff of a predator. Sounds were flattened, and things seen were either friend or foe. The tanned beauties beckoned. I pushed on to where enormous ventilation pipes rose out of West India dock, tall concrete reeds that drew oxygen down into the bedrock chambers of Monad’s office. The Wave loitered there, a steel pachyderm half-submerged in the lagoon. I stood at the entrance agitating for Cantor to buzz me in.
‘How have you been?’ asked the artificial intelligence.
‘Much happier for seeing my family,’ I replied. ‘And you?’
The door opened with a hydraulic hiss, the lip-parting of rubber coming away from rubber.
Finally, Cantor had his answer. ‘Harassed, Nelson. Disturbed.’
The door closed and sealed. Dr Hard was on hand to
accompany me to the supper meeting, way down in the secure bowels of the building.
The robot sniffed. ‘You are very anxious.’
‘There is a lot of trouble out there tonight,’ I replied.
‘You are worried about your family,’ it nodded.
The lift travelled all the way down into the bedrock of the Wave then opened onto a Zen garden. Large conker-coloured orbs, with quarters cut out to show the white pulp within, sat on the bank of a pond, profound and inscrutable. Sham moonlight was cast upon paths of bronze gravel. A waterfall beside the water cooler. I took a moment in the Zen garden to fix an expression of quiet passivity upon my face and in the outer layers of my thoughts. Impassive. Passive. I assumed an unctuous half-smile, the only mode in which to deal with the Monad management. I crossed over a stone bridge, a sori ishibashi, toward the sound of voices in the distance.
‘It’s not working,’ said Josh.
‘It’s a disaster,’ said James.
The Texan brothers were surrounded by screens, each of which displayed a different view of Redtown. There was Eastway, flanked by empty parks and the gated community on the site of the old country club. There was a floating view of Deyes High School. The ivy covering the front of the building was dying off. Pupils migrating from class to playground and back again. Hurrying by under my feet, the thought charts of the Lydiate coffee girls, over a dozen of them, flaring and firing in concert. A screen slithered overhead displaying big data diagrams of Redtown, each citizen represented by a red dot, most of which were inert.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Our supply-side tax cuts aren’t producing the figures they should,’ said Josh.
‘Tax cuts should increase tax revenue,’ added James.
‘– by motivating the work force to be more productive.’
‘That isn’t happening.’
Josh pointed at the people milling slowly around the town square. ‘They’re depressed. Look at them.’
The mind maps showed some anomalous readings. ‘They do seem down. When did the psychological data fall into the blue?’
This time I was answered by Alex Drown. She stood next to a screen that showed her red man busy working away. A double image of her. Alex and her simulated self were both short and dark-haired. It showed true self-possession when your red man did not customize itself. The real Alex Drown squinted at me with suspicion and contempt. The unreal one sat back in a swivel seat, its eyes closed in a data trance.
‘We put in some homeland security patches,’ said Alex. The screens zoomed around Redtown showing me the new robot patrols, surveillance trees and interrogation booths. ‘The concomitant increase in ambient fear levels is exactly as we predicted. According to our model, anxiety should increase consumption. We have also put in a stimulus package of tax cuts but we are actually seeing a dip in sales.’
‘People are eating and drinking more though,’ said Josh.
‘Self-soothing with snacking. Individual weight gain correlates to an increased security presence.’
‘Tripling Dr Hard patrols increases self-medication with alcohol by males in the 18–35 age bracket.’
‘These upward trends do not compensate for an overall downturn in economic activity though.’
There was large bowl of multi-coloured M&Ms on the workstation. The team from Numenius Systems fuelled themselves with sugar rushes. Alex took a handful and chomped them down. ‘Frankly, we think you have made the people in Redtown in your own image. You have underestimated qualities such as pro-activity, can-do spirit, the materialistic urge, because these are qualities you find distasteful.’
Josh put it more plainly. ‘Did you make these people liberals?’
Impassively, passively, I replied, ‘I don’t see how my politics could have any bearing on these simulations.’
James chipped in, ‘Here’s one from left field: perhaps the people of Maghull are showing deficient motivation because they lack an eternal soul?’
‘You’re right!’ I said. ‘That is one from left field.’
Alex showed me her disapproval with two tight shakes of her head.
‘The soul issue is one we have debated long and hard at Numenius Systems. We came to the conclusion that the eternal soul was beyond the capacity of Cantor to understand and therefore was not carried over in the simulation process. However, I think James has a valid point; without that essential aspect of the self, these people may show a certain listlessness.’
Alex’s red man opened one quizzical eye to hear herself make such an argument. Certainly the notion that the soul was related to patterns of consumer behaviour was not a traditional part of either economic or Christian doctrine. I sustained my half-smile and promised to look into the anomaly. The fatigue shown by the people of Maghull was also cropping up in the real world. The news reports of commuter unrest, of children taken out of school, of the large portions of the civil service not showing up for work, were indications of a spreading reaction against Monad. Not a revolution but a revulsion, a refusal. Society had become a sick joke, a sleight-of-hand in which life was replaced with a cheap replica. Progress abandoned, novelty unleashed, spoils hoarded by the few. The temperature soared as the body politic fought a virus from the future.
‘Are you just going to stand there or are you going to do something about it?’ said Alex Drown.
I had never felt so riven. I could barely walk for the buffeting of inner winds. North tearing at south. East fighting west. The urge to attack Josh and James was so strong I could not look at them. Alex Drown submerged her own opinions to mouth those of the company and this appalled me too. Our corruption had proceeded in daily increments, a thousand tiny defeats of the soul until our core was rotten. So what else was new? Bow your head and get on with your work because for all your moral objections you might as well throw yourself against rocks to protest against mountains as resist this power. No, I would not console myself with nihilistic platitudes any longer. Without expression, desire withers. Things within you die and fall away.
I put my hands over my face. Alex Drown stared at me. Her red man briefed her on the procedure for disciplining employees.
I lifted my face up. ‘There’s one possibility. One of the people in Redtown is corrupt. There is an old man. Horace Buckwell. I was there when we simulated him. He showed weird readings. Something odd in his brain. That might be throwing everything off kilter. I’ll go and fix it.’
I left the meeting and headed toward my office. In the Zen garden, I passed Dr Hard again. It grabbed me as I walked by and held me still while it conducted an examination.
‘Your blood pressure is right up.’ Dr Hard’s obsidian hand rested upon my chest. ‘Panic attack?’
The robot reached for my head. ‘I could administer soothing alpha waves.’
‘I have my own resources.’
‘I will monitor your progress. Your thoughts are very disturbing.’
I pushed by the robot and into the lift, relieved to be alone. I would activate the logic bomb by bringing together the two halves of its code hidden in Horace Buckwell and Morty. The consequences of this irrevocable act were beyond me, and there was no predicting whether good or evil would result, nor if it meant destruction or creation within my own life. Squeezed between the great pressure from Monad and the dream threats of Dyad, I took the only way out. I resolved to act.
Horace Buckwell awoke in a ward of Ormskirk hospital, secured in his bed by starched linen. For a while he had been dreaming of his dog barking. Little Hanz was yapping in the yard and June would not get up from the television to go and see what was wrong. As he awoke, these barks sharpened into the ping of his vital signs.
The ward was empty. There were no nurses on night duty at the desk. No one to tell him what had happened, for he did not seem to be injured and there was no pain to indicate a heart attack. He waggled his fingers, left hand then right hand. No stroke either. He sat up and removed the drip from the vein in his wrist. A single drop of bl
ood popped up. Next he peeled off the heart monitors from the grey hair of his chest and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His slippers were there, waiting for him. June must have been here. Why hadn’t she stayed?
Horace Buckwell got stiffly to his feet and took a peek at the chart at the end of his bed. It was blank. A shocking oversight, surely. This was all quite appalling. He went to push the emergency call button over his bed but something stayed his hand. This was all very odd. He remembered being in his back garden pulling down the rusted frame of an old greenhouse, a job that he had been putting off for two years until one cold winter morning he could not bear to be indoors anymore, with the central heating baking the smell of his old wife into something quite unpalatable, and so he had pulled on his stiff workman’s gloves, fixed his cap in place, and set about his task with vigour. Then, nothing.
He must have had an attack of some sort. A seizure. A fainting fit. Was it an after-effect of the simulation? He wondered if Monad damaged his brain when they copied it. The robot was very rough with him. Only the promise to keep those secrets he thought long buried had bought off Horace Buckwell. What if there was real damage there? Black outs or even worse. Could be worth a few bob. Then there was the trauma of waking up in hospital with no one to look after him. Surely they’d settle out of court? Yes, he would wait a little longer before pushing the call button. Build up a bit more of that trauma.
Then he noticed the silence. Not merely an absence of voices or night noises, there were no sounds in the building. No gurneys rattling along distant corridors. No ambulances racing into accident and emergency. Horace strained to discern so much as a pipe creak or a toilet flush. Nothing. He clapped his hands. That he heard. So it wasn’t his hearing. The hush was so absolute that his brain, yearning for stimulus, started to hear the groans and strains of his own body. His old pains were magnified by the silence.
He called out into the dark ward. No one answered.
The Red Men Page 28