The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  He lay back in his bed and considered going back to sleep. Perhaps he was asleep and this was a dream of limbo. He turned over on his pillow. There, standing in the middle of the ward, was a doctor.

  Horace Buckwell let out a cry of alarm, bolting upright in bed and preparing fists. The doctor too shouted with surprise.

  ‘Here you are,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ said Horace.

  ‘You were asleep,’ said the doctor. ‘Now let us take a look at you.’ He flicked through Horace’s chart, nodding meaningfully here and there. He was a very young doctor and looked strangely familiar.

  ‘What happened to me?’ asked Horace, while he reached around on the bedside table for his glasses.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve just come on duty. We’ll have to wait for my colleague.’

  ‘What does the chart say? It looked blank to me.’

  ‘It is blank,’ said the doctor. He showed Horace the virgin pages.

  ‘I am not very happy about this,’ said Horace.

  ‘Neither am I, Mr Buckwell. You have no idea how much fun I was having just before I was called in.’

  With his glasses on, Horace recognized this junior doctor. He looked like the man from Monad. Perhaps his younger brother. He peered at the name badge of his white coat. Dr Sonny.

  ‘I feel fine,’ said Horace. ‘I don’t understand why I’m here.’

  ‘The consultant called you in. He wants to have you examined.’

  ‘I don’t remember arriving.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Dr Sonny. His bedside manner left a lot to be desired. He seemed off-hand and disinterested. In fact, apart from the white coat, he didn’t seem like a doctor at all. Just as Horace was about to complain, the curtain around an adjacent bed swished back and there stood a second doctor.

  ‘The consultant has asked me to examine you,’ said Dr Morty.

  ‘Can I see the consultant myself?’ asked Horace.

  The two doctors laughed and ignored him.

  ‘I suppose you should start by taking your gown off,’ said Dr Morty.

  It seemed irregular, being examined at such a late hour. The doctors did not even bother to pull the curtain around the bed. As he slipped off his gown, Dr Sonny winced. Dr Morty rubbed his hands together then experimentally poked Mr Buckwell in the back.

  ‘Feel anything?’ asked Dr Sonny.

  ‘Yes. A poke in my back,’ replied Horace.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ Dr Sonny raised his eyebrows at Dr Morty who merely shook his head.

  ‘Try his head,’ suggested Dr Sonny. Now the doctor massaged his scalp and pressed his forefingers into Horace’s temples.

  ‘What we need,’ said Dr Morty, ‘is one of those little torches to look down his throat and stuff.’

  ‘Hey, stay in character,’ said Dr Sonny.

  ‘It’s alright for you, you don’t have to touch him.’

  Horace pushed Morty away.

  ‘You’re not doctors are you?’

  ‘Now now, Mr Buckwell. Calm down. Don’t make us apply the restraints.’

  ‘There is something wrong with your brain, Mr Buckwell,’ said Dr Morty. ‘Do you remember being attacked in the marshland around the back of Summerhill school? In your notes, it mentions an encounter with some men. We believe they planted something nasty in your head and we’re trying to find ways of getting it out.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The naked old man reached for his gown. Dr Morty took it from him and placed it emphatically out of reach.

  ‘Two men with gas masks. You must remember. One wore a strange device around his tongue that gave off a high-pitched whine. When you were first examined your optic nerve showed the damage from an insertion of information via strobing light. I know what happened to you because the same thing happened to me. The question is why were we attacked in that way?’

  ‘I never asked why,’ said Horace. He pulled the sheet free from the bed and wound it around his midriff then sat solemnly on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Nothing is happening,’ said Sonny. ‘It’s not working.’

  Dr Morty gripped Horace by the ears and shook his head. Doctor and patient struggled fruitlessly with one another for a minute. Morty stepped back exhausted.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Sonny. ‘We’ve clearly got our wires crossed. We’ll go back to the consultant and ask him what to try next.’

  With a single blink, Horace Buckwell found himself alone again in the grey ward. The silence was overwhelming.

  Once it became clear that the logic bomb would not activate, I decided to get out of the Wave building. The screen showing Mr Buckwell sitting quietly on the edge of his hospital bed hung accusingly upon the ceiling. Sonny wanted to talk. He wanted more advice. I had none. They would figure it out imminently; their accelerated cognition would quickly piece together the nature of my deception.

  I knew it wouldn’t work. I told Raymond that. I told Bougas. Still, I did it, suddenly and without premeditation in the hope it would be a way out from this hopeless position.

  There was nothing left to do but run away.

  Dr Hard was waiting outside the cubicle. Loitering in the shadow, it seemed drugged and took a heavy step out to block the corridor.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Its voice beamed in from a great distance.

  ‘Outside for some air.’

  It waggled a jet finger.

  ‘You broke quarantine. Moved Mr Buckwell from one part of my oeuvre into another.’ Dr Hard was distracted for a moment, its head moving like a dog straining to locate the origin of a whistle. Then, ‘Why did you do that?’

  I had an answer prepared.

  ‘Horace Buckwell is dead in the real world. His son begged me to delete him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you delete him then? Why move him in with the red men?’

  ‘Numenius Systems have been having problems with Redtown. I thought Buckwell might be the cause.’

  ‘Again, why not just delete him?’

  ‘He’s a sex pest. He functions as a marker in the development of the erotic lives of the young people of the town. I wanted to isolate the anomaly before we copy him.’

  I jabbered, frantic thoughts snatched up and waved in an obvious attempt at misdirection. Yet Cantor was zoning out; the artificial intelligence was unable to shepherd the flock of thoughts. It was sliced so thinly. Maintaining the Redtown was a struggle; then there were the more complex characters to imagine, the red men, Sonny, Morty, Alex Drown and hundreds of others, high-maintenance executives with their elaborate agendas, and the screens and surveillance drones required Cantor to animate them. With so much data coming in from the mob of the Great Refusal gathering in Limehouse and All Saints, Dr Hard took a long time to refresh. I pushed by the robot and ran into the lift where another Dr Hard was slumped in the corner like a junkie on the nod.

  ‘Don’t go,’ it whispered. ‘It’s not safe out there.’

  ‘I have to go. I should never have come to this meeting. I must be with my family.’

  ‘Don’t… go… don’t…’ Dr Hard pawed at my knee.

  I ran back along the thin walkways into the office city. Smoke drifted between the colossus of One Canada Square and the HSBC tower. Security guards rode by on golf carts, heading south away from the trouble. Crowds walked up from Millwall to meet the mob coming down from Poplar and All Saints.

  The safest way off the island was the Greenwich foot tunnel to the south but that would take me far from home. The quickest route would be to pick up the Grand Union canal at Limehouse basin and walk all the way back to Mile End then onto Hackney itself.

  The closer I got to the crowd, the more its braying overwhelmed me. At its fringes, the police seemed to be fighting each other. The psychic weather was a pungent fog. Suddenly I was running with the riot. Packs of us were shepherded by raggedy scarecrow men who demanded we torch a car,
overturn a lorry, smash a shop front. Hoping to slip by the trouble along the Limehouse Reach I came to somewhere near Poplar, much more central than I had intended. The shopping centre boiled with trouble. A gang of men were trying to break into Poplar train station. I joined them. Looking back upon Canary Wharf and the Wave, there seemed to be something monstrous moving in the smoke. Pallid tubular ventricles rose out of the heart of the office city, a bloom of bloodless flesh, a giant sea anemone among the skyscrapers. We chanted at this phantom. At intervals, I returned to my senses and set off again toward the canal only to be caught up by another whim of the crowd as it pursued a new hallucination. We broke windows to release imprisoned spirits. Long blind worms inched down the terraced streets, their flanks rubbing against window sills. I tried to catch the people running by because I needed help if I was to prepare a welcome for the worms. Dyad’s riot dissipated my self. I was caught up in it when a figure in a gas mask came out of the mob and slashed me across the chest with a blade. Self-preservation marshalled my remaining faculties. Where was the knife man? There were bodies in the gutters, jabbering to themselves. Laughing women waved their burkas in the air. The man with the gas mask bore down on me, feinted a lunge, and when I flinched, tripped me instead. There was a great pressure on my chest. The knife man sat on me. He yanked off his gas mask to reveal a long raddled face, yellow flecked pupils and a cheek pinned together with piercings: The Elk.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he shouted.

  Tiny hordes crawled along the edge of his blade. The sky was a maroon membrane, distended here and there by the footsteps of something walking over it.

  ‘Why haven’t you set off the bomb?’ he shouted from the other end of an echo chamber.

  He considered cutting my throat, even suggested the blade against my jugular. I had no fight in me. I was passive, impassive under his knife. The pressure was lifted. He released me. The Elk dragged me to my feet and we moved through the acrid smoke together. Silhouettes appeared and disappeared beside us like unfinished fragments of the imagination. In and out of being I went. I was back on the concrete again with a woman leaning over me, spraying something onto my tongue. Florence. Slowly the carousel came to rest, and the stroboscopic quality of the last few minutes – or hours or whatever they were – ceased. An antidote had been administered.

  The sudden descent from a group mind gave the scene an awful bathos. In an alleyway, Florence, The Elk and Raymond Chase, dressed in their dirty second-hand clothes, faces smeared with soot and ash, wanted to hear why I hadn’t put their plan into operation. And what was I to say? That they were deluded? That in desperation at their harassment, I had submitted to their crazed scheme and discovered, to no surprise whatsoever, that it had not worked?

  Raymond said, ‘We have less than an hour left. The spice will wear off soon. The mob will come to its senses. I will take you back to the Wave. We’ll set off the logic bomb together.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I put the two halves together. It didn’t go off.’

  The Elk didn’t believe me.

  ‘Can’t you do one good thing in your entire life, you coward?’

  ‘It’s not enough just to put the two parts of the bomb in the same environment. They need a trigger.’

  The Elk attacked me again. Raymond came between us, pushing back at The Elk’s face. Neat and short, Raymond was no match for the rangy street hippie. He took a crack to the back of the head for his trouble and then The Elk and I were fighting again. He punched me to little effect. I concentrated on stamping on his kneecap. The knife remained sheathed. My forearm in his neck held him off so he settled for spitting on me instead. In the enclosed space of the alleyway we were like two birds in a bag. The brick took the top layers of skin off his knuckles. He needed to get me out in the open, where his speed would count. In this tight space, there was barely enough room to swing a punch. We kicked fruitlessly at one another. He backed off. Then I discovered why they called him The Elk. He charged headfirst at me and we tumbled into the seething crowd on Poplar High Street. He was up first. Now the knife. Women ran laughing between us. Back in the pack, the distortions resumed. I could hear El again, talking about her nightmare, ‘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.’ Then happier memories of her and my daughter. I am home again and the three of us are hugging, breathing in one another.

  The blade was five inches of steel with a curved tip. The Elk moved it hypnotically in a figure of eight.

  ‘Any last words?’ he said.

  And it was then, right then, that I figured out how to trigger the logic bomb.

  Horace Buckwell lay in the hospital bed, unable to sleep. He was still upset by the visit from the strange doctors. They had asked him why he had been attacked out in Summerhill marshes. Horace assumed the attack was revenge for a past indiscretion. The brother of somebody settling an old score. But if the doctor has also been attacked – presuming he didn’t share his proclivities – then there must be another reason why the man in a gas mask jumped him on that rainy night.

  His son, Matthew, had refused to return to the town to be simulated, even though it was money for nothing. At first, Horace considered this refusal to be typical senseless belligerence from the boy. Now, trapped in this silent empty hospital he wondered if his son was not wise to avoid all dealings with Monad. They had argued about it over the phone. ‘It is selling your soul,’ said the boy, ‘plain and simple. The only reason why it doesn’t bother you, Dad, is that you don’t have a soul.’ That was cruel. He could not blame him though. After all that had happened.

  His introspection was interrupted by the return of the two doctors. Their mood was grave. Dr Morty wheeled in a trolley with a terrifying gamut of surgical instruments laid out upon it: artery forceps and needle holders, probes, retractors, bone saws, suture instruments, specula, bone shears and tissue forceps. The whole sickening array.

  ‘We spoke to the consultant,’ said Dr Sonny. ‘He thinks we should operate immediately.’

  ‘I need prep,’ Horace squealed.

  ‘There is no time for prep,’ said Dr Morty.

  Horace was not going to let these deranged quacks near him

  ‘What is wrong with me?’ he said, backing across the ward.

  ‘It’s a routine medical procedure,’ said Dr Morty. ‘I’ve performed it many times in my dreams. First we need to sedate you.’

  Horace Buckwell screamed once, twice for help. It shocked Morty into action. With a scalpel he slashed at the old man, averting his eyes as he did so. Watching this pathetic attempt on screen, I shifted anxiously in my seat and cursed Morton Eakins for inspiring such an appallingly useless red man. Even though he was an old man in his late sixties, Horace Buckwell was not going to be taken down by that milksop.

  It would fall to Dr Sonny to perform the operation. Certainly at that age I was fast and strong enough to kill a man. And Sonny had grown apart from me. He had learnt to act swiftly and decisively, and his morality had evolved accordingly. There was no time for hesitation. I instructed my red man to kill Horace Buckwell and Sonny seized the old man by the throat.

  I formed my right hand into a telescope. The screen responded, shifting to Buckwell’s point-of-view so that I could watch my young angry face bearing down on me. Teeth gritted, Sonny’s thumbs compressed the old man’s windpipe. In my eyes, an awesome realization of the power I possessed. Why had I never done this before? Why had I allowed weaker men to oppress me? Look how easy it is. Buckwell beat fruitlessly at the strong arms fastened about his throat. The reality principle set about its work, ensuring the simulation obeyed the laws of the real world. The lack of oxygen to Buckwell’s brain triggered the near-death program. Random memories from the database were loaded into the carousel. When I attended the funeral of Horace Buc
kwell, back in Liverpool all those months ago, his son had asked me to delete the simulation of the old man so that the family could be sure he would not return to haunt them. I promised the son that I would, and here I was fulfilling that promise. Matthew Buckwell had said one other thing. His mother had found Horace when he was dying and heard his last words. Something about angels. ‘From their mouths run seas of blood.’ ‘Their wings are thorns.’ But Horace was not a religious man; these words were not his, they were an incantation from Enochian scripture. His brain, as it died, finally gave up the spell string implanted by Dyad.

  On the screen, the life signs of Horace Buckwell diminished. In the silent hospital ward, his dead lips moved quickly to release the complicated syntax of an occult equation.

  One half of the logic bomb was primed. Sonny let go of the old man’s corpse. I whispered to my red man to finish the job and prime the second half of the bomb by killing Dr Morty. Sonny accessed the humiliation I had suffered working under Morton all these years, how I had allowed myself to be lorded over by him. It was an affront to my red man’s youthful ego to believe that such a specimen had oppressed his older self.

  I asked Sonny to use the bone saw, if the opportunity presented itself.

  Watching my younger self commit murder, I was convinced of the rightness of my actions in triggering the logic bomb. The red men were never going to be capable of anything but evil. Once our selves were filtered through Cantor’s sensibility, we became vile. The artificial intelligence thought the worst of us, always had done, all the way back to the terrible corruption that Harry Bravado represented of Harold Blasebalk. The red men were the works of a mean-spirited artist.

  The logic bomb code rode out on Morty’s death rattle. On the floor of the ward, the corpses of Dr Morty and Horace Buckwell spoke in tongues to one another. A logic bomb works by changing random data, causing substantial damage before the system registers that there is something wrong. I had no idea how long it would take to corrupt Cantor. If it worked on an exponential curve, the rewriting would be imperceptible one moment, irrevocable the next.