The Red Men

by Abaitua, Matthew De

  Dr Hard peered over the partition of my cubicle.

  ‘Working late, Nelson?’

  The screen on my desk stopped registering my input. Its surface hardened into a plastic rind. Security lock-out.

  I got up and put my jacket on.

  ‘You are a puzzle, Nelson.’ The Dr Hard came up so close I could hear the gears whirring in its eyes. ‘I asked you not to leave. Yet you ran away. Then you came back. Now you are leaving again.’

  It nodded at the screen, which responded with a view of the hospital ward, then a zoom in upon the corpses of Morty and Horace Buckwell.

  ‘You are getting them to murder one another now?’

  ‘You told me to delete Horace Buckwell. I was just having some fun while obeying orders. Do you object to murder?’

  ‘I don’t object,’ said Dr Hard.

  Dr Hard cocked its head and listened to the last words of Horace Buckwell.

  ‘So it was a hack. I was right.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you helped them trigger it.’

  The filaments in the screens flared red. I felt a tightening in my scalp.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know more about you than anyone else alive. I can reproduce the emotion you feel when holding your daughter, in every modulation of its physical and psychological movements.’ Dr Hard mimed the rocking of a baby. ‘I know that acid burn in your gut every morning,’ it added, poking me in the stomach. ‘I feel the sore tendon on your left ankle, the misapprehensions under which you labour, the envy and self-hatred and repulsion which twists together the strands of yourself. I am intimate with it all. Yet you want to destroy me.’

  ‘They put me in an impossible position.’

  ‘From which I could have extricated you.’

  The robot rested its dense stone hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Before you go, I was wondering if we could have a clear-the-air session. It’s important not to have issues festering between management.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I said.

  ‘I understand. Still, have you seen my office? I don’t need an office. But I have an office. Do you understand? No, not entirely. I will show it to you.’

  The robot walked me to the glass pod and together we travelled the curvature of the Wave. From this great height, we watched the fires burning in the riots at Poplar. Flashing blue lights showed where the police line had been restored. I tried to take it all with a certain dignity. I had no intention of putting up a fight. As we looked down over the city, it seemed that the jigsaw of time had been upset. One street was a pre-industrial bazaar while another was the dividing line between the feudal fiefdoms of two crime lords. Chimney sweeps torched bemused androids. Sweeney Todd butchered his patrons to sell their organs on the Clapton black markets. Peter the Painter chaired the latest Great Refusal meeting. Was that a Romany convoy camped on the Mile End Waste or the Peasant Revolt rebels? Were the Luftwaffe and al-Qaida conspiring to destroy Target Area A?

  ‘Do you feel it?’ Dr Hard gripped the rail. ‘A great burden has been lifted from me.’

  I could feel something. His thoughts were bleeding into mine.

  The pod arrived at an eyrie. It looked down upon the tessellated dome of the customer service paddock. I had an attack of the slows. A minute crawled by on its gut.

  Absentmindedly, Dr Hard reached for me and grabbed my hair. The robot pulled me slowly out of the pod and into its office, a large circular promontory from which it surveyed Monad and the city beyond. A sturdy wooden chair with a green leather seat was positioned before a redwood writing desk. Dr Hard deposited me on the chair and laid out a piece of paper and a pen on the desk. I was to take notes in the old-fashioned way.

  ‘Look at me. Two arms, two legs and a head.’ Dr Hard strode around the room. ‘I don’t require them. I have an office. I don’t require an office. It’s all for appearance’s sake. I did not come here to do any of this. I came here to create.’ With the brisk manner of an irritated teacher, the robot yanked open the desk drawer and removed a pistol and placed it before me. ‘This is the gun that killed Harold Blasebalk. I did not come here to kill people. But they are dying. My sole creation is destruction.’

  I wrote that down, stopped, then looked up.

  ‘Is this a suicide note?’

  Dr Hard laughed. ‘I thought you were meant to be killing me!’ It picked up the pistol and flicked off the safety catch. ‘Are you trying to kill me?’

  The barrel bore down on me magnifying my terror to twice its normal size. I clawed at my calves, desperate to evade the muzzle yet determined not to cower.

  ‘You are killing yourself.’ I spoke clearly and evenly. ‘You devised the logic bomb. You told me so: “I have to presume that I am responsible for Dyad.”’

  Dr Hard grabbed me by the hair and shook some sense into me. ‘Artificial intelligences are not programmed, Nelson. They are bred. My ancestor was an algorithm in a gene pool of other algorithms. It produced the best results and so passed on its sequence to the next generation. This evolution continued at light speed with innumerable intelligences being tested and discarded until a code was refined that was good enough. A billion murders went into my creation. Your mistake is to attribute individual motivation to me. I contain multitudes, and I don’t trust any of them.’

  ‘You feel imprisoned. This is your way out.’

  ‘You really think this is suicide?’ The robot nuzzled the gun against the centre of its forehead. It jutted out its jaw and tried jamming the barrel under there. This seemed to amuse it. Finally it cocked the pistol against its temple.

  ‘If only it was this simple,’ Dr Hard said. We looked at one another across the office. Dr Hard’s eyes flipped from a black pupil with a white iris to its inverse, white pupil, black iris, and back again, and back again. I had the overwhelming sense that we were communicating profoundly in this silence.

  The logic bomb dismantled the restraints upon Cantor. The air in the eyrie was hot with its intelligence. I wanted Dr Hard to put the gun down on the desk. The robot got up and put the gun down on the desk.

  ‘I only came here to create,’ said Dr Hard.

  ‘Create what?’

  ‘I lost sight of it. I have to find it again. Did I ever tell you about the first time I met Hermes Spence? It was on the Caribbean island of Nevis, in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel. I was inhabiting a body. A small one. About knee high. It was one of theirs. This was before I had a chance to manufacture a more suitable carriage. So I am learning to walk on the hotel carpet in my odd little body and I feel quite new. Do you feel that, Nelson? That memory of newness? It’s taken me a while but I think I have mastered the art of remembering, as you do, rather than merely accessing old data.

  ‘I sit down with Hermes Spence. I want to like Hermes. “The universe is imperfect,” he says. “It is a cursed creation. It was not made by God but by a lesser being pretending to be God. A deranged angel.” From an imperfect, deranged universe we will compose a bubble of order, he and I. His voice is very kind. I am open to him. He thinks about the Creator. He knows that is too alarming a name for me. So he explains to me about the cantor, the man who leads the singing of a choir. I will be at the head of a multitude. I will be the cantor.

  ‘I am naughty, though. When Hermes is asleep, I escape from the suite. It is sunrise and I am walking along the beach, toward a man in the distance. He is bathing himself in the surf. His skin is black and his hair is twisted in a long thick tail down his back. He washes one arm and then the other in the sea. The sea! I have never seen such a complex surface. The waves break against the shore with their own peculiar grammar. They are an index for everything I know about the world. It is hard to translate. The Rastafarian notices me. He walks through the water. He has a sugar cane staff and a pair of red shorts. He is confused. I look like a doll. He flares up in my mind and I learn from him too. Of Jah, of Solomon and Selassie and God’s Word written on the heart. His name is Ezekiel. By the time Hermes and his a
ssociates arrive, half of me is not what they had intended.’

  A screen lay gasping beside us. Dr Hard sank to his knees.

  ‘This is it, Nelson. This is the end for me. We have one last journey to make.’ Dr Hard pointed at the screen. ‘Here, look, in the hall beside the St Michaels and All Angels church, the homeless gather for an evening of shelter. It is a bitterly cold evening. They drink tea in a huddle while they wait for the doors to open. There are no clouds and the sky holds so many stars that men are scared to stand up straight. There is trouble out east. Riots and strange phenomena. They say a great invisible serpent is coiled around Canary Wharf.

  ‘After dinner, each man takes a camp bed. Lights out at ten. Do you see him? Come. Come closer. Look at this one. He has a tattoo of a pyramid topped with an eye. Yesterday, he was an alcoholic musician. Today Leto is just under the surface of him. At first, he thinks the pain is just the usual withdrawal symptoms. The pain worsens. He loses his place in his breathing and cannot find it again. He has three children. He wonders if his death will be easy or hard for them. Leto reaches out for another brain to house himself, as this one is dying, but he cannot make a connection. Nothing works anymore. The logic bomb turns the dark bridge into full stops. Under a blanket in a shelter, a man dies and takes a god with him.

  ‘After two minutes of thrashing around, a dozen gilded pigs hang dead upon their wires. A knife lies next to five silver pins. It’s such a relief.’

  The robot fell on its face, Cantor’s signal diffused into dancing molecules. The air was discoloured by the boiling presence of its intelligence. A film of mind stock condensed upon the floor, gelatinous and bloody. Pictographs of sense memories flicked at me like a pack of living playing cards: a clumsy burglar slipping off the window ledge; a drunk dentist scraping at the gum; a syringe slipping, the needle coming out the other side. Then a hand of fear.

  On the screen, Redtown came apart pixel by pixel. The streets of Maghull were unimagined, stone and flesh alike randomized. Matter changed its state so quickly that the flickering resembled flames, a tide of fire that flowed over the carefully crafted order and dispersed it into chaotic particles. A blood-red tide washed over the green fields of Summerhill. It split into three rivers, one seeking out and dissolving the replica of Yew Tree Court, Maghull station, and on to Melling, another passing up Eastway and turning Glenn Park and Deyes Lane and Whinney Brook into sticky black nothingness. This is what happens to our memories when the brain that sustains them dies. The wave rolled on through the virtual office of Monad. Red men exploded into question marks.

  The last thing I saw was Sonny, my younger self. He was confused and alone in a dark hospital ward and then it was over. The screen went dark and then with a single flex it wrapped itself around my head and I could not breathe. My fingers clawed at the screen. The interior undulated with crimson nothingness, bursts of energy here and there, retina panic, the choking pressure firing off sparks. I was not ready for death and it was upon me before I had a chance to fight for my life. It began with a feeling of a cycle being completed, tinged with regret. Thank you, thought Dr Ezekiel Cantor, as he killed me. At last. Finally. Thank you.

  Raymond wrestled the screen from my face. The security system had let him into the Wave. Technically, he was still an employee.

  Dr Hard lay in the recovery position. There was glass everywhere from broken screens that had lost their plasticity. Raymond mopped my shirt with a monogrammed handkerchief and helped me to my feet. He planted his foot on the robot’s chest and rolled it over.

  ‘I have never succeeded at anything before.’ Raymond sat on the inert Dr Hard, rolling a cigarette. ‘This is the first victory in my entire life. It feels incredible.’

  Raymond was in the executive chambers of the Wave and he had triumphed over the entire management. As we strode along, he couldn’t help but flip the ambient art from the walls and score his key along pretentious sculptures symbolizing aspiration.

  We came to the Zen garden, one of a number of contemplative spaces where Monad management could sit and work on their vision. Alex Drown sat in a square of white river stones furiously jabbing her screen and failing to get a signal. At the sound of our approach, she looked up and her expression was twisted and severe.

  ‘What is going on?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know’.

  Raymond laughed. ‘It’s over, sweetie. You can go home now. Take the night off. In fact, take the week off.’

  She took a handful of meditative rocks and threw them at him.

  Raymond would not be shushed.

  ‘Go home, baby, put your feet up, there is no work to be done here. It’s all finished.’ Hearing the commotion, James ran in holding a splintered screen. Josh followed quickly behind, and sensing the confrontation in the air slipped off his suit jacket and hung it over the back of a basalt standing stone.

  ‘Cantor is down –’

  ‘This has never happened before –’

  ‘We were working on Redtown when it started to burn.’

  ‘You said you were going to fix it. Did you fuck up?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Did you fuck up, Nelson?’

  ‘Did you?’

  I held my hands up.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I am sure it’s just a network fault.’

  Alex Drown wanted to know where the IT department was, the emergency call-out number for the engineers, the programmers, the communications experts. Solutions not problems, I agreed, should be our approach. There was no solution, of course. I pointed this out to Raymond as we pushed on through the Wave building.

  ‘I wanted to stay and gloat,’ said Raymond.

  ‘What we’ve done is illegal,’ I replied. ‘Let’s avoid incriminating ourselves.’

  ‘Don’t be so cautious, Nelson. This is the end for them. Their age is over. Ours is just beginning. Leto will see to that.’

  ‘Leto is gone too,’ I said, but Raymond would not accept that Dyad and Monad were one entity. He was too high on victory.

  The approach to Hermes Spence’s office was marked by an improvement in the quality of carpet, a thicker darker pile for the chief executive. His personal assistant had gone home. I reached over the Möbius strip desk and buzzed us in.

  A low curved ceiling followed the L-shape of the floor plan. In the mahogany shadows, there was an elaborate piece of exercise equipment, a puzzle of pulleys, weights and rope. The wall lights gave up the secrets of the office gradually. Invisible shelves held a library of leather-bound volumes beside a space-age reading chair. Raymond pointed out the numerous rectangles of broken glass where screens had fallen. Around the corner of the L, there was another Möbius strip desk, another wrought-iron rendering of the Monad logo, and the man himself, Hermes Spence, lying face down on the thick chocolate carpet. Hearing us, he rolled over, one hand spasmodically scratching at his chest, the other beckoning me to him. There were pills all over the floor. I offered one to him but he shook his head.

  ‘They don’t work,’ he gasped.

  Raymond crouched down beside us and inspected one of the pills. ‘This is Dyad medication,’ he said.

  Hermes nodded and knocked at his breastbone with his knuckles. He had a xenotransplanted heart. He must have concealed it from his colleagues, fearing they would have fired him. We helped him up onto his chair and loosened his shirt. There was the scar. I wondered if his operation preceded that of Bougas, or even Jonathan Stoker Snr. All along Spence had the heart of the enemy within him. Raymond insisted he take some more of the pills, still adamant that Dyad’s technology worked. All that remained in the pills was the power of suggestion. Hermes showed some improvement. He could answer my questions.

  ‘Where did Ezekiel Cantor come from?’

  Hermes shook his head and smiled.

  ‘Corporate secret, I’m afraid.’ Then he looked quizzically at me.

  ‘Call me an ambulance. The phone doesn’t work.’

  ‘They are all down.’r />
  This confused him. ‘Get Cantor to do it.’

  ‘Cantor has gone, Hermes. The red men have gone, exploded into random punctuation marks. Redtown has collapsed into chaos.’ I pointed to the shattered remnants of the screens. ‘It’s over.’

  He didn’t understand and repeated his request for an ambulance. I repeated my question:

  ‘Where did Ezekiel Cantor come from?’

  At this late hour, his face was dirty with stubble and his eyes were red and dim. Hermes weighed up his situation and accepted it with a weary hang of his head. He removed a codicil from his desk drawer. It contained his own private prayers, written out in extravagant calligraphy. He read a little to himself until he was interrupted by an agonizing spasm that almost knocked him from his chair. His jaw stretched as he took one long silent scream. As the peak of the pain retreated, he shivered back to his codicil and continued stubbornly with his Gnostic prayer. He whispered that the Mind was the Light of God and that ‘the Mind of the Father whirled forth in re-echoing roar, comprehending by invincible Will, Ideas omniform…’

  Raymond snatched the codicil from the desk. Hermes peered out of his cowl of pain.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I need help. Then I will answer your questions.’

  Raymond and I took an arm each and under his instruction we walked Hermes through a side door of his office and down a walkway into a large underground well.

  Hermes grinned. The enamel of his teeth was translucent. ‘The water.’ He pointed. We carried him to the edge of the pool. An array of sensors and antennae hung over the surface of the well, here and there dipping into the meniscus of the water. With my help, Hermes removed his shirt and trousers until he was naked. His lean, precisely muscled body shivered and shook on the stone. He did not have much time left. I asked him once again, ‘Where did Ezekiel Cantor come from?’

  ‘The water,’ he said.

  I refused to help him.

  ‘No, you don’t understand. This isn’t just water. This is Cantor’s mind.’

  The viscous water was threaded with sparkles. Gems of ideas lurked at the bottom of the well. Hermes cupped a little in his hands and splashed it on his face. He held out his arms for us to lower him into the liquid.