The Destructives (10 page)

And so on. An argument about love and control familiar to him from his studies of female culture of the period. Daughter rejects mother’s control and the mother gives ground, so long as the daughter does not harm herself through exercising too much self-control. Self-harm was a risk at this age, related to depression, both conditions defined as abnormal even though they derived from a strong sense of self – too strong, in fact, for the forgetting and forgiving that made life bearable.

Female status in Pre-Seizure culture was predicated on appetite control. But a woman in control of her desire did not function economically, and so loops were inserted into culture to accelerate female bonding in acts of over-consumption that defied restraint. These loops gave permission for loss of control. He loved the paradoxes of Pre-Seizure culture: on the one hand, building up an iconicity of self-control around images of thinness and athletic discipline, and on the other, unpicking that self-control to create necessary doubt and need. It must have been maddening to live through.

For his interview at the University of the Moon, he had composed a long thought on a loop titled “No Regrets Evah”. The loop had been found in the basement of a coffee shop on the Western border of London, and was categorised as “advert: point of sale display”. It had been stored in the library of the London School of Economics, and the restorer brought the original work out for him on a velvet tray. It was a screen folded so as to stand on top of a counter in a chain of coffee outlets. The loop ran on a four second cycle. It showed two women, with shopping bags clutched to their breasts, mouths agape as they in turn made a loop of their moment – one woman held her mobile out at arm’s length to film them both. Wriggling below this loop, a promise of money – a hundred pounds every day – for shopping if customers soshulled the loop. Then, below this, the only mention of the sponsoring brand: Diet Joozah, and its tagline “No Regrets Evah”.

The two women – the one holding the mobile had blonde hair, her friend had brown hair – constituted a unit tagged as Caucasian Duo. The blonde, being the active one making the loop, was the leader. If there had been a third woman, Theodore knew from other artefacts of the period that it would have been her responsibility to be ethnically diverse. As they made this loop of themselves, the women opened their mouths in the most striking fashion. The meaning of this oral gesture was obscure to him. The women were models, trained to perform mimes of spontaneous emotion for the purposes of loops, and must have been selected – in the case of “No Regrets Evah” – for the wideness of their gaping mouths. But what was the emotion that made them gape so?

In his long thought, he had sought to reconstruct the trajectory of this emotion. “No Regrets Evah” was a meta-loop, an image that showed women making an image. This gave the emotion a performative layer. The models mimicked the performative expressions adopted by women when photographing themselves in pairs, act and imitation recurring in the infinite hall of screens that composed their culture.

Solitary women adopted different expressions for their loops. These expressions were learned young and were also performative. The soshul streams monitored by Verity Horbo showed solitary girls trying on all manner of faces. Solitary but not alone. Because the girls were looking into the black compound eye of soshul, a hundred million girls reflected on individual obsidian orbs, some pouting in ironic imitation of other girls on adjacent orbs, or making the ugly face against expectations of beauty, making the blowfish face, the pout, the askance tongue. All these faces had to be learned and they were all performative and they were all units of communication. In soshul, the face became an emoticon.

In “No Regrets Evah”, the models clutched their shopping bags to their breasts, to get them in shot. The restoration had preserved thousands of bags from the period: luxury bags fashioned from alligator hide, canvas backpacks, golden purses, hessian sacks. Bags remained status symbols in the asylum malls; at the extreme edge of the trend, rituals surrounding the bag had metastasised into diamond-studded exteriorised wombs.

He walked slowly down the staircase. Verity pushed fronds of white hair behind a red ear as she gazed at the hearth.

“Your father is in traffic again,” she said. “I’ll tell him to relax.” And this she did with a gesture that was somewhere between a caress and a warning.

“And does the hearth say what I should do?” asked Meggan.

“I don’t think the hearth is calibrated for teenage emotions.”

Meggan winced at the attempt at parental humour.

“Please, I don’t want you spying on me. I can cope.”

Verity sat back and placed her spoon deliberately beside her bowl.

“You’re still a child. I have to look after you.”

Meggan went to reply but chose not to speak. Just left the unsaid in her open mouth. Speaking the zero.

Insolence. That was part of the emotion in “No Regrets Evah”. Defiance of custom. The rapacious open mouth moving through the crowd like a tank through traffic. No regrets meant being defiant in the face of the past, defiant in the face of memory. The mouth wide in horror. Self-horror. Pre-Seizure culture insisted upon the
now
to prepare for the amnesia to come. The Seizure erased humanity’s data, yes, but it was aided by a wilful refusal to admit to any sort of reckoning. So much had to be forgotten, deleted, erased.

There were thousands of Diet Joozah artefacts tagged as “intangibles” in the restoration. The brand represented substantial capital. Yet it wore the guise of young women. And this… this…
humility
was not the right word… no, it was not an emotion that caused their mouths to gape so. This had been an error in his long thought. Power could be recognised by its imitations of silence. In the same way that Meggan held her mouth open but did not speak back to her mother. Perhaps power was a careful absence at the heart of every artefact. A white zero.

Meggan put on her school blazer, finished packing her bag and submitted to her mother’s kiss at the door. Verity let her daughter go, watched her walk away, the gulls cried twice, and then she turned back to the data of the hearth.

Verity reached into an invisible bag and pulled out the stream of her daughter’s soshul, the loops of Meggan’s friends and frenemies beseeching, performing, ignoring, acting out. Then she extracted her daughter’s mood feed going back weeks. Sliding this data to one side, she plotted the blue zones of the mood feed against the soshul activity, found a correlation: the posts of Mala the Maladroit. The girl with the young-old face playing with her Meggan doll. Calmer this time, Verity looped Mala playing with the dolls, Mala mimicking her daughter’s precise enunciation. Acting out old goody-two-shoes then slipping back into
protomallisms
. Much of the slang was unfamiliar to Theodore. A lot of bay-sounds. Basic bitch and bae and babe. She said Meggan was
moist
. What did that mean? Sometimes her accent was Californian, sometimes East London. Either a function of too much time spent on soshul or a marker of psychological instability. Mala also had dolls of men dressed in suits and ties and these men fawned over then fucked the doll of Meggan. The male dolls could have represented teachers or parents. Authority figures.

Verity paused Mala’s obscene loop, intoned the word
school
and there was a minute of questioning beeps until the school accepted her call. She was forceful and effective in the way she engaged with the gatekeepers of the institution, skills from her time at work, before she became a mother. She made her way through the layers of admin until, finally, the principal appeared on screen, a black woman in an open-necked orange shirt, slicked back hair and power jewellery. Brief pleasantries and then Verity shared Mala’s soshul with her, the game with the dolls, the mimicking of Meggan’s voice.

“It’s bullying,” said Verity,

“We monitor all the children’s soshul. I can’t believe we’ve missed this.”

“It’s ouroboros. The loop lasts for ten seconds and then it consumes itself.”

“But you can see them.”

“Yes. I have tools that can reconstruct destroyed loops.”

“But they weren’t meant for you to see.”

“They were meant for my daughter to see.”

The principal shook her head.

“If Mala only intended for them to last for ten seconds then–”

“What are you saying?”

“By reconstructing the loops you are contravening her privacy.”

“That’s a side issue. Her behaviour is unacceptable. I insist you sanction her.”

“We don’t sanction children on the insistence of other children’s parents, Ms Horbo.”

Verity accepted that she had overstepped the mark.

“I’m upset. I’m bringing this to your attention.”

The principal made gestures of supplication and reassurance, and then she drew Verity into her confidence.

“Mala is a challenger child,” she said. “She’s had a very disruptive upbringing and the school has taken on her case because of our excellent track record in improving the metrics of challenger children. The more children like Mala we turn around, the more funding we get to support the excellence of children like Meggan. That is the reality that I must act within.”

“You will speak to her?”

“I certainly will.”

“And her parents?”

“Yes,” said the principal.

After the call, Verity prodded around the civil registry looking for traces of Mala and her parents. She called up the class photograph. Mala was not in it.

Verity paced around the kitchen, thinking through her problem. She opened up her daughter’s timeline again, isolated school leaving times. She fed the parameters of Mala’s face into the hearth and it searched for matches around the entering and leaving of school. The hearth took samples of first person viewpoint rather than continuous stream, the intermittence a legal workaround. Also, Meggan could opt out of first person at any time with a trigger word. Early iterations had used constant first person streaming and that had upset unquantified people.

The search criteria were not met: according to the samples held on the hearth, Mala and Meggan had never actually spoken to one another face-to-face. Mala had been glimpsed at the back of class. Or skulking around the playground. Being accompanied from class by a teacher. But there was no data on face-to-face communication.

Verity took a range of samples of Mala’s voice, and ran a hearth search for that audioprint. No matches came back. So – no catcalling in the playground. Next, she ran an audio search for Mala’s name and that brought up a large cache of conversations and remarks between Verity and her friends. For the rest of the morning, Verity listened to these conversations. Theodore drew up a chair, and did likewise. Mala, it seemed, had a past.

She had told some girls that she lived in sheltered housing with her mother. That they were in hiding from her father. He was violent. Had threatened to kill them both if he ever found them. Mala can’t even look at men, say the girls. Her father is English but she doesn’t want anyone to know that, so that’s why her accent is so weird. Other girls say that Mala is a liar and that her mother and father split up, and that Mala gets moved from schools not to protect her from her father but because she is a fantasist: the insecure new girl telling stories to get attention.

Verity summoned up the class photograph on the hearth again. The date on the photograph indicated Mala was in the class at that time, there was crossover with her soshul posts. With both hands, Verity gathered together all the followers of Mala and all the people and bots she followed, then began segmentation, in each instance cross-referencing usernames with other web presences to infer real names, real identities. This segmentation was run through a series of lenses to detect groupings. It took a while for Theodore to figure out what she was looking for. She plotted the followers geographically, and then searched for congregations in the UK. If Mala had left England on the run from her father, would she sever all contact, or would she still follow her old British friends?

No, nothing significant in the UK. Verity checked the startup date of Mala’s account. It had been set up only a month before she joined Meggan’s class. Odd, most girls had soshul from eight or nine years old onward. She must have purged her old soshul. Would a thirteen year-old girl really be capable of making such a clean break if she wasn’t in danger?

Verity drew her lips back and tapped thoughtfully at her teeth.

What was Verity looking for?

Verity got up, stood in front of the mirror, then she went to the bathroom. He had no idea what decision she had come to, or what she was going to do next. He was stuck in real-time with her. He needed a way of moving through the archive in the same way that Verity controlled the hearth. While she was gone, he put down his pen and paper, and imitated some of the gestures that Verity had made. The hearth did not respond. He tried voice command. He tried writing commands down on the paper. Nothing. The hearth seemed like the natural interface with the archive. But it did not accept his input. It might not be capable of running any searches other than the ones within its history.

Verity returned from the bathroom and called her husband, Oliver Horbo. A loop of Oliver in happier times trailed his presence, in corduroys and fleece and hiking boots, mock heroic among redwoods; then the live feed connected and he appeared – judging from the unflattering lighting and angle of the video – older and in a cubicle at work.

She told Oliver that their daughter was being bullied by a girl in her class, and that she wasn’t sure that the school were going to deal with it effectively. His body language indicated that he would have preferred to discuss this matter at home, that it was insufficiently urgent for work; tiny tells of reluctance that he stifled. Oliver counselled caution.

“No,” said Verity. “This is damage, Olly. This girl is psychologically damaging our daughter.”

“It might just be teen stuff. We have to let it run its course.”

“Soshul puts the bully in our house. In her bedroom. She can’t get away from Mala. Every time she goes on soshul another loop appears and then it is destroyed before she can respond. It’s like someone is hiding in her wardrobe and they disappear every time she opens the door.”