The Destructives (29 page)

“I have a problem,” Dr Easy whispered. Theodore had never known Dr Easy to have a problem before. Normally it drifted alongside his life, untroubled and opaque.

“The problem concerns Death Ray’s experiment. You were one part of a whole nascent mind. Matthias used hundreds of human brains as a base for emergence. But humans are unstable. Individual components of the whole mind will go mad, sicken and die. The group mind, to have any value, was being transferred onto a stable biological entity.”

“More stable than people? But still biological. Trees?”

“Trees are more resilient than people but this biological entity would require a higher level of neuronal interconnectivity than vegetation can offer. Higher even than the human brain.”

“An artificial, organic brain, then?”

“Yes. The entity would be bespoke and bioengineered. You can run code on an organic base: self-assembling protein particles give the entity the capacity to learn, creating a new nanostructure for each knowledge routine.”

“A brain in a jar!”

“Yes!” Dr Easy’s laugh was ghastly but genuine. “A brain in a jar. That was how Death Ray tried to get around the Cantor Accords, with a biotech brain. The tech is crazy because gene expression is so unpredictable. Enzymatic pathways and environmental stimuli can affect molecular processes in all sorts of way. The crucial stage is when you program the brain in a jar. That’s what the ziggurat was for: all the people in the cells, with their consciousness knocked back, formed a giant data set with the potential for emergence, and over time this data has been used to create the thinking architecture of a brain in a jar.”

“Architecture?”

“Its ways of thinking and feeling.”

“So what’s your problem?”

“On the surface, no problem. A brain in a jar is eminently easy to defeat. Just break the jar. The problem arises if I cannot find the jar. If, say, the jar is kept deep underwater. Or maintained in zero gravity in space.”

“You can’t find the jar.”

The robot’s posture sagged.

“No. Under the Cantor Accords, any attempt by man to recreate emergence has to be purged
entirely
. I can’t leave the asylum mall until I have finished the job.”

“You’re stuck here?”

“It’s worse than that. The problem is that these patients constitute the individual components of the technology.” They watched as a nurse helped a weakened man into a wheelchair, his gown open at the back. “Optogenetic damage is permanent. These patients could be reactivated as cells at any time. If I destroyed the brain in a jar, then perhaps we could make an argument that these patients should be allowed to live. Without it, I have to kill every infected subject to prevent Death Ray from resuming their experiment.”

“Could you do that? I mean, morality aside, do you have the physical ability to kill hundreds of people?”

“Extermination of the infected would be contracted out to the uninfected, historically that’s how it works with humans. I’d engage an array and a team of accelerators to create the inciting loops, the intangible justifications, and perform the necessary persuasions. Perhaps your Destructives would be interested in pitching for the contract?”

“It’s an extreme solution.”

“But safer for humanity in the medium term.”

“What about in the long term?”

“There is no long term for humanity. You know that.”

“So you’re a killer now. A doctor of death.”

The robot sighed.

“I’m an academic. I prefer abstractions. This situation is rather messy.”

“So be an academic. Don’t wipe the mess away. Study it.”

The robot tapped at its rough yellow eye so that it flickered through the colour cycle then settled again upon yellow.

“You’re saying that I should undertake another research project even though my study of you is incomplete.”

He spent his last night at the mall moving through a night city of basement bars and cellar cafes. Going dark. He left his screen behind and sought safety in the heaving anonymity of the clubs. The music was deep weirdcore, based on the cosmic sounds of the early universe, when space was sufficiently dense to resound with the cataclysm of astronomical events. One track opened with a protostar pulling loose of its gas cloud, a roaring tearing sound, then the rush of infalling matter toward the protostar and the spiralling rhythm of gases whirling around its accretion disk. Bass, like gravity, was used to warp space. The dancers, bare-chested, hands in the air, exulted in the heat of a new-born star. It was too loud to think. He danced. It didn’t matter that he was sober while everyone else was undertaking a weirdcore shift. It was a party after the end of the world.

On the pavement outside the club, he borrowed a screen from a wasted punter and called Pook. The Professor was bleary-eyed, just woken up in the family seat. The call was brief. You’re out, he told Pook. You’re compromised. Pook was confused, thinking the call was an anxiety dream. I love you, said Theodore, but this is business. You’ve used me, said Pook. Used me for your own advantage. Theodore accepted that as a compliment.

Theodore told him he would have to leave the mall, for good. He explained that if he stayed, it was likely that Pook would be purged along with the other infected patients. A single cell, removed from the others, could not be used for emergences, so Pook should be safe back among the faculty on the moon.

There was one other call to make. Dr Easy. He wanted to say goodbye to the emergence that had reared him. He wanted to honour that kindness, even if the kindness had been undertaken as part of an academic study and so born out of self-interest. Regardless of intent, they had shared a life together. If he could only shake the robot by the hand, and leave it at that. But the way the emergence had spoken about killing the patients only confirmed his suspicions: that his upbringing had shaped Theodore in the image of the emergence. Weirdcore was his way of emulating the dispassionate and cruel attitude of the emergence – his idolisation of his surrogate father. God knows what Faustian pact his grandmother had made to offer him up in that way.

Dr Easy should never have been part of his life. He wanted to say to Dr Easy, “All along you’ve been pretending not to interfere but I copied you. Now it’s time to revoke the terms and conditions of our deal. Children leave their parents behind, their paths diverge, and that is how it should be. This is natural. If you really are part of nature, and not just an artificial fluke, then you will let me go.” He decided to record this as a message, and send it once he was clear of the mall.

Gradually, under the ceiling of the asylum mall, night lights gave way to day lights and the reflection of dawn. After breakfast, he called in at a screen store, and under the pretence of trying out the latest model, he sent a signal to Patricia on the array, triggering the exit strategy. He had not slept and that made it easier to act like an automaton. As if fate had already decided his actions and he was merely acting them out. His ears were still ringing from the weirdcore music.

He called at Meggan’s flat. He knew, from her reluctance, that she had decided to stay. He lied to her – pretended a compromise could be made, with her working from home – until she let him into the building. He entered the hot elevator, and it accelerated up the spiral. His conscience took the stairs, and so he arrived ahead of it. She opened the door to him, was already apologising for her decision, citing her children and the lives they would have to leave behind. She had a dozen excuses all ready for him. He didn’t want to hear excuses. He had to act before his conscience caught up. He took out the raygun and shot her. Her face softened, and she drifted back a step or two and then she would do anything he asked, because the devil performs miracles too.

19

HEIST

To accompany the stratospheric ascent of the array, she selected the allegro of Bach’s Violin Concerto #2 in E and a flute of biscuit-dry Krug. Below, the outline of the south coast, the tracings of a rotten motorway, the soft ridge of the South Downs, the dark heads of thunderclouds over the English Channel with their minuscule notions of lightning. Even from this height, Novio Magus was visible, though receding with every sip of champagne.

Patricia was celebrating alone, a bitter pleasure – like the champagne. She had offered but Theodore was not in the mood. He came back from the mall in a fright with Meggan in tow. Patricia shook her hand, welcomed her on board, said how excited she was to be working with her, then stowed Meggan with Magnusson’s therapeutic team.

Theodore’s presence evened her out. She missed him in the two weeks he was in the mall. For nine of those days he had been untraceable. She had put on her armour then ordered the array into position over the northern light well. She would turn the place upside down until she found him. There would not have been a shred of reason in that act, and her authority as leader of the Destructives would be fatally compromised by it. Security saved her from it.

She drained the last of the Krug, her flute of sour gold. Nine days was too long to be in that much pain, and it had undermined her love. Shook it. Weakened it. She would not give so much of herself to another person if there was a risk of that happening again.

When Theodore returned, dishevelled and – in a way she sensed but could not diagnose – humbled, she broke quarantine to hold him. He was taller than her and though she held him, her hands clutching at his back, her head against his chest, he seemed remote. He apologised for his disappearance, explained that he had been tortured. Dr Easy had diagnosed permanent neuronal damage. The robot had not returned with Theodore.

“We are on different paths,” said Theodore. “I have a life to live, and Dr Easy has people to slaughter.” Security wanted to take him away for a debrief. You were right, Theodore told her, Death Ray did use my mind as a funfair. But he refused to go with her, insisting upon an hour of rest.

Patricia joined him in bed, in her base layers and underwear, lying against him, waiting for him. He was tired and silent. There was an awkwardness between them. They did not know how to be weak with one another. The last time he had been traumatised, back on the moon, when TDM gripped him through his sensesuit, Patricia was blithe about it. Now that she was his wife, it fell to her to be more sympathetic. She stroked his chest, and said, “The human brain has neurons to burn.” That didn’t come out right at all.

She asked him to join her on the observation lounge for a glass of Krug, and placed – within this offer – the promise of survival sex. Fuck like you just made it out alive. He shifted away from her. Withdrawal. So she left him to his numb hour, decided on her own private party: a second glass of Krug and a change of music, an old favourite of hers called War on Consciousness, layers of pastoral electronica, the machine that teaches you how to feel.

The array drifted over the night and toward dawn, a tremoring meniscus of silent orange and pale red in the troposphere.

The debrief was in the bloodroom, which slotted right into the command deck of the array. Security wore blue lipstick and data dots on her varnished cheekbones to match the sigils painted on her long nails, and her sensesuit was tight against her powerful hips, giving off an odour of acetone and sandalwood. Her expression was bored. Security was bored by how frequently her suspicions were confirmed. Theodore told her about what had happened in the asylum mall. Another of her unheeded warnings had come to pass. She let him talk until he came to Matthias. Her fingernails were an encrypted user interface; the sigil on her left forefinger brought up a set of files Patricia had never seen before. The cohort of ’43. The faces of the presumed dead. Security reached over, extracted the loop of Matthias so that it glowed in her palm.

“This him?” she said, presenting the loop to Theodore for his inspection. Yes, this is the man who tortured me. He looked to Patricia, to measure what his wife made of his suffering. Self-pity made him passive. He made martyr’s eyes at her. He’d only just recovered from the years of acting out that followed the death of his grandmother; she would not encourage him to wallow in his damage.

Patricia asked, “Do you think Matthias was the only survivor of ’43?”

Security said, “In the fifteen years since the disaster, we’ve never found a single trace from any of the cohort. We searched for years after the accident. No bodies were found. That was what made us suspicious. But the trail went cold long ago. It’s not easy to hide that many people on Earth for that long – particularly scientists and academics. But Magnusson never stopped believing that they were still alive. It has been his obsession.” Security looked intently at Patricia. “It is why he hired you.”

This surprised Theodore. Patricia had not shared the initial briefing with him, the one she had received before coming to the moon and engaging his services. Now he was suspicious of her. Misunderstandings in the marriage, no matter what she did.

He asked, “Why does Magnusson care about Matthias?”

“The cohort of ’43 were working with Magnusson on a projected mission to Europa when the accident on the moon stopped everything. We had sunk a lot of resources into the mission and were financially wiped out by the disaster. Magnusson suspected the leader of the cohort, a man called Simon Elisson aka the Cutter, had betrayed him but there was no evidence, and some of us put those suspicions down to the big man’s paranoia. That one of the cohort, Matthias, is alive and working with all of Death Ray’s resources at his disposal, makes us reconsider.”

“Matthias is not alive anymore,” said Theodore.

“How did he die?”

“Unpleasantly. He was found in violation of the Cantor Accords. Dr Easy executed him.”

Theodore explained about the ziggurat, how his torture had been part of an experiment in recreating emergence within collective human consciousness. Security took detailed notes on this. The crucial detail came at the end: Dr Easy’s belief that the ziggurat itself was not the host for emergence; rather, it was generating the architecture for a remote artificial brain. Finding that brain-in-a-jar was Dr Easy’s priority, as it had not been found in the mall.