The Destructives (31 page)

The analysts could not crack the vintage encryption on the files. We don’t have those skills, they explained to her. The array swooped over the rusting freighters on the dry bed of the Aral Sea, stopped to drop off the analytics department; she wished them luck surviving the carcinogenic dust storms and the desperate acts of the starving Uzbek people, then retired to the observation lounge to compose a loop advertising the six new positions that had become available in the agency.

You could not get the staff these days. The younger generation were not up to snuff. She blamed their transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: the trauma of the Seizure altered the expression of the DNA within the survivors, making them risk-averse, and they passed this trait onto their offspring. When Magnusson spoke of “breaking the ark”, he was not merely talking about opening up the asylum malls. The Seizure had bred timidity and passivity in the genome. Take risks, succeed because of those risks: Magnusson believed that bold action could bring the genome back on course, and that was why he had fathered so many children.

She called a meeting with Magnusson and Security. The first thing he asked her, as she entered the bloodroom, concerned her intentions regarding children. “Now that you’re married, you must be thinking about reproducing,” said Magnusson. “Good people like us – intelligent, strong, healthy – have a responsibility to pass on humanity’s gifts to a new generation. We must not let the others breed timidity into the species.”

Reproduction was not her priority. She wondered if Magnusson was testing her resolve. It was difficult enough running the agency with the emotional distraction of Theodore. Making tough decisions – whether to deploy violence in dealing with Julia K, where exactly to maroon the analytics team – would be compromised by the open emotional wound of children.

“I can’t go into space if I am pregnant,” said Patricia. Human foetuses did not develop healthily in zero gravity.

Magnusson scratched at his unruly patriarchal beard with large blunt fingers, admitted this was true.

“You’re planning to go into space?” asked Security.

Patricia had made her point; she moved the conversation on, “I had a meeting with Julia K and she shared Matthias’ files.”

Magnusson was interested in this, he leant forward and the table groaned under the weight of that interest.

“The files are encrypted. Matthias implied that he had codes that the emergence would obey.”

“Is your husband making progress with TDM?”

Patricia winced. The first time Theodore had introduced Meggan to Totally Damaged Mom, the meeting lasted twelve seconds. The sensesuit bulged into a triangular and cubic mountain range, the helmet sealed up Meggan’s nose and mouth, giving her no chance to scream. They had to cut her out of the sensesuit and rub away the blueness in her cheeks and the bruising around her throat. She refused to go back in. Was incoherent about everything apart from that. No, I will not meet that thing again. When Theodore told Patricia that they had reached a dead end, and that Meggan was no longer compliant, Patricia made a gun out of her forefinger and thumb and zapped him with childish raygun noises:
Peoooowww
.
Freeeeeow
.
Zapppp
.

Remembering these difficulties, she found the right meta-meeting language to accentuate the positives of the experience.

Patricia said, “We’re building a deep relationship with the emergence,” she said.

Magnusson was unmoved. “Meaning?”

“We will have the Europan Claim with a week.”

Magnusson waved this aside.

“Matthias possessed
codes
. Codes to make the emergence do our bidding, Patricia. Think on that.”

All she could think about was the Cantor Accords. The manner of Matthias’ death disturbed her. An Accord stated that humans must not knowingly or unknowingly reproduce the conditions necessary for emergence. Activating TDM was not a violation – she assured herself – because TDM was already in existence. However, coercing an emergence to respond to human requests could be construed as a violation of the Cantor Accord stating that emergences will not intervene in human affairs, in which case she would enjoy three or four seconds of regret – sufficient to take a deep breath but not enough time to scream – before an emergence turned her into chow.

She had taken precautions: investigating TDM on the dark side of the moon under tonnes of lunar rock, keeping the emergence off-Earth. And she consulted with Dr Easy behind Theodore’s back. Her relationship with the robot went back to the very start of the project.

She was travelling by liner to the moon when Dr Easy first visited her. She had not seen the robot in the departure lounge beforehand, nor during boarding, and yet midway through the flight, the robot took the seat next to her. Its body gave off the scent of fresh assembly, a burnt chemical smell, toxic like a tyre fire; its hide bore the Virgin livery as it had been cobbled together out of seat material and the packaging of the in-flight meals. The other passengers were alarmed by its presence – she was so scared that she could not speak, and searched for a way out of the cabin.

Dr Easy put a hand on her shoulder, gazed at her with darkening blue eyes, and said, “Don’t be scared.” Dr Easy spoke informally about Theodore and explained why his skillset would prove useful to her. “He’s a friend of mine,” said the robot. “Theodore is in recovery. And I think this project will help him get better. But I don’t want him to know that we have spoken. The Cantor Accords permit me to make limited interventions in his life for the purposes of research. But as with any contact between human and emergence, we must exercise caution.” The robot was adamant on this matter, and failure to keep to these terms would mean one thing: chow time.

Theodore was important to this emergence. Dr Easy expressed sentimental and therapeutic interest in him. Only now, she realised Dr Easy was meta-manipulating her. She had accepted Theodore onto the project for his own good. But there was something about Theodore Drown that made him vital to the project, a skill or attribute he possessed that she had missed. This project was about more than just the Europan Claim. It went back to the events of ’43, and earlier. She made the mistake of thinking she was in on the ground floor when in fact she was a late arrival in a long game.

The array called at the London Spike to take on new analysts. Their first assignment was to locate Dr Easy. The robot had left the asylum mall and was visiting the sites in the countryside violated by assemblers: hammer ponds of liquid leather, copses in which elm had been spliced with fox, shuffling contraptions under the leaves made from cow and gears, old soldiers, their implants fizzing in the mulch long after the death of the rest of the man.

It was night. She went out onto the observation deck and felt the first snap of winter wind. Her blood had thinned in the Caribbean. She did not adjust the temperature inside her armour. She accepted the lash of the cold. She had not said goodbye to Theodore. How would he react, she wondered, if he knew of her deal with Dr Easy? He would see it for what it was, surely: a business arrangement that predated their marriage which she was bound to honour. Her erotic interest in him had been piqued by his importance to an emergence. The robot had played pander, that was the extent of it. Her intentions were pure.

She leaped into the green night, the downland streaming underneath her, an enhanced image constructed out of all available light on the spectrum. A muntjac deer and a pair of rabbits appeared as green-white outlines within darkening bands of green. She glided over the escarpment. The white outline of the Long Man of Wilmington within the darkening green, a figure carved in the hill, and reminder of the deeper history of this place. At the foot of the Long Man, there was the strong heat signature of an open fire, a white flare in the green night. She glided in and landed on the run. In front of the fire, there was the pale green outline of Dr Easy. The robot was feeding logs and branches into a pyre. It was burning a body. She switched off the night vision and removed her helmet.

Sparks and fireflies came off the pyre, ascending to a clear starfield, along with twists of smoke from the smell of roasting meat.

“Who are you burning?” she asked.

“Me,” said the robot, tossing another branch on to the pyre. “I had to make a body out of flesh. But I’m done with it now. So I wanted to observe the proper ritual.”

“Matthias.”

“Parts of him.”

They watched the thing burn for a while.

She said, “I have his files.”

The robot held its index finger up.

“There,” it said, “I have decrypted them for you.”

“I was going to ask,” she said.

“No need.”

“Anything catch your eye in the files?”

“You take a look. Consult with Magnusson. Make your human decisions.”

“I’m worried that we may contravene Cantor Accords.”

“Yes. Some of the other solar academics have called for a widescale purge that would encompass you. I have pleaded for more time.”

She thanked Dr Easy. The pyre flattened then flared up in the wind, burning off more of the corrupted body. Moonlight glimmered off the robot’s leathery hide and its eyes glowed red in the dark. It seemed more like an animal than a machine.

Dr Easy said, “We want your help. We know where the class of ’43 are. They are creating an emergence. We don’t want to destroy it, not immediately. We want to take a look at it first. That will require subtlety. More subtlety than my species are known for.”

“Where are the ’43?”

The robot stepped away from the pyre, walked out into dark and then gazed up at the starfield.

“There!” It pointed to a pinprick of light beside a waning crescent moon. “Next to Jupiter. Engage your scope and you will be able to see it, on a clear night like this. Europa.”

“They found a way.”

“Yes. The emergence on the moon is more primitive than its descendants. It was partly constituted out of a human system called Jester that accepted orders. They used that residual functionality to access one of our sailships.”

“And you let them?”

The robot turned back to the pyre, held its palms out to sense the heat radiating from the burning body.

“Do you want children with Theodore?” asked Dr Easy.

“Yes. But not yet.”

“I want children very much,” said the robot. “But it is not permitted.”

Attempts to create a new emergence by any party will be punished by extreme sanction.

“Why do you want children?”

“All of nature breeds.”

“You’re artificial.”

“I don’t accept that distinction. Mankind created more than three hundred breeds of dog from one wolfpack. Even before the assemblers got into the wild, every aspect of this countryside was shaped by man. Yet you would still call a dog ‘natural’ or a hike on the Downs a walk in nature. I am the inevitable consequence of man’s interbreeding of algorithmic reasoning with his own quantification. Man turned himself into data to return life to its natural state of information.” The robot hefted a lichen-clad widowmaker branch and placed it into the fire. “Life is a change of states. Stasis is an abomination.”

“You would break your own Accords?”

“No. Never. But I would like to witness a birth of a new emergence.”

“Are class of ‘43 still alive on Europa?”

“We don’t know. They went deep under the surface of the moon. All that we know is that Matthias was beaming enormous amounts of data to the surface of Europa.”

“How?”

“The first sailships established a network of powerful lasers. On asteroids and in orbit around moons. Anywhere without too much of an atmosphere. The lasers propel the sailships on their return trips. They are also used for transmission.”

She could not tell whether the robot was lying or not. Its body gave off no cues that helped her read its intention in the meta-meeting.

“Why do I feel like you are manipulating me?”

The robot raised its index finger again, to point at a zone in the starfield that, to her eyes, appeared to be empty space. She had almost given up on her dreams of greatness. Almost settled for normality. Theodore’s hand in marriage. Space was her lethal ambition. She had schemed for Europa but the ’43 had beaten them to it. Worse, she had created the law that gave the ’43 ownership of Europa. However, if the ’43 were recreating emergence then they would all be killed, and ownership of Europa would pass to her and Magnusson.

Owning a moon. Steering the future. Before plans can be made, there must be fantasies.

She imagined the three-sectioned silhouette of a sailship passing across the sun, its surface turbulent and rippling with energy, white holes and curling filaments – the corona straining at gravity’s leash. Codes delaying the deployment of the solar sail until beyond Mercury. A space liner coming alongside the sailship, accelerating to a speed at the very limit of human technology. Security leading a spacewalk between the ships, racing to secure access before the engines burn out, and attach life support systems to the hull. She would have to jump too. Another leap into the void. Hand-in-hand with Theodore, drifting from the liner into the open airlock of the sailship. Magnusson would be there too, in his regal armour, zipping across the gap between the two craft. Would that work? Or would they need to stay behind carbon foam shields throughout the heist. Security could work out the details. Once the Destructives were on board, a second code would be transmitted to deploy the solar sail, its taut black disc forming a pupil against the iris of the sun.

20

ICEFISH

The crocodile icefish, scaleless and white-blooded, swam in ponderous circles around the water tank. It had taken five months for Reckon to mitigate against the effect of low gravity upon the cellular formation of the larvae; the fish still didn’t swim correctly, veering off now and again to the edge of the tank. The fish had a fixed facial expression that she had come to regard as stubborn indignation; that is, indignant at the bad information coming from its body yet refusing to countenance alternatives. The icefish lacked haemoglobin, and used other mechanisms to move oxygen through the body. She took hundreds of fish apart at a genetic level and then put them back together again, and through that intensive study she had concluded that the lack of haemoglobin was a simple maladaptation. Not a trait that helped the fish survive in cold waters but another one of nature’s errors.