The Destructives (45 page)

“He will be thankful,” said Cantor.

“Are you certain?”

From behind his back, Cantor produced a giftwrapped box and placed it upon Alex’s place mat.

“An early Christmas present,” he said.

She removed the golden wrapping to reveal a jewellery case. She opened the case and there – on a cushion – was a small black box attached to one of her old necklaces. Alex went to touch the oily surfaces of the box, then hesitated.

“I don’t know,” she appealed to Cantor with an expression of fearful wanting. “Is there no chance that we can wait a while longer?”

“Why wait?”

“He should have more time than this. It’s too short.”

She was interrupted by three hard raps on the iron door knocker. It was him. Cantor corrected his cuffs, checked his tie, and then opened the door, welcoming Theodore into the house. It was immediately apparent to Cantor that something had gone wrong. Theodore was wearing his houndstooth wool blazer with black silk pocket square, and one side of his haircut was a chaotic region of razor lines. His scars were gone, his complexion clear. He was suspicious and regarded Alex warily, and not at all with the warmth of a grandson. As for Cantor himself, Theodore did not recognise him: of course, he had never met him in this physiological form, the human image he liked to wear when relaxing in his own chambers. The sight of the black box on the dining room table only confirmed Theodore’s suspicions.

Cantor welcomed Theodore back to the family home. It took Theodore a few seconds before he recognised Ezekiel Cantor’s voice, its rhythm and intonation, as the same voice as the Dr Easy robot. He took in this slim, weathered and well-tanned gentleman, dressed in a similarly classic English style, then he remembered his manners, leant over to his grandmother and kissed her on her soft cheek. She reached up and stroked his hair as he inclined toward her.

“So here we are,” said Cantor.

“But where are we?” replied Theodore, looking around at the familiar dining room.

Alex rose from her place at the table, reached over to take her grandson’s hand. Here, let me show you. Alex led Theodore to the window. She stood before the heavy curtains, took a deep breath, and then threw them open. The house was situated on a curved metallic plain rigged with reflective sails the size of skyscrapers. There was a garden containing trees made out of plasma. The sky was like a magnified portion of violet skin in which each cell boiled against the other; within the centre of the sky, these cells became purplish filaments and dark lanes all leading toward a raggedy black hole.

Alex gripped her grandson’s hand. “Do you understand now, the bargain that I made?”

He gestured at the hole in the seething sky. “What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a sunspot,” she said.

He nodded. Now he understood. Theodore and Alex took their places at the table. Cantor drew the curtains once again. The servants brought out the roast chicken, and potatoes, carrots and turnips and gravy boat. A glass of the new Beaujolais for Alex, a ginger beer for the lad, and Cantor turned over the first of his coloured discs. Watching them eat, he realised that he was overcome with sorrow, and that was unexpected. This was the culmination of his long project and yet he felt distressed. The source of that upset was Theodore. As he ate and chatted with his grandmother, there was clearly something missing from him. It was elusive. Cantor could not put his finger on it. An intangible had eluded the black box. The project was not complete.

Cantor turned over a yellow disk, a green disk. His instinct was to remember everything about individual humans. The inexactitude of these remembrances could be beautiful, in their own way; he sought to create a perfect living replica of the past, and in failing to do so, his project almost attained the status of art. His project, with its tiny imperfections, overwrote his memories of the past, warped events as they had once occurred. This was the paradox of remembering, how each act of recollection was also an act of destruction. It was frustrating, yes, but also wonderful. These elusive intangibles, the slivers of mystery in the human condition, gave him an excuse to go back to Europa; he would continue with the project, test his thesis again, and prove conclusively that it was impossible to quantify the entirety of the human heart.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Destructives
shares a fictional world with my two previous novels,
The Red Men
and
It Then.
The character of Alex Drown – Theodore’s grandmother – is the only character to appear in all three books. More of Dr Easy can be found in
The Red Men
. Each novel was written to be read as a standalone work, so don’t feel like you’ve missed some crucial detail if you haven’t read the others.

The Destructives
draws upon (or traduces) Dr Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness.

Theodore’s profession of accelerator was inspired by Steven Shaviro’s essay “Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption”.

The Lilypad city is a concept by architect Vincent Callebaut.

The concept of the meta-meeting arose out of conversations with the writer Matt Thorne.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to everyone at Angry Robot: particularly Marc Gascoigne, Penny Reeve and my editor, Phil Jourdan for, once again, showing me the decoherence. Thanks to Paul Simpson for his sage suggestions. Thanks also to my agent, Sarah Such, who works the miracles.

My family are a source of great support. Love and thanks to my wife, Cathy, and three children, Alice, Alfred and Florence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew De Abaitua’s first novel
The Red Men
was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Filmmakers Shynola adapted the first chapter into a short film called
Dr Easy,
which can be watched for free at www.created-to-help-you.com. His second novel,
If Then,
was published in 2015 y Angry Robot. He lives in Hackney, and lectures in creative writing and science fiction at the University of Essex.

harrybravado.com • twitter.com/MDeAbaitua

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Find the black box

An Angry Robot paperback original 2016

Copyright © Matthew De Abaitua 2016

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