The Destructives (7 page)

Once he was ready, the engineers helped him into the sensesuit. They opened the back up and connected tubes and antennae for air and data intake, slid on the boots, clipped on the helmet and fired him up. He stumbled to his feet. To the engineers, he must look like a mummified puppet on cut strings, stumbling around their replica of the house. He gazed down at his own body. From inside the simulation, the suit appeared white and clean, as it had been back in the days before the Seizure. Everything he sensed in this environment had been quantified; therefore this suit must have belonged to the family. They would have used it to wander around simulated environments themselves, perhaps used it for enhanced telepresence or for sexual recreation. He turned around: the tubes and spiny wires attached to the back of the suit were invisible; they had not been quantified and so were not part of the sensory simulation. He felt their weight at his back but could not see or touch them.

He moved closer to the mother and child at the doorway. Their faces remained blurred and unrecognisable. Thanks to the suit’s olfactory interface, he could smell beeswax floor polish. He leant over, took a sheaf of the mother’s hair in his glove, and smelt it too: freshly washed, chemical products with a tang to simulate something organic. He didn’t know what. The artificial flavourings and odours of the era were lost associations and evocations: to this woman, her hair may have smelt of aloe vera or strawberries or the pine-strewn floor of the forest, but these associations had been constructed by contemporary advertising; without exposure to that cultural engineering, the chemicals evoked only a memory of his grandmother’s hand cream, which had also been impregnated with an essence that remained enigmatic yet magical.

He knelt before the mother and with both hands felt her thighs and calves, her backside and belly, her breasts and face; no physical implants, and muscle tone consistent with contemporary habits of exercise, further confirmation of the family’s middle class status. The daughter’s hips were prepubescent and she had breast buds. She wore her long blonde hair in a plait. He weighed the end of the plait in his glove, and then he saw, on the back of her blazer, a different coloured hair. A strand of ginger hair, not human. Cat hair. The front of the mother and daughter were concealed by the privacy protocol. If he could find out who they were, then the engineers would be able to infer their way into the next tranche of the simulation. It would unlock more data. And he dearly wanted to sense more of their lives.

From the lips of the mother, he felt a single exhalation on his cheek. The quant sensors had caught her in the act of expelling a breath. Toothpaste and coffee – a unit of soul. The polish on her fingernails was chipped, and her hair was not recently styled. A martyr to motherhood.

Theodore padded outside. He heard the seagulls call again and again, in a loop, and saw them glide forward and disappear, forward and disappear overhead. The lawn shimmered with dew, a dampness between his toes. Around the back of the house, the grass was longer, and in the shadows the yard was unkempt. Someone’s responsibility, someone’s chore, remaining undone. It was colder here under the branches of half an oak tree. Half the leaves tremored in the breeze, but the other half of the tree had not been quantified because it lay on a neighbouring property; that unquantified half was represented by a static polygon rendering of a photograph. He tested the tree trunk, was pleased to discover that it had been included as part of the stage set, and so he was able to climb up and look out over the fence. The rest of the neighbourhood was similarly blunt in its rendering, unquantified, and so filled in with data from a drone flyby. The branch he used to lever himself up into the tree was rendered vibrantly, smelling greenly and creaking under his weight. He noticed scoring marks on the bark, similar to those he had seen on the projection of the blanket box in the house. Territorial markings. The cat.

So where was the cat?

He climbed down off the tree and waded through the long grass. His grandmother’s cats had liked to sleep at the edge of their territory in sunlit patches. He crouched down so that he could peer inside the overgrowth. He found a ginger cat asleep in the dappled light. A vivid and detailed rendering of a cat, its ears rotating and twitching at every noise in its surroundings even as its head was turned delicately toward its back legs. And yet, and yet… the cat yawned, eyes closed, and the twitching of its ears resumed. But they did not loop. Not right away. The cat’s data stream was ongoing, and it was a rich seam of data. For a quantified family, being able to slip on a sensesuit and experience what their cat had been up to that day was a selling point of the technology. The mother and daughter were hidden from him. But the cat – white whiskers, tiger-striping, green iris and sharp oval pupils – the cat was open source.

The distant purring glide of electric cars, the salt tang carried in from the harbour.

He took off the helmet. He stood in the dark cavern surrounding the grounds of the house. The projection of the long grass came up to his knees, and the cat glowed contentedly at his feet. He saw a projection of himself in the broken window of the shed. The suit was included but where his face would have been, the gap in the data showed up as the projection of a featureless blue chromakey head. In this other world, he was a ghost from the future. A blue man.

“The cat is the back door into the family hearth,” he explained to Patricia and Professor Kakkar. “It is not confined to the one second loop of the mother and daughter. The stream runs for seven minutes. Seven minutes in which the cat sleeps and responds at an ambient level to the environment. And then the loop is cut off. I believe the loop is cut because one of the other family members interacts with the cat, and so at that point, the cat’s data falls under the hearth’s security lockdown.”

Patricia leant back in her chair, considering. “Family interactions with the cat are private?”

“Yes. Of course. The only reason why the cat is not locked down across its entire data set is because it was part of the social aspect of quantification. People shared their cat journeys with one another. Cat time was a major incentive for people to submit to quantification. Children wore sense suits to share in their cat’s
umwelt
.”

The term was unfamiliar to Patricia but not to Professor Kakkar. He smoothed his hand over the braille of his stubbly brown pate.

“The
umwelt
is the name for the subset of reality an organism is able to sense,” Kakkar explained. “Different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals.”

Theodore said, “There is so much more information within this data set than I can sense or your system can project. Including seven minutes of sensorium which make the cat’s ears twitch while it is sleeping.”

“So what are you saying?” asked Patricia.

Theodore shook his head.

“I don’t know. Not yet. Except, the data is richer than your projections allow. And that you’re not entirely locked out. There’s a backdoor for you.”

Professor Kakkar disagreed.

“Backdoors and encryption belong to the age of hacking. No one has successfully hacked a system since the Cantor Accords.”

“This encryption is old,” said Patricia. “From before the Seizure.”

“Yes. Your engineers need to go back and study how to exploit this back door into the hearth. This cat flap. Dr Easy could do it.”

He had avoided mentioning Dr Easy until then, just so he could catch them unawares. Sure enough, Patricia’s face went into lockdown, her lips parted around silence. Professor Kakkar looked down at his large white trainers, mentally sorting through his procedural cant to find the correct response.

“We can’t allow Dr Easy here,” said Patricia.

The professor seemed relieved that she had taken this approach. He took up her point.

“We hold many data caches in the cave. For security reasons we have to control access to each and every one with discrete wired connections. We cannot have a wireless intelligence walking around. The risk of infection is too great.”

“Then we take the data to the robot.”

“The data doesn’t surface and it certainly doesn’t leave Farside,” said Kakkar.

Theodore didn’t want to push his luck. If he made them too uncomfortable then he would be taken off the project, and he was keen to remain involved. He had kept himself apart from the world for too long. Kept talents and powers dormant. Patricia watched him withdraw his objections, and she seemed relieved. Not because she had felt threatened – he wasn’t foolish enough to believe that he wielded any power – but because by choosing to not question them further, he made it possible for her to retain his services. She stood up and prepared to leave. At the door, she turned around.

“About the cat,” she said. “Good work.”

The story of how life became data is also the story of how data became alive.

The quantified self movement had used scent receptors, embedded cameras and microphones, galvanic skin sensors, micro-GPS, temperature and pressure gauges, spectrometers across the wavelength of light from gamma rays and x-rays to the far infrared to infer an approximate translation of the ceaseless immeasurable experience contained within a single bubble of reality. A river became a seething geometric undulation of data. Every beat of the heart was tagged with a probability that it would be the last beat of that heart. Algorithms inferred likely outcomes from patterns within the stream, and initiated the appropriate stimulation to the subject. To the user. (Although this term “user” was misleading as it suggested agency on behalf of the subject.) The user was encouraged to adjust their behaviour to lift their metrics out of the orange banded zones of risk, the blue bands of unhappiness, and into the pale cream zones of safety and the whiteness of happiness.

Theodore sat on the lawn, and felt the dampness of the dew between his fingertips and the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck. Under the shade of a bush, the furred coil of the sleeping cat, its cheek resting upon its tail, with one ear and one set of white whiskers twitching in response to something in the environment. A burr of a fly perhaps. A scent of a coyote or another cat. Something outside of Theodore’s
umwelt
. The gulls cried every four seconds. A longer loop than the mother and daughter. Theodore breathed deeply in and out, meditating in his sensesuit. The house was in a cave, and the cave was under the moon, and above and below the moon there was space, the illimitable vastness without and within. Inconceivable, from his perspective. From his
umwelt
, his measly portion of the
umgebung
, the larger reality. The cat stilled its twitching whiskers, and licked a drop of fresh dew from a blade of grass. There. A tiny micro-event from long ago, hitherto unknown to man, known to him now. The lawn was vivid in the morning sun. He had been on the moon for so long he had forgotten the pleasure of sitting upon grass in early summer. The simulated earth swelled and pulsed in sensuous appreciation of itself. He felt an uncertainty within, similar to the feeling he had suffered prior to the moonquake. A tremor of fear, a fear that the exterior world was as malleable and subject to violent change as the world within.

“Start cat time,” he whispered. Kakkar unlocked the cat’s sensorium and patched him in. He stroked the grass with one careful hand and he felt, in the seat of the sensesuit, the subtle vibration of the earth purring. This world was alive. He unhooked the helmet but kept the suit gloves connected. The sunlight was gone, but its heat remained on the back of his hands. The sun. That was what the professor and Patricia where hiding from in the moon cave. The all-seeing eye of the University of the Sun.

He put the helmet back on.

The cat arched its back, stretched out its claws, and raised up its white-tipped tail. It walked nonchalantly through the damp shadows and then, after a whisker-twitch of consideration, climbed up a tree. He followed it, hand over hand up the branches. Cats are territorial animals, given to solitary repetitive patrols. High up to listen out for rivals and prey. He concentrated and tried to isolate the feline sensorium coming in through the suit. Kakkar had altered the mix of sensory impressions, magnified and intensified the resolution of the data, but it was just noise. Theodore could not process it as a cat would. His grandmother could have done it. Alex Drown could have used her implant to suppress her higher functions and shift – for five minutes – into the preconscious state of our deep ancestors, so that she scowled and prowled with the uninhibited grace of an animal. It was her party trick.

The cat leapt up onto a windowsill. It pawed at the closed window. He reached over and stroked its back. The cat responded to him. It turned its head and briefly closed its eyes at him: a gesture of trust, of mutual knowing. Through the window, he glimpsed the mother inclined over the daughter. The glass was smeared from the cat’s muddy paws. He rubbed at the dirt, and the glass cleared. The blurred oval of the woman’s face had changed: the features were isolated into individual artefacts and then rearranged like a glitchy Picasso painting.

He rubbed his fingertips together, noticing the dirt that came off the windows. The archive was responsive. It was interactive. The cat blinked slowly.

His comms perked up.

“Theodore?” It was Patricia. “Sorry to interrupt but you have a visitor. Your robot is outside and it is demanding to speak to you.”

He removed the helmet, and the house and the cat became fizzing projections of light.

6

THE META-MEETING

Dr Easy was waiting for him in the reception of the School of Emergences. It looked up as he entered; below the patient luminosity of its starlit eyes and high cheekbones hung the sallow concavity of its jaw, faun leather skin cracked like a battered satchel. It had replaced its missing hand. With two taps of its soft mitt against a plastic seat, Dr Easy gestured for him to sit.

“A chat,” said Dr Easy.