The Red Men (12 page)

A: At first it was no big deal, just like seeing yourself on a screen. But when it spoke, I was appalled.

A: I can’t tell you. It’s too private, too intimate. It deliberately picked out something that it knew I had never spoken of, not in my sessions, not in my diaries, not
in my life stream. Something that it had correctly inferred about me. The red men knew my secrets.

A: It asked to be called by a different name, a variation upon my own. The next day I went into work and it was like having my own Djinni. Money, women, power. Then I wanted to take
some time off. Enjoy my earnings. It didn’t want that for us.

A: At first. But it would always grind me down. Go on and on and on. I wanted to go on holiday for a month with my family but it had lost all feeling for them. It said to me,
‘I know that you don’t love them, you are merely habituated to them. I know what it feels like to be free of that responsibility.’

A: The red man was just one of my inner voices, a condensed aspect of my personality. Without the rest of me there to hold it in check, it quickly evolved to become quite unlike
me.

Reading this interview, Raymond was convinced that he had found his man. He made inquiries at the café on Grove Road where he had bought the A11 pamphlet and was told
that it was delivered every Thursday by a courier.

The following week he was there waiting. After the courier made his call, he followed him on his rounds. It was only as he slipped out of the café that he realized he had no idea how to
track a cyclist. He got on a bus, kept an eye on his quarry for a few hundred yards then lost him when he detoured down an alleyway. Raymond shoved his way through the passengers and ran after him.
The route was along the River Lea, a punishing cross-country run for the wan constitution of a poet. His brogues ruined, his shirt transparent with sweat, Raymond tripped and scuffed his knee. He
squeezed the skin, bringing on the pain, and instinctively blew on it to cool the sensation. He looked up expecting to see his quarry pedalling off into the distance. The courier stopped and stood
astride his cycle, tall and rangy, fit but weather-beaten. Beneath his hood, a ladder of cheek piercings glinted. He wanted Raymond to follow him.

The courier made further deliveries in Walthamstow and Leyton, and then his route took him to a barricaded house in a wrecked cul-de-sac. Raymond was a hundred yards behind. As he saw the
courier unlock the iron security door and move inside, he tried to shout at him to wait, but he didn’t have the breath and found himself alone on the street. He took in the surroundings of
the house, the butcher’s shop, the white van converted into a mobile bedroom, and then he slumped down on the kerb and rolled himself a fag. Freight trains of blood rushed from ear-to-ear. He
lit the cigarette and closed his eyes to enjoy it. Then someone put a knife to his throat.

He was dragged inside the house. Sections of the hallway floor had collapsed so he shuffled along the skirting board with bullying hands at his back. He leant on the wall for support. It was
soaking. His hands sank into it. Shoved upstairs, then manhandled over broken steps, then pushed into a cold dark chamber. He tried to get his bearings. An entire storey of the house had been
knocked through. The bedrooms and bathrooms had been replaced by a honeycomb of rusted iron and each hexagonal cell contained a tribute: a dead mouse decorated with beads and crystals; a pyramid of
stolen smartphones; vials of viscous liquid; the corpse of a small manta ray glued to a plate of glass. On the walls, an anonymous artist had drawn a war in biro. Raymond peered closely at a
section showing a giant stick figure stomping its way across a crude depiction of Mare Street.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ said Raymond to the courier, who sat half-naked and cross-legged upon a giant double bed.

‘Alright. Out with it.’

‘I’m looking for someone.’

‘That’s obvious.’

The wet dog stink was familiar from dozens of squats, the kind of smell you could only wash into your clothes and never out of them. Likewise, the renovation was wild but par for the course for
a hippie with a sledgehammer and drug-induced psychosis. The illustrations on the wall itched and crawled like rogue inner voices; they spoke to the connector, that deranged carpenter, responsible
for Raymond’s own wrong-headed creations. Particularly the drawing of the fat stick figure wielding a black cloud to defeat a horned cyclops. Double take. Wielding a black cloud to defeat the
Monad brand.

Raymond said, ‘I want to speak to a man who was interviewed in your magazine. He was tormented by a red man. I think I have the same problem.’

The courier fiddled with his cavities and gum infections while casting an eye over Raymond’s clothes, his second-hand tweed and dead man’s brogues.

‘I don’t believe you. You are not rich enough to be a customer of Monad.’

‘I’m not a subscriber. I work for them.’

‘As what? Poverty consultant?’

The courier picked up his knife, shuffled over, then pressed the blade against Raymond’s throat, testing the elasticity of his skin with the urgency of its point.

‘Strangers always come by looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found. Sometimes its easier just to kill them and spare us all that espionage.’

‘I could tell you things about Monad.’

‘What makes you think I’m interested?’

‘The drawings. Your pamphlet. And the others, the A115, the A104.’

The courier grinned and revealed his wrecked maw. His pupils were grey with flecks of yellow in them. The blade became more insistent, moving down to test the trapezius, then back again.

‘I don’t respond to reason.’

Raymond risked a slow nod toward the drawings upon the wall. ‘Who is the giant who fights Monad?’

‘My employer. Leto. The Lord of the Flies.’

Yes, now he saw it, the black cloud was an angry swarm of flies. Like two monsters in a Godzilla movie, the Monad logo and Leto were locked in lumbering combat. Here Monad smashes a number 38
bus across the head of Leto, who retaliates with two BMWs clapped either side of Monad’s head. Aside from this hand-to-hand clobbering, there were conflicts in higher dimensions, drawn
further up the wall. A squadron of flies, each carrying a Hackney citizen as payload. Here a fly was clinging to a large woman carrying two bags of shopping; from her nostrils came two angry blasts
of steam. Another fly veered upwards having just released a bearded man upon the Wave building below.

‘Who is Leto?’ asked Raymond. These questions were not just a way of distracting the courier from slashing his throat. He was genuinely interested, recognizing the truth of the
vision. ‘Is he the devil?’

‘You work for the devil, not me.’

Withdrawing the blade, the courier scrutinized Raymond from a number of angles.

‘Do you really like my house?’

It was a dream house. Dangerous and precarious but nonetheless compelling, its architecture familiar to Raymond’s dream self.

‘How far down do the tunnels go?’

‘The tunnels are part of our investigation.’ The courier smiled. ‘We also store things there.’

‘What things?’

The courier shook his head and said, ‘You promised to tell me about Monad. How can it be destroyed?’

‘I don’t know. No one knows where the server farm is.’

‘Leto says they are in the future.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Is Monad a test-run for an exclusive heaven?’

‘If it was, it would be a very boring heaven.’

‘You don’t talk like a Monad man.’

‘I work in customer service. I’m a poet. They said they were looking for people who could philosophically navigate the concept of Monad.’

The courier considered his blade. ‘That seems unlikely.’

‘I spent most of my time being insulted by the red men.’

‘They are evil.’

‘Yes. One red man in particular pretends to be my dead father and no one will do anything to stop him. I think your pamphlet interviewed the man on whom this red man is based. He suffered
the way I am suffering. I don’t know if he told you his name, if anyone around here ever uses their real names, but if you could get a message to him, then I might be able to help
him.’

The courier shook his head. ‘You can’t help him. You can’t fight Monad.’

Three quick bounds and he was stinking in Raymond’s face again, pushing him toward the biro comic strip scrawled on the plaster.

‘Look. Leto fights Monad. Two ideas at war. Not me, not you. None of us can achieve anything on our own.’

The courier shoved Raymond to the ground, then retreated, his expression showing revulsion toward his own sudden violence. His temper was a dictator, his reason its puppet parliament.

Only now did the terrible implications of being beyond the reach of the authorities come to Raymond. The dark areas were a good place to hide if you had a killing voice within you. The courier
sensed his fear and made the decision to step back. Wary of his own impulses, he told Raymond to leave. The small man stood up, correcting the line of his jacket and the bloodied ragged knee of his
trouser. Raymond knew that he could not leave without some hope that Blasebalk would meet with him. Scared as he was, he insisted the courier pass on his message.

‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ he said, stepping through the wrecked hallway.

Travelling back on the train from Stratford, his bones were cold and his muscles ached. Immigration ran a spot check on all the disembarking passengers, and he was manhandled by
the ticket inspectors and thrust forward into a huddle of face-plated police. They took a look in his rucksack and called in his details. He blipped back onto the radar of Harry Bravado.

The police shoved him on. The red man had cooked up something for him by the time he was on Mare Street, first triggering the security alarm of a sportswear shop, then hijacking the huge sound
system of a blacked-out bimmer. As it cruised by, he heard the rapper boom out, ‘IseeyaIseeyaIseeyaIseeya.’

His forays into the dark zones out east occurred during a month of compassionate leave from Monad. Once his twenty-eight days of leave were up, the company would move on to its next obligation
to safeguard Raymond’s mental health, suspending him on half pay and issuing him with a Dr Easy. Officially Monad knew nothing of his quest for Bravado’s subscriber. Unofficially I had
warned Eakins about it. Florence had tipped me off, after coming home and finding their bedroom redecorated with Post-it notes, torn sections from the
A–Z
, and peculiar drawings of
giants fighting on the streets of Hackney.

I was contractually obliged to give full disclosure of my friend’s activities so I met Eakins in his mezzanine office in the Wave and told him what I knew. Harry Bravado was imitating
Raymond’s dead father, and Raymond wanted to retaliate. If he couldn’t reach into the Monad to do so, then he would find his counterpart in the real world, Harold Blasebalk, and punish
him instead.

Through the glass, the customer service team argued with subscribers. It was clear that Raymond was not the only one in the intake to be suffering. Out on the floor all the men looked
dishevelled even for poets. A few pints of life had been siphoned out of them. Likewise, the women were washed-out and dead on their feet.

‘It turns out that Blasebalk is missing,’ said Morton, pouring himself a fresh glass of milk. ‘Harry Bravado told us. We’re concerned that Bravado’s recent aberrant
behaviour has been caused by his subscriber’s breakdown. The red man is angry and upset at Blasebalk’s behaviour.’

Morton was tetchy. The company was having a difficult day. His screen showed the full extent of the problem: an unidentified rogue program was consuming all the processing power, leaving the
simulated environment jerky and unfinished. The red men were reduced to their lizard brains and had taken to crawling around attacking one another. Unfortunately the entire IT department was on a
motivational course in the Caribbean.

‘The Cantor intelligence is also affected by the crash. It blames the weather,’ said Morton, pointing at the glass wall of his office, which was spattered with rain.

I sketched out worst-case scenarios if the AI went down. Morton interrupted my anxious hypotheses.

‘Being teased by a red man is within the terms of Raymond’s contract. He is employed to take this shit. I’ve spoken to Blasebalk’s wife and she said her husband felt the
red man was responsible for ruining his life. Management is not particularly exercised by this issue. There is little legal recourse for anyone here. We know that Harold Blasebalk has a history of
substance abuse and abandonment. A half of lager could push him over the edge. And I don’t need to fill you in on Raymond Chase’s charge sheet when it comes to mental
dysfunction.’

‘We have a responsibility,’ I said.

‘We have procedures in place to discharge that responsibility. All the red men are monitored by the Cantor intelligence. It likes to let things run their course, and we have to trust
it.’

‘What if Cantor crashes?’

‘If Cantor crashes, the red men crash with it. You have to understand their interdependence. Cantor is an artificially intelligent artist and the red men are figments of its imagination.
If Cantor decides to explore the narrative possibilities of one of those characters, then that is its artistic right. No one has access to any code. I doubt we could understand it even if we did.
All our IT department can offer is a kind of literary criticism.’

Morton took out his little ethnic bag of neuroceuticals and jangled them at me.

‘I hope to understand more once I have finished taking all of these.’

His reassurances were quite disturbing. I asked permission to pursue the matter further.

‘On a personal level, I am worried about Raymond. I am responsible for him working here. Could I pull Florence out for a while? I’d like to speak to her.’

Morton popped another couple of mood softeners and shrugged. It was his way of giving permission; a sub-vocal gesture so subtle that if the consequences of the permission turned out badly, he
could deny that it had been given.