The Red Men (17 page)

Hermes Spence took the podium. ‘I am not going to say any hellos.’ He gazed into the middle distance, resisting the imploring faces sat obediently before him, their expressions
yearning to see some mirroring in his own. When I first met him all those years earlier in the Liberal Club, he was two generations ahead of me. I had since gained on him. By hiding away during the
downturn, Spence had spared his body years of punishing wear and tear. He was tight around the jaw. He was not merely gym-fit; he was lit up from within by faith and temperance. Before committing
himself to each sentence, Hermes tilted his head through various aspects as if taking advice from an inner council. The effect of this gesture was to convince you, even before he spoke, that his
words had been challenged, revised and finally approved by a special committee: a host of angels with MBAs.

‘I want you to name something for me.’ He went to speak again, stopped. He was not coming to us with news of a recent triumph. He was coming to us with a brief. No one was going to
be welcomed back into the circle until they proved that they shared his vision.

‘What if it were possible to copy the contents of our minds onto a computer? Copy, not transfer. I would still be walking and talking in the real world, in front of all you. This uploaded
self would be a hypothesis based on readings of the neural activity of the brain combined with observations of my behaviour. Just enough to capture the pattern of my identity and not necessarily
every single detail of me. This hypothesis is then plugged into existing routines for simulating chemical, cellular and hormonal influences on brain activity. Once created, it is animated and
placed in a community of other hypothetical beings, similar to the island community you can see here.

‘I don’t want you to dwell on the feasibility of this. My question is: what do we call these other selves? Whatever term you come up with must be a forward-facing mainstream consumer
proposition. Imagine this technology percolating into society much as the mobile phone did. Beginning with a rich executive elite and over time drilling all the way through the demographic bands.
We’ll discuss your conclusions at sundown.’

Hermes strode away and up the Street of the Dead. Bougas shifted in his seat to follow him, a needle seeking its magnetic north. To have been lumped in with the rest of the court, its former
mistresses, its functionaries, and the chisellers of margin, was an affront to Bruno Bougas. Relegated from consigliore to mere contributor. Who needs an ideas man once you’ve stolen all his
ideas? His fury was implied by his silence. He withdrew and took himself off into the island to deliberate alone.

Let me explain about my role in the court of Hermes Spence. I was rarely consulted by the prince himself; rather I was a resource exploited by those further up the hierarchy than myself. The
Stokers called on me, Eakins pestered me, Alex Drown engaged me now and again to devise this or that. This was how I made my money while
Drug Porn
limped on from one financial crisis to the
next. A few days a month, in secret from my paranoid
Drug Porn
colleagues, I created products and adverts for the enemy. Sold them ideas and dreams. To be a corporate artist, one must train
the imagination to contort itself to pass beneath a bar, which is set lower and lower as the job progresses. Talent, innately given to wild and queer creations, is forced to cramp itself and
scuttle backwards, painfully contorted. Working with this court was like performing a limbo dance in every sense of the word. I danced under a low bar on the border of hell. In
Drug Porn
, I
ran an article by a science fiction writer who argued that complicity was the theme of the age. ‘The modern condition determines that there is nothing you despise that you do not contribute
to,’ he wrote. Instead of taking his argument as a spur to the Great Refusal, the denial of every incursion of consumerism, I convinced myself that my work with the Spence Consultancy made me
representative of this compromised age and therefore gifted any insights with a certain relevancy.

If I could do it all again I would edit that science fiction writer’s article. Complicity was the tragedy of the age. I thought I was only loaning out a talent but it returned to me
warped, fit for the limbo dance but only the limbo dance.

On the abbey lawns, the court made hesitant alliances as they prepared to work on Hermes’ question. The young Jonathan Stoker appeared at my arm. ‘Do you want to work together on
this one?’

He nodded over to his adoptive father. ‘Dad has been visiting Hermes out in Nevis. We can give you a few pointers.’

‘Like, what is this for? Why drag us all out to a remote island to set a thought experiment?’

Jonathan Stoker Jnr shrugged. He watched me want to reject him. He watched my face struggle as I thought of all the things I would rather do than sit down and have to solve this riddle. He
waited for my greed, my need, to assert itself.

The Stokers took me to a back room of the Argyll hotel and went to work on me with a shoebox of cash. I free-associated, putting on a show for my fee.

‘If you were going to upload yourself then you would presumably be able to customize this new version to be an ideal representation of yourself.’

‘The uploaded you would be like a celebrity of yourself, a distillation or perfection. But what does it actually do? Can it have sex? Could you pay to watch a perfect version of yourself
have sex?’

‘You’re thinking porno. We need mainstream,’ said Stoker Snr.

‘If it’s a celebrity version of yourself living an idealised life then it is your own personal hype. Also a hypothesis based on your consciousness. We could call them
hypes.’

‘Write that down,’ said Stoker Snr. He sanctioned the first payment. His son handed me a hundred and fifty quid. I pocketed it.

‘OK. Let’s move beyond the obvious. Not everyone wants celebrity. This could be an expensive product. You don’t want to fold adolescent values into it. Think global executive
culture. A personal digital assistant. A company with one employee infinitely duplicated. A corporation of You. Why can’t it take your name? Why can’t it be “digital Stoker”
– no, “digital” is not right. It’s like your son. Senior and Junior. In Japan, the surname takes a title depending on who you are addressing. To a superior from whom I am
receiving instruction it would Stoker-sensei. If you were a child or very close to me, you would be Stoker-chan. More neutrally, Stoker-san. We should add these titles to the names of our
simulations. Yes, sims. Stoker-sim. Spence-sim. It says who they are and what they are.’

‘Write that down,’ said Stoker Snr. His son went to hand me another hundred and fifty quid, but I held out for three hundred, arguing that I had cracked it.

‘One more,’ said Stoker Snr. ‘Friendlier. Less formal.’

‘A Whole New You. That’s the promise isn’t it? Especially for women, the shame toward the self, desiring complete self-immolation and reconstruction. It’s a new you. An
iteration. Like in software, it’s You 4.1, 4.2, whatever. If you have a number in the name it makes it sound nice and sci-fi, it signals that you are talking about the future and science and
maths. It’s a second version of me. It’s Me2. Me Too. Yeah. There you go. Makes a nice logo and an intimate brand. You could really market Me2.’

‘I am not sure about the numeral,’ said Jonathan Stoker Snr.

His father chipped in, ‘It needs more urgency. More excitement.’

‘OK. But let’s keep that thought about self-immolation and reconstruction. It’s like fire. Fire changes through destruction. Now you can’t call them firemen. How about we
just take the colour of fire. Not orange. They can’t be Orangemen, that’s taken. Red. Red men. Red is the colour of danger but also the colour of power. Everyone wants more power,
don’t they? Redboys and redgirls. Like a younger self. What sells better than youth? You would pay to have your younger fitter self hanging around, wouldn’t you? Maybe not. We should
stick with red men, regardless of whether they are based on a man or a woman. Just forget gender. We are talking about a new species.’

I walked out a grand richer. As they paid me, I noticed there was plenty more left in the shoebox. Stoker Snr patted me firmly on the back. ‘Good work, big man.’

Jonathan was more solicitous and reassuring. ‘We’ll make sure Hermes knows it came from you originally,’ he smiled. They would as well; it was more important to be seen as
being capable of extracting useful work from creative people than being seen as creative themselves. ‘And if this concept flies, of course we’ll retain you to develop it
further.’

The Stokers departed to work up the ideas; by dusk, the concepts of ‘Me2, ‘-sim’ and ‘red men’ would be rendered in 24-point text on horizontal PowerPoint slides. I
took the first of their tenners to the bar. Retiring to the conservatory with a bottle of Skye bitter, I found Bruno Bougas hunched over a table, a large sheet of paper before him upon which he had
doodled dozens of Dr John Dee’s monads. Etiquette suggested that we should not speak while we were still meant to be devising our responses to the brief. But I was smug with fresh invention.
He looked like he was working on an entirely different problem altogether.

‘Did you come up with anything?’ I asked. He leant back to show me the battalion of bull-headed stick men he had scrawled.

‘Did you?’ he asked.

‘I gave the Stokers one or two ideas.’

‘You know what the answer is, don’t you?’

Could there really have been one correct answer?

‘The soul, Nelson. That’s what you call the copy. If such a technology existed, it would be so advanced that the only way you could explain it to people would be to use magical or
religious paradigms.’

I disagreed. You could not sell a product called ‘soul’.

‘You are confusing marketing with satire. Also, religion is not a useful frame of reference for the mainstream. The soul is just hyperbole. You have to think in terms of celebrity and
self-improvement.’

‘No. Advanced technology will be sold as magic because it’s too complicated for people to understand and so they must simply have faith in it. Unfortunately this product
doesn’t exist. We are not at a new business meeting, we’re at a school reunion.’

He ground his index finger into the monads. ‘What this hieroglyph really represents is the complete detachment of Hermes Spence from any useful reality. It’s a symbol of folly and
madness. Somebody better show me a paying client soon or I am going home to kill myself.’

‘You are missing it. Hermes is asking us to think about utopias. About assuming the right to dream again. He wants us to think out of the box.’

‘Why must it be a box?’ replied Bougas, his odd smile revealing two pronounced incisors.

Come sundown, the court reconvened on the crescent of chairs outside the abbey. The grass was cut long enough to flatten into swirls and whorls under the sea wind. Sitting out as the last of the
light lurked above the distant hills of Mull, I felt negligible, a bystander in the eternal war between the sea, the sky and the rock, that red rock. There was a lot of flesh in the rock. The Kings
of Ireland, Scotland and Norway were buried here. The island was a grave, the last call before the great void of the Atlantic.

Hermes did not return.

Stoker Jnr came out to collect our work. He let us know that we would be expected to leave the island in the morning.

‘Is that it?’ Morton Eakins spoke for us all.

‘We’ll review your work and contact you soon,’ replied Stoker. That swine already had his feet under the table. I looked around for Bougas, to see what he made of
Spence’s absence, but the maverick consultant was gone.

The court sat in silence. The dusk thickened into night. Janis was first to lose her calm, mouthing off that she was going to get Spence right now and let him know in no uncertain terms
precisely how out of order he had been. Christine looked pained. Had she been invited only to be humiliated like this? There was misogyny in the soil. St Columba forbade woman and cows from setting
foot on Iona, saying, ‘Where there is a cow there is a woman, and where there is a woman there is mischief.’ A community is as much about who you keep out as who you welcome in. This
thought experiment had been set to determine who could stay in the circle and who was to be rejected. The Stokers had convinced me not only that was I staying in the court, but that I would enjoy a
greater status than previously. That was why, as the court walked disconsolately back to the hotel, their faces faintly luminescent in the overwhelming dark, I refused to move. Alone in the
crescent of empty and tipped chairs, I waited for them to come and get me.

‘I wanted to ask you a few questions.’

In a small wooden room lit by candlelight, Hermes Spence sat opposite me, his hand on my shoulder. Stoker Snr sat tight against me, a sweet aftershave disguising his meaty scent. In this
confined space, more a wardrobe than a room, I was conscious of my own burly odours. Hermes smelt of citrus and light. Behind his blue eyes there was a headful of sky.

‘I like red men. More importantly, they like it.’

I thought he meant the Stokers. He didn’t.

‘If you ask them, “what would you like to be called?”, each answers differently. One would like to keep its real name, another will make up its own. We asked them what they
wanted to be referred to as a species. Devise a variation on homo sapiens. What is Latin for “unreal man”? Homo Non Verus? Homo Falsus? Homo Fictus?’

‘A new species name has unfortunate connotations regarding evolution. It’s very important that they are not seen to be threatening. It would all go wrong if people felt they were
being supplanted.’

The air quality soured. Spence stood over me, his head bowed against the ceiling. I did not remember him being so tall. Zeal is an effective fitness regime.

‘Every generation loses sight of its evolutionary imperative. By the end of the Sixties it was understood that the power of human consciousness must be squared if we were to ensure the
survival of mankind. This project did not survive the Oil Crisis. When I first met you, you spoke of enlightenment. That project did not survive 9/11. With each of these failures, man sinks further
into the quagmire of cynicism. My question is: do you still have any positive energy left in you?’