The Red Men (21 page)

‘I just want you to come back,’ she said, unbuttoning Iona’s duffel coat. ‘You handed me the baton and ran off into the distance. That’s not what we agreed. We
didn’t agree to any of this.’

‘Where is Daddy running to?’ asked Iona.

‘I am not running anywhere,’ I said, answering my daughter directly, my wife obliquely. With a wan smile, I showed Iona the various words on the menu that corresponded to her
favourite foods. She shook her head. She wasn’t eating them anymore. Fish fingers were for babies, she pointed out. El took over, resolved the issue, and after the waitress took our order,
she leant over to me and said, ‘On the train, I was also thinking about what you are doing here. There was an article about Redtown in the paper. People are shocked that you are involved in
it.’

‘There are always sceptics.’

‘You don’t think there is something immoral about simulating people, buying up the copyright to their minds?’

‘It’s not like they are monetizing that content themselves. It’s an unexploited surplus resource. The process takes nothing from them; rather we are adding them to the global
knowledge base.’

‘While we’re here, you could simulate me and Iona. Have you thought about that? You would always have us to hand. Or you could simulate yourself, so that we could have a piece of
you.’

‘And what would you do with my simulation?’

El had thought about this one.

‘I would ask it why you were so keen to leave us.’

That was unfair.

‘Why is the idea of simulating us so horrible, yet it is acceptable to copy thousands of people from Maghull? Can you explain that to me?’

Selves will be the last territory to be mined, stripped, sold.

‘I am old-fashioned. I believe in secrets.’

‘And the people of Maghull don’t deserve their secrets?’ replied El.

‘Confession is an urgent need for them. They are caught up in a cult for self-exposure.’

‘You are a hypocrite,’ said El.

‘I don’t believe in what I do for a living. So what? My hypocrisy is the only thing which makes me demographically representative.’

‘How do you know something won’t go wrong again, like it did with Harry Bravado? Next time, it might be you in a graveyard with a bullet in your face.’

‘Why would Daddy be in a graveyard?’ interrupted Iona, indicating she had enough understanding of our conversation for El to back off the subject.

For El’s visit, I booked a room in a hotel by the Pier Head. This arrangement spared her the parody of domesticity Morton Eakins and I had in our apartment. Also, the prospect of my vile
colleague overhearing the conjugal visit – albeit, its ecstasies muffled by the presence of a sleeping child on an adjacent mattress – gave me an excuse to spring for the penthouse
suite. The sex was urgent and silent. When it was time for El and Iona to return to London, I walked them across the city to the station. If we had not resolved the big issues between us, at least
we had reaffirmed physical desire.

She was right to be suspicious of Monad. The corporation and the family are rivals. Capital is our lord, exercising
droit de seigneur
over its subjects. For all its power, Monad was a
possessive and insecure lover.

Don’t be good at things you hate. All of this was my doing. In the empty suite, I flicked through my initial presentation for Redtown. Hermes asked me to find him a town
so I found Maghull and then pitched it to the board. In the underground boardroom of the Wave, I screened films of the town and preliminary interviews with council leaders, summarized the census
findings, and presented brief interviews with a cross section of the citizenry. My presentation summarized Maghull as representing a goldilocks gene pool and meme pool, that is, not too hot and not
too cold.

The management sat around the table in various defensive and offensive postures. Bruno Bougas was distracted by his body, picking out a rogue hair, rubbing at a dry patch of skin, wincing and
nursing kidney pain. Jonathan Stoker Snr reddened his jowls every time I caught his eye. Across from him sat Morton Eakins, surreptitiously watching the reactions of his colleagues to determine his
own opinion. At the head of the table was Hermes Spence, chin forward, keen to hear anything positive after a few very difficult months.

Harold Blasebalk’s death was a continuing inconvenience. Neither of the two official theories surrounding Blasebalk’s death, suicide or murder by Monad employee Raymond Chase, were
PR victories for the company. Under the low light, the damage to Spence’s zealous complexion was apparent; a V of sweat-damp stress lines was engraved into his brow. Blasebalk’s death
was a gift to Monad’s enemies in government, business and the press, exposing Hermes Spence to the jackals of the British establishment. There were questions from across the Atlantic too,
from Monad’s Texan backers, cowboys of beef and oil, whose families had been wringing money out of the earth for five generations. All our fates were bound to Hermes. If he went, the whole
court went with him. At the meeting, I felt like I was chairing a group therapy session for the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

‘Interaction between the real and the unreal caused dysfunction in red men and their subscribers. Cantor proposes we develop a quarantined reality for our next project. I was set the
challenge of finding the right community to upload. Our first instinct was to look at elites, following similar revenue streams to the red men. A tailor-made digital heaven for the
super-rich.’

‘It’s still the way forward,’ said Stoker Snr. ‘I’ve had some interesting meetings with the prime minister of Nevis.’

‘What happened to the Venice plan?’ said Bougas.

‘The conservation of Venice in a Monad is a viable commercial project,’ said Morton. ‘The Italian government and the European commission would fund it. Cantor is less
keen.’

‘It has no artistic vitality,’ I said.

‘And your poundland outside Liverpool does?’ Stoker Snr was up out of his chair. ‘You want us to preserve the dullest town and upload scousers when there are people who will
pay millions... it was your friend that got the company into this mess.’

He turned to the others.

‘Why is this man still working here?’

I was used to his outbursts. ‘Cantor is engaged in a study of humanity. It allows us to work with it solely to pay its way. There are two metaphors for Cantor; we can view it either as
God, or as an artist. What it is not, Jonathan, is your employee, or your car, or your mistress. You can’t bully it.’

‘We must collaborate with it,’ said Spence, ‘just as we must work with each other.’

Bougas shrugged. ‘Cantor has been spending so much time in the underclass in the form of Dr Easy that it’s acquiring a messiah complex. It is content to walk among the huddled poor.
I am not. Maghull feels beneath us, too provincial. As a focus group it’s of use to domestic clients but their opinions and behaviour will mean nothing in Buttfuck, Arizona.’

I disagreed, feeling Bougas’ advice was a generalization of his own self-interest. ‘Redtown is not a consumer focus group. It’s a testing ground for policy.’

Spence agreed. ‘The individual consumer is debt-ridden and exhausted. Future revenues will flow from the state provided we have a convincing narrative that our involvement reduces overall
state expenditure. We can run Redtown through a decade of social engineering in a week, saving the government billions. That’s our story. Cantor willing, I am ready to throw my weight behind
this proposal.’

Morton Eakins also agreed. ‘It’s better that we go up North. Less media. It will help us move Monad off page two and back into the business section.’

Bougas had his head in his hands.

‘Why can’t we just let the whole Blasebalk thing blow over and carry on as before?’

In the three months since Raymond went missing, I’d kept my thoughts about what happened between him, Harry Bravado and Harold Blasebalk to myself. I did not want to be labelled as an
apologist for Raymond. Still, the question had to be raised:

‘Has Cantor revealed what happened in the graveyard?’

‘If Cantor knows who killed Blasebalk, it’s not telling,’ replied Morton. ‘For our part, we have to be seen to react. Otherwise the investigation and pressure will grind
on and on. We could lose our licence. We could lose Cantor.’

Stoker Snr had completely shredded my handout.

‘Raymond Chase will show up. I know he’s guilty.’

The old businessman got out of his seat and came over to me. ‘You know where he is, don’t you? He’s your friend. You got him his job here. He’s been in touch hasn’t
he?’

‘He has gone dark,’ said Morton. ‘We’ve sent people to look for him. The police have circulated his description across the grid.’

‘I find it very upsetting that Cantor is withholding information from us,’ said Hermes.

Eakins explained. ‘Cantor thought the killing was one of Bravado’s fantasies. It realized too late that the murder in the graveyard was actually taking place.’ None of us
wanted to explore the implications of Cantor’s failure in this matter.

‘The investigation into the death of Harold Blasebalk will unfold at its own pace,’ Hermes Spence moved on. ‘Right now, Redtown is the future of Monad and that future starts in
Maghull.’

The meeting was adjourned. No one congratulated me on the success of my proposal. From their experience, they knew the trouble that came with meeting the expectations of a successful pitch.

It was the first victory of my corporate career, my first terrible mistake.

Morton Eakins called, demanding I help him set up an observation post in Maghull. He was responsible for the Redtown habitat, the mapping and cataloguing of every house and
street in Maghull, its parks, pubs and shops. While I sat in on the uploading of the citizenry, he measured the town with his team of surveyors. He took care of nurture, I oversaw nature.

Unfortunately his use of neuroceuticals had given him perfect recall, making it hard for him to generalize. His fussing over detail was agonizing. I found him worrying in the gardens of St
Andrew’s Church. A team of builders were packing up their tools, while their foreman dodged past the pleading, stooped figure of Dr Easy. A half-completed scaffold had been erected alongside
the square tower of the Victorian church, not quite to Eakins’ satisfaction. He showed me the problem.

‘Shoddy,’ he said. With both hands, he gripped a supporting scaffold pole and shook it. ‘Even at this height, it’s not properly secure. When it’s finished, it will
be taller than the church. If it’s not fixed now, how unstable will it be at its full height?’

‘Why do we need an observational tower?’ I asked. We used balloons with mounted cameras to get aerial details of the town, supplemented with satellite imagery.

‘Two reasons,’ said Eakins. ‘First, so we can monitor the decay of the church itself, the effects of pollution upon its brickwork, the rusting of the weather vane. Secondly, St
Andrew’s is one of the cardinal hotspots in the town’s mind, demanding the most intensive observation. The chapel has been here since the twelfth century; psychogeographically speaking,
it is the centre of town’s religiosity.’

‘Maghull is not religious.’

‘The observance of Christianity is in a lull, admittedly. But I think it will pick up in the future.’

‘Surely we have other priorities.’

Morton hated being questioned, and immediately affected an aggressive impatience.

‘I know what your priority is. Spending the weekend in bed with your wife. We’ve lost two days because of her!’

The environmental routines for Redtown for gravity, light and time, the wind, the rain and sun came off the shelf from Monad. Morton wanted to examine Maghull’s peculiar mindset and how
that was influenced by the topography. Certain hotspots in the town emanated influence. That was why he was so obsessed with St Andrew’s Church. The crenelations of its tower were visible
from much of the town, a comforting symbol of the town’s parish past. Accurately capturing the circuit flowing between landscape and mind was crucial to the simulation. Cantor never grasped
the human unconscious; the red men were utterly secular, that is, temporal, their selves partaking of none of the archetypal, eternal patterns encoded deep within the human brain. In crafting
Redtown, Morton and I decided that landmarks would take the role of these unconscious impulses. The marshland around Maghull railway station, the secluded set of swings in Glenn Park, the disused
tracts of the Cheshire Lines would emanate their own dark music.

Dr Easy failed to persuade the builders to return. It watched their van skid out of the church car park. The robot’s eyes were luminescent blue in the dusk, hovering in its silhouette like
a pair of irradiated hummingbirds.

‘Did you come to some arrangement with the builders?’ asked Eakins. The robot appeared distracted, strumming its fat caterpillar fingers against its grill of a mouth, an arch
mannerism it had picked up from Morton Eakins.

‘They won’t come back. If I was to explain why, then I am afraid I would have to relate certain opinions of theirs that would offend you.’

‘We can finish it ourselves,’ said Morton. ‘Now. Tonight. Get some torches and some tools.’

Dr Easy shook its head.

‘This body does not have the physical strength to hammer in a single nail.’

Morton looked expectantly at me. I was having none of it. I suggested he hire a new team of builders instead and he begrudgingly agreed.

Dr Easy and I helped Morton take some readings from the grounds of the church. The ancient chapel was in the graveyard, a dank hollow shrouded by trees. I moved among the gravestones, recording
the evidence of clandestine activity in this sacred place. Upon the grave of Frank Hornby, a local character famous for his exemplary miniature worlds, I found three used condoms. I logged it as
three separate incidences of
al fresco
intercourse; here on the sunken moss, her buttocks rocked back and forth, whoever she was. The canal was visible through a thicket. A barge was tied up
there, its windows boarded up, and roof patched with tarpaulin. Where the canal backed onto the cricket ground, I noted more dark places of sexual opportunity, and even the barge struck me as a
loitering, disreputable phallus. Morton’s observation post would scare away the blasphemous activities in this secret place. The observer alters the observed.