The Red Men (27 page)

If I did not give in to Cantor, then Redtown would fail and Monad would destroy me. If I did give in, allow them to copy my innermost thoughts, then they would have me forever. When I was
younger, I would not have thought twice about it. To exist in a computer. To be a superman free of death and money. All reality mutable, a playground of infinite perversity. Drifting imperviously
through a hundred lifetimes of pleasure and experience. It was all I ever wanted. But not anymore. I remembered what Raymond had told me about the Blasebalks, the family destroyed by the unleashing
of the husband and father. I pushed the avatar’s hand away. Its eyes, as awesome and reflective as a full moon.

‘You resist me, yet you went into the Dyad without a second thought. Just because it was like taking a drug, which you are comfortable with. Whereas this is like sex, and you are
accustomed to monogamy. Your refusal is merely habit.’

‘I need to think it over.’

‘We do it tonight or not at all.’

‘I won’t go into the scanner.’

‘I don’t need you to. Do you know how I am going to do this? The magnetic resonance helmet is just for show. A way of phrasing the process in terms you understand. There are more
intimate ways into you.’

In the dark, I saw vague forms stir, the wet-back shimmer of screens gliding like manta rays across the classroom floor. Three, four, five, six – a shoal of screens. A screen tongued its
way over the lip of an open window, as another slipped discreetly under the door. Dr Hard leapt onto the desk and crouched upon it, one stone finger pressing into my chest, forcing me back into a
chair. The screens curled up beside its feet like gelatine familiars. This was my moment to act. To fight back or run away, just get out of Monad. But there would be no escape, the only way I could
ever return to my family was to finish this project, and if that required giving into Hermes’ solution, allowing my red man to be created, then so be it. I gave in.

‘This is for your own good,’ said Dr Hard. On the surface of the screens, lines of bioluminescent suckers emerged. I felt their kiss first around my legs, as a screen coiled its way
up my calf. Each tiny vacuum exerted a gravitational pull; my blood rose to meet them. The sensation, at once arousing and appalling, distracted me so that I did not notice the screen crawling up
my back until its suckers took hold of the hairs on my nape, took a cruel nip there, then stuck fast. Another screen swallowed my head and slid down over the forehead, sealed each eyelid, and then
parted itself around the mouth, so that I could still breathe. The sound of Cantor’s voice was clear.

‘Just think about yourself. What is good about you and what is bad. Let your mind range over your memories. Yes. Your family. Go back as far as you like. Your first memory. Sitting in a
pushchair holding a packet of cigarettes while your Uncle Ted takes a picture of you. Another one. Sitting on top of the stairs, playing. Your granddad is downstairs, he has come to take you to
nursery. You drift weightless down the stairs, levitating. Is someone carrying you? You are urinating, a dark circle of urine ebbs out across the carpet. These are your landmarks, your mind is a
city to me. You are in the operating theatre while the doctor lifts your baby daughter from your wife’s womb. You keep smiling at her, looking into her eyes. Never looking at the wound. Now
you will feel that you are losing control of your memories. I am just giving the ventromesial quadrant of your frontal lobe a little push. That’s where your will resides, and your dreams. You
have so little of one and so much of the other. I give it another push. There. And you cease to exist altogether.’

After tea, Horace Buckwell was in the habit of walking his long-haired dachshund. He corrected his flat cap, zipped up his body warmer and unhooked the dog lead from the coat
rack. He shook the question mark-shaped clip at his beloved Hanz, swooning under the influence of the gas fire. Age had eroded the hound’s enthusiasm for his master’s evening strolls.
The dog rolled over and presented its undercarriage to the faux-flames.

Thunder shook Maghull by its lapels; yards of rain splashed out of the guttering. If time had not cultivated such mutual enmity between Mr and Mrs Buckwell, then the old man might have
considered sitting in on a stormy night like this. But he could not stand the sound of her voice nor the quality of her silences. June was knitting a cardigan for someone at church while a soap
opera chattered in the background.

‘You going out?’ She tried to sound surprised.

She would be on the phone the moment he was out of the door, leaving more hopeless messages on the children’s voicemail.

As Hanz refused to come to the leash, Mr Buckwell tucked the little dog under his arm and went out into the rain.

There used to be more to see on his walks. The town of Maghull had grown old with him, and now it liked to spend its evenings indoors. Horace trudged down Newlyn Avenue, slipping the dog chalky
chocolate drops from his coat pocket. The first stop of his evening tour was a house on the corner. A raucous Catholic clan once lived there. He dawdled on the opposite pavement, eavesdropping. A
decade ago, closing time would have brought fights on the lawn or even a glimpse of a rummage in the garage doorway. Hand up her skirt. He had not forgotten the sight of it.

No more of that, old man. Now a quiet family lived there. June knew all about them. The kids were from her first marriage, then she moved here as part of settlement and met her new man on the
internet and he was on the oil rigs or something. June liked to keep tabs on people. The Buckwells shared one passion: the lives of others.

The night sat high up in the oaks. Whinney Brook ran fast and full with rain. Horace corrected his dog’s anorak and set off toward Summerhill, the derelict school over by the railway line.
The memories were keener there. At the top of the hill, there was a railway bridge where the children used to scrawl their rumours of sex in liquid paper. The modern graffiti was unintelligible to
him, hieroglyphs marking territory rather than spreading tittle-tattle. The school at the bottom of the hill had been closed due to a lack of new children, its windows and doors boarded up with
blue steel panels. With the arrival of Monad, a hollow pyramid had been erected in the grounds, its apex crowned with a lazy red eye. Horace’s appointment with Monad was imminent although he
was unsure of exactly what was to be done with him. His wife had organized it. Money had changed hands. He didn’t care about money. He cared about the town and its secret life.

Hanz wriggled under his arm, stirred by the smell of the marshland between the school playing field and the station. In their prime, they had explored this unkempt zone together. The little
hound was giddy with the scents of the place. In their routine, Hanz would run ahead while he made a show of calling after the dog until he was far enough into the marsh to be certain that he was
alone with whoever was out to play that day.

His pornography was buried there.

The grass on the playing fields was long and running to seed. He tested the solidity of the low railings. They wobbled somewhat in the foundations. He climbed over the fence as quickly as his
stiff hip would allow, Hanz stirring at the prospect of their old haunt. The rain conspired to conceal them from passers-by.

The Liverpool train rattled by. His secrets were buried in the firmer higher land close to the railway line. When he reached the spot, he took a pencil Maglite from his pocket. The spot was
marked by the broken pieces of one of June’s flowerpots, the glaze glinting under the beam of his torch. As he scratched aside the top soil he heard voices approaching. Two men and a woman.
He turned off the torch and his eyes were slow to adjust to the dark. One man was helping the woman climb over the railings. He lost track of the other. They didn’t look like locals. The
woman seemed to wearing something from June’s wardrobe; an old headscarf, woollen coat and a pair of sensible shoes. The man’s long hair spilt out of the sides of his hood, and the
metal sown into one side of his face glowed dully in the moonlight.

Hanz barked.

The man leant back and tied his hair into a pony tail. The lit end of a long hand-rolled cigarette was used to point out the crouching Horace Buckwell to the woman.

‘There he is.’

Who are these bastards, thought Horace? Can I run? Do I still have it in me to run? He lumbered off into the thicket, Hanz yapping around his feet. The muscle memory of flight rushed back to
him. This wasn’t the first time on his walks that he had got into trouble. But there was so much pain after the first few yards. He got tied up with branches, thorns and nettles. The attacker
was suddenly right before him, and the other man was behind him. He was wearing a gas mask. Regulation Second World War issue. Horace sprawled around in the mud. Was he having a stroke? Were these
hallucinations?

A man leapt upon him, quickly asserting a long blade against his throat to quell his struggles.

‘I have money,’ Horace gasped.

‘Open your mouth,’ came the muffled reply.

Part of him was curious to experience the perversions of these strange young people. He parted his lips and his attacker poured a measure from a hip flask into the old man’s mouth. Hanz
was beside himself with the excitement of this new game, ineffectually ragging the trouser leg of the attacker until he received a lazy kick. As the drug took effect, the man took off his gas mask
so that Horace could see the skull glowing beneath the pockmarked parchment of his skin, a wrapping so fragile that surgical pins had been inserted into the lad’s cheek to repair a tear. Over
his attacker’s shoulder, the woman stepped out of the shadows. Her lipstick was a black red. She was concentrating on something, a device she was holding.

‘Is he ready?’ she said to her companion.

‘Give it to me.’ His attacker took the device from her and fitted it to his lower jaw. She helped him tie it fast and quickly backed off into the bushes. The device reared out of the
young man’s mouth, a distended tongue with a bulbous tip from which a whine was ascending. Under pulses of strobe light, the small clearing in this patch of marsh juddered into existence. The
spice in the hip flask was already taking effect on the old man. The accelerating cycles of the photon stimulator disrupted Buckwell’s neurological activity through signals to the eyes and
ears. The trick was to call up a disused memory and in the moment of its summoning, slip a long line of code directly underneath it.

The Elk adjusted his position so that he was squatting on the old man’s chest, his hands gripping him by the throat as he beamed in a cortical hack, a bird song of inhuman information
codified as arcane language. Horace Buckwell writhed in the mud, his eyes wide open to visions of avenging angels.

‘When do you meet your red man?’

‘Soon.’

‘Are you worried?’

‘Are you?’

I had variations on this conversation with all my friends. Think of all the confidences we had shared over the years, the drunken insinuations of adultery, the confessions of boredom and
dissatisfaction in Soho noodle bars. Would my red man, free from responsibility and consequences, decide to expose their secrets?

El asked me about the red man every time I called home. We counted down to its arrival much as we had lain in bed speculating about our gestating daughter. There was no excitement about this new
arrival. Only dread. From her perspective, a part of me had escaped from our relationship.

‘I’m all still here,’ I said. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

El shook her head.

‘How am I meant to feel about all this? What exactly are you planning to do in the Monad without me?’

‘I never wanted this but they did it to me anyway. I wanted to protect our intimacies, the decade of love and sex that was just between us.’

In an age of digital reproduction, a relationship loses its aura. The sanctity of the original diminishes with every copy made.

I promised I would keep the red man out of our lives.

I had no power to keep that promise.

I promised that the red man would leave us alone, but it was a promise that if kept represented a kind of betrayal. The red man was a grave and disturbing likeness of me. The screens had seen
right into my core. If the red man could leave my family alone, surely that would mean that I too could walk away from them.

‘Monad hates me,’ said El. ‘I know it’s irrational but I feel like it’s punishing me. The company resents the time we spend together. It wants to take you away and
keep you to itself.

‘The company is so jealous and cruel. More like a mistress than a job. Monad’s got her claws in you.’

El showed me talons of her own, baiting me, her big dumb bear. Although we shared a smile, I was alive to the darker feelings she expressed with silences.

I said, ‘We’ve always been apart from all this.’

She shook her head and waved goodbye.

I blew her a kiss.

The screen crumpled and slid away, then I was alone again in the classroom.

‘Who is next?’

Dr Hard peered through the misted window of the headmaster’s office. I noticed the avatar left no paw-print in the condensation. The rain charged the school, retreated and charged again
throughout the morning. Pensioners queued under a covered walkway outside the main entrance. The last generation to excel at waiting, they stood in Pac-A-Mac and Barbour, placated by the
complimentary tea and biscuits.

I had been avoiding Dr Hard all week even as we worked together recording the debts and assets of Maghull pensioners. We copied the details of savings accounts, shares and bonds, and took a
snapshot of the capital of their extended family so that we could predict outgoings (pocket money to their grandchildren, loans to their son so he could get back on his feet after the divorce). Dr
Hard drove around town in the truck, knocking on doors, committing the interiors of their houses to memory, looking to see if there were any antiques or paintings of value. Out in the community,
the robot took to wearing clothes, a black shirt untucked over black jeans and toeless feet in Armani flip-flops. It reminded the pensioners of their upload appointments in person while I stayed
behind in the school, hunched over our financial profile of the town until my shoulders ached. When my red man was completed, it would perform the data harvest in an instant. In the meantime, I
bowed my head and got on with my tasks.