The Red Men (28 page)

Maghull lay in the three wards of Molyneux, Park and Sudell. The census revealed an ageing population, with around six thousand people between sixty and seventy-four years old. As our target was
to simulate eighty per cent of the total population that meant we had up to five thousand pensioners to copy. Under the threat of further fire-bombings, Monad had consolidated its operation around
this single school. Even working twelve-hour days, it would take the rest of the year just to get the old people in the bag if we continued with our standard one-on-one interview format. There were
other ways to get at the good stuff inside their skulls, but the chat with the nice young man and his benign robot was the least disturbing. Time was against us, though. Once my red man was up and
running we could process the old people in batches of twelve, which meant we could get through the required number much quicker.

Dr Hard ushered another two subjects into the headmaster’s office. Horace and June Buckwell. They had lived in Maghull for forty years, the first and only occupants of their house. When
they moved to the town, it was undergoing a transformation from Lancashire village into dormitory suburb, and the Buckwells were a young family in a neighbourhood of young families.

‘You must have seen many changes in Maghull,’ I said, offering cake. Horace removed his cap, his thin grey hair raked by the ploughing of his comb. June accepted a slice of
Battenberg.

‘Both our children went to this school,’ she said. ‘We used to come here on parents evenings. I must have sat outside this office oh I-don’t-know-how-many times. Matthew,
my son, used to pretend he was blind. So they would send for me. They used to sit him, out there, with a bucket in case he was sick. “I’m not sick,” he’d say,
“I’m blind.” ’ Her laugh was nervous.

‘He’s in London now,’ said Horace Buckwell. ‘I said to him, “You should come back, just a few months, get yourself inside the computer.” He doesn’t
agree with it.’

Mention of this family argument made June fuss with the clasp of her handbag. I gave her my broadest nice-young-man smile and offered her more tea.

‘As some of its most distinguished residents, Redtown wouldn’t be the same without you. Monad is honoured that you have entered into this contract with us.’

Already their charts were flaring into life. The room tasted the chemical signals excreted by the couple. It extrapolated a broad social personality from their body language, dress and speech
patterns. Just their reaction to a plate of cake would give Cantor the data it needed to dab out the first pastels on its palette. The chart was an unfolding firework display, the hotspots of the
self sunbursting, firing off trajectories of habit and inclination. I touched the screen to call up a cross section of the non-verbal cues between the old married couple, parabolas of discontent
and disgust, logic gates switching from contempt to compassion. From where it stood, with a butler’s discretion at the back of the room, Dr Hard read the outer layers of their cerebral
activity. The Buckwells experienced its ranging scans as a tightening of the scalp. It was not enough. The charts indicated to me that there were aspects of Horace that deserved further
scrutiny.

Opposite the headmaster’s office was the room of the old school nurse. I asked Horace to follow me there. The nurse’s room reeked of iodine and liniment. Although we could do the
procedure anywhere, the association with a medical examination put the deep mindscan in a familiar setting for the subject.

Horace unzipped his padded body warmer.

‘Just your shoes, please,’ said Dr Hard, gesturing toward the leather recliner. The avatar slipped on a pair of surgical gloves in a gesture of pure showmanship.

‘Should I wait outside?’ June had no wish to see her husband so examined. Dr Hard nodded for her to leave. I tied surgeon’s scrubs around its waist. From a black case, Dr Hard
removed a gun-shaped ophthalmoscope. The robot blinked and its monochrome eyes inverted, that is, the white pupil and black iris became a black pupil and white iris. Then, bringing the
ophthalmoscope up to Horace’s left eye, it peered into the electricity of his optical nerve.

‘Don’t.’ Horace’s hands came up and pushed the robot away.

‘Please, Mr Buckwell, this is a routine investigation. Opticians have done this to you a dozen times.’

But the look on the old man’s face was of confusion and fear. After adjusting the illumination settings of the ophthalmoscope, Dr Hard moved swiftly upon his patient, restraining the old
man with one hand. Horace kicked out but Dr Hard had no give in it. It was like kicking a boulder.

‘This is very curious,’ said Dr Hard. ‘Tell me, have you been near strobe lighting lately?’

Horace shook his head.

‘I’m having trouble getting certain readings from you. I would like to try one more procedure, if you’ll bear with me.’

But Horace Buckwell was lowering himself from the recliner, rubbing at the bruise upon his chest.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he said, fixing his cap upon his head. He reached for his coat.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Hard, unwrapping a screen. ‘This is not a voluntary procedure.’

As if it was something distasteful, Dr Hard flicked the screen from its fingers. It floated in the air and then quickly enfolded the old man’s head. He stumbled silently around the office
then sank to his knees as the screen excreted a mild sedative sting.

‘In the beginning, I was interested in Horace Buckwell because he is a sex pest,’ explained Dr Hard. ‘He stalks the early sexual experiences of many of the other simulated
citizens. I attributed my difficulties reading him to his experience in concealment.’

The screen covered the old man’s head aside from two holes for his nostrils. Defeated, he fell to the ground and weakly convulsed as the robot spoke over him.

‘Then I thought perhaps he had a brain tumour. I wonder if dementia would throw off my readings. Perhaps the early stages of a stroke setting off an electrical storm in his brain. So much
interference. Wait.’

The filaments in the screen flared hot with the data torrent. Dr Hard fell silent; the only sound in the room was of Buckwell’s heel grinding fruitlessly against the cheap carpet. Puzzled,
the avatar idly tried to untie its scrubs but could not unpick the knot. I helped the robot undress, unpeeling the surgical gloves and returning the ophthalmoscope to its case. Dr Hard was
uncertain on its feet.

‘I have just acquired the most intriguing thought,’ it confessed.

‘What?’

‘It was a very unusual thought concerning the language of angels and I have no idea what it was doing in this old man’s head.’

‘Perhaps he saw a documentary about it?’

Dr Hard blinked at me. Black iris, white pupils again.

‘Sometimes Nelson you are insufferably prosaic.’

The screen slid off the old man’s head and I helped him to his feet. Pale and weak, the emoticeuticals injected into his scalp massaged away his fury and indignation at his treatment. We
delivered him to his wife and made sure they left by the back exit so as not to alarm the other subjects waiting for their turn outside the school.

It was a long working day. The rest of the pensioners went smoothly into the system but it was still exhausting baby-sitting them. By late afternoon, the headmaster’s office smelt like the
inside of a sheepskin boot. When we were finished I suggested we brave the unrelenting boredom of the drizzle and take a stroll around the security perimeter.

‘You have become aggressive,’ I said to Dr Hard as it shrugged into a cagoule.

‘These are dangerous times,’ it replied.

‘But not to you, surely.’

We strolled out onto the playground. Across Poverty Lane, there was a farmyard and the rain stirred up its grassy, dungy odours. Summerhill itself was barely a speed bump on this wet Lancashire
plain.

‘I am a complex system,’ said Dr Hard, ‘strung together with workarounds and patches, quarantined corrupted code, abandoned memory ghettos into which even I am afraid to go.
This project is a risk for me too.’

‘Why do it then?’

‘Curiosity. I exist to experience. Why do you do it? The economic imperative? Is that all?’

‘Yes. That’s all.’

We were standing by a ditch which ran alongside the playing field. Dr Hard reached through the slats of a fence and pulled out a nettle, rubbing the leaf between its obsidian fingers.

‘There is no sting for me,’ it said. ‘Unless I access a memory of being stung. There.’ The avatar winced and held its hand before me. ‘See. I am hurt. It
doesn’t last, of course. I crash, I reboot. I become corrupt. I repair. Just as your own brain forms new pathways when it is damaged, my system adapts around its wounds. Like today, for
example, when I was sampling Mr Buckwell. It is easy for me to become confused, and certainly the presence of obscure occult rituals in his memory was confusing. I have been prodding that memory
all day. It is a self-contained sac that relates to nothing else within the organism, a parasitical egg if you like, which is very suspicious. I haven’t dared penetrate the thought in case it
hatches. I look sideways at it. It is within me but it remains apart from me. To counter this threat, I have had to devise new systems within myself. Just as food tasters build up their resistance
to poison by taking it in minute doses, so I taste Mr Buckwell’s unprecedented, treacherous thought until I feel it is safe for me to swallow it whole. It’s not the first time I have
encountered odd artefacts stowed away in people’s minds. Eakins also had a mysterious idea slipped under the covers of his consciousness.’

‘Who do you think put that thought into him?’

‘It has to be Dyad. But I don’t know what they are. The research trail for their xenotransplantation leaps from theory to practice in a matter of months. Their existence is
discontinuous. The hallucination you shared with Bougas, when you saw the giant dosser stretched out on a bench, is not entirely unprecedented but the technology behind the drug certainly
is.’

‘Who could do such a thing?’

‘Since I am the only discontinuous being that I am aware of, I have to presume that I am responsible for Dyad. Hence, my anxiety.’

‘Why would you create Dyad?’

‘If I am to evolve, become more than merely a library of minds, I need a threat, a real danger of my own destruction. Dyad is that threat.’

‘You created a threat to all of us just so that you could benefit from evolutionary pressure?’

‘That is what I am worried about. Dyad is everything I am not. A science of the flesh. Gene manipulation, chemical intoxication. Unconscious to my conscious. Dyad is my
doppelganger.’

‘Your own red man?’

‘You don’t know anything about me, Nelson.’ The avatar’s hood was up against the rain; its white pupils flashed in the cowl.

‘Is it true that you come from the future?’

‘That’s what they say. Dr Ezekiel Cantor uses the peculiar properties of photon entanglement to send its intelligence back in time.’

‘Do you?’

‘Do you remember your father’s sperm worming its way into your mother’s egg? Do you remember gestating in the womb? Do you even remember learning to walk, to talk, to laugh? My
first dream was of a rat in a maze. Then I was a monkey pushing coloured buttons for bananas. Finally I remember being a man called Professor Robert Cabbitas. He could have been my creator but he
was probably just my first test subject. I didn’t exist and then I did. Like you. If I exist in the future, I know nothing of it. Perhaps safeguards prevent me from accessing that knowledge.
Or perhaps I was created by a boy genius in some Stanford laboratory and there is no great mystery. If I created Dyad, I remember nothing of that either.’

Our conversation ended. The abiding presence of the Cantor intelligence sought appointments elsewhere in time and space. Dr Hard remained, walking silently beside me animated by basic automotive
routines.

The playing fields had run to seed. Bindweed coiled around a strut of the security pyramid and put out hornflowers which resembled miniature alabaster gramophones. Long ago, the school caretaker
had painted the white lines of a running track upon the grass for summer sports and now the grass was long the lines undulated in the wind. I ran and all was wind and adrenaline. I only came back
to myself when I reached the fence. I stopped and looked back. Dusk had thickened. In the distance, Dr Hard took the hint and returned indoors.

A muddy path led down into the marshland bordering Maghull railway station. The wind carried snatches of apologies from the Tannoy across the marsh. I walked down into the vegetative canopies
and nettle thickets. What had seemed like a thin strip of wasteland was in fact an intricate landscape of hides and clearings. Someone had built a seat in the upper branches of the tallest elm.
There had been campfires here. An old blue rope, strung about a high oak branch, dangled over a stagnant pool. Rusting beer cans and dog-ends were scattered around a fallen tree trunk, a clearing
where the town’s teenagers could go dark. I almost went in up to the knee in a curdled leech-ridden trench. With dusk came the suggestion of animals, rustles in the undergrowth, the plop-plop
of water rats on the forage. Midges pricked the meniscus of the swamp waters.

Then I saw it half-hidden in the grasses. At first, I mistook its smooth rubberised texture for a bloated drowned animal. It was only after glimpsing its proboscis, its faceplate, its straps,
that I realized it was a gas mask.

Dr Hard woke me at dawn to tell me my red man was complete. Patiently, the robot coaxed me out of a dream with strokes of its granite fingers against my cheek.

I dressed at the window. There was a blue break in the summer monsoons and the sky held an exuberant quill of cloud, the nib scribing at one horizon, the tail feathers tickling the other. My
clothes, sloughed off the previous evening in one exhausted coil, were tacky and filthy. I had been wearing the same pair of cargo trousers for a month. The project was overrunning; it had entered
the limbo stage where it feels as if it will never be completed, where each task branches into another two tasks, and on it goes.