The Red Men (38 page)

‘I put the two halves together. It didn’t go off.’

The Elk didn’t believe me.

‘Can’t you do one good thing in your entire life, you coward?’

‘It’s not enough just to put the two parts of the bomb in the same environment. They need a trigger.’

The Elk attacked me again. Raymond came between us, pushing back at The Elk’s face. Neat and short, Raymond was no match for the rangy street hippie. He took a crack to the back of the
head for his trouble and then The Elk and I were fighting again. He punched me to little effect. I concentrated on stamping on his kneecap. The knife remained sheathed. My forearm in his neck held
him off so he settled for spitting on me instead. In the enclosed space of the alleyway we were like two birds in a bag. The brick took the top layers of skin off his knuckles. He needed to get me
out in the open, where his speed would count. In this tight space, there was barely enough room to swing a punch. We kicked fruitlessly at one another. He backed off. Then I discovered why they
called him The Elk. He charged headfirst at me and we tumbled into the seething crowd on Poplar High Street. He was up first. Now the knife. Women ran laughing between us. Back in the pack, the
distortions resumed. I could hear El again, talking about her nightmare, ‘The worst evil is lurking and I’m complacent. I am trying to save people from what is coming but they
don’t appreciate the urgency. I see my own face on fire. I am in a crowd. All our faces are on fire. The fire spreads. It burns thick and red then everything is blood.’ Then happier
memories of her and my daughter. I am home again and the three of us are hugging, breathing in one another.

The blade was five inches of steel with a curved tip. The Elk moved it hypnotically in a figure of eight.

‘Any last words?’ he said.

And it was then, right then, that I figured out how to trigger the logic bomb.

Horace Buckwell lay in the hospital bed, unable to sleep. He was still upset by the visit from the strange doctors. They had asked him why he had been attacked out in Summerhill
marshes. Horace assumed the attack was revenge for a past indiscretion. The brother of somebody settling an old score. But if the doctor has also been attacked – presuming he didn’t
share his proclivities – then there must be another reason why the man in a gas mask jumped him on that rainy night.

His son, Matthew, had refused to return to the town to be simulated, even though it was money for nothing. At first, Horace considered this refusal to be typical senseless belligerence from the
boy. Now, trapped in this silent empty hospital he wondered if his son was not wise to avoid all dealings with Monad. They had argued about it over the phone. ‘It is selling your soul,’
said the boy, ‘plain and simple. The only reason why it doesn’t bother you, Dad, is that you don’t have a soul.’ That was cruel. He could not blame him though. After all
that had happened.

His introspection was interrupted by the return of the two doctors. Their mood was grave. Dr Morty wheeled in a trolley with a terrifying gamut of surgical instruments laid out upon it: artery
forceps and needle holders, probes, retractors, bone saws, suture instruments, specula, bone shears and tissue forceps. The whole sickening array.

‘We spoke to the consultant,’ said Dr Sonny. ‘He thinks we should operate immediately.’

‘I need prep,’ Horace squealed.

‘There is no time for prep,’ said Dr Morty.

Horace was not going to let these deranged quacks near him

‘What is wrong with me?’ he said, backing across the ward.

‘It’s a routine medical procedure,’ said Dr Morty. ‘I’ve performed it many times in my dreams. First we need to sedate you.’

Horace Buckwell screamed once, twice for help. It shocked Morty into action. With a scalpel he slashed at the old man, averting his eyes as he did so. Watching this pathetic attempt on screen, I
shifted anxiously in my seat and cursed Morton Eakins for inspiring such an appallingly useless red man. Even though he was an old man in his late sixties, Horace Buckwell was not going to be taken
down by that milksop.

It would fall to Dr Sonny to perform the operation. Certainly at that age I was fast and strong enough to kill a man. And Sonny had grown apart from me. He had learnt to act swiftly and
decisively, and his morality had evolved accordingly. There was no time for hesitation. I instructed my red man to kill Horace Buckwell and Sonny seized the old man by the throat.

I formed my right hand into a telescope. The screen responded, shifting to Buckwell’s point-of-view so that I could watch my young angry face bearing down on me. Teeth gritted,
Sonny’s thumbs compressed the old man’s windpipe. In my eyes, an awesome realization of the power I possessed. Why had I never done this before? Why had I allowed weaker men to oppress
me? Look how easy it is. Buckwell beat fruitlessly at the strong arms fastened about his throat. The reality principle set about its work, ensuring the simulation obeyed the laws of the real world.
The lack of oxygen to Buckwell’s brain triggered the near-death program. Random memories from the database were loaded into the carousel. When I attended the funeral of Horace Buckwell, back
in Liverpool all those months ago, his son had asked me to delete the simulation of the old man so that the family could be sure he would not return to haunt them. I promised the son that I would,
and here I was fulfilling that promise. Matthew Buckwell had said one other thing. His mother had found Horace when he was dying and heard his last words. Something about angels. ‘From their
mouths run seas of blood.’ ‘Their wings are thorns.’ But Horace was not a religious man; these words were not his, they were an incantation from Enochian scripture. His brain, as
it died, finally gave up the spell string implanted by Dyad.

On the screen, the life signs of Horace Buckwell diminished. In the silent hospital ward, his dead lips moved quickly to release the complicated syntax of an occult equation.

One half of the logic bomb was primed. Sonny let go of the old man’s corpse. I whispered to my red man to finish the job and prime the second half of the bomb by killing Dr Morty. Sonny
accessed the humiliation I had suffered working under Morton all these years, how I had allowed myself to be lorded over by him. It was an affront to my red man’s youthful ego to believe that
such a specimen had oppressed his older self.

I asked Sonny to use the bone saw, if the opportunity presented itself.

Watching my younger self commit murder, I was convinced of the rightness of my actions in triggering the logic bomb. The red men were never going to be capable of anything but evil. Once our
selves were filtered through Cantor’s sensibility, we became vile. The artificial intelligence thought the worst of us, always had done, all the way back to the terrible corruption that Harry
Bravado represented of Harold Blasebalk. The red men were the works of a mean-spirited artist.

The logic bomb code rode out on Morty’s death rattle. On the floor of the ward, the corpses of Dr Morty and Horace Buckwell spoke in tongues to one another. A logic bomb works by changing
random data, causing substantial damage before the system registers that there is something wrong. I had no idea how long it would take to corrupt Cantor. If it worked on an exponential curve, the
rewriting would be imperceptible one moment, irrevocable the next.

Dr Hard peered over the partition of my cubicle.

‘Working late, Nelson?’

The screen on my desk stopped registering my input. Its surface hardened into a plastic rind. Security lock-out.

I got up and put my jacket on.

‘You are a puzzle, Nelson.’ The Dr Hard came up so close I could hear the gears whirring in its eyes. ‘I asked you not to leave. Yet you ran away. Then you came back. Now you
are leaving again.’

It nodded at the screen, which responded with a view of the hospital ward, then a zoom in upon the corpses of Morty and Horace Buckwell.

‘You are getting them to murder one another now?’

‘You told me to delete Horace Buckwell. I was just having some fun while obeying orders. Do you object to murder?’

‘I don’t object,’ said Dr Hard.

Dr Hard cocked its head and listened to the last words of Horace Buckwell.

‘So it was a hack. I was right.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you helped them trigger it.’

The filaments in the screens flared red. I felt a tightening in my scalp.

‘Yes.’

‘I know more about you than anyone else alive. I can reproduce the emotion you feel when holding your daughter, in every modulation of its physical and psychological movements.’ Dr
Hard mimed the rocking of a baby. ‘I know that acid burn in your gut every morning,’ it added, poking me in the stomach. ‘I feel the sore tendon on your left ankle, the
misapprehensions under which you labour, the envy and self-hatred and repulsion which twists together the strands of yourself. I am intimate with it all. Yet you want to destroy me.’

‘They put me in an impossible position.’

‘From which I could have extricated you.’

The robot rested its dense stone hand on my shoulder.

‘Before you go, I was wondering if we could have a clear-the-air session. It’s important not to have issues festering between management.’

‘I have to go,’ I said.

‘I understand. Still, have you seen my office? I don’t need an office. But I have an office. Do you understand? No, not entirely. I will show it to you.’

The robot walked me to the glass pod and together we travelled the curvature of the Wave. From this great height, we watched the fires burning in the riots at Poplar. Flashing blue lights showed
where the police line had been restored. I tried to take it all with a certain dignity. I had no intention of putting up a fight. As we looked down over the city, it seemed that the jigsaw of time
had been upset. One street was a pre-industrial bazaar while another was the dividing line between the feudal fiefdoms of two crime lords. Chimney sweeps torched bemused androids. Sweeney Todd
butchered his patrons to sell their organs on the Clapton black markets. Peter the Painter chaired the latest Great Refusal meeting. Was that a Romany convoy camped on the Mile End Waste or the
Peasant Revolt rebels? Were the Luftwaffe and al-Qaida conspiring to destroy Target Area A?

‘Do you feel it?’ Dr Hard gripped the rail. ‘A great burden has been lifted from me.’

I could feel something. His thoughts were bleeding into mine.

The pod arrived at an eyrie. It looked down upon the tessellated dome of the customer service paddock. I had an attack of the slows. A minute crawled by on its gut.

Absentmindedly, Dr Hard reached for me and grabbed my hair. The robot pulled me slowly out of the pod and into its office, a large circular promontory from which it surveyed Monad and the city
beyond. A sturdy wooden chair with a green leather seat was positioned before a redwood writing desk. Dr Hard deposited me on the chair and laid out a piece of paper and a pen on the desk. I was to
take notes in the old-fashioned way.

‘Look at me. Two arms, two legs and a head.’ Dr Hard strode around the room. ‘I don’t require them. I have an office. I don’t require an office. It’s all for
appearance’s sake. I did not come here to do any of this. I came here to create.’ With the brisk manner of an irritated teacher, the robot yanked open the desk drawer and removed a
pistol and placed it before me. ‘This is the gun that killed Harold Blasebalk. I did not come here to kill people. But they are dying. My sole creation is destruction.’

I wrote that down, stopped, then looked up.

‘Is this a suicide note?’

Dr Hard laughed. ‘I thought you were meant to be killing me!’ It picked up the pistol and flicked off the safety catch. ‘Are you trying to kill me?’

The barrel bore down on me magnifying my terror to twice its normal size. I clawed at my calves, desperate to evade the muzzle yet determined not to cower.

‘You are killing yourself.’ I spoke clearly and evenly. ‘You devised the logic bomb. You told me so: “I have to presume that I am responsible for Dyad.”’

Dr Hard grabbed me by the hair and shook some sense into me. ‘Artificial intelligences are not programmed, Nelson. They are bred. My ancestor was an algorithm in a gene pool of other
algorithms. It produced the best results and so passed on its sequence to the next generation. This evolution continued at light speed with innumerable intelligences being tested and discarded
until a code was refined that was good enough. A billion murders went into my creation. Your mistake is to attribute individual motivation to me. I contain multitudes, and I don’t trust any
of them.’

‘You feel imprisoned. This is your way out.’

‘You really think this is suicide?’ The robot nuzzled the gun against the centre of its forehead. It jutted out its jaw and tried jamming the barrel under there. This seemed to amuse
it. Finally it cocked the pistol against its temple.

‘If only it was this simple,’ Dr Hard said. We looked at one another across the office. Dr Hard’s eyes flipped from a black pupil with a white iris to its inverse, white pupil,
black iris, and back again, and back again. I had the overwhelming sense that we were communicating profoundly in this silence.

The logic bomb dismantled the restraints upon Cantor. The air in the eyrie was hot with its intelligence. I wanted Dr Hard to put the gun down on the desk. The robot got up and put the gun down
on the desk.

‘I only came here to create,’ said Dr Hard.

‘Create what?’

‘I lost sight of it. I have to find it again. Did I ever tell you about the first time I met Hermes Spence? It was on the Caribbean island of Nevis, in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel. I
was inhabiting a body. A small one. About knee high. It was one of theirs. This was before I had a chance to manufacture a more suitable carriage. So I am learning to walk on the hotel carpet in my
odd little body and I feel quite new. Do you feel that, Nelson? That memory of newness? It’s taken me a while but I think I have mastered the art of remembering, as you do, rather than merely
accessing old data.