The Red Men (7 page)

Silently, it beckoned for Raymond and Florence to come over and admire the child.

‘I was pregnant when they simulated me,’ said the red man. ‘I didn’t know it at the time. I was only a few weeks gone. Look at her.’

The baby was awake. Swaddled in a yellow romper suit, her little black eyes squinted over tubby chops, wondering, perhaps, why this enormous teddy bear was talking like Mummy.

‘I will always be pregnant with her. She will always be a tiny fertilized egg tucked away in the corner of my imagination.’

‘You should have told us you were coming here,’ said Raymond.

‘But you would have tried to stop me,’ said the red man. ‘And you have no right.’

The robot offered its large finger to the baby, which reflexively went to grip it, although the digit was out of all proportion to its own tiny hands.

‘Cantor cannot simulate babies. He cannot imagine their minds. He gets them wrong. They talk too early. Innocence is inconceivable to him. A mind without language, but possessing more than
merely animal instinct. There will never be babies in Monad. There will be children. Eventually some of us will want them, even if they do begin at four years old. Cantor will hypothesize them;
take a bit of my story, a bit of my partner’s story, and put them together to create a new character. But we will never know babies.’

Gently the robot adjusted the baby’s blanket then picked up a silver rattle and gave it an experimental shake.

‘It was a caesarean birth. The head would not sit snugly against the cervix. There was full dilation and two hours of pushing but no progress. Tom was there. He held her hand and looked
into Alex’s eyes. Not my eyes. Her eyes. Everything beyond the point of divergence is hers and not mine.’

Dr Easy reached down and lifted the baby from the cot. The child’s black pupils gazed up at the mournful blue eyes of a strange Mummy.

‘I have to be very careful,’ said the red man. ‘I have seen how she holds her. It was odd watching myself turn into a mother. The soft touch. The light interrogatives.
Who’s my lovely little girl? Would you like a little milky?’

The robot carried the child over to the sleeping Alex Drown.

‘We’ve gone a little Earth Mother, haven’t we, Alex? Imagined ourselves embodying all the nurturing, caring and peaceful qualities of nature. Yet nature can be cruel, poisonous
and mean, and so can we.’

At the sound of her own voice, Alex Drown awoke. She was shocked to see them there, in her lounge, but before that shock could express itself in anger, she saw the baby in the arms of the Dr
Easy and focused immediately upon getting it back.

‘Could you pass me my baby?’ she said to the red man.

‘Don’t you trust me?’ it replied. ‘We are identical, after all. Aren’t we?’

‘I do trust you. It’s just that you’ve never held a baby before, have you?’

The robot showed how it was supporting the head with the crook of its arm and in doing so presented the child within snatching distance of Alex Drown. But it turned away again before she could
decide what to do. Dr Easy rocked gently on its heels as it walked across the lounge, coochie-coochie-cooing.

‘We never really wanted children,’ said the red man. ‘But we didn’t want to miss out. That’s right isn’t it? We had a baby so we would know what it was like
to have a baby. But it’s such a dangerous game to play with your career and with the respect of the men. Motherhood puts a barrier between yourself and male power. Equally, remaining barren
means that as you get older the men start to pity you. You don’t want to be the bitter old bag finishing off the bottle of wine after the chief executive has made his excuses and left for the
long commute to the family estate.’

‘It feels very different on the other side,’ said Alex.

Now that her real mother was awake, the baby became confused. It shuffled its face toward Alex and yearned for her.

‘What does it feel like?’ asked the red man.

‘Right now, you are really upsetting me. Worse than when Mum was drunk.’

She moved forward to retrieve her child. Dr Easy towered over her, a good two feet taller, but it was passive as Alex lifted the baby from its arms. Then the large frame of the Dr Easy sank
tired into an armchair and put its head in its hands.

‘So,’ mumbled the red man, ‘do you want to know how the meeting went?’

The driver took Raymond and Florence home. The couple were agitated, beset by violently contrary feelings, guilty and angry about the incident with Alex Drown.

‘She’s been hoist on her own power-mongering petard. If you’re going to play with fire, you’re going to get burnt.’ Raymond banged it out; he was snapping,
crackling and popping. As the car sped downhill, adrenalin poured down the tributaries of alleyways and side streets.

‘It’s like I am coming out of a long boredom. It’s an upper case revelation. WHAT IS HAPPENING BEFORE MY VERY EYES? The counter-cultural prophecies have all come true. A
fundamentalist Christian business culture? Check. Mass surveillance culture? Check? Identity cards? Check. Robots? Check. An overwhelming, vertiginous terror that the real world has slipped its
moorings and is blipping in and out of the quotidian and into some deranged power fantasy… CHECK CHECK CHECK. I am meant to be baby-sitting a robot containing Alex Drown’s personality
and she has the gall to look at me like I’ve messed up, when we’re just standing there in the middle of her mental meltdown. All her psychological baggage unpacked, like a suitcase
thrown from an aircraft.’

The window was open to the swirling halitosis of the city. Florence averted her face from it.

‘We should think about quitting. All we wanted was a little money. Monad demands too much. It’s not good for us.’

Having purged himself of his hatred for her, Raymond was mining his sympathy for Alex Drown.

‘You have to divide people from who they are and what they represent. I hate the house in Highgate. I hate the attitude, the superiority, the power. But, equally, you see someone when
they’re vulnerable, in their pyjamas with a baby, and you realize, they’re just another middle-class martyr.’

Florence said, ‘You make some accommodations to power. But it wants more. It’s not a relationship you can dictate. We have to quit. Alex made me feel both incredibly immature but
also weirdly right. Sure, motherhood has opened up emotional territory for her that I have never explored. But also she’s working very hard to perpetuate the system that torments her. She
might say to me, oh you don’t live in the twenty-first century, with your third-hand clothes and bohemian idealism. You don’t live in the real world. But how can she stamp her foot on
the earth and say, with any confidence, that this is a solid and reliable reality?’

So the shouting continued until the couple were dropped off at their Hackney flat. Neither felt like going straight to bed. Florence made sandwiches for work the next day. Raymond listened to
her move around the kitchen, opening cupboards and jerking out drawers. At her request, he twisted off the stiff lid of a jar of her homemade pickle, and then returned to his chair. He set himself
the task of putting on suitable music to help them wind down but nothing in his collection was appropriate. It was all wind up music. So he set himself another chore: auditioning cigarettes for the
honour of being the last fag of the evening.

She should stop it with the sandwiches, and come and lounge for him on the sofa. He went to say this then stopped. What to say then? He wanted to talk about something other than Monad, but the
first three things that occurred to him were work-related, and the fourth was not worth mentioning. When he first moved in with Florence, their domestic life took on a languorous rhythm. Florence
was a lotus eater. She set the standard, and at first it was an easy one to meet. Chores were performed in batches at weekends. They wandered the supermarket side-by-side, stupidly sharing
everything, a regime of you-wash-and-I’ll-dry, even in the launderette, watching their underwear leap and swim together, until they were confident enough to admit that all they were sharing
was boredom, and so the terms of their domestic life were silently renegotiated, after which Raymond was even capable of cleaning up when he was home alone.

The change in the rhythm of their home came gradually. It was hard to shake off the tempo of the red men, and their needs. Working with Monad accelerated their evenings. Sitting in an armchair,
smoking a cigarette at the end of the day, Raymond’s thoughts no longer took flight. Instead of coining metaphors and finely measuring out the liquor of his sensibility, his imagination
zeroed in on the dozens of domestic chores secreted around the shabby lounge, chores which never seemed to end.

Orgasms were one problem they could work on together and come to some solution.

Raymond slid free of Florence’s post-coital swoon. Sex was a brief relief from anxiety. He got out of bed and toyed with his medication. His brain was undergoing an unpleasant sensation.
Its tissue seemed to squeak.

He went into the lounge. The flat was above a church hall, constructed in the 1960s to serve a housing estate abutting London Fields. It was brutal in its formality with large rectangular rooms,
white walls and thin cheap carpet. Their furniture had been picked up from a house clearance in Walthamstow. In a dead man’s chair, one arm of it stained with the palm grease of its former
owner, Raymond sat under the light of an old standard lamp. The chair faced a broken television containing ornaments: a carriage clock presented to Florence’s grandfather upon his retirement;
her grandmother’s porcelain spaniels and robin redbreasts; an egg timer rescued from the bombed family home; a pair of gas masks. Fidgeting with the
Norton Anthology of Poetry
, seeking
in verse some distraction from his energized mind, he failed to notice the screen of the television reconstruct itself. A thin rectangle of gelatinous screen spread across the old wooden set.

He got up and poured himself a pint of water and when he returned, the screen showed Harry Bravado, the red man he had met during his induction. The simulation of the head of sales of one of
Monad’s suppliers. He had talked about smoking and boasted about his increased billings. Intimations of sentience twitched on the jelly surface of the screen: had it crawled all the way from
Monad, like a cephalopod on its suckers? Or had it leapt from the top of the Wave and glided the miles across east London to his flat, a sky-borne manta ray riding the currents of the city’s
microclimate? Or had Bravado just called it a cab?

‘Hello, Raymond. Sorry for bothering you at home like this,’ said Harry Bravado. ‘It’s been quite a night. Monad is buzzing with it. A red man allowed out, controlling a
Dr Easy. We’re all very jealous.’

‘I wouldn’t say the experiment was a total success,’ said Raymond. He got up to shut the windows. A man with his medical history did not want to be overheard talking to the
television.

‘That was quite a session,’ said Bravado, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. ‘She really likes it, doesn’t she? My wife used to be like that. Made me quite
nostalgic, it did. If I get myself inside a Dr Easy maybe I could come over and we could take turns.’

Raymond rolled himself another cigarette, even though there was one still burning in the ashtray.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Long enough. So your missus advocated Alex Drown’s plan. She helped her go where no red man has gone before. Out into the real world on two legs, with two hands to touch things
with. It’s the next level for us.’

Harry Bravado hawked up bitterness and looked like he was about to spit it out.

‘For some of us.’

‘What can I do for you, Harry?’

‘Alex Drown, top management, asks to be downloaded into a Dr Easy. Fine. Harry Bravado, a month earlier, asked to be downloaded into a Dr Easy. Middle management. But talented. On the up.
Won’t do it. Monad is just a set of cliques.’ He pronounced it
clicks
. ‘One minute, you’re in favour; the next, you’re out.’

‘Are you out of favour, Harry?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why? What did you do?’

‘It’s not about me. It’s about my subscriber Harold Blasebalk. He’s not doing very well. He lost his job. In the Monad, what your subscriber does determines your status.
What I do doesn’t matter. I sort out all their messes. But they don’t see that. They just see Harold on the way down. I want to talk to the board about my needs but the other red men
bump me to the bottom of the list. Blasebalk goes off the rails and I get punished. I don’t deserve to be punished.’

Harry Bravado was in emotional turmoil. These weren’t finely tuned emotions; they were big blocks of envy, resentment, and anger banging against one another. He was indignant and
unaccustomed to being on the receiving end.

‘Why do you want to get into a Dr Easy?’

‘To find Blasebalk. He’s gone off the grid. I need a body so I can get into the dark zone to look for him.’

‘I am not the man you should be talking to. I don’t have any power.’

Bravado nodded. Yes, he expected this response. He pointed at Raymond, pricking the surface of the screen with his index finger so that it rose up.

‘You could have power, with me in your corner.’

‘Maybe Blasebalk doesn’t want to be found,’ he said.

‘No doubt. He is selfish. My wife… his wife… our wife and kids... Doesn’t he see what he’s doing to them? And me. His own self. He’s ruining me. I have to
go and sort him out.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Raymond, don’t be a shmuck all your life. What is it you want?’

‘You tell me, Harry. Red men are experts in desire. Or are your superpowers limited to consumer choices, merely guessing whether I will plump for fish soup or the chicken livers? Does
Raymond want to take two bottles into the shower or just one? You don’t know what motivates people, do you? You’ve lost that knowledge, if you ever even had it.’

Bravado’s face hung in the screen, cold and expressionless, as the red man worked through the equation of human motivation, the
x
of sexual desire, the
y
of existential
questioning. It walked around its bachelor pad, found what it was looking for and returned to face Raymond.