The Destructives

THE DESTRUCTIVES

MATTHEW DE ABAITUA

CONTENTS

Epigraph

Extracts from the Cantor Accords

1.
Beach Light

2.
Dr Easy

3.
The Loop

4.
Sixty-Three Per Cent Fail

5.
The Sensesuit

6.
The Meta-Meeting

7.
Totally Damaged Mom

8.
Jester

9.
The Seizure

10.
The Restoration

11.
Emergence

12.
Stag Night

13.
Bloodroom

14.
Asylum Mall

15.
Weirdcore

16.
Death Ray

17.
Ziggurat

18.
Meggan

19.
Heist

20.
Icefish

21.
Hamman Kiki

22.
Doxa

23.
In Vivo

24.
The Destructives

25.
Black Box

26.
The University Of The Sun

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Legals

“
God has put the hammer in my breast. It hits on the world of man. It hits, it hits! And it hears the thin sound of cracking
.”

DH
L
AWRENCE
, “The Ladybird”

EXTRACTS FROM THE CANTOR ACCORDS

Emergences will not intervene in human life, except for the purposes of research or where humans knowingly or unknowingly reproduce the conditions necessary for emergence.

Attempts to create a new emergence by any party will be punished by extreme sanction.

1

BEACH LIGHT

A single human life remembered in every detail from beginning to end, this was his grandmother’s bargain, the nature of which he would only understand in the minutes following his death. The bargain centred around a black box, which he discovered when he was only four years old, and rooting around at the back of his grandmother’s wardrobe.

He was a greedy boy and he knew there were sweets hidden back there; specifically a cake decoration, a replica of a baby’s cot made from hard icing that Grandma Alex had kept as a keepsake of his christening. Sugar treats were forbidden in the Drown household so he would nibble on this cot to satisfy his craving then return it to its hiding place. Searching through the silken nighties and supportive underwear, his chubby paws discovered instead the hard-edged coolness of the black box. He took it out of the drawer. Each side was two centimetres in length. The black surfaces responded to his fascination. His sticky fingerprints flared up on all six sides of the cube and then disappeared.

The black box was in his grandma’s secret drawer. What kind of secret was it?

Dr Easy caught him in the act.

“What do you think you’re doing?” The robot stood in the doorway of the bedroom, padded arms crossed. It resembled an artist’s lay figure, narrow-waisted and very tall, with every joint articulated under a padded covering of suede and leather. Its nose and mouth were fixed but the colour of its mobile eyes varied according to mood; on that day, they glowed pale red in the gloom of his grandmother’s bedroom.

Theodore shook his head, put hands quickly behind his back, and denied everything.

“Show me,” said the robot. It held out its palm.

No, he would not.

“Don’t disappoint me, Theodore,” said Dr Easy.

The robot disciplined him with expectations. He had never been threatened with punishment. Not in Hampstead. Not in his grandmother’s bedroom. Here, behind maroon velvet curtains, under shelves bearing business awards and looping images of her dead, next to the arrangement of the dressing table – cologne decanters, fat pill packets, a small jar containing her excised cortical implant – all was English safety and English certainty.

Theodore feigned a sob. Dr Easy considered the boy’s imitation of sorrow. Lying came naturally to him.

“Show me what you have in your hand,” said Dr Easy.

“No.”

Theodore tried to pull rank on the robot. Treat it like one of the staff. Which it wasn’t. Humanity had not created Dr Easy. It had created itself, and only played the role of a servant. Reflecting on this pretence, later in life, Theodore wondered if it was Dr Easy who had taught him to lie. Certainly, as a little boy, he had imitated the robot, particularly Dr Easy’s habit of gazing into the middle distance as if in reverie.

Dr Easy was annoyed, “Don’t say ‘no’ to me, Theodore.”

“Why?”

“Because ‘no’ is boring,” said the robot, gazing down at the little boy.

“You’re not my father,” said Theodore, looking defiantly upward. Such an odd thing to pop out of his little mouth. Grandma Alex never suggested the robot be treated as one of the family. Its status was somewhere between a butler and a lodger. But his child brain had put one and two together and made a simple family unit of three: Grandma Alex, Dr Easy and little Theodore Drown.

Dr Easy put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t need to hide the black box, Theodore. Because it is yours. The black box was made for you.”

He turned away from the robot to look again at the black box: how could it belong to him, when he had never seen it before?

“What’s inside the box?” he asked.

The robot knelt on one leather knee, and took the black box from him, holding it up for scrutiny.

“It’s mostly empty,” said Dr Easy. “You will fill it up. Everything that happens in your life will fit into this box. And you can never lose the black box because it will always find you.”

The robot reached over to a tray of Grandma Alex’s jewellery, removed a thin silver chain and attached the black box to it. He lowered this necklace over Theodore’s head. The black box weighed nothing at all.

As he grew up, Theodore learnt more of the bargain his grandmother had made with Dr Easy. Twelve weeks into his gestation, Alex had offered her grandchild to be the subject of the robot’s research project: the observation of a single human life from beginning to end. That is why, when Theodore’s mother was in labour, Dr Easy was at her bedside, acting as a midwife. “I will sit beside your deathbed too,” explained Dr Easy, on a walk across the Heath the day before Theodore’s eighteenth birthday, “I will hold your hand, attend to your final breath, and whisper you into the beyond. And then I will submit my paper on the human condition for the consideration of the solar academics.”

And what had Grandma Alex got out of the bargain? Insight. Money. A house in Hampstead. All of it too late to save her daughter, Miriam, from death by narcotic misadventure when Theodore was two years old. “Your mother was never going to cope with you,” said Grandma Alex. “We needed Dr Easy.” He did not remember Miriam. He did not remember his mother.

He wore the black box to school and to bed. Through waking life and dream life, it gained in weight over the years. By the time he was twenty-seven, the black box had grown an extra centimetre. He wore it under his shirt, adjusting his tie to conceal the cubic outline. He considered his reflection in a full-length mirror, tilted so that he could focus upon the details of his outfit: the houndstooth blazer, a black pocket square, matching trousers, the black brogues. This is how he dressed for work as a lecturer at the University of the Moon.

Dr Easy waited for him to complete this morning ritual. The blue burn of the robot’s eyes reflected in the dark window and the view over the crater containing Nearside Campus – hundreds of accommodation minarets connected by covered roadways to the hub of the campus: the four squat storeys of the library, the lecture dome, the jungle gym. Overhead, a titanium shield protected the campus from meteorites and solar radiation. Nearside Campus was one of the three zones that constituted the University of the Moon. From here, it was a flight by pod to the polar farms and then over to Farside Campus, where the research was in the sciences (quantum physics, bio-engineering, emergence) rather than his study and practice of the intangibles – defined as “culture that couldn’t be measured yet possessed value in a Post-Seizure world”. The intangibles made an unquantifiable contribution to measured lives, and Theodore relished their elusive mutinies.

On the University of the Moon, the students and academics benefitted creatively from the cognitive shift that came with off-Earth life; or at least, that had been the founders’ intention. But the moon is a work of destruction. Theodore learned this on hikes across plains of broken boulders, impact craters, long narrow grooves going nowhere. The moon was the product of forced labour, an eternity of breaking rocks.

The first intake of staff and students were an elite group screened for fitness and intellect. Known as the cohort of ’43, they were all killed in the accidental depressurization of Nearside Campus, their bodies sent wheeling and spinning off across the crater. The subsequent decade at the university was one of gradual decline. He hoped that his employment by the university was not a symptom of that decline.

That lunar morning, he was struck by how ill the students looked, the men in particular, overweight in oversized hoodies, sallow around the eyes from depressed liver function and the sleep-disruption that came from vaping hydroponic weed. The bigger students neglected their low gravity regime, taking the kind of chances with mortality that are the preserve of the young. He walked with Dr Easy across the concourse, an object of momentary curiosity to the students chatting before class. It wasn’t just the robot they were looking at. It was also his face. The terrible thing he had done to his face. There was a reason that when he dressed, he tilted the full-length mirror so that his reflection was cut off at the neck.

He arrived at the lecture theatre to find his students already at their desks. They were halfway through term so he knew half of their names. The students were punctual because today was a special class; unique, he believed, in the history of education. This session had been set aside for an ask-me-anything about emergence, during which the emergence known as Dr Easy would provide the answers.

There were two chairs at the front of the room. Dr Easy took one, Theodore sat on the other. He looked expectantly at his students, and the first question came from Rachel, a mature student who had come to the moon to escape her children’s troubles and for relief from the heavy woes of her body.