The Destructives (11 page)

“We should limit her exposure to soshul.”

“And punish her for the actions of this girl?”

Oliver, the weary husband, remembered that this was a domestic problem, and not a work one, so he did not have to come up with a solution. His manner shifted, and he adopted a slanted, listening posture.

“What do you want to do?” he said.

This approach annoyed his wife.

“You don’t have an opinion on this? Really?”

“I’m trying not to be angry about it.”

“We should be angry.”

“This girl sounds troubled.”

“Yes. Murderers are troubled. Thieves are troubled. Bullies are troubled.”

“Let the principal speak to her. Then we’ll see if the loops stop.”

“You should see the way Meggan’s data aggregates on the hearth. It’s deep blue.”

“I’ll take you all out at the weekend. Dim Sum. She’ll eat that.”

A flicker of distraction on her husband’s face, something in the office wanting his attention.

“How’s the team?” she said.

“Still missing you,” he replied.

“I want to come back to work,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’ve been feeling so off the pace I couldn’t imagine coming back to Monad. Motherhood wrecks you, physically and mentally. But since we got the hearth, I can feel my mental muscles hardening up. I got my pelvic floor back and now I need to work on my psychic floor.”

“We could do with another income again.”

“I’m interested in some of the newer mining and pattern matching tools. Could you upgrade my permission? I’d like to train myself up.”

He was distracted. He did it. Verity took the permission and turned it into an icon, then placed the icon in her invisible bag.

“Give my best to everyone there,” she said, smiling. “And tell them to watch out. I’ll be back on campus kicking ass before they know it.”

She smiled all the way to the end of the call, and then as soon as her husband was off the line, she reached into the invisible bag and removed the icon he had given her. She opened it up on the hearth. A toolkit. One tool in particular caught her eye. A tricorn hat. Jester. She initiated the program. Jester asked her to select a username. She slouched back in her seat, thought for a moment, and then keyed in her new name. Totally Damaged Mom.

At midnight, with all the family members sleeping, Theodore returned to the guest bedroom, took off his sensesuit and gathered his notes. He was reviewing them when Patricia visited. She opened the bedroom door, said hi, removed her comms from her earlobes and fingers, unclipped her protective collar, sat lightly on the edge of the bed, and hefted off her boots.

“Productive day?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Do you want to go over my notes?”

She went through his notes.

“And what happened after she chose her username?”

“Jester requested access to the hearth. She refused. The program booted her out again. A dead end. Then she went through her own soshul, made herself a salad, and went out. The hearth went to sleep so I couldn’t follow her. I waited in the house alone all afternoon, and then she returned with Meggan. Clearly something had gone on at school. The daughter could barely look at her mother. A general air of shame. Verity ate alone, watched TV, went to bed. Her husband came back about an hour ago. He went straight to bed. I knocked off.”

“We have a hundred hours until sun up. Just in case you are losing track of time.”

“Why don’t we mothball the house and pick up the project on the next lunar night.”

She stretched and pointed her bare feet.

“I don’t think so. I can’t keep this locked down. Kakkar and his team are leaky.”

He sat up on his elbows. Part of him was prepared to argue with her. But he didn’t want to jeopardise the sex. In her sheer black body suit, she was irresistible. It was more than he could stand. She liked it when he bit her, when he gave every sign of not being able to control himself. What began as the imitation of savagery became the real thing; he went at her quickly, then reared back to recover. He fed on her delight in controlling him, because that control would mean nothing to her unless he was strong and worthy and difficult. Still, in this moment of recovery, he chose to remind her, in the way he stopped and touched her forehead, and kissed her, and moved deeper within her, that he was indulging her fantasy of controlling him just for the duration of the sex, and that it meant nothing in what remained of their real lives.

Afterwards, he went to the bathroom and washed his face. He didn’t like the house when he was out of his sensesuit, its flimsy fixtures and fittings, and artificial light illuminating the moon cave. The windows still had tape on them. A nagging sense that their sex had been indecently loud. That he might have woken the Horbos. A sense he could not shake even though he knew they existed only in a deep and encrypted past.

He went back into the bedroom.

“What is
our
metric of success?” he asked Patricia.

“Orgasm,” she replied.

“I mean, for the project. How will I know when I’m done?”

She sat naked on the bed, her knees pulled under her chin. She was always stretching, never dormant.

“I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

“If time is short then I need to know specifically what I’m looking for.”

Patricia reached over the side of the bed, and pulled out his notes from the day. She plucked out one in particular, concerning Verity’s acquisition of the Jester program.

“This is what we’re interested in,” she said. “Focus on this.”

He took the paper from her, read his own handwriting.

“Totally Damaged Mom.”

“The username appears in the metadata of the Horbo loop.”

“I didn’t know the Horbo loop had metadata.”

“It has taken years for Kakkar to reconstruct it.”

She found her underwear and pulled it on, shivering as she did so. “You’ve made progress. But there is more to learn. I don’t want to speculate what exactly because speculation can determine discovery. But this is our glimpse into the black box moment of the emergence. If we can reconstruct a chain of causality then we don’t have to think of them as emergences any longer. We will know who made them. Where they came from. How they happened. This knowledge could be highly valuable.”

“Valuable to who?”

“Valuable to anyone with dealings with the emergences.”

He looked quizzically at her, weighing up the slight naked female form on his bed.

“The Cantor Accords forbid collaboration between humans and emergences.”

“Yet you have a relationship with Dr Easy.”

“The doctor is merely an observer.”

“You know that there is no such thing as mere observation. I mean, I set out to dispassionately observe your work and look at the mess we’ve got into.”

She pressed her feet into her boots and adjusted the scales of her armoured legs. Her breasts and arms remained naked. She climbed onto him. The pressure between their bodies was the same as the pressure he had felt through the sensesuit, just before he was expelled from the archive.

“I will take risks for you,” he said.

She pulled on a sheer black top, and then something amusing occurred to her. “Should I be jealous of Verity Horbo? Are you developing feelings for her too?” She felt him, weighed up any passion that remained within him. “You are keeping two women in the same house. Now that is risky.”

“You’re trying to distract me, are you afraid of my questions?”

“No, I’m bored of them. I will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.” She climbed off him and resumed dressing. “Anything more will prejudice your work. In this particular case, speculation could obscure discovery, it’s as simple as that. Another hundred hours in the sensesuit. Don’t waste time sleeping. We’ve both got work to do.”

She closed the bedroom door behind her, and he listened to her walk through the house, how it sounded so brittle and hollow compared to the deep woody tones from within the sensesuit.

8

JESTER

He was alone again in the Horbo house. He lay on the bed, closed his eyes, felt the pull of sleep, resisted it, consoled himself with memory. He remembered talking to his grandmother about her implant. With the implant she did not need a sensesuit. Archives unfurled directly into her consciousness. He knew that during the Seizure, she had lost control of her implant and had a reality imposed upon her. She did not share the specifics with him, except to say that in this imposed reality she had played the role of a nurse in a lost battle and that even though it was scary, when it was over, and she came out of that living story, the separation was painful. “The unhappening of it all made me peculiarly unhappy,” she explained.

Her generation told stories about the Seizure. They told them to one another late at night and in confidence, stories pockmarked with hesitancy and shared allusions that made them difficult for outsiders to follow. As a boy he was surprised by this reluctance to share; if he had a war story like they did, then he would make loops of it all day long.

“Not everyone is proud of what they did in the Seizure,” said his grandmother. “It made people realise they weren’t as good or as right as they thought they were.”

“Were people punished for what they did?”

“No. We chose restoration over retribution. A veil was drawn. The emergences helped us forget.”

His remembering became dreaming. Conversations he might have once had. He was saying “But what happens if you lose yourself, Grandma?” and she replied “But that begs the question: what is there to lose?” And then Dr Easy was there, long leather arms reaching out for him with thick seams like the surface of his sensesuit. “What
are
you?” said Dr Easy, with such urgency that he awoke, in order to answer that question.

Headless in the gloom, the sensesuit reclined, partially inflated, on a chair. Along the seam of the neck section, there were several dark tendrils, each about ten centimetres in length, flexing in the air, like tar underwater. This was new. He raised himself on his elbow to take a closer look and the tendrils quickly withdrew. He got out of bed to inspect the suit more closely. The exterior of the suit was crisscrossed with seams forming a surface of quilted panels. The interior was a rubber-like satin so soft it was almost liquid. Between this layer and his skin the air could be heated or chilled to match simulated atmospheres; or, if the suit was tasked with simulating human touch, this layer of liquid satin could emulate the gentle compress of lips, fingertips, or a firm handshake. He hadn’t seen this layer move outside the suit before. He turned the suit around, looking for more of these tendrils but they had vanished without trace.

He put the sensesuit back on and sat on the edge of the bed, holding the empty helmet in his hands as if contemplating his own decapitation. The exterior of the helmet was inflated in various sections, and beneath these large bubbles, he felt a resin shell, the only hard piece in the armour, for protection if he banged into something while moving around the archive. Early sensesuits had not been designed for movement, so the user experience omitted proprioception – the sense of the body moving through space – preventing full immersion into archives. Because he could walk around the physical replica of the Horbo house as he explored the archive, then his experience of that archive was rich and granular, but that veracity came at a price; although rationally he could easily tell the real from the merely preserved, more primitive aspects of him were fooled by the archive.

He sniffed the helmet. The padded headband was musky. He engaged the sensory feed of the suit without putting the helmet on. His legs felt the warmth of sunlight upon them. He was halved – his body enjoying morning light in the archive, his head bowed under the weight of moonnight.

Patricia had teased him about his feelings for Verity. He was developing an attachment to her, a feeling he had not yet calibrated: the mother thing. His mother had died when he was two years old. He could not remember what it was like to be mothered. He turned the helmet over. It was protective, intimate. The front interior was a holographic theatre. His grandmother Alex had used her money and social power to raise him; she was fond of him, he was sure of that, but he knew that she would never have sacrificed anything for him. In the minutes of unshakeable dread that constituted a weirdcore hangover, he would think badly of his grandmother, convince himself that Alex had taken him in due to her guilt over the narcotic misadventure that killed his mother.

He had talked to Patricia about her upbringing. She mentioned the attributes of her father that she had internalised – discipline, self-reliance, humour – and the attributes of her mother that she had externalised, the faults and failings that were to be avoided. Patricia spoke like a man and walked like a woman. Verity was more maternal, and in observing her, he was also discovering the counterpoints or paradoxes of mothers, their ruthless compassion, fierce tiredness, passive strife.

Verity demonstrated these complex virtues but there was something else within the archive, alive to his presence, a gravitational pull, not Verity but something like her, an untempered emotional intensity that he could feel through the layers of the simulation. He felt its presence in the way the cat moved around him, the way the encryption opened up, the selection of quantified moments he wandered through. The archive wanted him to use it.

He put his head into the helmet. The satin drifted away from his skin leaving behind the smell of floor wax, dust motes, and the vented detergent vapours of a clothes dryer drifting back into the house through an open window. Layers of encryption shifted and then he was back in the archive.

A scream from downstairs. Not a good-time scream. Verity screaming, what did you do,
what did you do
? A mother’s fierce fragility. Crisis in the house.

Acting on instinct, he ran from the bedroom, down the stairs. The front door was open and on the porch he could see Verity Horbo’s sobbing back. She was kneeling over a body. Meggan. Her daughter. Theodore felt uncertainty in his chest and fingertips, the instinct to flee bad news before he became infected by it. He stood fast. This wasn’t his life. It was an archive. All over long ago. And so he had to look.