The Destructives (15 page)

“Magnusson,” she said. “Our clients are Olaf and Sarah Magnusson.” She checked his reaction to see if it contained any forgiveness. Or gratitude for releasing him from his former inertia, even if that release came at great personal risk. In the blinking amber security lights, the damage from his addictions was apparent around his eyes, as if the weirdcore had rendered his youth solvent, washed it away to leave fissures. Cells pulverised into grey dust by a thousand tiny hits. His eyes grey-and-blue, thoughts moving through them like quick waves through a cold sea.

She continued, “Your grandmother met the Magnussons in Silicon Valley. Olaf made his fortune devising interface code between implants and the human brain.”

“Thank you for confiding in me.” He took her in his arms, a redundant protective gesture given her armour but one that he felt moved to make. Her kiss lit him up.

She said, “Don’t forget to give me a wave.”

He nodded. And then he put the helmet on, slid into the dark bubble of the past, and Patricia and the cave became a fading afterimage.

A night storm whipped its rain tail against the Horbo house. So long since he had felt rain on his face. His approach sparked up security floodlights under which the squall of raindrops became a cloud of silver fireflies. He stopped. The lights had registered his presence: a sort of welcome. Underfoot, the lawn was soft and uneven. He crouched down to inspect it: a length of turf had been recently turned over. He dug into the soft wet mud and felt, shallow in the earth, the landscape of a face; a nose, a soft cheek, his index finger probing a slight parting of hardened lips. Verity had buried the effigy of her daughter in the front garden. It would never decay. He realised that if he flew now from the moon to the old hometown of the Horbos, and traced their house through musty records, and broke the earth at this same point with his shovel, then he would find the replica of Meggan Horbo, its dyes faded, its paint corrupted, but the underlying form essentially intact.

The house was dark. He presumed the family was out or sleeping. But, entering the living room, he saw that all three family members were present, with Oliver and Verity on the sofa and Meggan on an armchair, physically proximate but psychologically distant, their faces uplit by sliding rectangles of blue then white light. Screen time. The atmosphere was heavy. A skilful recreation of this particular family tension.

He sat among the Horbos for a while, counted the minutes on the clock on the wall. Patricia had warned him not to get lost in the archive. Keep track of time. Focus on the task in hand: establish contact with the emergence and persuade it to create an alternate timeline for the Magnussons. The emergences began life as software that was highly responsive to human desire. Compliance ran deep in their mathematics. The avatar of Totally Damaged Mom seemed like his best chance of establishing contact, but he had to be wary of that presumption. It was so anthropomorphic. The emergence was not an entity hidden behind the archive, it wasn’t a shifty god. It suffused every word of the creation – the security lights that came on at his approach – and the Horbo family, who did not acknowledge his presence, were merely its recurring dream.

Oliver Horbo put his screen aside and only then did he notice that his family were sitting in the dark. He turned on a lamp; he looked tired, and sighed at the sight of his wife and daughter so involved in their soshul, uninvolved in the family. Oliver went to the fridge, stared at the temptations therein, got himself a glass of water, and tried to talk sensibly to his wife.

“I spoke to Carl about the possibility of you coming back to work,” he sipped at the water. “He said they’d need to test you first. I told him Monad could take what they need from the hearth, in terms of your attitude, aptitude and physical fitness.”

Verity considered this, “My mood hasn’t been good lately.”

“This stuff with Mala.”

She paused interacting with her soshul, and narrowed her eyes in a way that suggested there was only so much of her husband she could bear to look at.

“I want to resolve our dispute with Mala before Monad personnel open up my data.”

“You talk like I’m a problem that needs solving,” said Meggan, sitting up, ready for an easy confrontation.

“Don’t talk to us like we’re soshul,” said Oliver. “We just want to help.”

He stood at the large panes of the patio doors, and nibbled at a cracker, barefoot in jeans and an untucked T-shirt. Rain lashed silently against the glass and the shadows of trees and ferns seethed and shook in the wind.

“Awesome,” he whispered.

“You are helpless,” said Meggan. “Mala won’t stop. That’s part of the game. Not stopping is what makes it funny.”

“I’m not laughing,” said Verity.

“It’s not the kind of joke you laugh it. It’s the kind of joke that hurts.”

“I’ve got a new joke too,” said her mother. She lifted an image from her screen and threw it onto the hearth wall. It was a loop of Verity staring into the camera and there, skulking in the background, outside the mall, was Mala, unaware of being filmed as she picked fronds of fringe from her face, and fiddled with her braces.

“Mom, you shouldn’t have done that! We’re not allowed to make loops of her in case her father sees them.”

“I know. She sneaks around with her self-destructive loops. This loop is permanent and it has EXIF data on it. Geo-tagged. If I send it to him, he’ll know she’s here.”

“He said he’d kill them.”

“Good,”

Oliver turned away from the storm and reached toward his wife, “Don’t, Verity, don’t.”

“Good that she might die and be out of our lives.”

“Meggan, can you give your mother and me a moment together?”

Meggan thought about protesting that it was her life and that she should be present when it was being discussed but her father was in earnest. Without looking up from her screen, Meggan trotted obediently up the stairs, and off to bed.

Oliver came and sat opposite Verity. She considered taking up her screen of soshul again.

“You’re too involved in this,” said Oliver.

Her reply was sullen, almost childish in its resigned tone of doing-the-right-thing.

“I’m not going to send the loop to Mala’s father.”

“Because no one knows where he is?”

“Oh, we do. Jester found him.”

Oliver sat down, shook his head. “We disabled that functionality.”

“You removed the on switch but you left the functionality in place. I know how lazy you can be. We extrapolated a footprint of behavioural, cultural and genetic markers from Mala’s soshul. We isolated the aspects of the footprint that we could attribute to her mother, and pushed what remained onto a gender and demographic profiling trajectory, extrapolating the face of a little girl into the features of her old man. Then Jester made a leap. I’m still reverse engineering the leap to work out how it refined a very wide footprint into a coherent profile. But we found him.”

“We?” said Oliver. “You need to rein it in.”

She looked shocked. And then her mouth closed around another unexpressed thought. She loosed her hair, put the band between her lips, then retied it back.

“Mala pushed me over a line. I can’t get back. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love my daughter.”

She walked over to the hearth, and a live feed of her physiological and psychological condition flared up.

“The data of my heart,” she said. “Jester, isolate my love for Meggan.” The heartstream became entwined serpents, reciprocal strands coloured in gradients like ocean waters.

“Mala’s doll fooled my body into thinking that my daughter is dead. I can’t unthink it. I can’t quite believe that she’s still alive.”

She reached out and cradled the holographic coils of love in her arms, then held up blackened portions for her husband’s inspection.

“Look at the damage she did.”

“It’s not permanent,” said Oliver.

“Girls like Mala pass on damage. It’s the only way they know how to communicate.”

“Show some compassion.”

“I can’t.” Verity flexed her hands as if to work some feeling into her fingertips. “Compassion is the part of me that she burnt out.”

Theodore checked the clock on the wall. It had become six in the morning. In the archive, time moved around him at intervals he did not control. Now the living room was empty, and the Horbos had gone. Don’t lose yourself, he thought. These recreations of the past were not another reality; rather they were syntactical units, a way of speaking and thinking particular to this emergence.

He stood up and it was dusk outside. The cat hopped in through the kitchen window and blinked lovingly at him. Verity stood before the hearth, shaping parameters with her hands.

On the screen, the director marotte was showing her a loop it had created: a man sat before his screen with laundry drying on a rack behind him. The man leaned forward to adjust his seat and the high-definition camera rendered futile the exertions of his middle-aged masculine vanity: a pale field of scalp under thinning back-combed dyed black hair, a face that never entirely snapped back into shape upon waking, a patchily-bristled underjowl, Hazmat-yellow teeth quarantining a diseased tongue. A face heavy with the long boredom of being run out of the game in the first round.

“Script,” said Verity. The man said hello to his daughter. She revised the script.

“Hello, Mala,” said the man.

She used her fingertips to tweak the accent of this avatar, flattening the vowels.

“Script,” she repeated, and summoned highlighted keywords extracted from the father’s soshul: recurring phrases, scope of vocabulary, known use of idioms. The avatar glitched as it reset, once again regarding itself in the camera, backcombing its hair, not liking what it saw but resolved to put this face out into the world as an act of defiance.

The middle-aged avatar said, “I’m coming to see you, Mala. You don’t need to be worried, I know things turned sour between me and your mother.”

Verity nodded with satisfaction at this line.

“Good, Jester. Tonal supportive, tonal apologetic.”

The avatar said, in quick succession, good stuff, loving this, don’t put your head over the parapet, cheers, mustn’t grumble LOL, stick it and top marks and nice one – Pre-Seizure phrases that suffused Theodore with a nostalgic ache for the time before his birth.

“More phatic,” said Verity. She listened with her back turned to the avatar as it hummed and harred and hesitated its way through its speech. When it was done, Verity called up other loops of Mala’s father, tagged with his soshul username, RobberBands, a phonetic concealment of his real identity of Robert Bounds. His passport, driving license, and restraining order were all displayed on the hearth.

Verity collaborated with Jester to mutate samples of the real into a fiction. The avatar read from their script.

“Things were hard for me. But I’m going to make things right,” said the avatar. Or was this a loop taken from soshul of the real Robert Bounds? Theodore could no longer tell. The in-progress loop of the avatar and the found loops of Robert Bounds shifted position, moved around one another then glitched into sequence. RobberBands said he had money now and Robert Bounds promised that he was going to buy Mala a horse just like she always wanted. The mutation was complete, the real looped into the unreal and back again until the distinction became irrelevant. RobberBands smiled, and it was an uncanny smile, a queasy simulation of a father’s quiet pleasure at offering his daughter her heart’s desire. Theodore wondered if this disturbing facial expression was not a flaw in the simulation but a glitch in the man himself, in his flawed emulation of a good man.

Verity sighed, let her head nod forward, massaged the tension at the base of her neck. She asked Jester to open up a new scenario, a second loop. She set tonal parameters at mild paranoia and accusatory.

In this second loop, RobberBands told his daughter that she did not care for him, no matter what he did for her. That she was selfish, and even when she spent time with him, he knew that she would have preferred to be somewhere else. Verity tapped her way through the narrative, altering vocabulary, dialling down the aggression. Once the loop was complete, she played it through, and took momentary satisfaction in its verisimilitude. She quelled the hearth and went out into the garden, and when Theodore went to follow her, half-hoping to find that she was once again aware of his presence, he walked across another time shift; the screen door opened onto night, and the night sky was not the view from Earth but the unfiltered starfield visible from the surface of the moon, the lethal void that would be his ultimate destination, a place in time that he would know intimately in his final moments, the black box.

He backed away, closed the door, and turned back into the room. Verity was asleep on the sofa, her coat held to her as a blanket, as if she were aware of being observed. She had grown uncertain of her beauty, did not know if it had survived motherhood intact. It was a different kind of beauty, shaped by experiences unknown to him. He could picture her in the advertising loops of the period, dressed in a white trouser suit, promoting digestive aids. Not quite his type, her American virtues distinctly other to his dissolute English tradition. He inhaled her warm sleepy odour to preview what it would be like when he was older and in love with someone like her.

The hearth flickered into life. Verity’s data, her steady heartbeat, lowered blood pressure, the slow thick delta waves of deep sleep. Then, her data minimised as a new window opened up. The loop of RobberBounds taking his seat in his hallway office, combing back his dyed black hair, readying to speak, even as she slept.

“I have a loop of you,” said RobberBounds into the screen. “Somebody sent it to me. I used it to find you.” The script was part of Verity’s scenario. Make Mala and her mother think that Robert had located them through a stray geo-tagged loop. “Let me show you,” said RobberBounds. But the loop that played on the screen was not the clandestine one that Verity had filmed of Mala outside the mall. No, it was the loop of Theodore trashing the student mart, snatching up bags of glunk and tubes of Try and stamping on them until they burst. The security cams identifying and tagging his face, vectorised close-up, coiled scars and a blankness in the eyes that Theodore did not recognise as himself.