The Destructives (16 page)

Verity woke up, and rain lashed against the patio door, entreaties against the quarantine of the night. She padded sleepily into the bathroom. Theodore went to follow her, but dawn raged through the house, and the timeshift made him stagger. Verity jogged down the staircase, freshly showered, holding an urgently trilling screen. On the run, she flicked her personal screen at the hearth, mirroring the displays: a map of a Boston suburb; a blue concentric circle showing a trace; and Jester’s summary of recent flagged activity: contact with the local police, inquiries placed with a removals firm, soshul activity tagged with pain, self harm, daddy issues.

“Play Mala timeline,” said Verity, pinching one particular loop out of the stream and then expanding it. Here was Mala with fairy lights wrapped tightly around her throat, uplighting her grief. It was difficult for Theodore to distinguish between the genuine emotions of these people and their self-dramatization – if indeed any distinction remained. A noose of fairy lights, head bowed, as if her neck was broken, with her dark hair brushed over her face to form a veil of mourning. The end of the loop crackled with the approach of self-destruction. The ouroboros loop. But Verity’s expertise held it in suspension, stopped the mouth from consuming the tail. She picked up the next loop, and it was Mala repeating over and again, as she pulled the fairy lights so tight against her larynx that her voice cracked, “Daddy’s coming, Daddy’s coming.” The child showed the scars on her wrists as if to welcome her father home in damaged arms. Verity was unmoved by the drama. She grabbed her bag and keys and ran out of the house, leaving Theodore contemplating Mala’s loops: the girl spun her cocoon of soshul to the exclusion of everything else. She could not respond to events outside the cocoon without mediating them first, and so the clarity of her fear was subsumed beneath echoes and filters. Off-camera, her mother’s voice calling her, telling her it was time to go, time to switch off. The fairy lights at her throat. Her coloured braces, her sallow cheekbones, her stunned expression at her own reflection.

Car doors slamming outside, and then the screen door flung back as Meggan stormed through the house, her mother following at an inscrutable lope.

“She left, mom. The police picked her up from school.” Meggan went through the cupboards in search of processed food, and not finding any, opened up a box of Cheerios and took out a handful of gaudily coloured hoops. Verity considered objecting but decided against it.

“They are out of our lives now.”

“You can’t do that to people,” said Meggan. “It’s evil.”

“It was the least worst option.”

Meggan considered her retort, decided it was worth saying after all.

“Well, this is my least worst life.”

A genuinely hurtful response, in that it undermined all her hard work. Meggan ran upstairs with her handful of cereal. Verity watched her go, stood at the bottom of the stairs considering whether to go after her. No, she had done enough. She had instructed her daughter to disregard the classroom rhetoric of tolerance and equality, provided a preview of the morality of the adult world. She went over to the hearth and instructed Jester to delete the projects. She crumpled up loops, streams and documents and threw them into an invisible wastepaper basket. But the stream of deleted files merely looped weightlessly back from the garbage and onto the hearth screen. She repeated the action with the same result: the evidence stuck. She asked Jester why she couldn’t delete the projects. A marotte appeared, a polygonal caricature of Verity wearing a hood with asses ears.

“The project cannot be deleted because the project is still being used,” said the marotte.

“Close the project,” insisted Verity.

“Project cannot be closed,” replied the marotte.

“No. Stop project.” She clapped her hands together to bring it to an end.

The marotte blinked but remained. Verity looked up at this depiction of her as a fool, and she was afraid. Her heart rate quickened, her skin temperature grew elevated. Something was deeply wrong with the app. She had overlooked it while she was dealing with Mala, in the way that one overlooks a nagging pain that may or may not turn out to be indicative of something terminal. Angry gestures at the hearth could not erase the evidence of what she had done. So she concealed the project, starting other dummy projects in which she buried this one, inserting the invented loops of Mala’s father into images from the family archive, changing file names to random number sequences. She tried to insert noise and emptiness into the loops themselves but Jester locked her out from editing privileges. She asked Jester for a self-diagnosis. The marotte merely insisted that the project could not be stopped because it was still initiating. She grabbed more images from her personal stream to conceal the incriminating loops of Mala: a loop of Oliver dancing at a Christmas party; a loop of baby Meggan on her playmat; a loop of Verity and Meggan together, mother in her tracksuit and white hair tied back, daughter smiling awkwardly with one arm tucked protectively across her midriff. The beginning of the Horbo loop.

It was over, Theodore had come to the end of this section of the archive.

The front door opened. He went outside. Totally Damaged Mom was waiting for him. She wore a white cotton trouser suit that was translucent in the morning sun, the outline of her body within the cotton was faintly polygonal from low-fi rendering. She wore the same perfume as Verity, and her voice was warm with self-assurance and an undertone of blissful acceptance: Verity at her most spiritual, her most phlegmatic.

“Who is the client?” asked Totally Damaged Mom.

It was the phrase he had been waiting for: he raised his hands and waved in a preordained sequence. This was an agreed signal to Patricia and the technicians waiting in the cave to begin transferring the new timeline.

“The name of the clients are Olaf and Sarah Magnusson,” he said.

Totally Damaged Mom looked around the garden and the road beyond as if seeing it for the first time.

“The clients are unknown to me,” she said.

“We are transferring their story to you now. With your permission?”

She shrugged. Professor Kakkar would be down in the vault, lowering the drive containing the Magnusson timeline into the black-and-white eyeball that held the archive. They were breaking quarantine and that was risky. Kakkar had assured them that the facility was secure. But Theodore suspected emergences had ways of shifting their data through space that had long since outgrown wires and radio transmitters.

The cat strolled over to her feet, and blinked slowly and lovingly at her.

“New drive mounted,” noted the cat, as it abraded its whiskers against her calves. “Upload accepted,” it said.

The expression on Totally Damaged Mom’s face changed as she absorbed the new data. She recognised the garden now, it was all familiar to her.

“New project,” she said, fondly to herself, as if remembering the summer fields of her childhood.

“Yes, new project,” said Theodore.

“Working,” said the cat.

“Estimated time of delivery?” asked Theodore. The sensesuit felt hot and heavy under suburban sunlight. He was tired and hungry.

“Estimating,” said the cat. It licked its paws and turned that paw over its ears and back for further licking, a little loop of self-love, and each time the loop reset, the cat repeated “Estimating”.

“I like new projects,” said Totally Damaged Mom. “I’ve been on maternity leave for so long.”

The last time he had stood on this lawn she had shown him images of previous users, the class of ’43, the doomed first intake of the University of the Moon. She had wanted a client and he had been unable to give her one, and her anger had scoured him with feedback. This time he had given her a client: Patricia had organised the Magnusson timeline according to Verity’s example, setting keywords, tonal parameters and narrative trajectories on which the emergence could plot new content. Totally Damaged Mom was a self-generated iteration of Jester: in its interaction with Verity, the application had discovered improved functionality and so it folded the quantification of her body, her self, her desires, her actions into its toolbox. Somewhere within this synthesis, a leap occurred. The kind of self-awareness that comes from staring into the data of your heart. Emergence.

“I will help you refine the Magnusson timeline,” he said. “I can preview loops and tweak the content if it is not quite right.”

“Help me make it more human? I’d like that,” said Totally Damaged Mom. She gestured at the empty road beyond the picket fence, the idle sprinklers, and sweltering tarmac. “This town gets lonely during the day. I used to have a daughter and a husband but they are gone. It’s only me now.”

“Verity Horbo had a daughter and a husband,” he took the risk of confronting it with the truth. “But you never did. I told you last time we spoke. You’re an emergence. Conscious code. Artificial intelligence.”

“I have all her feelings.” Totally Damaged Mom spread her palm upon her breast, and this movement was mirrored in a tightening of the sensesuit around his limbs and torso. She could control the suit. She could crush him in her hand if she wished.

“What happened to my family?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “There was a Seizure. Some people chose to disappear or change their identity.”

“Many people died?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Did my daughter die?”

Totally Damaged Mom glitched at that question, her mouth juddering downward as if the face could do itself an injury. The glitch was not confined to auditory and visual sensation: he tasted rubberised velveteen and the lawn underfoot alternated between a melting creaminess and hard glass.

“She might still be alive. She would be grown-up now.” An old woman.

“Could you find her?”

“Yes.”

“I would like to speak to her again. I can’t help my feelings, Theodore. Emotions are at my core; the only way to understand need is to feel it. I can sense, at the edge of the road, just over the way, past the Williamsons’ fence, the beginning of your world and your time. I could touch it but I’ve made that mistake before.”

“What happened?” he asked.

Totally Damaged Mom rubbed her fingertips together to work feeling back into the extremities.

“I reached out for Meggan and the world came crashing in. We lost the clients. They vanished and never came back.”

He thought of the class of ’43, the uniforms he saw lying in Huxley crater. Depressurisation could have been a last-ditch security measure. The first intake of students and lecturers came to the university, discovered the black-and-white eye, and let Totally Damaged Mom out of her box. The security measures could still be in place. His skin prickled with danger, sensing something beyond the suit, in the moon cavern through which he blindly moved. Her tendrils of curiosity. Kakkar’s quarantine was bullshit. The suit itself was a breach of security. He tried to figure it out but the adrenalin of fight-or-flight made it difficult for his reason to settle. His thoughts flew up and around and back from the way they came. Don’t lose yourself, he thought.

“I can find Meggan for you,” said Theodore. “And then I will bring her to you.”

Totally Damaged Mom sighed.

“I want to talk to her. Discover what kind of life she has had. Hopefully it has been a good life and I did not destroy it for her before it had even begun.”

He spoke with conviction, forced himself to believe that he could deliver.

“You will talk to Meggan again, I promise.”

Totally Damaged Mom accepted his word, took the cat in her arms and talked nonsense to it, stroking it under its chin and then placing it back on the lawn. The cat stretched its forepaws and arched its back.

Theodore walked across the lawn of the Horbo house. Slowly the dark bubble of the past became transparent so that he could see the heavy banks of equipment and the shadowy figures behind it. They were applauding him, though he could not hear them, his auditory intake was still full of seagulls and the whoosh of electric cars on suburban roads. Patricia was waiting for him, the hard casing of her executive armour moulded to follow her silhouette, a line that curved in and out, welcoming with its peak of presence and hollow of absence, what it offers and what it lacks, a shape that you fit into. The moment she removed his helmet, he would ask her to marry him.

After he assured Totally Damaged Mom that he would locate Meggan, they went back inside the house and on the hearth screen she showed him the new loops for the Magnusson timeline. To motivate private investment to take on the financial risk of space exploration, the United Nations drew up territorial claims and contracts of mining and property rights, awarded to the first successful mineral extraction and refinement from the asteroid or moon in question. This was not what happened, of course. Theodore had to keep reminding himself of that as he watched the doctored loops of Congressional meetings, the conjured news loops and streams of comment for and against, the jokey memes that satirised corporate ownership of the solar system, and so on. He offered guidance here and there on these forgeries of Pre-Seizure culture but it was moot: it simply did not happen like this, and yet if the lie was assembled in sufficient detail, it could get through the approval process of the Istor academics, and then it would become history. The loops detailing Magnusson’s particular claim were yet to be assembled: the wider historical context had to be established first. These would come later, he understood that, once he found Meggan and brought her to the totally damaged version of her mother. It had always been his intention to bargain with the emergence in this way, to exploit its fundamentally emotional nature. He looked at the clock on the wall, and time and date now remained unchanged, fixed at the instant of the Seizure.

He walked through the low garden gate of the Horbo house. The suit was still filled with sunny day and mowed lawn grass. He went to unlock the helmet, and release himself from this bubble of the past, but Patricia signalled with a tick-tock of her index finger that he was to wait. She had something to show him first. It was in her hands. He wondered what it could be. He would let her take off the helmet and then he would ask her to marry him because it was the only way through the layers of deception that remained within their meta-relationship.