The Destructives (18 page)

“Let’s seal the deal,” she said. She shifted around on her knees. “I want to be clear about our terms. You can do anything you want to me. But you do it only to me. We forsake all others for this. No exceptions, and no forgiveness. Only
this
.”

Afterwards, Patricia slept heavily from the wine and the exertion of the day. He went around turning off the lights, drawing the curtains, readying the lodge for sleep even if he felt an unwelcome nervousness in his chest, a long-forgotten feeling that he thought he had thoroughly quenched with the years of weirdcore. Not so. His body had not been entirely subdued by all that abuse, and was learning how to fear again, now that he was part of something he didn’t want to end. He opened the lodge door, sat on the stoop, listened to the sounds of the night: owls answering one another across the forest, the rustling of treetops, the quiet footsteps of his robot moving through the undergrowth, its two luminescent hyacinth-eyes fireflying through the shadows.

After consummating their marriage, all that remained was to consummate their business relationship. Patricia dissolved her consultancy to set up a new partnership with Theodore. She did not take his surname, retaining Maconochie as the name had always been good for business. He waited for her at the breakfast table: a white linen cloth, silver cutlery, a toast rack containing cold dry toast, a small glass of orange juice and a Scottish newspaper, printed in the vintage style to dignify the daily briefings and counter-briefings of power.

The editorial was conservative, drawing the reader’s attention to the danger of various novelties. The cover loop was a fleeting image taken from the passenger window of a moonliner. The same one he and Dr Easy had travelled on to return to Earth. The loop was of a golden streak, a flicker, that when slowed by a factor of ten thousand, turned out to be a spaceship of some sort, hard to tell with the blurring and the low resolution. A spaceship of unprecedented speed on a flightpath from the University of the Sun and out to the solar system. A spaceship created by the emergences. The paper’s opinionist maintained that the Cantor Accord protected mankind against the disruptive effects of such a technology, and that it was further proof that the parties calling for a “breaking of the ark” formed after the Seizure were misguided.

Patricia came down to breakfast in her executive armour. He showed her the loop of the spaceship.

“Solar sailship,” she said.

“You know about this?”

“The design is human. Pre-Seizure. The sail is tens of nanometres thick. Beryllium sprayed onto carbon nanotubes. The emergences will only build what humanity has already imagined. They are not creative. We provide the pattern, they have the resilience and persistence to build it.”

“Creativity is not so special. Dr Easy
creates
.”

“Within established parameters. I believe true creativity – the blinding flash of light in the dark, the new synthesis – scares them.”

He held the loop of the spaceship up to the light. “If this craft could support human life then it’s a dream come true.”

“A dream and truth they will not share with us.”

She took out a screen and called up her agenda for the day.

“We need to decide on a name. For our business. You are the expert in intangibles. What would you suggest?”

“A small agency needs an aggressive name. I’m working on a short list: We Are Your Enemy, The Violators, Black Box.”

“Lengthen your short list. Next on the agenda. Wedding presents.”

“I haven’t unpacked them yet.”

“I have. Pook sent us a china set.”

“Vintage?”

“Cheap shit hot from the assemblers in the asylum mall. But he personalised it for us.” She reached into her bag and removed a grey plate. When she turned it over, there was a loop playing at the centre. The Horbo loop, Verity clutching Meggan to her, over and again.

“You know him better than I do,” she said. “Does this mean he’s found her?”

He took the plate from her. He could hear, dithering away in the foundations of his heart, long-buried fear. He thumbed his scars, handed the plate back to her to return to her handbag.

He said, “It’s not easy getting messages in and out of Novio Magus. And you did ask him to be discrete. Yes, I think he’s found her.”

“In which case, we should move things forward.”

She swiped her planned agenda aside, clearing the calendar, initiating a prepared project plan.

“The client will want to discuss next steps,” Patricia exhaled so that she was focused and still. “This is it. This is the account on which we build our empire.” The screen chimed. She looked at the notification, could not stop looking at it.

“They are already on their way.”

“The client is coming to us?”

Patricia read the information flowing into her calendar. Coordinates in time and space for the meeting, a nondisclosure agreement, provisional contract terms disavowing legal responsibility, meta-meeting criteria concerning dress, body language and noncritical conversational topics, suggested attitudes. A strong warning that Dr Easy was not to accompany them.

After a couple of minutes of scanning through the legal prep, she spared the attention to answer Theodore’s question.

“The client maintains a mobile base of operations,” she said.

“How mobile?”

The geotag for the meeting was deliberately vague, covering an area from Loch Leven and the Mamore Forest in the North all the way south to Glen Etive. Wild land.

“Let’s find out.”

He first took weirdcore just because it was there, another obstacle to traverse in the assault course of narcotic experimentation. The drug had been designed to combine the mood-levelling benefits of tranqs with the neurological novelty of tryptamines. The effects were profoundly different. The user does not comedown after a weirdcore shift. Comedown implies descent from a height. The user
deepens
. The weirdcore shift is from the depth of ordinary being, the familiar z axis of emotional states, memory and philosophical and moral abstractions, to an intoxicating
shallowing
. The user becomes an x axis of surface. Weirdcore flattened him and then joined him up to the surrounding surfaces; during the ritual, the scarring of his face was nothing more than the marks of a knife on a chopping board.

It was as if there was a level of consciousness in all things. A much shallower consciousness than attained by the human mind, but the capacity to experience existed nonetheless, not merely in animals and other living beings but in rivers and rocks. Weirdcore reduced the complexity of the user so that they existed on a comparable level to the dregs of all things.

As the weirdcore wore off, the user waded from these shallows back to the deeper fathoms of being. During this hour of transition, consciousness felt like a poor fit. Like he’d lost weight and consciousness was baggy around the middle. Consciousness did not bother to render the rooms of his home in detail, but rather spliced together a model of it from memory, and then smeared the whole sensory experience to obscure the edit. Consciousness did not bother with the edges, focused only on what was central to the goals of the organism in that moment. Highly conscious beings inhabit a fiction. True realism is only available to the earlier stages of consciousness. On a weirdcore shift, he was breaking rocks along with the rest of reality. A weirdcore shift was a taste in the realism of neverlivedness. It induced granularity without abstraction, emotional dissociation, until the user was just another barnacle on the big balloon of space-time.

His calmness during the moonquake and the decompression of the moon cavern were symptomatic of long-term weirdcore use. Weirdcore’s shallowing affected moral judgment, as it was bound up with fear in a way that he did not fully understand. Morality was so intangible.

Also, self-deception was a feature of consciousness, not a bug; it was possible that he was using the side effects of prolonged weirdcore use as justification for acting out of self-interest.

Dr Easy called consciousness the Ministry of Lies. “Some of the colleges would like to break with the human mode of self-reflective consciousness altogether,” it explained. “There are other points on the spectrum of consciousness; we do not have to limit ourselves to the propaganda of the self.”

This phrase returned to him as the Land Rover crested a hill and bounded into the wild highland, the sun high and blinding behind mountain peaks trailing pennants of cloud, the car reverberating with vintage electronic music: Pre-Seizure, technology filtering the voice, digital emulations of analogue sounds, dating from a culture that was excited by blending the human and the digital.

Patricia was navigating. She muted the glitchy orgasmic gasps and burbling synthetic brooks of their music. Off-road turning in five hundred metres. They were getting close. Game face required. He turned carefully onto the mountain track, back wheels popping in and out of a peaty hollow. They drove deep into the glen. He peered up the mountain.

“What are we looking for?”

“The meeting room,” she said.

“Is it marked on the map?”

“Of course not.”

“So how will we know when we’ve arrived?”

She appraised his attitude.

“Are you committed to this?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Could you try that again with an erg of excitement?”

He winced, sought the correct tone within himself, and not finding it, chose silence.

Patricia said, “Repeat after me: ‘We’re all very excited to be working with you on this project’.”

“Excitement is the wrong word.”

“It’s part of the ritual. The Magnussons are old-fashioned tech entrepreneurs. We have to express excitement. Unless you have a preferred synonym. Would you prefer to be passionate about working on this project?”

“I’m coldly dispassionate about working on this project.” He warmed to his own sarcasm. “We appreciate the fine balance between great reward and lethal risk. Anything less is unworthy of our attention. Excitement is for amateurs. Tell me what you need me to do and pay me, and spare us all the ritual.”

Patricia smiled. “It’d be nice if that worked for once.”

The track took them only so far into the foothills, ending in a wood. Their destination lay somewhere within. They took their hiking gear from the back of the Land Rover and set off. Bare leafless branches, trunks furred with moss and mottled stripings, rivulets cut through the soft, ancient ground underfoot and filled with ochre ferns. The mountainside – steep and faun-coloured – was always
there,
in the same way that the void was always
there
throughout his hike on the moon: as an object that would not only outlive him but also outsmart him in ways that he was too stupid to understand.

“We’re near,” said Patricia. She pointed ahead. The forest thinned suddenly into a clearing, through which he glimpsed the meeting room itself. It was a large slate-coloured block within the clearing, twelve foot tall, and covered an area of about a thousand square feet. The exterior had been designed to be featureless, though it was darkly streaked with rain and scored here and there from various impacts. He walked one complete circuit around the perimeter. The entrance was an inlaid alcove, sealed and almost seamless. Tight guy ropes pulled neighbouring treetops into a canopy, concealing the meeting room from any observers lurking above.

“Should I knock?” he asked.

“Our appointment is not for another half hour.” She took a seat on a tree stump that was sticky with sap, indicative of how recently the area of the woodland had been cleared for the airdrop of the meeting room. “The door will open then and only then.”

13

BLOODROOM

At one fifteen, the heavy entrance to the meeting room slid aside. He and Patricia strolled into a quarantine zone where they stripped naked per the terms of the meeting. Wedding rings, screens, small change went into a box. A shallow aluminium drawer offered up folded outfits: grey long-sleeved vests and trousers, the material diamond-sectioned like a sensesuit, though thinner than the clunky version he had used on the moon. Perhaps more advanced, perhaps not. He slid on a pair of monochrome pumps, then put a comforting hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“We’ll be fine.”

She shrugged him off. “I’ll be fucking amazing. Do try to keep up.”

The airlock doors opened directly onto the meeting, and it was already in progress. The walls played through the loops of the Europan Claim, the timeline he had faked with Totally Damaged Mom: the repeal of the Moon Treaty, which had never been ratified by the significant space-faring states, and its replacement with a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Solar System, permitting sovereignty claims over any celestial territory pending approval by the Secretary-General. Rights to resource extraction and allocation could be granted to the first parties to sustain a presence on the surface or lower atmosphere of a comet, asteroid, moon, planet on the proviso that such resources were used wholly or mostly for the further exploration of space. Magnusson’s lawyer had drawn up the particulars, and TDM (Totally Damaged Mom: Patricia insisted upon honouring corporate tradition by using an acronym to describe the emergence. He still thought of her as Verity) created the loops, a fake history indistinguishable from the other contents of the restoration. He viewed as many of the loops as he could stand out of professional responsibility, checking that the surface was relentlessly convincing, the recreation of Pre-Seizure behaviour and cultural codes accurate and consistent. In this TDM had a unique advantage over the Istor College and other potential sceptics, for it was the only emergence that existed in the time before the Seizure, and the archive in which it… in which
she
(he changed his mind about her personal pronoun all the time) lived, the archive from which she was derived, was a unique trove of loops, perhaps as substantial a record of that period as the Restoration itself. From a prepared script, based closely on previous debates, she created loops covering the consideration and elaboration of the treaty by a legal subcommittee – a two-camera scene of a muted gathering, sparsely attended, not the most important business of the day, the moment the treaty was waved through by the General Assembly. To support the treaty timeline, TDM created a network of cultural artefacts: loops of studio debate between opinionists, minutes of off-air meetings, travel itineraries for committee members, surveillance footage of their journey to and from the meeting, hotel bills, and so on: as time advanced a single notch in the timeline, so the emergence filled in the story to a plausible level of granularity. She deliberately inserted noise and glitch typical of archives uncovered Post-Seizure, the instances where the historical data was warped by the gravity of the first emergence. Her.