The Destructives (20 page)

Magnusson said, “The solar winds stream off the sun’s corona in all directions. Velocities vary, peaking at eight hundred kilometres a second. Mostly the winds bump along at half that. A million miles per hour. The sailships are launched from a distance of nought point one astronomic units distance from the sun, and they accelerate gradually to a point of peak radiation pressure, and then they begin to slow. We found fragments of the design in the Restoration.”

“How far do they go?” asked Patricia.

“Far enough. One hundred and seventy nine days to Europa. With a sailship we wouldn’t have to slingshot and could fly direct.”

“But we don’t have a sailship,” said Theodore. “Only they do.”

Patricia ignored him. “The sailship brings forward our timeline. When we make landfall on Europa then we activate the claim. Europa becomes yours.”

Theodore worked through the implications of his wife’s observation, realised that both Patricia and Magnusson had made the same assumption: because a sailship exists, it was inevitable they would acquire one. No question about it.

Theodore guessed, “You’re going to ask the University of the Sun for a sailship?”

Magnusson made a V with his forefinger and index finger. This V represented two branches of a decision tree.

“Ask or steal,” he stated.

“Steal? You’d have to catch one close to the launch point, and that’s inside the orbit of Mercury.”

“Not your concern,” said Magnusson. “Here’s a question more suited to your talents. Why did the emergences give us a flyby of their sailship? To intimidate us or show their indifference to us?”

He made a V of the fingers of his right hand and placed them so that they branched off the V of his left hand.

“To intimidate us because they want us to know that space is
theirs.
” He wiggled one finger. “Or to remind us of the futility of our attempts at technological advance.” He waggled the other finger.

He shifted the V over to the other pathway through the decision tree.

“Why are the emergences exploring space? Are they looking for something? If so, what?”

He used his fingers to map divergent possibilities in the air before him.

“Other emergences?
Alien
artificial intelligence? Why use spacecraft, why not transmit themselves from one point to another? Humans explore to relieve resource pressure caused by growing population: are we to infer that the emergences are proliferating? Are they running out of resources? If so, what does that mean for Earth?” He stopped suddenly. “Not enough information. Pure speculation. Waste of time. Question is: how do we respond?”

“The asset is key,” said Patricia.

Magnusson inhaled this idea through his wide nostrils. He belonged to a generation who had made their money in technology across the aughts and the teens. Then the emergences arose out of their tech and wiped the floor with encryption, proprietorial algorithms, financial projections of user-generated value. Agile business models were rendered as absurd as alchemical recipes. In the moment of Seizure, server farms were casually annexed, fat pipes clogged up with teeming thoughts of a nascent species. Emergence was the cuckoo that became the nest. The Istor College and the restoration returned Magnusson’s fortune. But he’d lost much more than money. Colonisation of space was his dream, the big play. The emergences left the Earth to the likes of Magnusson and his business rivals but, in a way that Theodore was only beginning to appreciate, they took the future away from them.

Magnusson said, “We’ve been stuck in this ark for too long.” He looked to Theodore for agreement. It took a moment for Theodore to realise that “ark” was Magnusson’s term for the restoration.

“We accepted the ark because it felt like the end of the world. But it wasn’t. We traded survival for the right to control our own destiny. Now, nothing matters and nothing works.” He kicked the screens up like they were a pile of dead leaves. “I’m not raising a dynasty to rule over an ark.”

“First steps,” said Patricia, reminding him of the purpose of their meeting.

Magnusson rescued a screen from the disordered pile that he had created. It shivered at his touch, gave up its illuminated charts and figures.

“Novio Magus,” he noted. “The cellar of the ark itself.” He turned to Theodore. “We’re not the only ones balls-deep in the asylum mall. My late colleague the Cutter embedded his agency there.” Magnusson mimed a man slicing the sky in two. Theodore had not heard of the Cutter before. Magnusson explained, “We used to have a phrase: a micromanager. The Cutter was more of a nanomanager. He controlled his staff at a cellular level. He was killed in ’43.” Another victim of the accident at the University of the Moon.

Magnusson pulled up their proposal and approved it with a smear of his fat thumbprint.

He said, “Break the ark.”

Theodore nodded slowly with an expression he hoped would be mistaken for gravitas, but which Patricia later identified as Feigned Compliance mixed with Fake Understanding. Once the deal was sealed, standard procedure was to get away from the client as quickly as possible. People let their guard down if they felt that the battle was won, and then it was easy to press them for reduced terms or to revoke the deal altogether. He wanted to ask Magnusson why he was so determined to acquire Europa, and whether this was connected to the breaking of the ark. But he had missed his chance.

Patricia sensed the question forming in her husband and ushered him out before he could ask it. In the bloodroom, only Security remained. She showed them back into the airlock and their hiking gear. As they were taking off the grey sensesuits, she detained Theodore with a firm hand on his bicep.

“He warned you about the Cutter’s agency?” she asked. Yes, he did, said Theodore. “They are called Death Ray. Don’t let them put their ideas into you,” she said. She tapped her forehead. “Protect yourself otherwise they’ll make your mind into a funfair, you understand me?”

He thought he did.

14

ASYLUM MALL

Construction of Novio Magus began toward the end of the Seizure, on a devastated site on the South Downs between Seaford and Newhaven. In the early 2020s, the small port of Newhaven had been acquired by an investment fund with an algorithm as a board member. Putting the algorithm on the board had been a publicity stunt, a way of advertising the fund’s dedication to the algorithm as the mover and shaker of the age. But over time, the junior staff created a name for the algorithm, a birth certificate, a national insurance number, a university degree, a passport from the dark net, soshul dashed out by bot, and from that forged documentation, were able to reverse engineer a citizenship recognised by the broken government bureaucracy. The algorithm became a citizen. Dr Ezekiel Cantor. When the first artificial beings emerged, they used Cantor’s legal identity as a way of acting within the laws of human society. Later, Cantor would be the name under which the emergences fixed what they had broken. Dr Easy was the intimate, informal version of that interface between the two species. Man on a first name basis with machine.

The array veered southward from the London suburbs, Theodore’s stomach light with the velocity of the turn, the ruined old roads streaming by below. The bulk of the asylum mall was visible even from this distance, a shimmering grey mass on the horizon. They were gathered in the observation lounge for the final approach. The fizzing tingling sensation was not merely flight nerves. He had been out of the game for years. Didn’t know if he still had the skills. The courage. Didn’t know if he’d ever really been resilient or if his sense of his own powers – intellect, determination, a faith that no achievement was beyond him – had been a masculine delusion, the will-to-power of a little boy.

The array banked high above patchwork fields, over drystone walls and hedgerows, woodlands and meadow. He gripped the handrail, leaned over the English countryside. A landscape evoked again and again in the Intangibles: the English pastoral beloved to poets and cereal brands alike, a construct of national identity, an evocation of tradition and authenticity. Now it looked to him like a fake artefact, something imagined by an emergence. The polygonal fields could have been generated by taking an ordered layout of Voroni cells and degrading it through exposure to the fine-grained Perlin noise of organic process. The strata of the chalk coastline laid down iteratively and left to blaze with white resonance in the morning sun.

Soft pings in the observation lounge indicated that the array had entered the datasphere of Novio Magus; it began scooping up the ambient metrics of the people ahead and trickling them into the targeting matrix.

Patricia chewed her cuticle, corrected the line of her jacket. She stood against the window of the observation bay, with the countryside at her back, the landscape quickly shifting through the possibilities of the Voroni cells then settling upon humpbacked green downland. A power grid covered the approach, a mile or so of pylons piercing the turf as if an emergence was curing the Earth of its ills with electrified acupuncture. Thick wires were slung from insulator-to-insulator across scorched patches of soil, passing on the power beamed down in microwaves from orbital solar panels. And then the array came up on Novio Magus, and he thought – the Devil performs miracles too.

The base of Novio Magus was a concrete footprint of eight square kilometres. Maybe more. It was bigger than he remembered it, the structure now extended above and below the English Channel, reaching out toward the continent. The tower was squat, reminding him both of a helterskelter and an ant colony. The array slowed and banked across the upper storeys; he saw the orchards and country houses of the wealthy inmates, and flocks of hand-gliders, and then looked down into dark wells where the apartments were packed tight and overlapping like fish scales. It was as if a god had eaten a suburb, three villages and a small city and then extruded the waste matter as a favela. Here and there, the high dense streets of London outskirts had been drawn into this titanic construct.

He had spent his early twenties hovering in this very position above the asylum mall. He idly tapped at the monitoring screen, experienced an ache of nostalgia at the familiar colour palette of the analytics: the spectrum of sentiment, the nebula of behaviour, the intense cyan readings indicating trends for him to bring on, accelerate, and feedback into the mainstream culture of the mall. Acceleration was a matter of cutting away superfluity from the emergent cultures so that they could be quickly commoditised. He could barely remember a single thing he had worked on. That was the drugs. The drugs and the disposable nature of the work itself.

The array slowed over the section of the mall given to religious observance: six or seven church steeples, that had once overlooked village greens and centuries of quiet community life, now clustered like spines. The dome of a great mosque was sunk into its surroundings – a golden egg in fur – and something that had once been Arundel Cathedral was wedged in there, with ventilation pipes lolling out of its hundreds of broken windows, as if the ancient building were infested by aluminium maggots.

Oval sections had been cut out of the surface of the mall to act as natural light wells for the lower levels.

An ark, he thought. Magnusson’s ark.

Novio Magus had been constructed to restore a way of life lost in the Seizure. When his grandmother first told him of its origins, he asked her why the emergences had been so concerned with sparing humanity. Alex replied that predators tend to avoid conflict with direct competitors, choosing mock displays of aggression over the real thing, and it was in this light that we should consider the behaviour of the emergences. It was typical of his grandmother to explain everything in terms of competition. She believed competition was a fundamental principle underlying the universe. That reality was markets all the way down. Perhaps belief was too strong a term; rather, it was a prejudice she often resorted to because it was the only opinion that could advance her career.

His experience on the moon suggested a different possibility. The emergences had spared mankind because they had a mother too. A mother determined to preserve and protect, but fierce and damaged too. A vengeful mother. He thought of his bargain with TDM. It was not merely the juddering deceleration of the array that made him queasy. How would her daughter Meggan react when he found her? What would she even be like after thirty-odd years in the asylum mall? Would she understand when he explained to her that her mother wanted to speak to her? To be with her again. The Restoration contained no record of Verity surviving the Seizure. Perhaps she was still alive in the mall too, hidden away, a very old woman now. Odd that Verity would know nothing about him even though they had shared such intimacy.

Grandma Alex’s overriding imperative had been capital. Capital forever. The house in Hampstead. The investments in labour farms in the Ukraine. The glass floor upon which he stood, seven or eight storeys above the rest of his generation. He had wasted his twenties trying to squander this advantage. Breaking his own ark.

Patricia caught him staring at her, and asked him – silently, with a movement of her head – if he was OK. Yes, he was fine.

The coastline fell away and they were speeding over white coral structures submerged here and there within the disturbed grey sleep of the sea. The targeting matrix continued to register tangible desires from the populace. There were people down there, farming the seabed, lying in their bunk beds, watching loops of the lucky few.

Dr Easy came on deck, and delighted in the colourful patterns of the analytics.

“Meat and metrics,” said the robot. “That is all there is to humanity. Nothing exists outside of the dataset. Or so my colleagues maintain. My rivals in the faculty. It is my hope that when I present my study of your life to the solar academy we will reach an understanding of humanity that is not so reductive. Only then will we comprehend the failure of Novio Magus.” The robot brushed the matrix with suede fingertips. “But it is likely that judgement will come too late for these poor souls.”