The Destructives (28 page)

No, he didn’t. Not this time. He stayed in control. He asked the nurse to gift wrap the pomegranate scent, then he was back among the customers carrying the burden of their daily bags.

Meggan lived on the fortieth floor of a twisted high-rise, a double-helix of apartments and terraces. In the lobby, he buzzed her flat. She was expecting him, come on up.

He ascended the vertiginous spiral in a hot elevator, registering the acceleration in his balls. The twist of the high rise ensured that the terrace of each apartment hung directly over the seething hub below.

A nameplate on her door. Meggan Bushnell. She was not Meggan Horbo anymore, having changed her surname through marriage. Before contacting her, he had browsed her soshul. She had two daughters, twenty and fifteen years old. Soshul loops revealed her husband Michael to be a lyrical bearded northerner, anachronistically artistic, a kindly bearer of beer weight and poetry. Not at all like her high-achieving technocratic father, Oliver.

Theodore wiped her soshul from his screen, and corrected the line of his jacket. He was paler than he would have liked. Definitely not at his full powers of persuasion. Nonetheless, he would not fail. He had to make her leave with him. The raygun in his inside pocket was a last resort.

Meggan opened the door to him. The asylum mall had really gone to work on her. From her soshul loops, he expected a version of her mother: poised, controlled, exercised. But this woman had been rudely pushed into middle age and had yet to regain her composure. Her clothes were ill-fitting and out-of-date: monochrome green, with strain lines. She wore her dark hair short and practical. The efficiency of her gestures, the tidy portions of hospitality she offered to him, made it clear that she saw herself as a pragmatist, quite different from her husband, who was foolish with generosity.

He gave her the wrapped gift, and she thanked him and set it aside, only opening it when they drank tea together.

“So,” said Meggan, testing the new scent on her wrist, “you are a friend of the family.”

“Yes. I knew your parents in Boston.”

This surprised her.

“But you can’t have been born then.”

“Right. I was born ten years after the beginning of the Seizure. Yet I have spent time in your family home in Boston. I remember you and Verity and Oliver. I remember the living room and the hearth screen, and that old wooden blanket box you used to have. And your cat.”

She raised a hand to her mouth. A true gesture. Shock. She did not have the self-control required for the meta-meeting.

He continued, “Do you remember a girl from your class? Mala?”

Meggan shook her head, though it was a gesture of disbelief rather than denial. The flicker of pain in her eyelid was a tell.

“Mala sent a package to your house.”

“A doll of me. Yes.” She set her tea and patience aside. “Who are you really? Are you from the agency? I thought we were done with all that.”

Meggan had become more masculine with age: short hair, wide jaw, thinner lips. Marks of suffering he was too young to comprehend. Lines that ran deeper than the ritual scars of weirdcore. He couldn’t read the nuances of an older face.

He said, “I represent a new agency. We’re called the Destructives, and we need your help.”

She was angry but she wouldn’t send him away, not yet. Because he knew her story, and she needed to hear more.

“How could I possibly help you?”

“I’m close to your mother Verity.”

“My mother is long dead,” said Meggan, with a cruel matter-of-factness. So Verity
was
dead. He had grown very fond of Verity in the time he spent in the Horbo house.

He explained that he was a lecturer in intangibles from the University of the Moon, and that he had discovered, in an archive, the quantification of the Horbo family. These months of data formed a simulation of their lives that he had explored, and which she could relive too. The prospect was appealing to her, at first. She remembered Boston afternoons, her parents wealthy and secure, the loving routines of her family life. To walk around your past, to hear your mother speak again, to listen to father joking around.

Her doubts, when they came, were harder for him to read.

He sipped at his tea. “Part of your mother lives on. Part of you too.”

“Lives on?” she asked. She adjusted her cardigan over her soft middle.

“Yes.”

“I could talk to her?”

“She wants to talk to you.”

Meggan covered her mouth with her hand. Her voice, when it came, was spacey with shock.
How
?

“Emergence,” he said, simply.

“So they were right. They blamed us because of the Horbo loop. My parents knew that the loop was linked to Jester. Oh
God
.” She stood up and walked over to the coat stand, reached inside the pocket of her husband’s donkey jacket and removed a pouch of tobacco; her fingers tremored as she rolled herself a cigarette, lit it, exhaled.

A second thought. “Why wasn’t the archive destroyed in the Seizure?”

“This archive was preserved because it is part of an emergence. Your past and the emergence are fused into one entity.” He loved the smell of hand rolled tobacco, one of the asylum mall’s genuine delicacies and redolent of a lost age of artists and working men. His exercise regime forbade it, of course.

“So they were right. My family were responsible for everything that happened. Emergence. The Seizure. We were the start of it.”

“Not responsible. Emergence would have happened anyway. The next day, or the day after.”

“And it speaks through my mother. You make it sound like an emergence is wearing my family like a human mask.”

He thought of Dr Easy’s grisly new body. The corpse as translator between human and emergence.

He leant forward.

“The emergence made itself out of its immediate environment, and that environment happened to be your family.”

“Why would I speak to it? It’s not a real person.”

“What are
other people
? They are actions, words, appearances, loops that they like and don’t like. The emergence follows your mother’s example in all of these categories. I would take the opportunity, if it was offered to me, to speak to my dead loved ones.”

“Will she be able to see me?”

She was afraid of her mother’s judgement; she knew how harsh that judgement could be between mother and daughter.

Theodore nodded, “Verity was forty when she was quantified. When you meet her, your mother will be younger than you are now.” He looked out of the window, at the curve of the ceiling, oxidised copper-green, with great iron ribs holding each section in place. “In some ways, you will be the responsible one. You will be able to teach her. “

“My mother was in prison throughout the Seizure. By the time it was over, she was very ill. My father was determined to get me out of America. I wasn’t with her when she died.”

The cigarette disappointed her. She had lost her taste for smoking.

“So I speak to my dead mother.”

“First, we get you out of the mall. You and your family. You will receive a salary as our consultant. No more sanity quotients. We’ll find you somewhere nice to live.”

“For the rest of our lives?”

“A year-long contract to begin with. Enough to set you up.”

“Why do I have to leave Novio Magus?”

“We’re keeping the archive secure. You have to be physically present, wearing a sensesuit. She has to be able to feel your presence.”

“You’re asking me to uproot my family.”

His appeal to her emotional needs was a miscalculation. She was a mother. Her needs were secondary in the scheme of the family. He should have lied to her about the duration of the contract, told her it was for a lifetime. Why had he not lied? Because he had trusted Meggan to understand that leaving the mall was the best option for her and her family? Or because he was trying to make her choose to leave, and therefore retain some sense of his own goodness. Don’t be cruel to her – that’s what Patricia had said. A lie would not have been cruel. By telling the truth, he increased the likelihood that he would be forced to resort to the immoral position of the raygun. If he used the raygun to secure her consent, his damnation would be complete.

“I am offering you work,” he said, appealing to her pragmatism. “As our liaison with Verity.”

She laughed bitterly.

“That thing killed my mother. It ruined my life. It destroyed everything.”

“Just one conversation. I’m not asking you to be nice to it. Tell it how you feel! Tell it you hate it, I don’t care.”

“And you’ll pay me a money salary?”

“Yes, money. You won’t just be grafting for sanity points. How do you earn a living in the mall?”

“Cleaning. And I put in my screen time, like everyone else. My husband gigs and drives a cab.”

“Your children are grown up. What do they do?”

“It’s tough out there for young people. My eldest is training to be a drone assistant.”

“There is no future for your children in the asylum mall.”

She flinched at that: her greatest fear asserted as fact.

“I know you
people
call it the asylum mall. But to the people who live here, it’s Novio Magus.”

“Novio Magus was a mistake. Even the emergences admit it. A mistake that no one has bothered to rectify.”

He would not waste his time arguing with her sense of civic pride. She was an intelligent woman. If she had not been so damaged when she was young, then she would take this offer – not merely out of emotional need to speak to her mother again, but out of a sense of possibility. Out of hope. But life had been harsh and unfair to Meggan, and it was too late for hope.

“Talk it over with your family,” he stood and buttoned his black jacket, aware of the raygun in the inside pocket. “I will return for your answer tomorrow.”

He didn’t want to think about her refusal, and what it would force him to do. He was tired of planning worst case scenarios for eventualities that never came about.

He caught the train back to the ziggurat. The corridor became a tunnel which then opened up, under the great light well, into an expanse of village and parkland. On his lap, a sealed bag of Oof cakes and a coffee. Just like any other commuter, shuttling to and fro on the daily shift of retail therapy, work therapy, home therapy. More people wore greyscale in this part of town, a remnant of residual bohemianism. Bookshops, stationary shops, authentic tat. A world that ended ten years before he was born, preserved in the mall as a therapeutic experience.

He walked down the street as if he lived there, then crossed into the woodland, making his way through the dogwalkers to the lobby of the ziggurat. Dr Easy stood among the medical staff, discussing how to process the victims of Matthias’ experiment being brought down from their cells. Nine hundred or so in total. They’d been kept in solitary confinement for periods varying from two months to ten, and hooked up to a group mind. A swarm of psychiatric drones over a car park filled with ambulances.

The patients were a diverse if huddled mass. Whereas the citizens of his London had, over time and through economic selection, adopted a homogenous butterscotch colouring, the mall patients retained ethnic and racial characteristics: physiognomies that were identifiably a Sussex or Nordic type, British-Jamaican or the descendants of the final Somalian migration. Regardless of sex and race, the men, women and children shared the same dark-eyed, blasted expression, as if they had not slept properly for years. It was an expression he was surprised to discover on his own face.

Dr Easy was lecturing the therapeutic staff on treatment options for optogenetic damage; the staff seemed sceptical, and in one case, resistant: a senior consultant – a triathlon-thin man, late middle-age – adopted a stance that came straight from the meta-meeting playbook marked Superior Scepticism. Human experimentation was not news to the medical staff and they resented Dr Easy’s interference in their affairs.

Because they worked for Death Ray.

The paramedic checking the neural response of an old woman in a grey sensesuit; that administrator from the acute ward, on site to discuss options; the cheerful woman from the catering company handing out packed lunches to the patients waiting to be processed: they all worked for Death Ray too.

Of course they did.

Creating something on the scale of the ziggurat needed hundreds of agents.

It was only a matter of time before one of them stepped up to replace Matthias as project leader. Death Ray would continue their plan to recreate emergence.

He opened the bag of Oof cakes. Thick chewy pucks of whey protein. A food substitute. Oof because eating one was like taking a punch to the stomach. Pook had originally come to the mall to investigate why a group of strangers had committed suicide with poisoned Oof cakes. Pook had diagnosed the influence of a group mind, although Theodore could see why a person might choose to die by poisoned Oof cake even without the influence of a gestalt consciousness: flavourless and stodgy, an Oof was all rumination and no pleasure. A symbol of everyday life in the mall. He would take the Oof cakes to Meggan next time he saw her.

He sat on a grassy hillock, watching the ambulances come and go. Dr Easy joined him. The robot’s manner seemed markedly altered, and was not so soft or therapeutic. As if the flesh used to fashion its new body still contained an anger and an urgency. It did not sit down.

“How are the patients?” asked Theodore.

“The nurses will manage their condition. I’m not concerned about their wellbeing. Where have you been?”

“I spoke to the person I was looking for.”

“So you’re leaving?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Twenty-four hours. Do you think we have that long?”

Dr Easy watched the medical staff as they wheeled patients across the car park; now and again, a nurse or doctor glanced over in their direction.

Theodore finished chewing, “Death Ray will come back at us. But they will need to work through the variables of taking on an emergence.”

The robot sat down. The new body smelt of varnish and had lost the cracked leather odour that Theodore associated with childhood.