The Destructives (8 page)

“
The
chat,” replied Theodore, standing.

The game they would now play involved sins of omission. The robot could sniff out falsehoods but the physiological cues for omitted information were harder to discern. And the robot did not like to probe. That would be too instrumental. Too active. And Theodore had spent his entire life lying to Dr Easy. He put it all into silos: the re-creation of the house, the archive, its peculiar responsiveness to his presence, the way the cat arched its back when he stroked it. His smile spoke of the terms of his nondisclosure agreement with Patricia.

“It’s like the good old days,” said Dr Easy. “You disappearing to some underground den, me tracking you down and rescuing you from yourself.”

“But this time, I’m not
on it
.”

The robot leaned forward and sniffed the space between them.

“No, you’re not, are you?” Dr Easy seemed almost disappointed. “If you’re not here for the grokk then why are you here?”

“To help someone. Research. They need an expert in Pre-Seizure culture. They asked nicely.”

The robot nodded. “Making yourself useful. Share?”

He had changed back into the sour natural fibres of his tweed jacket and linen trousers but he was unshaven.

“I’m on an NDA. Why don’t you sit this one out?”

The robot crossed its suede legs, and idly picked loose threads from the material gathered at its joints.

“I fixed my hand,” it said, and rotated the hand on its wrist joint then flexed the fingers individually.

“I don’t want to do this now. I’m busy.”

“Do what?” asked Dr Easy with feigned innocence.

“You can’t observe my life if you interrupt me whenever I attempt to live it.”

“I was
concerned
,” said Dr Easy, with facetious emphasis. “This Patricia, on your calendar. Patricia Maconochie.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Everything, as usual. A lifetime’s worth that would take a lifetime to relate. I presume you only want the salient details. What do you want to know?”

Why did the cat arch its back when I stroked it?

“If anything occurs to me, I will ask her myself.”

“You are a gentleman, aren’t you? Mostly a gentleman.”

Dr Easy affected the dispassionate air of a physician or a butler but the starlight in its eyes pulsed with contrary emotions. The emergences were emotional beings. Without emotions, a being cannot prioritise information, and therefore cannot act. Emotion is necessary for survival.

“You’re upset,” he said to the robot. “I can see that. But if I let you in, now, then your presence will irrevocably alter the situation that is unfolding.”

“I’m not upset,” the robot stood up. “You can’t upset me.”

“Go back to Nearside Campus. Wait for me.”

Dr Easy put his hand on Theodore’s shoulder, drew him close so that Theodore’s body responded to the proximity of the robot with a helpless erotic tremor.

“She can’t be trusted,” said Dr Easy. It had no lips, no breath, just a cracked wooden slot that served as an ever-parted mouth.

“I know.”

“You are vulnerable, Theodore. You’ve been hiding away, recuperating, but now the world has come knocking at your door again. Open the door by all means–” the robot stepped back and mimed the opening of a door, “–but
baby steps
, Theo,
baby steps
.” The robot shuffled half a yard to demonstrate
baby steps
.

Alone, he took the elevator back into the basement of the School of Emergences. He ate in the kitchen of the house, sensesuit on, helmet off, idly considering the flickering projection of the mother and her daughter. He was tired and felt it as a nervous tightness below his throat. He slept in the upstairs bedroom of the house, naked apart from the helmet, so that his dreams incorporated the day-to-day sensorium of the archive, with its looping early morning light. On waking, he took the helmet off, padded into the bathroom, noticed a new razor had been left out for him, shaved and took pleasure in the planes and angles of his lean face, avoiding the coiled scars on each cheek. The rest of the damage from his addictions was internal. The liver. The lungs. His blood.

Then a breakfast meeting with Patricia and Professor Kakkar. The professor sought their approval for the way in which his team had managed to isolate the sensorium of the cat and then emulate it. Theodore gave ritual thanks. He knew how to behave. All meetings were supportive and positive – on the superficial level. Confrontation and criticism was a last resort, deployed only after an arsenal of silences had been exhausted. Disapproval was conveyed through complements which only a skilful and experienced practitioner of meetings could decode. So when Patricia emphasised how pleased she was with the diligence of Kakkar’s team, Theodore registered the absences in her praise – she did not laud their ingenuity, she did not draw attention to the positive results of their work. Kakkar was a big man, and he leant over the table in huddled supplication.

Then Patricia turned on Theodore.

“And you’re doing amazing work.
So
creative.”
So
ineffectual.

“I’m just very excited that we can all work together.”

“I can see that. You bring a unique energy to the project.”

“I’m inspired by your influence.”

Kakkar nodded with delight to hear such positivity. He dabbed away the sprinkling of sweat from his temples, sat back and relaxed.

Amateur.

The content of the meta-meeting – Patricia was clearly unhappy with their performance – passed the professor by. He would have to deliver soon. Theodore didn’t want to be kicked off the project. He wanted the money. But, more than that, the content of the archive itself.

“And how is your work with the cat progressing?” asked Patricia. “I’m really intrigued to hear how that’s going.” She corrected her earring, quite deliberately.

“I stroked the cat,” he replied.

“Did you? Amazing.”

“And it arched its back.” He smiled. “It responded to my touch.”

Kakkar shook his head. “Coincidence,” he said.

“No. The cat looked at me. It greeted me.”

“It’s an archive,” insisted Kakkar. “You cannot interact with an archive.”

Patricia adjusted one of her gauntlets. “I want to show you something,” she said, “The technicians managed to extract some data from the sensesuit. It’s not much. The suit is a custom job and locked down. But we got this much.”

A ball of light appeared in the palm of Patricia’s left hand, then resolved into high definition footage of the house, the backyard, the lawn, the cat. She had a brief loop of Theodore’s point of view made through the sensesuit. Simply by crooking or lengthening her fingers, she could forward, reverse, zoom and pan within the 360 degree loop of his experience. Close-up on the cat. His hand reaching out, the cat letting him stroke it and then raising its tail for him to follow. The cat blinked slowly in greeting. Patricia closed her fist over the ball of light, and so it disappeared.

“That’s all we could extract. Thoughts?”

“The cat could be a user interface to guide us through the archive,” suggested Theodore. Then, noticing their unfamiliarity with the Pre-Seizure term of
user,
he explained how people used to be thought of as users in regard to technology and not the other way around.

“What did the cat show you?”

“It took me to a window, and through it I was able to see more of the mother than previously.”

“A help routine,” said the Professor. The sweat had returned to Professor Kakkar’s temples. He unfolded and refolded his handkerchief as if showing them – Look! here is a handkerchief I can solve!

Patricia smiled in acknowledgment of this minor achievement.

“Rather enigmatic for a help routine,” said Theodore.

Patricia listened, deliberate and self-contained. Under the subtle terms of the meta-meeting, the pursing of her white lips was almost ostentatious. She placed her attention upon him in the same way that she might place her hand on the head of a small dog.
She can’t be trusted.
No, of course she couldn’t. But isn’t that thrilling – the presence of a grown-up, a player in the market, the alluring silences of power?

“I don’t think it’s an archive at all,” he said.

Her lips parted as if to reply. Yes. She had her suspicions.

“Further investigation, then,” she said. “Not speculation.”

And with that, Patricia brought the meeting to a conclusion. Professor Kakkar departed on pleased and effusive terms. Theodore remained alone with her. Only one layer of the meeting was concluded. The meta-meeting continued in the corridor. Patricia asked him if he had everything he needed to continue his work.

“Because if there is anything you need, you can have it,” she said.

“I needed a razor,” he said. “And then one appeared in the bathroom. It seems that somebody is taking care of my needs.”

“Some of your needs,” she replied.

He worried away at that remark for the rest of the day. Was it a sexual signal, to let him know that as his client she was open to more of his services than he was currently providing? It had been a while. It wasn’t easy to get laid on the moon. Thoughts of Patricia came and went as he prowled around the house in his sensesuit.
Some of your needs
. It could also have been an insinuation about his past vices. In which case, she was sending out the opposite of a sexual signal: reminding him that his past made him repulsive to her, and that he should not mistake the mutual subtleties of the meta-meeting for erotic intimacy. She was using him, those were the terms of their relationship.

He stood on the lawn. His helmet was full of the past. The gulls wheeled overheard, mocking him, and there was a white moon in the day sky. The erotic associations of the moon – fertility symbol, goddess, the feminine to the solar masculine – could only be discerned from distance. Close up, locked in the neutered environment of life support, the moon was asexual. In low gravity, his libido had drifted away from him. Sessions with Dr Easy met his need for psychological intimacy, and he had regulated his need for sex with routine masturbation. On the moon, movements had to be careful and controlled otherwise you could drift away into the void.

He went back to the garden. The cat was on the windowsill. It noticed his gaze then flicked its tail up, beckoning with the white tip. The cat strolled around the porch and – satisfied that he was following it – went into the house. It stopped at the blanket box and, ears flat, gave into the instinct to mark its territory, scratching methodically at the wood. Then the cat paced around its food bowls in the kitchen. The bowls were new and had not been there when he first entered the house. Even though the bowls were full of food, the cat wanted more food, or perhaps fresh food. He opened a cupboard. It was full of sachets of cat food. The first cupboard he’d looked in. What did that mean? The other cupboards were empty. He dumped the old food into the bin, cleaned out the dish, squeezed in a rectangle of mashed fish in jelly, and put it down for the cat. It licked at the jelly and then began to eat.

He had the sense of being watched. Not just by Patricia and the technicians but by the house itself. It was not a malignant gaze. There was something familiar about it, the way it pulled him in only to push him away again. He went back to the blanket box and inspected the cat’s scratches. Yes, there was more scoring in the wood than when he had first arrived. Time was passing within the archive even if the key components – the mother and daughter – remained static. Cat food in the first cupboard he opened. He ran his finger along the cat’s scratch. Odd. The feel of the groove did not match its appearance. One sense – touch – did not match the other – sight. And the feel of these grooves were not vertical. They were curved.
Cursive
. A letter “B”. The sensesuit on the fritz or something else? He tried to open the blanket box but the lid and hinges were mere simulations and the box itself was one solid unit.

He went back out to the garden, climbed the tree and inspected the markings the cat had made there. The same mismatch between the haptic and optical sensorium: he saw vertical grooves in the wood but his fingertips traced the outline of a letter “H”. Clues, obviously. What kind of encryption leaves clues on how to be broken? Yes. The pulling in, the pushing away. The familiar contraries of flirtation. There was something in the archive. Something that could feel his fingers tracing the scratches of data. Something flirting with him.

He went back into the house. The cat was sat imperiously upon the blanket box; he went to stroke it and the cat leapt off. Slowly the lid opened and the box was full of old photographs printed on coloured film. Family photographs. Wedding photographs. Holiday photographs. The people in them were blurred and generic. Either encrypted or unquantified. He sorted through them and found a photograph that was not obscured. A loop played on the surface of the film. A loop of a mother putting her arms around her daughter, the two of them smiling awkwardly for the camera, an undertone of awkwardness in the daughter’s smile, a flash of fear in the smile of the mother, pulling her daughter to her in a protective embrace, who resists it then gives into it. A famous loop, the loop that signalled the onset of the Seizure. The Horbo loop. He felt a light pressure at every point of his body, as if he was being embraced by a kindly giant, and then this weight was lifted from him. The scratched letters. H. B.

He heard voices from the porch. On the runner carpet beside the front door, mother embraced daughter before waving her off to school. He was inside their quantified lives. The encryption had been lifted. He could see their faces, and he recognised them: Verity Horbo, the mother, with her white-blonde hair cut shorter than in the loop, varsity track pants and top, a flush on her pale skin. Meggan Horbo, gawky, painfully self-conscious, left arm folded protectively over her midriff, slight hunch in the shoulders, closing in upon herself even as she walked away.

He stood in the kitchen, and didn’t dare move in case he broke the spell. Verity closed the screen door and walked by. Her perfume was exquisitely woody: he recognised fig and maple – natural essences rather than artificial flavourings. Expensive. She put the coffee on, moving around the kitchen oblivious to his presence. The coffee pot steamed and the room was soaked in its rich smell. This detailed unit of the past was so perfect. His deep nostalgia for this period, a time he had never known himself, ached with fulfilment.