The Destructives (9 page)

Verity waved to call up the family data on the hearth. On a shifting map, she watched the icon representing her daughter meet the icon representing the school bus, and, satisfied, she shifted her attention to the newsfeed. Skyscrapers on a spring morning. 2020. The newscaster talking about gains on the stock market. She waved the channel away, and the broadcast was replaced by a browser. The internet. Or rather: the specific internet history of Verity Horbo. He realised at once the importance of this find, a potentially enormous cache of Pre-Seizure data, a time thought erased. She called up her own messages, scanned through them, and he stood at her shoulder, trying to decipher names and intent, and then, after a pensive sip at her coffee, she summoned up five streams of loops and images – some kind of aggregation, he guessed. Soshul loops showed young girls and boys pouting and preening for the camera. Puffing up their faces, grimacing, always in different outfits. The narcissism of Pre-Seizure teen life. Meggan’s friends. The stream flicked by too fast. Without context, he could not tell what she was looking for. But, from her reaction, he knew that she had found it. And it made her angry, she set down her coffee with intense care. Kneeling close to her face, distinctly oval and morning raw, he studied the half-formed words and sub vocalisations which almost sounded out her thoughts.

What if he touched her?

“Are you getting this, Patricia?”

No reply from the comms. The technicians had managed to extract the loop of him stroking the cat. But at this deeper layer of security the suit was isolated and locked down further than they could reach. It was just him and the recordings of the past.

With artful gestures, Verity Horbo isolated elements from each of the five streams into a mosaic of loops all featuring one particular girl: Mala. Mala had an old face for a young girl, a masculine brow and a hacked-out haircut. In one loop she was playing with dolls, her old-young face made-up in a parody of innocence. The dolls, magnified on the hearth screen. A screen grab. The doll had the face of Meggan Horbo. Verity stood suddenly in her seat and turned away, walking right into him. She stood half-in and half-out of his arms. The pressure began in his fingertips then spread to his forearms. As if the giant was holding him aloft by his wrists. The pressure spread to his elbows and his arms were locked in place, and the pressure built from his toes inward, up his calves and across the tendons at the back of his knee. Breakers in the sensesuit should cut in before he experienced pain. So why was he in pain?

“That bitch,” said Verity. “That fucking bitch.” The sensesuit gripped his thighs and he fell in one solid lump to the ground, his helmet rapping painfully against the wooden floor.

The past disappeared: Verity, the cat, the blanket box of photographs all vanished. The pressure lifted from his body. He was back on the other side of the encryption. Cast out.

It was time he confronted Patricia about what she knew about the archive.

“I’m not the first person to try to enter the archive, am I?”

“No.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They got so far. No further.”

“What does that mean?”

“The archive let them in and then revoked their access.”

“But they kept trying?”

Patricia winced.

“What happened to them?”

“Your sensesuit is a custom job, and came with the archive. We have tried to access the archive using other suits but the protocols lock them out at the primary level. It has to be this suit. But this sensesuit comes at a price. There are no breakers on feedback.”

“Pain. I felt it. How much pain?”

“As I said, there are no breakers. The other consultants all recovered from the experience then left the project to take on other challenges.”

“Did any of the other consultants find the loop?”

“What loop?”

He sat back in the chair, wondering if he should tell her. Wondering if she already knew.

“I found the Horbo loop in the house.”

She clenched her hands together with excitement.

“No, nobody made it that far.”

“But you were expecting to find it.”

“Not the Horbo loop specifically, but I was expecting to find something like it. An artefact from the cusp of the Seizure. This is palpable progress.”

“Progress toward what?”

She shrugged and smiled.

“To unlocking the rest of the archive.”

“We should stop calling it the archive. What you have is the quantification of the Horbo family. The hearth. We could learn so much about the last days of the Seizure. The hearth could go back years and their interactions with the wider data sphere of their time could fill in huge gaps in the restoration.”

He walked around the meeting room, trying to calculate the risk. The pressure that had locked his limbs in place and made him fall. The violence with which he was cast out of the past.

Patricia tapped the armoured nail of her index finger upon the desk.

“We have less than a week until sun up. I want this wrapped up by then.”

“You are worried about the University of the Sun.”

“The Seizure is a black box event. We tell ourselves that it was an accident. But we don’t know what happened. Or why it happened. I would prefer to make up my own mind without interference from the emergences.”

“Can you monitor me when I’m in the hearth? Supplement my analysis with that of your team?”

“We couldn’t extract any more data from the suit. The encryption shifts and evolves. Whatever you experience in the house, you will have to decipher it yourself.”

“There’s so much soshul. I recognise certain facial expressions from the restoration. Some of the codes of soshul continued on as a folk culture in the asylum malls.” He paused, looked at his hands as he considered what he needed before he could act. “I have to find a way of controlling the stream of data. I need a way of controlling my entry points into the hearth and the ability to freeze and study particular loops.”

“If you had an implant then we could use you as a storage medium to get data out of the house.”

“No implants. I’m risking enough as it is.”

“You are.”

“I deserve something for it.”

“You do.”

Her compliance surprised him.

Patricia sat back in her chair. “So what do you want?”

He hadn’t considered that.

He said, “More money, obviously.”

“Is that all?” she replied. “I thought I made it clear to you. You can have anything you need.”

In his bedroom on the top floor of the Horbo house, naked apart from his black box necklace, he watched Patricia remove the gauntlets of her executive armour. When she was ready, she smeared her white lipstick with her forefinger.

“Let’s get messy,” she said.

After sex, they told their stories to one another. Patricia was from a military family and had spent her early childhood on army bases: Germany, Korea, Oman. Then came the big family home in Norfolk, private girls’ school, a suspension for brawling. She was a typical elder sibling, ambitious and clear-sighted in terms of what had to be done, the inheritor of her father’s military pragmatism. A high achiever at university then dropped out halfway through her PhD, either late-flowering rebellion or a yearning for action that academic research could not meet.

“And now. Who are you now?” he asked.

“I have a canalside apartment. East London. No significant other. I worked inside corporate for a while. Made good contacts. Now I’m working those contacts on a freelance basis. Building something of my own. And you?”

“You have my file. Your psychologist was very thorough.”

“Tell me about the black box and your robot.”

“You know that I grew up in the care of my grandmother, Alex Drown, along with an emergence Dr Easy. We lived in a Georgian house on Church Row in Hampstead. Alex Drown was a self-made woman, much like yourself. She told me she’d been a fixer for big tech going into and coming out of the Seizure, and had the implant scars and detached retina to prove it.”

“Hence no implants.”

“By the time I came around, she was mostly retired, sitting on advisory groups, compiling consultancy reports, scrupulous in keeping her distance. The black box is part of a bargain she made with Dr Easy; she gave the emergence the right to observe my life in return for help with her work. In my house, the Horbo loop was a bedtime story. How the world came to an end.”

“It didn’t end. I was born a year into the Seizure in a military hospital.”

“It was an end. So much knowledge was destroyed, we can’t know the extent of our losses. We persist as a species but we are different as a people, with these great gaps in our memory. Substantial erasures. I was born later than you, as the Post-Seizure world was taking shape.”

“Your mother died.”

“When I was two. Overdose. A recreational accident. Not suicide. She didn’t marry my father so I kept the maternal name.”

“You are part of the Drown matriarchy,” said Patricia, a firm hand on his chest. They did complement one another. Her mannish assertiveness and take-no-prisoners attitude was a firm push, his feminine hesitancy and aversion to the edicts of power was a subtle pull.

“All that I know about the Seizure and the emergences, I learnt at the skirts of my grandmother. The appearance of the Horbo loop, writing over humanity’s data, marked the beginning. All the encryption was cracked, the firewalls burnt, the backdoors kicked in, humanity’s data reverted to a loop of a mother clutching her child to her, the child accepting that crushing love, their smiles a genetic echo of one another.”

“Verity and Meggan Horbo. Mother and child.”

“It’s primal, isn’t it?”

“The first emergence.”

“Yes. The mother of all emergences. The Horbo loop was an explosion of seeds and eggs. Of new life, colonising our memory. Making our memory into its habitat. From that moment of fertility came a whole new species. But we lost so much.”

Patricia’s face was naked in the simulated moonlight.

“I don’t think so,” she whispered. “We have not lost
this
,” she explored his scars with her fingertips. “This beautiful nowness.” She slid the sheet from her body and he reared over her, experiencing her body as a landscape contiguous with his own desire: the way her breasts pooled back against her ribcage reminded him of the dunes of moon dust, the land that wants to be explored, her raised inquisitive
mons,
its interior slick with anticipation, he flowed directly into her, and wondered if his longing for the past was merely a desire for stasis, to dwell in what had been done, as a way of avoiding
this
, the hourly risk of acting in the world and being acted upon. Desire is reciprocation; her gasps, the blue curves of moonlight in her dark eyes brought out his own sighs, he gripped her, shifting from delicate control to the emulated savagery of fucking.

7

TOTALLY DAMAGED MOM

Patricia slid out of bed and pulled on a sheer black body stocking. He helped her dress in her executive armour, clipping it over her torso and back, section by section. Then he pulled on his silk chromakey blue layer, perforated so that the sensesuit could interact with his skin. She hefted the sensesuit over his head, and he held his chin up as she buckled it tight. In the mirror, he watched her apply her lipstick until her pout formed a white zero.

“Did you have fun?” he asked.

She blew him a zero kiss and left the bedroom. He waited for the sound of her footsteps to fade before putting the helmet on and disappearing into the past.

A bright spring morning in the Horbo house. The sound of a family waking. Footsteps padding across the floorboards between bedroom and bathroom, pipes creaking under the load of waste water. Beeping and trilling alarms, and gulls crying in the wide suburban sky. He smelt butter browning in a pan and the bright toxicity of shampoos and soaps. He opened the door of his bedroom. The spare bedroom. The guest bedroom. Then he sat back on the bed, reluctant to go down and face the family.

He had come into the house anticipating dispassionate academic research, nothing more, in which he was a spectre of the future, intangible and invisible, moving through the family data. But he had a superstition that Verity could sense him, in the same way that an anaesthetized patient might sense the scalpel and dream of silver. She had cast him out of the house, that was what he believed. An irrational belief, but there nonetheless.

Theodore walked down the stairs. Mother and daughter were bickering over breakfast, a squabble in which the mother sought to soften the daughter’s sense of crisis: Meggan, her mother noted, always arrived at the family table on the verge of an outburst.

He went over to the desk, and searched through the drawers until he found a pad and pen. He had asked the technicians to ensure these items existed as objects, and not solely as sensory information within the house. Testing the pen between the fingers of his sensesuit, he began writing down what they were saying. The sensesuit had blocked all their attempts to extract data from it. Handwriting seemed the safest way to get some kind of recording out of the house.

Verity said, “What are you stressed about?”

“I have a Spanish test today,” replied Meggan.

“I haven’t heard you practising your Spanish for a while.”

“I know. I’m dropping it.”

“So why are you stressed about it?”

“Because it’s a test.”

They were eating cereal, brightly coloured hoops, something a child might insist upon.

“Could you finish that?” said Verity, indicating the bowl, her voice weary with the repetitive cajoling of motherhood.

“I’ve had enough.”

“You’ve barely touched it. You can’t go a whole day at school without a proper breakfast.”

Silence as the daughter ate another spoonful.

Then, “You say cereal is shit anyway.”

“Don’t use that word at the table.”

“If we had proper breakfast then I would eat more.”

“So it’s my fault now.”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that you’ve always said cereal is bad for me and then you complain when I don’t eat enough of it.”