The Red Men (20 page)

‘I asked for three grand.’

‘You don’t think two thousand pounds is a fair price?’

A quick look to the right revealed that he did think it was fair. But he was in the building trade and was used to hiking up his price at the last minute.

I took out an envelope.

‘This is an advance of one thousand pounds.’ Double what I had promised.

Would he take the money now, and by doing so tacitly accede to our terms, or was he capable of resisting immediate reward in the hope of securing a bigger fee further down the line?

He slipped his thumb into the envelope, ripped it open, and looked at the money.

Then he folded it and put it into his back pocket.

‘Go on then.’

Dr Easy put his hand on my leg and patted it twice. A signal to move on to the next stage of the interview.

‘Actually, we’re done Mr Lunt.’

‘I thought you wanted to ask me some questions.’

‘We have.’

‘The thing with the money?’

‘Actions speak louder than words,’ said Dr Easy.

‘What about my memories, all that stuff in the questionnaire about my Dad?’

‘We are not preserving you for posterity, Mr Lunt. We are merely taking a reading of you so that we can predict how you will act in certain situations.’

I made him sign away the copyright to the contents of his mind and asked him casually if he had any questions for us. The interview seemingly adjourned; he relaxed. He asked what his red man
would do all day in the Monad.

‘It will not exist in Monad. This particular batch of simulations will inhabit another workspace.’

We were now onto the second script, a three-stage process in which the subject was disorientated and regressed so that they deferred their volition to a parental figure, in this case the
comforting figure of Dr Easy.

‘The red man will live in this town,’ I said, pointing firmly at the floor.

‘In Maghull?’ he looked confused.

‘In our simulation of Maghull.’

Dr Easy interrupted me.

‘Don, can you see yourself imagining a simulation of Maghull inhabited by simulations of its citizens who are unaware of the unreality of their existence?’

The question was designed to disorientate him. Dr Easy asked Don Lunt to imagine himself imagining, setting him on a Möbius strip of thinking about the shape of his own thoughts. On a
screen in the palm of my hand, I checked the readings coming in from his mind. They had lost their strong vivid bands. By removing the noise of his aggression, we had cleared our way to the good
stuff buried far within.

‘Let me put it another way,’ continued Dr Easy. ‘A copy of Maghull will exist in my head. A large sample of its citizens will live there too, and so will you. It is an
incredible opportunity. We call it Redtown.’

‘In there, will I know what I am?’ Lunt was regressing nicely, his voice softening and taking on the childish higher registers.

‘It will have the same level of self-awareness as you do,’ said Dr Easy. I nodded, as the script indicated I must. The trick was to feign complete understanding of Dr Easy and not to
attempt to follow what it was saying.

‘Will I be able to speak to myself… to it… in there?’

‘Redtown is a quarantined reality,’ said Dr Easy.

‘That means no,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t want to anyway. Allowing people and their simulations any contact causes all sorts of trouble.’

‘How will I know if you start doing weird things to this other me?’

‘That shouldn’t bother you.’ Dr Easy prodded the air. ‘Are you the kind of man who worries about the well-being of a tooth after it has been extracted?’

Don Lunt squinted.

‘No.’

‘If you woke up tomorrow and discovered that you are the type of man who worries about the well-being of a tooth after it has been extracted, would that worry you?’

Don Lunt squinted.

‘Yes.’

‘So why are you worried about what happens to our copy of you?’

He had a nagging sense of being shilled, but no evidence of it. After all, the money was still in his back pocket.

‘I’m not worried,’ he said finally. His expression said otherwise.

‘Good,’ said Dr Easy. It stood up and Don Lunt instinctively rose also. Once he was standing, the kinks in his posture made it clear that he had a pressing, uncomfortable
concern.

How long would it be before he asked the question? The one they all ask.

‘You did very well,’ said Dr Easy, ushering Don Lunt to the door. ‘In fact,’ it said, looking back to me, ‘I am proud of both of you.’

‘Wait.’ Don Lunt rubbed his palm over his face. His hand was over his mouth, then it wasn’t. ‘These thoughts of mine, the memories and the dreams, you will keep them to
yourself won’t you? Not even tell him.’ He pointed at me.

‘I’m not human, Mr Lunt. Your secrets are as safe with me as they would be with the trees or the rocks.’

‘Other people can’t just look at them?’

‘Your memories are not home videos. Only I understand the information that is you.’

Dr Easy put its paws on the big man’s shoulders and gave him a reassuring shake.

‘Just call if there is anything else you need to know.’

I stood at the window with the robot. We watched Lunt walk over to his jeep.

‘Was there anything interesting in his head?’ I asked.

Dr Easy nodded., ‘He used to stand on the balcony of his apartment in Johannesburg and urinate on the heads of the black people queuing at the bus stop. As a child, he found a large
concrete ball which he rolled down Mount Pleasant in Liverpool, causing quite serious damage. Once he discovered the wicked sensation of letting the ball go and watching it accelerate down the
hill, he became who he is.’

‘You never have managed that whole client confidentiality thing, have you?’

‘Privacy is absurd. Information wants to be shared.’

Dr Easy massaged its temples, a sign that the Cantor intelligence was overworked. The robot moved past me, searching for somewhere to sit down. This Dr Easy had taken some punishment. The suede
skin of its left arm was repaired with tan patches and thick scars of black stitching. On its torso, someone had burnt a crude ‘D’, the letter formed out of charred holes each the
circumference of a cigarette end. ‘The initial of a particularly abusive patient,’ said Dr Easy, when I ran my fingers across the fused ruptured material. A few years working the
drop-in centres and outpatient programmes in Liverpool had left this particular avatar with numerous battle scars. There were dents in its head and yellow foam spilt out of a razor-slash on the
back of its thighs.

Dr Easy waved me away, its large soft head between its knees, its attention required elsewhere. The avatar fell silent as the speck of Cantor which animated it withdrew. There were limits to Dr
Ezekiel Cantor’s omnipotence. The fierce beam of its consciousness was dispersed into a hundred thousand spotlights, raking across inner and outer continents, real and unreal lands. The more
of Maghull’s citizenry we copied into Cantor’s imagination, the more frequent these interruptions became.

I opened up a spreadsheet and logged the completion of the Lunt interview. Our target was twenty-two thousand people, about eighty per cent of the entire town, making the total copyright grab in
the region of forty-four million quid. Maghull had a nationally representative standard of living but was not so rich that any of its citizenry would turn their nose up at a couple of grand for
doing little more than sitting in a chair chatting to me and my robot. The Stokers had wanted to upload Hampstead, which was blatantly impractical, given the number of powerful people there who put
a high price on their psychological privacy. Also Hampstead has a degree of ethnic diversity, a sampling of the executive class of every nation. Although there is homogeneity to the world’s
bourgeoisie, agglomerating around values of education and status, the underlying differences of religion, culture and immigrant experience would require different base algorithms, taking up too
much of Cantor’s mind.

Maghull had almost no ethnic diversity. The ward came out at ninety-eight per cent white British, predominately protestant, two generations and seven and a half miles away from Liverpool. The
town’s nature was suitably straightforward. Formerly a parish on the south-west Lancashire plain, it was transformed in the late 1950s to house the displaced population of Liverpool’s
slums. Much of the population moved in then, young couples just married, and stayed for the rest of their lives.

The creation of Redtown followed the same process as the creation of a red man. We began by making a mindmap, plotting the landmarks of the town as if they were key psychological influences.
Being at mother’s bedside as she dies corresponds to the central business district. A teacher praising a precocious reader matches up to the canal, the construction of which accelerated the
growth of the town. The recognition that you will never fulfil your promise is a new housing estate on an old school field. Guilt at abandoning your family, the overgrown marshland beside the
railway station. Each of these places exerts a continuing influence upon the citizenry; like a traumatic memory, their subtle pressure persists.

It was already past five so I hurried to meet El and Iona at the train station. Dr Easy drove me in a hire car as far as St George’s Hall. With its grand neoclassical
architecture and windblown plaza, the landmark kept a solitary vigil on a low hill, one of Liverpool’s numerous ridges on the rise up from the eastern bank of the Mersey. I stomped across the
plaza contrary to gusts of sea wind. At the crossing, I saw the hire car again, Dr Easy at the wheel. This was as close as the robot was getting to El. I couldn’t bear the thought of it
glimpsing her innermost feelings. Dr Easy would know immediately of her doubts, her spasms of hatred toward me, any unfaithful thoughts or indiscreet actions. The robot would read it all from her
body language. She did not deserve such exposure, nor could I stand to discover her secrets.

I bounded up the stairs at the entrance of Lime Street station and went directly to the concourse. El was looking out for me, Iona dangling idly off her hand. She smiled when my familiar shape
came into view. She had a lowdown London pallor, and was sallow around the eyes, tired from the unending, unshared tasks.

‘Iona slept on the train. I had time to think. Do you remember the
Drug Porn
parties you used to run? There is a photograph somewhere of the two of us at a masked ball. You are
wearing a blue moleskin suit and a samurai helmet. I am in my fur and serial killer’s rubber mask. There are plastic palm trees behind us, a screen showing a film of a beach. On the train, I
tried to remember all the parties you held but it was hard to tell them apart. Before Iona was born, the years concertina into four or five memories, of being in bars, watching films, dancing,
lying in the sun. Anyway, I was thinking about
Drug Porn
and what a different phase that was for you, how innocent it was, commercially I mean, how absurdly impractical. I went along with
it. I’ve always supported you. But I was thinking how different you must have been then. Do you think you’ve changed? You don’t play the fool so much.’

I hefted Iona up in arms so that she could see across the Mersey. ‘Iona is the fool now. I am just her straight man.’

In the form of our child, the physical disparity between El and myself had produced a pleasing average. I was a wardrobe of a man, an overweight brick. El was petite and did not so much stand
beside her husband as shelter in the lee of him. Raymond used to make fun of us. ‘Did you steal her from a neighbouring tribe,’ he’d say, eyeing her up as being better matched to
his tidy stature. After a month apart, I really felt head-and-shoulders above her. A gap in the relationship had appeared; she was all the way down there, I was all the way up here. Domesticity had
given me a kind of radar sense that regularly swept across my wife and child, revealing their mood and location so that I was always reassured as to their happiness and safety. My time in Liverpool
switched off that sense. My efforts to please them failed. We went to the wrong café and ordered the wrong food. Affectionately, I bit Iona on her upper arm and she screamed, furious and
wounded. El did not know what to make of my action.

‘I was being a monster,’ I explained. ‘She used to like it.’

El rolled up the child’s sleeve and rubbed gently at the bite mark.

‘I am not doing very well, am I?’

El did not my catch my disconsolate mournful expression; we were out of sync when it came to reading one another’s faces.

The café was a student haunt at the top of Bold Street, and we were hemmed in by the loud theorizing of the other patrons. They weren’t other people to me. They were a contingent
bundle of genetic traits, psychological tendencies, environmental impacts, social conditioning, received ideas, cultural norms and so forth. The things they spoke so forcefully about were mere
ticker tape running in and out of an arbitrarily composed consciousness sited within a brain evolved to evade predators on the African plains.

‘You aren’t even listening to me,’ said El.

‘Sorry,’ I replied. ‘I was miles away.’

El helped Iona into her duffle coat, ensuring her hat was pulled down over her ears.

‘What were we talking about?’ I asked.

‘We weren’t,’ said El, not turning to face me, staying determined that Iona fasten each of the toggles. Here were two silences for me to decipher: firstly my daughter’s
uncomplaining compliance to her mother’s will, who she sensed was in no mood for a whinge; secondly, my wife’s averted gaze, an ostentatious signal, an overstated subtlety, if one can
live with that paradox, if one can live with it and marry it. Back home, we did not need to articulate our feelings, the air we shared was scented with our respective moods which filled the house
like the smell of beeswax polish upon varnished floorboards. Now we were apart, we could not rely upon finessed silences.

I asked El to stay. To try again. The menu had two things she liked. There were cakes in a glass cabinet. Iona could barter good behaviour for one. If they left now, the day would be lost mutely
wandering the windblown streets in search of the right thing to say, the right place to say it, and we would find neither. I promised to focus and not be so distracted.