The Red Men (4 page)

The surface of the Wave was smooth burnished steel with no flat planes, offering few impact points for a missile or plunging airliner. Its sinuous steel oscillation bristled with communications
antennas. Throughout the lagoon, ventilation pipes rose out of the water, serving offices buried far beneath. The Wave was connected to the wharf by the filaments of the walkways, which were
retractable in the case of an alert.

To get onto the walkway, Raymond had to pass through a black metal frame, a scanner which chimed softly to signal that he had been analysed, identified and approved.

He tried not to take it as a compliment.

The same PA who had accompanied him on his interview was waiting in the arboretum.

‘Are you ready to go to work?’ she beamed professionally.

He matched her enthusiasm with three quick nods.

He had no idea what he was doing.

He had no idea what his job was.

The orientation exercises took up most of his first week at Monad. To begin with, the new intake watched training videos. He was unsure if he should whisper mocking asides at the blandishments
coming from the screen or take notes. There was a short documentary on Monad tech in which two veteran actors, Will Mooch and Sebastian Blast, the stars of a classic science fiction TV show, read
from a corporate script with studied joviality.

‘The mind is the final frontier,’ said Mooch, striding along a computer-generated replica of the anterior cerebral artery. ‘Man has postponed his explorations of outer space to
journey into inner space.’

‘The mind is the future,’ emphasized Sebastian Blast.

The presentation detailed how Monad had licensed a technology from an American company called Numenius Systems, a technology which could simulate an individual. Florence had also made it through
the interview process and she and Raymond exchanged sarcastic remarks throughout.

‘It’s impossible to copy a soul,’ said Mooch. ‘Monad’s simulations are like sophisticated reflections in a mirror; they don’t have that third dimension that
is really you. We record hotspots of molecular activity in crucial areas of the brain through non-invasive surface scanning, combine that with in-depth interviews with the subject, supplemented
with our unique exegesis of their online behaviour, and plug all that information into our artificial intelligence. At the end of the process, we get something which looks like you, talks like you,
and thinks a bit like you.’

The video ended with Sebastian Blast conversing with his simulated self, which looked exactly like the actor at his physical peak. The youthful simulated Blast delivered the final speech to
camera, ‘I am not a copy of Sebastian Blast. I’m a story about myself told by the Cantor intelligence. This artificial intelligence resembles a writer that has been given a considerable
amount of information about me and has created a character out of it. Over the next few days you will encounter more concepts and technology like this that you may find disturbing. If at any time
you feel disorientated by Monad, please contact your supervisor immediately.’

Disquiet punted itself quietly across Raymond’s thoughts. He shared his doubts with Florence. ‘They can’t do that, can they? That is impossible, isn’t it? Artificial
intelligences? Simulating consciousness?’

She shrugged.

They went for lunch at the Puzzle bar in the Crossharbour district. Their first night together in her bedroom had ended in a failed sexual encounter. Now they had get to know one another sober
and with their clothes on, unsure of what to do with the memory of that first awkward encounter.

Florence gestured toward the riverside flats.

‘I used to think how glamorous it would be to live up there. Now I look at the balconies and think how lonely they look.’

‘A landscape is a state of mind,’ Raymond observed.

‘Is that from Verlaine? Or is it Amiel?’

The discussion turned to poetry. After interning, Florence had published a slim volume. Economic necessity determined that she apply for work at Monad.

‘I was appalled when they gave me an interview,’ she said. ‘I thought it reflected very badly on me. Obviously they had spied some embarrassing tendency toward corporate
soullessness in my application.’

‘We are not exactly Kafka’s “men of business”, are we?’ said Raymond. He was overdoing the literary references. Florence was only twenty-six. He was the older man.
It was unseemly of him to try so hard. He should be silent like a military man. Yet he couldn’t help rabbiting on.

‘It’s my condition. I get a bit manic now and again.’

‘I remember,’ said Florence.

She guided the conversation back to poetry.

‘Are you still writing free verse?’

‘No. I’m experimenting with form. The sonnet, the haiku.’

‘Do you write as quickly as you talk?’

‘Yes. Everything all at once. I perform my work aggressively.’

‘I perform like a cat’s tail winding around the foot of a bed. Apparently. That’s what a critic said about me. I wasn’t trying to be sexual but some men don’t
require much encouragement.’

From the way Florence was dressed, it was clear she had always been poor. There was a Bloomsbury languor to her outfit. Her blue mac was Chanel, although it had not been dry-cleaned since its
previous owner passed away. Her shoulders did not entirely support its shoulder pads.

Coming out of his manic phase, Raymond had rediscovered his personal style. His figure was once again that of an Englishman during rationing and so he never wanted for good second-hand clothes.
He was wearing a two-button single-breasted Hamish Harris tweed jacket with high-waisted fishtail trousers, braces, and a collarless bib-front grey Wolsey shirt. Raymond and Florence were drawn to
one another; they were a charity shop couple and as close as Canary Wharf came to exoticism. A good relationship needs a conspiracy, and their secret was a longing for the past, a nostalgia for a
period long before they were born, the austerity and integrity of the British nation under the Blitz, from a time before television, before the incursion of the screens. Florence had two spam
sandwiches stashed in her handbag, and she gave one to Raymond. Thus they put their bad first night behind them.

Raymond’s lunchtime conversations with Florence became part of the routine during the orientation training at Monad. The mornings were spent down in the conference rooms
of the Wave Building, attending lectures and seminars such as ‘Why the Map is not the Territory: Simulation and the Self’ and ‘Against Epiphenomenalism: Are You Out of Your
Head?’ During the lectures, speculation concerning the nature of the mind washed over Raymond. Taking notes, he felt strongly that he knew exactly what the lecturer was on about, and how
these profound observations altered his view both of himself and of reality. But as soon as he tried to explain the concepts to Florence, his understanding melted away and it was like trying to
remember a joke he had heard in a dream. After gasping at the revelation that the brain formed second order quantum waves which corresponded to the macroscopic wave functions of reality, he forgot
about it completely. These new concepts were so complex that it was as if his brain was reluctant to understand itself.

One Friday afternoon, the entire intake was corralled into a meeting room. The men gravitated toward the back of the room, their arms crossed, their expressions sceptical. Morton Eakins slipped
into the gathering and threw a balled-up screen from the back of the room onto the front wall. Slowly this screen spread across the entire surface from floor to ceiling, then the lights dimmed, and
the screen filled with the Monad brand. It resembled a stick man with one central eye and a semi-circle partially eclipsing the forehead. This circle, or head, was set on a cross, which at first
glance could be seen as an arms and torso, except that the horizontal line crossed the mid-point of the vertical, contrary to the traditional stick man, where the arms are drawn slanting downwards
from the neck. Either side of the base of the cross, there was a quarter-circle.

The logo was more complicated than the usual corporate identity, and reminded Raymond of a glyph or sigil.

Morton Eakins pointed at the brand.

‘This is Monad.’

He exhaled, an evangelist’s awe at what he was about to impart.

‘What is it?’ asked Eakins.

Some of the intake went to answer, but he was too quick for them.

‘Monad is the new new thing. Monad is a mystery.’

On the screen, the Monad logo morphed into a question mark.

‘Why has Monad employed you? What does Monad want you to do? Where did Monad come from and where is it going?

‘This past week, we’ve laid on a crash-course in philosophies of the self, the latest research into consciousness, neuroscience and the cultural construction of the self, and the
implications of artificial intelligence. But we have not answered the big question: what are you lot doing here?’

His hairline was retreating. Unfortunate deposits of fat gave him dugs and a double chin. There was a hairless, beardless babyish quality to Morton; his black company fleece and black moleskin
trousers resembled a funereal romper suit.

‘What if your consciousness could be uploaded into a computer? It’s a common idea in science fiction. It proceeds from the assumption that the mind like the computer is a consequence
of computation. If you are merely a collection of neurons firing in a network, then it is simply a matter of recording the position of these neurons and mapping their locations onto a model which
interprets them as thoughts, memories, the qualia that is the ineffable you.

‘Over the last five days, we’ve raised these kind of speculations and hopefully you’ve understood that it’s impossible to upload your mind into a computer using current
technology.

‘We could analyse your entire brain. Peel it like an onion and record the contents of every slice of tissue with an electron microscope. It would kill you, and to what purpose? In every
cubic millimetre of brain matter there are ten-to-the-power-of-five neurons and ten-to-the-power-of-nine synapses. That is before we even get onto the nervous system. Or chemical and hormonal
activity. How would we reassemble a map of the brain into a mind? Where would we get the model which could run that program? What computer could possibly contain such an immensity of
information?

‘To create a model of the mind, we could take a baby, a
tabula rasa
, and expose it to carefully controlled stimuli while recording the development of the brain and the growth of
their consciousness every day for the first five years of their life. We could show the child their mother’s face, note down the concomitant swell of neural activity. Would that give us the
information required to reconstruct consciousness from a brain scan?

‘Then there are broader philosophical problems. Consciousness can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation, a survival mechanism that has allowed our species to flourish. As such it is not
merely housed in the body, but it is bound up with it. Your minds may not exist without your bodies. Lightning is a phenomenon of a larger weather system and if you attempt to isolate it, would it
merely be a spark?

‘It’s vital that you understand the distinction between simulated and uploaded consciousness. Why? Monad simulates its customers, and you are going to explain to our customers
precisely what has happened to them. There must be no misapprehension that the simulation is a perfect copy of them, or that it constitutes some form of immortality. They are characters in the
imagination of the Cantor intelligence. The reason I am employing you is that you are all writers. And Cantor’s functionality in this regard resembles the human capacity to model the
behaviour of others in the imagination, to predict how other people will react to given circumstances, and to intuit behaviour that conforms to a particular characterization. Writers possess the
conceptual equipment to simplify this mind-boggling situation, and you will need to do that on a daily basis as you field calls and complaints from our client base.’

The Monad brand appeared again on the screen.

The Horned devil with cloven hoof. Taurus. The cuckold. On closer inspection a modulation of the symbols of Mars and Venus to mark a third sex, a new species.

‘Any questions?’ asked Eakins.

Florence raised her hand.

‘Assembling a menagerie of writers and poets to deal with some weird hypothetical technology seems to me – and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way... I mean, I
appreciate the money and everything – but this is madness.’

Eakins indulged her with a smirk.

‘There’s a call centre in Italy which employs only actors. Actors always need money, and are gifted improvisers. Therefore a call centre staffed by actors is more appropriate for
certain products, specifically the products which don’t lend themselves to a scripted approach. I don’t think there has ever been a customer service department staffed by writers and
poets before. It’s my unique concept. Literature attracts psychological types we think will be the best fit as a liaison between a client and their simulation. Since the money you earn will
support your art, we expect a lower staff turnover. Also, being writers, you’re very cheap.’