If Then (7 page)

“I don’t believe the Process is refining the inhabitants of this town and discarding the materials it cannot work with.” Alex adjusted her glasses. James noted that the bloodstains had been scrubbed out of her collar.

“Aren’t we ignoring the obvious?” said Edith. “The reason everyone is so healthy is that the Process predicted who would fall sick and evicted them in the first months.”

Joe nodded. “The Process discovers illness before I do. Before the patients themselves. It knows our fate.”

“The Process is an iterative, incremental framework for human interaction powered by complete access to everything we feel, say and do,” Alex reminded them. “And, yes, Joe, it is predictive. It monitors, learns from and anticipates our needs. The Process is partly composed of algorithms and associated data sets that evolved under the pressure of the needs of billions of consumers, salvaged from the internet and transferred to our biotech. The first algorithms of mass observation screened humans for outliers, specifically patterns of behaviour associated with terrorism. It was our genius to use those same methods to screen for behaviour that was social positive rather than social negative, and use it to reinforce that behaviour.”

“And we need eviction to enforce socially positive behaviour?” asked the baron.

Carla was shocked. “Eviction is not a need! Children in my school have lost their parents. Nobody needs that. Who could need that?”

“Not such a sane town, after all,” said Edith.

“I don’t understand your argument.” The baron turned his long weathered face back to Alex Drown. “That these people are cast out of their homes for their own good? Or that our town needs the prospect of punishment – no matter how arbitrary – to function?” The question had the soft ‘g’ and trilled ‘r’ of the North Brabant accent, a remnant of the baron’s childhood on the family estate in Eerde.

Alex said, “The Seizure was a response to the declining value of labour among the majority of people in the West. Put simply, we needed to find, for people like yourselves, an alternative mechanism to markets for meeting needs and driving production. Lewes was fortunate because, while the value of the labour of its citizens approaches zero, the data that can be harvested from you and used to refine the Process has a reasonably high value.”

“We are
interesting
,” said the baron.

“But not in the ways that you would like to be,” said Edith.

Alex Drown continued, “The Process is constantly evolving. We’ve established thirty-four behavioural patterns within the Process consistent with algorithms that were extant prior to the Seizure, some from financial services, dating agencies, retailers, market research, some from national health monitoring, some from national security agencies of various nations, one from our own lifestreaming and experiential tagging project, and so on. But new patterns are emerging.”

The baron slapped the table with mock amusement. “So how can you be confident of its intentions? Oh, excuse me, I forgot. I must not speak of intentions. That would be teleologically unsound of me, wouldn’t it? What would we do without the Institute to counsel us on our flawed ways of thinking? Let me try a different tack: what does the Institute make of the appearance of this stretcher bearer?”

“The bailiff is monitoring the soldier for us. We await his report.”

The council turned to James and Hector. Edith gestured for James to come forward. He stood up but Hector stepped ahead of him to stand in full attention before the conference table. The doctor inspected the physiognomy of Hector, testing the plasticity of his skin, the resistance of his flesh, the ridged sinews of his forearms. He sniffed around the chest, and peered into the pupils.

“This is an obscenity,” said Joe. “To expend such resources in times of austerity is a moral offence.”

“Art is never a moral offence,” announced the baron.

“You approve?”

“I do,” said the baron. “The Process has become an artist.”

“The appearance of this soldier makes a mockery of our sacrifice,” said Angus. The
douanier
had relatives on the other side of the fence, scattered in encampments throughout the Downs; James had not needed to evict them because the implant prevented Angus from letting them through the gates.

Edith sought more opinions from around the table. The manufacture of the stretcher bearer may seem to be an affront to the virtue of frugality, but to question the Process was to return to the whinging of democracy, and that made them uneasy.

“He speaks too,” said James.

Alex leant forward. “He actually spoke to you?”

“He said he was a pacifist.”

Edith was moved by the thought of a pacifist soldier. She came around from behind the table to take Hector’s hands in hers.

“Poor, poor boy,” she comforted him. He did not respond to her touch.

From the other side of the door came an urgent knocking and a plea to know what was going on in the meeting.

“The ombudsmen are impatient for the eviction list,” said James.

“They want to be put out of their misery,” said the baron.

Edith let go of Hector’s hands. She opened the doors to the ombudsmen. The room filled up with the representatives of the districts, and they were, with one exception from Southover, Lewesians who could trace their ancestry in the town back four or five generations – at least. By contrast, the council was mostly made up of outsiders, people who had chosen to live in Lewes rather than being born into it.

The
douanier
secured the door while James seated himself before the ledger of the evicted, fountain pen in hand. Alex and the doctor set about preparing him. Alex whispered an unlocking sequence into his ear while the doctor took out his syringe case and administered neuroceuticals to make the data flow more easily.

Edith, the incorrigible old hippy, took James’ hands in hers as the Process began. He heard algorithms in the heft of the table and flickering in the gaslight. The implant made him into a pantheist, aware of the spirit in each and every material thing. The moon defined and initialized the beliefspace of the algorithm. And as his mother used to say, If beliefspace = 1 then mutate_with_inf (candidate, beliefs, minmax) else halt. If g is greater than or less than six then halt.

Decoherence.

G drew its value from the number of stars visible through the small black window in his bedroom and from the first vector of the last known location of his mother.

Def update_beliefspace.

The substance of his consciousness and the stuff of the universe were revealed portions of the absolute. Godstuff flowed out of the implant and his fingertips trembled with interconnections between himself, other people and the land. The approach of something transcendental. A shell explosion is a flash of inspiration. The undulation of long grass in the night wind. A father’s intemperate chastisement of his son. A man in short trousers and a hooded jerkin walking alone across the Downs, whistling a hiking tune. The vast current of things. The trenches to come, marks in the earth where the future will break. Interconnections vaguely apprehended. Deeper than the soul of individuals lie thoughts too vast for language. Evil will excavate the truth more rapidly than Good. A dirge sung over the ruins.

He was staring into Edith Von Pallandt’s face and she was afraid.

Mutate a factor and run the algorithm again.

The names of the evicted flowed from his pen. A quick act of automatic writing, his hand moving steadily, one name to a line, twelve lines in all. Ruth’s needles knitted him together. It was over, the implant shut down and the tendrils of god stuff slithered out of him.

The ombudsmen shifted anxiously: they had been drawn from the ranks of truculent and sceptical dissenters, chatboard trolls, market gossips, and barroom nihilists whose role was now to witness the giving of the names. The room was heady with their beefy odour of homemade soap and damp woollens.

Twelve names in the ledger.

The Cliffe ombudsman cried out.

“But this one is a child!”

There, his finger on the page, smudging still-wet ink. Agnes Bowles. She was to be evicted along with her parents and her little brother, Euan.

“She’s ten years old!”

“We can’t evict children!” Carla was beside herself.

The vast thoughts and scattered images and sense of interconnectedness faded, and he came to in the garishly-coloured room, where he registered human stink and sweat quivering on moustache hairs. People. After the state of grace, he always felt mournful and misanthropic. They asked him what they should do about the child. Surely they could not follow normal eviction procedure. The town would never accept it. The Process had to be questioned. But there was no love in him for anyone and he just wanted to go home. Edith tried to detain him, but he shook her off and warned her away.

James and Hector went outside onto the high street. The evening was cold and still, the street illuminated by high burning braziers. Alex Drown was waiting for them.

“The soldier is a pacifist,” she said.

“He said that he would not fight.”

“You and Hector are part of an ongoing thought. We must think of him in terms of yourself, your connection to him, what the Process is trying to communicate through that contact between you and him.”

“Under the influence of the implant, I saw images of the war.”

“It’s coming,” she said.

“Are you staying in Lewes tonight?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I will walk back across the Downs.”

“It’s five miles across dark country. You’re not afraid to be out there on your own?”

She looked back at the town hall, as the ombudsmen filed out, and then up at him.

“There’s plenty to be afraid of here, bailiff.”

6

R
uth resented making
men’s clothes. She put her arms around James and took his chest measurement then withdrew when he returned the gesture. On her wrist, she wore a small cushion of pins, a sign that he should keep his distance, that she had no patience for him right now.

The choral gowns of lamentation, a dozen hooded linen ghosts, hung in a line across the living room, their breasts rent during the last eviction and requiring repair. She inspected each gown in turn, and, with pins between her lips, made quick notes with a small pencil. It was the week before eviction and everyone had a job to do. The black silk and lace remained untouched in its transparent box.

After James cleared away the lunch plates, Ruth went down to the communal kitchen to put in her loaves and check the stockpot. The kitchen in their house was small with only a firebox for cooking and an improvised vent that let in the cold. Narrow and with broken chipboard, the kitchen had been designed for heating up ready meals after a day at the office, for whipping up fairy cakes or grilling fish fingers, not for baking bread, preserving fruit, hanging game, fermenting cider, cultivating yoghurt, and all the other cooking techniques they employed.

Sensing her annoyance, James boiled water upon the firebox and made tea from a hedgerow leaf bound in a small stained muslin sack. She drank a mouthful and gave the rest to Hector. She was cross. No, not cross. To describe her mood as cross would only annoy her more. She could not forgive him for the names that had appeared on the eviction list.

“I know the Bowles family,” said Ruth.

He said nothing.

“Agnes is beautiful and bright and her brother, Euan, who is four, is blond and very serious. The family made sacrifices during the Seizure and accepted reallocated housing in Malling even though they owned a nice place in the centre of town. The father, Tom, built a wooden shelter at the school so that in the summer the children could have lessons outdoors. How will we survive if we evict a family like the Bowles? It makes no sense.”

He was staring out of the window, drinking his tea.

“What are you saying?”

“The Process is supposed to create absolute fairness. But can you give me one good reason why the Bowles family are to be evicted whereas any number of frankly useless individuals are still here?”

“What are you saying to me? What do you expect me to do about it?”

“You’ve met the family. At the lido. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“It was last summer. We had a picnic. You bought us popcorn. Their boy, Euan, kicked a ball at you. He wanted to play.”

“I don’t remember them,” he said.

“Then there must be something wrong with you,” said Ruth.

Through the window, an unharnessed horse loitered in the empty street. He wondered where the rider was. Ruth would not be receptive to him changing the subject. Snow was coming, and he anticipated waking up tomorrow to discover the horse and the town erased.

“Do you think there is something wrong with me?” he asked.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Is there something wrong with you?”

“You are angry.”

It took her a moment to master herself. “You told me anger could get me evicted.”

“That’s just something I say to keep the peace. No one knows what makes a difference to eviction. Apart from the obvious. Do you remember Mr Farncombe? A debtor. And a bad heart. He clearly had to go. Do you remember how he chained himself to the radiator? I had pull the whole room apart.”

“You remember Mr Farncombe, but not the Bowles?”

“I remember all the evictions. It is a very vivid time for me. The adrenalin, the confrontation, the strangeness of being there but not being in control. I almost tore Farncombe in half because the Process hadn’t registered that, when I took hold of him, he was tied down.”

“He might have considered that a mercy.”

“Not at all. The
douanier
told me that Farncombe’s friends from Brighton came and got him. He’s holed up with them in an old hotel on the front. There is always life after eviction. The Bowles family will be fine. Somebody on the outside, some old friend or a lord who wants a young family on his land, will take them in.”

“If it is so hospitable out there, why did Farncombe chain himself to the radiator? Did you ask yourself that?”

“He was afraid of change.”

“Should I tell Agnes not to be afraid?”

“Tell her not to resist.”

Ruth returned to her sewing machine. With one hand, she spun the mechanism and with the other, held the linen gown so that the needle completed the seam, and sealed off their conversation.

No one is indispensable.

His boss taught him that, a long time ago, when he first worked in an office. He never quite believed it, always felt there was something exceptional about his insight and his talent, right up until the point they dispensed with him, and then with his boss. He went on to teach business to students, or was it genetics? He was not nostalgic for the lost age of jobs; in retrospect, it seemed an arbitrary sorting mechanism for his class. They made nothing but money, and towards the end, not even that. He heard of a bank that fired all its clients because their algorithm could make more money without them. People ceased to be a vital component of the economic system. To call what happened next a collapse or a Seizure was to speak from an anthropic perspective. From the point of view of the financial instruments themselves, the system was thriving.

The Seizure was a long time coming; like dementia, its progress was marked by mood changes, problems with reasoning and memory loss. The wobble, the General Strike, the crash, the recovery, the second crash, the collapse, the hope, the end of hope, the chaos and then Seizure: it lasted for so long that it was normal right up until
it really wasn’t anymore
. The government sold redundant regions of the nation for private development and he helped maintain order. An archipelago of prosperity arose. Islands within an island. He didn’t sleep much to begin with, kept awake by wine-deranged financial calculations at four in the morning, crazed escape plans, the rigmarole of anxiety. During sleep, the mind sorts through the flotsam and jetsam of the day to decide what is worth committing to memory, and what can be discarded, and with broken sleep comes broken memories.

No one is even necessary.

Lewes was one of the land assets acquired by an Asian fund algorithm. Alex had been tasked with the experimental transfer of the intellectual copyright of big tech into nature, and put together a deal with the Institute. She explained it to him on numerous occasions but all he remembered was the phrase “black box bio-technology”.

“Does this mean we now live inside the black box?”

Bioware for the townspeople was a condition of the contract, the stripe for all, and the implant for a few. He volunteered because he was strong, had no dependents and because he prided himself on his adaptability. He questioned Alex Drown at the very beginning, when she was advising the council on their decision.

“The Process will make a fair society,” she explained. “Instead of using market forces to distribute goods to meet needs, the Process monitors the lifestream and physiological condition of each individual within it, and then manufactures and distributes the required goods. The overriding imperative is fairness.”

“Can you define fairness?”

She could. “Fairness is composed of over a hundred and twenty metrics; these are simplified using Fourier transforms into a short stream of numbers, and then the Process monitors and nudges these metrics when they exceed or fall into unacceptable levels.”

“Into unfairness.”

“Yes.”

“What if we want to come out of the Process? How do we do that?”

“The contract is very clear. The town has to see the Process through to its next iteration. There is no get-out clause. If the Process is interrupted in its beta phase then the asset loses value.”

“By the asset, do you mean the town?”

“The asset is the people and the land unified with the Process. Each component of the asset, on its own, is of negligible value.”

“Is there someone we can appeal to, if we get desperate?”

“The Process,” said Alex.

“What if I change my mind?”

“Irrevocable decisions form character, James,” said Alex. “It’s a hard decision but by your age, you should have used up all the easy ones.”

After the procedure, he awoke in the Institute. His scalp itched with the implant. Alex tuned him into the Process; he felt a surge of heat at the base of his skull, and staggered around the overgrown lawn of the stately home waiting for his head to explode.

The window of their flat, set on the curved corner of the building, was exposed to the winter gale. It was cold to the touch. In the street below, the horse turned and turned again then set off with deranged resolve down Market Street. He put on another layer of clothes and spent the evening under blankets on their burst sofa rereading novels by candlelight, while Ruth concentrated upon the sewing machine.

The next morning, he went to prepare the armour for eviction night, and took Hector with him. They walked down the hill and into the Phoenix estate. The development of the estate had been abandoned in the Seizure so half-built new homes and shopping units coexisted with rotten warehouse timbers and the weed-strewn backroads of light industrial edgelands. The sky was low and secretive, and snow bunched in the gutters and spilt through the broken roofs of the yards. James made deep footprints, Hector did not. Ruth had traded a quilt for a herringbone tweed overcoat for the soldier, although it was too generous for his trim frame. Hector wore all the clothes they had given him under and over his uniform, so he had four pairs of socks on his feet, pyjamas under his khaki tunic and slacks, and his balaclava topped with a beanie hat. From his pack, he produced a canteen, took a swig, then offered it to James.

“Are we talking again?” asked James, as he accepted the canteen.

The soldier waited for him to take his drink.

The previous night’s snow had frozen into ridges and treacherous fissured patches. Their boots crunched through it until they arrived at a concrete bunker half-buried in the earth. Snow curled over the edges of its slab roof like a layer of fat. Through his gloves, James felt the stinging cold of the iron padlock.

The men walked down rough concrete stairs and ducked under a low ceiling to reach an inner chamber forty feet deep, a dark cylinder lined with shelves from the bottom to the top. The torchlight revealed – suspended in the centre of the cylinder – an enormous hand with three sharp, flat, iron fingers. The hand was attached to a rusting girder that in turn ended in a ball-and-socket elbow joint. The beam flashed up. The heart of the armour was a harness with a porthole or colloid for visibility. The beam flashed down. The armour was mounted on two extendable legs.

James hoisted himself up and climbed over the central cage to the shoulders of the armour, about thirty feet up, and started its diesel engine. The engine whimpered, turned over, whined and knocked. Spotlights set high on the armour flared then died off. James cursed, hitched a torch between his ear and collar bone, then dug out a drill bit and a spanner. The pump was off by one timing belt groove. He tightened it and tried again; the engine started without knocking. Climbing over the head of the armour, he released the bolts on the bunker roof. It was frozen shut. He tried to force it but it was no good. He climbed back down and went outside to clear the snow and chip the ice from the hinges so that the roof would shift. Nothing mechanical worked first time.

With the roof off, he could work by daylight. The engine ran on biodiesel brewed by the town engineers and came in two varieties, viscous rapeseed oil or the tallow made from animal fat, which crystallized well above freezing. The central body piece of the armour was created in the factories of the Process: it was a structural battery, a mould of nickel-based battery chemistry and steel. It was waterproof, which was vital as sometimes the armour had to lunge through rivers to extract people reluctant to be evicted. With the engine running, the armour could power its hydraulics and any appliance he plugged into it – in this case, a heating coil to thaw out the tallow.

While he waited for the fuel to liquefy, he tried to engage Hector in conversation. The soldier was biddable if not responsive; he understood speech but his manner was dilatory, drifting in a state of mind somewhere between trauma and narcotic daydream.

“I want you to talk to me, Hector.”

The soldier shifted his boots in the snow. The fumes from the juddering exhaust smelt of popcorn.

“On the bowling green, you said that you would not fight.”

The soldier removed his balaclava. The way the tip of his long nose hung over an ironic curl of his smile was a sign that he was prepared to speak.

“I will not fight,” said Hector.

“Who are you?” asked James.

“I will serve,” said Hector. “I must bear my share. But I will not fight.”

“Who are you?” James repeated his question.

The soldier squinted at him.

“Sergeant John Hector. Have we met before? Yes, in Limerick. You were one of the fellows in the barracks. Give us a coffin nail.”

James did not know what to say.

“Do you have a smoke?” continued Hector. “You are dense, old man.”

James fetched an old pouch of Terry’s homegrown tobacco stashed among the tools. Hector rolled himself a cigarette and offered the pouch back to James. He shook his head.

Hector coughed, stirred his boots in the snow and walked across the yard toward the river. The Ouse was muddy and low, the bank slick and treacherous. His reflection swayed on the brown river, a thin neck and narrow head atop the overcoat. This stretch of the Ouse was tidal and the clay colouring deepened with the shallowing of the river through the afternoon.

“Where do you come from?” asked James.

“The Westmorland Dales, in Levens,” said Hector, and James could hear the accent. “My father is a painter. My mother is dead. Her father was a Magyar so I have Romany blood. Father’s from Quaker stock. I didn’t sign up right away. We argued about it. I wanted to serve so that my beliefs would be witnessed by the misguided men who fight. I wanted to show that I’m not afraid.”