The Red Men (11 page)

The mania was back. He crawled around on his hands and knees to ground himself against the leaps and bounds of his reason. He should never have gone near the cannabis. Narcotics had an inverse
effect on him; just as hyperactive children are dosed with stimulants to slow them down, so the somnolent clouds of dope brought about a gnashing frenzy in Raymond. His urge to monologue was so
strong he crawled to the toilet bowl, nauseous at not having anyone to talk at. Eventually, he dug out his phone, reasoning that since Bravado already knew where he lived, there was no harm in
switching it on and calling me.

‘Nelson. A quick query. If a red man harmed its subscriber, would Monad switch it off?’

‘What’s on your mind, Raymond?’

‘I’m not the first victim of Bravado. He tormented his subscriber too, ruined his life as far as I can tell.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I went looking for Harold Blasebalk. He’s missing, just as Bravado said. His wife told me he became obsessed about unplugging himself. I figure he’s gone dark somewhere out
east. The question is: how do I find him?’

‘What do you hope to achieve by digging up Blasebalk?’

‘Monad won’t be able to ignore Bravado’s behaviour if I can prove he has been tormenting his subscriber. It undermines their whole business. I’ll see that Bravado gets
deleted for what he’s done to me.’

‘Good luck Raymond.’

‘Yeah.’

Raymond switched off his phone and removed the battery.

Unfortunately, I never had that conversation with Raymond.

Later, when I had to piece together this sequence of events with Florence, I was adamant that I had never spoken to him about looking for Blasebalk. To begin with, I would never have recommended
going into that part of the city in Raymond’s condition. Stratford and the outer fringes of Hackney were attracting a new type of immigrant. Anonymity seekers. The conspiracy theorists and
the fathers fleeing child support. The alienated scientists, converting sweatshops to synthesize new narcotics, practitioners of outlaw technologies clustered in the abandoned manufacturing zones:
xenotransplantation, genetic modification, maverick biotech geniuses working out of the back of a transit van. The network interprets government as damage and routes around it. Ground Zero of the
Great Refusal. Like all black economies, it was cash-only; the notes all had their serial numbers singed off. Sometimes the Kurdish guy at the off-licence on Mare Street handed them out as change.
In such a society, Raymond’s reality testing would quickly fail. No, if he had called me and said he was going dark in search of Harold Blasebalk I would have advised against that adventure
in the strongest possible terms.

‘Wake up, son. I have to talk to you.’

Raymond opened his eyes and saw a glowing figure standing at the other end of the room. It was his father, wearing a thick woollen coat, scarf and brown leather driving gloves. The door was a
window into the afterlife. Raymond slipped out of bed. His father watched his naked son feel urgently around the edges of the screen clinging to the door frame.

‘Who brought you in here, Dad? Was it Harry Bravado?’

His father blinked rapidly. He was having trouble thinking around the fist in his mind. Then he remembered what he had come to talk about.

‘Son, you have to take the lithium. You are a man now. You’re too much for me and your mother to handle when you are like this. It really upsets her when you talk your stuff. Can you
just think about what you’re saying?’

Raymond took a good look at his father’s face, got in right up close and saw the capillaries erupting behind his skin and how he talked tight-lipped to conceal the ruin time had made of
his teeth. He peered right into the old man, close enough to smell the frazzled ions. His father thought he was faking it, playing the malingerer. His father’s love, once presumed to be
fathomless, actually had disturbing creatures scuttling around at the bottom of it: disappointment, anger, frustration. He just wanted to shake some sense into that boy of his.

‘Dad, what is Harry Bravado making you do?’

‘No one makes me do anything, son. I am my own man. If you took your pills again, you would remember that.’

‘I can’t trust them. He has poisoned them.’

The screen was a genetically modified virus. It had slipped under the door and crawled up it, like a slime mould. Then, under remote instruction, the virus hardened into a screen, secreting a
solvent to bond it to the old wooden door. Raymond gave up trying to prise it loose. He put on his dressing gown, sat on the edge of the bed and rolled himself a cigarette. His father didn’t
approve of his smoking but he let it pass, reluctant to cause unnecessary confrontation.

‘Come home, Raymond. You need help. It’s gone much further this time. We’re worried that you are going to do something irrevocable.’

While flicking at his lighter, Raymond realized two things: one, that the lighter worked and that therefore it was unlikely that this was a dream, as devices rarely function correctly even in
lucid dreams. The sensation of smoking, the increase in heart rate, the yawn of his satiated craving, also reassured him that this was actually happening. Secondly, turning the lighter over in his
hands he realized he had been careless to have allowed such a recent product into his possession as it was likely to have an RFID chip. He would need a Zippo, something he could break down into its
constituent components and search. Or he could use matches, once he’d taken them out of the box.

‘I can’t get through to you anymore,’ his father pleaded.

‘That’s because you’re dead, Dad. I carried your coffin. I can feel the weight of you shifting into the corner of the box. I don’t know if Bravado’s been using old
family videos or even if he’s lifting my memories out of my own head. You are a simulation created by a simulation. You are ones and zeros.’

‘Please Raymond. Don’t.’

‘You’re dead, Dad. You are in the ground, I put earth on you.’

‘Take your medication. Otherwise we’re going to have to section you, and I don’t want to do that. Please, Ray, just stop this. Just stop.’

Raymond couldn’t stop because of the grief. The love rage. It was impossible for him to remain calm in the face of such provocation. Unreal as he knew this phantom to be, it disinterred
the ferocious fight-and-flight of his relationship with his father. Such emotions are radioactive and persist in the earth for centuries.

‘Come out, Bravado! Stop hiding behind my Dad.’ Raymond grabbed at the image of his father and it reacted as if seized by his hands, even reaching up to fend him off. Its weakness
and cowardice further confirmed its unreality. Dad would never have stood for being manhandled and had the strength about the trunk to knock his son down.

‘If you think you are freaking me out then listen to me, Harry. I’ve got a few home truths for you. I went to your house. You’re just some middle-class sap. I met your wife, I
would have had her if she wasn’t such tough old turkey.’ But the red man would not acknowledge that it was in there. His father dropped to the carpet clutching his shoulder, grinding
his teeth against the sudden pain in his chest: electrical fire radiating up and down the nerves in the jaw, and the heart itself a heavy blazing firebrick. This was exactly how he had imagined his
father’s death. Red flared into puce then purpled then blued, the tongue expressed and engorged like a rude, immense flaccid member. Once his father had finally stopped twitching, the screen
consumed its filaments and dispersed in a puff of molecules.

The room went dark. Raymond returned to bed. When he closed his eyes, a carousel of anger and violence span in his mind. Scenarios of beatings, kickings, stabbings took over his imagination, all
through the night, unstoppable and disturbing in their detail. The Connector took out a new box of nails. If he managed to find Harold Blasebalk, it would be hard for him to control himself.

Raymond took an interest in a butcher’s shop, trying to get his breath back. Boiler chickens in garroted ranks turned and twisted on their string like grotesque wind
chimes. The door was propped open by a basket of carcasses, ratty wings and giblets, topped with a sign that suggested ‘Help yourself!’ Peering into the shop, he saw rugs of tripe,
baskets of tongues and guts unspooled like fire hosing. There was no one behind the counter.

It was an autumnal Thursday afternoon and the streets were wet with rain. He had followed a man to the corner terrace of a wrecked cul-de-sac. The front of the house was protected by a tall iron
gate which opened into a pleached bower of interlaced thorns patched here and there with squares of carpet underlay. The fence was a sharpened palisade with each stake ending in a three-pronged
arrowhead. Raymond idled around the back of the house; sheets of metal topped with barbed wire acted as fencing, although subsidence had opened up slivers between individual sections revealing the
extensive tunnelling work out back. The excavations were considerable; cars, tipped in bonnet down, wedged the earth apart. A workshop built out of oil drums filled with concrete was covered with a
canopy of corrugated iron.

Feeling that he was being watched through the slats of a boarded-up window, Raymond retreated to the other side of the street. A small white Citroen van showed similar handiwork to the house;
the wing mirror hung off the chassis bound with parcel and gaffer tape. The passenger seat was overwhelmed with bags and boxes, paperwork and pans and a potted cactus sat on the dashboard. Peering
through a half-drawn curtain on the back window of the van, he saw a mattress and a grey duvet. Whoever owned this van was just one key-turn away from moving on.

His study of the local shadow media had lead him here; mimeographed manifestos and photocopied pamphlets picked up from cafés and dives, a throwback to a time before the screens. Their
creators were suspicious of the network. These were off-line publications for the dark zones; their inky illustrated covers opened onto wonky text. Once you got past the poetry and the polemics
against global capitalism, there was always a pseudonymous article about Monad.

The hand-made publications took their names from road designations in the area, the A503, the A104, the A106. There were clear differences in editorial remit. The A112 was riddled with closely
set lines speculating on the origins of Monad, the minuscule point size recalling the diaries of a graphomaniac. The commentary insisted Monad used photon entanglement to receive messages sent back
from their office in the future. Receptors for these messages were located in space, or beneath the Wave building, and the great server farm holding the Cantor intelligence and his red men was also
in the future.

Other writers speculated that emergence explained Monad’s leap into artificial intelligence, and accused their colleagues of stumbling into a conceptual gap caused by a lack of
understanding of quantum physics. ‘These sensationalized misreadings of Bohr and Heisenberg ignore Eberhard’s theorem that “All paranormal phenomena based on clairvoyant
telepathic, faster-than-light, and precognitive backward-in-time communication using non-local connectivity is impossible.” That is, no information can be transferred via quantum
nonlocality.’

The A11 was slanted more toward the effects of Monad than its causes. It gathered first-hand accounts of red men, and took care to italicize descriptions of their air-brushed physiognomy. Public
figures known to have red men were stalked, with particular attention lavished upon Richard Else, the journalist whose televised interview with himself announced the technology to the
mainstream.

There were also tales of harassment. One man’s account told of a red man going rogue, spilling secrets about old affairs backed up by time sheets, cash withdrawals, credit card and phone
bills. It took to sending him brief video clips of his own death, close-ups of his throat being slit, or the precise effect a bullet had when fired up through his jaw and into his skull.
Referencing these anecdotes, an editorial suggested: ‘Anything a red man dreams or imagines, it can set down as media. Although their acts are restrained by the reality principle, it seems
they are encouraged to give full vent to their desires, no matter how destructive. They are indulged like precocious children. However, none of their art goes beyond simple violent or sexual power
fantasies. The red men possess only the most prosaic and rudimentary simulation of the unconscious.’

Raymond stopped reading and flicked back, wondering if this anonymous interviewee was the man he was looking for.

A: Management suggested it. The company already had a relationship with Monad supplying quantitative and qualitative research on consumer behaviour. I was sceptical that the
simulations would be in any way accurate but there was no doubt that the red men technology was a breakthrough as a research tool. We wanted to maintain our relationship with Monad. They were a big
client, and I drew the short straw.

A: I was interviewed by the Cantor intelligence in weekly sessions. I gave it public and private access to my life stream and its archive. Personnel turned over my insight file, and
I passed on the diaries I’d kept as a young man. My wife and children’s life streams were also accessed. My psychiatrist was interrogated. I had no problems with this level of exposure.
To complete the process, they scanned me while asking me questions about my mother. That was it.

A: It was mute when I first saw it. A red dour silhouette. It needed to grow. There is a training period. It shadowed my live life stream. Then, one day, I clicked my fingers at my
screen and there was my red man, smiling back at me.