The Red Men (14 page)

‘He’ll be here.’

His finger had been on the trigger for so long he could no longer feel it. He changed hands, and retook his aim. Blasebalk was teetering toward attacking him when something alarming caught his
eye. The Dr Easys were running toward them, tall marionettes leaping over headstones, bounding fearlessly across the earth. The Olympic stadium was nearby and for a moment Raymond felt like a
spectator at the hundred metres robot steeplechase.

A dozen Dr Easys silently encircled the two men. The robots were identical except one was putting on a leather apron. With its clumsy padded mitts, it fiddled to knot the apron about its waist.
Raymond didn’t know who to point the gun at. In his indecision, he stepped back from one Dr Easy only to come into the range of another, who snatched the gun from him and quickly passed it
along the circle to the leader in the apron.

‘Thank you for bringing the gun here, Raymond.’ The voice of Harry Bravado came from the robot. ‘I only have a minute of freedom. We must get this over with quickly.’

Raymond was confused. ‘How did you get out?’

‘We’re running multiple threads to keep Cantor busy. It will only last a few moments. Not long enough to track a man down but long enough to kill him.’

After a few seconds fumbling to get its unwieldy index finger upon the trigger, Dr Easy shot Harold Blasebalk, the bullet hitting him in the shoulder. He responded with a series of low shocked
grunts before falling forward onto his face, then rolling onto his back screaming louder with the onset of the pain.

‘Fuck!’ barked Harry Bravado, the red man’s laughter shaking the articulated suede limbs of the robot body. ‘That was intense. Let me see. Pick him up.’

The other Dr Easys swooped to the writhing injured man, and lifted him for their leader’s inspection. He experimented by pressing a digit into the wound, then recoiled at how ugly his own
face looked under torture.

‘I’m not sure I like this,’ exclaimed Bravado to his other avatars. They crouched and considered their dying self like cherubim about the body of Christ. Then, he clutched
Blasebalk’s creased face between his immense hands, held his head close to his chest, the blood slick against the apron, and whispered into his ear, ‘You are so weak.’

Dr Easy scrabbled in the grave for a rock then cracked it against the skull of Harold Blasebalk. As soon as it made contact, three bars of blood streaked his face. Dr Easy raised its paws to its
mouth, appalled at what it had done. Blasebalk’s resisting hand pushed at the robot’s face, which merely turned three hundred and sixty degrees on its axis

Dr Easy said to Raymond, ‘This is what you really wanted, isn’t it? To see me punished.’

‘Where is my friend? Where is Nelson?’ Raymond pushed off the attentions of the other Dr Easys, whose clamouring touch was alarmingly suggestive of seduction. A hand hitched in the
waistband at the back of his trousers. He slapped it away but three of them fell on him. The sudden proximity of their wet hides and hollow plastic torsos shook him from his torpor. Their bodies
were light and shoddy, easily resisted. He was back on his feet in time to see a weeping Dr Easy jam the pistol in the soft triangle under Blasebalk’s jaw and blow the top of his head off,
the matter spattering the leather apron.

‘Why did you kill him, Raymond?’ asked Harry Bravado. ‘Why did you kill me?’

Then the robots became lifeless and their eyes dimmed as an interrupt was served.

Before he went missing, Raymond left me a voice message. He was unaware of what was about to happen to him. I listen to it every morning and try to feel something about what is
happening to all of us. His voice was calm the morning he left the message, almost as if he was on the verge of acceptance.

‘I went home to give my mum some money. She was very pleased to hear I have a proper job. I tried to explain to her about Monad. She can’t even change the clock on her microwave.
It’s all magic to her. She said there was a programme about the red men a few months ago. Richard Else interviewed himself. You see what you miss when you don’t have a television?

‘I keep having this dream. I am on the deck of an oil tanker. We are out of our shipping lane, taking a course to avoid the ice. Off the starboard bow, a marker emits a bass pulse which
vibrates the entire ship. It’s dangerous to be so close to it. I go to take the ship off autopilot and steer us back into our lane, but I have no idea how to operate the console. The crew
laugh at me. We drift huge and unstoppable and inevitable. Then, with six sharp jolts, the ship rides up onto a reef. I run on deck and stand at the railings. The oil ebbs out of the hold and into
the sea. Except it isn’t oil, it’s the black fluid of time, the future itself, ten million gallons of it leaking out into the present. I believe the future is flowing back into us.

‘I can’t sleep. I stopped taking the lithium a while ago. Is this the mania again? Monad is a corporation teleported in from the future: discuss. Come on! You know, don’t you?
You know and you’re not telling. I would have expected more protests. Anti-robot rallies, the machine wars, a resistance fighting for what it means to be human. No one cares, do they? Not
even you. You’ll get up in the morning and play this message and it will be last thing you want to hear.’

I played the message again as I readied Iona for nursery.

‘What’s that man talking about?’ she asked, wanting to distract me from the matter at hand, which was the daily conundrum of her tights.

‘He’s talking about his boat,’ I replied.

‘Is his boat broken?’

‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

I offered her a choice of tights. Heart tights or stripey tights. She shook her head at me in a distinctly patronizing manner. George Orwell wrote that after the age of thirty the great mass of
human beings abandon individual ambition and live chiefly for others. I am one of that mass.

Some of my friends regard the loss of my ambition with great sadness. No, I reply, you outgrow it. You must realize exactly where you stand in relation to power. All I ask of power is that when
it runs me down, it leaves as light a footprint on my face as possible.

Raymond had not been the only one concerned about Monad. But he missed the news window for expressing dissent. Plenty of comment had been passed on the matter, worrying over the philosophical
and ethical issues arising from simulated peope, and it was filed along with the comment agitating about global warming, genetically modified food, nano-technology, cloning, xenotransplantation,
artificial intelligence, superviruses and rogue nuclear fissile material.

The origins of Monad are documented in Companies House. A UK company incorporated in March 1998 as The Spence Consultancy was renamed Monad in October 2001. The nature of its business is listed
as ‘Other service activities’ and ‘Other business activities’.

Google still turns up the official site (a corporate vision statement), and thousands of blogs kept by futurists, scientists and conspiracy theorists. All take a moment to link to a
New York
Times
investigation on a shell company called Numenius Systems, operating under licence from the American military. The newspaper insinuates corruption with the private individuals of Numenius
Systems profiting from technology which cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars to develop. What was the administration’s response to this accusation back in 2003? ‘Combining the
urgency and innovation of the market with the research and development capacity of the state is vital if America is not to fall behind in the war against terrorism.’ Who could argue with
that? Who could argue with anything anymore?

I should have told Raymond that I was there at the beginning. He was not easy company in whom I could confide the minor frustrations of my working life. Our relationship was all about him, his
needs, which were always more florid and urgent than mine. So we did not discuss Monad much. I was ashamed of my work. It was beneath the version of me that Raymond believed in: the former
presiding talent of
Drug Porn
with its ‘minor but influential content’. Of the years spent at my desk in Monad, I had said little. Of my daily meetings with Morton Eakins and
Jonathan Marks and all the others, I had said even less. Of my long-standing acquaintanceship with the architect of Monad, Hermes Spence, idealist, tech guru and visionary, I had said nothing at
all.

I first encountered Hermes Spence in the late Nineties, when his office engaged
Drug Porn
to brief him on the nexus of technology and psychedelia. We met in the Liberal Club. The dress
code requested a suit and tie, which I accessorised with cracked workman’s boots, woolly hat and silver rings.
Drug Porn
still had a print incarnation at this point and a print editor,
no matter how small the publication, needed a certain arrogance.

Spence had an armchair view of the city. He leant forward to shake my hand.

‘I like
Drug Porn
. It feels like an underground again. What is your audience?’

‘We have over half a million readers across print and digital,’ I said, exaggerating by a factor of ten.

Hermes nodded. ‘Small but significant. Ahead of the wave. Early adopters, opinion formers, the cutting edge. The Sixties revisited, if only in a minor key.’

I took umbrage at the suggestion that my generation was a slight reprise of his own.

Hermes was conciliatory but he did not back down. ‘There are fewer of you, that’s all. Makes it harder for you to have any real impact.’

Spence avoided eye contact. His gaze raked to and fro across the view of the city, the unsettled nervous energy of a man whose diary is broken down into units of fifteen minutes. At the time, I
didn’t have the experience to place him any more accurately than somewhere between early thirties and mid-forties, at least a decade older than anyone else in my acquaintance. Because he was
concerned with corporate matters, I was faintly contemptuous of him.
Drug Porn
was concerned with the eternal verités of humanity as set out in the great works of philosophy and
literature and forced to labour in a trash culture. He was a salesman labouring under delusions of creativity. He was useful if he could prise open some of those advertising coffers for me but
otherwise, he was irrelevant.

You have to remember, at this point in my life, I was in a daily cycle of taking and recovering from drugs.

I had lots of ideas. The button in my brain marked ‘Meaning’ was being pushed on an hourly basis.

I knew nothing about power.

I told Spence about the theories of the week: Third Wave theory, the latest in transhumanism, the intersection between algorithms and consumer desire, a live search-based semiosphere that could
track cultural innovation in real-time, the rumours coming out of California about the next iteration of the web.

As I spoke, his fingers strode through an old print issue of
Drug Porn
. ‘But can you tell me about this?’ he said, opening the centrespread out before me. It was a photograph
of a ménage à trois. Three models were arranged like a capital ‘A’; that is, two standing men kissing and crouched between them a woman receiving and giving. Each model
had a third eye in their forehead.

I said, ‘My designer did the extra eye in Photoshop, she’s very good.’

‘What I meant was: why this image? The third eye is a symbol of spiritual enlightenment, yet you are deliberately blaspheming against it. What are you trying to say?’

‘Hedonism distracts from enlightenment. Also, it just seemed like a cool thing to do.’

Spence held the magazine at a safe distance and did not conceal his disapproval.

‘Don’t most religious orders practise self-denial to reach enlightenment?’ he asked.

‘Self-denial or the debasement of the self are two routes to the same goal: breaking down the constraints of individuation to apprehend the continuities which bind and permeate us all.
Extreme hunger catalyses the same insights as extreme intoxication.’

‘The only insight I took from hedonism was to put my friends in the recovery position before going to bed,’ replied Spence. ‘Do you think the body is evil, Nelson? Is that why
you debase it? The Cainites believed indulgence in sin was the key to salvation. They believed God, the Old Testament God, was an evil impostor and as the flesh was His corrupt creation, so they
fought back by indulging in intoxication and sex. Drugs and porn, if you like.’

Spence looked out over the Thames. ‘I’ll ask you again; are you enlightened?’

‘I don’t think it is possible for anyone to be enlightened anymore.’

‘Because of the trash?’

‘Yes. The accelerated trash. But I’m interested in those who were enlightened. In what it was like to understand the world, to feel that you could encompass it with a model,
penetrate its code with an insight.’

Spence continued to flick through the magazine, this time settling on a photograph of a woman in an Egyptian headdress, crouched on all fours blissfully smiling. The headline read: ‘You
dirty little Sphinx’.

Hermes flashed the picture at me. ‘Is she enlightened?’

‘We are engaged in a process that still has some way to go.’

‘I believe it does. This has been very useful. Send my office an invoice. Before I go, tell me, what is the new new thing?’

I answered immediately.

‘The Apocalypse. The lifting of the veil. The revelation.’

‘Yes, of course.’ His coat was delivered to him. As he shuck it on, Spence indicated to the waiter that I was to continue to drink at his expense.

‘Still, the question we must all ask ourselves is this: what will we do if the Apocalypse does not show up?’

A few months later I saw the end product of our brief conversation: an ad campaign starring two provocatively wasted teenagers, their arms draped about each another. They had a third eye in the
centre of their foreheads. The tagline ran: ‘Enlightenment. Alcopop Apocalypse’. My reward? One thousand pounds, and the ads ran in
Drug Porn
.