The Red Men (24 page)

‘The two men used sex energy to activate their intent upon a sigil. Fortunately, I am an expert in altered states, the language of angels, the rituals of Horus and Set. When I was fifteen,
I saw the name of God spelt out in the curlicues of a labia minor. At nineteen, I was sectioned because I was living five seconds ahead of everyone else. Jungian synchronicity, the mysteries of the
Gnosis, the Qabbalah, even Siberian Khanty mushroom magic – I have studied it all. I know the sympathetic magic of Wicca and Voodoo, I’ve met the Yaa-loo and wow-wee wow-wee. The Order
of the Golden Dawn send me their newsletter. There isn’t a sacred entheogen on the face of this earth that I haven’t ingested.’

As he spoke, Bougas diluted and mixed the spice into two pools. He intended for us both to take the Leto spice in response to the evening’s attacks.

I could not condone such madness. His brand alchemy was fancy executive punditry. You might use a corporate magician to draw up the astrological chart of a new server, or employ numerology to
pick a sympathetic product launch date. You didn’t employ a wizard as the first line of defence against a violent anti-corporate cell.

He handed me a ceremonial wafer smeared with the spice.

‘We start by entering Leto’s communal dreamland.’

I looked with horror at the wafer.

‘This is ridiculous. I am not eating this.’ I handed the wafer back to him. He refused it.

‘I’m giving you a direct order. Take the drug!’

‘This is not the military, Bruno. We work in technology and marketing.’

‘We work in the future!’ screamed Bougas. ‘And this is how the future gets decided.’

Bougas readied himself for the dose. With an elastic band, he tied his credit cards, cash and identity card together and placed them carefully in an inside pocket. With a second band, he raked
back his black curls and fastened them into a ponytail, all the while muttering to me.

‘I am going to show you the true nature of the conflict we are caught up in. We’ve been keeping you in the dark. You’ve been very reasonable about it all. One step at a time.
The strategy of a pawn! Bad move after bad move. That’s been your response. For the world I am about to reveal to you, reason is inadequate. And you’re going to love it, Nelson. It will
be like old times. The pleasure principle fucks the reality principle up the ass.’

Bougas grabbed my head and lifted the wafer toward my lips, the stink of his sweating body wafted up from his loose blouson. Under limousine lights, the spice glimmered on the wafer. What beasts
were held in suspension in that vile jelly?

‘We suspected it right from the off. An entity like Cantor cannot exist without a counterpart. When I needed my new kidney, I discovered Dyad. Dyad perfected the technique of
xenotransplantation. The medical establishment is years behind their inter-species organ swap. Dyad, like Monad, is selling a discontinuous technology, a piece of the future in the present day.
Where is it all coming from? Let’s find out.’

Bougas was ready, his own dose prepared.

‘This is not a drug. It’s a password to a hidden chamber. It’s the left turn when normally you take a right. Our enemies have been using it all night to move around us. To
outwit us. We have to take it in their wake. Now.’

With thoughtless greed, I wolfed down the wafer.

Finally my long boredom was at an end.

‘You have made a wise decision.’

The sales representative greeted me with a handshake. He wore a double-breasted grey striped suit with a blue tie and a detachable collar. Against this thrifty formal outfit, the customizations
of his body were quite striking; his pupils were grey and flecked with yellow like gold leaf upon cement and five silver bars pierced his chalky cheek, surgical pins to arrest the progress of a rip
in the skin. He grinned despite the pain of his piercings.

‘First of all, I want to give you a tour of the complex and then we can start thinking about making specific arrangements.’

According to his paperwork, the sales rep was called Michael Sawyer. The name was familiar. A memory of the siege house, the man shot in the mouth, the fire, Dr Easy standing in the street.

I pointed to the name in the paperwork.

‘Your name is familiar.’

‘That’s not my name. You can call me The Elk.’

The Elk ran his tongue urgently around the inside of his upper and lower palate, the tip taking a scouring inquisitive run across the gums. A salesman’s tongue is always restless, probing,
oppressive.

The Dyad office was a single-storey warehouse in a light industrial park situated between a carpet factory and a manufacturer of conservatories. As The Elk signed me in at reception, he threw
confidences out like dice. The Elk, it seemed, was a nickname he had acquired while homeless on the streets of London.

‘Hackney mainly. Do you know Hackney?’

He shows me the ruin of his mouth, the rotting fence posts of his teeth.

‘I have four front teeth missing. One for every month I lived rough.’

‘Was that a long time ago?’ I asked, not quite able to look him in the eye.

‘It seems like it.’

He rolled his head on his neck muscles and stretched to loosen the tension about his shoulders.

‘It really does your back in. Sitting on the pavement all day, asking for money. Then there are the nights carrying around everything you own in wet bags. It’s terrible for the
posture.’

The Elk tore my details out of the register and folded them into a plastic envelope which he then clipped upon my lapel.

‘Security. You know how it is.’

He removed the padlock securing the heavy iron doors. The rusting, industrial entrance opened into a long corridor, decorated at set intervals by placid art and municipal pastels. The smell of
cleaning agents indicated the medical nature of the establishment.

‘Doesn’t having a job get you down? Don’t you miss the freedom of the streets?’ I asked. ‘Drinking under the sunshine, abusing workers.’

The Elk walked on, ‘Dyad is not like a normal job. I’m not working for the man, here. I’m working for the anti-man.’

I looked at the corporate literature in my hand. The Dyad logo was seared on the cover of the brochure. At first glance, the Dyad logo resembled a pair of glasses on the bridge of a nose, or a
barbell overlain with the letter ‘X’. Turning it ninety degrees, the Dyad brand was also a reflection of the head and arms of a stick figure. Two beings bonded into one, like so:

‘Dyad gave me a chance when no one would even look at me.’ The Elk walked backwards so that he could speak to me face-to-face. His hand gestures were inflected with t’ai chi;
he had new age bangles around his wrist, and his fingernails were cracked from scrabbling against paving stones.

‘Dyad took away my addictions and gave me purpose. Dyad is not a company in the conventional sense. It is a shared state of mind, a communal coming together to inhabit an idea.’

‘Whose idea would that be?’ I said.

‘Leto’s, of course.’

I followed The Elk into a side office where he produced more paperwork for me to complete. I signed disclaimers and waivers, and a single declaration that I was sound of mind.

‘All of this,’ he said, picking up the documentation, ‘will be shredded if you decide not to go ahead. Until we finish this process, you are under no obligation to Dyad and can
step out at any time. You understand?’

I nodded, and continued signing. The Elk went through his patter.

‘You are a family man. Nothing is as important as your continuing ability to support that family. So many people leave it too late to come to Dyad because they think it is selfish to
invest in their own health. Believe me. You are the best investment you could make. If you die, you let everyone down.’

I finished filling in the forms. The Elk took them from me and slipped them into my file.

‘You are doing the right thing.’

‘You never know what’s around the corner,’ I said.

‘I suppose you want to see them now, don’t you? Everyone likes to touch them, if only once.’

I nodded. The Elk bounded out of his seat and went over to a locker in the corner of the office from which he produced two white chemical suits, two pairs of lightly powdered disposable gloves,
latex booties and two gas masks. I slipped off my coat. The Elk removed his suit jacket and placed it on a hanger in the locker. Together we helped one another into our protective clothing,
ensuring the seams were fastened down, the cuffs at the wrist and ankles tightened. Once the gas masks were on, we could only communicate through hand gestures, the first of which was a simple
beckoning wave from The Elk.

Follow me.

From the office, we returned to the corridor and clomped down to a double set of air lock doors. Even though I was hooded and masked, I still closed my eyes against the scouring jets of water. I
turned around with my arms hitched up to ensure I was fully decontaminated. When I was bold enough to open my eyes again, I saw that The Elk was giving me an inquisitive thumbs-up. I replied with
one of my own.

OK.

We ambled through the air lock into a white-tiled warehouse sparsely populated by figures like ourselves, oversized snowmen, a few of whom looked up from their tasks to wave. The workers were
each attending to a heavy golden fruit suspended from the ceiling upon flexible transparent tendrils. As The Elk led me on into the factory floor, I saw that these fruit were in fact pigs. Each pig
was clad in a gold suit fashioned out of skintight PVC interwoven with a lattice of filaments. Over their eyes, the pigs had been fitted with large green-tinted goggles. Their trotters pushed
hither and thither upon a floating sequence of platforms. It seemed that the pigs were being kept in a simulated environment of their own, which they experienced both through the goggles and
through the ripples of their sense suit.

The Dyad brochure had prepared me for this spectacle. The pigs were bred specially for xenotransplantation, so their arrested immune systems required a completely sterilized environment. The
simulated environment was put in place merely to reassure them, pigs being notoriously skittish and liable to overheating due to their lack of sweat glands. The Elk led me to one particular sow and
encouraged me to lay my hand upon her distended pregnant belly. In there wriggled a foetus already infected with a lentivirus carrying my foreign genes. Its mother, with her natural defences
knocked out, would not abort the alien offspring.

Although I was in my early thirties, I was entering cancer country. The lifespan of a xenopig was about a decade, therefore covering me up until my fortieth birthday, when the process would
begin again. With this first investment, I could guarantee a perfect match for blood or bone marrow, and would always be able to lay my hands on a replacement heart, liver and lungs to sweep away
all the damage my appetites had inflicted upon them. Like Jonathan Stoker Snr, I could replenish my virility with a new brace of testicles. Or like Bruno Bougas, I could restore kidneys devastated
by painkillers. My heart, wrung dry between the twisting hands of stress and stimulants, would no longer be a cause for concern.

The Elk risked another thumbs-up and I responded in kind.

Instead of a pension, I would have a pig. Man and animal bonded together as one being. A Dyad.

All that remained was the matter of haggling over the price.

Back in the office, The Elk quickly became exasperated with my belligerent negotiating technique. He shook his head as I waved a page from the brochure at him.

‘How do I know this is really a xenopig?’

The brochure showed the animal floating like a gilded astronaut in the laboratory farm.

‘How do I know you haven’t taken human organs and engineered them to match me, then stuck them in a pig? Wouldn’t that be cheaper than growing them from an embryo? I think you
are using the pigs just to cover up what’s really going on here at Dyad.’

‘That’s a very serious allegation,’ said The Elk.

‘It is.’ I said.

‘Sometimes we do transplant people into their pigs. If their body is irrevocably damaged, the pig can house the human brain, once we adjust the skull. That’s one of the reasons why
Dyad’s life-prolonging strategy is superior to those of rival technologies.’

I tried another tack.

‘How have you overcome the risk of viruses dormant in pig DNA crossing over to humans?’

‘You will have to take medication.’

‘Does it have any side-effects?’

‘Some patients have complained of feeling a bit “snouty”.’

‘What did you say?’

‘A bit snouty. A bit porky. The risk of porcine retroviruses crossing over to humans is very serious. We mitigate that risk by making you less human with our medication. You can only
infect other xenotransplant patients. Man and beast unified in a new hybrid species.’

I had not forgotten Bruno Bougas sitting with his shirt off in my apartment, manipulating his fleshy features in the mirror and making that very complaint. I had not forgotten Stoker Snr’s
maroon jowls and augmented coil of cock, his indiscriminate appetite for meetings, deals, and advantage. Nor could I be said to be wholly remembering them. The memories bobbed up, detached from
some larger submerged structure.