The Red Men (30 page)

After skirting Kirkby, we doubled back toward the out-of-town shopping zone in Aintree and the Old Roan. Here the green belt was dead patches between dual carriageways and roundabouts, scrub
subordinated to the scale and speed of the motorcar. Great windswept junctions flanked by Travelodges, pub-warehouses and gym-barns. Beyond Copy Lane police station, slip roads led to multiplex
cinemas and bowling alleys. Maximum acreage, minimum entertainment. The toytown castle of the old Vernons factory, where the women of Maghull had once spent their Saturdays crouched over
spot-the-ball coupons, had been converted into a nightclub called Paradox that was subsequently demolished, so that only the distinctive clock tower remained.

Paradox had been flanked by a pub called Manhattans. The evening would start here, perhaps progress to a Deep Pan Pizza parlour across the way before falling into the club at midnight. Then, at
four in the morning, the lads took the long walk home beside the motorway, wheeling one another around in shopping trolleys filched from the forecourt of Asda. Their untucked shirts filled with the
night wind and only the lager insulated them from the cold.

Redtown’s index of experiences contained over ten thousand entries for nights out in the Paradox. Notches in life’s stick. Count them. Twenty-first birthday party at the Paradox.
Stag party at the Paradox. Saturday night out with the lads at the Paradox, drunken infidelity in the back of a minicab. ‘No, we can’t go back to my place.’ Dress smart casual.
Wash the glitter make-up from your cheeks before climbing into bed with the missus.

We hunkered down with the rest of the traffic on the Ormskirk Road. Sonny’s eyes were closed.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

It took him a while to blink his way into the present.

‘I was going through the index of Paradox memories. We hate these people, don’t we?’

‘My feelings aren’t as strong as they used to be. When I was your age, I was more arrogant. More certain that I was right. Now I am Zen about how people choose to live their
lives.’

‘They have to change. We have to change them.’

‘Change them into what?

‘Inside Redtown, we could transform these scousers into anything we imagine. We could splice their genes with birds and lions. Forget the Liver bird, let’s have the Liver griffin.
Allow them to remake matter on a whim. A pantheon of suburban gods!’

We turned left into the car park at the centre of a bullring of superstores. The area was hectic with Sunday shoppers, Dads laboured to heave enormous cardboard boxes into the boot of the 4x4,
children hankered after a burger as a reward for staying quiet while Mum dithered between the choice of three tiles for the new kitchen.

I turned to my red man. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’ll take about five minutes to copy all this. We already have a colossal number of trips to the Ormskirk Road Retail Park from the life streams. There is very little anomalous
behaviour. This is a cinch.’

We climbed down from the truck and strode into a furniture warehouse. Sonny, his face flitting across the Dr Hard avatar, attracted a few hostile glances. People had grown accustomed to the
lolloping goofy bodies of the Dr Easy. The lithe tall granite of Dr Hard was a source of suspicion. Well over six foot tall, its athletic bearing and Armani threads expressed superiority, an
unforgivable presumption round these parts. My youthful features playing on its face made it appear even more aloof, expressions of undergraduate disdain begging to be taught a hard lesson about
life.

‘Look at these.’

Sonny waved some gilt door handles at me. He mugged around with a Perspex toilet seat in which small plastic fish were suspended. In the garden centre, he reclined in a hammock while I chatted
to the manager and instructed him on the correct treatment of his store’s allocation of Monad screens.

‘Leave some water out for them at night. They need it to maintain their plasticity. Don’t attempt to interfere with them. If one of them attaches to an employee or a customer,
don’t try to prise it off. Call us and we’ll talk it down. Of course we will share the data we accumulate with your head office, as per our agreement.’

Sonny approached a sales assistant.

‘Listen Dave,’ he said, flicking Dave’s name badge, ‘I want to buy a computer.’

The assistant looked up at Sonny and shivered.

‘Well, sir, it depends on what you need the computer for. We try to tailor all our machines to people’s unique needs.’

‘My needs are certainly unique. I need something to back my harem up on. Do you have anything that can do two-to-the-power-of-ten-nineteen? That’s one thousand times twenty million
billion calculations per second.’

Sonny tapped the tower of an adjacent workstation.

‘How about this one? It looks powerful.’

‘It has the latest processor.’

‘I bet it does. A trillion calculations a second. Woefully inadequate to express the subtleties of one of my concubines. Did I tell you about my girls? As a reward for doing a good job, I
am allowed to muck round with the reality principle. You know what that is?’

Dave the assistant shook his head.

‘Obviously where I come from, they don’t pay me for the work I do. There isn’t much call in the Monad for money. My payment is time operating outside the bounds of the reality
principle. Indulge my pleasure principle. I fashioned a harem out of all the girls I had unconsummated crushes upon. They are not my sex slaves. I am no brute. I woo them. They have a degree of
free will as to whether they will be seduced or not. I think, as a young man yourself, you can appreciate the joy of such an arrangement and therefore understand how reluctant I am to see any of my
girls accidentally erased or even corrupted.’

The assistant, realizing he was being mocked, sullenly took his leave. Once I had done my pitch about the screens, I led Sonny back to the truck. His behaviour was out of character. My
character, to be specific. I may have once hankered after humiliating my peers and demonstrating my superiority to the world but I never possessed the callous confidence to act it out in this way.
The pattern of my identity was slowly diffusing in the Monad, acquiring the arrogance that distinguished the red men from their human counterparts.

‘Where next?’ said Sonny. ‘This is fun.’

‘A change of plan,’ I announced.

From Aintree, we drove west toward Seaforth docks and the wind farms on the sea wall. Colossal white propellers turned over streets of terraced houses.

‘I don’t like to see you messing with people. It’s an abuse of our position. We need these people’s cooperation.’

Sonny said, ‘I was conducting an experiment. I wanted to see how people react to our presence. Close up. We will have to include ourselves in Redtown. The Maghull we are copying is a
Maghull changed by our interference. The observer alters the observed. The last piece we put into Redtown will be a version of you and a version of me. I wanted to see myself reflected in
Dave’s eyes.’

‘We’re not including ourselves in the simulation. We’re going to erase the memory of the whole operation from Redtown.’

‘That’s not the smart way to do it. I have been talking to the others in the Monad and we’ve decided that Redtown will basically be Maghull as it is now. Not some hypothetical
version of it before we arrived. Everyone in Redtown will remember being simulated except they will think that they are the real versions, getting on with their lives after our little
invasion.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘If we went back and erased memories of you and Monad from the minds of everyone in Redtown then we would immediately be falsifying our record of them. Better to allow them that memory.
Just make them think Redtown went ahead while they continue in what they mistakenly believe is the real world. It’s a bait-and-switch.’

‘Who did you talk to about this?’

‘Nelson, you are our man on the ground. You are very important to this project. But you are not its leader.’

‘I asked you, who?’

‘Hermes.’

I walked along the fence. In the distance, the Mersey rolled awkwardly under its burden of ships, its skin breaking out in diesel sweats. The waterfront went on for miles, a dark zone of
industrial Gothic. How easily one could get lost in there, hiding out in the timber sheds or nesting up in the rafters with the birds. The miles of docks were patrolled only by a couple of security
guards, who took a break from their mound of pornography to shine a torch here and there. The dockers loaded the ship with luxury sports cars, taking their turns to spin them around the bay before
driving on to the ship. Would anyone even notice another man in a boiler suit sneaking up a gangplank? I could make a break for freedom. What would that be like? It was definitely an option. In the
meantime, we had a funeral to attend.

The final resting place of Horace Buckwell was a crematorium on the outskirts of Lydiate. A road ran in, a road ran out. The two long lanes ended in a low municipal building. We
drove toward a tall chimney. It puffed out another small deposit of incinerated carbon. Behind the chapel, there were gardens of tranquillity. We parked and got out of the car. Sonny took in the
fields of headstones and urns, the small raised plaques and their visitors.

‘Why have we come here?’

There were four large fields of graves, arranged in a square so that each resting place was easily accessible by car. This crematorium had been included in Redtown. It was one of the first
landmarks that Morton recorded. It was hard to imagine a more humble ending than this. In the garden of tranquillity, two undertaker’s lads shared a cigarette, blowing out smoke, imitating
the crematorium chimney. Puff, puff, spit it out, grind it under your heel until entirely extinguished.

We did not have to wait long for the hearse bearing Horace’s coffin.

‘He’s the first citizen of Redtown to die,’ I said. ‘His family have already made inquiries about our simulation of him.’

‘They want to speak to it?’

‘The family didn’t ask for contact. If anything, it was the opposite. It’s hard to grieve if you know that most of the dead person is still running around a server. I reassured
June Buckwell that our copy of her husband would never be able to speak to her. That, as far as she was concerned, he was gone.’

Sonny leaned back as he accessed Redtown data.

‘Horace Buckwell’s entry is marked.’

‘He was a difficult case. Cantor was rough with him.’

‘You think the procedure killed him? Will the family sue us?’

‘That’s what I am here to find out. There is a wreath in the back seat. Would you mind passing it to me?’

The elderly mourners made slow progress. I joined the line and took a seat at the back of the chapel. It was nothing more than a waiting room. On the front row, the Buckwell family sat unmoved
through a few platitudes from the minister and two tinny verses of requiem muzak. The coffin trundled through a parting and closing of curtains. It couldn’t have taken more than a quarter of
an hour. As the family rose to leave, their faces were set against the prospect of tears. The son, the daughter and the widow left in single file, offering one another no support. How do you mourn
a man like Horace Buckwell? It was unlikely that this family would serve a malpractice suit against us.

On the steps outside, the mourners spoke only of the drive home, sorting themselves into car loads. June thanked for me for coming. The thought of Horace’s soul persisting in Redtown
troubled her. It troubled me too, although I did not tell her why we were so concerned about Horace Buckwell; that his simulation had been quarantined because it contained treacherous information
concealed as the Enochian language, the magical tongue of angels first set down in the Elizabethan age. I considered asking her if her late husband had any interest in the occult but decided, in
the interest of propriety, to offer my condolences instead. I walked back to the truck. Her son was dawdling around the car park, smoking a cigarette away from the rest of the party.

‘Would you like me to take that?’ he said, pointing at the wreath I was still carrying.

‘Please.’

‘I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Matthew Buckwell. The son.’ A tall intelligent young man with a mop of blonde hair, there was little physical resemblance between
Matthew and his father.

‘I know who you are.’

He stared at a burial in progress on the other side of the cemetery. I wondered if the Buckwell family had chosen cremation, the thorough atomization of Horace, because the thought of his
rotting body only made him even more monstrous. Matthew Buckwell couldn’t look at me. I understood why. As far as he knew, I spent my evenings eating popcorn watching re-runs of his
childhood.

Finally, he asked the question.

‘So you know everything about us then?’

‘It is not like that. Whoever your father was, it’s between him and Cantor now. How did your father die?’

‘The doctor said it was a severe stroke. Mum found him. He was talking about angels. A Holy Axe falling. Then he was gone.’

These dying words troubled me. I made a note of them.

‘Could I ask you a question? Are you a religious man?’

I shook my head.

‘In your work, have you come across anything like a soul?’

‘We’re not looking for that kind of thing.’ This was my stock response to any metaphysical question.

Matthew Buckwell said, ‘The soul should be a comforting prospect but ever since my father died, my sister has had nightmares about him. I’m sure you know the kind of man he was, what
a cosmic injustice it would be if his soul persisted. The thought that he is still out there, drifting around in your computers just waiting for you to flick the switch . . .’ He shivered at
the thought. ‘When will your work be done?’

‘Very soon.’

‘Could you promise me something? Erase my father the first chance you get.’