The Red Men (36 page)

How long could Raymond’s counter-culture withstand the corrupting cuckoos of Stoker and Bougas? Wasn’t it always thus? Idealism undone by power-mongers. For all his occult hedonism,
Bruno Bougas liked to stand in the shadow of power. I thought about sharing my theory about Dyad with him, that Dyad was the unconscious creation of Cantor who needed a competitor to ensure the
artificial intelligence’s continuing evolution. If the logic bomb deleted Cantor, it would also erase Dyad. In that eventuality, the xenotransplant technology would stop working, the spice
would lose its potency, and Bougas’ body would reject the pig organs. I imagined him haemorrhaging in the pub toilets.

When I said goodbye to Bruno Bougas, I knew that I would never see him again.

I returned to Lower Clapton Road. The hooded lads who had earlier circled me so threateningly now tipped me the wink and paid me mock-respect. Who knew whether the plan would
work? I wouldn’t risk a tenner on it, never mind my job, my house, my life. Dyad could threaten me in Hackney but their reach was limited. Monad could destroy my life data, effectively
removing me from the Western world. If I was to act solely out of self-interest, there was no contest. The question was whether I could act outside of my own interest; that is, act for a greater
good. Even here, the good in question was not apparent. I was not certain Monad was evil, for all Bougas’ deranged propaganda. Even my personal experience of the company, as terrible as it
had been, was not a rare one. Monad was no worse than the oil companies or the arms dealers and less socially destructive than offshore banking. These were macro problems far exceeding the remit of
my micro-existence. To risk everything to correct such an evil, when the momentum of the entire world was taking it toward self-destruction and self-interest, would be both heroic and delusional.
And yet, what was that urge lurking way down below? An urge to be free. An urge to destroy what I had built. To create freedom out of the destruction of all that oppressed me. I would have to watch
that instinct. Who knew where it might lead?

At the sound of El’s scream, I bolted down the stairs to the bedroom. Her nightmares were increasing in frequency and intensity.

She described it to me. ‘A tidal wave of fire rolled down Mare Street. The flames coiled in and around one another. The smoke within its mass formed black scales upon a slithering head of
fire. The ash outline of a mother with a push chair combusts in the snap and bite of a flame serpent. I see them toiling toward us, through the window of a Vietnamese restaurant. You are paying the
bill and won’t listen to my screams until you have finished calculating the tip. I am crying and trying to get Iona out of the door. There is a crowd there now. We’re all trying to get
out at once. Our hair is on fire. Our eyes are on fire. You are screaming at the sight of me burning. Then the main wave breaks over us and our bodies meld into one another until everything is
blood red fire.’

‘Then you wake up?’

‘Yes.’ El got out of bed and shook on her kimono. ‘There is something more, though. We have an argument. When you are getting the bill, you are ignoring me because we’ve
been fighting.’

A light well brought the streetlights into the underground room.

‘What were we fighting about?’

‘I wanted you to do something. You had promised me, “I’ll do it.” It was very important. To do with the fire, I think.’

Then El recoiled with a look of disbelief at the next mental image.

‘Something to do with an elk?’

Dyad’s reach was longer than I had anticipated.

I did not discuss the plan with El. I told her, as she cooked dinner, that I would be returning to the office for a late meeting. I omitted any mention of the logic bomb and my
plan to trigger it. The house was monitored. We would be found out. Then there was her sacrifice of a year of our family life so that I could build Redtown, an achievement I now intended to undo. I
had no stomach for explaining how wrong I had been. So, all good reasons for not discussing the plan. But not the main one. Most of all, it was likely that I would fail, through either cowardice or
incompetence, and I did not want her to know that I had failed.

She didn’t want me to go and we argued about it. There were already news reports of unrest east of Stratford and the kitchen was overrun with mice. The mice streamed across the floor as if
they were being driven ahead of a coming wave. She threw the dinner in the bin and insisted I help clean the kitchen. I could not. I had to go to Monad. The most important act of my entire life was
waiting for me. She sent me out of the door with curses.

It was one of those winter evenings when you wear the dark on your shoulders like a heavy coat. At Hackney Station, the railway line was alive with rats. On the platform, lads guffawed at the
vermin stream and threw stones at their seething exodus. The train to Stratford rolled past the estates of Hackney Wick, which fizzed and rocked with fireworks. There is an urban myth that tells of
drug dealers letting off fireworks to inform their customers that the new supplies have arrived. If there was any truth to this, then Hackney was in for a hell of an evening.

From Stratford, I caught the robot train to the Wave. I was the only passenger. Everyone was going in the opposite direction. At Canary Wharf station, a disembodied, synthesized voice apologized
for the performance of its human employees. Down on the deserted pavements, the office city chatted to itself. I bolted over a footbridge, triggering a delicate simulation of wind chimes. Rumours
of a mob skimmed over the river. I turned, alarmed. But it was just the echoing enthusiasm of an automated pub quiz carried on the wind.

The walkways were meaningful pauses in this monologue, interludes of cold black Thames. Night clouds chugged overhead. I quickened my pace, feeling exposed. Outside Fast-Tan-Tastic, a video loop
showed bronzed, toned thighs. I huddled beside these images for warmth. A masseuse kneaded the naked gluteus maximus and minimus of a raven-haired beauty, and the camera caught her faked
‘o’ of saucy pleasure in close-up. I was anxious. My senses were acute. I felt like prey that had caught whiff of a predator. Sounds were flattened, and things seen were either friend
or foe. The tanned beauties beckoned. I pushed on to where enormous ventilation pipes rose out of West India dock, tall concrete reeds that drew oxygen down into the bedrock chambers of
Monad’s office. The Wave loitered there, a steel pachyderm half-submerged in the lagoon. I stood at the entrance agitating for Cantor to buzz me in.

‘How have you been?’ asked the artificial intelligence.

‘Much happier for seeing my family,’ I replied. ‘And you?’

The door opened with a hydraulic hiss, the lip-parting of rubber coming away from rubber.

Finally, Cantor had his answer. ‘Harassed, Nelson. Disturbed.’

The door closed and sealed. Dr Hard was on hand to accompany me to the supper meeting, way down in the secure bowels of the building.

The robot sniffed. ‘You are very anxious.’

‘There is a lot of trouble out there tonight,’ I replied.

‘You are worried about your family,’ it nodded.

The lift travelled all the way down into the bedrock of the Wave then opened onto a Zen garden. Large conker-coloured orbs, with quarters cut out to show the white pulp within, sat on the bank
of a pond, profound and inscrutable. Sham moonlight was cast upon paths of bronze gravel. A waterfall beside the water cooler. I took a moment in the Zen garden to fix an expression of quiet
passivity upon my face and in the outer layers of my thoughts. Impassive. Passive. I assumed an unctuous half-smile, the only mode in which to deal with the Monad management. I crossed over a stone
bridge, a
sori ishibashi
, toward the sound of voices in the distance.

‘It’s not working,’ said Josh.

‘It’s a disaster,’ said James.

The Texan brothers were surrounded by screens, each of which displayed a different view of Redtown. There was Eastway, flanked by empty parks and the gated community on the site of the old
country club. There was a floating view of Deyes High School. The ivy covering the front of the building was dying off. Pupils migrating from class to playground and back again. Hurrying by under
my feet, the thought charts of the Lydiate coffee girls, over a dozen of them, flaring and firing in concert. A screen slithered overhead displaying big data diagrams of Redtown, each citizen
represented by a red dot, most of which were inert.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Our supply-side tax cuts aren’t producing the figures they should,’ said Josh.

‘Tax cuts should increase tax revenue,’ added James.

‘– by motivating the work force to be more productive.’

‘That isn’t happening.’

Josh pointed at the people milling slowly around the town square. ‘They’re depressed. Look at them.’

The mind maps showed some anomalous readings. ‘They do seem down. When did the psychological data fall into the blue?’

This time I was answered by Alex Drown. She stood next to a screen that showed her red man busy working away. A double image of her. Alex and her simulated self were both short and dark-haired.
It showed true self-possession when your red man did not customize itself. The real Alex Drown squinted at me with suspicion and contempt. The unreal one sat back in a swivel seat, its eyes closed
in a data trance.

‘We put in some homeland security patches,’ said Alex. The screens zoomed around Redtown showing me the new robot patrols, surveillance trees and interrogation booths. ‘The
concomitant increase in ambient fear levels is exactly as we predicted. According to our model, anxiety should increase consumption. We have also put in a stimulus package of tax cuts but we are
actually seeing a dip in sales.’

‘People are eating and drinking more though,’ said Josh.

‘Self-soothing with snacking. Individual weight gain correlates to an increased security presence.’

‘Tripling Dr Hard patrols increases self-medication with alcohol by males in the 18–35 age bracket.’

‘These upward trends do not compensate for an overall downturn in economic activity though.’

There was large bowl of multi-coloured M&Ms on the workstation. The team from Numenius Systems fuelled themselves with sugar rushes. Alex took a handful and chomped them down.
‘Frankly, we think you have made the people in Redtown in your own image. You have underestimated qualities such as pro-activity, can-do spirit, the materialistic urge, because these are
qualities you find distasteful.’

Josh put it more plainly. ‘Did you make these people liberals?’

Impassively, passively, I replied, ‘I don’t see how my politics could have any bearing on these simulations.’

James chipped in, ‘Here’s one from left field: perhaps the people of Maghull are showing deficient motivation because they lack an eternal soul?’

‘You’re right!’ I said. ‘That is one from left field.’

Alex showed me her disapproval with two tight shakes of her head.

‘The soul issue is one we have debated long and hard at Numenius Systems. We came to the conclusion that the eternal soul was beyond the capacity of Cantor to understand and therefore was
not carried over in the simulation process. However, I think James has a valid point; without that essential aspect of the self, these people may show a certain listlessness.’

Alex’s red man opened one quizzical eye to hear herself make such an argument. Certainly the notion that the soul was related to patterns of consumer behaviour was not a traditional part
of either economic or Christian doctrine. I sustained my half-smile and promised to look into the anomaly. The fatigue shown by the people of Maghull was also cropping up in the real world. The
news reports of commuter unrest, of children taken out of school, of the large portions of the civil service not showing up for work, were indications of a spreading reaction against Monad. Not a
revolution but a revulsion, a refusal. Society had become a sick joke, a sleight-of-hand in which life was replaced with a cheap replica. Progress abandoned, novelty unleashed, spoils hoarded by
the few. The temperature soared as the body politic fought a virus from the future.

‘Are you just going to stand there or are you going to do something about it?’ said Alex Drown.

I had never felt so riven. I could barely walk for the buffeting of inner winds. North tearing at south. East fighting west. The urge to attack Josh and James was so strong I could not look at
them. Alex Drown submerged her own opinions to mouth those of the company and this appalled me too. Our corruption had proceeded in daily increments, a thousand tiny defeats of the soul until our
core was rotten. So what else was new? Bow your head and get on with your work because for all your moral objections you might as well throw yourself against rocks to protest against mountains as
resist this power. No, I would not console myself with nihilistic platitudes any longer. Without expression, desire withers. Things within you die and fall away.

I put my hands over my face. Alex Drown stared at me. Her red man briefed her on the procedure for disciplining employees.

I lifted my face up. ‘There’s one possibility. One of the people in Redtown is corrupt. There is an old man. Horace Buckwell. I was there when we simulated him. He showed weird
readings. Something odd in his brain. That might be throwing everything off kilter. I’ll go and fix it.’

I left the meeting and headed toward my office. In the Zen garden, I passed Dr Hard again. It grabbed me as I walked by and held me still while it conducted an examination.

‘Your blood pressure is right up.’ Dr Hard’s obsidian hand rested upon my chest. ‘Panic attack?’

The robot reached for my head. ‘I could administer soothing alpha waves.’

‘I have my own resources.’

‘I will monitor your progress. Your thoughts are very disturbing.’