The Red Men (37 page)

I pushed by the robot and into the lift, relieved to be alone. I would activate the logic bomb by bringing together the two halves of its code hidden in Horace Buckwell and Morty. The
consequences of this irrevocable act were beyond me, and there was no predicting whether good or evil would result, nor if it meant destruction or creation within my own life. Squeezed between the
great pressure from Monad and the dream threats of Dyad, I took the only way out. I resolved to act.

Horace Buckwell awoke in a ward of Ormskirk hospital, secured in his bed by starched linen. For a while he had been dreaming of his dog barking. Little Hanz was yapping in the
yard and June would not get up from the television to go and see what was wrong. As he awoke, these barks sharpened into the ping of his vital signs.

The ward was empty. There were no nurses on night duty at the desk. No one to tell him what had happened, for he did not seem to be injured and there was no pain to indicate a heart attack. He
waggled his fingers, left hand then right hand. No stroke either. He sat up and removed the drip from the vein in his wrist. A single drop of blood popped up. Next he peeled off the heart monitors
from the grey hair of his chest and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His slippers were there, waiting for him. June must have been here. Why hadn’t she stayed?

Horace Buckwell got stiffly to his feet and took a peek at the chart at the end of his bed. It was blank. A shocking oversight, surely. This was all quite appalling. He went to push the
emergency call button over his bed but something stayed his hand. This was all very odd. He remembered being in his back garden pulling down the rusted frame of an old greenhouse, a job that he had
been putting off for two years until one cold winter morning he could not bear to be indoors anymore, with the central heating baking the smell of his old wife into something quite unpalatable, and
so he had pulled on his stiff workman’s gloves, fixed his cap in place, and set about his task with vigour. Then, nothing.

He must have had an attack of some sort. A seizure. A fainting fit. Was it an after-effect of the simulation? He wondered if Monad damaged his brain when they copied it. The robot was very rough
with him. Only the promise to keep those secrets he thought long buried had bought off Horace Buckwell. What if there was real damage there? Black outs or even worse. Could be worth a few bob. Then
there was the trauma of waking up in hospital with no one to look after him. Surely they’d settle out of court? Yes, he would wait a little longer before pushing the call button. Build up a
bit more of that trauma.

Then he noticed the silence. Not merely an absence of voices or night noises, there were no sounds in the building. No gurneys rattling along distant corridors. No ambulances racing into
accident and emergency. Horace strained to discern so much as a pipe creak or a toilet flush. Nothing. He clapped his hands. That he heard. So it wasn’t his hearing. The hush was so absolute
that his brain, yearning for stimulus, started to hear the groans and strains of his own body. His old pains were magnified by the silence.

He called out into the dark ward. No one answered.

He lay back in his bed and considered going back to sleep. Perhaps he was asleep and this was a dream of limbo. He turned over on his pillow. There, standing in the middle of the ward, was a
doctor.

Horace Buckwell let out a cry of alarm, bolting upright in bed and preparing fists. The doctor too shouted with surprise.

‘Here you are,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’

‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ said Horace.

‘You were asleep,’ said the doctor. ‘Now let us take a look at you.’ He flicked through Horace’s chart, nodding meaningfully here and there. He was a very young
doctor and looked strangely familiar.

‘What happened to me?’ asked Horace, while he reached around on the bedside table for his glasses.

‘Don’t ask me,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve just come on duty. We’ll have to wait for my colleague.’

‘What does the chart say? It looked blank to me.’

‘It is blank,’ said the doctor. He showed Horace the virgin pages.

‘I am not very happy about this,’ said Horace.

‘Neither am I, Mr Buckwell. You have no idea how much fun I was having just before I was called in.’

With his glasses on, Horace recognized this junior doctor. He looked like the man from Monad. Perhaps his younger brother. He peered at the name badge of his white coat. Dr Sonny.

‘I feel fine,’ said Horace. ‘I don’t understand why I’m here.’

‘The consultant called you in. He wants to have you examined.’

‘I don’t remember arriving.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said Dr Sonny. His bedside manner left a lot to be desired. He seemed off-hand and disinterested. In fact, apart from the white coat, he didn’t seem
like a doctor at all. Just as Horace was about to complain, the curtain around an adjacent bed swished back and there stood a second doctor.

‘The consultant has asked me to examine you,’ said Dr Morty.

‘Can I see the consultant myself?’ asked Horace.

The two doctors laughed and ignored him.

‘I suppose you should start by taking your gown off,’ said Dr Morty.

It seemed irregular, being examined at such a late hour. The doctors did not even bother to pull the curtain around the bed. As he slipped off his gown, Dr Sonny winced. Dr Morty rubbed his
hands together then experimentally poked Mr Buckwell in the back.

‘Feel anything?’ asked Dr Sonny.

‘Yes. A poke in my back,’ replied Horace.

‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ Dr Sonny raised his eyebrows at Dr Morty who merely shook his head.

‘Try his head,’ suggested Dr Sonny. Now the doctor massaged his scalp and pressed his forefingers into Horace’s temples.

‘What we need,’ said Dr Morty, ‘is one of those little torches to look down his throat and stuff.’

‘Hey, stay in character,’ said Dr Sonny.

‘It’s alright for you, you don’t have to touch him.’

Horace pushed Morty away.

‘You’re not doctors are you?’

‘Now now, Mr Buckwell. Calm down. Don’t make us apply the restraints.’

‘There is something wrong with your brain, Mr Buckwell,’ said Dr Morty. ‘Do you remember being attacked in the marshland around the back of Summerhill school? In your notes, it
mentions an encounter with some men. We believe they planted something nasty in your head and we’re trying to find ways of getting it out.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ The naked old man reached for his gown. Dr Morty took it from him and placed it emphatically out of reach.

‘Two men with gas masks. You must remember. One wore a strange device around his tongue that gave off a high-pitched whine. When you were first examined your optic nerve showed the damage
from an insertion of information via strobing light. I know what happened to you because the same thing happened to me. The question is why were we attacked in that way?’

‘I never asked why,’ said Horace. He pulled the sheet free from the bed and wound it around his midriff then sat solemnly on the edge of the bed.

‘Nothing is happening,’ said Sonny. ‘It’s not working.’

Dr Morty gripped Horace by the ears and shook his head. Doctor and patient struggled fruitlessly with one another for a minute. Morty stepped back exhausted.

‘Forget it,’ said Sonny. ‘We’ve clearly got our wires crossed. We’ll go back to the consultant and ask him what to try next.’

With a single blink, Horace Buckwell found himself alone again in the grey ward. The silence was overwhelming.

Once it became clear that the logic bomb would not activate, I decided to get out of the Wave building. The screen showing Mr Buckwell sitting quietly on the edge of his
hospital bed hung accusingly upon the ceiling. Sonny wanted to talk. He wanted more advice. I had none. They would figure it out imminently; their accelerated cognition would quickly piece together
the nature of my deception.

I knew it wouldn’t work. I told Raymond that. I told Bougas. Still, I did it, suddenly and without premeditation in the hope it would be a way out from this hopeless position.

There was nothing left to do but run away.

Dr Hard was waiting outside the cubicle. Loitering in the shadow, it seemed drugged and took a heavy step out to block the corridor.

‘Where are you going?’ Its voice beamed in from a great distance.

‘Outside for some air.’

It waggled a jet finger.

‘You broke quarantine. Moved Mr Buckwell from one part of my oeuvre into another.’ Dr Hard was distracted for a moment, its head moving like a dog straining to locate the origin of a
whistle. Then, ‘Why did you do that?’

I had an answer prepared.

‘Horace Buckwell is dead in the real world. His son begged me to delete him.’

‘Why didn’t you delete him then? Why move him in with the red men?’

‘Numenius Systems have been having problems with Redtown. I thought Buckwell might be the cause.’

‘Again, why not just delete him?’

‘He’s a sex pest. He functions as a marker in the development of the erotic lives of the young people of the town. I wanted to isolate the anomaly before we copy him.’

I jabbered, frantic thoughts snatched up and waved in an obvious attempt at misdirection. Yet Cantor was zoning out; the artificial intelligence was unable to shepherd the flock of thoughts. It
was sliced so thinly. Maintaining the Redtown was a struggle; then there were the more complex characters to imagine, the red men, Sonny, Morty, Alex Drown and hundreds of others, high-maintenance
executives with their elaborate agendas, and the screens and surveillance drones required Cantor to animate them. With so much data coming in from the mob of the Great Refusal gathering in
Limehouse and All Saints, Dr Hard took a long time to refresh. I pushed by the robot and ran into the lift where another Dr Hard was slumped in the corner like a junkie on the nod.

‘Don’t go,’ it whispered. ‘It’s not safe out there.’

‘I have to go. I should never have come to this meeting. I must be with my family.’

‘Don’t… go… don’t…’ Dr Hard pawed at my knee.

I ran back along the thin walkways into the office city. Smoke drifted between the colossus of One Canada Square and the HSBC tower. Security guards rode by on golf carts, heading south away
from the trouble. Crowds walked up from Millwall to meet the mob coming down from Poplar and All Saints.

The safest way off the island was the Greenwich foot tunnel to the south but that would take me far from home. The quickest route would be to pick up the Grand Union canal at Limehouse basin and
walk all the way back to Mile End then onto Hackney itself.

The closer I got to the crowd, the more its braying overwhelmed me. At its fringes, the police seemed to be fighting each other. The psychic weather was a pungent fog. Suddenly I was running
with the riot. Packs of us were shepherded by raggedy scarecrow men who demanded we torch a car, overturn a lorry, smash a shop front. Hoping to slip by the trouble along the Limehouse Reach I came
to somewhere near Poplar, much more central than I had intended. The shopping centre boiled with trouble. A gang of men were trying to break into Poplar train station. I joined them. Looking back
upon Canary Wharf and the Wave, there seemed to be something monstrous moving in the smoke. Pallid tubular ventricles rose out of the heart of the office city, a bloom of bloodless flesh, a giant
sea anemone among the skyscrapers. We chanted at this phantom. At intervals, I returned to my senses and set off again toward the canal only to be caught up by another whim of the crowd as it
pursued a new hallucination. We broke windows to release imprisoned spirits. Long blind worms inched down the terraced streets, their flanks rubbing against window sills. I tried to catch the
people running by because I needed help if I was to prepare a welcome for the worms. Dyad’s riot dissipated my self. I was caught up in it when a figure in a gas mask came out of the mob and
slashed me across the chest with a blade. Self-preservation marshalled my remaining faculties. Where was the knife man? There were bodies in the gutters, jabbering to themselves. Laughing women
waved their burkas in the air. The man with the gas mask bore down on me, feinted a lunge, and when I flinched, tripped me instead. There was a great pressure on my chest. The knife man sat on me.
He yanked off his gas mask to reveal a long raddled face, yellow flecked pupils and a cheek pinned together with piercings: The Elk.

‘Why are you here?’ he shouted.

Tiny hordes crawled along the edge of his blade. The sky was a maroon membrane, distended here and there by the footsteps of something walking over it.

‘Why haven’t you set off the bomb?’ he shouted from the other end of an echo chamber.

He considered cutting my throat, even suggested the blade against my jugular. I had no fight in me. I was passive, impassive under his knife. The pressure was lifted. He released me. The Elk
dragged me to my feet and we moved through the acrid smoke together. Silhouettes appeared and disappeared beside us like unfinished fragments of the imagination. In and out of being I went. I was
back on the concrete again with a woman leaning over me, spraying something onto my tongue. Florence. Slowly the carousel came to rest, and the stroboscopic quality of the last few minutes –
or hours or whatever they were – ceased. An antidote had been administered.

The sudden descent from a group mind gave the scene an awful bathos. In an alleyway, Florence, The Elk and Raymond Chase, dressed in their dirty second-hand clothes, faces smeared with soot and
ash, wanted to hear why I hadn’t put their plan into operation. And what was I to say? That they were deluded? That in desperation at their harassment, I had submitted to their crazed scheme
and discovered, to no surprise whatsoever, that it had not worked?

Raymond said, ‘We have less than an hour left. The spice will wear off soon. The mob will come to its senses. I will take you back to the Wave. We’ll set off the logic bomb
together.’

I shook my head.