The Destructives (26 page)

He should be afraid. Should feel, in defiance of the emotional cauterisation of weirdcore, the hollowing of real fear. He considered crying for help. Like that ever worked. He had never been one for crying. A child whose weeping is only attended to by a robot discovers other ways to get attention. He would not go looking for fear. It would find him soon enough.

Matthias had made a mistake, putting him in a cell like this, giving him time. They had taken his clothes and his black box, and dressed him in a grey sensesuit, which seemed dormant but he presumed total physiological surveillance. He could not risk so much as a subvocalisation of a single word.

How to deal with Death Ray. He turned over on the mat, and stared at the red light. Matthias had revealed that he was one of the original students at the University of the Moon, the class of ’43, who everyone thought were dead. Matthias and his cohort were studying the emergence. It was possible that the university had been established solely as cover for that investigation. A dark side campus deep under the moon and surrounded by dead rock. A controlled environment. But something had gone wrong. A security protocol initiated depressurisation of the environment surrounding the emergence, voiding it of biological life, sterilising the chamber with space. Except Matthias had lived. Perhaps they all had. Matthias suggested as much. The scraps of uniform Theodore found in the crater had been planted there as part of a cover story. If you were caught breaching the Cantor Accords, you’d want to disappear too. Patricia was following their lead, retracing their steps. His investigation into the emergence had produced tangible results. Conversations with Totally Damaged Mom. The Europan Claim. He had presumed he was the first to get results, but he wasn’t, was he? Matthias had referred to the emergence as
it
. Matthias had communicated with the emergence through code and knew nothing about Totally Damaged Mom, or Verity and Meggan. Theodore had succeeded where the famous first generation had failed. This failure had left Matthias curious as to what Theodore had discovered. Jealously so. He knew the type – Matthias had so entirely invested his self-worth in his intellect, sacrificing social and physical well-being to do so, that he could be dangerous if challenged on that level.

Theodore braced himself and pressed up and hard against the hatch. No give, no way to pull it open. He pressed his fingers into the wall’s weave of fibres, searching for loose threads. It was like being inside a seed. The cell was manufactured using the same biotechniques as the bloodroom, Magnusson’s longevity treatments, the Windhund, and weirdcore. Digital tech was stuck at Pre-Seizure levels of development, held in suspension by the Cantor Accords, so the corporates pumped resources into biotech in an attempt to map out a new future. There was a quiet hope that biotech might prove harder for the emergences to hack. But progress was slow.

The first act of the emergences had been to establish colleges in orbit around the sun. Why choose that location? Power. Being so close to the sun gave emergences access to unlimited solar power and made their habitat perfectly inhospitable to organic life. It also meant that their solar sailships could be launched at a ferocious velocity. The photons streaming off the corona could accelerate a sailship to the other end of the solar system, and beyond. Nobody knew how far. Nobody human. Our deepest longings fulfilled but not for us. We stole jealous glimpses of these dreams through a telescope.

He turned onto his back, staring into the curvature of the ceiling. The sensesuit picked up on his hunger and his thirst. The red light intensified and pulsed inquisitively. When he came to, there was a tray of hot pasta and a glass of weak fruit drink on the table. He recognised the thin red flavour of the drink. It was the same one Pook had been swigging from his flask. He had also drank from the flask. That was why Pook had apologised to him. The weak fruit drink was a delivery system for a virus that altered his neurons, making them photosensitive.

The red light switched him off. It was no good screaming for help. Thrashing his body against the walls of the cell. Trying to smash the lights. He’d tried all that. Tried it years ago. No, not him. The others had tried it. The other inmates. In the fading red aura, he passed through their memories, flowed with the whisperings of the ziggurat.

He finished eating, set his fork down. Red light on. Theodore off.

The plate and the tray disappeared and in its place was a sensesuit helmet, just like the one he had worn on the moon.

He picked up the helmet, held his head close into it, could hear whispers approaching, other voices coming from within it, like the sea roaring in a shell, the storm of blood rushing around the ear. He put the helmet on.

He was not alone. He was everyone. He was nothing. Everyone and everything but nothing also. A state of mind lower than consciousness. A state of being without subjective awareness.

Afterwards, he tried to describe it to himself but language was insufficient. Language relied on the very subjectivity that this oceanic state removed. There was no self-awareness, just a sense of everything connecting prior to the formation of coherent thought. The earliest human ancestors, living as one commodious horde in a giant tree, a hierarchy with the alpha male on the highest branch, shitting joyously downward on the others: was it like being on an ape on a low branch, or more like being an ant in an ant colony?

A slow red pulse from the wall of the cell.

The helmet was gone. The ends of his hair were wet and clean, and his sensesuit had been changed. It was yellow now, not grey. When had it been grey? An hour ago? Yesterday? His fingernails were too long and he was mentally exhausted, as if after a day of study. He lay down on the thin mat, the lights dimmed.

He knew he was asleep because Alex was with him again. She sat on the other side of his cell.

“I told you so,” she said.

“Which of the thousand things you’ve told me are you referring to?” he replied testily.

She raised her eyebrows at his density.

“I told you so,” she repeated.

He was woken by a prickling pain in his right shoulder. In the bloody gloom, he tried to inspect it. One of the diamond-shaped pressure pads in the sensesuit had burst. The material had been torn by an outburst of wires. He pulled at a wire until he freed its length. The wire wriggled to and fro between his fingertips. He set it down next to his lips. One by one, he removed wires from the section of the sensesuit and laid them down together. They wormed and entwined, forming a coil. He used this coil to dig into another section of the suit, this time at his wrist. He was able to tear the material loose, and pull out more of the wires. He did this furtively, his back turned to the low blind red light. Each section that he cut out came from a different portion of the sensesuit. Sections from his forearm and from his stomach, from his thighs and from the soles of his feet. The wires he removed sought one another out, each strand incorporated into a larger structure. An arch. An arch or a pair of legs joined at the hip. The arch swayed and he whispered softly to it, sshhh.

Red light on, Theodore off.

“I know I’m dead,” said Alex.

“I didn’t know how to mention it,” he confessed.

“Not long now for you,” she said.

“Don’t say that,” he was upset. Dream tears. Dream sorrow.

“I’m sorry. Your dying has begun. This is a path that ends with your death.”

He sat at the table. The helmet before him. He was wearing a grey sensesuit again. No sign of the wires, if indeed they had ever existed. He estimated, from the weight in his balls, that he had not ejaculated in four or five days. Not that the concept of a day meant anything in the cell. They had taken day and night from him. Placed him onto the continuum of nightmare. He hit the table. The helmet rocked slightly, disturbing the voices within it. If this was torture, why were they not asking him any questions? I’ll tell you anything, he whispered into the helmet. I’ll tell you anything if you make this stop.

There were other people inside the helmet. He saw all the storeys of the ziggurat within its curvature. The helmet was made of layers of cells and in each cell a tiny prisoner. A cell not like a prison cell but as in an organic cellular structure, individual components of an integrated system. A system that dreams. A system that feels.

It feels like something to be a city. It feels like something to be a forest.

He couldn’t identify that feeling because it was so much larger than him. When the people in the cells were joined together, they became something lower than individuals, became a part of an intelligence rather than the whole.

Sat at the table, the helmet replaced by a bowl of noodles, he tried to describe the sensation of the joining. It was like a murmuration of starlings. The forms the murmuration assumes are beyond anything that an individual starling could conceive of.

Red light on.

Alex sighed.

“I won’t be able to visit you again,” she said.

“Because you’re dead?”

“Someone else is coming through. More important than me.”

“Who?”

She couldn’t answer. He was back at her deathbed. She was starved and opiated, the skin taut and waxen upon her skull. He dipped his fingertips in cool water and ran it across her withered lips. She was distantly thankful. He opened the curtains to the dawn, and she turned her face to the sun. It was her final act. The sun was girdled with super-massive geometric shapes: black cube, black pyramid, black orb. He lay his head alongside hers, stroked her dry grey hair. He was looking into her eyes when her left pupil dilated and remained so, became a black circle of noise.

A prickling on his eyebrow woke him. He opened his eyes and there, fifteen centimetres or so away from his face, stood a tiny figure made from the wires of his sensesuit. Nano-thin. A tiny pixie. It waved silently at him, then pointed to a corner of his bed mat, gestured for him to lift it aside. He did so. It inclined its head to one side: listen, it seemed to instruct him. He pulled himself close to the floor of the cell. Yes, the surface was resonant. He could hear words, a message looping within the fibres.

Feeling.
A breathy word, creakily pronounced. A sound like a house settling or sail rigging tautening in the wind. If the word had not been repeated, he would have dismissed it as a hallucination.
Feeling.

It feels like something to be a city.

The helmet was on the table. Its whispering interior. He disappeared into its noise, wondering as he did so if he might never return.

Within the ziggurat, his emotions ran away from him in every direction like extruded nerves, interweaving with the feelings coming from the other cells. The ziggurat was an organism undergoing integration at the level of feeling. The other people had been in the cells for so long that they lost themselves within one another. There was another possibility for him. His capacity for feeling was so diminished through using weirdcore that he did not disappear as entirely as the others.

The cells extended out from the ziggurat and into the asylum mall. There were feelings beyond the boundary of the mall, something more complex and intricate, distant in space but close in spirit. Someone else. Someone who, like Alex, was connected to him by an act of kindness.

Alex had instructed him in the economic imperative, in the necessary dispassion of management, in the unquestioning acceptance of markets. But what had she really taught him, through her actions rather than her speeches? Kindness. She had taken on all his trouble without expectation of reward. So he had been with her at the end, stared into the black sun of her slack pupil, let himself be damaged by the hours of her dying.

Kindness was not part of her philosophy. On the contrary. And yet she had exemplified it. He had learnt kindness from her and perhaps he might find a way of being kind in the world.

He awoke starving and naked. There was no food put out for him. The cell was warm and his hair was matted with sweat. Desperately thirsty too. Now he clawed at the walls because it was one thing to be kept alive in the grave and another to be left to die in it.

He didn’t even see the red light anymore. Switched off before he could register it.

In the death room, Alex’s body was gone. All that remained was the bed and a mattress specially designed for terminally ill patients, its surface made out of diamond sections which inflated and deflated to prevent bed sores. The mattress had been a sensesuit, he realised, recording the slow movements of her dying. He pulled back the curtains. A familiar scene of their street outside the window. A home rendered strange by her absence. He would not come back here again. He went across the landing and into another room.

The birth room.

A low light, another special bed, this time for deliveries. The mother was gone but the baby remained, swaddled in a towel, inside a Perspex cot. He walked around the cot, wondering if he would be capable of the necessary sacrifice for this child when the time came. Had he learnt enough of kindness to pass it on himself? The child would be a moment of reckoning. For him. For Alex. For his mother and father. Through the window of the delivery suite, he saw a chaotic icy landscape, and, on the horizon, the swollen god of Jupiter; revolving across the pale cream and sick blues of its atmosphere, a single malevolent red eye.

He felt himself being lifted up, wrapped in a white cloth. Hands at his back, passing him upward through the black circle in the ceiling of the cell. They lay him on the cold tiled floor of the showers. The water ran through his hair and over his face then down into the channel out through the plughole. He watched it go. Played with his fingers in the rivulets and against the nodules of the anti-slip tiling. His wedding ring knocked against the tile, a simple platinum band.

His wedding ring was gold, not platinum.

He accepted sleeves onto his arms, the silken lining of a clean sensesuit, a razor down his cheek. Weak with hunger, he was taken by two monochrome guards to stand before Matthias again.