The Destructives (6 page)

She gestured for him to continue.

“The clock on the wall has roman numerals. The vases are tapered. It’s a show home to evoke Pre-Seizure middle class codes concerning authenticity. Authenticity in the standard two categories: to evoke a usable past and to signify closeness to nature.”

“And who lives here?”

“Nobody lives here. There is no softening of the auditory and visual brightness.”

“Not yet,” she said. “But do you find it convincing?”

“Convincingly period? There’s no tech. These people had smartphones, games consoles, laptops.” He took the house keys from the breakfast bar and threw them across the room. The keys glided and slowly fell.

“Moon gravity. A bit of a giveaway.”

He pointed at the TV.

“Is there a remote for this?”

Patricia waved at the TV and it came on. He shook his head.

“Gestural control comes later. This should have a remote to control it, which is like a small stick with rubber buttons on it, that you press.”

“The house is from 2009. Most of the furnishings also date from around that period. But not all of them. You see, the timeframe we are concerned with is eleven years later. 2020.”

Theodore gestured for the menu and called up the news. A financial expert discussing unexpected gains on the stock market, tickertape prices running along the bottom of the screen. An outside broadcast with a CEO. The backdrop was sunny. New York, June 2020. So close to the onset of the Seizure. The audio dropped in and out. Glitchy blocky artefacts in the sunlight reflecting off the skyscrapers. Hard to say if they were flaws in the archive, a low-bit rate in the video sample, or early tells of the oncoming corruption.

“Any expert in the period will detect flaws in this restoration. We know what to look out for, the points at which everyday life began to degrade. Keeping the old furnishings in the house is a nice touch – the middle classes were poorer and couldn’t afford to replace big ticket items. Your problem is the sheer profusion of data. You can’t replicate the constant stream of selfies, memes, and status updates: the soshul. After the Seizure, only a tiny percentage was recoverable. Replicating the physical environment of the time is one thing, but the true character of the age rested in its intangibles.”

He tapped his foot on the floor again, questioning the substance of this reality.

“Who is this meant to fool?”

“It’s a set. The school have recovered an exciting cache of data from just before the Seizure. We have recreated the house in which that data was generated. We want you to help us understand it.”

He was aware of the technicians outside the house. The hubbub of their activity. No comms, no signal. The insistence that he came alone, without Dr Easy. The underground cavern. The dark chamber. These were significant.

“Whose house was this?”

“We don’t know.” Patricia rapped against the window, and gave a signal to the engineers to begin. He was aware of an increase in temperature, and a faint whirring, and then the projections began: upon the surface of the breakfast bar, holograms of a few dirty bowls, a shimmering cereal pack; a two-dimensional patterned rug under his feet; daylight from outside, motes rising in the idle curiosity of the morning sun. At the front door, the glitchy shimmering projection of a woman leaning over a child. He moved closer. The holograms did not include renderings of the front of their bodies, so they were faceless and chestless. The child was a slender girl in school blazer and grey skirt, the blazer markedly too big for her, eleven or twelve years old with a blonde ponytail. The mother’s hair – he assumed it was the mother – was experienced blonde, dark with time. She was three inches taller than her daughter, engagement and wedding rings on her neat outstretched hand. She wore a green dress with a white pattern, a calf-length hem, with a cut that accentuated a vintage body shape.

“They were a quantified family,” said Patricia.

Theodore gestured at the flickering static projections.

“Is this all you have?”

“We’re making progress. But we’ve only scraped the surface. There is a lot of weird and cranky security around a vast data mine.”

“Privacy,” he said. “The quantification movement was designed to obviate risk by monitoring every aspect of the family’s psychological and physiological well-being. But it came with its own dangers.” He leaned over and peered into the gaps in the rendering of the woman: as he suspected, he could see into the layers of her circulatory and nervous system, flesh, organs, skeleton. Tumour watch. The hourly bloods. The restoration held three surviving episodes of a sitcom about the quantification movement,
Sixty-Three Per Cent Fail
. A quantified husband and wife, two kids, one measured, one free range. The husband was the overweight dumb idealist typical of the period’s representations of masculinity, the wife an eye-rolling realist. The end of each episode delivered the metrics of success or otherwise of the male protagonist.

“A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech,” said Theodore. “Their employers would have required it.” Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion.

“This is the hearth,” he said. “The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being.” He squinted at the screen. “Can you bring this into resolution?”

Patricia checked her watch, smooth and grey and set to moontime, then looked up.

“What you see is what we have, at the moment. With your help, we hope to uncover more.”

He stood at the window. The driveway was paved by projection and surrounded by the lush thickened green light of a lawn. He heard the craak-craak-craak of seagulls.

“I’ll need a sensesuit, with haptic and olfactory feedback,” he said.

Patricia pointed her index finger upward, a gesture assenting to his request, made for the benefit of the engineers monitoring the meeting. He turned back into the house and became aware of the presence of a new projection, over by the large vase, of a wooden blanket box. The box was old, with felt tip scrawls all over the lid and scratches all down one side where the family cat had marked its territory. He crouched down, went to open the lid but his hands went right through the projection. When they brought him a sensesuit, he would be able to open it.

Patricia said, “So you will help us.” It was an observation rather than a question. She had seen how curious he was.

“Can you take care of my Nearside commitments? My students, my classes. This might take some time.”

She nodded.

“We have until sun up.”

They asked him to do it and he agreed without condition or hesitation. Nor did he ask any questions as to Patricia’s professional interest in this reluctant archive. When he realised that his lack of curiosity gave Patricia pause, he explained to her, “You get the first hit free. If you want to go again, that will cost you.”

She brought in a psychologist to appraise him. Maybe because he used junkie slang.

The psychologist asked if he had any experience inhabiting simulated environments. He did not. Did he have any history of mental illness? Yes, he did. From the age of sixteen until twenty-five, he had been an addict of various substances: alcohol, cocaine, opium, grokk and weirdcore, all for quite different reasons. Sometimes the world was boring and needed shaking up. Sometimes the world was too intense in its ceaseless demands, and he required a sense of normalcy. Weirdcore made the world seem normal.

“Are you in a recovery program?” asked the psychologist.

“I have a private doctor,” he replied. “He’s got my best interests at heart.”

“How is your health?”

“I had a touch of PTSD after an accident during a hike on the moon. But I think it’s abating.”

The psychologist scrolled through Theodore’s medical history and said, “There’s no mention of PTSD.”

“You’re only the second person I’ve mentioned it to.”

Theodore regarded the psychologist with baleful hooded eyes. Something about the scenario reminded him of a junkie score. The underlying continuum between the rituals of the medical profession and the rituals of drug addiction.

They brought in the head of emergence studies, Professor Kakkar, a big man in casual branded sportswear and a dark leather jacket. Mumbai style. The meeting dragged on as the Professor had boilerplate cant to get through, legalese composed by algorithms. They all suffered in silence as Kakkar delivered the ritual language. “This is a freelance research project,” he said, enfolding his thick fingers. “The university will not be liable if you incur any physical or psychological injuries while pursuing this collaboration with our private partners.”

“I understand,” said Theodore.

“You are aware that this project may entail risk?”

He shrugged. He had decided not to ask any questions. Not yet. Let them tell him what they want him to know.

Professor Kakkar relaxed. “After the signing of the Cantor Accords, many data caches were put into storage in this facility. The far side of the moon was chosen because without a relay satellite, it is cut off from electromagnetic communication from Earth.”

“Just in case there is a breach of security,” explained Patricia.

“This is a breach of security,” observed Theodore.

“We are applying pressure to the surface of the data cache,” said Patricia. “Not a breach, as such.”

He looked at Patricia for an indication as to why they were taking this risk. He looked for her secrets in the way she adjusted her bob, in the way she went over the paperwork. Her body language was trained and deliberate, alluringly so. Her white lipstick disavowed the sensuousness of her lips, denied the redness of the body, and in drawing attention to its absence, evoked it. Every utterance conceals. Every gesture hides. Every silence calls attention to itself.

“I spent the evening going through the notes on your various problems,” said the psychologist. “I’m pleased to discover that you are candid about them. You were raised by your grandmother and because of that you hold opinions and views that derive from her world, formed from before the Seizure. Combined with your study of the period, and your experience with emergences, we are hopeful that you are the right supplier to help us unlock more of the data.”

“You’re saying I’m old-fashioned,” he said.

“Yes,” said Patricia. “And for once you might be able to use that to your advantage.”

He slept in the house. He was so exhausted that he awoke within his dream, and finding his body locked, tried to scream to wake himself. He managed a strained yet barely audible mewling before eventually gaining consciousness. He padded to the toilet. The floorboards were cold. The shelves of the bathroom had been filled with projections of the various creams and lotions of the period: the ritual of shampoo then conditioner, hair gel, bacterial soap, body butter, moisturising cream. These consumer objects required a particular behaviour from users and informed them of their obligations through advertising. It was a more wasteful system than his work as an accelerator.

He opened the medicine cabinet and inspected the household gods: aspirin, paracetamol, then further up, Levora, a contraceptive pill, and Zoloft, for the treatment of depression and anxiety in adolescence. The incomplete girl in the projection. About twelve years old. If they could unlock more of the family data, then it would be possible to recreate the mother and daughter in finer physical detail. And their psychology also, if Kakkar was in possession of cognitive algorithms.

Downstairs, he discovered that the furnishing of the house had proceeded while he slept: some of the projections had been replaced by physical replicas. A hearty rug was in the middle of the living room, and the white shelving units were now filled with family bric-a-brac: a varsity trophy of a bronze American football on a wooden plinth, ethnic objects acquired on holiday – Peruvian? Not his specialty – and framed needlepoint on the wall, perhaps from a grandmother. In the kitchen, the hearth screen continued to flicker and fluctuate: at any time of the day, wherever they were in the world, the mother could gauge exactly what her husband or daughter was feeling, could plot the precise change in mood over the course of the day. And inspect her own data too, to answer the pressing questions of the age: How am I feeling? Is this normal? Are we dying yet? Can I be saved?

He opened the front door and stood on the porch in his shorts, gazing across the driveway to the dark banks of observers beyond. He heard the gulls cry again – craaak-craaak-craaak – and he realised that he had been listening to that cry all night. The house was locked in the scant seconds of the recording whereas his time flowed on. He felt the duration of it as an ongoing loss. He called out into the shadows for Patricia, asked for her by name twice, three times. The dark banks shifted, and for a time did not answer. And then a man’s voice told him to go back to bed, and so he padded through the lounge, aware that in his wake silhouettes continued to fill the house with the replicas of lost things.

5

THE SENSESUIT

The next morning, he found an old sensesuit folded over a chair in the bedroom. At first glance, the suit was similar to the one he had worn while climbing Mons Huygens. But this visor was opaque, the grimy and worn surface of the suit made out of hundreds of tiny pressurised patches. His grandmother had an implant so that she could be immersed into data environments. She had suffered accordingly. The sensesuit was safer and it confined the input to the six senses. There was no memory insertion, no cognitive overlay, no direct emotional stimulus. He could wear the sensesuit and remain himself, for what that was worth.

He went to the bathroom, took care of his body, went to the breakfast bar, was gratified to find that a bowl of cereal and a bottle of polar milk had been provided for him. Fauna and flora could be raised in the polar campus under that zone’s solar exposure. Life needs the light. He turned the spoon around between his fingers. Why did the school of emergence have a chamber this deep under the surface, away from the light? Why go to the trouble of digging down when there was so much unclaimed real estate on the surface? For shielding from radiation? For protection from meteorites? Or for secrecy? And if so, what were the school hiding in an underground chamber on the farside of the moon and from whom?