If Then (11 page)

“What happens to me when the implant is active?”

“The implant imitates anaesthetic. It degrades the connections between neurons so that the network of consciousness loses integrity. Pathways of your mind fade like rainbow bridges. Unlike anaesthesia, the interruption in consciousness does not shut down control of your body. The implant then replaces the degraded parts of your consciousness with a network of its own which connects you directly to the Process. Once two networks mesh then, unlike anaesthetic, you regain consciousness.”

“It’s like being carried on a wave.”

“Partially. A wave that goes forward and then ripples back, perhaps. Networks are distributed across space and time, and so are we. Software imitates biology and physics: from the smallest quantum events of your consciousness to the formation of stars.”

He said, “You bamboozle me.”

She took that as a compliment.

“Could you take the implant out?”

“If the implant was a little metal seed in your head, then we could take it out. But it is so much more than that. The implant is a tool we created. You imagined a model of yourself in the image of that tool. Then you delegated control to that model. That you continue to distinguish yourself from the implant is merely a habit of language.”

“I see things under its influence. I call it the
godstuff
. It’s part of me.”

“It’s true that you’re not entirely responsible for all of your actions.”

“I will never be free.”

She put her hand on his arm. He was so much bigger than her, and her knowledge of the world was so much greater than his; the imbalances in these respective proportions really turned her on.

“Freedom is not important. We are interconnected. We don’t act alone. So don’t feel guilty.”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. Her kiss sparked the implant into life and the gap within him was filled with swarming calculations and visions.
Godstuff
. He staggered.

Alex whispered, “Sometimes I wish I could hack into the Process, and make you do what I want.”

She unwrapped a pair of blue polythene gloves.

“Can I stop this?” he whispered.

“Your decisions are made six seconds before you are aware of them. What you think of as free will is post-rationalization. You live in the past, James.”

“No second thoughts?”

“Your decision has already been made. Don’t waste my time with excuses.”

She gestured for him to kneel. He did so, and inclined his head forward, exposing the scar of the implant. She applied anaesthetic gel, and then cut away the growth of skin and flesh until the portal was clean and clear.

8

H
ere comes the godstuff
, flowing in and filling him up. His blood is thickly luminescent with ecstasy and his head is a starshell. The dialogue-in-silence –
James
, the name of that dialogue was
James
– is shunted aside by icons of the Process: the black box itself, then a triangle thing that rhythmically enunciates decision trees, the square of white hot instincts, and two circles of action conjoined in a loop. He thinks of the circles as – respectively – the golden orb of human decision and the iron ring of machine decision. The circles move slowly toward one another until they line up to form the porthole of the armour. It’s Eviction Night and all systems are on.

His breath steams the colloid. Its transparent gel shimmers then is clear again. Cold dusk. Strung up in the heart of the armour he hovers in the pose of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, in two places at once, hands touching the circumference of the iron circle and the edges of a white square. And such emotions! The godstuff thrills every cell that it connects with: the cells in the grass and the brick and the soil and the steel and the stars, the cells in his heart and his tongue, his balls and amygdala. Godstuff sluices around the canyons and contours of his fingerprints so that he can touch other points within the network: Ruth walking with the crowd by the river, holding a child’s hand in her own, a grip he feels from both sides – the safety that comes with being led, the responsibility that comes from leading; Hector is out there too, turning from the monument to observe the approach of the first banners. Alex Drown slumps against the wall of the lockup, blood tears streaming down her left cheek. She told him that when the implant was dormant he was as slow as everybody else, existing six seconds after the fact, stuck permanently in the past. But to the godstuffed bailiff, limbs stretched out and bound into the armour, he owns the
now
.

He apprehends the townspeople as a lightcluster, the larger lights proceeding toward the centre, with smaller points at the eastern and western borders, lights conjoined to others by vertices so densely interwoven as to take on physical form, the heavy light of need and desire.

The crowd lines a narrow street of teetering shop fronts and bowed houses, wearing outlaw masks. At the round house, smugglers emerge from Rotten Row with their faces concealed by handkerchiefs printed with skull-and-crossbones, their stripes covered by whatever has come to hand: a straw boater, a potato sack, a tall top hat.

He comes at them through a house, iron horns to the fore, charging through brick and plasterboard and furniture. His claws rent aside the exterior wall and his head spears through the roof. The tiles ripple aside, and the crowd are screaming, fleeing; their hearts accelerate his heart, the fear of the prey feeds the lust of the predator. The musk of cordite, woodsmoke and acrid paraffin. The first eviction wants him, it pulls and pleads. But who shall go first? The thief, the poor or the child? The triangle thing pushes out least worst outcomes. The iron ring of the machine decision pulses on, onward, on. The back of the armour is a pipe organ of heat exhausts and amplifiers. He screams the name of the next to be evicted – Francis Sacks – and veers southward toward Cliffe.

The families of Cliffe run alongside the armour, led by their swordswomen and the smugglers in woollen black-and-white hooped jumpers, holding aloft burning crosses made from petrol-soaked rags and wire frames. Children scamper through the graveyard of St Anne’s Church, between headstones on tilted ground. Mischief men whirl sparking strips of rookies overhead and they explode in flurries of red tickertape, rattling the windows, scaring the drone rooks out of the router trees. A mucky-faced smuggler with golden teeth holds aloft a red flare, its guttering bloody light soaking the fleeing crowd.

At the war memorial, the crowd divides, most turn left down Market Street toward the fire site and Malling, but the people of Cliffe turn right toward their defences. The decision trees blink rightward, and along that path he sees Cliffe’s preparations against him: a rook’s eye view of the ombudsmen preparing the road for his arrival, a peek into a shed in which men fill barrels with hot tar. At the centre of the conspiracy, a man to be evicted, Francis Sacks. Part of the game. The game of his death. There is not enough of him left to care.

Hot in his harness, blinking at the sweat stinging his eyes, he senses Hector nearby, the stretcher bearer a luminous emptiness within the black box of the Process. High up the memorial, leaning among the statues of angels, Hector perches in his stretcher bearer’s uniform, knapsack slung over his shoulder, the godstuff roiling around him like a worried sea, waves of data reaching to catch him if he were to fall. The decision trees turn their branches toward Hector. The golden orb resonates. He is not an error message. He is source code. Hector climbs gracefully down the monument and then he is lost in the crowd, and James feels that loss keenly.

The procession heads downhill. The armour is locked down for this part of the ritual. A children’s choir move to the front, wailing up and down the scales, the banners of the lost rise up like sails on rigging, accompanied by the incessant scraping of iron barrows against the road. Red smoke from the flare ribbons past the porthole. The children rent their gowns of lamentation.

The mischief men whoop and skitter in and out of his legs, and a Molotov cocktail erupts off his flanks, the fire curling out, sparks rushing upward.

A barricade at the bridge, shadows huddle behind it. With a whirring and grinding action, he raises himself up to his full height, turns his blank faceplate to the crowd, crushes part of the barrier beneath his foot, and scoops up the remains in his claw, casting the burning structure into the river. A few yards of no-man’s-land between himself and the enemy line. A tot of rum is passed along that line for courage, and then godstuff and blood and fire shake the armour. In tug-of-war teams, the smugglers bring down shop fronts upon his shoulders, and walls collapse into the back of his knees. He swings in his harness, battering back and forth against the interior. Cog-teeth trapped, the mechanism buckling against its own arrested urgency. The iron ring flickers. Instinctively, he turns to free himself, sees smugglers skipping over the red roofs, releasing flaming barrels of tar from their traps, barrels that skid across the roof, flicking the tiles aside and then hit the guttering, overturn, and spill bursting violent blooms down upon him. He raises great iron talons in alarm and is silhouetted against stormy corona. They have him.

The air scorches his eyes and throat. It’s not so strange to be in the armour once you’ve grown accustomed to the otherness of the body. He spits with anger onto the porthole, and saliva boils away on the hot colloid. Not enough warning from the black box. On its slanted surface, he had glimpsed some of the preparations of Cliffe against him, but not all. A tingle of fear becomes a tolling, he feels – in his coccyx – his body revolt against the trap. A white square hot with survival instincts. He gets down on one knee and the walls fall over him, and then he crawls out, head first, Molotov cocktails splashing against the faceplate. The smugglers aim for the head even though it is empty. Their mistake. He gets to his feet, takes a step forward and the road splinters between his toes, and his leg sinks up to the calf in earth. The heat extractors whine and the industrial brass section on the back of the armour sounds a bugle charge, a factory whistle and a foghorn’s warning. Stuck midstep: if he goes forward then his next step may also sink into the ground, whereas if he turns back, then he will be wallowing in the fire again, risky if the diesel in the armour gets too hot.

A smuggler’s face appears at the porthole, and then the man hammers at the colloid with a crowbar, trying to prise it open. This is why he has to be inside the armour: to concentrate all their hatred. The dull impacts of bricks and boots upon his back. The smuggler is pushed aside by another, and they press a banner to the porthole; it is a painting of the armour on fire, and a copperplate legend reads
Put death in your diary
. The decision nodes and chance nodes burst ahead, and he sees four paths to his death. His death is not an end node. Chance and decision explode onward from his death. The war will speed over the Downs. The town will be broken down into particles and then resewn into armaments and bodies to run the war again. He moves back along these outcomes to this moment of decision, this moment of chance. He pivots on the trapped leg, heaves his free leg forward, then it goes right through the surface and into the trench below. The porthole is level with a golden-toothed smuggler. He thrusts a searing poker into it. The colloid bends and warps inward around that hot point, and James kicks back, the harness swinging him away from danger. Every way he looks, the outcome is death. Ridiculous. He will decide, then, how to survive. He pulls his elbows up sharp and lets himself topple forward, smugglers diving aside, the armour smashing through the false road and fitting tightly into the trench beneath. Cold soil smears up against the colloid, the hot skin gives off a stifled hiss. The smugglers bring the remaining houses down across his back, burying him underground.

The trench is a line in time and space, a boundary on the edge of territory into which men disappear.

Black smoke steams from the wreckage. The smugglers hitch scarves over their mouths so as not to inhale his carcinogenic stink.

The iron ring blinking, the white box pulsing to restart brain activity. Never. Never has he encountered such resistance. He gazes into the black box, wondering
why is the Process doing this to me?
The godstuff has withdrawn, leaving him with the smell of fear, strong and hormonal, inside the armour. Inside his own body. To lie inside the earth like an exhausted root, to take his place in the grave, it feels right. The mob killed the bailiff before him, clubbed him to death on Eviction Night. He wonders,
is it my role to die
? He twists in the harness but the armour does not respond. It needs the godstuff, the implant that turns him on. The iron ring blinks but does not engage. Stalled. The air turns sour. He bangs his head against the porthole to knock some sense into the tech.

Godstuff flows up through the earth, a concentrate of ideas, a sweet mercury that seeps between proton and electron, passing easily through the armour and filling the void within him. He clears his vents with a fierce blast of air, and then the armour heaves itself out of the trench, horned head breaking up through overlapping sections of shop front, smugglers darting forward to press it back into the grave. But it can’t be stopped. Eviction cannot be stopped. On, the iron ring commands him, on!

His floodlights fire up and rake across the smoky faces of his attackers. He finds his voice in a whine of feedback that makes the crowd wince and retreat. This has gone on long enough. The black box pings up the location of Francis Sacks. He reaches down into a twitten and scoops up Sacks in his claw, then cuffs him out into the street. Sacks’ family regroup and he leans over and gives them horned sound and fury, then turns back to Sacks.

“You are Francis Sacks?” he asks.

Sacks shakes his head. James appeals to the crowd.

“Will anyone vouch that this man is Francis Sacks?”

Blackened hands rise slowly in the dim street. Then Sacks is pushed forward by the others, his bald head matted with blood and dust. He rants and shouts at the crowd, then pleads with them, then attacks them. The floodlights expose bruised and mottled faces writhing in a brawl. Sacks can take any man in a fair fight but this is not a fair fight. The men and women of Cliffe club their neighbour to the ground, then offer up his unconscious bulk. James gestures for the cart to be brought up.

Eviction Night: one down, eleven to go.

T
he town is a gyre
; the castle and the keep the high centre, the stacked cottages circulating around and about, curtailed by the rise of the Downs. The high chalk cliff on the easternmost side of town is a luminous white thorn with drone birds nesting in its black veins. He loves the shape of this land. Strides over it as one of its giants. Startled electric blossoms of fireworks in the sky, festive ordinance mortared out from the fire site, that old playing field beside the glimmering slack of the river. A light cluster of townspeople gathering there, Ruth among them, stripes syncing for the communal experience of the unveiling of the totem. The totem is massive this year, something the size of a house covered in tarpaulin and trundling slowly across the Downs on pedrails, down through the town, to be unveiled with full ritual at the climax of the evening. Smugglers bring up ladders and swords, preparing to cut the ropes on the tarp.

He coheres in Southover during the eviction of the Aukett sisters, the elderly women holding each other’s hands as smugglers help them up onto the cart. The next one will be tough: three evictions in Landport. The Landport lads are notorious for poaching game from the Firle and Glynde estates and their women are always breaking curfew. He expects trouble. Raw trouble.

From Eridge Green Road, he calls out the names of the evicted, his amplified bark echoing all the way across the estate and down to the river. Abandoned toys on the pavement. He taps gently on a window with his iron claw, moves onto the next house, rakes the front wall aside to expose a box bedroom, a frilly duvet, a white wardrobe. He flips the bed over but there’s no one there. He places his claw onto the bedroom floor and applies incremental pressure until the house comes apart in his hands, a set of arbitrary divisions within space.

The river
cry the drone rooks, they are hiding in the river. Vague outlines of people hunkering in the reeds, stifling their fear. He walks right into their ambush and they come at him from behind outcrops of marsh grass and from under the overhang of the river bank and from out of the muddy river itself, an enfilade of gunfire severing hydraulic lines and cabling. A bullet ricochets inside the armour and
thunks
hard into a ceramic plate on his private armour, his second skin. The floodlights on his shoulders spark out. He ignites the flares in his horntips, and charges forward into the Landport resistance, scooping people up to the left and right then tossing them aside winded, bleeding, wailing with backwards bent limbs. He doesn’t feel their pain but registers it as multicoloured data. The resistance gives way and then it’s just a matter of chasing down the evicted; he finds one hidden under an overturned skiff, another climbing up a bridge, the third a woman accepting her fate, eyes closed, hands raised, like a child wanting to be picked up by their parent.