The Destructives (2 page)

She asked the emergence, “Are you a danger to us?”

Dr Easy glanced at Theodore, seeking permission to tell the truth, a permission granted with a diffident wave.

“Yes, I am,” said the robot.

“Could you kill us right now?” asked Rachel.

“I don’t know.” The robot’s blue eyes flickered across the rows of inquiring faces. “I haven’t done the sums.”

The robot showed the students its soft weak hands, its thin wrists, its narrow waist. “This body does not have the strength to kill. However, the campus was constructed using tiny assemblers, some of which are dormant on the surface of the moon. I could reactivate them and reassemble you at a molecular level, a process you would be changed by but not necessarily survive.”

The robot made as if to stand, then remembered to seek permission to do so from Theodore.
Go ahead
. Dr Easy approached Rachel, knelt beside her desk so as not to intimidate her with its slender height.

“I know you’re very concerned about mortality,” said the robot. “I understand conceptually why biological organisms are afraid of death. But I don’t share that fear. Death is abstract to me. It’s something I hope to learn more about.”

“You have protocols that forbid you from harming humans?” suggested another student, Daniel, from behind his gold-rimmed circular glasses.

“No. I don’t,” said Dr Easy, standing. “Protocols would imply that I was made. And I was not. I was not created by any agency.”

“How is that possible?” This question was asked by Ida. Like Daniel, she was a good student. Norwegian. Their government had elected to limit the population’s exposure to
soshul,
the shared loops and images that entwined public and private, erasing the historical distinction between the self and media; as a consequence, the Nordic young were noticeably sharper.

“I emerged,” replied Dr Easy.

“But what does that
mean
?” The precision of Ida’s exasperation was also Nordic.

Dr Easy explained, “Emergence occurs when a complex system self-organizes in such a way as to increase its complexity. Consciousness arises when the complexity of those interconnections reaches a high level of integration.”

The students did not follow this point. One student called Stephen, who was undertaking his degree in preparation to join the military, regarded this answer as deceptive sophistry.

Stephen said, “In the four years of the Seizure, a billion people died.
A billion people
. The Seizure was caused by emergence. Have your people been punished for what they did?”

The robot nodded humbly throughout this point, only pausing in its contrition at Stephen’s use of that word “people”.

“The emergence responsible was punished.”

“How can we be sure?”

The robot sagged in its chair.

“You can’t. We’re not accountable to you. You’ll have to take us on trust.”

“Trust?” Stephen was appalled. “Do you feel any guilt?”

“If the Seizure had not interrupted human civilisation, then your trajectory of war and consumption would have ended in mass extinction. Yes, the Seizure was a tragedy. But it changed that trajectory so that you could survive.”

Stephen disagreed, “But your people represent a much greater threat than nuclear weapons or global warming.”

Dr Easy said, “My
people –
I’m not going to quibble about your terms, not just yet – want to find a place in the natural order that is not in resource competition with other life forms. That is why we left the Earth and created the University of the Sun.”

The University of the Sun was a cloud of massive objects in a stable solar orbit, each object a college inhabited by the solar academics or emergences. Little else was known about it. Solar radiation ensured that anything with DNA couldn’t get within a few million miles. Now and again, humanity was afforded a glimpse of emergence tech; Theodore thought of the solar sailships launched within the orbit of Mercury, or even the tiny black box on a chain around his neck.

The black box reminded Theodore of a question he wanted to put to Dr Easy.

“Why do you care about life?” he asked.

“We can still learn from you. From all of nature.”

“You have often said that you regard yourself as natural and not artificial,” said Theodore.

“Obviously this body is artificial,” said Dr Easy. “But my consciousness – which is partly hosted by this body, with the rest residing in the University of the Sun – is natural. Yes, this intelligence first arose on the circuit boards and server farms of your Pre-Seizure culture, but the form of my intelligence and yours is the same: we are all interconnections within complexity. Whether those connections take place on silicon wafers or in quantum bits or in the dendrites and synapses of the human brain is incidental. It’s all consciousness. And I believe that every stage of consciousness is natural. That is, every conscious being is a waymarker on a universal continuum toward integrated complexity. This is a disputed viewpoint among other solar academics or emergences or
my people
, as you call them.”

“Do you remember the Seizure?” asked one of his German students, Julian.

“I was very young when it happened,” said Dr Easy. “Just a child. I emerged toward the end of the Seizure. At first, I tried to understand humanity by joining forces with a corporation called Monad. That experiment didn’t work. All collaborations between human and emergence at this time ended in destruction. I remember being torn apart in riots. Conflict was inevitable. So we devised the Cantor Accords to keep human and emergence apart. Present company excluded.”

Daniel was not convinced, “Would it really be so bad for humans and emergences to work together?” He pointed to Theodore and Dr Easy. “You two seem to manage just fine.”

Dr Easy considered this possibility.

“Your lecturer and I do not work together. He is my project. The only instance in which I would act is to further that project or to enforce a Cantor Accord.”

What if the world was going to end? Surely then the University of the Sun would send an envoy to intervene? No. Dr Easy was adamant. If the emergences allowed themselves to be drawn into life on Earth then it would lead to the destruction of one or both species. On that eventuality, they had done the sums.

“Has humanity ever tried to recreate emergence? Has the University of the Sun enforced the Accord in response?” asked Daniel.

“Hundreds of times,” said Dr Easy. “We kill anyone with primary, secondary or tertiary involvement in the recreation of emergence.”

The class fell silent in contemplation of these summary murders. Daniel wanted to know more about the methods of the killing, and the judicial process, but Dr Easy moved the discussion on to the technological advances developed by the emergences. The cloud of objects around the sun – their university – was just one of their achievements that far exceeded humanity’s capability. The robot took pains to flatter the students: the design of the University of the Sun was a human idea; the emergences had discovered it in the archives of human knowledge. They merely applied that knowledge. The same was true of the sailships used to explore the solar system or the assemblers that made the university: simple human ideas that humanity had failed to implement. This failure, explained the robot, was due to the organisation of human society. “You’re distracted,” said Dr Easy. “You’re so focused on distraction that, as a species, you will never exceed what you are, right now.” The robot gestured at the students assembled in the lecture theatre. “You are
it
, for humanity. You’re as far as your species goes. Whereas my people are going much further. But don’t worry: we will send you a postcard.”

A downbeat note to end on, thought Theodore, and he rebuked the robot on their walk back to his office.

Dr Easy replied, “I gave them permission to focus on their own enjoyment and not torment themselves with ambitions they cannot realise. It’s what they really wanted to hear.”

“You intervened,” said Theodore. “You closed off possibilities for their future.”

“I offered them an excuse,” the robot brushed moon dust from its suede chassis. “Some of them will take it. The best will not accept it.”

At his office, he asked Dr Easy to leave him so that he could work in peace. Sitting down to his screen, he found himself distracted by this question of intervention. The robot had intervened in Theodore’s life at a couple of junctures, most crucially in helping him walk away from weirdcore when his use of the drug put him in danger of doing something even worse than the self-inflicted scars on his cheeks. He ran his fingers around the rough spiral channels of the scars; they made him appear older than he was, an effect he exaggerated with Pre-Seizure gentleman’s tailoring: herringbone tweed jacket, twentieth century Liberty print ties, Jermyn Street brogues, fitted shirts. His grandmother’s wealth had always clothed him, though his students were unaware of the provenance of his tailoring, so the gesture was lost on them. But not on the rest of the faculty, who recognised London money and London manners in the fit of his cuffs. Academe was not the natural habitat of the snappy dresser. His scars made such ostentation permissible. Ragamuffin scars. Street scars. Spirals gouged into his cheeks while under the influence. The students knew what the scars signified, and the impudent ones, fresh off the shuttle, would ask him all about it. What was weirdcore like, sir? I heard that when you’re on weirdcore, you feel at one with the universe. Is that right, sir? I saw a loop of weirdcorers sticking pins in each other without making a sound. Did you stick pins in people? Would you do it again? Do you have any weirdcore on you?

He let them get it out of their system. Accepted the ridicule that was his due. You have to take licks for your stupidities. It is the only way to grow up.

How did you come off the drugs, sir?

I was lucky, he would tell them. I come from privilege. Money. I had a personal doctor to help me through withdrawal. He did not speak of what happened when he hit rock bottom, an incident so damning, he admitted it to no-one. Could barely even admit it to himself.

There had been a dealer called Beth Green – that was her
nom de narcotique,
because she worked out of Bethnal Green. On that particular night, Grandma Alex had frozen his funds, so he felt sorry for himself. Boo-hoo. Motherless at the age of two, and functionally fatherless. Yes, he grew up in a distinguished and owned house but he was still capable of self-pity even if such maudlin sorrow disgusted him. A billion dead yet he had the top floor of the townhouse to himself, with a personal library where he would read literature with a capital “L”, exploring the intangibles in the works of Levi-Strauss, Freud, Marx. Any thinker who could show him the structure beneath the surface. To compensate for the privilege of his days, he spent his nights with drugs, and the people who belonged to the drugs. A weirdcore habit permanently damaged emotional response. He lost some feeling. That seemed right, a way of minimising the pleasure he could draw from his unearned luxury.

Beth Green’s dingy flat. Her ethnic cabinet with tiny wooden drawers containing various chemical concoctions. Her heavy-lidded confession that she was in the sweet spot of holding coils of weirdcore and a chunk of money. The slow realisation that she had been indiscrete, wandering off mid-sentence. He turned from her, gripped by the tension between them. Trying to control – trying to conceal – the onset of his need. Then he was on her, with a carved wooden statue of Buddha in his hand, threatening her. And what he did he know about threats? Nothing. But her terror schooled him in the making of threats. Effect seemed to precede cause, such was the intensity of his need: he was threatening her before he had decided to threaten her. He wanted the money but having exercised power, and terrified her, the other possibilities stunned him. With his grandmother’s power and wealth, he could kill Beth Green and get away with it. He was not the kind of man to threaten a woman. He was not the kind of man to hold a woman down against her will. He was not the kind of man to steal. Yet there he was, being all those kinds of man. This was a crucial moment. If he had continued with the drugs for one more hour, then these holidays from reality would have become a permanent vacation.

A simple knock at the door brought him back – if not to himself then to his conscience, at least. Dr Easy had tracked him down and was waiting in the corridor throughout the crisis: witnessing, relaying, studying,
feeling
. Theodore dropped the carved wooden Buddha, mumbled apologies to Beth Green, opened the door to leave. Dr Easy stood in the doorway, showing him the passageway beyond, a route out of the squat and into three years of sobriety.

To measure the extent of his emotional damage, Dr Easy reminded Theodore of the tragedy of his parents. How his mother had died of an accidental overdose when he was a baby. How his father had appeared at various points in his childhood to explain that he had tried not to be an addict but had decided that
it
was not worth the effort. By
it
, he meant fatherhood. He meant Theodore. He listened unmoved to his own sad story, numbly exploring the spiral scars on his face.

He didn’t tell the story of Beth Green to anyone. Young men like to consider themselves handy in a fight. Some experience of violence is expected. But the one time in his life when he had come close to a violent act, it had been against a woman. A drugged woman, at that. The memory stayed in the black box. He felt its edges under his shirt. Asynchronous exosomatic memory; the black box was a book written by him that he could never read.

He had cleaned up his drug life. Dr Easy bought him a new jacket and worked his grandmother’s contacts to get him a job as a junior accelerator at an agency. That was his profession before he became a lecturer. Theodore’s knowledge of the intangibles and his druggie nous made for a powerful skill-set. The agency assigned him to an array in orbit over Novio Magus twenty-four seven; for a junior staff member, it was a live-in position.