If Then Read online

  Edith recoiled from this suggestion, and responded fiercely.

  “Don’t call me a leader. I have no power. No influence in all this. That is the point. You people come to me over and again, expecting me to do something, but we have moved beyond leaders.”

  “You prefer this way of life?”

  “Don’t we all? Were you thriving in the old world? I was dying from cancer. I’m not cured. I’m not stupid. It’s only remission. But my treatment under the Process worked, in a way that it wasn’t working before.”

  The artist pulled her braids to her, inspecting their length, or perhaps merely so that she could fling them back when she stood up. “I’m not sure it’s any different now. We have exchanged one form of powerlessness for another.”

  Ruth interpreted this remark as support for a dissenting act. “The eviction of Agnes is a chance to marshal discontent and use that collective will to influence the Process.”

  “We don’t what is good for us, as a species,” said Edith. “We were on the verge of destroying the planet. The Seizure bought the Earth some time. The Process could be the way forward.”

  “At what cost?”

  “What cost would you not pay to save the world?” Edith leafed through the Kinlog. “Why did you not come to me after Newhaven, or the September Exodus, or any of the hundreds of people your husband has put outside the town gates? Because it’s a child, I know. I have children of my own. It fills me with sadness. But if you attempt to direct events with your own hands, then you will bear the consequences of that act. It will all fall upon you, Ruth.”

  “The Process sent me a message,” said Ruth. She got up off her knees. “I wanted to stop the eviction. Desperately so. And then the Process sensed this need, and the stretcher bearer spoke to me. He said that we can serve but we don’t need to fight. Don’t you see?”

  Blue Raven smiled, and took up a piece of paper and a pencil.

  “Those exact words?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Ruth.

  “No, not those exact words,” said Edith. “He said, ‘I will serve but I will not fight.’”

  Ruth agreed: yes, those were the actual words.

  “The stretcher bearer spoke at the council,” explained Edith. “And he used that phrase. It’s part of his pattern. The words are not for our benefit, they have no bearing on this situation. We’re all in the dark, Ruth, as we’ve always been; but we’ve got this far because of the Process, and so we must follow it through to its completion, otherwise we lose everything. Oh, you poor, poor soul.”

  Edith stood and took Ruth in her arms, then sat her down upon the grey moulded sofa. Blue Raven finally served tea in vintage china cups, and reminisced about boyfriends she had misplaced, while Jesse spoke about the injustices of the old world and the moral clarity of the tabula rasa, the ethical component of extinction, the justice of the fall. Ruth heard them but did not listen; the tumblers of her decision continued to turn, she would find a way through this impossible situation.

  Edith offered to walk with Ruth back down to the town. As she left, Edith reminded Blue Raven of the consequences of her art.

  “I think you should depict the events of tonight honestly and in the way you think is right. But you should be prepared – if there is a resumption of England, and the administration turns its attention to our little town – to rip out the page concerning this evening and burn it, shred it, bury it in the deepest hole you can dig.”

  * * *

  By late afternoon, the streets were dismal with rain. Hector stood beside the war memorial in his uniform, gazing long at the two angels of aquamarine bronze sat at the base of the obelisk, with the third angel, Victory, offering a garland from its peak. Rendered in gold lettering, the legend This was their finest hour. Hector regarded the names of the dead and the passing faces of the living with growing interest, watched over by James from the distant window of the flat.

  James was ready to go, hours before time. He exercised to shake off some of the nervous anticipation and failed to get a hit from his homemade tea.

  He succeeded in passing an hour.

  Hector remained beside the monument.

  What was Hector doing? Was his every act determined by the Process or had a series of instructions been planted within him that, as he interacted with other people and the environment, produced what might appear as will? Was his behaviour revealing of the intentions of Process, and if so, could James figure out what it meant? Merely by standing next to the monument, Hector was changing the town’s perception of him. You could see it in the way the Lewesians lifted their heads to acknowledge him as they walked by. Some of the old men even put a hand on the soldier, nostalgic for a war they had never known. All the pity and the mourning and the hopeless courage of the war became, by simple association, the property of Hector. James felt the idea forming in the Process: the Lewesians, anticipating the communal experience of eviction, drew strength from the precedent that such sacrifices had been made in the past to safeguard the collective good.

  James retrieved the armour of scales from the transparent box. He had wanted to wear it from the moment he awoke. He abraded the graphite texture of the helmet between his index finger and thumb. The feel of it only heightened the cravings. His body swooned with the memory of full integration with the Process: fragments of being interconnected in all their complexity and contemplated from a position of invulnerable bliss.

  His back felt strong and straight from his exercises. He slid himself into the armour and the bracing pressure of it against his muscles felt right.

  The bright yellow plaster of the house fronts were streaked with rain. He set off down the hill, walking quickly, fists clenched, toward the inbetween place of the Phoenix estate. He was alert to potential threats: a rattling movement from a garage; a fleeting reflection in a pool of rain; a figure descending the fire tower overlooking the river.

  A small woman in a long coat.

  Alex Drown.

  “Where is Hector?” she asked.

  “Standing beside the war memorial.” James gestured back up the hill. “Placed there by the Process like a chess piece. I was hoping you’d be able to tell me why.”

  “It’s not simple cause and effect, James. In a network, causality is distributed across space and time.” She gripped his strong forearm. “How do you feel?”

  “The cravings get worse every time. Can you fix that?”

  “Addiction is a feature, not a bug.”

  “Does your implant come with an addiction?”

  “The Institute works in project cycles and part of our working practice involves a burn list in which we work intensely to resolve each of the outstanding tasks. It is my cognitive burn down. I long for that stage of the project. During it I experience complete focus. I forget everything else: this town, personal hygiene, even my daughter.”

  “How is your girl?”

  “I visit her when I can.”

  He unlocked the bunker and they went down into the dark. The strong smell of diesel, the dusty shelves of oily tools, the lingering fug of the leather padded supports – these were musk to him. He unbolted and slid aside the roof. From her inside pocket, Alex removed a suede case containing her instruments. He climbed into the sealed box at the heart of the armour and uncovered the porthole so that he could see out.

  “Ruth asked me if I could stop the evictions, if I wanted to. Is that possible?”

  “Well, Ruth doesn’t understand you the way that I do,” said Alex.

  After the procedure, Alex had helped with his convalescence. He remembered long afternoons sat in a wicker chair on the terrace overlooking the lawn, with the backgammon board in front of him, the pieces stacked in their opening positions. He understood the rules of the game but he did not know how to play, that is, the will to win had gone. The procedure on his medial orbitofrontal cortex subsumed his desires and made him more receptive to the will of others. Alex’s job was to cultivate just enough will within him that he coul
d act but not so much that he acted contrary to the will of the Process. The procedure made him a good listener. Over the board, across successive games, she confessed her story to him; an alcoholic mother and alcoholic father, who left when he turned sober. She had been carer and coper. Tough, motivated, but lonely. As troubled as his own upbringing. It never occurred to him to initiate a sexual relationship.

  “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

  Here 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.