If Then Page 7

  No one is even necessary.

  Lewes was one of the land assets acquired by an Asian fund algorithm. Alex had been tasked with the experimental transfer of the intellectual copyright of big tech into nature, and put together a deal with the Institute. She explained it to him on numerous occasions but all he remembered was the phrase “black box bio-technology”.

  “Does this mean we now live inside the black box?”

  Bioware for the townspeople was a condition of the contract, the stripe for all, and the implant for a few. He volunteered because he was strong, had no dependents and because he prided himself on his adaptability. He questioned Alex Drown at the very beginning, when she was advising the council on their decision.

  “The Process will make a fair society,” she explained. “Instead of using market forces to distribute goods to meet needs, the Process monitors the lifestream and physiological condition of each individual within it, and then manufactures and distributes the required goods. The overriding imperative is fairness.”

  “Can you define fairness?”

  She could. “Fairness is composed of over a hundred and twenty metrics; these are simplified using Fourier transforms into a short stream of numbers, and then the Process monitors and nudges these metrics when they exceed or fall into unacceptable levels.”

  “Into unfairness.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if we want to come out of the Process? How do we do that?”

  “The contract is very clear. The town has to see the Process through to its next iteration. There is no get-out clause. If the Process is interrupted in its beta phase then the asset loses value.”

  “By the asset, do you mean the town?”

  “The asset is the people and the land unified with the Process. Each component of the asset, on its own, is of negligible value.”

  “Is there someone we can appeal to, if we get desperate?”

  “The Process,” said Alex.

  “What if I change my mind?”

  “Irrevocable decisions form character, James,” said Alex. “It’s a hard decision but by your age, you should have used up all the easy ones.”

  After the procedure, he awoke in the Institute. His scalp itched with the implant. Alex tuned him into the Process; he felt a surge of heat at the base of his skull, and staggered around the overgrown lawn of the stately home waiting for his head to explode.

  The window of their flat, set on the curved corner of the building, was exposed to the winter gale. It was cold to the touch. In the street below, the horse turned and turned again then set off with deranged resolve down Market Street. He put on another layer of clothes and spent the evening under blankets on their burst sofa rereading novels by candlelight, while Ruth concentrated upon the sewing machine.

  The next morning, he went to prepare the armour for eviction night, and took Hector with him. They walked down the hill and into the Phoenix estate. The development of the estate had been abandoned in the Seizure so half-built new homes and shopping units coexisted with rotten warehouse timbers and the weed-strewn backroads of light industrial edgelands. The sky was low and secretive, and snow bunched in the gutters and spilt through the broken roofs of the yards. James made deep footprints, Hector did not. Ruth had traded a quilt for a herringbone tweed overcoat for the soldier, although it was too generous for his trim frame. Hector wore all the clothes they had given him under and over his uniform, so he had four pairs of socks on his feet, pyjamas under his khaki tunic and slacks, and his balaclava topped with a beanie hat. From his pack, he produced a canteen, took a swig, then offered it to James.

  “Are we talking again?” asked James, as he accepted the canteen.

  The soldier waited for him to take his drink.

  The previous night’s snow had frozen into ridges and treacherous fissured patches. Their boots crunched through it until they arrived at a concrete bunker half-buried in the earth. Snow curled over the edges of its slab roof like a layer of fat. Through his gloves, James felt the stinging cold of the iron padlock.

  The men walked down rough concrete stairs and ducked under a low ceiling to reach an inner chamber forty feet deep, a dark cylinder lined with shelves from the bottom to the top. The torchlight revealed – suspended in the centre of the cylinder – an enormous hand with three sharp, flat, iron fingers. The hand was attached to a rusting girder that in turn ended in a ball-and-socket elbow joint. The beam flashed up. The heart of the armour was a harness with a porthole or colloid for visibility. The beam flashed down. The armour was mounted on two extendable legs.

  James hoisted himself up and climbed over the central cage to the shoulders of the armour, about thirty feet up, and started its diesel engine. The engine whimpered, turned over, whined and knocked. Spotlights set high on the armour flared then died off. James cursed, hitched a torch between his ear and collar bone, then dug out a drill bit and a spanner. The pump was off by one timing belt groove. He tightened it and tried again; the engine started without knocking. Climbing over the head of the armour, he released the bolts on the bunker roof. It was frozen shut. He tried to force it but it was no good. He climbed back down and went outside to clear the snow and chip the ice from the hinges so that the roof would shift. Nothing mechanical worked first time.

  With the roof off, he could work by daylight. The engine ran on biodiesel brewed by the town engineers and came in two varieties, viscous rapeseed oil or the tallow made from animal fat, which crystallized well above freezing. The central body piece of the armour was created in the factories of the Process: it was a structural battery, a mould of nickel-based battery chemistry and steel. It was waterproof, which was vital as sometimes the armour had to lunge through rivers to extract people reluctant to be evicted. With the engine running, the armour could power its hydraulics and any appliance he plugged into it – in this case, a heating coil to thaw out the tallow.

  While he waited for the fuel to liquefy, he tried to engage Hector in conversation. The soldier was biddable if not responsive; he understood speech but his manner was dilatory, drifting in a state of mind somewhere between trauma and narcotic daydream.

  “I want you to talk to me, Hector.”

  The soldier shifted his boots in the snow. The fumes from the juddering exhaust smelt of popcorn.

  “On the bowling green, you said that you would not fight.”

  The soldier removed his balaclava. The way the tip of his long nose hung over an ironic curl of his smile was a sign that he was prepared to speak.

  “I will not fight,” said Hector.

  “Who are you?” asked James.

  “I will serve,” said Hector. “I must bear my share. But I will not fight.”

  “Who are you?” James repeated his question.

  The soldier squinted at him.

  “Sergeant John Hector. Have we met before? Yes, in Limerick. You were one of the fellows in the barracks. Give us a coffin nail.”

  James did not know what to say.

  “Do you have a smoke?” continued Hector. “You are dense, old man.”

  James fetched an old pouch of Terry’s homegrown tobacco stashed among the tools. Hector rolled himself a cigarette and offered the pouch back to James. He shook his head.

  Hector coughed, stirred his boots in the snow and walked across the yard toward the river. The Ouse was muddy and low, the bank slick and treacherous. His reflection swayed on the brown river, a thin neck and narrow head atop the overcoat. This stretch of the Ouse was tidal and the clay colouring deepened with the shallowing of the river through the afternoon.

  “Where do you come from?” asked James.

  “The Westmorland Dales, in Levens,” said Hector, and James could hear the accent. “My father is a painter. My mother is dead. Her father was a Magyar so I have Romany blood. Father’s from Quaker stock. I didn’t sign up right away. We argued about it. I wanted to serve so that my beliefs would be witnessed by the misguided men who fight. I wanted to show that I’m not afraid.�
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  “Of what?”

  “Of shipping out. We’re under orders although who knows where to. They issued us with pith helmets so perhaps Egypt. Or India. Joe Smith heard a rumour about Japan. What do you think?”

  James did not know whether to play along with the delusion or to confront the soldier with the reality that he was out of his time.

  “The Dardanelles,” said James, remembering what Alex and Omega John had told him about John Hector’s service record.

  “The Turk? I must read the Koran. But you didn’t answer my question: are you afraid?”

  James thought of his old life. “I was afraid for so long because I believed fear was a way of controlling the future. But it’s just a way of holding onto the past.”

  “You sound like my father,” said Hector.

  “If your father is a pacifist, then I am nothing like your father. Did you see the armour?”

  “The ironclad? I did. Like something from HG Wells. Does it go?”

  “It goes. I can’t exactly think straight when I am connected to it.”

  “I don’t imagine any of us are thinking straight. What is its purpose?”

  “It’s our weapon.”

  “Why does the town need a weapon?”

  “The armour replaces the police. It responds to the will of the people. It is a kind of democracy.”

  “Democracy is a swizz,” said Hector. A disc of river light glinted within each of his pupils.

  James went to check the thawing of the tallow. He turned off the armour engine, swilled the fuel around with a stick to aid the melting of the fat crystals, then climbed down into the cage and felt the armour hum around him. The vibration of the engine made his teeth chatter and the mechanical noise was annihilating in the close underground chamber. He slid his arm into the exoskeleton and twitched a fingertip but the mechanical finger did not respond, and that was how it should be. The armour was not his to command. It was the instrument of the will of the Process. He checked the coolant levels, the ventilation and the heat sink, ran diagnostic tests on the electrics and picked brick from out of the pedrails. Maintenance complete, he shut the armour down, slid the roof back into place, and secured the bunker.

  Hector was still at the river’s edge. He stepped lightly around the frozen mud to peer into a drainage ditch.

  “See, down there, a pair of gadwall ducks!” He squatted down to get a better look at a wading bird with long red and orange legs. “And a red shank. The floodplain is a good breeding ground for them. Look at his great dipper’s beak!”

  From his pack the soldier took out a flat tin of watercolours, a sketchbook, some HB pencils and a nimble sable brush.

  “When we were out in the Clare Mountains on training days, I’d always find something picturesque to paint. I could stalk a heron for hours.”

  He sat cross-legged on the snowy bank, overcoat underneath the seat of his trousers, sketching the red shank as it walked alone through slime and the buttery mud.

  “Why is democracy a swizz?” James asked.

  Hector concentrated upon his drawing. “I simply do not believe in the idea of the nation. Democracy invariably leads to war because politicians stir up patriotic feeling to get elected. I will serve my fellow man but I will not serve the nation.”

  The young man drew nature deep into his lungs.

  “This will be your first time in combat?” asked James.

  “Yes. My soldiering has been endless drill at Basingstoke and Limerick. This will be my first time out.”

  “Do you remember the day that I found you on the wire?”

  The soldier did not respond. The question was not part of the pattern.

  The men walked upriver. Hector enthused about the wildlife; at Halmsey weir, watching a swan’s glacial drift against the speeding current, he remembered a day out at Lake Windermere, when a swan had attacked a chocolate-coloured Labrador.

  Friesian cows milled in the low, boggy plain between the river and the raised earthwork of the railway line. Upriver lay the chalk pit of Offham, the gatehouse of the douanier, and the town perimeter. They stopped at an islet in the river. It was riddled with warrens. Under the trailing skirts of a maudlin willow, dun rabbits nibbled and loped, enjoying the protection of the river’s course.

  “I grew up in Levens,” said Hector. “Just before sundown, I’d take a boat out to watch the light break on the mountain’s edge, and feel alone on the water. I was a lone wolf, still am really. There are too many people in the army for me. I don’t mean you, old fellow. I respect you. It’s the commonplace man of the barracks who bores me: the office boys and the city clerks and the shop assistants. Little chiefs in suburban villas brooding on kismet, asking themselves: will I die on the battlefield? What will become of little me, will it matter when the sorry lot of me – all my ideas, because people are just a collection of ideas, aren’t they? – soak into the earth?”

  He stopped. At his feet there was a dead rabbit, its skin sunken and sallow, the legs and paws lying at full stretch as if the animal had taken one last leap.

  “Look there, in the eye sockets, ladybirds! Isn’t that the strangest thing?” The eyes had rotted away and in each of the gummy orbits, two brightly coloured, spotted bugs turned this way and that, seemingly confounded by these bone craters. Hector crouched to peer closer, then offered his index finger as a way out. They were not ladybirds. Their antennae were too long, and the head was an array of lens and grille.

  If Hector noticed the manufactured quality of the bugs, he did not admit it.

  “Are ladybirds lucky, do you think? Two of them.”

  The ladybirds relayed data back to the drone birds, which fed into the tree routers, from which the numbers were cast up into the Process; if a phenomenon could not be measured by the Process, then, effectively, it did not exist.

  Hector fell silent beside the river. James took his arm. “Come,” he said, “there is someone we have to meet.”

  The two men retraced their footprints in the muddy slush. Downriver, snow-covered roofs gathered in the lee of Lewes Castle. Overlooking the river crossing at Pells, a church tower, a steep terraced street, and a child’s playground. The river’s course, tamed by sedge and bullrush, diverted into a lily pond. They passed the lido and then across icy fields around the back of the allocation point. Hector had reverted to his default silence.

  Children were out on the streets of the lower tier of the Malling Estate, and at the bailiff’s approach, they scampered away from their creation: a snowman with square armoured shoulders and a horned head.

  The men walked up the steep Malling Hill until they reached the outlying terraces of the town flanking the road in from the east. James found the house he was looking for: the house of the Bowles family. Friends and neighbours milled outside with parting gifts of food and equipment. He watched from across the road. Chests and boxes of possessions had been loaded upon a cart, a sign that the family were not intent upon resistance. He wondered if they had made contact with outsiders, if they had a plan for what would happen once they passed through the gatehouse of the douanier. He steadied himself against a lamppost. Around its trunk and overhanging broken lamp, the Malling residents had strung dead mobile phones and broken pieces of circuit board, a superstitious offering to disrupt the Process. He stood across the road in a brown windcheater and ancient combat trousers, an unarmoured and untethered man. A snowball scuffed the lamppost. He looked around for the person who had thrown it. No sign.

  He crossed the road. The line of well-wishers cringed and averted their eyes at the approach of the bailiff.

  “Is the family home?” he asked. A second snowball arced through the air and popped against the side of Hector’s head. Suppressed laughter from the line. The soldier took a step to balance himself.

  The man of the house came to the door. He was tall, wearing a blue linen shirt under dungarees, with brown curly hair, powerful long limbs and the taut skin of an outdoor worker. The round grey frames of his
glasses were created by the Process as was his belt of titanium tools. Over his shoulder, the narrow hallway contained more boxes and a little boy curious to discover who had come to the door.

  “I am the bailiff,” said James.

  The carpenter was appalled. Then angry.

  “Why are you here?”

  He should have known the name of the carpenter. Ruth had mentioned the names of all the family. But when he reached into his mind for the names and came back empty-handed, he felt an unpleasant greasy sensation in his stomach and fingertips.

  “I came to offer my sympathies. And to hear what plans you have for living outside.”

  The carpenter’s hands were large and rough. He took hold of Hector’s collar and, striding out of the house, dragged the light lithe soldier over the yard and into the road, then threw him down onto the frost.

  “Why him? Why does this thing stay and my children go?”

  The carpenter kneeled beside Hector and gripped his skull. “The soldier is an error message. And yet not only do you ignore this evidence of malfunction, you take it into your house. You choose this error over real people.”

  The carpenter released Hector’s head. The soldier dragged himself to the gutter, rolled over, and got slowly to his feet.

  The carpenter came up close to James’ face.

  “The Process issued me with a new set of tools only a month ago. Why do that if I am dispensable?”