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CHAPTER 1

IGNITION

I brushed my daughter's blonde hair, taking pleasure in bringing order to its morning tangle. Iona stood at the window, gazing at the busy Hackney street. She blinked at the faces of the pedestrians, each discontent in his or her own way, stumbling and dawdling, stragglers in the human race. I concentrated on the long stroke of the brush. Each pass spun golden thread. We did not talk. I adjusted my position to brush the underside, drawing out a sheaf of hair upon my palm. While she slept, tiny zephyrs had whirled the golden thread into intertwined locks; carefully, I unpicked them.

I finished brushing her hair and then we put on our coats. Iona chose a doll to take to nursery, and that was the end of this peaceful moment together. The collar of the day slipped over my neck, the leash jerked taut, and the long drag began: work, meetings, teatime, Iona's bedtime then work again until sleep took me. Drifting into unconsciousness, the leash would be unhooked, and I would wonder where the day had gone. Where I had gone. Close my eyes. Nothing there.

Iona said, "Daddy, what is that?"

A small group moved with authority and purpose through the pedestrians. It was the police, specifically an armed response unit, strapped up in black Kevlar armour and carrying sub-machine guns. We were used to the police; Iona wasn't pointing at them. No, it was the tall figure in their midst that had caught her eye: the robot was at least seven-foot-tall and was covered in a skin of kid leather, with fully articulated legs and arms and sensitive catcher's mitts for hands. It was not entirely steady on its flat feet. The police jogged to keep up with its loping stride. The robot passed by the window and glanced our way: a pair of mournful blue eyes set in a suede ball of a head.

Again, Iona asked me what it was.

"That's a Dr Easy," I replied. "It's a robot. You know what a robot is." I helped her into a duffle coat.

"Why is it a doctor?"

"It helps people. Sometimes people get mad. It makes them better."

"Why do people get mad?"

"They just do."

It was time for us to go. I opened the front door. Iona clamped her hands over her ears. A police helicopter hung in the air, its rotor blades drowning out the clamour of the main road. Policewomen set about sealing off the street, unwinding strips of yellow tape and evacuating the shops: customers halfway through their manicures were led indignant from the nails and hair place and at the internet shack armed police threatened the Somalians who were waiting for their permits to finish downloading. A pair of builders in plaster-spattered boiler suits sauntered from Yum-Yum, refusing to be rushed. As each establishment emptied, the police put down metal crowd barriers to close it off. We milled outside the off-licence. What was going on? Did anyone know?

An armed man was holed up in a house, said the constables. Shots had been fired. Snipers, as graceful as burglars, skipped over the rooftops and took up positions behind chimney stacks. I looked back toward my house but could no longer see it. A blue tarpaulin had been set up across the street. The armed unit huddled behind a barricade with Dr Easy sat cross-legged among them, listening politely as the captain explained his intentions.

Dr Easy made me anxious. It was the eyes. Sometimes feminine, sometimes masculine, just like its voice, which could be maternal or paternal depending upon the need of the patient. When I was unwell and suffering from anxiety, I was offered sessions with Monad's in-house Dr Easy. It spoke with a man's voice and let me hit it in the face.

I wriggled my hand free of Iona's grasp and checked my pulse. It was elevated. Her question came back to me: Daddy, why do people get mad? Well, my darling, drugs don't help. And life can kick rationality out of you. You can be kneecapped right from the very beginning. Even little girls and boys your age are getting mad through bad love. When you are older, life falls short of your expectations, your dreams are picked up by fate, considered, and then dashed upon the rocks, and then you get mad. You just do. Your only salvation is to live for the dreams of others; the dreams of a child like you, my darling girl, my puppy pie, or the dreams of an employer, like Monad.

The robot sat patiently through a briefing by the tactical arms unit, which was quite unnecessary, as it would already have extracted all the information it required from their body language. Dr Easy listened to the police captain give orders because it knew how much pleasure it gave him.

The body of the robot was designed by a subtle, calculating intelligence, with a yielding cover of soft natural materials to comfort us and a large but lightweight frame to acknowledge that it was inhuman. The robot was both parent and stranger: you wanted to lay your head against its chest, you wanted to beat it to death. When I hit my robot counsellor, its blue eyes held a fathomless love for humanity.

Slowly, Dr Easy stood up. The crowd fell silent. The robot held up its enormous right palm, a gesture of peace to the gunman. Its left hand was arranged with similar precision – the palm of an open hand facing forward, the five fingers slightly bent. With this gesture of charity and compassion, Dr Easy took stately steps across the road toward the gunman's house.

The police retreated to where Monad's contractors had set up a monitoring station. Gelatinous screens billowed out like spinnaker sails to catch the data pouring in: infrared, millimetre-wave and acoustic impressions from the police helicopter were matched to the sensory input of Dr Easy, creating a live three-dimensional model of the siege house. The gunman was on the second floor, in the corner of a bedsit. I hoisted Iona up into my arms and walked over to the contractors, flashing my Monad ID. Could I be of help? In an advisory capacity? In the spirit of public and private sector collaboration? The Monad technicians knew me from the company five-a-side league. I was allowed to hover in the background.

In the time it took me to remove a small box of organic raisins from my pocket and give them to Iona, Monad assembled a working profile of the gunman, mining his scattered data and reassembling it in the shape of a man. His name was Michael Sawyer and he had no prior criminal convictions. He had a number of traffic violations and an onerous mortgage, a low six-figure income with a high five-figure alimony. His medical records contained prescriptions for beta-blockers and anti-depressants that had not recently been renewed. He had moved out of the family home and into rented accommodation, but not to here; this siege house was not his last known residence. The previous year he had racked up tens of thousands of air miles, doing three continents most weeks. This year, none. I looked at his employment record and drew my own conclusions. Here was an exhausted and confused foot soldier of globalization, bounced up the empire of a media magnate before falling out of favour. He managed to get a position at a telecommunications and military electronics firm which in turn had been taken over by a larger company. Personnel took out his expense claims for the last year and exposed them to micro-analysis, searching for a pretext to fire him and avoid paying redundancy. They had found what they were looking for.

This was the gunman's background. Now the police captain added the foreground. Officers on patrol had identified Michael Sawyer's sports car as wanted in connection with a hit-and-run in Soho. When they inquired at the house, they heard three shots. The firearms unit arrived and a further two shots were let off from an upstairs window. Officers returned fire but surveillance showed the suspect still moving around inside the house.

"We tried to negotiate. They always negotiate. Not this one. He hasn't said a word. We don't know what he wants," said the police captain.

"Dr Easy will find out," I said.

I wanted to see a Dr Easy in action. My work for Monad was conceptual, concerned with planning and development. I rarely saw any project through to completion, and so never acted in any decisive way upon the world. My will and ambition had been diluted by years of being the ideas man, a thinker and not a doer, a position of unchanging powerlessness in any company. Monad dreams. I do not. Not for myself, anyway.

The siege house was a Victorian terrace carved up into bedsits. Six doorbells clustered beside the shattered front door. Dr Easy went inside. On the screens, we watched the robot's slow progress up the staircase. Its inner monologue came through the monitors. It could already smell Michael Sawyer, his fear hormones, the stink of a wounded and hunted animal. The robot crept up a tilted cobwebbed staircase until it came to an unlocked door. The gentlest pressure from the robot's paw swung the door back on its hinges.

The room was dingy. A dirty single bed. A Baby Belling oven on a peeling melamine surface. A microwave. A stereo. A half-unpacked suitcase. Michael Sawyer was crouched in the corner. His striped shirt was untucked and slick with blood. At the sight of the robot, he gurgled and gesticulated with the shotgun.

"He has a bullet wound to the mouth," observed Dr Easy. "And there is an overpowering smell of petrol in here."

"Ask him what he wants," ordered the police captain.

"He can't speak," said the robot. "The sniper shot him in the tongue."

"Can he write it down?"

"It doesn't matter. I know what he wants."

Dr Easy moved forward to comfort the injured man. Michael Sawyer made a gesture that was like Atlas trying to shake some sense into the world.

The robot translated for us. "Too late. He is going to kill himself now."

The flat was saturated with fuel. Dr Easy made no attempt to intervene. The robot was already backing out of the room when Michael Sawyer lit a rag. Fire filled the screens and – back on the street – blew out the windows of the house. Iona was scared and I held her tight to me.

A great fire waits under London. Michael Sawyer had merely slid back the grate.

Lift up a manhole cover, listen to it roar.

Dr Easy walked out of the billowing smoke, and then, with flames running all the way down its back, the robot burned on the street until someone came forward to extinguish it.

CHAPTER 2

ZZZZZZIP

The door buzzer woke me at dawn.

I blundered out of bed and flicked on the intercom.

Raymond spoke first.

"Today you are going to change my life."

At the door, he was gripping the iron bars of the security gate with both hands.

"Aren't you excited?"

My head was waxy with sleep. Across the road, strips of police tape lingered around the cavity where the siege house had been. I'd stood there all afternoon and into the dusk when, to douse the flames, the police had dumped tonnes of water through the roof; these waterfalls streamed through the broken windows, backlit by powerful halogen spotlights. Afterwards, I thought about Michael Sawyer a lot. How easy it would be for the project of your self to go suddenly horribly off the rails.

"Please, it's urgent," said Raymond.

Scratching at his new goatee with dirty fingernails, he had changed since our last meeting. That was how it went with Raymond. His identity was in flux during his manic phase: he was a Buddhist then he was out on bail then he was Zen celibate then he was the spare man in a swingers enclave, all in the course of three weeks. I first met him when I was the editor of Drug Porn and he was a contributor. Recently, he had taken up a tighter orbit, looping around the routines of my family life.

The first thing I said to him, straight up, before I let him into the flat, was this:

"Shut up. Don't say anything. This is a small place. Iona and El are asleep downstairs. You can come in, but first you must promise me that you won't start talking until I am ready, a state I will indicate by pointing at you, and saying the word 'speak'."

Since our last meeting, he had grown a neat swell of gut, inconsequential beside mine, but significant on his carpenter's pencil of a figure. As he went by into the flat, I could smell the sweat of alleyways, the urban dewfall of bus fumes and rotting garbage. He laid down a dosser's bag, its zip defeated by the sleeping bag shoddily stuffed inside. He asked to use the toilet and I indicated, through quiet pointing, that I would meet him out back when he was done.

I went down to check on El. The bedrooms were underground and dug out of the old coal cellar. She was drowsy, having been up in the night with our daughter. I told her to go back to sleep and her dreaming self obeyed me. In Iona's dark little room, sweetly stuffy from her child's body, I checked her temperature with the back of my hand, adjusted the duvet around her shoulders, caught my reflection in the pulsating obsidian monitor on the chest of drawers.

In the garden, Raymond rolled a small joint in the encrusted ridges of his trousers. I served tea and pointed at him.

"Speak."

"I've been out all night. I can't convey the importance of what's happened to me. Sex and revelation. Well, almost sex. Certainly revelation though." He whistled.

"You are catastrophizing again," I said.

He considered my observation, rolled it around his palate with a swirl of marijuana.

"Do you want some of this?"

"No."

"You haven't asked what my revelation was?"

"Does it involve the end of the world?"

"It is more surprising than that: I've decided to get a job."

"Who is going to give you a job?" I asked.

"You are," he said. "You're going to change my life. I met this woman. She told me Monad is hiring writers and poets. I'm going to apply to work with you at Monad."

I was due at Monad in an hour. I would take the Overground train to Stratford then down to Canary Wharf and Monad's offices at the Wave Building. Our garden backed onto the platform at Hackney Central. The station Tannoy echoed apologies over the fence, interrupting our conversation. A train pulled in to the platform. The passengers seethed against one another; pressed against a single window, among the human faces, was an Alsatian's terrified chops. No one got off that carriage with their reputation intact. It was a commuter route for all trades: immigrants from Eastern Europe, dusty with demolition work out West, snoozed against middle managers, who made every effort to close their senses against the press of fellow passengers. The nearly dead travelled on this train too. Stabbed or shot in the Pembury or Nightingale estates, they bled into the upholstery on their way to A&E at Homerton hospital.

The train pulled away. The garden was quiet again, and Raymond resumed his talk.

"It all started when Florence the poet asked if I wanted to come over for cunnilingus and pasta. I asked, 'What type of pasta?' She said, 'Fusilli.' I said, 'Don't mind if I do.'"

Raymond had been practising this conversation on the walk over.

I raised my hand.

"Stop. I don't want to hear about this. Just tell me about Monad."

"No. It's all relevant. You're doing exactly what she did. Florence. She put her finger on my lips and told me I could only speak when she winked at me."

"We have to do that. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of your conversation."

"That's because I have perfect recall."

This was true. Raymond was always bringing up something I had said half a dozen years earlier. He could rummage around in the brain gutters and memory drains to pull out clumps of throwaway ideas, irrelevant asides, boozy promises that were never meant to live beyond closing time.

"After the pasta we went to a reading at the Vortex. Then it was zzzzzzip" – this exclamation a conversational tic to signify a jump cut in his inner movie – "and me and Florence are drinking sherry in her bedroom. I told her I didn't want to sleep with her."

"'Come to bed, Ray-mond,' she cooed at me like a dove from under her duvet.

"I said, 'No, I can't have sex. I have too much going on at the moment.'

"She put her index finger to my lips and said, 'I don't want your objections. Shut up and give me head.'"

He was smoking his joint now, and it was having no effect upon him. The tetrahydrocannabinol could not compete with the charged juice running through his axons and synapses, it could not insinuate itself into the quantum events operating in the microtubules of each and every one of his twenty-three billion neurons, the chorus of tiny mysteries that sang into existence the strange consciousness of Raymond Chase.

I was puzzled as to how, via the infinite processes of the brain, he had come up with such a daft idea as to not have sex with willing Florence.

"I was trying to have a conversation with her. Is it so wrong in this day and age that a man has something to say?

"'Speak here, Raymond,' she said, hitching up her dress. 'Tell it the alphabet, let your tongue go from A to Zed.' I was so busy telling her about my reality filters that I hadn't noticed she'd taken her knickers off."

The phrase "reality filters" was mine. When he was manic, reality was everything at once and it was all connected to him: Raymond became the junction box through which many currents flowed. Instead of walking the street with the filters in place, one spotlight of consciousness on the pavement before him, all the lights were on in Raymond's head. It became difficult for him to tell where he ended and other people began.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Red Men"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Matthew de Abaitua.
Excerpted by permission of Watkins Media Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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