The Destructives

The Destructives by Matthew De Abaitua Page B

Book: The Destructives by Matthew De Abaitua Read Free Book Online
Authors: Matthew De Abaitua
Ads: Link
backside and belly, her breasts and face; no physical implants, and muscle tone consistent with contemporary habits of exercise, further confirmation of the family’s middle class status. The daughter’s hips were prepubescent and she had breast buds. She wore her long blonde hair in a plait. He weighed the end of the plait in his glove, and then he saw, on the back of her blazer, a different coloured hair. A strand of ginger hair, not human. Cat hair. The front of the mother and daughter were concealed by the privacy protocol. If he could find out who they were, then the engineers would be able to infer their way into the next tranche of the simulation. It would unlock more data. And he dearly wanted to sense more of their lives.
    From the lips of the mother, he felt a single exhalation on his cheek. The quant sensors had caught her in the act of expelling a breath. Toothpaste and coffee – a unit of soul. The polish on her fingernails was chipped, and her hair was not recently styled. A martyr to motherhood.
    Theodore padded outside. He heard the seagulls call again and again, in a loop, and saw them glide forward and disappear, forward and disappear overhead. The lawn shimmered with dew, a dampness between his toes. Around the back of the house, the grass was longer, and in the shadows the yard was unkempt. Someone’s responsibility, someone’s chore, remaining undone. It was colder here under the branches of half an oak tree. Half the leaves tremored in the breeze, but the other half of the tree had not been quantified because it lay on a neighbouring property; that unquantified half was represented by a static polygon rendering of a photograph. He tested the tree trunk, was pleased to discover that it had been included as part of the stage set, and so he was able to climb up and look out over the fence. The rest of the neighbourhood was similarly blunt in its rendering, unquantified, and so filled in with data from a drone flyby. The branch he used to lever himself up into the tree was rendered vibrantly, smelling greenly and creaking under his weight. He noticed scoring marks on the bark, similar to those he had seen on the projection of the blanket box in the house. Territorial markings. The cat.
    So where was the cat?
    He climbed down off the tree and waded through the long grass. His grandmother’s cats had liked to sleep at the edge of their territory in sunlit patches. He crouched down so that he could peer inside the overgrowth. He found a ginger cat asleep in the dappled light. A vivid and detailed rendering of a cat, its ears rotating and twitching at every noise in its surroundings even as its head was turned delicately toward its back legs. And yet, and yet… the cat yawned, eyes closed, and the twitching of its ears resumed. But they did not loop. Not right away. The cat’s data stream was ongoing, and it was a rich seam of data. For a quantified family, being able to slip on a sensesuit and experience what their cat had been up to that day was a selling point of the technology. The mother and daughter were hidden from him. But the cat – white whiskers, tiger-striping, green iris and sharp oval pupils – the cat was open source.
    The distant purring glide of electric cars, the salt tang carried in from the harbour.
    He took off the helmet. He stood in the dark cavern surrounding the grounds of the house. The projection of the long grass came up to his knees, and the cat glowed contentedly at his feet. He saw a projection of himself in the broken window of the shed. The suit was included but where his face would have been, the gap in the data showed up as the projection of a featureless blue chromakey head. In this other world, he was a ghost from the future. A blue man.
----
    “The cat is the back door into the family hearth,” he explained to Patricia and Professor Kakkar. “It is not confined to the one second loop of the mother and daughter. The stream runs for seven minutes. Seven minutes in

Similar Books

Hard Way

Katie Porter

Cain's Darkness

Jenika Snow

33-Pack CHEATING Megabundle

Nikita Storm, Bessie Hucow, Mystique Vixen

The Infiltrators

Donald Hamilton

The Blue Castle

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Necropolis

Santiago Gamboa

In the Zone

Sierra Cartwright