Diversifications Read online

  DIVERSIFICATIONS

  by

  James Lovegrove

  This one’s for

  Adam, Eric and Roger

  i migliori fabbri

  CONTENTS

  THE HEAD

  CARRY THE MOON IN MY POCKET

  SEVENTEEN SYLLABLES

  THE METEOR PARTY

  CUTTING CRITICISM

  THE BOWDLER STRAIN

  TERMINAL EVENT

  OUT OF THE BLUE, INTO THE RED

  KILLER-KILLER

  THE LAST CHANGE

  LONDRES AU XXIEME SIECLE

  AT ONE

  RUNNING

  PIECEWORK

  JUNK MALE

  SPEEDSTREAM

  Afterword

  THE HEAD

  111011 Smith had a good life and he knew it.

  He had a devoted, supportive wife. He loved everything about 1001001. He loved her curling copper hair. He loved the way she moved, the soft hum of her servomotors. He loved her elegantly symmetrical forename. He loved the nimbleness of her mind, able to process data far faster than his and always produce a sensible output.

  In little 10010 he had the kind of son every father dreams of, a bright, well-behaved, affectionate boy. They were as alike as two diodes. Everyone remarked on the resemblance. Father and son, version 1.0 and version 1.1. In 10010, 111011 saw everything that he himself was and had been and could be.

  He lived with wife and son in a pleasant, tidy suburb in one of the nation’s older, grander cities. Theirs was a nice classic house with purplish muscle-fibre walls and big vitreous-membrane windows, and 111011 was able to afford nice things to go with this nice house: carpets of deep-pile hair, keratin panelling in the dining room and a three-piece suite with burnished redskin upholstery.

  He had a job he enjoyed and a boss he liked working for.

  There was, in short, very little to complain about in 111011 Smith’s life. And yet he couldn’t help feeling perturbed. It was as if it was all too perfect, as if a physical law of the universe was being violated by somebody having everything he could possibly want. Almost since inception 111011 had felt this anxiety, or a vague, embryonic variant thereof. Through his happy childhood, his exemplary academic progress, his first employment and swift rise up the corporate ladder, his flawless courtship of 1001001—constantly at the back of his mind had been the thought that something was about to go wrong, indeed should go wrong. The older he got, the more he perceived how bug-free the running of his existence had been, and the stronger became his conviction that a massive crash was due—overdue.

  He spoke of these concerns to 1001001 in bed at night. She listened, hushed, soothed, sympathised, but never quite, he thought, understood. Nor did he want her to understand. Such was his love for her that he wished her to remain untroubled even if he wasn’t, and so he was glad that he was able to unburden himself to her without arousing anything in her except compassion, of which, luckily for him, she appeared to have inexhaustible reserves.

  Sometimes he would wake up during the small hours and be unable to achieve shutdown again, his mind racing, nameless doubts skittering around inside him. He would get up, pull on the snug, woven-fur dressing gown 1001001 had given him for his thirty-fifth inception anniversary, and go into 10010’s room. There, he would rearrange the bedclothes over his sprawled son and then simply stand, for anything up to 1,800 seconds, watching the sleeping boy, the slow rise and fall of his chestplate, the twitch of his eye louvres as he dreamed his innocent dreams. The sight of 10010’s blissful slumber temporarily quieted 111011’s soul. What was so bad about a perfect life if it cocooned and protected this child from harm? Ungrateful 111011. Selfish 111011.

  But then, with the daylight, the anxiety would return, and the reprieve 111011 had felt during the night would seem hopelessly false and vain, like a trick that had been played on him.

  It was in the Head that 111011’s fears finally found a focus; or at any rate the Head provided the outlet his fears were looking for at just the time when such an outlet was becoming a psychological necessity. If not for the Head, 111011 might well have suffered a complete breakdown. The Head precipitated a crisis that in turn provided a resolution, of sorts, to his problem.

  The company 111011 worked for, Fleshtone Manufacturing Ltd., made entertainment technology, principally sound-reproduction equipment and telecommunications displays. Their eardrum stereo speakers were favoured by ordinary consumers and hi-fi cognoscenti alike, their retinal video-projectors had won industry awards, and their baseline voicebox modules were fitted as standard in almost every telephone handset in the country. Fleshtone’s founder and CEO, however, 122100 Wingate-Hayes, was not content with the company’s success so far and restlessly tested and developed new lines and sought ever new ways of refining and improving his products. His latest concept, which he unveiled one morning to a conference room packed with executives of every echelon, was an all-in-one domestic interface system, a unit that combined the functions of phone, stereo, fax and more besides.

  “We’re going to call it,” he said, “the Head.”

  It was still at the theoretical stage, so all he could show his employees was a mock-up of how the finished article would look. He paused dramatically before taking it out of its box. There was something of the performer in 122100 Wingate-Hayes. He was old money, as his base-3 forename and double-barrelled surname would suggest, but he was also vulgarly and flashily entrepreneurial, a combination that lends itself well to tycoondom.

  When the object finally came out of the box, there was a collective intake of breath from every executive in the room. What Wingate-Hayes had produced for their perusal was strange, unique, and eerily ugly. It looked like a real head. It had eyes, a mouth, a nose, ears, all the features of a real head. Yet it was made from flesh and skin and bone. The lips were rounded and pliant. The nose projected steeply. The eyes had a horrible lifelike lustre.

  “I’m thinking hair over here and here,” said Wingate-Hayes, indicating the bald dome and brows of the Head. “Possibly we can style the units in such a way that some are overtly male and others overtly female. That way, through the inter-sexual dynamic, they’ll appeal to the broadest possible customer base. We can offer them in a range of skin tones and hair colours; the permutations are endless. And of course, inside …” He prised off a pre-cut section from the side of the scalp to reveal sinuous ridge-folds of soft grey tissue. “The latest and most sophisticated data-interpretation hardware we can create. The Head will be interactive, voice-responsive, mood-sensitive, friendly, talkative, quizzical, polite. It will sing. It will relay telephone messages. It will be powered by electrical impulses, perhaps with an integrated power source, that’s undecided as yet. It will be a companion to the friendless, a boon to the busy. There’ll be one in every home and your kids will love it and so will you! Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about this one, everybody. I think the Head is going to revolutionise the way we live. So we’re fast-tracking production and dedicating half the annual R and D budget to getting a prototype up and running within sixty days. Are there any questions?”

  There were, the usual practical questions—what sort of numbers for the first production run, what marketing strategies were to be implemented, what price each unit might retail at, that sort of thing. No one asked the question that 111011 Smith burned to ask but didn’t dare: why are we making this thing at all? The Head was hideous. It was wrong. It was an abomination, a grotesque parody of life. Nothing like this should be allowed to be. Did no one else see that?

  But 111011 was still only a junior executive, valued for his ideas but not his opinions. He was paid to do as he was told, and Wingate-Hayes was telling him, and all present, to help propel the Head from concept to a
ctuality, and so he had no choice but to comply.

  The next two months were particularly difficult ones, not just for 111011 but for his family as well. He rode the train to work each morning with a heavy heart, watching the glistening cityscape pass by outside—the meat walls, the bone spires, the gardens with their lung trees and bacterial lawns—and seeing nothing but vaingloriousness and threat. As production-line manager, his job was to supervise the operation of the great organic machines that ingested raw materials at one end and squelched out components for Fleshtone’s various creations at the other. Each time parts for the prototype Head were generated, he regarded them with a distaste bordering on disgust. That eye, all spherical and gelatinous, with its trailing tentacle of nerve. That tongue, a grey-pink slab, dimpled, wet. Wonders of science, yes, but science of the most perverted kind. The factory smells, never pleasant at the best of times, seemed to 111011 more than usually strong whenever Head parts were being manufactured. He had become accustomed to the pungent olfactory by-products of the industry, but this smell was exceptional—acrid, sulphurous, bilious. No one else at the factory noticed anything different, but after every exposure to it 111011 would travel home with a scorching headache that not even an oil-massage from 1001001 could alleviate.

  His home life suffered in all-too-predictable ways. He snapped at 10010. The boy would be doing nothing more than what boys do, romping around, making a noise, but the pitch of his yells and laughter seemed calculated to aggravate. The look in his eyes when his father scolded him was heartbreaking, and 111011 felt immediate remorse every time, but by then, of course, it was too late, the hurt had been inflicted, the damage done. 10010 started clinging to his mother. He became wary of the man who until recently had been not just a father but a willing playmate.

  Lovemaking with 1001001, normally so sublime, turned into a chore for 111011, a conjugal obligation rather than an energetically pursued and mutually fulfilling recreation. He took part remotely, going through the motions, finding it all desperately mechanical—male into female, jack into port, plug into socket—and ultimately unsatisfying. If 1001001 noticed the wane of his sexual enthusiasm, and she surely did, she said nothing. Generally her husband’s present behaviour had become so untypical of him that it was clear he was going through a difficult patch, something to do with his job, and she decided it was best to leave him be for now. 1001001 was of the opinion that these sorts of things usually worked themselves out in the end.

  But then there was the dinner party with their neighbours, the Wilsons. 1001001 put out their best bone china for the occasion, she served 111011’s favourite side-dish (childish but irresistible: silicon chips), and everything went swimmingly until a chance remark by 10001111 Wilson concerning a Fleshtone product she had purchased lately, a television with one of the new aqueous humour flatscreens, sent 111011 into a paroxysm of outrage. He ranted for several hundred seconds against his company, against technological innovations, against customers who bought unthinkingly into the whole new-equals-improved lie. Poor 10001111 Wilson, who had thought all she was doing was offering a polite, complimentary conversational titbit, was completely taken aback. Her husband, 100, was furious. The rest of the mealtime chat was conducted in stiff, stilted tones, and shortly after the dessert course was cleared away the Wilsons remembered that the babysitter had to go home early tonight.

  That was when 1001001 put her foot down, literally—stamping on the kitchen floor with a resounding clang. Enough was enough. 111011 had gone too far. She could put up with him being a moping, bad-tempered bastard in private but now he had embarrassed her in front of their friends! Either he sorted himself out quick-smart, or…or…

  She didn’t need to add the rest. The penalty was abundantly clear.

  The following day, as it happened, was the day the prototype Head was scheduled to be given its first practical tryout. Almost certainly it was the prospect of this that had shortened 111011’s already short fuse and provoked his dinnertime tirade. In the conference room with all the other execs he looked on as technicians busied themselves with the unit, running diagnostics on the circulatory system that powered it, the veins, heart, lungs and other peripherals, making sure everything was in tiptop working order. The Head itself sat on a pedestal, inert, eyes closed, mouth shut, very much as if asleep. Finally Wingate-Hayes came brisking into the room.

  “Sorry I’m late, everyone. Got held up talking to one of our overseas distributors. You didn’t think I was going to miss this, did you? Right-ho. Everything ready, chaps?”

  The technicians nodded.

  “Then power it up! Come on, come on.”

  111011 prayed for failure. As the heart began to pump and the lungs to inflate and deflate, he prayed for catastrophe. The Head would explode. Crimson fluid would shower everywhere. Fate would demonstrate the true folly of this misbegotten enterprise.

  For a while nothing at all appeared to happen. The Head remained still, unmoving, and 111011 thought, Well, not the spectacle I was hoping for, but still, good enough.

  Then the eyes fluttered open.

  There was a gasp from the executives that was half surprise, half appreciation. Wingate-Hayes remained yet-to-be-impressed, but a smile was twitching at the corners of his mouth.

  The eyes roved, looking from one face to the next and then around the conference room, as if the Head was assessing its surroundings, taking stock. 111011 felt nausea. He had to put out a hand against a wall to steady himself. He had never beheld anything so offensive, so fantastically wrong.

  A technician made an adjustment somewhere, and suddenly the Head spoke.

  “Good morning, Mr Wingate-Hayes,” it said, in a voice that was liquid and glutinous, a fluctuating approximation of a real voice. “How are you this morning?”

  “Very well, thank you,” said Wingate-Hayes, beaming. “And you?”

  “Oh, you know,” said the Head, “bearing up. I have three messages for you. Would you like to hear them? Or, if you’d prefer, I could entertain you to a rendition of any of your ten favourite songs.”

  “Maybe later on the songs. Perhaps you have a joke for me?”

  “A joke.” The Head grinned, then closed and reopened one eye.

  A wink, thought 111011. They’ve programmed it to wink.

  That was the final straw.

  “Knock knock,” said the Head.

  “Who’s there?” said Wingate-Hayes.

  “10100110.”

  “10100110 who?”

  “10100110 dear I can’t reach the doorb– Ughurk!”

  The punchline was truncated because 111011 had stepped forward and snatched the Head from its pedestal. He held the hateful thing aloft, staring into its face and revelling in the perplexity he saw there. The Head attempted to say something, but the windpipe connecting it to the lungs was stretched taut, its airflow constricted. It rolled its eyes, panicked. Technicians were shouting at 111011. Wingate-Hayes was spluttering.

  “Don’t you see?” 111011 said to the assembled executives. “Don’t you see how appalling this thing is? This makes a mockery of life. What next? Do we build it a body? Do we let it roam independently? Do we give it a name? Make a living being out of it? Let it take over the world?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer (assuming the astonished executives would have been capable of formatting one). He provided his own answer. Lifting the Head above his own head, he hurled it to the floor. Then he stamped on it, and stamped on it, and stamped on it, until it was nothing but splinters and mush.

  At this point security staff arrived and 111011 was bundled hastily out of the room.

  Three days later he found himself in the salon of the company psychiatrist.

  “A hysterical episode like this is not as uncommon as you might think,” said Dr Galbraith. “We lead such high-stress lives, some of us. It’s hardly surprising if now and then we get our circuits crossed.”

  “All I could see,” said 111011, “was that…that monstrosity in every home, babbli
ng at everybody, taking up our kids’ time, taking over our lives. I know I shouldn’t have done what I did, but if I had the chance I’d do it again.”

  “What is it you fear most? That the Head will somehow take away our independence? That we will come to rely on it to a dangerous degree? That a domestic convenience will somehow become a dominating force?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know.”

  Dr Galbraith sat back in his chair and chewed contemplatively on the end of his pipe. “Think about it for a moment. Imagine a future in which organic creations like the Head are dominant. Then think about the trouble organics cause. Think about your house, constantly in a state of decay, constantly requiring upkeep. Think about your garden, which you’re forever having to tend in case it gets out of hand. Think about your television that sometimes goes wrong and has to be repaired or replaced. Imagine a world in which flesh has the upper hand, in which meat rules, in which this fragile, volatile stuff is in control of everything. Could such a world really exist? And if it did, how long do you think it would last? There would be chaos. Confusion. Decline. No, 111011, I don’t believe we have anything to fear from the Head and from whatever may follow on from the Head. I believe you and I and the rest of our kind aren’t going to be supplanted, or even subjugated. We’re here to stay.”

  A year later, Heads were on the market and all the rage. As Wingate-Hayes had predicted, one in every home. They sang, they talked, they told jokes. Children thought them cool and cute and played with them all the time. Adults wondered how they had ever managed without. Even into the Smith household a Head found its way, eventually. 10010 pleaded and implored and cajoled to have one. All his friends at school said how brilliant they were.

  The Smiths’ Head was female. She had long silky hair, and she sat in a corner of the living room all day, her peripherals tucked neatly out of sight in a cupboard beneath her. Fleshtone had improved the voice simulation. She sounded uncannily normal. She chatted with 1001001, she kept 10010 amused. Even 111011 found himself using her, reluctantly at first, but in time he became as reliant on her as anyone else.