Free The Destructives by Matthew De Abaitua

“–but baby steps , Theo, baby steps .” The robot shuffled half a yard to demonstrate baby steps .
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    Alone, he took the elevator back into the basement of the School of Emergences. He ate in the kitchen of the house, sensesuit on, helmet off, idly considering the flickering projection of the mother and her daughter. He was tired and felt it as a nervous tightness below his throat. He slept in the upstairs bedroom of the house, naked apart from the helmet, so that his dreams incorporated the day-to-day sensorium of the archive, with its looping early morning light. On waking, he took the helmet off, padded into the bathroom, noticed a new razor had been left out for him, shaved and took pleasure in the planes and angles of his lean face, avoiding the coiled scars on each cheek. The rest of the damage from his addictions was internal. The liver. The lungs. His blood.
    Then a breakfast meeting with Patricia and Professor Kakkar. The professor sought their approval for the way in which his team had managed to isolate the sensorium of the cat and then emulate it. Theodore gave ritual thanks. He knew how to behave. All meetings were supportive and positive – on the superficial level. Confrontation and criticism was a last resort, deployed only after an arsenal of silences had been exhausted. Disapproval was conveyed through complements which only a skilful and experienced practitioner of meetings could decode. So when Patricia emphasised how pleased she was with the diligence of Kakkar’s team, Theodore registered the absences in her praise – she did not laud their ingenuity, she did not draw attention to the positive results of their work. Kakkar was a big man, and he leant over the table in huddled supplication.
    Then Patricia turned on Theodore.
    “And you’re doing amazing work. So creative.” So ineffectual.
    “I’m just very excited that we can all work together.”
    “I can see that. You bring a unique energy to the project.”
    “I’m inspired by your influence.”
    Kakkar nodded with delight to hear such positivity. He dabbed away the sprinkling of sweat from his temples, sat back and relaxed.
    Amateur.
    The content of the meta-meeting – Patricia was clearly unhappy with their performance – passed the professor by. He would have to deliver soon. Theodore didn’t want to be kicked off the project. He wanted the money. But, more than that, the content of the archive itself.
    “And how is your work with the cat progressing?” asked Patricia. “I’m really intrigued to hear how that’s going.” She corrected her earring, quite deliberately.
    “I stroked the cat,” he replied.
    “Did you? Amazing.”
    “And it arched its back.” He smiled. “It responded to my touch.”
    Kakkar shook his head. “Coincidence,” he said.
    “No. The cat looked at me. It greeted me.”
    “It’s an archive,” insisted Kakkar. “You cannot interact with an archive.”
    Patricia adjusted one of her gauntlets. “I want to show you something,” she said, “The technicians managed to extract some data from the sensesuit. It’s not much. The suit is a custom job and locked down. But we got this much.”
    A ball of light appeared in the palm of Patricia’s left hand, then resolved into high definition footage of the house, the backyard, the lawn, the cat. She had a brief loop of Theodore’s point of view made through the sensesuit. Simply by crooking or lengthening her fingers, she could forward, reverse, zoom and pan within the 360 degree loop of his experience. Close-up on the cat. His hand reaching out, the cat letting him stroke it and then raising its tail for him to follow. The cat blinked slowly in greeting. Patricia closed her fist over the ball of light, and so it disappeared.
    “That’s all we could extract. Thoughts?”
    “The cat could be a user interface to guide us through the archive,” suggested Theodore. Then, noticing their unfamiliarity with the Pre-Seizure term of user, he explained