Free The Destructives by Matthew De Abaitua Page B

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    He had the sense of being watched. Not just by Patricia and the technicians but by the house itself. It was not a malignant gaze. There was something familiar about it, the way it pulled him in only to push him away again. He went back to the blanket box and inspected the cat’s scratches. Yes, there was more scoring in the wood than when he had first arrived. Time was passing within the archive even if the key components – the mother and daughter – remained static. Cat food in the first cupboard he opened. He ran his finger along the cat’s scratch. Odd. The feel of the groove did not match its appearance. One sense – touch – did not match the other – sight. And the feel of these grooves were not vertical. They were curved. Cursive . A letter “B”. The sensesuit on the fritz or something else? He tried to open the blanket box but the lid and hinges were mere simulations and the box itself was one solid unit.
    He went back out to the garden, climbed the tree and inspected the markings the cat had made there. The same mismatch between the haptic and optical sensorium: he saw vertical grooves in the wood but his fingertips traced the outline of a letter “H”. Clues, obviously. What kind of encryption leaves clues on how to be broken? Yes. The pulling in, the pushing away. The familiar contraries of flirtation. There was something in the archive. Something that could feel his fingers tracing the scratches of data. Something flirting with him.
    He went back into the house. The cat was sat imperiously upon the blanket box; he went to stroke it and the cat leapt off. Slowly the lid opened and the box was full of old photographs printed on coloured film. Family photographs. Wedding photographs. Holiday photographs. The people in them were blurred and generic. Either encrypted or unquantified. He sorted through them and found a photograph that was not obscured. A loop played on the surface of the film. A loop of a mother putting her arms around her daughter, the two of them smiling awkwardly for the camera, an undertone of awkwardness in the daughter’s smile, a flash of fear in the smile of the mother, pulling her daughter to her in a protective embrace, who resists it then gives into it. A famous loop, the loop that signalled the onset of the Seizure. The Horbo loop. He felt a light pressure at every point of his body, as if he was being embraced by a kindly giant, and then this weight was lifted from him. The scratched letters. H. B.
    He heard voices from the porch. On the runner carpet beside the front door, mother embraced daughter before waving her off to school. He was inside their quantified lives. The encryption had been lifted. He could see their faces, and he recognised them: Verity Horbo, the mother, with her white-blonde hair cut shorter than in the loop, varsity track pants and top, a flush on her pale skin. Meggan Horbo, gawky, painfully self-conscious, left arm folded protectively over her midriff, slight hunch in the shoulders, closing in upon herself even as she walked away.
    He stood in the kitchen, and didn’t dare move in case he broke the spell. Verity closed the screen door and walked by. Her perfume was exquisitely woody: he recognised fig and maple – natural essences rather than artificial flavourings. Expensive. She put the coffee on, moving around the kitchen oblivious to his presence. The coffee pot steamed and the room was soaked in its rich smell. This detailed unit of the past was so perfect. His deep nostalgia for this period, a time he had never known himself, ached with fulfilment.
    Verity waved to call up the family data on the hearth. On a shifting map, she watched the icon representing her daughter meet the icon representing the school bus, and, satisfied, she shifted her attention to the newsfeed. Skyscrapers on a spring morning. 2020. The newscaster talking about gains on the stock market. She waved the channel away, and the broadcast was replaced by a browser. The