The Red Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

no food vendors, no tourists, no confused old
men, no old women pulling trolleys, no madmen berating the pavement, to slow them down; he walked in step with a demographically engineered London, a hand-picked public.
    Am I one of
them
? Raymond considered the taste and texture of this thought. Having fought an asymmetrical war against
them
his entire life, he had expected to feel guilt on the
first day of his betrayal. He didn’t.
    He walked down Marsh Wall and reached the Meridian bridge, one of two arcing walkways connecting the wharf to the colossal structure that rose out of the water of the West India dock: the Wave
Building. Its steel crest sloped down and ran underwater, only to rise up again a few hundred yards downriver: the west wing was in bedrock of the Thames.
    The surface of the Wave was smooth burnished steel with no flat planes, offering few impact points for a missile or plunging airliner. Its sinuous steel oscillation bristled with communications
antennas. Throughout the lagoon, ventilation pipes rose out of the water, serving offices buried far beneath. The Wave was connected to the wharf by the filaments of the walkways, which were
retractable in the case of an alert.
    To get onto the walkway, Raymond had to pass through a black metal frame, a scanner which chimed softly to signal that he had been analysed, identified and approved.
    He tried not to take it as a compliment.
    The same PA who had accompanied him on his interview was waiting in the arboretum.
    ‘Are you ready to go to work?’ she beamed professionally.
    He matched her enthusiasm with three quick nods.
    He had no idea what he was doing.
    He had no idea what his job was.
    The orientation exercises took up most of his first week at Monad. To begin with, the new intake watched training videos. He was unsure if he should whisper mocking asides at the blandishments
coming from the screen or take notes. There was a short documentary on Monad tech in which two veteran actors, Will Mooch and Sebastian Blast, the stars of a classic science fiction TV show, read
from a corporate script with studied joviality.
    ‘The mind is the final frontier,’ said Mooch, striding along a computer-generated replica of the anterior cerebral artery. ‘Man has postponed his explorations of outer space to
journey into inner space.’
    ‘The mind is the future,’ emphasized Sebastian Blast.
    The presentation detailed how Monad had licensed a technology from an American company called Numenius Systems, a technology which could simulate an individual. Florence had also made it through
the interview process and she and Raymond exchanged sarcastic remarks throughout.
    ‘It’s impossible to copy a soul,’ said Mooch. ‘Monad’s simulations are like sophisticated reflections in a mirror; they don’t have that third dimension that
is really you. We record hotspots of molecular activity in crucial areas of the brain through non-invasive surface scanning, combine that with in-depth interviews with the subject, supplemented
with our unique exegesis of their online behaviour, and plug all that information into our artificial intelligence. At the end of the process, we get something which looks like you, talks like you,
and thinks a bit like you.’
    The video ended with Sebastian Blast conversing with his simulated self, which looked exactly like the actor at his physical peak. The youthful simulated Blast delivered the final speech to
camera, ‘I am not a copy of Sebastian Blast. I’m a story about myself told by the Cantor intelligence. This artificial intelligence resembles a writer that has been given a considerable
amount of information about me and has created a character out of it. Over the next few days you will encounter more concepts and technology like this that you may find disturbing. If at any time
you feel disorientated by Monad, please contact your supervisor immediately.’
    Disquiet punted itself quietly across Raymond’s thoughts. He