The map took up one entire wall. It was a map of the world, coloured black and outlined in white; on it, little red dots shone like hellish stars.
The barefoot man, dressed in unbleached cream cotton, didn’t have to have the map beamed on the wall, it was not as if he needed it.
He liked it.
A warm breeze billowed out the white voile that hung over the terrace doors.
The terrace led to the pool where, that morning, he had already swum his allotted lengths and, next to it, he had eaten his carefully compiled breakfast, swallowing the accompanying tablets.
He was waging a war, one that had been ongoing for years. It was a war against his body, which wanted to degrade, decay, defragment like a badly maintained computer hub. He would not let it. He had the money for nootropic supplements, exercise, nutrition, meditation and education to stop the rot. But that was the thing, as the years had gone by, he realized he didn’t want to merely stop the rot anymore … he wanted to transform it.
Aspire had been born.
‘Sir?’
He had been about to begin his first micro-nap. The staff knew that. He would not get irritated by this interruption, however, as irritation led to a spike in cortisol, which was napalm for the nervous system.
He nodded.
‘Sir?’ The man was poorly dressed for the heat, dark blooms of sweat flowering the armpits of his shirt with its too-tight, buttoned-up collar. ‘I have had an update from St Dunstan’s.’
The barefoot man found the little red dot on the map. The island. It was one of his favourite trials. He’d met Moses once, many years ago, when he’d just been starting out with his shiny new sleep idea. An over-caffeinated man with bloodshot eyes and poor skin but he’d had an idea for sleep technology that made the barefoot man’s heart beat faster, cortisol be damned. It started with fixing sleep issues, but the end result? Well, the end result was altogether something more interesting.
It was a technology that, eventually, became part of his arsenal.
Increasingly, as Aspire grew to take in other technology, gene therapy and medication, the barefoot man had found himself waging war not just against the body, but also against the old world, the old way of doing things, the old order. Disappointingly he discovered that governments were hardly worthy adversaries because they couldn’t keep up with the pace of this change and didn’t understand its scope. Even when they did, legislation then worked so slowly they were destined to lose the battle before they’d even realized they were in it.
There were plenty of others who understood the potential.
Sweat Stain edged into the room. ‘St Dunstan’s has been compromised, sir.’
‘How?’
‘The problems with the trial proved insurmountable. The full evacuation policy has been activated.’
Full evacuation policy. He knew what that meant, and he sighed. Regrettable.
As if on cue, one of the red lights on his map began to blink.
The jarring dissonance of that blinking light against all the other steady, unwavering ones was perturbing. He didn’t like it.
Sweat Stain was nearly at his elbow. Too close. The barefoot man could smell his cologne, just about, under the stench of meaty perspiration. Perfumes were beautifully scented poisons. He reminded himself to issue a memo about them.
‘Ms Maxwell? Mr Ing?’
‘I regret to inform you of their passing, sir.’
It was inconvenient to lose Delores and Moses. The woman had been clever, in her own way, and Moses, well he was a legend. But, as they said, legends … never died. Moses would have to continue, in one shape or another.
It was messier than he would have liked. But that was beta-testing for you. Unpredictable. Thankfully, it was frighteningly easy for people to be wiped away – if you chose the right people in the first place.
But still … messy.
And exactly what Morpheus could be used for in the future: one carefully constructed dream, one perfectly balanced REM sleep, and those people would simply forget what had happened on that island. Their brains would be reprogrammed. So much cleaner.
He clasped his hands and tapped the two index fingers together. Sweat Stain cleared his throat nervously.
‘And?’
‘Well …’ The man swallowed loudly. ‘We’ve just had a report of a boat, coming from one of the coves and heading to the mainland. It has two people in it. As yet unidentified.’
The barefoot man clenched and unclenched one fist, watching the tendons in his wrist flex and disappear.
One day those tendons might be reinforced with a biologically compatible substance that hadn’t been invented yet, something that would keep his skeleton strong while his organs were replaced one by one. Then, eventually they would find a way to open up the parts of the brain currently unmapped, stimulate those dormant neurons into activity as yet unimagined.
Better human beings.
Smarter people who learned quicker and made better choices. The kind of people who would not choose to get in a silly boat and sail away. This was the ultimate purpose of the glowing map, wasn’t it?
The barefoot man hadn’t realized how useful sleep could be, before he discovered Moses. The world was obsessed with it, or rather the lack of it, but previously he’d thought of it as wasted time: necessary, but a waste all the same. Thanks to Moses though, sleep now held all sorts of possibilities that could be utilized by all sorts of people with different agendas.
Well … they’d think they had different agendas. He smiled. Soon though, they would discover they all had the same agenda: his.
The flashing light that represented St Dunstan’s on the map blinked out.
That was an improvement. Now there was no irregularity to needle him as he stared at the map, all the lights glowing unwaveringly. It was like one of those magic-eye pictures, if he stared at it long enough something else would form in his vision – he could see the future in it, a future in which he was the centre and pivot.
The barefoot man tapped his fingers together a few more times. Curiosity was a sign of an active mind and he had to admit, he was curious. A boat. Delores had had a hand in that, no doubt. He had never trusted the woman. It might amuse him to find out what had happened.
The lights on his map shone unwaveringly, each of them representing a trial in some forgotten part of a country somewhere. Not just sleep, of course – that was merely one part of his arsenal in the war he was waging.
Birdsong piped up suddenly. His micro-nap was over. He wondered whether one of his telomeres was fraying slightly because of the missed rest and imagined it, the broken fronds swaying like coral under the sea. A full day and a fixed regime stretched out before him. He would be late for his LED light bathing.
Sentimentality. It would be his downfall. He got up and Sweat Stain backed away before him as if he was a god.
Not yet.
‘Intercept the boat at the mainland. Discreetly.’
‘Yes, sir.’