The Destructives Read Free Page B

economic collapse. The mall was a live-in therapeutic retail environment. The populace had jobs, earned money, and acquired “sanity tokens” which they spent on products, services and experiences, the novelty of which burnt out quickly in such a pressured environment. As an accelerator, he kept the culture moving, kept the desire and anxiety churning over, an addict’s daily lot. The consumer inmates of the mall had been living there for nearly thirty years.
    He was given the top bunk in a cabin shared with three other aspiring accelerators.
    His big hit was a haircare product called beach light . Property in Novio Magus increased in value the closer it was to the light wells: the deep cylindrical holes bored through the mall’s iron roof and its layers of padded cells, shops, treatment rooms, beauticians, operating theatres, cafes, waffle stalls, electro-shock therapy stations, quarantine wards and retail experiences. Light was precious in the mall, and natural light a rare benediction, a moment of peace shared between the sun and the body. He decided to accelerate products that promised sunlight on skin.
    The specific concept of beach light came from a story his grandmother used to tell him about the first day of the Seizure.
    Alex had been visiting a client in their enclave on the outskirts of Walberswick, a village on the Suffolk coastline. She described how, after sharing tea and scones with the client – a CEO in mental distress, who needed to be relieved of his controlling shares – she decided to go for a walk on the beach. A fog rolled in over the sea, up and over the entire east coast, thickening as it went with atmospheric particulates. Black beach huts emerged out of the fog like the helmets of an invading army. Alex loved the acoustics of fog, the sense of narrowed space, especially at the water’s edge, with the horizon and distant shores entirely closed off. A pair of dog walkers greeted her; a spaniel rubbed its snout joyfully into the sand, snorting up the lifegiving day. Funny, how you remember these things. She checked her phone. Signal was intermittent, there was a buffer wheel indicating a large file stalled in the ether. The crisp sound of the waves as they considered, over and again, the pebbled shore. The file, when it finally downloaded, was strange. A loop of a mother clutching a child to her. The loop was every post on every stream of her soshul . A mother clutching a child was every email in her inbox. The ad networks were infected, and served this loop through every unit of their inventory. Her bank balance was mother-and-child. Unlike the rest of the population, she knew what this meant and had prepared for it.
    The fog made her feel like she was wrapped in a muslin bag. She did not hurry back to her driver. Rather, she watched the rest of the walkers prod inquisitively at their phones as they too discovered the loop of mother and child playing in place of all that had seemed permanent. She decided to enjoy these last few minutes of a passing civilisation. The final hour of peak carbon emissions.
    The light, sifted by the fog, was a detail she always dwelt upon when telling this story. Beach light.
    In the array, he accessed the restoration for loops of women on beaches. Always long hair, matted with seawater, salt or sand on their lips. Women so relaxed they could easily be flotsam and jetsam brought in on the tide. Light waves undulating off the water, occasional swells sheathed in tiny sun jewels. Beach light. The agency had a hair product that needed accelerating. He made the link. The light of the beach trapped in your hair.
    Before he knew it, he was running the array. Pumping light into every product he handled. He diversified from beach light into creams that put the deliciously silver sensation of moonlight against the skin, into drinks infused with sun-ripened fruits. He accelerated the cult of light to a point of ritual observance; he made the consumer patients of the asylum