Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  His hypocrisy made my jaw clench. I looked straight ahead and concentrated on keeping my voice level. ‘I thank you for that, Jordan. But if that man has my niece, I’m going to do everything in my power to find her.’

  ‘If, Lucie. If. For Christ’s sake. I don’t believe you have any proof, otherwise you wouldn’t be sneaking around his apartment while he’s out. We’d get a legitimate warrant, we’d go to his office and arrest him.’

  ‘If he’s not involved,’ I snapped back, ‘it doesn’t make a difference. If he didn’t do anything, nobody will see those feeds.’

  ‘You will,’ he muttered.

  I’d expected an argument, but I hadn’t expected him to be so disgusted. I hadn’t expected to feel so ashamed.

  * * *

  When I got back to the station, Barbra took me into her office with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her face, which worked out to be a kind of weird snarl. ‘We got in. Just as expected, there was a legacy vulnerability our coders managed to exploit. We’re currently channelling a live dump of some of Green Valley’s key data streams, including Egus’s accounts, live utility metering, systems control data and so on.’

  ‘Just metering and accounts? You’re not getting live access to The I? You can’t see inside?’

  Barbra smiled. ‘It’s a great breach, Lucie, but it’s not the God particle. Wouldn’t we love to be able to monitor everything and everyone at all times. Even Egus and his friends didn’t manage that in their heyday. Got pretty close, though.’

  ‘Won’t he know?’ I asked. ‘Egus, I mean.’

  ‘Bill is certain the transfer is cloaked properly and Zeroth won’t see us piggybacking on the stream. They’ve disguised our tap as one of Zeroth’s own redundancy loops.’ She stopped and looked at my face. ‘Don’t be disappointed. It’s an excellent ingress. We can consolidate these data streams with the old user data we already have on file. We can trace any suspect who ever owned an I, just like Zeroth.’

  ‘You mean the Zeroth records weren’t deleted? Wasn’t that the whole point of the Turn?’

  ‘Safekeeping, Lucie, is different from usage.’ She offered a beneficent smile again, as if to a favoured pupil. ‘It’s slow, it’s frustrating, I know – we’ve been fighting this battle for a long time. But you’ve done great work. I’ll need you on analytics immediately – we have a hell of a lot of data to process.’ She put her hand on my arm, a gesture as strangely unsettling as her long-toothed smile. ‘Of course, I can’t officially commend you. But you should be proud of yourself.’

  I wasn’t feeling very proud of myself. I was bristling. At that moment, when only one suspect was of any interest to me, snooping on an entire city full of people seemed arbitrary and pointless. Barbra was already settling into the chair behind her desk, staring at something on the screen in front of her.

  ‘Can you tell me: why are we even watching them?’ I said.

  She looked up, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to me and away from the screen, then frowned as various options scrolled down the menu in her mind. Finally, she settled on magnanimity towards the staffer who’d just delivered the project this major coup and was obviously tired. She took a deep breath and reinstalled the wolfish smile on her face. ‘To keep them safe. Everything we do in this office is to keep citizens safe.’

  11 I tried to hide behind a Day-Glo orange upsized plaster cast of a Minoan death mask, but the woman had spotted me. I’d seen her and spoken to her several times at these events of Fabian’s but I still couldn’t remember her name or anything about her.

  ‘Isn’t it just so… unique?’ she asked me.

  I nodded.

  Just remember one or two small details about people, Fabian had often counselled me, and lead off a conversation with them, then you’ll soon be into an illuminating discussion. You find these things awkward because you forget to unlock people’s trust.

  It should have been easy for me. My profession, after all, was analysing and collating significant details about people. It wasn’t that I could manage data and not real people; I often had warm discussions with people on the bus and at the precinct and with Bobby Khan and the regulars at Verla’s – I remembered their names. But there was something about Fabian’s colleagues, or friends, or apparatchiks, that blocked me. It betrayed my limited imagination, I knew, but they all looked and sounded the same to me. Academics, politicians, commercially successful artists, other curators like Fabian – they made me feel stupid and small.

  Even though I’d gone home and dressed smartly, compared to them I felt sweaty, tired and underdressed. This opening had been on the calendar for months, a big night for Fabian. I had to be with him tonight, but my attention was anywhere but here. I’d spent the afternoon staring at a split screen, keeping an eye on the feed from Barrett’s home while I sifted through the audit of the Green Valley data. The longer his flat stayed empty, the more anxious I became. But at Sentinel, I would know immediately if Vidal moved or if Jordan’s patrol found something. Wandering around the city by myself, with no trail to follow, and not even a junction set of my own, I’d be blind and mute. I had to be patient. Jordan’s patrol was actively looking for Kira on the streets, and I was looking for her there, in electronic space. We were doing everything we could. Jordan knew the art museum’s number and would call or send a patrol officer if there was any news. I had to trust him.

  David, on the other hand, wouldn’t know I was here. I’d picked up a message from him that he’d left in the afternoon, which the woman at the answering service just read back: ‘Any news? None on my side. Still looking. Will keep in touch.’ He might be calling me at home right now.

  ‘It really reminds us who we are, that we’re made of clay,’ the woman whose name I’d forgotten gushed, expertly grasping a glass half filled with white wine and a small plate laden with three bare skewers in one hand, dabbing her lips with a cocktail napkin in the other.

  ‘Not stardust?’ I muttered.

  Her smile froze and she tilted her head. Then, after a pause, she said, ‘That’s right. We’re not stardust – if stardust means we’re all special and twinkly. That’s the precise myth the soft corporations tried to sell us. The cult of individuality; tearing us apart, breaking down communal endeavour in favour of winner-takes-all competition. That’s how we got to the Turn, and we must never forget. Your wonderful Fabian’s collection is so important right now, when our memories are getting short. Reminding us we are clay – and, yes, not stardust – that we all share the same end. Reminding us of our deaths speaks truly of our authenticity.’

  The woman wafted off to circulate and I hurried around the edge of the vast basement space where Fabian had set up the exhibition, making towards the reception desk, where I’d be able to hear Jordan’s call.

  Fabian had been working on the exhibition for nearly two years, gathering death tributes, totems, funereal masks and gravewealth from museums and galleries around the world, and then commissioning local contemporary artists each to reimagine one of the pieces in whichever medium they chose. One of the paintings, of a dead baby wrapped in an Aleutian papoose, had been reimagined in a magnified pointillist style in summer colours. I remembered the dot woman whose work I’d walked into in Green Valley, her originality vampirised by exploitation, advertising and kitsch. I wondered if she regretted staying in Green Valley, trapping her imagination in formaldehyde. If she’d had the choice, would she have preferred to come out into the real world and expose her vision to collectors and patrons like these?

  Another of Fabian’s colleagues was coming at me with an aggressive smile. I turned, pretending I hadn’t seen her, scanning for a hiding spot in one of the closed galleries, when someone tinged a wine glass self-importantly.

  The audience quietened and turned to the first landing on the main staircase, where a microphone was set up. Marc Fernando, the museum’s director, handed his knife and glass off to a young assistant. ‘Welcome to the Stanton Trust Museum’s new exhibition, Mortality Reima
gined! Gathered here tonight are the city’s most far-sighted benefactors and the museum’s most loyal and supportive friends. You know how much we appreciate your continued efforts, often against the tide of public priorities, to keep art and heritage essential lifelines of our communal lives. I know you’re all keen to get back to looking at these marvellous pieces. Aren’t they wonderful? But let’s offer a minute to the curator of this incredible show, Fabian Tadic.’ He raised his glass and an urbane cheer went up, along with the wine glasses of the audience. ‘Fabian, will you say a few words?’

  Formidable and elegant in his black suit and sea-green tie, Fabian took his place behind the microphone. He scanned the faces looking up towards him, and when he located me, favoured me with a public smile and a half-wink that, despite my preoccupation, warmed me. This was a room full of Stanton’s political elite, the cream of the party and Omega, and Fabian had sought my eyes out and favoured me.

  As he spoke, paraphrasing his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the metal on his wrist flashed with each expansive gesture and his fingers shaped gracefully around every flourish. I watched him without listening, recognising how his confident stance held the room, and how the assembled power brokers angled their faces towards him, as if to a soft autumn sun. This is Fabian, I thought, the man I go home to each night. He can hold this room in deference as well as he holds me; they feel as safe in his command as I do.

  Someone was watching me, a man, glaring at me from the other side of the room. Without taking his eyes off me, he nudged the woman next to him and side-mouthed something towards her. She fixed me with an equally spiteful look. I recognised the man: he’d been in Fabian’s apartment a couple of times, at the Omega strategy meetings he’d hosted there. One of the group’s core funders, an odious religious Luddite called Daniel Jameson. Jameson muttered something to his partner, pasted a thin smile on his face and started walking towards me. I couldn’t bring myself to make small talk with that man, no matter how much Fabian would appreciate it. I shielded myself behind a passing waiter with a tray of canapés, and turned and hurried up the side stairs, leaving Jameson frozen at the end of his run, watching me leave.

  By the time I slowed down, I was in the museum’s administrative wing. Fabian’s warm and spacious office would be a good place to hole up for a few minutes. I could use his phone to call Jordan, see if there was any update at the station, check if there were any more calls or messages from David. Passing along the dimly lit corridor, only a faint glow smudging through the frosted glass panes of the offices as I went down towards the staff bathroom, I heard the deep thrum of photostats churning out brochures for the museum and Omega material in the print shop.

  * * *

  Because I was upstairs, nobody found me passed out on the bathroom floor. I pushed myself up to a side-legged squat then hauled myself up by pulling on the lip of the basin counter. I stood there for a minute, leaned over, testing my legs, trying to piece together what had happened. When I finally lifted my face to the mirror, I could still see the dark, matted shape clearly, behind me, sinking back into the narrow gap between the last toilet cubicle and the wall. The lights it suggested and the imploding lives it projected shimmered faintly around its scabrous pelt. I didn’t want to turn again, fall again, but it raised its head and demanded my attention, and for a second I saw a reflected flash of yellow eyes, but then they were sucked into the swirling smudge of its face. I could sense it behind me, and I turned my head to look at it, but it wasn’t back in the shadows now.

  It had come closer, I told myself, even as the memory was fading like a dream. I had seen some of the lives it wore. It was taunting me, dressing itself in surveillance feeds of a thousand crimes, a thousand ripped lives. It was just a hallucination, a vivid daydream. Just exhaustion.

  * * *

  ‘How can you get into bed with people like that?’ I asked Fabian.

  ‘They support our work.’ He turned to me, stopping halfway in the intricate procedure of removing his cufflinks and tie-pin and placing them in the box on the dresser. It was meant to be my dressing table that he’d installed along with me all those years ago, but the notion of sitting on a soft stool in front of angled mirrors was foreign to me. I pulled off my armful of cheap bangles and flopped them over the arms of the fanciful maquette on the dresser, twisted my arms around my back to unzip, my muscles aching, a bruise blooming on my shoulder, and stood beside the bed as the dress fell.

  ‘Your work? You say that like it’s some sort of profound mission, but as far as I can tell, the Omega group is just a bunch of disgruntled ex-intellectuals who can’t move with the times.’

  ‘If “moving with the times” is allowing us to get sucked back into complacently giving our freedom away to a corporate-technological tyranny, then yes, we don’t want to move with the times.’

  ‘But there’s so much potential, Fabe—’

  ‘Potential that continually and repeatedly becomes corrupted. That’s what happens to unchallenged power.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to soften my stance, trying to get him to understand me rather than offer me freshman lecture notes. ‘I saw something yesterday, in Green Valley, that reminded me. There’s so much we can do with the technology that would allow us to evolve. When people like Daniel Jameson are involved in Omega, it can only mean that you’re working to stop our evolution. He’d like nothing more than to bring back slavery and have his church write the laws.’

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘It’s more complex than that.’

  ‘You’re not comfortable with him, I know it, Fabe.’

  He didn’t rise to the bait, only turned back to the dresser mirror. ‘Let’s not do this now. It’s been a long night and you must be exhausted.’

  The petulant teen in me wanted to snap back – Don’t tell me when I’m exhausted – but I was more self-aware than that. I’m a highly regarded professional too, I reminded myself, instantly remembering David’s plea: I’m important here. All of us, every single goddamn one of us, preening and proving in front of some invisible audience. You could take away the social networks, but our will to compete and compare, our craving for affirmation, would always remain.

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  I had a shower and went to bed, curling my back to Fabian as he read himself down. I was only intending to rest and listen out in case the phone rang, and I felt like I’d hardly closed my eyes, but when I woke again, at half past two, the room was dark and Fabian was snoring softly beside me.

  My mind was racing with false images speeding and merging with reality, and sleep tried to drag me back down, but I fought it and pushed up from the bed, my bones still aching. Padding towards the study, I turned back at the bedroom doorway and looked at Fabian’s body sprawled in a slant of light from between the curtains. Like this, he was fragile; just a body. After closing the study door, I unpacked my satchel and turned on the portable monitor I’d requisitioned from Sentinel. Having the tech in the house felt as much a betrayal as sneaking a lover into our bed.

  Vidal Barrett’s sitting room was still and quiet. I flicked through the feeds to find him in his bed, on his back, one bare leg sticking out from under the comforter, bare shoulders above its hem and his arms folded neatly across his chest. The scattering of books on the nightstand had been joined by a tumbler of water and a pair of glasses. In the next room, the girl lay in her top bunk. As if disturbed, she flipped over with a flail of limbs and fixed her eyes straight into the angle of the cornice where I’d set the fibre camera. I knew there was no way she could sense that I was there, but for a moment she stared at me with eyes rendered blank and glassy by the infrared sensors. Then she lay back and curled on her side under the quilt and went still again.

  A creak in the hallway and for a second I was ripped between both apartments, incapacitated by the confusion. I stashed the monitor under a pile of papers just as Fabian opened the door.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said, squinting at me groggily. />
  ‘Yes, sorry.’ I made a nonchalant show of skimming through the pages. ‘Can’t sleep.’

  He frowned and rubbed the back of his head where his silvering hair was tufted up.

  ‘I’m trying to do some work,’ I continued, ‘but I’m worn out.’

  ‘Come back to bed,’ he said. ‘Try to sleep.’

  ‘I know I won’t. I’ll just disturb you. I’ll just stay up a while, if you don’t mind.’

  He shrugged. ‘Why should I mind?’ But of course he did. ‘I wish you wouldn’t…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Never mind.’ He turned and closed the study door behind him.

  III

  12 Vidal Barrett whisked eggs and poured them into the pan. They didn’t seethe like they should and he realised he hadn’t let the butter warm up for long enough. He scowled as the mixture grudgingly started to heat up and congeal, then started scraping it with a spatula. It’d have to do.

  He was still getting used to this, looking after someone other than himself. When Sofie was small, he’d left the domestic stuff to Dierdra, and she’d left the responsible, rent-earning, adult-being, getting-dressed-into-day-clothes stuff to him. Then they’d split up and Dierdra’s impressive lawyer argued successfully that he’d been negligent, using his time sheets and caseloads during that period as evidence against him, and she’d won sole custody. Somehow Sofie had become sixteen and still alive and funny and smart and warm-hearted. Then Dierdra had gone and fucking died.

  He slid the pan off the heat and stared at the coffee machine as it dribbled a mugful out for Sofie, stretching his arms over his head and hearing his joints crack. He rotated his neck a few times in half-hearted homage to the exercise he really should be taking, then took the mug through to Sofie’s room.