VI
21 I fought Vidal as he pulled me away from Kira and wrestled me downstairs, but the ram’s incursion was weakening me. I was still struggling against him, batting him away, screaming to be taken back to Kira as we reached the floor below. Rainbow was waiting down there. She handed Vidal something, then I had nothing left as he got me down the last flight of stairs and slammed the heavy steel door behind us.
It all stopped.
The ram was gone, vacated my cortex the moment I crossed the threshold of Vidal’s I.
‘We need to get that tracer out of you,’ Vidal said, pressing an electronic wand to my back. ‘But this will help for the moment.’ A vibrating, crackling sensation radiated outwards from my spine; there was smoke in the middle of my brain. He handled me back into the stairwell and slammed the door behind us again.
Now that the electronic panic had cleared, and the ram had ceded control of my systems, I had my strength back and ran up the stairs and to where I’d seen Kira. Vidal knew not to try to stop me. As I passed the bedrooms, I saw the children had been reconnected to The I. They were sitting on their mattresses, their faces relaxed and pacified, staring into the middle distance. Nothing like the moaning and fitful grinding I’d seen a minute ago. In the last room, Rainbow was propping Kira up on her mattress, as docile as a rag doll.
‘She’s gone out,’ Rainbow said to me.
‘She was standing there a minute ago,’ I said. ‘She was talking to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Rainbow. ‘She’s getting better. But she’s gone out now.’
Vidal had caught up with me. ‘I won’t be able to do the extraction here. I’m already worried that they’ll have seen you.’
‘I’m staying with her,’ I said.
Vidal frowned, glancing between me and Kira. ‘I had no idea. Honestly. Who is she to you?’
‘She’s my niece. Her name is Kira,’ I said, going over to her bedside, sitting down at the edge of the mattress and rubbing the hair back from her brow, a carbon copy of Odille’s. My motions were stilted. I didn’t know how to act maternal; I didn’t know what to do with this mess of protective rage inside me. Kira didn’t respond to my touch, but her breathing was deep and calm.
‘What…’ Vidal started, then decided against asking anything. ‘Oh,’ he said again, ruffling his scalp. ‘You’ll need an explanation, then, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Potboiler-aunt might have stormed up to him and grabbed him by the collar, shoving him into the wall and demanding to know what the hell he was doing with her niece, but I just sat there, holding her limp hand. What Kira needed, more than bravado, was peace.
‘Okay, so,’ Vidal started, approaching carefully, and keeping his voice low, ‘it looks bad, I know, but the first thing you need to know is that we’re trying to help them. This, without a doubt, is the best thing we can do for these children.’
‘You mean kidnapping them?’ I said, the menace clear in my level tone. ‘Taking them from their parents and their homes?’
‘No. Freeing. Rescuing. They’re not well there. They’re not healthy, they’re not safe. I want to reintegrate them into normal society.’
‘And this is a decision – what? – you made all by yourself? To take these children from their families?’
‘No, not by myself. There are others involved.’
‘Who?’
‘Others who have their best interests at heart.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ I snapped. ‘Someone who has their best interests at heart would call the police, social services.’
‘They wouldn’t have a clue how to treat them, Lucie.’
‘They wouldn’t be dumping their bodies.’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t. Tell me this at least: why are they dying?’
He looked down and paused, knowing that a glib answer wouldn’t be good enough. He sighed, and I could tell he wasn’t pretending. ‘They’re so damaged by that place… it’s so damn hard for them to adjust, especially the born-ins. And the slop they’ve been feeding them isn’t designed for growing children. I wish we knew how to help them better. It’s so fucked up in there. That’s why I brought you here. I needed to show someone who cares, so you can see them, what’s happening to them, why they have to come out of there.’
‘Still, she shouldn’t be here,’ I said, looking around at the dingy interior of the room. ‘These children should be in a hospital. They should be with their parents.’
‘They can’t go back and they won’t,’ Vidal said.
I’d almost forgotten Rainbow, standing as a silent auditor in the corner of the room. But now she spoke. ‘She’s getting better,’ she said, glancing between Vidal and me, tears welling in her eyes. ‘We’re all getting better. Please don’t send us back.’
‘But surely,’ I said to her, ‘being at home is better than being here?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘We’re working so hard,’ she begged, as if it was my decision to make. ‘Please don’t let her,’ she said to Vidal.
‘You still think it’s fine in there, don’t you? There’s only one way you’re really going to understand,’ he said.
22 ‘This is going to be a bit uncomfortable.’
I’d heard those words too often in the past week. We were in the back of a Misty Vale delivery truck, surrounded by strapped-in pallets stacked with forty-gallon vats of Green Valley’s potato-yeast starch. The driver was Roger Basson, who I’d last seen talking to Vidal at the farm. Close up, he was a paunchy, red-faced man with a narrow ring of hair and narrower lips, and he’d jumped down from the cab and unlocked the back of the truck for me and Vidal without a word, only a side-eyed glance. On the drive out to Green Valley’s delivery bay at the far end of the wall, I’d got used to the funky stench of the foodstuff. I lay face-down on the scratch-fibre carpet that lined the back, hearing the growl of the truck on the road and the squeak of the chassis and the cargo belted onto its shelves. The cheap carpet smelled like a teenage boy’s sheets, and I shuddered as Vidal squatted down next to me and opened a metal-clad briefcase of electronic equipment.
I’d wanted to stay with Kira, watch over her, but soon I’d realised that Vidal wasn’t lying when he said she’d be in her digital coma for the whole day. Rainbow and Sofie seemed to understand her better than me. Reluctantly, I’d let him convince me to leave her in their care. ‘Just a couple of hours, and you’ll know everything you need to know,’ Vidal had said. He was right. If I wanted the truth, and I did, I had to go back to Green Valley.
In the truck, I remembered that I should have told Jordan that I’d found Kira, and I wondered if I should have told him where I was going, but it was too late now. I’d fill him in when I got back. Seeing Vidal Barrett with the children, I knew I could trust him – this wasn’t a violent man, and he was being honest with me. It was before dawn on a Saturday, and I hoped he’d be fast asleep or, for all I knew, entertaining someone he’d picked up in a bar. As it was, I’d only tried Fabian from Vidal’s phone. It had just rung, so I called my answering service. He hadn’t tried my number and had sent no message, so I simply asked them to tell him I’d called.
Vidal seemed at first to be gentle. He swabbed my skin with alcohol where the pinpricks left behind by Gina Orban’s intrusion had just about healed, but when he started digging into my lower back with what felt like a screwdriver, I was scoured through with pain. Vidal was leaning over me, my arm braced between his knees, and whatever he was doing to me had paralysed me.
I was letting a lawyer operate on my spinal cord with a screwdriver, some morbid part of my mind commented. I strained to coordinate the muscles in my throat to yell out for him to stop, but he pre-empted me. ‘Don’t worry. It’s temporary. I’m not causing any damage.’ He shifted and brought a small spike, like a dental pick with a tweezers end, into my eyeline. The truck jerked again. ‘This is all I’m using. It’s not as bad as it feels, and I’ve done this be
fore.’
I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my face into the rough carpet as the truck jerked and bounced along. I clenched my jaw, wishing I had something to bite down on, and trying not to think of what would happen if the truck bumped at just the wrong time.
Vidal moved on to my mid-spine with a, ‘Hmm, okay.’ By concentrating on the ebbing throb in my lower back, I found I could ignore the new sear from the middle as he picked and scraped. Oh God, get it over with.
‘You must be very important,’ he said cheerfully after another minute or two, and he went on picking at the third site, at the base of my neck. I was forced to grunt for him to explain what he’d meant. ‘They left three tracers in you. One’s usually more than enough. It’s almost as if they were worried you’d have help getting them out.’
When he was done, he rubbed the wounds with antiseptic and stuck small, round plasters on them, like the type you put on an inconvenient pimple. He handed me a blanket, a pastel-teal supermarket fleece, and turned away as I pushed myself up. I draped the floral-scented blanket around my shoulders. Under the material, I rubbed at the plasters I could reach, feeling them spaced evenly down my spine, the deep throb and sting of the wounds beneath.
‘What does that mean?’ I said. ‘How exactly do these things work?’
He turned back to me and held out a swab on his palm, where three miniature metallic discs like little sequins lay, still covered in a coating of blood and yellowish flecks of what I didn’t want to think too hard about, that came from my body. For a moment I felt exposed and a pre-cortical shame, but I told myself to get over it.
‘They’re RFID chips. Based on the old-school tech people used to use to track their pets. You remember?’ I nodded. ‘But with lots of added goodness. That’s why you have to check yourself afterwards.’
‘You say it like everyone should know that. Like it’s common practice, just popping in to Green Valley.’
‘Gina must’ve put them in when she installed The I, under orders from Egus, I guess.’
‘You know Gina Orban?’ I said.
‘Of course.’ He shrugged. ‘She’s the liaison.’
‘It’s weird. It all seems so small-time. Even though there’s not much traffic, you’d think there’d be enough visitors to warrant a slightly bigger staff.’
Vidal frowned, a dark look, almost of pity, clouding his face. He muttered a small word under his breath, then after a pause, ‘So, it’s clear Egus wanted to keep track of you after you left.’
‘Is that all these things do?’ I asked. ‘Keep track of me?’
‘No.’ He bent over a large kitbag and removed what looked like a shirt wrapped in thin plastic. ‘Because they’re linked to the Green Valley ecosystem, they can affect your physiology and your psychology like a limited version of The I.’
A sick bolt cramped my gut. ‘You mean they can control my moods and my reactions?’
‘We’re not sure,’ he said. ‘There’s probably not the full mood-altering capability on these little things.’
‘Who’s “we”, Vidal? Who are these others, who apparently have my niece’s best interests at heart.’ David had said someone from inside was probably helping; whoever had faked Kira’s beacon and corrupted the playback. ‘It’s someone inside, isn’t it?’
He didn’t answer, so I went back to questions he seemed keen on answering. ‘So, these tracers? Could they make me see things?’ I asked instead. ‘Hallucinations?’
Looking over my shoulder, focussing a little way behind me with a look of caution, as if he saw the ram standing right there, as if he knew precisely what I was talking about, he said, ‘Yeah. That’s likely.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘I’m guessing you’ve seen a black ram, right?’
I felt a jolt through me and I crackled with focus. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s someone in Zeroth’s twisted vision of a Green Valley cop. For one thing, it checks on visitors and makes sure they’re following the rules. They’re big on rules there, you may be surprised to know.’
‘No. I’m not.’
Vidal was setting up other equipment as we spoke, tidying away the tools of the operation – like he’d done this a hundred times before. What exactly did I know about Vidal? Was I right to trust him? He may well have just put something else in me, and just be pretending to help me. But I’d never allowed myself to give in to formless paranoia. If I didn’t trust anyone – if I didn’t allow myself to trust my own instincts – I might as well stay at home for ever, waiting for the knock. I remembered his concern for Rainbow and the children. I believed he was helping them, at least.
‘Listen, Vidal,’ I said. ‘Can The I make things real? I mean, can it make things materialise?’
His hands froze when I spoke. After a second, he recovered himself and said, ‘There are rumours they were working on that before the Turn. It would have been the holy grail. They never managed.’
‘I think they’ve done it. I saw the ram in real life, not just a projection or residue.’
‘Outside Green Valley?’
I nodded.
‘No, never. They weren’t close to it, even in the environment. It would have been impossible for them to just magic things up wherever they liked. Laws of physics. It would always be reliant on the infrastructure.’
‘I saw it. It was real. It attacked me.’ I pushed the blanket away from my shoulder, showing him the bruise.
‘Not possible,’ he said. ‘It’s a biodigital projection like the rest of The I’s environment. It reached you through the tracers. You must know how convincing it can feel.’ But he didn’t catch my eye as he said this, afraid either of looking a madwoman in the eye or lying to my face.
So, feasibly, signals from the mirror network Vidal had set up in his office had caused me to see the ram outside Green Valley, that was all. Maybe I wasn’t going crazy. It felt good to have a rational explanation to hang onto, no matter how tenuous – but still, I didn’t like how The I could make such a fool of me.
‘Anyhow, you won’t be seeing the ram any more,’ he said, the three metal tracers rattling as he dropped them into a canister. He carefully opened the seal along the top of a plastic ziplock bag and removed the folded navy blue material from it. It was a shirt, long-sleeved, thin material, like a thermal undershirt, but as Vidal unfolded it, he exposed a nest of wires in the middle of the parcel. ‘The next step,’ he said, passing the shirt to me, ‘is to get you on our interface, the safe version. The open-source one, let’s say.’
I almost told him to stop there and take me back to Stanton – I didn’t want anyone installing anything into my body ever again – but I had to know for myself whether Vidal was telling the truth. Were Kira and the other children better off inside or outside Green Valley? There was only one way to find out.
Vidal turned away in another show of courtliness, which I thought was redundant since he’d already been poking around in my flesh, digging out parts of me. I dropped the blanket behind me and pulled the shirt on. It fitted quite closely, but with a bit of droop in the biceps and around the chest; I wondered who had worn it before me, as I worked the wires out of the back and flipped the close-fitting hood over my head. Had he brought Sofie into Green Valley?
‘So, I’ll be able to access The I’s feed with this, just like with their implants?’
‘More or less,’ he said, as he adjusted the wires running along the shirt’s spine and up over my skull, clipping transponders into the studs there. ‘There are some differences. For one thing, this is a shitload less invasive. You can take it off any time, or you can turn it off any time. For another, there’s no aversion control.’
‘So why bother using it? Why not just go straight in without any interface?’
‘You want to see what they see, remember,’ he said.
‘Yeah. Makes sense.’
He stopped reeling the wires and looked straight at my face, his eyes flickering between my eyes and my mouth. ‘Remember, Luci
e, I’m taking you in today to see what Green Valley really is, because you want to know. But that reality is something nobody should ever have to see. The I’s illusion is what makes the place… bearable.’ He handed me two fresh I lenses in a case.
‘What do I need these for?’ I asked.
‘You still need to see the simulation. But you’ll be seeing our version, and it won’t be controlling your mind.’
The truck slowed and I could hear the crunch of gravel below us. Vidal zipped himself into his own electronic vest. ‘If you’re ready. And remember, you don’t have to do this.’
‘Let’s get on with it.’ I stood up, moving towards the truck’s door.
‘Uh-uh,’ Vidal said. ‘We’re not just going to stroll in. We have to get in here.’ He lifted the red lid of a white plastic skip, like a hospital laundry trolley, strapped to the truck’s wall, and half-hoisted himself over the lip before turning to me. ‘You need a hand?’
I pushed by him, flipped myself into the skip and squatted into the base. At least it was clean.
‘Thought not.’ Vidal wedged himself in beside me. ‘I usually do this alone. Sorry.’ I peered through one of three small holes drilled under the skip’s handle, trying to ignore Vidal’s shifting and grunting behind me and the press of his limbs on my back as he adjusted his body in the small space.
Basson reversed the truck to a stop, then came around and opened the rear door. Light glared from outside, despite the fact that it was only a textured expanse of wet grey dawn beyond the truck’s rear doors.
‘You’re a good man, Roger,’ Vidal said.
‘Yeah, we both know I’m not doing this for the benefit of my eternal soul,’ Basson said bashfully, patting his pocket.
‘Nonetheless,’ Vidal said.
It took a moment’s adjustment to identify the delivery bay set into the shadowy windward side of Green Valley’s shell, barred by anonymous steel roller doors; the only marking apart from years’ worth of rust, dents and hurried patch-up was a faded sign, stencilled in Zeroth’s corporate typeface to the lower corner of the roller shutter: DS-793 A-F.
Green Valley Page 17
