Started with Errors (Relative Industries Series Book 2)

by Joanna Beaumont

  With their eyes locked, Lana handed her the envelopes.

  “Thank you,” Beth said.

  Beth placed the envelope pile on the seat next to her and dragged a finger down the list of names on her screen. “Lana Underwood, did you say?” She ticked her name from the list and looked up at her. “Take a seat.”

  With her breath still suspended, Lana stepped past Beth, grabbing hold of headrests on the way to the back of the bus. She sat down and watched the back of Beth’s head. Beth worked in RI. Beth worked in RI.

  Callum dropped in the seat next to Lana. “She took so long for a moment I thought your name wasn’t on the list.”

  She smiled nervously at Callum.

  “Are you okay? Don’t worry about Alex and the black hole thing.”

  Alex was the least of her worries. Beth was her old university friend, and she knew she was Lucy Green.

  The bus stopped, and Lana followed Callum when he rose, took a seat in time adjustment, pulled down the harness, pulled up the harness and entered Zone 12.

  Lana was on autopilot while her mind spun with worry. What if Beth didn’t keep quiet? They’d been friends once. She hoped they still were.

  Callum spoke, but the waves of anxiety oscillating through her body drowned out his voice. She barely noticed the towering floors above her head while she followed the rest of the group along the echoing Zone 12 walkway. They stopped and gathered around Beth.

  Beth called out the name on each envelope then paused, gazing at one in her hand.

  Lana knew why she was hesitating. It had to be hers.

  “Lana Underwood!” Beth called.

  Lana stepped towards her.

  “There you go, Lana Underwood.” Beth leaned closer. “Meet me in the North Bar tonight at 7:30.”

  Lana took the envelope and found her space back with the others next to Callum.

  Beth stepped away from the group and looked up at the huge digital clocks fixed on the smooth vanilla-cream walls.

  “Back inside Zone 0 the date is April 26 and the time is 10:25 p.m. Here inside Zone 12, the date is April 26-twenty-five. That means, today is the twenty-fifth day of April 26. And the time in Zone 12 is 3:30 p.m.”

  Like a tour guide, Beth strolled down the walkway, and the group followed behind her. Lana stayed hidden, occasionally craning between heads to catch a glimpse of her.

  Beth stopped and faced the group. “You are all expected to volunteer. Zone 12 is a self-sustaining facility producing its own food and desalinating water from the surrounding ocean, and that’s only possible if we each do our share.

  “The needs of the ten thousand people inside Zone 12, in just one Zone 0 day, are the same as a city with a population 360 times that.

  “Zone 12 has been operational for just over three Zone 0 months and taking into account night time shut downs has clocked in around fifty years of technological advancement. Some of those advances in transport and security you will have seen rolled out across the New Cities in the last month.

  “We have one thousand employees starting work or leaving us every Zone 0 day. And most staff will work inside Zone 12 for ten years. So, with ten thousand people recruited every ten days there are plenty of jobs in here for people at home and excellent retirement perks for twenty-years service.”

  Lana remembered Lewis at home, desperately trying to qualify for a job at RI. He shouldn’t bother. They were nothing more than fodder for the Zone 12 time acceleration machine to chew up and spit out. Accelerating time was one way to sort out the jobs shortage.

  “There are opportunities to take part in trials, and trial activity is listed on notice boards around the facility. I suggest you do not take part in any limb regeneration trials just yet.” Beth laughed. “There is a trial running on the SS6000, the next incarnation of the sense simulator. Most of you will have one of those at home in your kitchen. So the sense simulator should serve as an easy introduction to trial activity. If you need any further information or have any problems while you’re settling in, please contact me first. My number is on the back of your envelopes.”

  Callum nudged Lana. “Which room are you in?”

  Lana shrugged and absently handed her envelope to him. He rummaged inside it and pulled out her keycard.

  “I’ll come by later,” he said, dropping the key card back inside.

  “No, I’ll see you in the lab tomorrow. I’m going straight to bed. Period pain.”

  His top lip curled. “Oh,” he said, handing the envelope back.

  The group stopped near elevators, and Beth continued speaking. “If any of you are willing to share living quarters, we’re looking for volunteers. Next year we’ll be operating slightly over capacity.”

  Callum nudged Lana. “Shall we share?”

  “No,” she said, more harshly that she meant to.

  He was taken aback, but Lana was too busy watching Beth’s every move to be too concerned.

  Callum took the elevator with three others and watched Lana.

  Lana waited for the next elevator and watched Beth.

  In her new living quarters Lana sat heavy on her bed and gazed at her reflection in the full-length wall mirror opposite it.

  After the night flight her body was in an unfamiliar half-state. Her eyes lids wanted to close, but the rush of adrenaline flooding through her body wouldn’t let her rest. It never entered her mind she might be recognised by an employee in RI. What if Beth wasn’t the only one? They had a thousand new staff coming in each day. Her time in RI could be over before it started.

  She’d tried to disguise her appearance with a different hair and eye colour, but that wouldn’t fool anyone who had once known her well, like Beth had. They’d started university in the same academic year. Lana read biology and Beth studied software engineering: virtual reality gaming if she remembered correctly. When they met at a Youth Action Group meeting they’d both known they were GAV positive for two years. Under normal circumstances their paths might never have crossed; they were in different halls of residence and studied in different parts of the university.

  Paige had wanted to start the Youth Action Group, and she’d asked Lana to help her. At first, Lana was reluctant. She’d accepted her infertility status but Paige couldn’t. Paige said she’d be the face of the YAG and would take care of everything. Lana’s involvement would be minimal. Paige would print out the leaflets, and all Lana had to do was hand them out at university.

  When sign-ups to the group flooded in they assumed the unaffected had signed up to help the affected, and that encouraged Paige to travel to different university campuses and distribute more leaflets. Soon the YAG was active at every university across the UK.

  Women kept their fertility status secret. It wasn’t something to brag about on social media, so no one knew who was GAV positive or negative, and it was impossible to tell from a woman’s appearance.

  The first meetings of the Youth Action Group took place on university campuses, and they were focused on fund raising for the new research charities. They would run miles, bungee jump, bake cakes, sell jumble, anything they could.

  But the YAG wanted the government to fund the medical research as a matter of priority. In their minds offering tax relief on charitable donations wasn’t enough. The YAG said the government should treat infertility research differently than, say, cancer research. So the YAG moved from fund raising to campaigning.

  When Beth approached Paige and Lana after a meeting the YAG had been up and running for nearly two years. During that meeting Paige had shown the sign-up rate per month on a chart. They had millions of women signed up. Beth offered to run an anonymous online survey, so they could assess for themselves the proportion of sign-ups affected by the virus. Beth said she couldn’t understand why the sign-up was so high and neither could anyone else.

  Millions of women replied to that survey, and soon the estimate of the number of affected was significantly above the numbers published by the government.

  The su
rvey revealed every post-thirty-five was GAV positive. No wonder support for the group was overwhelming.

  In December ’57, they presented their results to the government, but soon after that both Paige and Lucy Green’s personal-trust-scores plummeted. Each day, they watched the truth-index associated with the YAG website and their social media postings lower a little. They didn’t make it too obvious. It was an incremental reduction until their online presence disappeared.

  Any social media posting or website mentioning the result was taken down too.

  The only evidence the YAG-UK had ever existed was reported by the search engines under the heading, some search results were removed due to their truth-index.

  The media labelled them scaremongers and spreaders of fake news. The police took Paige into custody and held her for questioning. There were rumours of treason.

  But the YAG had taken hold across the world. Countries had run their own surveys and published their own statistics. All governments with testing programs had lied to their affected.

  Then the extremists took over and hijacked the YAG's peaceful rally-cries.

  Their chant Research-Not-Pensions was taken to violent extreme and pre-thirty-fives, mainly those over retirement age, were jumped and beaten up on the streets on their way to buy a newspaper or a pint of milk. Homes and care homes were set on fire while the old people inside played bingo or filled in crosswords.

  And while shouting Research-Not-Social-Care a series of frenzied assaults took place on the sick and disabled and those on the state-guaranteed-salary.

  Families turned on families and potential victims were reported to the YAG. Anybody taking money out of the system took money away from research and became a target. The terrorists didn’t care who else they took out so long as they murdered a pre-thirty-five.

  The first phase of attacks was uncoordinated, but in the second phase they stepped up their game and implemented a simple but effective strategy—mark and torch. They understood critical mass and how to break the system.

  Even with the extra resources martial law provided, the infrastructure couldn’t cope. Guarding every pre-thirty-five wasn’t possible. And worse still, the police, fire brigade, intelligence agencies and the armed forces had their own post-thirty-fives, their own enemies within, conflicted by the need to protect and the need to protest.

  When the war started in 2058, the post-thirty-fives were under the age of twenty-three. They were a minority in law-keeping organisations, but even small bugs in the system can be enough to thwart efforts to maintain order.

  The markers lived locally. They knew the people, the area, the pre-thirty-fives, and they marked homes to torch with a red cross.

  People lived with the red cross on their door for days before anything happened. If it was removed, it reappeared within hours. Then, within a short time period across the country, the burning started.

  Lana stepped towards the mirror, untying the silk, dotted scarf tied around her neck. She lifted her chin and touched the skin near her collar bone.

  The grafted skin was a shade paler than the rest.

  Becoming someone else during the chaos was easy. Arson destroyed paper trails, and the post-thirty-fives deleted and altered records in their own work places.

  Paige provided Lana with a fake licence. During the war, Paige knew post-thirty-fives gone rogue in every industry. Lana Underwood was the first name Paige thought of, prompted by the discovery of yet another dead body with a similar name on the news. And Lana Underwood accepted a transfer into a New City hospital with a specialist burns unit under her new, made-up name. But without a university degree to her fake name she had to earn her job at RI back, and so she competed in the virtual employment environment with thousands of others. Fortunately, having the relevant knowledge, it took one year to get a job, not four.

  She felt along the mirror’s edges and tugged at it. It was fixed to the wall.

  Frustrated, she gave up and from her bag removed a black marker-pen. She drew a line down through the middle of the mirror. Then using long stokes, she etched to the right of the line, slowly and carefully at first. Then she scribbled faster and faster until there was no mirror in which she could see her awful burns.

  She never saw her grandparents’ bodies lying side by side in death. The coroner said they’d died in their sleep and had not woken up, choking or calling out her name. But how could that be? When that was all she ever heard in her nightmares.

  She removed her top and trousers and hid her right side beneath the lines. She gazed at her left side. That was the perfect side of her, and the side of her she wanted Callum to know. The side that didn’t have to lie. She wasn’t sure how Callum would react if he saw her scars. Would he be horrified, repulsed even? Would he still want her? She’d never allow herself to be vulnerable enough to find out.

  Chapter Ten

  Lana lifted her Zone 12 mobile phone from the desk in the sitting area. Callum had messaged her. She wanted to get close to him, but if she did, she’d have to tell him lies, and covering up lies always led to more lies.

  Eventually she’d slip up, probably when they were both emotionally invested. Her heart would be broken and so would his. A future without him had already left a gaping hole of regret inside her. Without replying she placed the phone back down.

  Her IT login information and a map were inside the A4-sized brown envelope on her desk. She searched for the North Bar on the map and then folded it and pushed it inside her back pocket.

  7:15 p.m. She couldn’t be late.

  She closed the apartment door behind her and took the stairs to the ground floor.

  The scale of the building was overwhelming. A sink for the world’s hope and despair, but she wasn’t ready to give up hope or go home yet.

  On the walkway she passed two guards. Don’t show fear. Guards can smell it. She tried to look casual, but the faked casualness must have made her conspicuous because the guards narrowed their eyes at her. How could she possibly keep up this pretence? If Beth was to be her enemy too, she may as well pack her bags now.

  Lana pushed open the swing door into the North Bar.

  Ripe body-odour had fused with the artificially perfumed air, the air conditioning overwhelmed by the heat from those huddled inside.

  A frazzled woman serving drinks clunked bottles of beer down on the polished steel bar then wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

  Lana wouldn’t volunteer until someone told her she must, and it wouldn’t be in the bar. Preferably it would be inside a small storage cupboard where she couldn’t bump into anyone.

  She uncoiled the hair tucked behind her ears and smoothed it down, hiding as much of her face as she could.

  Beth was alone, sitting in a booth. Lana took in her expression. Was that a hint of a smile? Was there some small welcome on her face? She hoped so.

  Lana sat opposite Beth, cowering like a scared dog. “Hi,” she said tentatively.

  “Lucy, it’s so good to see you. What happened? You disappeared from uni. We were only two months away from final exams. Paige said you were dead,” she whispered.

  Lana’s mindless panic disappeared. She’d not expected the warm reception. She needed a friend. A friend she didn’t need to lie too. She pulled the scarf down at her neck. “This happened.”

  Beth stared at her scars. “Shit.”

  Lana gave a sad smile. “And you haven’t seen all the scars yet. They still get painful even now. I can hide it beneath clothing and fortunately my face was okay.” Lana smoothed the scarf back into position. She checked around the bar then leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “After the results of the survey, while I was home over the Easter holidays, the YAG set our house on fire. Our parents died in a car crash when I was seven. We grew up with our grandparents. They were both asleep inside the house. Paige and me…we’d been out together for the evening. And when we came back the house was on fire. The fire fighters didn’t come. Fifty houses were torched that
night on our street. I tried to rescue them. I tried to put out the flames. We should never have gone out and left them.” She dropped her head into her hands and took deep breaths.

  “Can I have a drink?” Lana asked.

  Beth pushed her own glass of lemon water towards her.

  Lana had meant her own drink. She needed a minute alone to calm down. She wiped the sticky lip-gloss mark from the glass, clutched the glass with trembling hands and sipped.

  “My grandparents both died from smoke inhalation, and I was in and out of the hospital for two years,” Lana whispered.

  “I’m so sorry. Everything went crazy after the survey’s result came out,” Beth said.

  “I know.” Lana swallowed down the painful lump constricting her throat. “It’s not much better now. I hate living in the New Cities and pretending to be someone else. I’ve been so lonely without Paige and my grandparents. I’m too scared to get close to anyone in case they find out about me.”

  Beth reached for Lana’s hand. “I won’t say a word to anyone. I promise.”

  Her warm touch reminded her of what life could be like if she ever allowed herself to be loved again. Lana wiped her face dry. “Thank you. You don’t know what that means.”

  “Did you get your degree?”

  “Lana didn’t, but Lucy received a posthumous degree. I’d completed all the course work by then.”

  Beth gripped Lana’s hand again. “Poor you.”

  For seconds they watched each other.

  “But on the TV, Paige said you died.”

  “I wanted out of it all. I wanted to disappear and not be Paige Green’s sister anymore, and I wanted to use my degree and make a difference. We both decided it was for the best for both of us. Paige would use my death as a reason to start a political party, condemn the violence and fight legitimately for properly funded research.”

  “The Youth Party worked,” Beth said. “Everyone welcomed it. The government would have done anything to bring calm to the situation. It was desperate.”

  They were quiet for a while, Beth shaking her head and Lana’s expression solemn.