by Unknown
“Oh, good god,” said Don witheringly. “You think because we’ve splashed around in it a lot that we’re some kind of jam whisperers now?”
“You do have the most experience with it.”
“I’m sorry. We’re as lost as you are,” said Tim tightly, folding his arms.
“Of course, you were the ones who broke the window on the third floor in the first place . . .” said Kathy. She never spoke in anything other than understanding concern, but the merest hint of threat hid in that last ellipsis like a troll under a bridge. “Well, anyway, the workday must continue. Come with me; we need to go over your salvaging agenda for the day.”
“You still think this place has good leadership?” whispered Tim challengingly, as we followed her swaying hips.
“So they’ve got bad intelligence,” answered Don levelly. “I’d have thought you’d be glad to find some common ground at last.”
Kathy led us into the department where her new office was apparently located. With the eerie red glow, the sticky heat, and the partially disassembled cubicle farm, the place had started looking like a postmodern hell.
“All right then,” said Kathy when the three of us took the three prepared seats in front of her desk. “We have had to increase our quota for food supplies, now that the community has absorbed the surviving Briar Center refugees. Fortunately, our lookouts and Intelligence department have put together a rather detailed map of food sources throughout the nearby city that should still hopefully be well stocked.”
She spread a road map of the city center over her desk. It was sprinkled with red crosses, which had all additionally been circled with green highlighter, because there were a lot of people in each department who were constantly looking for ways to look busy.
“Your best locations for today would be the food court at the top of the MacArthur Center and the restaurants on the upper level of the Wintergarden,” she said, pointing them out. “Now, there’s a pet shop directly between those two. David would be grateful if you gave it a quick once-over for dogs or anything large enough to run a treadmill.”
“What if we find another survivor settlement?” asked Tim.
Kathy’s pen rattled rapidly against the map as she considered this. “That would obviously depend on whether or not they are infringing upon our territory.”
“And what consists of our territory?”
She examined the map, then swept her open palm across the whole thing in a circular motion. “Pretty much all of that. But you should definitely take a diplomatic approach at first.”
“At first?” Tim folded his arms. “So don’t break out the napalm launchers until we get the order?”
“That’s right,” said Kathy, oblivious to sarcasm. She returned her finger to the location of the pet store. “Now, even if you don’t have any luck with meeting the dog quota, the Agriculture department have also asked if you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye out for something they could use as fertilizer—”
A sudden, short, sharp, cracking sound put a full stop on her sentence and stirred me from a light doze. At first I thought Tim had lashed out at the idea that he, a former pseudoruler of a rival settlement, should rummage around in the bottoms of guinea pig cages for bits of dried-out shit, but he hadn’t moved. Then there was another krk and all three of us jumped and pointed at the window behind Kathy.
A stark white line, curving and bending weirdly like a bolt of lightning, crawled across the glass. By the time Kathy had turned around far enough to see it, it had bisected the entire window. At several points along its length, tiny bubbles of jam appeared and began to swell. As we stared, they expanded into peas, then olives, then gumballs, then stopped, quivering as if ready to burst.
Kathy made the mistake of reaching out a finger towards the closest one, perhaps responding to some inbuilt instinct to pop bubble wrap. When it caught the scent of her flesh, the bubble deformed and became a horizontal stalactite, straining itself forward to reach her.
Then four more cracks appeared all at once, forming an X in the glass around the pointed bubble. They scuttled rapidly along the window, and at the moment they touched the frame, the glass shattered.
A wave of jam forced its way into the room, sucking Kathy into its depths as if it were popping a boiled sweet into its gaping mouth. The rest of us were already off our overturned chairs and backing towards the door, as the jam slurped its way along the carpet toward us, eating up Kathy’s meticulously made bed and the papers on her desk.
The intrusion hadn’t gone unnoticed by the mentally keener members of the Acquisitions team. Most of them were already making for the stairs. Cracks were appearing on every window in the level, like partially completed spider webs. I heard metal groaning like a sleepy bear and another window gave way in the north wall, flooding hastily vacated cubicles with a second wave of jam, which spread lazily through the room like honeymooners making themselves comfortable on a hotel bed. It didn’t take long for the south wall to bow to peer pressure.
With jam encroaching from all sides, it was getting very crowded around the door to the stairwell. Even life in the saunalike environment of Hibatsu had done little to reduce the doughy, bell-shaped builds of the topless office workers. A heaving mass of sweating flab had formed and was now attempting to shrink away from the expanding jam like a drop of water on a hot stove, but a middle-aged secretarial woman and a bespectacled IT sort had become wedged in the door frame.
Don, babbling incoherent, angry syllables, took a risky step away from the mass, then shoulder barged the human lump like a Japanese train guard. It quivered, but refused to give. The safe area of floor had shrunk down to about seven feet across, a circle of institutional gray in a vibrant crimson carpet.
Don and Tim exchanged nods, then both of them took a step back and, on the count of three, threw themselves at the blockage. A tidal wave of struggling limbs and pale flesh tumbled out into the stairwell. Everyone was fighting to get up the stairs, struggling over each other like bees in a hive. I saw Tim crawling over the mob, madly bringing his fists and feet down to push back the others as he clawed ahead, which would have been pretty damning if he had any political ambitions left.
“Tim!” I called, grabbing the banister and pulling my entire body up the steps. “What are EEP.”
Someone’s hand grabbed my ankle as I planted it in the human quagmire. I yelped, pulling in vain at the vicelike grip, before it suddenly relaxed. The jam had reached the door, and had started with the base of the pile before it moved on to the topping.
In the end, all but four or five bureaucrats were able to jump away and get up the first set of stairs, where we paused to watch the jam. It gradually leveled out about four steps up, expanding downstairs to hook up with its manifestation on the third floor.
But then it kept moving. A miniature wave appeared in the surface and threw itself against the next step up. Then another, and it caressed the top of the sixth step.
“It’s still rising,” I said aloud.
No one needed further encouragement. Within seconds the surviving members of the Acquisitions department had sped upstairs en masse, leaving me alone with Don and Tim. As the crowd thinned down to the three of us, the jam ceased climbing the stairs, one last wave flopping poutily backwards.
“Well, this all puts rather a dampener on things, doesn’t it,” said Don with grim annoyance.
“I’m gonna go talk to X,” I said.
“Why?” asked Tim, hugging himself.
I was already climbing the stairs. “She knows something about the jam. Maybe she knows why it’s doing this.”
“Great idea,” sighed Don, still staring at the jam. “I mean, she was evasive about it for the first ten million deaths but I reckon five more will tip it.”
—
I was quite glad that Don and Tim didn’t join me on my quest to interview X. The fact that she knew about the jam seemed to be an open secret to everyone but her, and I was afraid she’d lock up if I didn’t spea
k to her alone, especially if I had to bring up the whole “responsibility” business.
I found her on the roof. I wasn’t sure if she’d been assigned a job, but if she had it must have been a pretty lackadaisical one. I strongly suspected she’d been given some kind of diplomatic immunity, like what Deirdre had. I found her staring down into the jam, head bowed.
“X!” I called. She turned and watched me approach, confused. “X, listen. I need to know what’s going on with the jam. It’s doing something weird.”
Each part of her face shifted one by one into a carefully neutral expression. “I don’t know why you’d think I’d know more about the jam than anyone else.”
I put my hands on my thighs and panted, still out of breath from the run up the stairs. I didn’t need this. “X, please, be serious. The jam’s rising. Some people have already died.”
Her eyebrows rose, shocked. They waggled subtly for a few seconds as if engaged in some silent debate, before they both settled back down. “If that’s the case, then you should stop wasting time trying to get me to—”
“I know you’re responsible for the jam.”
I’d gone with a sudden instinct, fearing the conversation was ending too quickly. Every single part of her turned to slightly reddened stone. I chewed my lip guiltily, as if I’d just yelled out a swear at a funeral.
“What did you say?” she quavered.
I considered backtracking, but for better or worse I was in this, now. “I know you’re responsible for the jam. Or at least you think you are.”
“How do you . . .” She stopped for a deep breath. “What makes you think I think I’m responsible for the jam?”
“I overheard.” Like a runaway truck speeding down a hill towards a puppy and duckling farm, I told her about the entire conversation I’d overheard on the roof of the Briar Center, where Y had assured her that Hibatsu would provide for them and she’d made her confession. She listened placidly, but I noticed her eyeballs bulge by about a millimeter every five or so words.
“I-I don’t recall saying . . .” she began.
“Don’t, just . . . just don’t,” I said.
“So now that you have this information, what do you intend to do with it?” she asked. The foot on the end of her crossed leg was jiggling spasmodically.
I sighed. “I don’t intend anything. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I can’t even imagine what I could blackmail you for. I just want to know why the jam is rising and I think you can tell me.”
“I would have thought it would be obvious,” she said in a suddenly much lower and more resentful voice.
I was momentarily stunned by her directness, but recovered quickly. “Erm. Apparently not.”
“You’ve observed that the jam can extend parts of itself towards organic material, right?”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
“The effect amplifies the more organic material it can sense, especially living material. When you have a lot of living things clustered together in the same place, the jam finds it a lot easier to detect them. That’s why the jam has risen around this settlement. It’s designed to prevent pockets of resistance—” She stopped herself and reddened. “I mean, it looks like it would have been designed to . . . I mean, this is all an educated guess, obviously.”
In my private thoughts I speculated about the exact nature of that education. “So why has it suddenly risen now?” The answer hit me before she could reply. “Oh god. It’s because of us, isn’t it. Now the plastic people have been absorbed, the Hibatsu population’s gone up far enough . . . Hang on, how come we never noticed any of this happening back at the Briar Center?”
“Because the residents there were all moving around in the jam already. It would only have been trying to move sideways, and that wouldn’t be noticeable. Here there’s a huge cluster of humanity hovering just out of the jam’s reach. Of course it’s going to rise. It’s like blotting paper in water. What exactly has the jam done?”
“It’s gotten as high as level four and I think it’s going to keep coming.”
“Okay. Take a quick look down there and tell me if the jam has risen any further since you saw it last.”
I stepped to the edge of the building and looked down, obeying with flustered excitement before remembering how many stories lay between me and ground level. The vertigo swam about my head and stomach like a pair of cackling ghosts, but I forced myself to focus on the jam. It was so far down it was impossible to tell if it’d risen any higher, since the fourth floor and the fifth floor looked pretty much the same from—
“There you are!” came Angela’s voice.
I spun around. Angela had just emerged from the stairwell door, but the slightly more pressing detail was that X had silently moved directly behind me, and was frozen with surprise at my sudden turn. For an instant I saw that her hands were splayed out as if preshove before she clasped them together into a more neutral arrangement.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Me? Nothing!”
Angela was now beside us, filming as always. “Hey, we’ve been called to a meeting with the board of directors. That’s us three, Don, Tim, and a few other lads. Right . . . now . . .” The space between her words lengthened as she noticed that I was staring at X with tight-lipped terror. “What . . . what are you doing up here?”
“Is this something to do with the jam’s behavior?” said X, very deliberately turning away from me and towards Angela.
“Oh, don’t you even pretend you don’t already know this. It broke all the windows on level four.”
We started on our way to the top-floor conference room. “It broke windows?” said X, as we descended the stairs. “I never even considered that.” She stroked an invisible beard nervously. “I suppose the jam must have risen to the point that it acquired enough of a constricting effect to cause damage to the building’s—” She stopped when she noticed Angela watching and listening intently.
“Ye-es?” she said, from behind her omnipresent camera.
“I mean, it’s just common sense,” said X defensively. “Common, everyday intuitions like normal people have.”
When we were on the director’s level, Tim and Don were already waiting outside the main conference room door, along with a group of around twelve former plastic people.
“Ah yes, normal, everyday people like the ones who work for places called Human Extinction Protocol Libra,” said Angela in a deliberately conspicuous voice. “Have you told everyone about that card we found, Travis?”
“Oh, give it a rest,” snapped Don. His arms were still as folded as they’d been in the stairwell and appeared to be locked in place with shock.
“This is all part of the scheme, I know it!” said Angela. “They’re not satisfied with just silencing the people; they’ve got to silence the whole building, too!”
“Um, could someone please tell me what’s going on?” asked Deirdre petulantly.
The meeting room door opened slightly and a young man who had apparently been nominated Kathy’s understudy poked his head out. “We’re ready for you all, now.”
Our rather ungainly group filed in and took up position in a cluster against the wall. There was a tension in the air, like the pause between the words aim and fire.
“Thank you for coming in on such short notice,” said Gary. His fingers were interlaced like the jaws of a steel trap. “I expect you already know what this is about.”
“No, I don’t,” exclaimed Deirdre, glancing up and down the line. “What happened? Did someone die?”
Gary coughed meaningfully and she shut her mouth. “The loss of level four is going to be difficult to bounce back from. And it seems like an appropriate leap of logic to assume that the jam is rising because of our recent sudden population growth.”
A cold lump was gathering in the pit of my stomach. I risked a look over at my peers, and judging by their faces, something similar was interfering with their digestive systems, too.
&nbs
p; “The motion was carried that we should systematically reduce the population by one individual each evening and measure the jam level each morning,” said Gary matter-of-factly. “Continuing until the jam has stopped rising or begun receding. This should effectively minimize the number of terminations.”
“Terminations?!” I cried.
“Thrown from the roof. We’re going to do it in a sort of sacrificial way,” said Philip excitedly. “Don’t worry; the jam makes for a pretty soft landing.”
“Now, we don’t expect anyone to volunteer for this,” said Gary. He paused lengthily to give someone a chance to defy his expectation, but no one went for it. “That’s why we’d like all of you to talk it over amongst yourselves and nominate one of your number democratically.”
“What? Why us?!” barked Don.
“We decided to go through candidates according to reverse order of arrival,” said Gary. “All of you were very recently inducted into our community as a consequence of the conflict between our settlement and the Briar Center.”
X put up a hand. “I nominate Travis.”
“What?!”
Gary put up his hands. “Now, now, please let this be a group decision. Can we leave this with you and ask that you come back with a unanimous decision by around six o’clock?”
Everyone looked a little stunned. Tim stepped forward. “Look, you have to have realized this isn’t necessary. We’ll just leave. All of us, we’ll just get in the boat and go. We won’t be a problem anymore.”
“Of course we considered that option,” said David. “But our feeling was, we’ve only just gotten rid of one rival settlement within our territory, and planting the seeds for another would just be counterproductive.”
“So, six o’clock, then?” said Gary, shuffling his papers in a finalizing kind of way.
I glanced along the line and noticed everyone else doing the same, waiting for one of us to light the fire of defiance under the rest. But lighting the fire was taking too long and Gary’s papers were being shuffled with more and more meaningful violence with each passing moment, so the former plastic man nearest the door took the initiative and walked morosely out of the room. The rest of the group started following without haste.
