by James Smythe
She has videos on the computer, kept on the desktop. They’re taken from a forum about these things, where she’s nothing more than a username that bears no relation to who she is. numbers and letters chosen at random, on purpose. She doesn’t know if the forums are monitored – or who would be monitoring them – but just in case. She grabbed the videos over one long weekend, determined in case the site ever suddenly disappeared. She’s renamed the videos with numbers, so that she knows what order she’s learning them in, and she’s already watched them tens of times, but never with anything to practise on. It’s different when there’s a practical application. Plus, there’s a difference in the firmware in the Machines, and she needs to know exactly what she’s playing with. She thinks that she should check it, so she goes back to the bedroom. It’s the first time she’s been surprised: before, she pulled the paper off, and exposed it piece by piece. now she sees how big it is for the first time, and the mass of blackness seems to make its own negative light, casting the rest of the room in a shadow of its own making. and it seems so tall to her. Impossibly tall. The ceilings are high, ten foot, and this wasn’t much taller than the first removal man, but it seems to fill almost every bit of the space. She tries to see on top of it but can’t, so she idles in front of it. The screen is still active but on standby, the colour and brightness dampened. She presses it and the whole Machine whirs into life. The noise – she hadn’t noticed it before, but it must have been there – is like gears, as if this were some nineteenth-century apparatus. Something almost industrial. She knows that this is a computer, and that what’s inside is fans and microchips and cables to carry processes from one part to another; and the hard drive, never forget the hard drive, which is both the brain and the heart of the Machine – but the noise is unlike any that she’s heard. She supposes that she’s forgotten: that things have changed since this was cutting edge. She thinks about the newer models of the Machine, the ones after this. how much one of them would have cost her, even if it could be hacked and updated like this one has been. That she would have been here in a decade still, forming her plan, slowly losing herself, alone for so long, with Vic’s body rotting more and more. Less her husband with each passing day, week, month, year.
The screen gets lighter, and she sees the button labelled ABOUT. She presses it, and there, a year and a firmware number. She reasons that this must have been one of the first commercial models, before even her mother started on the programme, and well before Vic was using one. She pulls the crown down from the dock and the screen changes, updates. PURGE, it invokes, or REPLENISH. Like this is some sort of advertisement. She’s seen the language on both beauty products and bleaches. She doesn’t put the crown on her head, because she dare not.
She’s thought about it, sometimes: as she’s tried to get to sleep, lying in bed, thinking about how easy it would be to wear a crown, to press the buttons and to talk about Vic and herself, and their old life together. To talk her way through everything that she’s lost. To press the PURGe button and feel it all drift away. Vic used to say that it felt like when you take painkillers for a wound. he said that they gave him heavy stuff after the IED went off and put its shrapnel in his shoulder and his neck, and once he’d popped them there was a sense that it had once hurt, but that it was like an echo of the pain was all that was left, or the memory of the pain. Like it’s been rubbed hard and then left alone. That’s what the Machine did. he rarely spoke about it as time went on, but in the early days, before Beth was allowed anywhere near the process, when Vic still knew what he was doing and why he was doing it, he frequently used to describe it to Beth when he got home. They said it would be two weeks before he’d start to lose what it was he was running from, and it was, almost to the day. after that, Beth didn’t like to say anything more. he knew that it was time for his treatments and he didn’t question them. Beth looks at the bar for copying Vic’s files over, and it’s hardly gone down.
Come on, she says, though it’s not like she can do anything with it here and now. She lies on the bed next to the Machine, a bed that she’s never actually slept in because it felt wrong, somehow, ever since she decorated the room. She watches the bar and shuts her eyes, and thinks about Vic and what he could be.
When the company behind the Machine announced that they were working on a cure – they would put the word in inverted commas, because they were so cautious with how they went about presenting it to the world after the last time – they said that the technology side of things was flawless.
They said, We can take a person and make them whole again.
Beth – everybody – doubted it, but then they showed videos of a man and his progress. In the earliest videos he shuffled like a zombie and needed feeding and changing and his eyes lolled back in his head even as his loved ones poked and prodded him, asking him questions, trying to get a response. In later ones he fed himself and walked, and even responded to his name. They showed old video of him ignoring persistent, insistent calls – Shaun, Shaun! – over and over again. Then they invited him up onto the stage where they were making the announcement: and they did it solely by calling his name. Once. Shaun! he ran up, and he shook their hands. he looked at the cameras, and his gaze was a bit glassy-eyed but he was mostly there. he waved at the crowd, and then they asked his wife up there as well, and they embraced on stage to applause. Standing ovation: he is healed.
And this can only get better, the men from the company promised. Beth saw it in their eyes: the idea that this was somehow their redemption. The thing that might stop their houses being burned and people fighting with them in the streets and the headlines on the tabloid sites. They have destroyed thousands of lives and now they’re back, ready to save the day. They said, it takes years of therapy to bring them to this point. It uses our pioneering technologies. The process works best when we’ve got a full and frank medical history, and when you help us.
Shaun was back in another video. This time, his bedside in some hospice somewhere, where the bed was thin and metal-framed and the bed sheets that yellow colour. On his head was a crown, or what passes for a crown now: tiny multi-coloured pads designed by a famous South american designer, to make it appealing, placed on the temples and the forehead, tiny lights indicating that they’re all wirelessly connected. his wife talked Shaun through a shared experience from their past that, presumably, had been lost; she’s laughing and squeezing his hands.
We found it so funny, she said, and then you opened the presents, and you had another one, from Mark and the kids. a funny story, and when she laughed at the end, so too did Shaun, somehow simpatico to it all. On stage, Shaun watched the video and then spoke to the audience. Slow and measured, careful with his words.
I can hardly believe this is me, he said. Standing here in front of you. The audience whooped and clamoured.
Shaun represents hundreds of man-hours of work, the doctors said, and it’s not perfect. Shaun’s not perfect. But we’ll get there. By the end of this decade, they said, we hope to be able to offer this therapy to many of our ex-patients. Shaun waved again. The end of the decade made Beth’s heart sink, because that was eight years away. That was so far away that, by the time it arrived, she would have been apart from Vic for more time than they had been together. and that was two years ago. They were asked, over and over, how long it would be before the public could have access to the tech. We don’t want to rush things, they said. They – everybody – wanted to avoid a situation like the first time around: rushed to market, and then thousands damaged, seemingly irreparably. They were cautious, and their ‘end of the decade’ became the start of the next decade, in the post-Shaun interviews. They wanted to wait until it was right.
The internet didn’t want to wait, though. People who knew things, people who worked for the company and hated what they had done, people with vested interests: they all stepped forward under the internet’s veil of anonymity, and they told others how to do it. They leaked firmware, software, instructions; things that
somehow they had got their hands on, that they shouldn’t have had. cloak and dagger, they explained that the Machine could be used to create a new persona in the damaged. It could build them up again, as they were, based on who they were. It could be achieved through talk, through photographs and videos. It was better if you had the recordings of their original sessions. They got together in clandestine meetings, organized themselves to do work for this: on the technology, the software, the work itself. eventually they had their own case study, their own version of Shaun: a lady called Marcela. She was from eastern europe, and Beth didn’t understand what she was saying but she got the gist. Marcela was herself again, in that she smiled and she waved at the camera and the person behind it, and they bent past the lens and leaned in to kiss her and she kissed his bearded face back, and he gave a thumbs-up to the camera.
We used the original recordings to help Marcela, the video said, and that sold it to Beth. Because she couldn’t wait. This was too important to her, and to Vic. When Beth opens her eyes, the on-screen bar is finished: only it says that the files have been moved, not copied. She looks at the hard drive and it’s empty, but it doesn’t matter. Vic’s memories are in the Machine now, and where they should be.
4
The window of her bedroom opens onto a view of what used to be thought of as a field, but now it’s just scruff, cracked dry soil and scuffed-up anthills. They called them the Grasslands when they built this place. The area between the flats and the cliffs isn’t huge, because that was the only way that they could get planning permission, and the most-desired flats had been the ones with the eastern-aspect view: looking out onto all that grass. The residents would remark that they lived in the greyest building on the island, but it didn’t matter, because the view was what you saw every morning. You weren’t looking at the walls. It was meant to be for new overspill from Portsmouth, because the mainland couldn’t expand any more. That was the trick with it being so enclosed: there was no more land to build on. The developers moved across the water, assuming that people would want to live there, but they didn’t. apart from Beth, that is. The Grasslands themselves were protected because they were so close to the new cliffs, far too fragile to build on. The local council had decided that those flats that had the spectacular views – out to the sea, to the mainland across the way, to freedom – would be put up for sale, and the rest could go to whoever needed them. Back then, when the first proposals for the construction of the site went through, the Grasslands were still green, and the trees dotted around the landscape were all green as well, their leaves almost constantly present. When Beth moved in she didn’t know the names of them, but it helped her, being able to see them so unfaltering: when she was at her lowest, they survived. The trees are still there, now bare or getting there, but the grass is almost entirely gone: it’s now a sickly yellowing orange, almost burnt. It looks the way that lawns used to look in the summertime after kids had played on them: hard, dry soil patches, like liver-spotted scalp peering through thinning hair.
Beth spends the day waiting for the files to copy, staring out of her window at the Grasslands, and by the time she’s remembered that she hasn’t eaten it’s dark outside. She looks at the tins piled in the kitchen and thinks about how many of them she’ll be eating in the weeks – months? – to come, baked beans and spaghetti hoops on toast, and she looks out of her living room window – past the rest of the estate, over towards the street of shops and takeaway restaurants that leads towards the main road – and decides to chance it. She opens the front door and looks around for people, but she can’t see anybody out this side. There’s noise (rustling and cackling) from behind the block, from the Grasslands, but that doesn’t worry her. The only creatures that she ever sees out on the Grasslands are cats, from all around the neighbourhood: a glaring of them masses, like a congregation. They’re not watching her or the flat or anything in particular. They just seem to mass. If there are kids out there – or worse – she can never see them. They’ve become excellent at staying in the dark. She locks the door behind her, and then checks it’s locked, shoving it with her shoulder. When it doesn’t budge she checks the window where the men took it out, pushing it as hard as she can to check it’s secure. Satisfied, she walks down the bridge path, towards the stairwell. The doorway’s open – some of the residents collectively decided to take the door off, because there were times that trouble had waited at the bottom of the stairs, and they wanted to make sure that they could hear it in future – and the lights are on, which buoys Beth. She runs down them, really pelts, and then out into the estate, past the bollards, to the street. She wants something hot. a curry, maybe, or spicy chinese. She can smell the indian Palace from the edge of the estate: the restaurant opens their back windows and doors, trying to entice people down. Some nights the whole estate can reek of food, and some nights that’s the last thing that Beth wants to think about. But tonight it’s enough.
Inside the restaurant they’re playing music that Beth recognizes, but in some water-chime musical form. Songs from when she was a child, that she still knows the words to: huge ballads, slow-dance pop songs that once soundtracked hit movies. The waiters all sit around a table at the back, all with half-pint glasses half-filled with lager. Two of the four stand up when Beth walks in.
All right love, one of them asks.
Hi, Beth says. I wanted a takeaway?
Sure, sure. What can i get you?
Chicken korma and a pilau rice, she says. The man nods. he leans back and peers through the door to the kitchen, then nods at the solitary chef Beth can see in there, who’s been leaning against the cookers.
It’ll be a few minutes, the waiter says to Beth. Want a drink?
I’m fine, she says.
She sits at a table by herself to wait, near the window, and she watches the few other people out for the evening, all of them going to get takeaways or hurrying forward by themselves, collars up and eyes down. a group of kids – heads shaven into a step around the back and sides, suddenly popular again, and ripped jeans with smart-looking cheap shirts – walk past: they see her peering out and they spit at the window. One of them undoes his fly and rushes up to her, and she flinches backwards, away from the window. One of them stands at the back and doesn’t do anything but stare, a fixed gaze that won’t break. They all laugh.
Ignore them, the waiter who took her order says.
Bunch of pricks, one of the others says. he doesn’t look up from his beer.
I know, Beth says. The waiter walks towards her table and leans over it. There are curtains that she hadn’t seen, only half-height ones, but he pulls them across, blocking her view of the street, and the kids’ view in.
Better when they can’t see the customers, he says. Beth sits and stares at the curtain for the next few minutes, because she can hear them still out there on the street. They’re laughing about something, down at the kebab house, and there are occasional bangs where they’re throwing something, or hitting something. She thinks about standing up to see what they’re doing, but knows that if they see her it will only antagonize them. She nearly asks the waiters how many times their front glass has been broken. It always looks new, she thinks.
When the waiter comes back with her food (which smells amazing, she thinks, cooked freshly because she’s the only customer they’ve had all evening) he loads it into a plastic bag and throws a few poppadoms in.
You going to be all right? he asks.
Yes, she says. I only live up the hill.
In the estate? he inhales and laughs with the other waiters. I’ll walk you.
Don’t be silly, Beth says.
What else am i doing?
I’m fine.
Look at all my customers, he says. he opens the door for her and stands back, letting her head onto the street first. The boys outside the kebab shop shut up slowly, one by one, falling into line. They’re all some ambiguous age that Beth can’t tell, past the hoods and caps, even in this heat. They’re looking ov
er at them. Just ignore them, the waiter says. he walks next to Beth, briskly, their pace faster even than when she walked down here, and they don’t look behind them. The boys stay quiet, so they don’t know if they’re being followed. Beth pictures it: them dropping their kebabs and cans, leaving them on the side, and then walking behind them as one. Falling into a pack, a tight unit, rapidly advancing, a cloud of dust ready to swallow them whole. That one who stared suddenly at the front, leading the others.
