by Kim Curran
Also by Kim Curran
Shift
Control
First published 2014 by Kim Curran, TW12 2DL, Great Britain
www.kimcurran.co.uk
Copyright © Kim Curran 2014
Cover and Design by Regan Warner
Kim Curran has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
1
ISBN 978-0-9929297-0-1
To Lisa, who believes anything is possible.
And makes me believe it, too.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgements
KIM CURRAN
1
‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’
‘A future!’
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
A hundred voices ring out in angry unison, fists pumping, placards waving in the air.
I’d given up trying to explain the issues with the chant on the way here. How can you have a future now? In fact, how can you have a future ever? The future, by definition, is always tomorrow. Always unattainable. I’d tried to tell them that. I’d gone as far as using words like oxymoron. But then Dave Carlton called me a moron and everyone on the underground carriage had laughed. So I’d laughed along with them, as if the embarrassment wasn’t eating away at my stomach like acid, as if I wasn’t acutely aware of the void between me and them, and stared out into the flickering blackness of the tunnels.
Fifteen minutes later, here I am, standing in front of the gates of a school under threat, shouting along with the rest of them. Adding a hurried and mumbled ‘Ten years from...’ before the final and heartfelt ‘now!’ as some form of petty victory that even I knew was pathetic.
But I wasn’t about to leave the protest, even if they did have a stupid and logically impossible mission statement. Even if it was cold and I needed a wee and I didn’t know why we were protesting outside a school that was closing down when we were less than half a mile away from parliament, which, I was pretty sure, has more influence on our future than this school could ever have. Especially with the election only a matter of months away.
Forget all that. I was sticking this one out. Because getting buffeted about between twenty of my classmates and hundreds of strangers, having my feet trodden on and not being able to see anything other than the back of the kid in front of me, was the first time in months that I felt like I belonged.
Today, I was one of them again. United by the belief that ‘You’re better together’. Which is what Glaze is all about after all.
‘Are you filming this?’
At the sound of that all too familiar voice, I look up. Ryan McManus shoulders his way through the crowd to stand next to me. Well, next to the boy next to me. But in this tight vicinity I find my heart beating a little too fast. Stupid heart.
‘Live flow, bro,’ Karl, the kid next to me, answers. He’s the tallest in our class so Ryan tasked him with filming the protest and streaming it to Glaze. ‘Fifty K hits already.’ Karl’s eyes defocus—the sign of someone accessing Glaze. The sign I’ve come to loathe.
I’m the last in my year to get hooked up. You have to be sixteen to join. So while the rest of the boys and girls in Year eleven have been exploring all the delights Glaze has to offer for months, I’m still waiting. That will teach me for going up a grade when I was ten. I never quite fitted in to start with. But now their lives all revolve around who’s following who, and what’s trending today, they’re even further away. But not for long. In a matter of weeks, days and hours, I’ll turn sixteen and be able to reach them.
‘They can’t ignore us now, hey, Ryan?’ I say, weakly.
Ryan looks down at me, his dark eyebrows drawn together in mild confusion. I’ve got used to that just-waking-up look you get when you pull someone out of Glaze. Ryan must be struggling to focus on the two realities: the stream of data flowing before his eyes and an image of the shabby, ginger-haired, pale-faced girl looking up at him.
‘Yeah, sure,’ he says, blinking like he’s bothered by something. I’m worried it’s me who’s annoyed him, but then he smiles—that unbelievably cute smile—and I feel my knees go weak. Stupid knees.
‘This,’ Dave Carlton says, indicating pretty much the whole world with a lazy wave of his hand, ‘is lame. When is it going to get fun?’ His eyes fog over as he looks into his feed. ‘Dudes, check out the chick with the tits. She’s here somewhere.’ He snaps out and looks around, trying to match up the geography of the feed he was seeing with our current location.
‘As opposed to the chicks without tits?’ I ask. But I’m glad that no one hears.
‘Seriously, Ryan. You have to help me find her,’ Dave says. He grabs Ryan’s arm trying to see over the heads of our classmates to find his mystery woman. ‘Username “LuckyLucy”. Oh, LuckyLucy, this could be your lucky night. Am I right?’ He raises his hand, waiting for a high-five. Ryan leaves him hanging. It makes me like him even more.
‘Um, yeah, look I’m staying IRL today, Dave,’ Ryan says.
‘What? With these hotties around? Are you mental?’
‘I want to experience it first hand.’ He pats Dave on the shoulder, in the way that only Ryan McManus can get away with.
Dave shrugs. ‘Whatever. More for me.’
Dave goes back to looking around for his mystery lucky girl, flicking in and out of the feed to track her down. Ryan and I exchange a glance that I take to mean, ‘sorry about Dave, he’s a prat,’ but which I really wish meant ‘how about you and me leave this crazy place and talk about the real mechanisms of social change somewhere?’.
It was Ryan who organised this protest. He’d read a stream about it and decided that we should do something.
‘If we stand by and let them take this school, they’ll be coming for ours next,’ he’d said.
Most of the kids hadn’t been bothered by the idea of our school being shut down. But Ryan has this way of persuading people. Of leading them. If I’m honest, he’s the real reason I’m here. Not that I’d do anything just for a cute boy. I’m not that kind of girl. But Ryan, well, he is that kind of guy. The kind I would do anything for. I hate myself for it.
I turn away from him, embarrassed I’m staring too much, to see a wide-eyed, blonde girl moving through the crowd. She leaps into Ryan’s arms and the two of them start linking up like they’re not surrounded on all sides. I turn away so fast I hit my head against a protest sign. It hurts.
‘Oh, Ryan,’ Amy says, when they’
ve finally disentangled. ‘Have you seen Nathaniel Buckleberry’s feed?’
‘Who?’
‘What about Nathaniel?’ Pippa pushes forward to join Ryan and Amy, or ‘Ramy’ as they’ve become known. I wave as she passes but she doesn’t acknowledge me.
Pippa, or at least the Pippa I knew, the one I was friends with a few months ago, was never into any of this ‘Che Guevara crap’ as she called it. She was happy flicking through women’s magazines and picking out her next outfit. But now, she actually seems to care about this stuff.
‘Nathaniel’s here!’ Amy says, grabbing Pippa by the arm.
‘He’s here? Where?’ She squeals. ‘How did I not know that?’ Pippa hops around, trying to see over the heads of our group.
‘Nathaniel’s a fake, Pippa. Like you.’
Either Pippa doesn’t hear Kiara’s snide comment, or she chooses not to. Either way, she’s now jumping up and down with Amy, begging Ryan to move so that we can find Nathaniel in the crowd.
‘She still not speaking to you?’ I ask Kiara, who is picking at the edge of her Take Back The Future sign as if it was responsible for our generation’s lack of prospects.
‘I think you’ll find it is I who am not speaking to her, Petri,’ Kiara says, her chin held high, trying to look like she’s not bothered. Stubborn as ever.
I sigh. I’ve been caught between their bickering too much recently to really bother any more.
I look from the giggling Pippa to the stern Kiara and try to remember how the two of them could have ever been friends. But they were. Bona fide BFFs. I know for a fact that Pippa punched the letter ‘K’ into her arm with a maths compass and covered it with ink she’d stolen from the art supply cupboard. And Kiara did the same with the letter ‘P’. You could see the stippling blood through their shirts for weeks after. I wonder if the scars still show?
I guess people grow apart. And teenagers are supposed to have the attention span of brain-damaged gold fish, after all. What we love today we’re bored of tomorrow. The Tumblr generation who can’t concentrate on anything longer than 30 seconds without hitting ‘next’. That’s us, right?
But it seems weird that in a matter of months you can go from carving someone’s initial into your flesh to not even acknowledging them in the hallway.
I’m seeing it all around me. Old friendships, old passions, set aside and forgotten about. Personalities tried on then discarded like yesterday’s fashion. There’s wreckage, for sure. Girls sobbing in corners. Boys punching lockers then sobbing in corners. And this, we’re told, is what growing up is all about.
Puberty, people, is a bitch.
It’s not like I’m immune to it. I’m only lagging behind a little. I assume that’s why it takes me longer to get over things. My favourite song of last year is still my favourite song today. I can play it on repeat for hours and hours and not get tired of it. I still love Alice in Wonderland as much as when I first read it. And I miss my friends.
This will all change when I get on Glaze. I’m sure of it. When I’m hooked up I can be a part of their lives again. I can stay up till midnight and wait for Nathaniel’s latest track to be released—rather than having to wait for three weeks to hear it like the rest of the non-hooked population—and then discuss its languorous melodies, or whatever, for hours with Pippa. Or dissect the subtext of crap Hollywood movies with Kiara. Or make new friends on the other side of the world, who I can talk to about books and art and philosophy. For now, I’m in limbo. I’m in a holding pattern waiting to land. And that’s OK. Like they say, good things come to those who wait.
‘He’s playing a song! For us!’ Pippa clasps her hands to her breast and lifts her face to the sky, slipping away from the reality around her and losing herself in the other one. The better one. She’s not alone. Most of the kids around me have tuned in and are rocking back and forth to the same beat, mouthing lyrics I can’t hear. Hands reach out to hold each other. Even Kiara, who I know hates the faux folk that Nathaniel pumps out, looks moved by it all. They’re all sharing this moment and not only with each other, but with the hundreds of people who’ve gathered here, and the millions of people all across the world who are hooked up, supporting what is being done from afar.
I’ve read everything about how the network operates. How the chip that gives you access is connected to the visual and aural cortices so you can see and hear the stream when you focus. Apparently it takes a while to adjust, but after a few weeks it becomes like a sixth sense. Like accessing an old memory, or picking out the sound of a bird singing from the background of noise. And it’s there waiting for you. All the information you need to navigate modern life, as their latest ad campaign puts it. There’s other reported stuff too. Like the internal GPS means that people know which way is north or south even with their eyes closed. Neuroplasticity it’s called.
I probably know more than anyone here with an actual chip. But then my mother works for the company that invented it: WhiteInc.
They’re still swaying and singing, and I’m starting to get really bored, when the crowd surges forward, knocking a few of our group off their feet. I’m pushed from behind and only manage to avoid falling flat on my face by grabbing on to Karl’s arm. Whatever spell Nathaniel had them all under is broken.
Vidboards, which a moment ago were showing grinning pictures of the men running for election along with a reminder about ‘Decision Time!’, now show two red letters on a black background. NF.
‘Someone’s adjacked the boards,’ I say, pointing over at them. But no one pays any attention to me.
Boys wearing black hoodies and weird silver scarves wrapped around their faces weave through the crowd, spreading out. Anger radiates from them like heat. They’re not here to hold signs and shout chants. They’re certainly not here to sing along to Nathaniel’s new song. They’re here for trouble.
Girls scream as they’re shoved aside. The boys try to push back, standing between the girls and the swarm of black, I catch Kiara as she’s elbowed out of the way and help her to her feet again.
‘Calm down, guys,’ Ryan shouts. ‘There’s no need for aggro.’
The masked boys laugh.
‘Change is conflict, brother,’ one says, pulling the metallic scarf down to reveal his face. His pupils are too large and too dark, his jaw is sliding from side to side like a cow chewing cud. He looks possessed by something. Or on something.
He pulls a bottle out from under his jacket, tosses it in his hand once, twice, then throws it over Ryan’s head. We all watch as it soars over the crowd and comes crashing down on the concrete between us and the wall of police surrounding the school.
My hands start to shake in anger at the stupidity of it all.
‘Yeah!’ I shout. ‘Let’s all throw stuff. That’s how you bring about change. That’s how you stick it to the man! Look!’ I glance down and see a small crumpled plastic cup on the ground. It’s been trodden on. I know just how it feels. I scoop it up and throw it into the air. It barely makes it about five feet before floating back down. ‘See how much impact that had?’ I yell. ‘Forget about peaceful protest and lobbying government. Why not throw stuff like a child having a tantrum!’
My rant has no affect on the boy who threw the bottle. He grins, a shark grin, and steps towards me.
I stumble away. My path is blocked by a body behind me. There’s no escape. Shark boy is inches away. I can smell his breath. Stale cigarettes. He raises his hand. A black-clad arm appears out of the crowd and pulls shark boy back. The arm belongs to another kid with a black hoodie and scarf over his face. But unlike his friend, his eyes are dazzlingly bright. Golden brown like the broken glass on the concrete. He looks at me and it feels like he’s looking into my soul.
‘You should get out of here,’ he says. ‘Things are going to get nasty.’
Seconds later a salvo of bottles falls out of the air, smashing all around us. These boys in black might be organised, but they’re terrible aims.
The first boy wh
oops and punches the air, then charges off into the crowd.
‘Go. Now!’ The boy with the amber eyes says, before following his friend into the crowd.
2
EVERYONE STARTS SCREAMING and pushing, trying to get away from each other. But no one can move.
Pippa is sobbing and screams something about Nathaniel but I can’t make it out. Kiara throws her sign to the ground and tries to clamber over the bodies in front of her. I grab Pippa’s hand and pull her in a diagonal against the surging crowd. It’s what I’ve read you should do when stuck in a rip in the sea but it’s having no effect now. Her fingers are dragged out of mine. I’m off my feet, being carried by the wave of the crowd, utterly helpless. My face is crushed against Ryan’s leather jacket. Typical, I think. The only time you get close to him and it’s going to get me killed.
‘Ryan! Ryan!’ Amy is pulled in the opposite direction from us. Her hand reaches out toward Ryan, clawing at the air.
‘Just relax, Amy,’ he yells. ‘It will be OK. Head back to the station.’
I can barely move my head, pinned between a spitting, swearing boy behind me and Ryan’s strong back in front. My ribs are being crushed and I’m suffocating. There’s only one way I can go. Down.
I wriggle on to my hands and knees and start to weave my way through the forest of legs. The rough ground and broken glass cut into my knees and my fingers are knocked and bashed so many times I can hardly feel them anymore, but at least down here I can breathe.
‘Wait for me.’ Ryan is behind me, also scrabbling through the crowd on his hands and knees.
There are screeches and screams and a sound like a plane taking off and water pours down on my head. I look up to see the person above me knocked clear off their feet by a jet of water.
The water cannons are out.
The sound stops and dripping wet people struggle to their feet. I’m soaked through, my hair stuck to my face so I can hardly see, but still I press forward, dodging stumbling people and stamping feet.
