Inkers

by Alex Rudall

  “What difference does it make? I’m always going to look like this!”

  Tom shook his head, his back still to her. Stars were visible above him, winking through trails of clouds.

  “We look after you, you know,” he said. “It’s very hard outside.”

  Lily clenched her fists. She could tell he was struggling to control the rise of feeling. Lily raised her fist to strike him and then lowered it again.

  “I’ll just take the rib, then,” she lied.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Tom muttered, and his control failed. He spun to face her as the wave of ink flooded up his carotid into his brain. His face looked wrong, the eyes too large, the mouth too thin. Lily took a step back.

  “Tom–” she said.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” he repeated, his voice distorting. His arms were too long. He reached a hand towards her, fingers hooked, clawed, growing black.

  She ran back towards the house. He shouted after her but it did not sound like words. She dashed across the courtyard, out to the vegetable garden on the other side, across the soft beds, clambered over the fence and ran along the track up the hill towards the trees. They were bending in a building wind. The clouds accelerated high above.

  When she reached the trees she checked behind her. Nobody was following. She slowed to a walk, panting. She turned off the main track, climbed a steep bank and followed a narrow path up the mountain. The need was building in her already, the need to take away the pain, nervous energy in her arms, an excitement in her chest. She wanted to stop and do it right there but the thought of Tom following her, still mutating from the ink, and the still–fresh memory of her dream made her push on. It was very dark. As she walked she swung her rucksack off her shoulder and reached inside, rummaging until she found her knife in its plastic sheath. She pushed it into her right pocket, a comforting hardness.

  She came at last to the tall oak tree and peered up. The gnarled trunk loomed over her in the darkness. She checked around her and finding no visible monsters swung herself up onto the first big branch, kicked against the bark to find her footholds and then climbed up with practised ease. When she felt the planks of machined wood beneath her fingers she pulled herself over the lip onto the wooden platform. Above, the rustling leaves shuddered against the sky, backlit by a bright thin crescent of moon. Her heart beat faster. She pulled out her sleeping–bag, unrolled it and laid it out on the wood, carefully as the space was not very big. She manoeuvred herself into the bag.

  She took her tin out of her rucksack and opened it, her heart pounding. Inside were two glass vials and a stained pipette. One of the vials was half–full with the blue liquid. She picked it up, took a pipette with her other hand, flicked the cork out of the neck of the vial with her thumb, tilted it a little so that she could get as much of the ink as possible from the corner, and, squeezing the end to push air out of it first, stuck the pipette into the blue. The dark liquid rushed into the pipette. She pointed the open end at the sky, returned the empty vial to the tin and shoved it back in her rucksack.

  She lay down, keeping the pipette pointed away from the ground, straightened her left arm, the skin already blotchy with the stains from a thousand similar occasions, and squeezed the bulb of the pipette above it, sighing as the drops of blue ink touched her. The ink spread and ran over the skin, gradually slowing as it was absorbed. She tucked her arms into the heavy sleeping bag. As the ink hit her bloodstream and her heart pushed it around her body, she tasted the familiar garlic taste and felt the sadness and sleepiness build in her in a wave of emotion that rushed up her arm and across her chest and over her face. She closed her eyes and sank into blissful blue darkness.

  Lily woke up in the winter sun, warm in her sleeping–bag. She checked her watch – midday. She felt like death. She extracted herself from the sleeping bag, rolled it up, recovered and packed her pipette and climbed down from the tree. The air was fresh and cold. She set off for the farm, feeling dirty, hungry and wanting more ink. Halfway there, the singing of the birds was interrupted by the whirr of an engine. She jumped on a large flat rock and saw through the trees the rib motoring across the waves. Tom. He went down to the city about once a month to sell enough ink to buy any food and supplies they could not grow or make. She stamped in anger.

  It was not until she was back in the farmhouse and undressing for the shower that she looked down and saw the three dark spots on her belly. Each had a little circle of dried blood around it. The night before was more gap than memory, and the memories she did have were like dreams, but she could remember a sharp pain and a pale face leering over her. She put her hand on the marks; it hurt to press on them. Shaking with anger, she pulled her clothes back on and left the bathroom.

  Brian and Annie’s bedroom door was closed. She walked quickly along the corridor and banged hard on the door. There was no response. She banged again, shaking the door in its frame.

  “What?” came the sleepy, muffled response.

  “Brian,” Lily said.

  There was silence, followed by the sound of footsteps creaking across the floor of the bedroom. The door opened and Brian stuck his pale face through. His weight could be seen in his face and chin. He was wearing a dressing–gown, but she could still see his white, hairy chest. His crooked nose, beady eyes and greasy hair did not make him any more attractive. He blinked at her blearily.

  “Are you OK?” he said, rubbing an eye. Despite his looks he was charming. He always made eye contact and listened to everything you said. That, she supposed, was how he had managed to convince Annie to come with him nine years ago, and how he had managed to make the deal with Tom. And how he had managed to keep them here for so long, despite the apparent lack of progress. As far as Lily could tell the huge quantities of lethal, massively illegal ink growing in the vats in the barn were the only thing they had managed to produce.

  Lily silently lifted her t–shirt and showed him the bloody mess on her belly. Concern registered on his face. She was pretty sure he could make his face do almost anything, regardless of what was going on inside him, so she ignored it and just said, “I need to talk to you.”

  He nodded. “OK. Um. I’ll be out in a sec.”

  The door shut. She leaned against the whitewashed wall opposite to wait. She could hear him talking to Annie in words too muffled to pick out, and the sounds of Annie’s brief replies. After two minutes he stepped out again, dressed in white t–shirt and cut–off jeans, and closed the door on the dark room. He rubbed at his eye with the palm of his hand.

  “Let’s go to the barn,” he said.

  They descended through the farmhouse and went out into the courtyard. The shutters along what would have been the front of the ink barn, back when it was used for livestock, hadn’t been opened since Lily had arrived, four years ago; now the only way in or out was the big solid door on the end of the barn, facing the front of the farmhouse, that she had been unable to get through the night before. Brian wore all the keys to the farm around his neck. He fumbled for the right one and opened the door.

  “After you,” he said.

  Lily went in, into the cold, suddenly aware that she didn’t feel safe with him behind her. She walked on anyway. It smelled like cut wood. Big air conditioning units powered by the generator behind the barn and solar panels on the roof whirred day and night, even in winter, to keep the temperature at a steady fifteen Celsius, the optimum for ink–growth.

  Her heartrate increased at the sight of the six big vats.

  From this side, she couldn’t see over the lip of any of them to where the glass windows on top showed their almost priceless contents, but she knew the colour of each of them by heart. Yellow on her left, green on her right, blue ahead on the left, red opposite that, and finally black on the left and white on the right, and behind each one a great tank of cow’s blood and anti–clotting agent, gradually leaking into the vat for the nanites to feed on.

  Tom had showed them how to do it, in the beginning. He had figure
d out how to grow it himself using darknet guides, when he was a drug dealer in Manchester. He had learned to catch pigeons in his attic to drain and feed to his tiny ink–cultures. He always struggled to find a safe way to sell it. He had heard from one of his clients about a pale nerd trying to buy massive quantities of ink; entrepreneurial, he had used his contacts to find Brian. He went with him back to the island, and, finding he liked the isolation and wildness, stayed there, teaching Brian and Annie how to grow the ink and selling it for them on the mainland whenever they needed money for supplies. He didn’t really understand what they were trying to do and he didn’t really care.

  Whenever she saw the vats Lily got an almost overpowering urge to climb up the ladders and find a way in. She had seen an overdose once, when she had lived rough in Glasgow, an old homeless man called Rodge. Lily had been approaching a dealer to try and beg or flirt a hit of ink when Rodge had burst out of a bush, pressed a knife to a dealer’s throat, grabbed his stash and drank half a litre of yellow before the dealer could get his gun. Lily had run away across Richmond Park and then, unable to ignore the noise of it, turned back.

  Rodge had become a huge yellow moth.

  As she watched, horrified, he swooped on the running dealer and bit his head clean off. The monster rose several metres into the air, burst into flames and then dissolved into a cloud of ash.

  But then Rodge had not been able to afford much ink in his lifetime. Lily had never met anyone who had taken a tenth of the ink she had, and she fantasised that, like an immune, she would not be killed. But so far she had always resisted the urge, and now she simply led the way between the tanks, walking steadily.

  They passed between the final vats into the open area at the end, where the four scientist’s desks sat, actuator ropes hanging from the ceiling with the VR suits attached to the end like shed skin, and beyond, the four huge black blocks of processors and memory drives, solid cubes each easily a metre in diameter, tangled with hundreds of cables for power and information transmission. Their dull hum combined with the whine of the air conditioning to create a constant level of noise she could never bear for long.

  Brian went to his desk and started moving bits of electronics about, brushing away metal dust from around a drill. He had the bent–neck posture of the pre–VR internet addict. His stomach pushed out of his t–shirt and rested slightly on his desk.

  “What did you give us?” Lily said, her heart beating faster.

  “I told you,” he said, picking up a stack of papers and knocking them together on the surface of his desk, not looking at her. “It’s a new mix. A bit experimental.”

  “You never said mix!” she said.

  “You’re still here, aren’t you?” he said, half–turning his back to her, rustling through a desk draw.

  “What are these?” Lily said, touching her belly, anger rising in her. He turned his head a little to look.

  “Spots?” he said, turning back to his desk. “I have no idea.”

  “They were holes.”

  At last he turned to face her. There was anger in his face.

  “Do you understand what we’re trying to do here? The risks we take, we have taken every day for nine years, long before you arrived? Do you know what would happen to us if we got caught?”

  “Yeah, of course I know,” she said. You didn’t need school to know what singularity–tech was about or what the punishment was: first the ITSA inkhunters came, and then, if you survived that, they locked you up forever in a prison full of inkers in permanent withdrawal.

  Brian pushed both hands back through his hair and took a step towards her, his podgy white face flushing red in the cheeks.

  “And they all think it’s gone, it’s not coming back, so when it does come back we’ll have nothing to fight it with. But you know better than maybe anyone what it’s capable of. One day the sun will go out and the GSE will just bear down and crush us all. And we’ll have nothing. But we’re getting so close. I can’t believe it, every day I’m expecting a knock on the door or a drone bullet to the back of my head when I cross the courtyard, but we’re getting so close. We could literally save the world from destruction; if we can build something to do that, and you and Tom had helped, not just helped, been key – so yes, there are risks, of course, massive risks–”

  “J–jesus, shut up!” she interrupted. “What did you give us? Why were my dreams different?”

  “I told you! It was a new strain, a mix, but it’s still ink, and it worked, didn’t it? Like normal? A bit more intense maybe, but it worked, didn’t it?” Despite the conditioned air she could see beads of sweat forming on his forehead. She had to admit that it had worked, had been ink, undoubtedly, she could almost remember them taking it, around the fire, Brian’s big pale face…

  “Yeah, but no, I can’t remember hardly anything, and I fell asleep inside, which I never, never do in the summer, and my dreams changed, which they haven’t since, since Cheltenham, whatever I’ve taken, ink or anything.” She shook her head and turned away from Brian, looking up at the rafters of the barn. Three years ago they had had terrible problems with pigeons nesting there, until Tom had figured out a trap using seeds and a cage. The pigeons were gone but the rafters were still streaked with vertical lines of white shit. Brian spoke from behind her, his whining voice blending with the drone of the cooling devices.

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it? And maybe it wasn’t the ink, maybe you’re growing out of it or something, or getting better, getting over it.”

  “And the holes?” she said, turning back to him.

  He didn’t break eye–contact with her, shook his head, a nasty expression spreading over his podgy features. “Look, you probably leaned on some nails or something when you were sleep–walking last night. You did it to yourself, and you just want to blame me because you’re too cracked to sleep properly.”

  She wanted to walk forward and hit him in his fat face. She wanted some ink, too, as much as she’d ever wanted some, not blue or yellow or red but black, a huge pipette of black to make her feel something good.

  “You have to try and act like an adult. When we’re done, it’ll be worth it, we’ll be able to do anything we want, we might even be able to go and find the GSE, find your parents. You know what’s at stake. Just have some patience, and we’ll be able to get out of here, do whatever you want.”

  There was a moment of silence amid the hum of the computers and the air conditioning. Lily felt tears pricking at her eyes, a lump growing painful in her throat.

  “You shouldn’t have given us weird stuff,” she said, “you shouldn’t have. Tom’s going to hurt you when he gets back.” And she turned and walked out of the ink barn, punching the silver vats of ink on her right as she passed them, black, blue, yellow. She kicked the door open and slammed it without looking back. She ran out of the gate, left it swinging open behind her. Before he put the stack of papers on top of it she had seen the long glinting syringe on the desk, and beyond the anger she was scared.

  Amber

  Amber hooked the hood of her VR top over her head and settled back, the deep seat adjusting itself to support her back in almost the right places. She glanced out of the window before she switched on. Men in glowing clothing were dashing about the runway in the afternoon light, clearing up for the jet’s departure. She checked her watch. ITSA jets were not late in take–off or landing except in exceptional circumstances, and Amber suspected the exceptional circumstance in this case was the only empty seat on the large, first–class only SCRAMjet, which happened to be the aisle seat right next to her. She slid the shade down on the window, blinked her eyes to signal her implants to go full VR, and the window, the large screen on the back of the seat in front of her, and the long tube of the jet and its contents of murmuring hooded passengers faded silently from view, replaced with the early–morning beach vista she preferred as her VR desktop. Gradually her spinal and cortical implants kicked in and the seat behind and beneath her was replaced by the feel
of the sand. She was sat on a dune, looking down over the beach, the air warm and smelling of salt. Blades of grass scratched at her arms.

  “Who’s missing from this flight, in the seat next to me, please?” Amber said, using the “inside” voice that would not make her physical body speak. “Use my clearance, this is an ITSA matter.”

  After a barely perceptible pause, a female voice replied from somewhere in front of Amber —“This flight’s roster and current occupancy status is classified below Area Commander level, I’m afraid.”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Amber said, pushing herself to her feet and walking off the dune towards the surf with sinking strides. “I’m in the promotion round. I’m technically an Area Commander–.”

  “I’m aware,” interrupted the voice with an exasperated note. “Actually you’re a Trainee Area Commander, with none of the relevant clearances unless specifically assigned to you by an actual Area Commander, or higher, for a specific mission. And as far as I can tell no such assignation has been made to yourself, recently, or ever. Indeed until you actually set foot on Nepali soil it could be argued that –”

  “Oh, fine,” Amber said, entering the water and stopping where it was just lapping at her ankles. A seagull beat past in front of her, scanning the water for dinner. “Your best guess, then. For personal reasons.”

  The reply was instant. “Going by the departure and destination locations of the flight and the recent widely–publicised US speaking engagements of various high–ranking members of ITSA command, as well as the preset on the seat, which indicates a tall, heavily–built male, my best guess would be one General Howard S. Dryer, Country Commander for ITSA Nepal and Disputed Regions since 2032, not to mention your new boss.”

  “Yeah,” Amber said. “I thought so. Couldn’t you have just said it was him in the first place?”

  “No,” the voice said.

  Amber took several more steps into the water, feet sinking into the giving sand beneath.