Zero Bomb

by M. T Hill

  He shakes his head, conscious of how stupid he sounds.

  Rupal growls. Low and level. She points her nose towards the back of the kiosk, where Remi can just about make out the far wall of a storeroom. He points in response, and the fox allows her head to hang slack.

  ‘You want me to go back there?’

  Remi’s heart is going. But the fox has apparently expended what little energy she had left, and stays put. He goes through. He squeezes his nostrils tighter. Makes a seal.

  He gasps.

  On the floor of the storeroom lie the remains of two decapitated wood pigeons. Their necks reveal signs of damage, but the wounds are clean, precise, their carcasses otherwise intact. Packaged, even. It occurs to Remi that Rupal has prepared them for him. That when he was tasked by code on a Tube carriage to find objects for the woman in grey, Rupal was already out there collecting them. That when a driverless car was driven at him, all of this was already in motion.

  A rustling. A tickling at his leg. Rupal is with him again. Low down, like she’s ebbing away. Slowly, she enters the storeroom ahead of him and stretches her forepaws to the first shelf of a unit. He goes there, almost straddling her. On the shelf he finds a neatly organised sheaf of papers, damp and degrading most, wrapped in what remains of a thin plastic ring binder. He pulls the bundle into the light. Rupal is on her toes, leaning up and towards them. There are teeth marks in the spine of the ring binder.

  Remi opens it. The first sheet is in fact a noisy monochrome photograph. Remi’s heart creeps towards his mouth. The image shows a woman talking with a bearded man. They’re wearing thick wools, and smoking. In the background, just out of focus, the unmistakeable shape of moorland. To one side of them stands a younger girl, hair pulled mostly across her face, but unmistakeably Martha. Martha, with her mother’s broad shoulders, and Remi’s long neck, and the clipped appearance of her earlobes.

  The caption beneath the photograph reads GREENLEY SITE #54, dated late last year. Remi’s guts tighten. His first response is repulsion, jealousy. Then a swing back to incredulity.

  Remi lowers the photograph and stares at Rupal. ‘You took this?’

  The fox twists her head as though she’s been caught out. Her tongue is hanging, cracked and dry. A kind of thick white powder has collected at its tip.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asks, pointing to the man.

  The fox yaps once, brightly.

  ‘Greenley?’ Remi says. He turns the page. Another image: this time of a teenage girl leaving what might be a railway station. She’s carrying a large backpack, and looks withdrawn.

  ‘Where did you take these?’ he asks.

  The fox startles. She begins to cough or choke as if she might be about to bring up a hairball.

  Remi exhales and turns the page. Now a nameless OS map, stained grey in places by dripping liquid. A circle drawn in shaky red pen. Tight contour lines suggesting elevation; a hill or mountainside, or the moorland from the previous picture.

  He looks at Rupal. The thick white paste on her tongue has started to dangle, stretch away.

  ‘She’s here? This is where she’s staying?’

  Rupal stays very still.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says, and he turns the page. Now a CCTV capture, its picture lined and rough. The subject, however, is clear enough: a portrait of Rupal, balled up on the floor of a bare, apparently windowless cell, not much larger than her body.

  Remi says nothing. The papers in his hand waver slightly. The heft of it all bears down – brings with it an immediate link, a sympathy, and the idea Rupal isn’t meant to be here with him; that they likely won’t know Remi is in here either.

  Remi squats to take in the next page. He peels back the paper like it might injure him. Another photo of another cell, this taken from a different angle. The cell is noticeably larger, and empty. Old brick. A toilet bowl stands in one corner: this is a cell meant for human occupation. He stares at it until he can imagine being kept there, and has to glance away. He takes a breath before he continues, turns the page to discover an extract, written using fine ink and apparently ripped from a journal or notepad. Of what little he can read – the rest being smeared, or nonsensical, or torn – there are several distinctive sentences:

  by observation, exhibits symptoms of acute dissociative amnesia. Will likely prove susceptible to intensive unreality therapy, with retraumatisation a distinct and advantageous possibil

  And a few lines later:

  especially pliable/amenable to our long-term goals

  And further down the page:

  daughter maintains useful proximity to target Greenl

  These are medical notes of some sort. Medical notes about him.

  Rupal has given up something here, a way for Remi to try and understand. Not a message, but a dossier of intelligence. The fox has been helping him. Why, he can’t even start to understand. Is it because the fox, like Remi, is trapped in this game? At the mercy of similar pressures? Is she trying to warn him? It all runs deeper than Remi can see.

  ‘What now?’ Remi asks her. And he looks at the fox’s damaged head, its missing eye, and suddenly considers turning the screwdriver on himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘For what I did to you.’

  Like she was waiting for his permission, Rupal slinks into a corner and buries her head in a cardboard box, chews down on something. When she returns to him, her single working eye is glittering, lit from within. She comes with a fresh energy, and in her mouth is a slim, lead-coloured envelope, partially scored and folded laterally. She drops it in Remi’s lap, and the weight is enough for him to know. It’s the trackable manuscript case he couriered for the literary agent in West London. The realisation is electrifying: a coalescent line that runs between the driverless car and the men on the Tube carriage, and then to Rupal herself. This whole time, she’s been involved.

  Rupal nudges at the case, and Remi takes a long breath. He runs his tongue across his gums, both sets. The lock and seal is broken anyway, but opening it – even looking inside – is a hefty transgression; runs contrary to everything he’s done to establish himself and survive in London. In some odd way, it jeopardises everything.

  ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘I can’t do it.’

  Or is it fear? Of what’s inside? Of what he might have carried in this package unknowingly?

  In any case, the fox acts on his behalf. She bites the bottom edge of the case and shakes it from side to side. Out tumbles a jaundiced, scrappy paperback, cover all but missing. Remi takes it from the floor and brings himself to hold it, feel its age. The powdery texture of its pages. He pulls it up to his face and inhales sweet vanillin, thumbs wet with the hot slime from Rupal’s mouth. According to the partially torn title page, the book is called The Cold Veil, author Laurel M. Brace. The verso says it was first published in 1971, with this particular edition printed in 1982. Remi peels back the title page. The first line of the prologue reads: In the coldest harbours of tomorrow, the machines stood victorious. A novel, then. A slim, long-ago published novel, and not a draft manuscript at all.

  Remi holds the book. Hollowed out and deathly still. Rupal is watching him. With her chin, she makes an upward motion towards the book. Remi turns it over and thumbs through it, noticing that large sections of text have been torn from the binding glue. He goes through it again. What looked accidental seems anything but: the sections removed have crudely abridged the story, of which there now seems little left. Front to back, this copy of The Cold Veil comprises a prologue, the first chapter, the thirteenth chapter and an epilogue. Four segments in total. Suddenly, he’s aware of the novel’s artifice: a sense of its being considered, prepared somehow, rather than just passed along. An act – of something.

  Rupal barks at him.

  ‘What?’ Remi says, splaying the book face down over his knee.

  Rupal trots closer. She noses the paperback deeper into his lap and then burrows into it, noisily pushing its pages up over her head. The action flicks remnant glass into
Remi’s face. She growls as she does this, possibly frustrated, backs away and flips the volume. Then she bites deeply into the novel’s spine. She tosses it to the floor. The punctured book skitters and lands with its final pages open. Set in the rear cover is a photograph of the author. It is a face younger than he knows, and yet the jawline, the pitch of cheek…

  The author Laurel M. Brace is the woman in grey.

  Remi opens his legs and stretches his toes. A dislocation: he doesn’t remember eating, can’t imagine ever wanting to again. The world pinched up and in retreat. When he scoops the book from the floor, it slips from his fingers because they’re shaking.

  Rupal comes away from his lap and retrieves the book for him. He takes it, and Rupal returns to him, fussing at his armpit until he lets her in. The smell of her. And there, on the dusty floor in the back of the kiosk, with Rupal curled under his arm and her chin nested on his exposed belly, her working eye tuned down to a simple black line, Remi begins to read what remains of the old woman’s novel, in part because it’s been arranged for him, and in part because there’s nothing else to do.

  14

  Later, when he’s finished reading, Remi takes care to place the book on the floor between his legs. Edges straight, parallel with each leg, so that the title and author’s name are obscured. In this way it’s under his control, its power in some way diffused.

  He isn’t fully sure what to make of Brace’s disjointed story, though he has gained some satisfaction from joining up the unseen and unsaid, filling in the temporal blanks made physical by the book’s dismemberment. In this sense the abridged novel has been generous – it neither insulted nor underestimated him. It could even be its own short story in this format, given its mostly functioning state, and if its editor – or its vandal – recognised this. Or was it just a matter of time and format? Either way, the novel wears its decade on the page – Brace’s writing being of a slightly stilted, gently formal style that reminded Remi of the youthful enthusiasm he once held for utopian science fiction, and the story, so far as he can tell from these four chapters, being relatively straightforward. That said, it’s also surprisingly prescient in many ways, if a little naïve in its depiction of an automated society. The 2010 Remi lived through wasn’t so staid, nor so peaceable. Or sufficiently advanced, come to that. Even now, here in 2030, flying cars are a rich man’s fancy. Then, of course, there are the logistics and politics of its world, which don’t fully mesh: there’s no mention of a universal basic income, which Remi and many others, cleaving to the idea that working gives you purpose, and rejecting free money for the feckless and lazy, had voted against in 2022. Brace has also reified the unions, instead of predicting their annihilation at the pitheads and later on the NHS wards; and the death of privacy is a conspicuous gap, given what they know now – perhaps especially in light of what Brace herself has ordered done to Remi. There can’t be, he decides, a living writer who doesn’t want to touch on the willing surrender of personal data, or the slyness of personal technology too complex to fix or modify, yet always so perfectly intuitive – or fun – to use.

  But in another sense, Brace’s idea of an ‘automatic England’ is certainly upon them. In pockets of the country, drone labour is very real, and without a basic income to mitigate the excesses of concentrated ownership, the blight in some parts of the wider world has been no less catastrophic than war. It’s just that the real automatic England presents itself as a different variety, with a more respectable sheen. People don’t simply rise up and resist machines as Kip Mornington and his army do in Brace’s novel. If basic income ever comes up in contention – well, the country was too afraid to try another way, believed the scaremongering about its costs, and tacitly voted for the status quo to continue, falsely believing these issues would only ever affect someone else. The will of the people – that’s how they’d put it. And what are you going to do about it?

  Remi wonders, then, how Brace would view her work now. If it’s hard to accept that by speculating in fiction you also date a piece of fiction. That if you live for long enough, you might also see its relevance slip away.

  In spite of all this, the characters resonated for him. While there’s a distance in reading her, Remi had sympathised with Morn, the stoic protagonist whose struggle against the machines stemmed from personal loss. He wonders what happened to Brace to inspire it. If the novel is in some way autobiographical. A father and a daughter… a war and a wager. He wonders too what this book is for. How do these four chapters link to his time in the warehouse with Brace? Or this contract of hers. Is the book meant to be a statement? Is it a warning to him? Or is it something more?

  Rupal lifts herself from Remi’s stomach, chin fur matted and damp. A smell rises from their contact: sweeter than musk, or his sweat. Remi feels drunk. Tired to the point of delirium, mired in Brace’s fiction. It’s affected him physically, this book.

  ‘We should go,’ he says. ‘We should get out of London.’

  The fox stands and shivers. Remi lifts himself up and does the same. He stoops for the old paperback and slides it back on to the storeroom shelf. Taps it, almost reverentially, and motions for the door.

  Rupal won’t lead. She stands there at his side. ‘Hop it, then,’ Remi says, and starts to move. The fox hangs back behind him.

  He pushes the shutter switch. The rollers shift. He steps out on to the street and the fox noses into his legs. Her way of pointing.

  ‘Where?’ he says. But the answer is already waiting. Over the road, a bar of blue lights pop and flare, and an electric engine whinnies into life. The ambulance is waiting for him.

  Remi, very still, looks down at the fox. Not a protest – more to check for intent. But Rupal’s already trotting away up the street, shoulders jouncing under her skin as if Remi never tried to destroy her. This time, she doesn’t turn back. He follows her passage – Rupal’s rewilding, her brush bleeding into heavy morning – as she sheds her name and becomes other once more. Another London fox; every London fox.

  The ambulance’s rear doors open. Boots clumping on gravel. A large man crossing the road, a woman in the driver’s seat. Remi stands there by the A-board outside the shop, lost and found, awaiting them. Ready, like it or not, for his next instruction.

  PART II

  THE COLD VEIL (ABRIDGED)

  Prologue

  War’s End, Earth. 2070.

  In the coldest harbours of tomorrow, the machines stood victorious. The fifty-year war, at its apogee an extra-planetary war, was concluded.

  The moon, such as humankind’s limited government knew it, was lost. The Martian colonies, so painstakingly erected, were riven and left to the wages of solar radiation. Earth, the first and last front, was depopulated by magnitudes unthinkable to anyone who had lived through the late twentieth century.

  It was the year 2070 exactly, and the machines could now rest and tally their run of crushing victories. In doing so they chattered and rattled among themselves, linked as they were through the same core network that sustained their existence. On this day, a fine cold day, their automatic empire was born. The cold veil was drawn.

  Yet not all of humanity had acceded to these terms. One such human, a tall woman with polar-white hair, swathed in cotton rags and sheepskins, her skin deeply tanned, stood above the coastline of Dover, the southernmost reaches of Kent, upon the eroding white cliffs which had for centuries provided natural guard against seaborne assault. From here the woman watched the machines in conference. From here, this unseen vantage point, she discerned the machines’ antennae crackling with longwave messaging. The snap of their chatter above the wailing of a mournful sea. She confirmed their build versions, she recorded their heights, and soon she would plan her route into their nest.

  Which is not to say the woman was unaware that humanity had lost, or indeed was lost. It had been inevitable for some time. About this she was philosophical – she often questioned aloud if homo sapiens’ whole time extant as a species was simply the result
of bad fortune. The woman’s father and many others of his era had created the first generation of machines intended to free humans from toil. Unwittingly, they had devised for themselves a pitiless yoke.

  The tall woman’s name was Morn, full title Miranda Mornington September, Prime of the Fourth Metropolitan Borough of Southampton. She had journeyed here alone in spite of her old age, wearing a suit of bespoke farmour: a hulking bipedal exo-system constructed almost exclusively from reinforced stallion and bull bone, salvaged tendons and ligaments, heavy leathers. The farmour was driven by a tin-and-iron pulley and cam system, whose movements reproduced and augmented her own, yet still the journey had been long and arduous, and when the task was complete she would need to hunker down in seclusion before striking camp and returning with a token of her visit. The one thing that would help them in the siege to come.

  For now, though, the light was too flat for Morn to make good on her promise. Better to rest here and launch her assault under that savage clarity of dawn. She climbed back into the bodybay of her farmour and drew its ribs and her skins tightly around her, releasing the perfumes of mould and moss, tallow grease and oil. Above her, the homing pigeon preened in the suit’s shoulder cage.

  Latterly she slept for a time, knowing as she drifted into the void that for all their worlds were fallen, there remained, in the hearts of those still alive, a crucial defiance. Humanity was insurmountable while its blood still ran hot.

  By first light Morn was already up and on a battle footing, poised on the banks of a fast-flowing seawater inlet. In the early hours she had woken to hear the machines moving beyond the shingle and separating out from each other; she had imbibed her leaf immediately and fed her homing pigeon, and tracked one of the machines to a small manufacturing complex inland by some two miles, her senses aglow. The seawater inlet, presumably, drove the generators needed to power the machine replicators, which were responsible for the spidery harvesters she had observed yesterday, drawing minerals from the bluffs. This place was not the nest, then, but it was still a nest. She was certain her quarry would be found inside; that the machine she had trailed was part of its rudimentary command structure. And so the scene was set.