by M. T Hill
The lab is on fire. Greenley’s work is gone.
Martha runs into Sharon’s shed. Ready now for what must happen, the confrontation. Except, of course, the injured man’s makeshift bed is empty, and his drip bag is on the sheets, leaking.
Outside once more, pulse at full tempo. Desperate to find something she might be able to salvage. Beyond the sheds stretch the growing slopes, upon which three of the hands are pointing skywards, their manipulators splayed and grasping. Martha’s hand, conversely, is stationary, its jib pointing away from her and down into the valley. The limb-trees around it are missing their protection, tarpaulins snapping in the wind. Whole branches have been torn out, wires and pipes trailing in the grass. The cables that link the solar arrays and growing lamps have been turned from the soil and severed. Most of the solar arrays have been tipped over and had their cells smashed in.
Their guest, she accepts, has chosen his moment to strike.
Martha rounds the nearest set of limb-trees. The next set, and the third, until she’s approaching her hand unit from behind. It’s still pointing away from her, down into the valley, as if to blame Dillock itself.
Just as she reaches the back of her hand, Martha trips on a prosthesis. A complete lower leg. In anger she kicks at it, this wet and lumpen thing, and baulks to see its skin flex. The leg has been unwrapped, which means the leg has been used. Which means it belongs to someone.
Martha kneels to the leg, bile rising. Its connecting face is scored and bitten. Chunks of ersatz flesh are flapping off the ankle and sole, as though it’s been tugged at; impressive damage, given the leg’s compactly layered construction. The leg’s core, its ‘bone’, is also protruding from the connecting face, as though rammed upwards from the heel. There are pocks and serrations across its blade. She adds it all up. She has to steady herself. The injured man must have found a way to get his new leg off, then used it as a cutting instrument. To sever things. She squints, noticing irregularities in the calf’s smoothness. Martha touches it, the leg’s clammy skin. She runs her finger along the calf towards a tiny object, dark and thorn-like, embedded in the ankle. She picks at it until it’s out in her palm. An amber tooth – a long, curving canine. Too thin, too sharp, to be a human’s. She squeezes the tooth and clears her throat. Standing there in the breeze, beneath the smoke suspended on damp air, she sets her eyes on the hand, on the valley beyond. How many times has she walked over to her hand like this? Martha holds out the tooth in front of her and presses her finger into the point until it’s close to breaking the skin. ‘Where are you?’ she asks. But that question is already answered. When Martha focuses beyond the amber tooth, its used edge, she can see for herself. Someone is standing behind the upright beam of her hand.
Instinctively, Martha drops to all fours and into the shadow of the nearest limb-tree. A stench of leaking disinfectant and latex as she tries to control her breathing. Slowly, carefully, her knees and hands sodden with mud and growing fluid, she follows the row uphill, then edges round it. From here she can see what’s waiting on the other side of her hand. She covers her mouth with a muddy palm, a soundless scream. It’s the injured man, held fast by the hand’s manipulator. His whole forearm is caught in the clenched metal, mangled and bloody. His hand hangs limp, and his head is low, eyes shut. A sticky bubble of blood expands and retracts from his nostrils. Evidently he can’t squat owing to the hand being out at full extension. In fact, he can barely stand at all: his half-leg is crossed behind the thigh of his complete leg for support, and his toes are just about grazing the mud.
The fox is curled up in the grass at the man’s feet. Martha squeezes the tooth, understanding. She darts forward, closing the gap quickly, and takes the man beneath his jaw. She tightens her grip, feels his glands slip beneath her thumb and forefinger. His eyelids flutter. If she balls up her fist she could crush his windpipe, throttle him, finish him—
The man comes to. His left pupil is slower to react. He blinks at her. Her heart is raging.
Then a stillness as he searches her face. ‘Martha?’ he mouths, and it’s clear he’s straining against more than the metal around his arm. His eyes swell, shimmer, then brim over. Spittle pops between his lips. ‘You came back,’ he manages. And he smiles a sad smile.
Martha squeezes. The man’s face contorts. His trapped hand twitching madly above her head. She squeezes again as she studies him, his shocked face, seeking herself in him. She follows the ragged scar tissue into the crags of his cheeks, the lines around his mouth. Down his body at the weft of his clothing, the shuddering of his leg. Back to her warped reflection in his pupils. He’s soaking from the rain, his blood and sweat, and he can’t be her father, he can’t be, and not only because this isn’t her father’s face – not as she remembers it. Her father died when she was seven. She has already mourned him once – that rift has long since closed and hardened. She turns away to swallow her desperation, to try and deny she feels it. She reminds herself he deserves cruelty for what he’s done to them, to the allotments. She sets her jaw and turns back to him, glaring.
Confronted with this expression, the man’s back arches. He tries to wipe the mucus from his top lip, some attempt at dignity. The gesture is so pathetic it shocks her. Above the anger, she finds herself pitying him. She releases his throat.
‘Like a flytrap,’ he says loudly, coughing. ‘Your robot.’
Martha steps back, unsettled by his sudden change in tone. It’s like he’s remembered something; remembered to be a certain way. Martha crosses her arms to stop her hands from shaking, then nods curtly. Her anti-tamper patch worked. She responds in kind: ‘We’d have caught you last night if the others had bothered listening to me.’ Her voice sounds distant, cold, but the mid-tones are starting to filter through.
‘Teach me for being hasty,’ he says. ‘But I think I’ve done things properly today.’
‘Like killing him?’
‘Killing? Who?’
‘Greenley.’
The man scowls. ‘Greenley?’
Martha goes on glaring at him. ‘That pistol you brought.’
‘That’s… unfortunate,’ the man says, shaking his head. ‘But try to understand—’
‘Look at the state of it!’ Martha snaps. ‘You’ve ruined us. What’s to understand?’
‘It’s not personal,’ he says. ‘That’s all I meant.’
‘How isn’t it?’
‘It’s just bigger. It’s a movement. A revolt.’
‘Against what, though? Electricity?’
Now the man’s face goes very blank, so that he appears to be hypnotised. ‘Automatic England!’ he shouts.
Martha sighs. She could almost laugh. ‘We’re not even halfway there,’ she hisses. ‘You know these hands cover the town’s healthcare, don’t you? Everyone round here gets their chip. And we give people more time – to do things. They can paint, or rebuild old motorbikes, or, I dunno, parent their kids. Now what?’
The man takes a deep breath. ‘Don’t be an appeaser,’ he says. Still with the overloud voice, like he’s performing for someone. ‘Don’t be so naïve. You’re young. You think you’ve escaped real life, don’t you? But the state still knows you. Every little thing – they know you all right. They’ll have had that drone keeping an eye on this place since day one. And they let you carry on so they could swoop in and suck it all up when you’re done.’
‘Fuck off,’ Martha says.
‘It’s true. The stuff you make here – where do you think it’ll all end up? It goes overseas, that’s where. It goes on war medicine. On killing machines. You think you’re doing good, but all they see this technology as good for is to maim and kill, and control. You can chase utopias all you like, but one day they’ll invert it. Your robots generate cash. That’s what matters.’
‘Well, they won’t do anything now, will they?’
‘And that’s right,’ the man urges. ‘Try to see it. We have to do this. It’s one encroachment after another. Machines rob honest work
from honest people.’
‘Bollocks,’ Martha says. ‘You’re embarrassing. Everyone your age voted down basic income, which would have freed us full stop. You weren’t protecting us – you went out and protected what you all found comfy.’
‘No,’ the man says. ‘People voted against robots doing charity work. People voted to earn their own way.’
Martha narrows her eyes. ‘Then you’re fighting the wrong thing. There are still other ways, better ways. We were proving it.’
The man shakes his head. ‘It’s too far gone. You can only do this – your co-ops – for so long. It needs zeroing; the whole country does. A hard reset.’
‘And what does that look like?’
Another long silence between them. The man gazes at the fox, apparently studying it, and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, Martha gasps: his face has returned to its vulnerable state. The lines are softer, and more recognisable to her. Certainly he’s more frightened. And now it’s somehow easier to find herself in the shape of his ears, the underlying structure of his brow and forehead. These are shapes she knows of herself, indivisible. Martha swallows, and her throat is dry. The man takes her wrist in his hand, a roughness closes around her veins. She swallows again, and the lump won’t go. Suddenly there’s a smell of decaying leaves at the turn of autumn; she’s a little girl in dungarees and too-big wellies and her father is picking rotten conkers from a pile in the elbow of a dry-stone wall; the pair of them scrubbing then soaking mouldy conkers in jars of vinegar, her mum tutting at the shell fragments and soil on the table. Martha does know these hands, these shoulders, these eyes.
It’s him. He’s her father.
And he’s gazing down at the fox, and he’s trembling.
‘Martha,’ he whispers.
‘Don’t,’ she says, shaking off his hand.
‘Please.’ Still whispering. ‘I had to make sure she was sleeping. I can’t string it out much longer. The fox – she’s idling. It’s her recharge state. You need to finish her now, before—’
‘What?’
‘Kill it. I mean destroy her. It’ll buy you a few minutes. I let the other two go, your friends, but it’ll be obvious if I slack off again.’
The fox is curled around itself. Its chest rising and falling.
‘You let them go? Sharon and Rolly?’
‘Martha…’
‘Stop calling me that—’
‘The fox is my monitor. They know I’m done here. If Greenley’s really gone, then it’s over. You can leave.’
‘But this is my home,’ she tells him.
Her father shakes his head. ‘You won’t be hurt. That’s the deal. I had to see you again, even if it was just once. To have a chance. They knew it. They showed me. To do this was to free myself.’
‘Stop lying. Stop talking.’
‘I’m telling you the truth, now. Forget what I said before.’ He bows his head. ‘Please. The fox has been recording us. I had to say that stuff.’ The whisper is insistent. ‘She’s idle now, but she’s been relaying it. She’s electric. She follows me. All you have to do is cave her head in.’
Martha kneels by the fox. Its fur is filthy. There are shreds of wool and prosthetic skin at the corners of its mouth.
‘If you do it,’ her father says, ‘I can help you. It’s the deal. I finish the job, I do the fox in, I close the loop. And I’m free. We both are.’ He touches his trapped arm, which has turned a livid blue. ‘Look at me, love. I can’t do it myself.’
‘I’m not touching the fox,’ Martha says, and turns away. She follows the pointing hand down into the valley. Late sun lancing cloud, distant Manchester veneered in copper. For the first time, she notices plumes of dark smoke rising from the city centre. Emergency lights flashing in the distance. The silhouette of a lone raptor tracking over the valley. No, Martha isn’t ready to leave. She isn’t ready to move on from here.
Her father spits on the ground. It’s thick and white, like glue. ‘He showed you, didn’t he? Greenley – the scan picture. I knew he’d found it. I felt him take it.’
Martha keeps her head still. Her face still. She doesn’t turn back. The fox purrs.
‘You don’t look like him,’ she tells her father.
‘They used machines on me,’ he says. ‘To make me hate them even more. The programme resets you. I see it so clearly in hindsight. I knew it even as the car drove us here. They had me, and they still have me. She – the fox – she makes sure.’
‘And now you want me to forgive you?’
‘It’s not that.’
‘I don’t even know you.’
‘Then at least know I never wanted to harm you, or your mother.’
Martha snorts. The grief and the rage. All these years in the rain. She swivels and slaps him, and it feels good. She slaps him again. She spits on his chest. ‘I don’t know what you think happened,’ she shouts. ‘You left, and the house burned down. I was seven. I was seven.’
‘I know. Please—’
‘You don’t know. And you don’t deserve me standing here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘But the fox—’
‘No – you’re getting it out. To feel better about yourself.’
‘That’s not what this is. But you’ll wake her—’
‘And the other one. In the car – Benjamin. He had a family as well.’
‘Ben was never quite over the line.’
‘So you shot him?’
Her father’s eyes widen with alarm. ‘No! Jesus, no. He did… He did it. When the first news broke from Birmingham, we were nearly here. Ben started questioning what Laurel had done – what we’d done. Close to the allotments, he lost his mind, tried to get out of the car. Screaming that he couldn’t go through with it. So Laurel took control and locked us in. We were meant to be a team… Ben had broken his contract. She didn’t even need to say anything. She crashed us into that shed to make sure, and we sat there in the wreckage and he just did it. Just shot himself, like it was nothing.’
‘Laurel is your handler? Is that her name?’
Her father nods. ‘Birmingham was her op – we were the second wave. She’s an illusionist, Martha. Her trick was convincing each of us that we would be heroes.’
‘So you were meant to, what, come here and wreck Greenley’s lab? Kill us?’
Her father looks down, defeated. ‘There was a charge, a device, in the car. It wouldn’t go off. Not after the crash.’
‘I saw it. And there was the woman called Semolt.’
Her father nods again. ‘Angelika. There were three of us. Me, Ben and Ange. It was her car.’
‘You murdered people.’
‘No!’
Martha gets in his face. ‘This Laurel woman you follow has murdered people.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Only you matter. If you don’t kill the fox, you’ll suffer. Laurel keeps her promises.’
‘Well, she can’t keep this one. The police found her swinging – Greenley told me. She’s dead. So I’m not doing this, and you don’t get to tell me. You don’t.’
Now the fox responds, stirs at Martha’s feet. It stretches over its hind legs with a casual elegance, licks around its mouth. Watching them. Assessing them.
‘Oh Christ,’ her father says. ‘She heard you.’ But instead of bracing himself, he leans forward and draws back his lips. There’s a glint between his teeth. In one rapid movement he drags his mouth across his free wrist. He squawks and convulses, then repeats the action. When he pulls his arm away, his chin is stippled with fresh blood. He reveals a wound in his wrist, which he immediately begins to suck at, thick red saliva swinging into the grass. He cups his hand and opens his mouth, and a tiny red square slides out and drops into the mud at Martha’s feet.
The fox darts for it. Martha’s father drives his foot into the fox’s abdomen, then stamps down on the fox’s neck. ‘Rupal!’ he screams, and shifts to put more of his weight over the animal. His stump waves hopelessly.
Martha
is horrified. The fox is yelping.
‘Take it!’ her father screams. ‘It’s Greenley’s lab work, the research! Take it!’
But Martha, shaking her head, is backing away.
‘Take it!’ he screams. ‘Take the bloody memory chip!’
This time she hesitates. Staring down at it. Her name like a refrain – repeated and amplified and head-splitting. The fox writhes under her father’s weight. It snarls and snaps at her, tongue thrashing.
‘Now!’ he says.
So Martha moves to snatch up the chip. As she does, the fox bites into her sleeve, a spike of pain. Martha slams a fist into the fox’s neck and staggers backwards. Her father, clenching his teeth, bears down. The fox strains at her, raw and frenzied. Martha retreats again. Her father doesn’t say anything, or can’t. His eyes have glazed; his face looks serene. Martha’s fist tightens around the chip. The fox is rabid, hyperextending, tearing strips from her father’s foot.
Martha moves away, slipping in the mud, accepting that she’s about to leave her father with the fox trapped beneath him; man and beast conjoined and shrieking, some terrible new creature, held captive by Martha’s machine. Soon she’s on past Greenley’s shed, by now well alight. Past what remains of her own shed, the wet slats and personal rags. Past the growing patches, the greenhouses and groundwater pumps, where the shrieking finally stops.
At the forest, right on the edge of it, a pigeon comes to rest on the powerlines that once connected the allotments to the main grid. It coos once at Martha, jerks its head, and flies away. She pushes through the bushes on the boundary. The trees welcome her in.
She runs.
12
Greenley is heavier than he looks. It vexes Martha, his body’s weight, as she tries to unfasten the seat belt – she’d always figured if you tapped one of his limbs it would ring like a length of scaffold tube. She keeps looking through the windscreen, waiting for the fox. Smoke from the lab fire is filtering down through the trees, settling above the road as a dark gauze, stationary in the light. The air is bitter with it. At last she gets Greenley’s belt off, and his head lolls forward. His crown is like a mouth of broken teeth, chewing raw mince. She retches, though not at the sight of his wound, but rather the slackness and absence of him; at the way his skin is the same temperature as the seat belt, the dashboard, the air moving on her neck. She pushes his head back against the rest. She wants to respect him. She remembers the nurses with her mum, and how they would speak to her as if she were still conscious. ‘Okay, Joan,’ they’d say, ‘we’re just going to clean your top half now,’ and they would gently sponge the topside and underside of her arms and around her ribs. ‘Okay, Joan, I’m just going to dab your neck now,’ and they would, because the sweat had left a salty crust there, and it was hard to go near her when she was more alive, still fighting.
