by Nikki Owen
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Chris says, throwing down his torn phone to the table. The cover spins towards me; my palm reacts immediately, slamming down to halt the revolution. I then take the cell and lock it shut.
Chris watches me. He leans back then forwards then bites down on his lip as if he is about to eat it. ‘We have to check.’
I jump, lost in my own world of thought as if he were never there at all. ‘Check what?’
‘I’m sorry, but we have to check Patricia’s phone.’
A deep, unidentifiable knot tightens in my stomach. I force my eyes to study my friend. Patricia’s chin is propped up by the heel of her hand, and her elbow, where it attaches to the end of her long, milky limb, rests on the wooden bar where a half-empty beer sits, the bartender behind a wooden table funnelling a glass with a white cotton cloth.
‘She’s not really your friend – that is what the woman on the train said to me.’ I look to Chris, a pocket of heat swaying between us. My cheeks burn. ‘Who was she referring to?’
He sighs. ‘I don’t know. Patricia? Or maybe… maybe Isabella?’
‘But why would she say that?’ I anchor the tips of my fingers to the edge of the table. ‘I… You.’ I stop. ‘Why?’
He opens his mouth to speak, then lets out a long, slow sigh and, raising his fingers, rakes them through his hair. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you not know?’
His sight locks on my fingertips. ‘This.’ He moves to spread his fingers to mine then seems to hesitate. Instead he picks up a sim card. ‘All of it.’
My eyes stay on his fingers before switching to the innards of the cell phones on the table. I don’t know what to do. My friend. The tracker. None of it makes sense and it hurts. It hurts me – the thought of it, of what it could mean, that I am even now suspecting my friend, my first true friend among all of this.
My eyelids feel heavy. I am tired with it all and yet there is no end in sight, no stop or halt or slide to the finish, just an infinite line of lies and corruption. Both Chris and I take it in turns to stare at the ripped up cells and Patricia.
‘Inside,’ I find myself saying as the music sways around us, soft words, ‘I think, we are all made in the same way.’ Chris looks up but remains silent. He feels near to me, even though he is sitting on the other side of the table. I pick up a cell phone innard. ‘I think we are built, like these devices, from the same blueprint; it’s just that from time to time, adjustments happen and circuit alterations occur. So, does that make us different? Does that explain the reasoning behind people, behind their thoughts and actions and the things that they do? That they are simply wired in a similar yet unique way?’
Chris shakes his head and lets out a long, deep sigh. ‘We have to ask her.’
‘What?’ Panic floods. ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because… because it might not be her.’ A rush of heat and anger hits my head. ‘She is my friend.’
‘Okay, okay. Sorry.’ He holds up his hands, five fingers a piece, and for a moment this calms me. I sit back, leg jigging at it all, unable to make eye contact.
‘Look, Maria, if—’ He hesitates, bites on his lip, glancing to Patricia who is looking our way. Chris leans in, lowers his voice. ‘I’m sure, if there’s a tracker on her phone, there’s a good reason, okay? I mean, shit – the Project are fucking everywhere. They… they could have got hold of her phone at any time.’
‘How?’
‘What?’
Jig, jig. ‘How could the Project snatch her phone? Our cells are with us all the time.’
Chris opens his mouth to speak then closes it.
‘I do not want my friend to be upset,’ I say after a moment, a moistness to my eyes that takes me by surprise.
‘No.’ A beat. ‘It will be okay, you know.’
‘How can you know? We cannot predict the future, just wish for it.’
‘No, but I think it’ll all be okay.’
‘How can you say that? Are you a mind reader? A time-traveller?’ I feel my pulse rise along with my voice. ‘Are you? Well, can you—’
‘Maria, sssh!’ Chris’s hand is on mine. He immediately whips it away. ‘I… I’m sorry.’
I touch my hand where his fingers have just been as Chris rakes through his hair and mutters chastisements to himself. Skin. Another person’s skin on mine, I realise with a slap of realisation, is not a sensation I am familiar with and yet, I miss it. Odd. How can you miss something you have never known?
I set down my hand and look at the primary-coloured copy of 1984 on the table as a possibility strikes me. ‘She could be in trouble.’
‘Hey? Who, Patricia? In what way?’
‘The woman at the station who gave her this book’— I pick up 1984— ‘she could have planted something on Patricia.’
‘I guess, but how would there have been the time, you know, to place the tracker?’ He pauses. The door to the tavern opens and closes, a small flurry of snow blowing in. ‘We can’t say anything, you know.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘I mean… I mean we can’t say anything about the tracker to Patricia, not just yet.’ He starts to sweep away the pieces of our phones, clip them back together. ‘We know there’s an issue, so we’ll be careful, and I have the black box to block signals, but we don’t want to… worry her. Not yet.’
I consider his words. Why do I feel as if I want to cry? ‘She… she does have a propensity to worry.’
‘Exactly. So’— he searches my face— ‘we won’t mention it for now, until we know more. Deal?’ He snaps my sim card into place, slides my phone to me. ‘Maria?’
I begin to reply then stop, because in my head I cannot help but try to calculate an answer, attempt to compute how a tracker at the station could have been secretly planted on Patricia’s cell. But in the end, all I come up with is speculation until, desperate for something, for any lifeboat of an idea, I look to my friend where she nurses a half-empty beer at the bar and yet, despite all I do, despite my intelligence and my order of facts, I come up with nothing.
‘You okay?’
I look to Chris as he checks on me, and even though I want to reply, I am numb, unable to articulate myself. His words as he speaks to me, as he repeats his request on my status, evaporate into the air, and in the centre of the room, the fire burns and the wood in the grate chars to black.
Chapter 14
Deep cover Project facility.
Present day
The door to the chamber flies open. I blink, eyes assaulted by the sudden bright light that floods in.
‘You can come out now,’ Black Eyes says. The officer stands close by.
I do as ordered, wobbling a little so I have to hold the heel of my palm to the wall.
‘Just a side-effect of your treatment,’ Black Eyes says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’ He flicks his fingers. ‘Come.’
I step into the main room, a strange ripple through my muscles and spine, and sit in a leather chair the colour and texture of butter.
‘Tell me what you saw in there.’ Black Eyes draws in a long line of oxygen, his chest swelling beneath the cloak of his white coat, rising then dropping as, pen in hand, he clicks a nail to the metal rest of the chair.
‘I saw… people. I… I saw things.’ I rub my brow – odd, woozy. When I blink, the room sways and I think of the drugs I am being given, the Typhernol. Is that affecting me now?
Black Eyes sits upright, his mouth cut into his crinkled skin and I try to focus on him, to stop the tide of nausea that now comes. I slap my fingers to my nose. There is a stink, thick, overpowering, of medical swabs and clinical sutures.
‘I want to know exactly what you saw, Maria. Time to us is crucial now.’
I want to ask him how his wife died, where his daughter is buried, but something is warning me not to.
‘Subject 375 – Maria – I require you to an
swer my question.’ He leans in. ‘This is for you, here. This is your therapy.’
He sits back, clicks the steel of his pen. ‘You must now talk.’
Unknown village, The Alps, Switzerland.
Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 21 hours and 27 minutes
The guitar music drifting in waves in the warm air, Patricia wanders over and slips back into the seat next to me and smiles. Both Chris I and remain silent. Our cell phones are reassembled, all pieces slotted away. I want so much to tell Patricia our findings. I want to speak to her and converse with her and tell her how worried I am, how this tavern and its spiced wine smell and hearth is fuzzing my brain, how, when Chris speaks, I have such a strong urge to nestle into his chest that it almost overwhelms me, and most of all – most of all – I want to ask her about the tracker and have her tell me that she has nothing to do with it, that it was planted and that everything is going to be okay.
But I don’t do that. Instead, I watch her, scan her body and count in my head as a nervous ball of elastic tightens in my stomach. The gaps in her teeth. The three black holes in a rosebud mouth, a mouth that, when she moves, seems to shine in the glow of the low lights that pulse out yellow and orange across the wash of wood entombing the tavern. One second of time, two. She is supposed to be my friend but now I am too scared to admit to myself what the opposite of that could mean. Is enemy the only option?
‘Hey, Doc,’ she says, ‘look, I’m sorry about before.’
I snap out of my reverie and, for a moment, I am temporarily confused. ‘What… Sorry for what?’ Chris flicks me a glance then quickly looks away.
‘For the way I… the way I walked away, you know, before.’ She shifts in her seat, pulls at her ear.
‘But you did not walk away. You walked to the bar. To get a drink.’
She breathes in, a frown fixed on her face and for a second, it seems as if she may say something, may even get cross, but then her features break out into a smile, a smile that fills not only her face, but, it feels, engulfs the whole room.
Spreading her fingers out to mine, Patricia remains close to me then, exhaling hard, she slips her phone from her pocket and places it on the table. I touch it and notice, oddly, that it is warm, as if it has been used for a prolonged length of time. Chris catches my eye and this time I do not look away until a bleep sounds from his computer tablet.
An alarm bell rings inside me. ‘What is it?’
He scratches his cheek. ‘I’m… I’m not sure.’ He swivels the tablet round. ‘So, I ran a quick program on this earlier, you know, just to check all’s okay, using the blocker, double-checking for any more viruses, when, well, look – this came up.’
The alarm tolls loud. ‘It is the age clock timer again.’
Patricia immediately looks over. ‘What? There’s two of them? But, I don’t get it, how—’
‘There’s a duplicate clock.’
‘Shit.’ Patricia stares at the tablet. ‘That… that doesn’t sound good.’ I glance to her hands; her fist is clenched white.
A prickle of concern travels over me as I study the clock. ‘Where has it come from?’
Chris punches out a breath. ‘I have no idea, but there’s a number code linked to it every time I hover the cursor over. I don’t want to click on it yet in case it triggers another virus.’
‘Yet the black transmission device, the blocker you have, is working?’ I ask.
‘Huh? Oh, yeah.’
‘Then how did this new clock appear here?’
In the tavern, the fire flames lick the hearth, the barman pours wine into small glass goblets, and to the side, the band on the stage beyond plays a low slung song with lullaby voices made of silk scarves and chocolate. My brain registers it all, filtering it, checking faces for familiarity, my foot tapping slightly to stim off the anxiety inside me. I feel uncentred, as if everything I thought was set has suddenly been blown to pieces.
Patricia slides nearer to me, and giving me a small, compact smile that I cannot decipher, she points to my notebook.
‘Doc, why don’t you check in here, see if there’s anything that can help? If the Project are after us’— her eyes do a loop around the tavern— ‘we’ll have to go soon. There probably isn’t much time left.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Chris says.
‘Hey? What d’you mean?’
‘How d’you know we’ve not much time left?’
‘What… How…’ She stops. ‘What the fuck are you on about? I just meant there’s never any time left. Jesus…’
My brain sparks at her penultimate word. ‘Time.’
Patricia turns. ‘What?’
‘Time, time, time,’ I mutter to myself, tearing open my notebook and locating a page where an algorithm sits from a dream I had in prison. ‘Time.’ I run my finger down the page, over the words, past the drawings and sketches then look straight to Chris.
‘Talk to me, Google.’
‘2,005 – the number of deceased subject numbers from Hamburg.’ I jab at the page open in front of me. ‘Read this.’
Chris looks at the notebook. I can smell his sweat, the sugary baked-bread of his skin, and think again of how much I like him, without fully understanding why – or what to do about it.
‘Is this what I think it is?’ he says after three seconds pass.
‘Yes.’ I’m staring at the dark hairs on his skin, counting their pattern. ‘It is something I dreamt of a long time ago, a timeframe algorithm I used in prison to break into MI5’s database. We can use it to get through the duplicate clock without being found.’
‘It could work.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you do it?’
I pause, a mild headache forming between my eyes. ‘Yes.’
He spins the laptop round to me. ‘Go for it.’
It takes me ten seconds. No more. My fingers are rapid, tapping at such a speed that my eyes barely register what they are doing, my brain working so fast that my breath has to catch up, and when I am finished, when I flop back and blink at the access I have created, I start to shake.
All together, we peer at the screen as, before us the seconds tick down and down to a date when I was born to a woman I have never met, who I may not ever be able to know or trust.
‘Hey,’ Patricia says after a few seconds, ‘what… what’s that?’
Chris frowns, leaning in a little further as, slowly, an image rolls onto the screen pixel by pixel. A face. Familiar, well known. ‘Jesus. That’s what the duplicate links to?’
Patricia’s mouth drops open. ‘Oh my God.’
My whole body has gone rigid, chest barely inhaling, because the face staring back at us is someone familiar, someone we have to try and trust.
Harriet Alexander. Balthus’s wife.
The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom.
Deep cover Project facility.
Present day
I do as Black Eyes says: I talk.
One word after another, I reproduce every single detail of what my mind saw in the chamber – the photograph, the wife, the daughter, the words spoken. When I finish, I notice my hands are shaking, my skin is perspiring, and my foot, when I glance down to it, is tapping rapidly.
‘Here,’ Black Eyes says, leaning forward and, a flask in hand, he holds out a cup of steaming hot coffee. ‘Take it, you are cold.’
I reach out and clasp my fingers around the metal, feeling the sting of the warmth. I take a sip. The liquid slides down my throat.
‘Better?’
I swallow. Hot, strong, good. ‘Yes.’
‘It is a good therapy for subjects, the deprivation chamber, helping you to have time out from the everyday sensory overstimulations.’
He regards me for a while, not moving until I drain the cup, and, when I hand it to him, he screws it back onto the flask, placing it to the right side of his chair.
‘You know,’ he says now, a small smile drawn on his lips, ‘the brain creates its own reality
in the darkness. When there is no sensory input whatsoever, the brain guesses what it can see, hear. When our senses no longer give our brains any new data, it continues to use what it knows.’ He pauses. ‘In the chamber, your brain generated its own reality.’
I touch my scalp. ‘But what I saw felt real…’
‘What you saw was the brain creating a world to replace one that didn’t, for that short moment inside there, exist.’
‘I saw the photograph. It was the same one as on your desk.’
‘Yes, and your brain recalled that and then used it when all other sensory input was non-existent, to create a new vision for you to see. Even though there was nothing to see at all.’
Heat rushes up my spine, to my neck, head. ‘So I saw… a hallucination?’
‘Correct.’
‘Did you take Project drugs as I do? Did your wife?’
His eyes flutter shut for one second then reopen, glistening. ‘Maria, what you saw was not real. It’s what our minds do. What you saw was made up, make-believe.’ He reaches forward and I think he’s going to touch me when, instead, his hand lands on his knee. ‘She was real,’ he says after a moment. ‘My wife, the one you saw in the photograph. She was, once, the love of my life. But what your brain conjured in there?’ He delivers me a direct stare. ‘That was a complete hallucination.’
Make-believe. Unreal. I contemplate the words, run through the dynamics of the theory, yet no matter which way I turn it, no matter how much I attempt to extract some clue or secret unearthed from deep within my brain, the only conclusion that can be reached is that he is right. Black Eyes is right. I look back to the chamber, find myself oddly wishing I was back in there, hidden by the sensory barrier it provided, enclosed in the peace it gave me away from the regular world, when I begin to recall something. A thought… No. So, what? A memory?
At first, it appears as simply a flicker but then, a second or two later, it is a fully fledged flame that burns bright in my head.
Chris, Patricia – the three of us in the Alps. Something about a timer… no, two timers and the face of someone I know. I try to pinpoint the memory, grab onto it, but the effects of the chamber, the Typhernol I am taking jumble me up and it’s hard to lock down what I recall.
