That first night, I ran my finger over my mobie screen to find out more about who I was: Delia Greene, age 17. I had a small amount of data, just enough for an emergency. I had a room and a job at a ReCorp sorting facility. I could go further and find out what music I liked, the texts I read or didn’t read, the games I played, the broadcasts I watched, the corporations I barracked for. A lifetime of data had been created and deposited in Delia Greene’s history.
I wanted to key in Lark’s name, my fingers hovering over the screen. I didn’t do it, of course. It would have been pointless – all traces of her would have been erased, just as all traces of Fern Marlow had vanished.
The sense of being alone was overwhelming.
Miss Margaret had warned us of this. She gave us visualisations to keep us calm, breathing exercises to still the panic. ‘Mine your data,’ she reminded us. ‘Read, game, do anything to keep yourselves busy. And establish connections – nothing serious but enough to keep you part of the world. Above all, regard it as temporary.’
I looked around my tiny room and was flooded by the desire to contact my family, people I’d forgotten about for years. During my time at Halston I’d only been ashamed of my childhood home, and the little I remembered of my parents was so tainted by that shame that it was difficult to know who they were anymore.
I knew they both worked long hours in jobs that earned them just enough to keep us fed and clothed. Our rooms were not as grim as the one I am in now but they were simple. We all slept out the back and we lived in the front room, sharing a toilet with the family next door.
We had a balcony, a narrow strip of cracked cement that overlooked the street below. The railings were rusted and we knew to stay well back from the edge. My mother grew plants, watering them with pilfered rations and bringing them inside when the monsoons came. She loved those plants.
‘Look,’ she would say to me when one flowered, holding it up. Thinking back on it now, I don’t know where she would have got the seedlings. BioPerfect kept strict control over all product, just as PureAqua outlawed any personal water harvesting, but I guess there are always ways around these things.
My father liked to cook. I remember this much about him. He would prepare our meals with exuberance and delight, trying to teach us at the same time. He was an energetic man, loud and passionate in everything he did. And he was always so proud of me.
‘Look at her reading already,’ he would exclaim, holding my face with both hands and bending down to kiss my cheeks. ‘Brilliant – that’s what you are. A bursting golden ray of brilliance.’
I wonder whether my parents know I’ve disappeared.
I don’t want to cry, but when Chimo mentions my brother’s name I feel all my strength seep away. He sits opposite me in the dark, his eyes never leaving mine.
I don’t know how to respond, and it takes all I have to continue meeting his gaze with no emotion. This could be a trick, I tell myself. Nothing but a trick. ‘Lewis?’ I repeat.
Chimo inches closer, leaning towards me. ‘He’s on the sieves. We’re friends. He’s been looking for you.’
As he reaches for my mobie, I tell him to use his own. He hesitates, then says he’ll have to fetch the other one he uses, but I stand my ground.
‘That’s fine,’ I say. ‘If you’re going on the sieves, you run the risk. Not me.’
And then I’m alone. I grab my mobie and am poised to try to find Miss Margaret when I realise it’s panic that’s making me think like this. My heart racing, I put the mobie down again. I’d be stupid to even enter her name and it would serve no purpose. Who knew where she was or what she called herself these days?
Standing by my window, I take a deep breath. I need to think clearly.
Chimo returns ten minutes later, a bottle of warm LemChick in one hand, his mobie in the other. ‘Here,’ he says, offering me the drink. ‘This should help with the last of the fever.’
I’m about to refuse, to tell him that I’m much better and he’s done enough, but I’m hungry and it smells good. ‘Why are you looking after me?’ I ask.
He doesn’t reply. Sitting cross-legged on the cement floor, he turns on his mobie and begins to trawl. Outside there is a tired puff of breeze, dust and smog drifting in and settling. On the landing, kids are playing. They run up and down, the soles of their shoes slapping on the concrete. A girl squeals when she is found, followed by the slamming of doors as hiding begins again.
‘Coming,’ a boy calls out. Then: ‘I saw you! I saw you!’
I have no memories of Lewis and me ever playing together. We probably didn’t. My childhood with him was brief. I was always busy with accelerated learning programs. He attended an EdCorp facility and spent the evenings with his friends in the compound courtyard. The little interaction we had was usually no more than bickering or snide remarks in passing. The last time I spoke to him was on that trip home.
Chimo beckons me to sit beside him.
‘What I’m about to tell you has to stay between us.’ His voice is quiet, his mobie upturned on his lap so I can’t see the screen. ‘You know about the sieves?’
I nod impatiently. Everyone knows about the sieves, the networks that exist outside the official ones; the lines of communication that are put up and pulled down, underground links that let people get in touch, talk, exchange data without being traced. Some are deeper than others, and finding your way in can take years of dedicated lurking, waiting for an invitation, a password, a nod.
At Halston they taught me how to use the sieves to pump out the ‘illegitimate’ messages, the guerrilla marketing broadcasts that were made to look like they had nothing to do with BioPerfect – the most powerful communication tool if and when they worked. You didn’t want the deep sieves for this work, you wanted the ones that skated along the surface, heavily populated, abuzz with the latest news. The problem was their instability. You could use the sieves but you never knew how long a broadcast would last. It could be days, it could be seconds.
‘There are groups of us,’ Chimo explains. ‘Subversives from all corporations that talk to each other.’
I nod again. He isn’t saying anything I don’t know.
‘Lewis is trying to find you.’ Flipping his mobie, he shows me. ‘I don’t keep his messages – I can’t – but I do have this one, the latest. It came through this afternoon.’
A young man looks at me from the screen. His eyes are a greenish hazel, his long pale brown hair falls over his forehead, his hands tap the table in front of him, agitated. He is talking, but too soft for me to hear.
I look at the savepath. Chimo has buried it clumsily, hastily, stripping away all content but the image of the man’s face. The screen freezes in front of me. I lift the mobie and zoom in.
‘I don’t know who he is.’ When I finally utter those words, I mean them. I can’t remember Lewis clearly enough. I have spent so long trying to forget him.
Chimo wipes the broadcast and looks at me. ‘Your real name is Fern Marlow. You have spent the last twelve years at Halston School for BioPerfect’s genetically designed, along with Lark Enright, who has also disappeared. I don’t know why you are here but I do know that Lewis wants to find you.’
The changes in season were gentle at Halston, the passing of time muted by the gradual shift in the light, the shortening and lengthening of the days slow around us. Weeks and then months passed since Ivy’s disappearance. It wasn’t to say that we had forgotten her, but the persistent pull of Halston’s demands occupied so much of our time that she just slipped below the surface.
In our senior years the focus on our areas of speciality intensified. Lark spent more time in the music rooms. I worked hard in the media labs on small pieces about the beauty of life at Halston, and Wren underwent gruelling management and leadership training sessions.
Wren was never close to Ivy but, with Ivy’s absence, it was as though she were thrown out of balance. She struggled to find an easy place with me and Lark. She became close to a girl
called Laura and, together, they were the nearest Halston had to rebels.
When we were young we used to joke that Laura had been designed for sex appeal. She was all sultry curves and pouts, even from a young age. She and Wren spent a lot of time talking about and talking to boys from the neighbouring school. They communicated via the sieves, using quick channels that were so easy to detect. But if the teachers at Halston knew about it, they never said anything.
There were rumours that they snuck over there at night. I didn’t know if this was true, but sometimes I would see Wren, tired and sullen in the mornings, and I would wonder.
Lark and I remained close but we, too, had opened ourselves up to others at Halston. She talked about music with girls in the same stream, often studying with them and listening to new pieces they’d discovered.
I spent time with Mahla in the year above me. She was obsessed with early twentieth-century modernist poetry, the breakdown of language and faith in the order of things appealing to her more than it appealed to me. But I liked her ideas, her way of approaching a narrative from an unexpected place.
She came from one of the wealthier families and she often gave me clothes and jewellery she no longer wanted. If I admired a scarf, for example, she would insist I take it.
‘I have so many,’ she would complain. ‘My mother keeps sending me presents – I think it’s her way of dealing with boredom. She shops and shops and shops. It would be a relief if you took it. There’s no space left in my closet and she gets so offended when I tell her to stop.’
Wren would admire my finery with an appraising eye. Like me, she was acutely aware of the markers of wealth. Lark, on the other hand, was oblivious. I often passed on Mahla’s gifts to her as well, hoping she would replace a tired piece of clothing with the spoils I’d been given, but she never seemed to mind whether her shirt was frayed or her shoes were scuffed.
Despite our tentative friendships with the other girls, there was never a tight closeness with any of them. They all came from a different world to us. They came from the wealthy suburbs of BioPerfect, set in green fields that stretched as far as you could see, rolling, gentle, a sublime glittering world. They lived in walled compounds with magnificent trees, miniature lakes with smooth mirrored surfaces, near farms producing fruit, vegetables, creamy milks and cheeses all sold as novelty items from the barnyard door. And the houses themselves – those I could only imagine. I painted them as pretty cottages from ancient children’s picture books, with thatched roofs, climbing roses, chimneys and chalk-white stone paths to a bright front door, but often they were far larger and grander.
I would sometimes look at the datastreams of these girls. I saw their lives, their holidays, their beautiful parents and their handsome boyfriends. Alice, who helped Lark with her singing, was one of them. In her last year, she was dating Matthew, the captain of the nearby boys’ school. An athlete whose parents had also purchased a considerable amount of intelligence, he was perfection to all the younger girls. When Alice showed us her life, I burned with envy as I, too, told her how beautiful she was, how handsome he was, how lovely her house was.
She dismissed us impatiently. ‘That was taken last year before we transformed the garden,’ she said, swiping to the next image. ‘Yuck. Matthew looks awful in that. He’d skipped several days of training and it shows.’
When I wasn’t studying I could be found in a greenhouse, working with Marcus. Sometimes we listened to music or watched mediastreams as we worked, but more often than not we just chatted – about the plants, classes, friends. Just as Miss Margaret had come to seem like a mother to me, he was akin to a father.
Marcus encouraged me to appreciate the beauty of the biological process by simply observing. ‘Less questions, more watching,’ he would say, teasing me when I began to ask him how, why or when.
I had once remarked on how lucky we were, that the possibility of genetic perfection through BioPerfect’s labs had made it all so simple. ‘They don’t really have any choice but to flourish,’ I said.
I remember how he’d looked at me, a half-smile playing on his lips as he shook his head. ‘They did all right on their own, you know,’ he told me, and I recalled the first time I had visited him, when he had shown me one of the seedlings he’d grown from an unmodified seed. ‘They only had to fix things because people stuffed them up in the first place.’
We’d talked about the world as it had been in our history classes, the days when people had been divided into nationalities rather than a network of corporations run by the Parents, each of whom exercise various controls over the other through a complex web of subsidiaries – so complex that very few ever try to grasp it. The idea of country and nationality seemed ridiculously simplistic and impractical to me.
‘And it was just an illusion,’ our history teacher told us. ‘Corporations owned the nations and their leaders even then.’
The aim of each company was to increase its profits. This was a given. But the days of money for money’s sake were gone. Greater company wealth meant improved living conditions for employees. And this was in everyone’s interest – a better, stable world for all. Or, at least, that was what they told us at Halston.
I remember an uncomfortable sense of the place from which I had come hovering at the edge of the words I was hearing. My parents worked hard. Their days were long. We’d all been privy to the constant mediastreams of PureAqua’s success and profits yet we had lived in conditions that filled me with shame.
Our teachers told us about the beginning of The Breakdown of the old world. There had been illness and famine and drought – problems that remain with us, that are being tackled by the Parents. We learnt of the factors that had led to The Breakdown, but I had never considered the world as we now know it as anything other than a marked improvement. Marcus was the only person I knew who spoke about the world before as being a good place, a place where life flourished in the wild.
I rarely went too long without seeing him, but as senior school progressed, my studies gave me less time to spend in the gardens.
It was near the end of my second-last year, just after I had completed a major project, that I decided to take the morning off. Though the frost was yet to come, there was a chill in the air, the sky brittle overhead. I will only see two more winters here, I’d thought to myself. I walked across the fields, looking at each of the trees on the way, excited at the prospect of stealing a few hours in the greenhouse.
When I let myself in I saw another man bent over the winter seedlings.
‘Hello, I’m Fern,’ I said. ‘Where’s Marcus?’
The man shrugged. ‘Guess he got too old. Time to retire.’
I was dismayed. ‘Where did he go?’ I wondered why Marcus hadn’t told me or at least sent me a message of farewell.
‘How would I know?’
When I didn’t leave, the man asked what I wanted.
‘I help out here,’ I told him.
He raised an eyebrow at this. ‘You’re destined for better things than this,’ he said, doing little to hide the derision in his voice.
I blushed, embarrassed by his hostility. ‘I’m not like that,’ I said. ‘I’m a Lotto Girl.’
The man turned back to the seedlings. ‘So you have to earn your keep?’
I shook my head and looked out at the clear wash of sky, soft scoops of cloud drifting over the lawns. ‘They encourage us to take up activities for pleasure.’ It was only as I spoke that I realised how I sounded: privileged and pandered, someone to be obeyed.
‘Well, for me it’s work.’
‘What would you like me to do?’ I asked.
‘Whatever it is you normally do and let me get on with my job.’
Before Discussion Hour, I asked Miss Margaret why Marcus had gone without saying goodbye.
She told me his departure was only very recent. He’d been given an opportunity to retire and had taken it. ‘He hates farewells,’ she said, ‘but he did ask me to give you this.’
/> It was a packet of seeds and with them a brief handwritten note on a folded piece of paper, something I had only seen in history streams. He wished me all the best for the future and hoped we would see each other again one day.
‘Where has he gone?’ I asked.
‘To family and friends.’
I looked out the window and down towards the greenhouses. ‘I wish I could visit him.’
Miss Margaret put her arm around me and squeezed my shoulder.
That night our topic was chosen by Renata. She was shy and studious and rarely contributed more than a few words. I remembered how I had felt during Discussion Hour when I was in junior school. In awe of the older students, I would often just listen, trying to appear as though I followed every nuance of the argument. Sometimes Miss Margaret encouraged us to speak, but she also affirmed listening. The best conversationalists are those that know when to be quiet, she would say, her voice kind.
That night Renata told us she wanted to talk about chance.
‘I am curious,’ she began, as those discussions so often did, ‘as to whether we are heading towards an era in which any meaningful role for chance is eradicated. And, if we are, what are the ramifications of this?’
Sitting on the couch next to the desk lamp, she looked at each of us, and I wondered, just for a moment, whether she really was curious. Were any of us really curious or were we all just pretending? I had been shaken by the new gardener’s contempt for me, I suppose. He had made me feel like a fraud.
‘Take ourselves, for example,’ she continued, gaining a little more confidence as Miss Margaret nodded her approval. ‘We are an attempt at defying chance, to create the very best possible outcome that chance could have given us if it had been allowed to run free. The place in which we live is also controlled – the climate, the contact we have with the outside world, all of it. Can we extend this control over everything? And, if we can, what are we doing?’
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