‘Is there a reason for this trip?’ he asks.
I tell him I want to see the compound where I grew up one last time.
If he’s disappointed that I’m not planning a subversive action, he doesn’t show it. ‘I am here to help you,’ he says. ‘If you need anything, let me know. Anything at all.’
I don’t actually need his help – not in the way he might think, but I do have a small favour to ask. I want to speak to Lewis, to reconnect, to let him know I’m all right. Perhaps it is also a desire to say goodbye, just in case it is impossible for us to talk again.
‘I need access to the sieves,’ I say. ‘Not now, but when you can.’
He is speaking rapidly, never taking his eyes off me. ‘We will find a way,’ he promises. And then the tone in his voice shifts as he offers to take me around the neighbour-hood after I’ve settled in, to show me places to scan for food and anything else I will need. ‘It’s all very close to you. Convenient,’ he says, his face as blank as I’ve always known it to be. ‘Good,’ he adds. ‘We’re back online. I don’t know what happened there.’ He checks the data. ‘Looks like smooth sailing to PureAqua,’ he tells me.
I know the details of where I grew up from the mediastreams that document my early years and from my own personal data, all restored to me now that I’m Fern Marlow once again. I have images of our flat and of my father and mother, yet my memories outside these images are scant. In those early years at Halston, I was determined to forget the place from which I’d come. But since I’ve left I’ve been trying hard to access the past, to take myself back to that place.
When the autocarrier comes to a halt and the doors slide open, I’m surprised at how nervous I feel. I’m anxious about the gap between the memories I have been trying to recreate and the reality I will face.
Roberston is right behind me as we cross the compound courtyard. The young and the healthy would be at work, while the old and the unwell remain behind, sweeping, washing, arguing and talking.
It is not unlike ReCorp, and I feel myself breathe a little easier with the familiarity.
There are the stairs to our tower. There is washing hanging over the railings, and a group of small children are playing on the landing in the middle. One of them laughs at my suit and then the others soon join in, pulling at the ProtectaPure, delighted at the slight squeak it makes beneath their fingernails.
‘You look funny,’ a girl says to me.
‘I know,’ I reply, my voice muffled by the covering. I ask her if she would like to have it – my silly outfit for dress-ups – and she can hardly believe her luck as I undo the claspings and shed it, there on the stairs, like an artificial skin.
Behind me, Robertson protests. ‘If anything happens to you –’
‘I grew up here,’ I say. ‘I lived in ReCorp.’
With my hands on the railings, dust and grime beneath my skin, I continue to climb the stairs until I reach our old front door.
‘Are we going in?’ Robertson asks.
I have no idea. I stand for a moment, at a loss as to what to do.
‘Look,’ Robertson says, pointing to the water silos that were once guarded by my father.
I don’t remember this view. When I stand here on this balcony, it’s my mother’s plants that I remember. I scan the landing in front of me, but there are none of them left.
Robertson is the one who knocks. ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘We’ve come this far, we might as well go inside.’
There is no answer.
I press my face against the window, peering through. The room is simple: two fold-out beds, a small table and, beyond that, a burner and a sink. Everything is tidy, everything is in its place.
‘Who lives in there?’ I ask the little girl who has half put on my suit and followed me up the stairs.
‘They’re new,’ she says, giggling at the echo of her voice. ‘I don’t know their names.’
‘Did you know the people before?’ I ask.
She shakes her head and goes back to trying to put her arm in the right part of the suit.
‘Shall we go?’ Robertson asks me.
‘Not yet,’ I say.
I have my mobie out, taking images, capturing the magnificence of the water towers, the glint of sunlight on the wall next to me, the little girl as she laughs with her friends, the colour of the rust on the stairwell, the shade of the trees in the corner of the courtyard, the place where Lewis used to hang with his friends, the lazy stretch of a dog as we walk past. Robertson follows behind me.
It is only as we are about to leave that I see it – a flash of green by a back door. Its leaves are slightly yellowed at the edges, but a plant nonetheless.
Seeing me walk towards it, an old woman picks it up and pushes it inside. ‘It’s not mine,’ she says, her protest feeble as I try to reassure her that I’m not here to police despite my fancy clothes and Robertson’s ridiculous suit.
‘I used to live here,’ I say. ‘My mother kept plants, up there –’
The woman’s smile is broad, one cracked tooth loose in her mouth. ‘Jessie?’ she asks.
I nod eagerly.
‘It was hers,’ the old woman says. ‘I took it,’ she whispers, ‘when they went.’
‘I heard they died,’ I say.
She looks at me and then she begins to howl, and I realise I am not going to get any more from her.
‘She’s not well,’ says an old man standing in the shadow of the doorway. He steps out to take her by the arm. ‘There, there,’ he soothes. ‘There, there.’
As we head back to the autocarrier, I stop for a moment and breathe in. The soot, the grime, the noise and the heat – I remember it all so well, I suddenly realise.
‘Don’t,’ Robertson says. ‘You have no suit.’
I just shake my head at him and smile.
It takes several weeks before Robertson gives me the access I asked for. I could have tried without his assistance; I know how to get in there and find my way around at a rapid speed, but I was being watched – I would have been a fool to think otherwise – and I didn’t want to put Lewis in danger.
In those first few weeks, he gave no indication of any self other than the Robertson he presents to the world. He meets me after work and shows me around the precinct as he promised.
‘Are you doing this because you’re lonely?’ I tease him. ‘Or because you’re spying on me?’
‘We prefer to call it monitoring,’ he says. ‘Making sure you’re settling in.’
‘You’re very caring,’ I tell him. ‘Everyone at BioPerfect is.’ I look straight at him, showing nothing in my expression. Apart from that one moment in the autocarrier, this is how we are with each other.
Sometimes we eat together at a small food bar near my unit complex. He asks other people to join us. To help me make friends, he says.
I’m something of a curiosity. As a Lotto Girl I would be anyway, but when people learn of my kidnapping, they are fascinated.
‘Tell us about the compound,’ Marcel says, leaning close.
‘How small was your room?’ Jennifer asks, and I tell her that there was no more space than three of these tables put together.
‘And the monsoons.’ James wants to know. ‘I’ve heard about them. It’s amazing anyone survives. How much rain is there?’
I’m tempted to pick up the glass on the table and tip the water over his head, but I don’t, of course. I’m making friends.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I’d just gone through Halston as planned. I would have been delighted with a job like this. I would have been hard-working, ambitious and determined to impress. I’m trying to be all those things now.
Would I have brought my family to live near me? Would I have looked after them? It’s a question that nags at me when I lie awake in the middle of the night. Maybe I would have just sent them data, keeping them at a distance while at the same time easing my conscience.
Some nights I lie there thinking I’m back
at ReCorp and the rain is coming down. Or I’m swinging in the hammock with Chimo, the still night air heavy as a blanket. I reach for him and then I pull back, the emptiness of this room hollowing out my chest. There have been times when I have thought I was at Halston, and in the darkness I try to see Lark’s bed, there on the other side of the room, to hear her breathing quiet in the stillness, but there is nothing.
Often I get up and sit out in the courtyard, looking up at the perfect sky. I could watch mediastreams – it’s what I once would have done – but most of the time I choose not to. And then my thoughts return to my family. Would I have asked my mother and father here? I like to think I would have, but I honestly don’t know.
Lewis? Probably not. I wouldn’t have wanted to be tainted by his subversive activities. And he wouldn’t have wanted to come.
I take out my mobie and look at the streams I gathered from that day with Robertson, the images of the compound, the beauty of the small details that I captured, and I cut and sharpen and shape them until they are just as I want, saving them in a databox called ‘Special’.
Other nights I talk to Lark.
She wants me to tell her that I’m all right and that’s what I do. ‘Robertson is looking after you?’ she asks. I wonder how she knows. ‘He looked after me,’ she says, ‘when I was first brought in and when I came here to live.’ She is quiet for a moment, and when I peer a little closer I can see she’s blushing, just the faintest tinge of colour on her otherwise pale cheeks.
I ask Robertson about his friendship with Lark, and he immediately tells me that he spent time with her as well, settling her into her new life.
‘I know,’ I say, smiling at him, ‘but that’s not what I’m asking about.’
He shifts uncomfortably in his seat and I enjoy seeing him squirm. He’s always so poised and calm.
‘Is there something going on between you two?’
‘What makes you think that?’
I shrug and take a bite of the SweetCrisp he brought me.
‘I’ve asked for a transfer,’ he confesses, ‘so that I can be near her.’ He looks at the table and then shakes his head as he glances up at me again. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love.’
His shyness makes me like him.
‘You don’t need to stay for me,’ I tell him. ‘I’m settling in perfectly.’
‘Just a little longer,’ he says.
I don’t reply, but I know he’s referring to his promise to help me.
Robertson meets me after work and he’s excited. ‘Jerome told me you like these,’ he says, handing me a small box.
I open it up and there are two perfect eggs in there.
‘Be very careful,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t drop them on the way home or leave them anywhere foolish. You don’t know what I went through to get my hands on them.’
I thank him and he tells me that it’s a farewell present.
‘Are you going for good?’ I ask.
‘For a while,’ he says. ‘Everyone thinks you’re doing so well that there’s no need for me anymore.’ He tells me he is hoping to spend some time with Lark. ‘But I’ll see you again,’ he adds. ‘I’m sure of it.’ And he takes my hand before kissing me goodbye on the cheek. ‘Be careful with the eggs,’ he calls out as he walks away, and I promise him I will.
The note that he has left in my hand is brief. One egg contains a portamobie. There will be instructions on it to find a data vacuum. I am to go there and use it tomorrow at lunchtime. And then, at the bottom, is a single line: We’re glad you’re still with us.
I shake my head as I read it and then I hold it over a flame and let it burn.
Once, when I was talking to Lark, I asked her if she knew the song my father sang to us when we were little. I hummed a few bars to her, my voice lacking confidence. I’d never been able to hold a tune, I’d said ruefully.
Of course she knew the song. She sang it for me, and I asked her to wait, to let me record it.
Now I leave trails of the recording across the sieves, working furiously in the time I have. It doesn’t take long for him to appear. The screen flickers and then he’s there, the same but different. His hair is shorter, clipped close to his face. His eyes, too, have changed. They are now a pale grey instead of hazel and he has put on weight.
‘Look at you,’ I say, shaking my head.
It isn’t just the change in him that puts me at a loss for words. I’m floundering because I’m presenting myself to him – the self I am becoming. Just as I needed to incorporate my first home into this new self, I also need to see him. I want us to know each other.
He tells me he’s emerging. He’ll work for DataMap with a legitimate identity.
‘So I can contact you that way?’ I ask.
He hesitates. ‘I think we need to give it a while. You’re so closely monitored.’
The screen is tiny and it’s hard to see him clearly. I lean a little closer. ‘You’re looking very respectable.’ I grin.
‘That’s the aim.’
We don’t have long. He wants me to tell him all that’s passed since we were last in touch. He knows BioPerfect got to me first. When his people arrived, I was already gone. There had been no trace of me at the compound; nothing until the old Fern Marlow appeared back in the datastreams as a story of triumph – as a robust BioPerfect design.
I’m sitting in the shade of a tree at the edge of a park, trying to look like a normal worker on a lunchbreak, relaying everything as quickly as I can. I tell him about Jerome’s revelation that I was, in fact, designed, the testing I have undergone and continue to undergo, the placement they’ve given me.
‘And you believe them?’ Lewis says.
I shrug.
‘Over Margaret and Rahim? Really?’
I don’t want to continue this line of conversation – I know where it’s headed – but he keeps talking, his words rapid. He knows for a fact that Rahim hasn’t been wiped – not by BioPerfect, anyway. He just can’t emerge yet. He’s too hot. And as for Miss Margaret, rumour has it she, too, is still underground, hiding until the time is right.
‘They need you,’ he says, his voice urgent.
I stare up at the interlacing branches above me, the leaves like tulle, fine and feathery against a cerulean sky. When the breeze lifts, they swish like a dancing girl’s skirt, tossed up and down with a gentle rhythm, all of it awash, colours running into each other. Of course our conversation would come to this. I’d been foolish to think otherwise.
Aware of my silence now, he tempers his voice, making it gentler, more persuasive.
‘You need to let me make my own decisions,’ I tell him. ‘I’m more than what you think I am.’
He waits for me to continue.
I stare up at the sky again, biting my lip, before turning back to the screen. He looks like my mother but he has our father’s eyes.
‘I don’t blame you,’ he says. ‘It’s comfortable where you are. What you went through was hard. But sometimes you have to make a sacrifice – so many people need you to do that.’
There is a part of him that still sees me as that spoilt child, the special one who felt she belonged somewhere better. I can’t blame him. I behaved badly when I was with him and the recent contact he’s had with me has been brief. Still, I’m disappointed. I wanted him to see me as I am now.
‘I’ve already decided what I’m going to do,’ I tell him.
I’ve been steeling myself to act, and here, under the shade of a tree, I know, as clearly as I have ever known anything, the time has come. There will be no more waiting, no more living according to the expectations of others.
The screen is flickering and there is a low hum. He is hard to see but he looks intent on ensuring I can hear him. The sound has already faded.
‘Trust me,’ I tell him, but he’s gone, my fingers touching his cheek as his image breaks into millions of pixels, dissolving to black.
I sit underneath the perfection of the sky and look down at my limbs, my
skin, my bone, my hands, my fingers (so capable now on the sieves), the mole above my right knee (there at birth), the cut above my left wrist (a can at ReCorp), the inside of my wrist (the spot that Chimo kissed). The person who has been Fern Marlow and Delia Greene will soon become someone else.
I let the portamobie fall to the ground as I’ve been instructed to do, and I walk back across the parklands towards my work unit.
I have streams that are ready to be uploaded across the networks and through the sieves. I will go to my workstation by the window and I will pretend that is what I’m doing, head bent low: Fern Marlow, Lotto Girl, hard at work.
But if you look closely, you will see that this picture isn’t the whole truth. I am at my desk, but I have logged onto the Wastelands, and I am following the path that only I know in order to retrieve this tale. I am finishing it, the last few words, and when I am done, I will work fast, pumping it out into every channel I can find.
My story.
If you discover this and make it through to the end, you may choose to see it as just a mediastream created by someone who has been designed to entertain and intrigue you. Or perhaps it speaks to you as a message from the subversives not to trust everything you have been told. It could be neither, just words thrown into the Wastelands by someone from another time. Fact or fiction, lies or truth? You must make up your own mind.
I will be long gone, the consequences of my actions another part of the complexity of who I am, inevitably touching everyone I have known, each of us connected and separate, ordinary and special, shimmering, changing and so hard to hold.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Andrew and Odessa, as always.
I’d also like to thank the fabulous editorial team at Random House, Zoe Walton and Catriona Murdie. It was such a joy to know that Special was in the hands of people who cared.
About the Author
Special Page 19
