Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  Herb was beginning to suspect that he had been suckered.

  eva 1: 2051

  Eva had a headache. This was the day she had been working toward for the last three months and she had awoken with a headache.

  Sitting at the tiny kitchen table, she forced herself to drink a glass and a half of water, then rested her head in her hands, elbows propped on the daisy-patterned surface of the tabletop, and tried to think. Her stomach was bloated with stale water, she felt sick and hung over, this despite the fact that she hadn’t had a drink in months. Maybe if she ate something, filled her stomach with something solid, she would feel better? There were plenty of things to eat in the flat: the fridge even held a convector burger she had brought home from work last night. She had had to buy food to maintain the pretense. Any deviation from her routine and they would come around, tapping politely at the door. All those professionally friendly people with their sincere smiles and concerned frowns and their “Could we come in for coffee? Just passing, you understand. Saw your light was on and thought we’d pop in for a chat.”

  Still, if things went according to plan, by this evening she would be free of them. They would be left tapping at the door, stretching up on tiptoes to peep through the windows, stooping to peer through her old letterbox, and Eva would be hundreds of miles away…

  But first she needed to get rid of this headache. The next few hours were the most crucial, and it was vitally important that she be able to think clearly. So, first something to eat, then get dressed, then down to the garage shop to buy some Somaspirin or Panacetamol.

  She took the burger out of the fridge and set it spinning in the convector, the smell of strawberry-flavored meat quickly filling the room. After watching it turn a few times, she decided to get dressed while her breakfast cooked.

  The sun was shining through the faded yellow curtains of her bedroom. Eva sometimes wondered who had hung them there originally, all those years ago. When the next tenant came to the flat, would there be anything left behind to remember Eva by? She doubted it. The white paper ball of the light shade caught her eye and cheered her up slightly. She had bought it seven years ago, just after she had moved in, to replace a glass shade that had filled the room with red light. Maybe one day someone would lie on the bed and gaze up at her paper lantern and wonder about the person who had hung it there. Brewster, her threadbare teddy bear, sat on the bed, gazing at her with a glassy-eyed stare that reminded her she still had things to do.

  She opened the wardrobe door. Three outfits in burger bar colors. It was tempting to put one on: she got extra credit in her pay for every hour she was seen wearing the uniform outside the firm’s time. She flipped past her good dress and some not-so-good skirts and trousers, all hung neatly on their hangers. She paused as she reached DeForest’s forgotten suit, still hanging in its expensive blue storage bag, left behind when he had been recalled from her life and relocated to who knows where. She gazed at it for a moment, lost in thought.

  The convector chimed and her head throbbed in time to the notes. She pulled out one of the burger bar suits and quickly got dressed. She found a purple-and-red uniform baseball cap rolled up in the trouser pocket. Eva threaded her prematurely grey-white hair through the hole in the back to make a little ponytail as she walked back into the kitchen/lounge.

  Her burger sat steaming in front of the convector.

  Two bites and a swallow and her headache was getting worse. She forced herself to eat the whole of the burger slowly and finished the remaining half glass of water. Then Eva picked up her purse and keys and walked out of the flat, down to the garage.

  Reasons for escaping:

  I couldn’t even get myself promoted at the burger bar.

  The greyness of South Street is seeping into my soul.

  I have no friends to speak of.

  They killed my brother.

  Eva ran through the list in her mind as she stepped out into the unpleasant morning air. She didn’t dare write down her reasons. They would see, as they saw everything. Then they would be around to visit her with their professional concern, something they learned in the second year of the Social Care course.

  “Eva, why are you unhappy?” they would ask. “Why is promotion so important to you? What do you mean by the greyness of South Street? Why do you want to leave? But where would you go? Your problems will just come along with you, Eva; you must know that. You’ll never solve anything just by running.”

  But there were still places they didn’t control. Places they couldn’t see. Eva had heard the rumors like everyone else. Eva knew one such place, and she had planned her flight there with meticulous care.

  The late morning rush hour was easing off. All those people who paid good money to live in the supposedly clean air of the country were helping to make each breath Eva took just that little bit more unpleasant as they drove past to their city center jobs. Across the road, the garage was a brightly colored plastic blancmange mired in a grey sea of cracked and crumbling concrete. She dodged through the traffic to reach it, stepping gratefully from the hot air reeking of raspberry-scented gasoline into the cool antiseptic atmosphere of the retail area. She thought it was funny, the way the cleanest places in the city were responsible for the greatest proportion of its pollution. She staggered to the pharmacy shelf and looked for something to take the throbbing pain from her head. It was all that she could do not to laugh at the irony of her purchase.

  Eva found a yellow-and-red-striped pack of tablets and took it to the counter, along with a pink can of cola. She felt in her pocket for her e-card as the young man behind the counter scanned the pack of pills. He frowned at his screen.

  “It says here you’ve been going through quite a few of these lately. I’ve got to ask you when you finished the last pack.” He blushed as he spoke, the flesh-toned cream he used to hide his acne contrasting nicely with his reddening skin. Eva reckoned he couldn’t be aged more than thirteen. Only just old enough to hold down a part-time job.

  “I finished the last pack last weekend. I was having a very heavy period. Does it mention that there, too?” The boy turned a deeper crimson and tapped at a button.

  “I’ve got to ask if you have any alcohol at home.”

  “I gave that up months ago. The computer must know that. It monitors everything that goes into my apartment, and it counts every empty package and bottle that comes out.”

  “Sorry, Eva,” apologized the boy.

  “Call me Ms. Rye. You don’t know me.”

  “Sorry, Ms. Rye.” He placed her e-card on the counter and held out the painkillers. “Your account has been debited.”

  Eva snatched the package from his hand, popped the top of the cola can and took a deep swallow. She slid two pills from the package into her mouth and then chased them down with another gulp of cola.

  “That’s better,” she said.

  “Good morning, Ms. Rye.”

  She ignored him and pushed her way back out into the raspberry-stinking air. As she strode toward the middle of South Street, she ran over what she had to do in the next few hours.

  The most important thing was to continue acting normally. If there were any hints that she was deviating from her normal routine, they would spot it. She had learned that lesson the hard way, when they had killed her brother. Her phone vibrated in her back pocket.

  She hit the answer button. “Hello.”

  “Hello there, Eva. What would you think about one hundred and fifty credits for ten minutes’ work?”

  The voice was colorless and sexless. Their voices always were. She thought quickly: she couldn’t afford to lose time from her schedule on this day of all days; at the same time she didn’t want to attract suspicion. She made her voice sound tired and listless.

  “I’ve got a splitting headache. Ask someone else.”

  “Three hundred credits, Eva. All we’re asking is that you take a detour down Keppel Road on your way to the shops. Three hundred credits could pay for a new washing m
achine.”

  “I don’t need a new washing machine.”

  “You will in about three weeks. Built-in obsolescence is a pretty exact science these days.”

  Eva was about to agree, she didn’t have time to argue. But she stopped herself. She had to act normally. What would the normal Eva have done? Bargain, of course.

  “Five hundred credits,” she said.

  “Done,” said the voice. “Near the station end of Keppel Road there is a hawthorn tree. Hawthorn trees have twisty brown trunks and small ragged green—”

  “I know what a hawthorn tree looks like.”

  “Of course you do. There may be some small pieces of metal stuck in and around the base of that tree. We would like you to tidy up the mess. It should take you no more than twenty minutes.”

  “You said ten.”

  “That’s right, we did. When you’ve collected the metal, place it in a mail tube. We’ll let you know the address you need to send it to later. Bye.”

  The line went dead just as Eva reached the end of Keppel Road. She turned down it, heading toward the Lite Station. She guessed that some stealth plane had suffered minor damage over the city the previous night and she had been detailed to collect the wreckage. The thought put DeForest in her mind again. Like all company people, he had denied the existence of stealth ordnance, and like all young people with ideals, Eva had teased him mercilessly about his denial.

  She remembered a January afternoon. The last one they would ever spend together, though Eva hadn’t known that at the time. They had sat snug in her flat, the heating turned up full, the lights turned on against the grey day, while they drank red wine and watched old movies. DeForest was flying back that evening, back to his wife and his other life in Connecticut. Eva hated the early evening flights; the day would drag by without either of them being able to settle to anything. On the screen before them the hero was being dragged into the shelter of a doorway by his mystery female protector.

  “All that sweat and not a hair out of place,” said Eva scornfully. “I wish I knew where she got her clothes from, too. She’s been completely drenched in oil and they still look good on her.”

  “I’m impressed by the way she’s avoiding the search planes. All that infrared detection equipment on board, and she fools them by setting fire to a few newspapers.” DeForest took another drink of wine and gave Eva a little squeeze. She wriggled herself into a more comfortable position.

  “There are one or two things about those planes I’d take issue with,” said Eva, sliding her eyes sideways to look at DeForest’s expression. “For a start, how come they’re visible?”

  DeForest gave a tolerant laugh. “Oh, here we go again. Ms. Conspiracy Theory 2047. The Earth is monitored by a fleet of invisible airplanes all reporting back to the evil Artificial Intelligence that evolved in the Internet.”

  Eva elbowed him in the stomach.

  “Oh sorry, Mr. Free Enterprise 1987. I forgot that the world is actually run by a series of multinational companies that put the needs of the poor and the environment before their own profits.”

  “My company gave several million credits to charity last year. And we sponsored the Llangollen dam project.”

  “And I bet you spied out the territory using invisible planes, just so your competitors didn’t try and muscle in on your plans.”

  “Why should we do that? The dam is a nonprofit-making project.”

  Eva grinned at him.

  “…and we don’t have any stealth planes, anyway,” he added smoothly.

  “Too slow.” She laughed and raised her arms to acknowledge imaginary applause. “Thank you! Thank you, people. I was right and DeForest was wrong!”

  “No, you weren’t.” DeForest grinned and pinched her backside.

  “OW!!!” squealed Eva, pinching him back. They began to pinch at each other some more and then to kiss and then…

  And then, later on, DeForest had flown back to his other home and had never contacted Eva again. When she attempted to reach him, her calls were intercepted by the company. First she was told that he had been relocated to Korea, then that his wife had had a baby and he had decided to concentrate on his real family. Finally she had been told to stop contacting the company, and a block had been placed on her comm lines.

  Eva reached the hawthorn tree. Crataegus monogyna. The Latin name rose in her mind unbidden, and she wondered where she had once read it. The hawthorn was one of the trees that lined the road on both sides, its brown trunk twisted out of a dusty grey square of earth and gravel at the edge of the pavement. Its roots had forced up the old paving slabs bordering it to form a mound. She walked around the tree to see three feathered darts stuck in its trunk. She pulled them out and looked around. A fourth dart was buried in a nearby gate; she pulled that out too. Eva felt as if the two rows of terraced houses that bordered the road were watching her with their blank windows. Her phone vibrated and she jumped.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “There are two more darts. Can you see them?”

  “No. Where should I be looking?”

  “Try behind the wall next to the gate that had the dart stuck in it.”

  “What if I’m seen?”

  “Don’t worry. We’re distracting people in the immediate vicinity. Phone calls, overheating frying pans, malfunctioning electrical appliances…They’ll all be looking the other way.”

  Eva sucked at her bottom lip nervously. She glanced up and down the street and then pushed open the gate. There was a narrow gap between the wall and the bay-fronted house, mainly filled with old gravel and weeds. A tortoiseshell cat slept in a corner, partially sheltered behind a stack of window glass that leaned against the wall. Eva saw one of the darts straight away, lying at the foot of the rain-streaked panes. She picked it up and looked frantically around. The last dart could be hidden anywhere in the weeds that sprang from the old gravel. She needed to find it quickly: she had a train to miss.

  She glanced around the empty street again. Cracked red bricks and grey pebbledash, blind windows reflecting the April sky. Nobody was coming, but she still felt incredibly exposed. She bent down and began to run her hands through the weeds, parting the stalks to search the gravel beneath. Nothing.

  She paused, her arms folded tight against her chest. Her phone vibrated again.

  “Hurry up. We can’t keep this street clear forever.”

  “I’m looking,” Eva snapped. “Are you sure the last dart didn’t get stuck higher in the tree?”

  “Positive. We’re detecting its signature at ground level. About half a meter from your left foot.”

  Eva looked around again and realization dawned. The cat behind the glass wasn’t asleep: it was dead.

  “It’s in the cat,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not looking. Get someone else to do your dirty work.”

  There was a moment’s pause and then the voice spoke again.

  “Fine, fine. Get out of there quickly. Your payment will be reduced to four hundred credits. Go to Mehta’s Information Shop.”

  “I’m going.”

  Eva pushed her way through the gate and walked quickly down the street. Across the road a curtain twitched and, out of the corner of her eye, Eva caught sight of an old woman, watching. Eva dodged left and headed down a side street. A man in his slippers stood on the sidewalk talking to a woman in a dressing gown. A front door stood open behind them, an untidy cluster of doorbells screwed haphazardly into its frame. As she walked past, Eva overheard a snatch of their conversation.

  “He went running out of the house just after midnight last night. Kept shouting ‘my eyes,’ sounded as if he was in pain. Disappeared around the corner and then collapsed. Heart attack, the doctor said.”

  “What are you going to do with his things?”

  Eva continued down the road, as the reason for her contract took shape in her head. What price her part in the concealment of a murder? Four hundred credit
s.

  The world was slipping down into Hell, and everyone was helping it on its way. Everyone accepted a little bit of money, and a little bit of blame, and that way they could all walk around with a conscience that was just a little bit off-color. Just a little bit, but add all those bits together…

  Another reason why Eva had to escape.

  If Eva had believed in fate, she would have had to admit it was finally coming round to her side. Her headache had almost cleared, and the diversion to pick up the darts had resulted in her arriving at the place she had been aiming for all along. She walked into Mehta’s Information Shop deep in thought and headed to the back of the retail area. First deal with the darts, then lose her card, then finally back home. After that, she would begin her escape in earnest.

  A stack of blue mail tubes lay on a shelf near the back. Eva picked one up and reached in her pocket for the four darts. She examined one before dropping it into the plastic container. A short fat needle, the red “feathers” at the back sliding smoothly into the metal barrel for concealment. Her phone vibrated once more.

  “Hello.”

  “Drop them in quickly. You’re drawing attention to yourself.”

  “Do the red feathers pop out at your signal, to help make them visible to collectors?” said Eva.

  “Classified information, Eva.”

  “Why don’t you just make them disintegrate?”

  “That’s not technically feasible. I think you’ve been listening to too many conspiracy theories. Just drop them in the tube and address it to 4A53.FF91.2E22.B7C2.”

  Eva scrawled the figures on the tube with a black marker pen that had been thoughtfully left on a nearby shelf.

  “Okay. Deposit the tube in the secure slot. We would like to thank you for your efficiency. Your account has been credited with four hundred credits, plus seventeen credits for the postage. Good-bye, Eva.” The line went dead.

  Eva dropped the tube in the correct slot to a faint popping sound and then made her way to the front of the shop. It was time to resume her intended schedule.

  She picked up five magazines from the shelves near the entrance doors and carried them to the checkout, pulling her e-card from a pocket as she did so. The young girl behind the counter scanned the card and the magazines. She recited each purchase as it appeared on the screen.