Heartstream

by Tom Pollock

  “But … but…” The hurt, confused innocence on your face is just the way it would have been on hers. “I won’t. I’ll help you. I’m on your side.”

  I want to believe you – I long for it; I feel wrung-out with that longing. But the part of me that needs to move is like stone. What would I do, if I were in your place? I picture my own mother with her lonely, exhausted smile and my guts twist.

  “You know it wouldn’t stay private.” The words march out of me, relentless and unforgiving. “He’s the mayor of London; it’d be a huge scandal, huge news. And that’s before we get to you. You built an empire, an entire identity, on her memory. On how you feel about her, how your followers feel about her. Are you really ready to tear that memory to shreds? For a stranger who turned up in your kitchen saying she had a home-made bomb stuck to her chest? You could do that to her? I couldn’t, not to my own mother.”

  You hold my gaze, and very slowly you say, “I thought you said you were my mother.”

  A laugh of pure despair pulls itself out of my chest. “No, you see that’s just it. I’m not. It was her voice that taught you to speak. Her finger you followed as you learned to read. She fed you, clothed you, kissed you when you were hurt, cuddled you when you were sad and yelled at you when you broke her rules. Don’t you see? That’s the horror of what they did to me. They didn’t just steal away my child; they made it so that I never had her.”

  The tears are running hot and free down my face now, but I can still see you clearly enough to see the way you half crouch, almost like you’re going to spring at me.

  “I would give anything, everything. Everything I ever had, to be able to trust you, to know you. But you’re a stranger to me. The one thing I really know about you is that the woman who raised you is the most manipulative human being I ever met.”

  You straighten, a confused little tuck of skin appearing on your forehead. “What?”

  “I said you’re a—”

  “No, I heard. Sorry. It’s been a long time since anyone’s called me a stranger. What about when you streamed off me – do you not feel like you got to know me then?”

  I bark a brief laugh. “Streamed off you? They didn’t even let us have phones in the hospital, let alone those patches you’re so attached to. I’ve never touched Heartstream. Everything I know about you I found on the Internet since I got out.”

  “But…” You gesture to the back of your head, where your hair’s as close-cropped as mine.

  “This?” I flush. “Oh, they shaved my hair off in the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was pulling it out.” I blink, and for an instant my hand’s full of rust-coloured curls, blood on the roots like paint on brush tips.

  You gape at me for a second, and then something flits over your face, a decision, a resolution, but it’s gone so fast I wonder if I imagined it.

  “If I could prove it to you,” you say quietly, “if I could show you could trust me, would you look?”

  I gaze at you, frozen, desperate for some way out of this paralysis.

  Gently, you take my arm with one hand, and put the other around my waist, and I find myself walking. I feel so weak I can barely support my own weight. It’s muscle memory with you; you’ve had so much practice easing broken people into motion.

  “Quick!” you whisper.

  A murmuring outside swells into a shout, creeping in through a flaw in the window glass. I can hear voices raised, barked in what sounds like orders. A muffled cheer. Then a voice through a loudspeaker.

  “To the woman holding Amy Becker; this is the Metropolitan Police. You are surrounded and your detonator circuit has been jammed. Release your hostage. Send her out of the building ahead of you, and come out with your hands up.”

  You guide me along the landing into your room. We’re surrounded by charcoal drawings of birds. You dive flat onto your stomach and I drop to a crouch, expecting bullets or a blast, but you’re only scrabbling under your bed. You pull out a slim black box.

  “Do you trust me?” you ask.

  My throat is so parched I can barely answer. “N-no.”

  “You will.”

  You pull the lid off the box. Sitting in the bottom, nestled in plastic, sucking all the light out of the world like black holes, are three oval fabric patches.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Amy

  “Today’s not too bad,” Mum said with an anxious smile. “I think I could do today.”

  “You’re sure?” I asked.

  The smile stayed in place, but it crumpled at the edges like paper starting to burn.

  “I don’t know if it’s going to get any better than this, to be honest.”

  So I put the word out. That special stream I’d been trailing for weeks now was finally here. Clear out if you don’t want to be part of it, because at 8 p.m. GMT, for one hour only, like a guest DJ, my cancer-riddled mother is taking over my feed.

  “I’m not sure I can do that for you,” she’d said, when I’d finally sucked up the courage to ask.

  We were having our traditional tea and toast, relocated from the breakfast table to her bedside because the twenty-three steps to the kitchen were about half a day’s worth of energy for her at the moment. Well, technically I was having it. Her toast was untouched, and instead of English breakfast tea she had some kind of herbal monstrosity that smelled like it had been distilled from old women’s underwear drawers, but she said it helped with the nausea. But still, tea and toast. Rituals are important, especially at the end.

  “I want to spare you that.”

  “I understand,” I’d said. “I do, and it’s completely your call, but…” I’d hesitated. “If it’s me you’re worried about, I genuinely think I’d find it easier to know, rather than spend the rest of my life wondering, you know?”

  She’d thought about it for a few days and I hadn’t pressed her, until finally she’d agreed.

  “On a good day,” she’d stipulated. “If you want to know the depths, we can talk about that later, but for now I ease you in. You might be the one handling the kit, but I say when it starts, and when it stops. Agreed?”

  I had. She’d hesitated then.

  “Amy?”

  “Yes, Mum?”

  “You know, all the people who … follow you?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If it’d help you to know, do you think it might help them too?”

  And so there we were, a week and two days later, in that hateful bedroom, with two and a half million people on six continents standing by anxiously to receive. I pressed the patches to the base of Mum’s skull, and tried not to think about how papery the skin felt.

  “At least we haven’t got to shave my head,” she said. “Not with the osteosarcomb-over here.”

  I laughed. “Suits you – you’ve got the bones for it.”

  “Why thank you.”

  “I wish you’d passed the bloody things on.”

  She smiled a little sadly, but didn’t answer.

  “You ready?”

  She nodded.

  “Just say if you want to stop.”

  “I will.”

  I picked up her phone, thumbed the newly installed little blue heart, scrolled to the top, and hit broadcast.

  I remember gasping as the exhaustion hit. I just felt so heavy, like my skin was suddenly made of lead. It was hard to lift my arm, and when I did I cried out. Nausea swelled in me and my stomach bucked, but Mum had warned me not to eat for the last twelve hours and I came up empty. There was a bone-deep ache in my shoulder, another in my chest, and it rose to a shrieking pitch when I moved. Tears sprang into my eyes, blurring her face.

  “It’s OK,” she said, and I felt her sympathy for me throb through the link. “You get used to it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and even connected as we were, I couldn’t tell if she was lying. “People can get used to anything. It’s the best and worst thing about us.”

 
I closed my eyes. She didn’t try to hide anything, not the fury, the acid humiliation at being stuck in this godforsaken bed, not the fear, not the desperate, needle-tipped guilt she felt at leaving Dad and me and Charlie, especially Charlie, so young. But also, how deeply and implicitly she trusted me, not just Dad, but me especially, to look after him. And alongside that was love. I was staggered by the sheer weight of her love and how proud she was of me.

  “If we’re going to do this,” she said, “let’s do it.”

  I picked up my own phone (and my hand felt like a boulder on the end of my wrist) and hit broadcast there too.

  I remember the messages as they came in.

  Holy shit.

  What the fuck, Amy?

  Christ, I never knew.

  The numbers dwindled fast, from 2.5 million, to 1.8, to 1 million, to 700K, as the tourists got out. But then they stabilized and, astonishingly, started to grow again.

  And then something amazing happened.

  Oh my God, this is exactly how I feel.

  Other patients started to log into the feed. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand, how, when you were living with this, you could want more pain. But more and more of them were.

  All of them said the same thing, more or less.

  I don’t feel alone any more.

  Twenty-three minutes in, the first parallel feed came online, then another, then another, spreading like echoes in a cave system. When Mum finally nodded to me, and we killed her feed, there were more than two thousand of them, broadcasting not just to us, not even mainly to us, but to one another. A Fundarella account someone in Kuala Lumpur set up raised more than nine and a half million dollars for research into the rare and obstinate kind of bone cancer Mum had.

  With all the follow-up takes reverbing her story around the Internet’s various echo chambers, her name trended on every major social site for two months.

  I press the patches to the back of Polly’s head. The scalp between the bristles is slick with sweat and I have to press them down three times before they’ll stick. I think of how I did the same for Mum.

  Her old phone, sitting on my desk with its secret memory card and its cargo of poison, catches my eye.

  Can you really go public with that? I don’t know. Didn’t she suffer enough? She was my mother, for God’s sake. And Charlie’s. Can I do that to his memory of her? Can I do that to him?

  I grapple with it, fighting to make the woman I read in those texts and the woman who made me tea in the mornings fit into the same space, but I can’t. She was different women to different people, at different times. The seventeen years between then and now changed her. I changed her. I have to believe that.

  But she never told you, a voice inside me retorts. And she never let her out.

  Her. I look at Polly, and she looks back at me with huge, frightened eyes, shrunken like a starved animal inside the fake bomb vest that is far too big for her, her hand clutching her gun to her breast like a kid with a stuffed toy rabbit.

  She’s so stuck, so crippled in every synapse by constant betrayal, that she can’t trust me without proof.

  In the end it always comes down to who you trust.

  The robotic voice rattles the windows in their panes. “This is your final warning.”

  “Amy,” she says, “you don’t have time. Ryan can guess what I’ve told you. They have orders to kill us both for all I know. Just go, before they come in.”

  I thumb my phone, ignore the Heartstream icon – odds are there are coppers following my stream now, and I don’t want them picking this up – and instead scroll over the basic one-to-one app that comes with the patches.

  Establish private transduction loop? I hit yes.

  Boots crunch the gravel below my window. Polly emits a frightened mew.

  “Think of Charlie,” she begs me. “He needs you. Go to him.”

  In my memory, Charlie is falling towards me in a glittering spray of glass, the echo of the shot still in the air, the panicking crowd scattering around him like shrapnel from a grenade, and the concentrated force of their emotion slamming me into unconsciousness.

  Enter partner transducer serial no. I dash tears from my eyes as I stab it in.

  “I’ve let you go,” she pleads. “Why won’t you just leave me?”

  I flinch from the misery etched in her face. That’s what people have always done, her expression says, and part of her, the part gripping that gun so tight the veins stand out on her knuckles, can’t believe that I won’t do the same. I have to show her.

  “You won’t read my mind, exactly,” I tell her. “But you’ll feel how I feel towards you. You’ll know I mean you no harm; you’ll be able to tell if I’m lying to you.”

  More boots crunch gravel. Through the crack in the open window I hear clicks that could be safety catches being flicked off.

  Just run, a voice in me urges. Drop the phone and run. Think of one of those coppers putting a bullet in your brain. Think of Charlie. Think of him losing his mother and big sister inside of a week. Now RUN!

  But my feet stay rooted to the floor. Sweat drips from my forehead onto the phone. I stab at the screen, but the wet glass won’t answer. “FUCK!” I scream, and Polly starts hard. I wipe it clear on my hip and thank Christ it works again.

  Leave her. You don’t know her. So what if you started out in her uterus? That doesn’t make her your mother. Your mother’s the one whose memory you’re about to destroy. The one who raised you and loved you your whole life.

  I look up at Polly. She stares back, baffled, frightened, frozen.

  And lied to me my whole life, too.

  “Amy,” Polly says quietly. “Leave me. It’s what I deserve.”

  “No,” I say simply. “It’s not; it never was.”

  I hit broadcast.

  For the first two seconds, it’s like a normal stream. I feel the ghost of her heartbeat in my own chest, tripping even faster than mine. I feel the drag of her sleeplessness at the corners of my eyes. I feel her confusion, her guilt, her desperate, paralysing fear of betrayal, and under that, as quiet as the sound of breathing under rubble, hope against hope that this time, someone is being true to her.

  Trust me, I’m begging her. I stretch out a hand towards her, and she stares at it. Then I feel her in my head. She thinks of Mum, the happy, smiling pictures of us she found on her phone, and as she does my mess of feelings for my mother surface in front of her. She picks at the strangled knot of them, brushing up against my love and grief and anger and confusion as one by one they come loose from it.

  Trust me. Hesitantly, she reaches towards my hand.

  And then the feedback comes in like a tornado.

  The dampeners! I think frantically. They’re only default in Heartstream. I forgot to set them…

  But then the thought’s gone in a blizzard of images and emotions.

  Mum’s body, cold and waxy under my hand.

  Ryan slamming the door in my face.

  All my pain and fear and hopelessness spins through her and through me and back again, growing each cycle, feeding and feeding and feeding and feeding, louder and louder and louder and LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER AND LOUDER—

  My baby’s heartbeat echoing through the ultrasound.

  Charlie’s face, dark with betrayal. You promised!

  My legs go out from under me, my jaw is slack and drool runs freely from the corner of my mouth. I’m going to pass out. Polly crumples against the wall, eyes glazed. My stomach clenches. Oh God, this could kill her. I try to touch my phone, to end the stream, but I can’t even make my thumb twitch.

  I slide down the edge of the bed, flat on my back, staring at the ceiling.

  A girl, just like me. In love. Trembling with excitement as she kisses him.

  Watching the flames eat her home, her life, her family.

  Cradling her baby in her arms.

  I will not be destroyed I will not be destroyed I will not be destroyed.

  I feel her
will to survive in her like a pulse.

  Darkness creeps in at the edge of my vision. I’m going to pass out. Polly’s now flat on her back, her eyes like marbles. I feel her heart breaking.

  I won’t … let … them.

  And then, just like that, it’s gone.

  I’m gasping, spit and air rasping in my throat. I flop like a fish, until I manage to get my elbow under me. My head feels anvil-heavy as I drag it far enough off the floor to look down at my hand, but my phone’s not there.

  With a gurgling groan, Polly pulls herself into a sitting position. Her left hand holds the gun. Her right holds the phone.

  I couldn’t even lift my thumb, and she, on her first ever stream, dragged herself across the room and took it from my hand. If she hadn’t, we both would have died.

  I won’t let them destroy me. The sheer power of that impulse devastates me.

  “You really aren’t going to leave me?” she asks. Tear tracks claw her cheeks.

  I shake my head and the throb in my temples makes the room blur. “No. I couldn’t; you’re—”

  A crash from downstairs cuts me off, the sound of splintering wood. Boots drum on the floorboards. Someone shouts “Clear!”

  “They’re in the house.” Somehow, I clamber to my feet. My legs feel like overwarm butter but they’re under me. Now I’m pulling her up. She clings to me like she’s the child.

  “Stay close to me,” I breathe. “Whatever you do, don’t give them a clear shot.”

  I hesitate for a fraction of a second, then sweep up Mum’s old phone from my desk and hand it to her. “You’re going to need this.”

  “Downstairs clear!”

  The boots are like thunder on the stairs. Polly’s fingers twine through mine. With my free hand, I wrestle with the window sash, and for a moment it won’t budge, but then it slides and the tape gives way with a sucking noise and air rushes over my face. Shouts of surprise and alarm carry from the crowd across the road. Cameras flash like distant gunfire. I look down. The roof of the porch slants away, barely two feet below.

  The door bursts inwards under a boot.