They’re heading for a vacant building complex where, according to the data synchronization, several birth and death clinics had previously been located, but have since gone bankrupt or been relocated. The buildings are in good condition and most of the security cameras are still operational. It’s possible that the complex is simply going to be renovated before new clinics are opened.
Some areas seem to have been converted into illegal living spaces by squatters. I can see signs of regular habitation. Mattresses and chairs, extension cords, portable hotplates. Certain walls have been spray-painted with Roman numerals and letters from an alphabet that the translation software doesn’t recognize.
Zarnee’s GPS dot moves inside the building. I click my way through the corresponding camera views and find them on the second floor in a former birthing room. All that remains of the previous furnishings is one hospital bed pushed against the wall. Zarnee is holding Riva’s hand as she scans every corner of the room. Her movements seem hesitant.
A high-pitched cry comes from an adjacent room, Riva flinches, Zarnee continues unfazed. I find the camera in the next room at the exact moment that Zarnee enters. Riva stops in the doorframe. Unlike the rest of the building, this room is still in its original state. It’s a nursery with about fifty tiny empty beds. When another cry comes from one of the beds near the front, I suddenly realize that three of them are actually occupied. The babies must be between one and two months old. As if the sound were contagious, the other two babies start crying. A figure emerges from a dark corner of the poorly lit room, a boy, about Zarnee’s age. He bends over one of the beds and puts something in the baby’s open mouth. Zarnee goes over to the next bed, bends down, and lifts a baby out. He holds it against his chest and rocks it back and forth. It immediately gets quiet again, you can only hear the babies breathing.
—Who are these children? Riva asks.
She hasn’t moved from the doorframe.
—Breeder babies, the boy says. His facetag identifies him as Ace Schilling, nineteen years old, unemployed, poor performance values.
Zarnee gestures for Riva to come closer. Once she’s standing next to him, he holds the baby out to her. Its eyes are closed, it looks like it’s sleeping.
She doesn’t take it.
—Don’t be scared, Zarnee says, he doesn’t bite.
—He can’t, the boy laughs, his adaptation values are way too high, DNA guarantee.
When Riva doesn’t react, Zarnee gently puts the infant back into his bed.
—Whose are they? asks Riva.
—Nobody’s, Zarnee says.
—I mean, where do they come from?
The boy walks up to Riva and holds out his hand.
—Ace. Welcome, Riva.
Riva mechanically shakes the hand in front of her.
—Even these babies sometimes scream for no reason, says the boy.
—Let’s hope, Zarnee says, that they’re still screaming when they grow up.
I think about what Masters will say when he sees these recordings. Squatters with untagged babies that must have been stolen from a breeder facility. I would have to report them, initiate an investigation. Remove Zarnee from the intervention.
And destroy everything that we’ve accomplished.
Bring Riva back, I write to Zarnee.
I hear his tablet vibrate, but he doesn’t react.
Zarnee, I write, right now!
Zarnee’s tablet vibrates. He pulls it out of his pants pocket, skims the message, then opens the back of the device with a quick movement and takes the battery out. His GPS tag disappears from the map on my screen.
It’s 3:30 a.m. Masters’s last activity on the server is displayed at shortly after twelve. He still hasn’t seen anything from the trip to the peripheries.
Without thinking, I log out of the security cameras and delete my access from the log.
Immediately afterwards, I realize what I’ve done. Removing work history data is not allowed. I’ve committed a criminal offense. My pulse shoots up. I feel like a casting candidate who has made a mistake on stage that can no longer be undone.
I remember the botched Call-a-Coach™ conversation. About how I deleted all the data without hesitation, without thinking.
I try to calm my breathing. No one ever noticed that the Call-a-Coach™ logs were deleted. Maybe nobody will notice anything this time either. The chances are good. They won’t look for external recordings if I don’t mention them in my daily report.
My pulse is slowly returning to normal. But there’s still the inescapable feeling of intense disappointment. I’m disappointed in myself. How could I lose control like that?
I see myself as a young girl in the institute. I think of her achievement potential. Her hopes. Her dreams. Back when I was still able to do what was expected of me.
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27
At night I dream about Masters. He’s fused to my back like a tumor. His body compressed into a backpack-sized knot, his head in my neck, whispering criticism into my ear. I sit in front of my monitors and try to concentrate on the data analysis. Every time I click on a file, it multiplies. You halfwit, Masters whispers. She’ll never dive again.
When I wake up, I’m sitting at my desk. I’m sure I fell asleep in bed.
On the work monitor, the securecloud™ folder with my performance reviews is open. It’s empty. I restart the computer, log back in, open the cloud. The log indicates that the files were removed a few minutes ago by someone who entered my employee ID and password.
I don’t remember deleting them. I try to recover the files, but they’ve also been removed from the backup. My fingers are shaking. Unauthorized removal of corporate documents, such as employee data, triggers a security alert by default. How am I supposed to explain this?
I remember Andorra and the strange sleep disorder she suddenly developed in her last year at the institute. How I woke up in the middle of the night because she was making a commotion in our room. She was digging through documents at her desk. There were sheets of paper and various objects lying all over the floor. I asked her what she was doing. She didn’t answer. Even though her eyes were open, she didn’t seem conscious. She let me lead her back to her bed and then went right back to sleeping normally. In the morning, I excitedly told her about her strange nighttime behavior. We laughed about it then, but when it happened again a few nights later it didn’t feel right. I brought Andorra back to bed, waited for her to fall asleep, and didn’t tell her the next morning. This nightly version of Andorra seemed like a clone to me, a strange being who had the same appearance and voice as Andorra, but only as a type of camouflage. As if someone had taken possession of her body and was controlling it for unknown purposes.
The notification sound from the internal messaging channel tears me out of my thoughts. It’s an urgent-message™ from someone in our data security department.
According to the log, the following 67 sensitive internal files created by Hugo M. Masters were removed from the securecloud™ at 4:21 a.m. by your user profile without management approval. Please confirm that you are responsible for the deletion in order to rule out the possibility of hacking.
I suspect that I might have been sleepwalking, I write to the data officer.
You mean that you deleted the files in your sleep?
That seems to be the only explanation. I can’t remember deleting them. But I woke up at my desk and the files were gone.
I’ll run the security scanner on your server to rule out a hack.
Okay, thanks.
I reported the incident to management. They’ll contact you.
Okay. Can you recover the deleted files?
Already done.
Thank you.
I write a note to Masters about the incident. He’ll be less angry if I tell him myself than if he learns about it from the internal communications
department. To my surprise, he answers immediately. It’s 4:26 a.m.
Come for a medical examination first thing tomorrow morning.
This has really never happened to me before. I’m very sorry. It was not intentional.
All the more reason to have a medical exam.
I have a compulsory check-up at the end of the week anyway.
Come tomorrow morning.
Okay. I’m really sorry, Mr. Masters.
Go to sleep. Your sleep habits are far too irregular. And you didn’t meet your exercise minimum again.
I’m sorry, Mr. Masters.
Go to sleep.
But I can’t get back to sleep. I think about Andorra before she disappeared. How she was possessed by a foreign entity that stripped her of her passion for life. How it turned her into a sad figure, unpredictable and dangerous.
We sat on the bed and watched Casting Queens™. We laughed and commented on the performances and the jury’s statements. Suddenly, Andorra jumped up like she was in pain.
I asked if something had bitten her. Even though the windows were covered with mosquito nets, they somehow always found a way in anyway. She shook her head and stared at me, not responding to my questions. At some point I just went back to watching the show. One of our favorites had made it to the second-to-last round. She wanted to be a judge. The tasks were specific to her chosen profession, revolved around legal texts, the main principles of the legal system, and the constitution. The candidate answered the questions so quickly that I could hardly follow and had to stop the stream from time to time and repeat parts. I was so absorbed in her performance that I forgot about Andorra.
All of a sudden she was standing right in front of me. She shook me as if I needed to be woken up. She pushed my tablet off the bed and yelled at me:
—You’re an idiot, Hitomi, you’re a dumb, stupid animal. You don’t care about anything! You don’t understand anything!
I was so blindsided that I couldn’t say a word. I began to cry. Never before had Andorra spoken to me like that.
I looked at her, the girl I had been with my entire life, who had slept beside me every night for as long as I could remember.
There was a stranger in her place. Crying made my mucous membranes swell. The tears seemed to spur on Andorra’s anger.
—Where do you think she’ll end up if she doesn’t make it to the next round? she snapped at me.
—Then she’ll try again next time, I said.
—And if she doesn’t make it then?
—Then she’ll try again.
—You don’t get it!
She spit the words from her lips like shards of glass. I had never seen her so upset.
—What don’t I get, Andorra? What do you want from me?
—You pretend that there are rules that apply to everyone. But it’s not a level playing field! When we go to the castings, we’ll cut straight to the final rounds. Did you ever think about that?
—Because we’ve been pre-qualified.
—But how did we get pre-qualified, Hitomi? What makes us so special?
—We got good results in our preliminary exams, we perform better than the others.
—Do you really believe that? Andorra asks.
—Why not?
She shook her head and left the room. That night she didn’t sleep in her bed.
I didn’t see her at breakfast the next morning either.
The first time I saw her again was in class, freshly showered and in her uniform like everyone else. When I hesitantly sat down, she smiled at me as if nothing had happened. She whispered in my ear that she hadn’t done the math assignments. She would get points taken away and have to do additional make-up work. I was so grateful to have my friend back that I just erased what had happened between us. I never wanted to think about it again. I said I would help her with the additional assignments so that she could finish them faster. She smiled.
—You’re the best, she said.
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28
—You need to move more.
I can only see the outline of the doctor’s face in front of the bright sun shining in through the window wall. A few spots around the eyes, everything else is covered in shadow.
—Ten thousand steps a day, he says. That’s the contractual agreement. You never made it past four thousand last week.
—I can’t always leave my work monitor. I’m doing a live analysis.
—Then exercise in the office. Your health should be close to your heart. The fitness requirements aren’t in place to serve us, they’re for your own good.
I nod and try to make him feel like I’m going to follow his instructions, that I’m going to do a better job in the future.
—Your sleep is very irregular.
—It’s difficult at the moment, yes.
—A regular sleep rhythm is essential for physical and mental health.
—I know.
—I’ll prescribe you a stronger sleeping pill. You should do relaxation exercises thirty minutes before falling asleep. We have several app suggestions on the server.
—Okay.
The doctor speaks into his tablet. His voice is deliberately quiet. I’m afraid it’s a bad evaluation.
—Do you think that the lack of sleep is what caused my somnambulism? I ask as nonchalantly as possible once he’s finished with his notes.
—It wasn’t somnambulism, Ms. Yoshida.
—What do you mean by that?
—We analyzed the data from your activity tracker. It couldn’t have been sleepwalking because you were awake when the company data was deleted.
—But I woke up in front of the monitor.
—Data doesn’t lie, Ms. Yoshida. You know that just as well as I do.
—I assure you that I didn’t intentionally delete the files.
—Ms. Yoshida, you’re the expert: doesn’t it make sense that an employee who repeatedly receives average to poor performance reviews would want to delete them in order to improve her performance fee?
The doctor smiles in a deescalating way, just as I learned to do in crisis training. I recognize the contrast between his natural-looking expression of empathy and his analytical gaze. He’s trying to assess my reaction to the confrontation.
—I can only tell you what I remember, I say. And I didn’t wake up until the data had already been erased.
—I believe you perceived it that way, Ms. Yoshida. Sometimes our brain blocks memories that we can’t process. As I said, you’re the expert.
What if I really was completely conscious when I deleted the data? If it was a sudden attack and now my mind is protecting me from the awareness that I would do such a thing? If my deleting the camera data from the birthing clinic and the Call-a-Coach™ conversation were signs of a destructive inner process? A kind of loss of control over my consciousness? Over my thoughts, my behavior? I suddenly feel like I’m falling, and have to support myself against the edge of the examination table next to me.
As a child, I trained myself to play through all possible outcomes before reacting to anything. Before each word, I considered its potential effect on the other person.
—Ms. Yoshida, the doctor says. We would like to give you another chance.
It perfectly fits the tone that’s recommended for uncooperative clients. Caring, but firm.
—Mr. Masters has decided not to press charges against you.
—Thank you. Thank you very much.
The relief can be heard in my voice. I’m starting to feel woozy.
—Take it as a warning. We reserve the right to take legal action if you don’t comply with your contractual obligations in the future.
—Of course, I say. That’s not going to happen.
—That includes your health requirements. You need to make sure you get e
nough exercise. Sufficient sleep.
—Yes, I say.
—We only want the best for our employees.
—Yes, I say. Thank Mr. Masters very much. Please tell him I’m sorry.
When I go to leave, the doctor gives me a friendly smile, shakes my hand, and then immediately disinfects his own hand afterwards. In the hall outside his office, I’m overcome by the sensation of falling again. My vision is so blurry that I have to lean against the wall.
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29
—I have to tell you something.
Zarnee seems nervous. Fidgeting in place, constantly touching his right ear.
—Did something happen? Riva asks.
—Sit down.
Zarnee takes Riva’s hand and leads her to the sofa, pushes her onto the cushion, sits down next to her.
—Zarnee, you’re scaring me.
—There’s nothing to be scared of.
I immediately get a bad feeling.
Zarnee, I write him via our communication channel, what are you doing?
The notification sound makes Zarnee look over at his tablet on the living-room table. He reaches for it, glances at the screen, and then switches the device to silent. His facial expression doesn’t indicate whether he has read my message.
—Riva, Zarnee says.
He clasps her hands. In the distance shot, they almost look like a couple, their eyes focused directly on each other.
—I’m leaving, Zarnee says.
—Where? Now?
—I’ve already packed my things.
—What do you mean?
—I’m not coming back.
Zarnee? What are you doing?
His tablet vibrates, but he doesn’t even look.
—What do you mean? Riva asks again. Her voice is breathy and quiet.
—I’m moving out.
Zarnee, I write, end the conversation immediately and call me.
Zarnee holds Riva’s hands in front of his face as if he wants to make sure that they’re real.
—I’m sorry, Riva.
The High-Rise Diver Page 16
