Instantiation

by Greg Egan

  The floor was filthy, strewn with clumps of oil-clotted sand, scraps of yellowing invoices curling at the edges, and a few newer burger wrappers and polystyrene cups. In the distance, someone sat on a bedroll, a slight figure with their back to her.

  Kate called out, “Hi! Is it safe here?” The walls flung her voice back at her.

  The figure turned and replied, “It’s all right. No one hassles you.”

  Kate approached. It took her a while to be sure, but once she had clear sight of the boy, she knew it was Rowan da Silva.

  “I’m Kate.”

  He held out his hand and she shook it, but he offered no name himself. She looked around. “Are we the only ones here?”

  “Right now we are. There’s a lot more people at night.”

  “I heard this was a good place,” Kate said, “but you never know until you see for yourself.”

  Rowan nodded distractedly, then lowered his gaze and stared glumly at the floor. If he really was suffering from the same disease that had struck Reza, Kate found it hard to discern the effects. With Reza, there had been a yawning abyss between the man she knew and the shop-window dummy he’d become, but with this boy she had no expectations to help her gauge the symptoms.

  “How old are you?” she asked gently.

  “Sixteen,” he lied.

  “You don’t get on with your folks?”

  “They’re dead.”

  Kate said, “I’m sorry.” She hesitated, but decided not to push him into embellishing the claim. “My husband, how can I put it … showed me a different side.”

  “Like he hit you?”

  Kate wanted to say yes; it only mattered that she had a plausible story. But something in her rebelled against the slander. “No. He just changed.”

  Rowan said, “You hear that a lot.” He rose to his feet, then picked up his bedroll and a cardboard sign. “Gotta hit the lunchtime crowds if I want to eat.”

  “Yeah. Good luck.”

  He wouldn’t make it to the city by lunchtime; he had to mean the nearest mall, some forty minutes away. Kate waited five minutes, then followed him. She caught sight of him on the main road, following the route she’d expected him to take, then she quickly moved to a smaller, parallel street so she wouldn’t be at risk of discovery if he happened to turn around. After crossing back along side streets a couple of times, she soon had a good enough sense of his pace to feel confident that she wasn’t going to lose him.

  When she was almost at the mall, she spotted Rowan setting up his bedroll and sign on a public street near the entrance. Kate stood beside a tree and recorded video with her phone in one hand and her arm at her side, panning and tilting slowly to sweep the zoomed frame across a range of directions that she hoped would encompass him. It worked, well enough; she managed to extract a still image in which Rowan was clearly recognizable.

  She circled around the mall and went in through a different entrance, then found a café. She’d spent all her small change, so she had to retrieve a fifty-dollar bill she’d hidden beneath an insole. Between that, her choice of wardrobe, and the acrid smell she’d acquired since showering in the shelter by trekking a dozen kilometers in the heat, she’d never felt more self-conscious, but the waitress took her money without a flicker of disdain and handed her the WiFi password along with her coffee.

  Kate logged in and created a GMail account, then sent the pictures of Rowan to his mother, geotagged. She had to assume that Ms da Silva now knew that she’d been suspended, so she kept the tip anonymous, and resisted the urge to offer suggestions for a medical examination that would probably sound even more bizarre and unwelcome coming from a stranger than from a rogue police officer.

  She left the café and took up a position outside the supermarket, where she had a clear view of Rowan. Half an hour later, a squad car pulled up in the street, and both of Rowan’s parents emerged. Kate watched them arguing with their son, and when they failed to persuade him to come with them, one of the officers took him by the arm and got him into the car with a minimum of force.

  She had no way of knowing if they would take the kind of steps needed to get him a proper diagnosis, but there was a chance that at least they could keep him from fleeing again for another few days, in which time she might be able to gather enough evidence of the outbreak to trigger a full-scale public health response, and clear her name to the point where she could make sure that Rowan was included.

  When the squad car drove away, she sat on a bench in the mall, pondering her next step. She was on CCTV now, and regardless of her changed hairstyle it was only a matter of time before anyone seriously looking for her would be able to start reconstructing her movements.

  So she had to return to the warehouse that night, or she might not get another chance.

  9

  Kate had expected the warehouse to be pitch black by nightfall – with the occasional beam from a phone, deployed sparingly – but it turned out that some of the squatters had obtained what looked like solar-charged hurricane lamps, which they set up on crates to spread a warm yellow light across the cavernous space. There was even a small portable microwave that people were using to heat up food. The mood of the place was almost cozy, as if they’d gathered here to ride out a storm or a flood, strangers united, however warily, against a shared calamity.

  The squatters around her had been taciturn when she’d introduced herself, but she felt more like a newcomer than an outsider – on probation, not rejected. So far she’d sighted fifteen people, and among them she’d recognized four of the missing whose families she’d interviewed: Suzanne Reyes, Ahmed Fahadi, Gary Katsaros, and Linda Blethyn. Since none of them were minors, or the subject of warrants, there was no point trying to get police involved; it was possible that the best thing she could do would be to keep her mouth shut until morning, then find ways to tip off their loved ones. If she could get enough people who’d been affected by the disease reunited with the people who could recognize their condition, her job would be half done.

  Gary and Suzanne had been using the microwave, but now Kate saw them walking straight toward her, carrying containers of food.

  “Are you hungry?” Suzanne asked. “It’s Chinese, not too spicy.”

  Kate nodded gratefully and accepted the meal, then she gestured to the floor and the three of them sat cross-legged on her blanket. Her companions were both around her own age, and though she knew Suzanne had spent time in shelters, both were better dressed than she was.

  Gary looked around across the warehouse floor. “This isn’t how I saw myself ending up.”

  Kate laughed sympathetically. “Me neither.”

  “But when my wife changed, I couldn’t stay in the house. I couldn’t stay there, pretending that nothing had happened.”

  Suzanne remained silent, but she was watching Kate intently. “Changed how?” Kate asked.

  “Hollowed out,” Gary replied. “The first time I saw her, I didn’t think it was her at all. Everything that made her who she was had gone. Just because her face was the same, how could I recognize her without that spark? But it was her body, I had to accept that in the end. Her body was still there; it was everything else that had drained away.”

  Kate stared back at him, unable to speak. He was not infected with the disease that had claimed Reza and Michael; his wife was. Kate had spoken to her for twenty minutes, but to a stranger, emitting the right words in the right order was enough for her to pass as normal.

  Had they all been hollowed out: everyone she’d interviewed who’d claimed that it was the missing family member whose behavior had changed? Even Rowan’s mother? Kate struggled with her memories of the interview. It was one thing to be oblivious to the lack of familiar cues that only someone who’d known her for years would expect, but nothing about her fears for her child had rung false.

  Suzanne said, “My husband was the same. When I woke up, I thought there was a rapist in my bed. If I hadn’t seen his appendectomy scar, I might have bashed his brains
out.”

  Kate looked down at the blanket. “It was the same for me,” she confessed. “My husband and my son. Then my sister, and one of my colleagues…”

  Suzanne reached over and squeezed her shoulder.

  “It’s spreading,” Gary said. “The hollowing is spreading. And it’s so hard to stop, because only the nearest can know who’s been taken.”

  Kate said, “We need to go to the Department of Health. If there are enough of us telling the same story, they’ll have to investigate.”

  Suzanne responded with the kind of smile that seemed to say they might as well light up the Bat-Signal. “I know two people who did that: a woman and her son. No one heard of them again. It’s spread to the government, it’s spread to the hospitals, it’s spread to the police.”

  Kate shook her head vehemently. “But it can’t be everyone. It must be just a few.”

  “How can you be sure?” Gary countered. “In someone you know, it’s unmissable. In anyone else, how could you tell?”

  Kate had no reply. She’d thought she was close to turning things around, but all she’d done was send Rowan back to the robotic remnants of his parents, to be treated as if he was the one who’d lost his mind. Everything she’d been taking comfort from was being kicked out from under her.

  Gary said, “The only way to fight this is for each of us to do what no one else can. We need to honor those who were our nearest. Prepare ourselves for what needs to be done, then go back to them and grant them peace.”

  Kate’s fists tightened, but she spoke as calmly as she could. “Don’t say that. They can be brought back. They can be cured.”

  “This is a war now,” Suzanne insisted. “Do you really think it would be merciful to spare them – and just sit around hoping that a cure is going to fall from the sky, while they spread the infection even further? Imagine a world where people like us are outnumbered. Do you have any idea how close to that we might be, even now?”

  “So have you slaughtered your family?” Kate retorted, knowing the answer full well. She turned to Gary. “Have you?”

  “No,” Gary replied, but his tone made no concession to her stance. “We need to act in concert, all on the same night. They can’t be prepared for this – we need to take them by surprise.”

  “That’s monstrous.” Kate was numb. “You don’t murder people just because they’re sick.”

  Suzanne said, “It’s the hardest thing you could ask of anyone, but Natalie showed us: if you’re strong, it can be done. If you loved them, and you face up to what they’ve become, it can be done.”

  Kate had no words. Suzanne squeezed her shoulder again. “It’s tough,” she said. “You need time. We’ll talk again soon.”

  They left her sitting on the tattered blanket. Kate watched as they crossed the floor and met up with Linda and Ahmed.

  So this was the brave resistance against the horrors of the plague: people ready to abandon all hope in medicine, and just cull the herd. She could understand how shocking their personal experience had been, but the way they were reading it could not be right. No disease in history had ever spread so fast that the infected outnumbered the healthy.

  Kate closed her eyes and saw an image of Beth, the big sister she’d worshipped, defending her from a clique of narcissistic bullies on her first day of high school. But then she pictured the shell of a woman she’d seen standing on the porch, holding the thing that had been her nephew. What were the odds that Beth had been infected at the same time as Reza and Michael, unless the disease had run rampant across the city? What were the odds that Chris Santos would be infected too? He lived on the other side of the river.

  She lay down and curled up on the blanket. The world couldn’t change overnight, without warning. Nothing worked like that; it defied all logic.

  But she couldn’t deny the evidence of her senses: Reza, Michael, Beth and Chris had all succumbed. Her only hope of proving the catastrophists wrong was to test their dismal hypothesis further. She had to put aside her fears of ridicule and betrayal, and take her story to as many people as possible who she had ever had reason to trust.

  10

  Kate slipped out of the warehouse just after dawn, leaving everyone else still sleeping. She’d been afraid that Natalie’s disciples might have had someone watching her, but they could hardly keep all their potential recruits under surveillance. And if she’d tried to turn them in, what would she say, to whom? That half a dozen homeless people were planning an uprising? Did the hollow men and women even understand their own nature well enough to conceive of the uninfected as any kind of threat? If they were just puppets going through the motions of living out the lives that their original hosts would have lived, how could that include any scenario that reflected their own difference?

  As she strode down the highway, she tried to stare down her qualms and fix on a choice of confidante: someone who lived far from the center of the outbreak that had claimed Natalie’s family, and who had no more reason to be infected than anyone Kate might have plucked off the street at random.

  Emily had been her closest friend in high school, and if they hadn’t met up in person all that often in the last few years, that had only been a matter of how busy they’d both become. She’d visited Kate just after Michael was born, and when Kate thought back over their conversation, she felt sure that she’d be able to tell at once if anything had changed inside her friend’s skull.

  Emily was living in Coomera, some forty kilometers south; not exactly walking distance. Kate found a bus stop for the route into the city and joined a small queue of early commuters. She met one woman’s gaze and they exchanged polite greetings. Hollowed or not? Infected or not? If this disease spread so rapidly, so easily, how had she been spared, herself? Some natural immunity? Some genetic quirk? She’d survived sharing a bed with Reza, but how many of the hollowed could she share a bus with before her luck ran out?

  It was mid-morning by the time Kate arrived in Coomera, but Emily worked from home, so there was no reason for her not to be around. Kate rang the bell and stood waiting, anxiously. She could feel herself already gloomily prejudging the verdict, on no evidence whatsoever.

  She rang again, then banged on the door. “Emily?”

  A young man emerged from the house next door. “I think she’s still away for another week.”

  “Oh.”

  “Either that, or she’s tricked me into watering her plants while she sleeps all day,” he joked.

  Kate smiled. “I should have called first.” As she walked down the road toward the bus stop, she remembered Emily talking about a business trip to Texas to meet with potential investors. She’d apologized for dropping in so soon after Kate came home from hospital with Michael, but she’d been preparing to leave in the next day or two. Kate hadn’t entirely forgotten; she’d just assumed she would have been back by now.

  Half an hour into the long ride north, the bus passed a battered payphone. Kate rang the bell and got off at the next stop. She walked back to the payphone, trying to recall Emily’s number; it had been years since she’d had to type it. When she punched her best guess into the keypad, a bland synthetic voice offered her a hint of success: “The number you have dialed currently redirects to an international destination. Do you wish to proceed with the call?”

  Kate said, “Yes.”

  After six rings, she heard: “You’ve reached Emily’s phone, please leave a message.” Kate slammed the handset down. She recognized her friend’s voice, but it had been stripped of any trace of warmth and humor.

  She stood by the phone as the traffic sped past beside her, trying to understand what had happened. Had Emily been carrying the virus even before she’d flown out of Brisbane, and only succumbed to it after she’d arrived in America? And then … what? She’d re-recorded her phone’s greeting, to reflect her new, diminished state of consciousness? Unless she was actually an alien pod-person signaling to her fellow invaders, why would she even think of doing that?

&nb
sp; Kate called the number again, listened to the recording again. She’d heard the same words dozens of times over the last ten years. And she could not put her finger on any change in timing, pitch, or intonation.

  She called a third time, covering her left ear against the traffic noise. Every syllable was shaped and positioned just as it always had been – like the freckles on Reza’s shoulders. It was only the deeper meaning that had slipped away.

  But this was a sound file, a digital waveform – and if it was literally unchanged, then any meaning with which the speaker had imbued it ought to remain intact.

  Kate called again, trying to block out any emotional reaction to the voice and judge it entirely as she would a series of beeps in an audiology test. The result was not what she’d expected: the affectless drone she’d been hearing before suddenly seemed more human, not less.

  Just as the tone sounded for the caller to leave a message, the faint hiss on the line changed, and a live voice, thick from sleep, said, “Hello?”

  Kate said, “Emily?”

  “Kate? Is something wrong?”

  “No. Did I wake you?”

  “It’s all right; it’s not that late here.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d still be away.”

  “Yeah … I’ve had a lot of interest in the project, but these things never go to plan.”

  Kate kept the conversation going while saying as little as possible herself, prodding Emily along with smalltalk, while tuning her own expectations in and out. The more she sought a feeling of solace and intimacy, the more her friend’s voice mocked and disappointed her. But when she emptied her mind and just listened, everything sounded normal.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Emily asked. “You sound a bit out of it.”

  “Work’s been crazy,” Kate replied. “There’s a case … I can’t talk about it now, but maybe when you get back.”