The Last Resort

by Susi Holliday

  Amelia looks around the group; everyone raises an eyebrow or shrugs or nods – all seemingly happy enough to go along with this. But is she happy? On the one hand, she feels like she’s missing out, having the wrist-tracker – not being able to experience the exciting, disorienting view of the memory feeds like the others. Maybe she should request a new tracker. Maybe that’s what they want her to do . . . But on the other hand, she’s freer than the others. The wrist-tracker is not clamped onto her skin. She’s not being forced to endure what is transmitted. On balance, it’s better that she keeps her mouth shut.

  ‘You still with us, Amelia?’ Lucy calls over to her, snapping her back to the present. ‘On three . . . One, two . . . three.’

  They turn in unison and tap their trackers. Amelia’s holographic screen appears, hovering over the beach. It’s pixelated at the beginning, and it takes a moment to come into focus.

  ‘It’s Harvey,’ Amelia says, unnecessarily. She blows out a sigh of relief. She was expecting it to be one of them . . . maybe even her. After Tiggy’s public shaming, it’s obvious that they are all expecting the worst.

  ‘Firstly, a little piece of housekeeping . . . we do understand that you might have been somewhat shocked to find the camera there, and you’re right in thinking that it’s not the only one. But I’d like to assure you that it is there for your own safety. This little beach is quite perfect right now, but most of it will disappear very shortly, when the tide comes in. I realise that none of you have thought of this yet, no doubt caught up in the moment . . . considering what to do about the revelations you’ve had about a couple of your colleagues. But I’m afraid that despite our many abilities here at Timeo, we can’t yet control the tides.’

  Harvey smiles, turns to face a screen positioned behind him and clicks his hand-held pointer. The screen changes from green to black, and the Timeo logo slides across it, followed by the tagline ‘Creators of the technology you didn’t know existed’.

  ‘I’m going to step out of the way for a few moments, and let you enjoy the presentation.’ With that, he clicks the pointer again and disappears from the screen – which is now fully taken up by the screen from behind, with the logo and the scrolling tagline.

  ‘This had better be good,’ Scott says.

  ‘Welcome to Nirrik Island.’ An unseen voice narrates as a drone-filmed aerial view of the island comes into shot. ‘This special place is the realisation of a childhood dream, for your host – the founder of Timeo Technologies.’ The image pans in, then tilts as the view of the bay where they are currently sitting fills the screen. The tiki bar is gone, as are the loungers and the sports equipment, and the beach looks calm and peaceful – and very, very isolated. Amelia shifts in her seat, not finding the stool particularly comfortable. The island looks vaguely familiar, but the aerial shot hadn’t stayed on-screen long enough for her to work out why.

  ‘Despite the various invitations you have all received, and the array of benefits and rewards you have agreed to, none of that is the true reason for your presence today on Nirrik. Your host has invited you here to showcase a series of products that are not yet available anywhere else in the world. The many, many exciting things that Timeo creates are not sold by Timeo. Although you have never heard of our company, you will have certainly heard of, and made use of, many of its ground-breaking technologies. Due to confidentiality laws, we are unable to reveal these technologies – but rest assured, many if not the majority of the companies that you believe to be the most innovative in the world have been made so by the products that Timeo has created, manufactured and developed – passing over full copyright and patents to the client companies involved.

  ‘Timeo is modern technology . . . and what we can reveal is that memory-mining and neural pathway programming are at the very forefront of our research . . . and now you specially selected few are part of this exciting research and development pipeline.

  ‘Congratulations! You are here to help make history. Please enjoy the rest of your day. Your host looks forward to welcoming you tonight to a party that none of you will ever forget . . . Oh, and please – don’t destroy any more of our technology. As I said before, the cameras are there for your own safety . . . And finally, do not attempt to remove your ear-tracker. The next image will demonstrate this in more detail.’

  An image fills the screen: an enlarged animated diagram of the earpiece tracker and the side of a head, showing the ear. The display is schematic, so they can see both inside and out, and the image rotates slowly, showing what happens as the prong of the tracker is inserted, and how it butterflies open inside, fixing it in place.

  Amelia gasps. They don’t need to see what happens if someone attempts to pull the tracker off. She looks at the others. They’re silent, their mouths open in shock.

  The image disappears and the aerial shot of the island returns briefly, before it pans out once more. The screen vanishes and Amelia stares at the blank space, swivels in her seat to take in the bay. So they’ve been duped. Brought here under false pretences to guinea-pig some newfangled neurology gizmos. Her first reaction is a wave of relief that her tracker couldn’t be made to latch onto – into – her ear back at the visitor centre. But in the next moment, the feeling is replaced by a tickle of unease as she wonders if maybe it was a ruse. If there’s a reason she’s not getting access to the test device.

  And that tickle is joined by another deeper, creeping feeling that she knows exactly where this place is – but her memory is keeping it tightly locked away from her . . . and she has no idea why.

  Tiggy

  Tiggy has heard enough. She’s bored of this trip. There’s no opportunity to build her brand. No opportunity to network with anyone of actual use to her. What has she gained, aside from a humiliating reveal of a night she’d much rather forget? It’s all Giles’s fault. If he hadn’t been with those two sluts, if he hadn’t apparently bragged about it, like it was something to be proud of, then those bitches would never have known. He convinced her to come here, and now she hasn’t even got him here to get through it with. She’s sick of these people.

  She’s also sick of these people asking her where Giles is.

  At first, she’d played the worried girlfriend card – despite the horrible projection of his filthy threesome that she really didn’t need to see, and his protestations that she’d got it all wrong. Yeah, it was all wrong – wrong because Giles is a filthy cheating scumbag, and apart from anything else, his attractiveness as a partner is very much on the wane. His late-night drug-taking is starting to take its toll, not to mention his business starting to slide down the chute of ‘has been’. At least Tiggy is able to adapt her own brand and stay on trend. So what if those bitches say she’s ugly? She knows she’s not. She sorted them out anyway, didn’t she?

  They’re just jealous.

  She ignores Amelia’s calls for her to come back, to stay with the group. All that crap about tides and rocks and whatever else. She can see the way out of here, and she’ll head there herself. The aerial shot of the island hadn’t been up for long, but she’d seen it, mapped it and spotted where they’re all meant to be heading: the big house.

  There was a lighthouse at the top end of the island, and the house wasn’t far from there. The others might have come to the conclusion that she was stupid, but what they don’t know is that she has both a photographic memory and an extremely good sense of direction. She excelled at geography at school, understood how to read terrain on a map and how to deal with it.

  Yes, the tide is coming in soon. The position of the sun tells her what she needs to know. She’ll be out of here and on a flight back to the mainland before the rest of them have even worked out where she’s gone.

  She’s pretty sure she recognises this island, from a trip long ago. Something she hasn’t thought about in years. Something she’d rather forget.

  But that doesn’t matter now.

  She wants to find this ‘host’. This person in charge of Timeo. She wants
to know why she is here. Why her, when there are plenty of other brand experts and influencers they could have chosen? They’d told her it would be worth it. They’d told her it would clean her slate. Her ‘slate’ being that unfortunate incident at the party, about which they were disconcertingly well informed. But everyone’s seen it now, haven’t they? They know what she’s capable of, and they are 100 per cent judging her for it. So why is she really here?

  She gets why Amelia is here. Of all of them, she’s the most obvious, now that they’ve been here for the best part of a day. It had seemed like a mistake. She didn’t fit in with the others at all. Her personality, her skill set. None of it was right.

  But, of course, it was right. She’s the peacekeeper. She’s the stable one. She’s the confidante. And it had worked. She’d got Tiggy to admit to something she never thought she would voice. That thing with her not having the same tracker as everyone else had seemed suspicious, and it still does – but it means Amelia gets to probe in her own way. Even if their fancy tech can read their minds, having a real person teasing things out is much more effective. None of them trust the tech – but they all seem to trust Amelia.

  But the tech simply can’t do what they’re claiming. Way too fantastically Black Mirror. Though how else to explain it? Where could the footage have come from? That was a very exclusive party. No cameras. Definitely no filming. And it had been shot from her point of view. She’d have had to be fitted with a helmet-cam or something.

  From the Timeo presentation, it seems that the whole story had unfurled from inside herself . . . that this was Tiggy’s own memory, released via the tracker that is still pinned above her left ear. It seems too impossibly far-fetched, and yet – she knows it’s accurate. She was there. It happened exactly as it was projected.

  She touches the earpiece, wiggles it slightly, trying to see if she can pull it out. But they’d shown that particular option pretty clearly in the presentation – the design of the prototype. The single metal prong is in fact two prongs that spring open once they penetrate the skin, like those special fittings for hanging heavy pictures on thin internal walls. She’d watched a handyman hanging pictures at her parents’ Chelsea penthouse. He’d showed her the spring action of the wall fitting and explained it to her like she was stupid. She’d had an urge to ram it into his forehead, but had to content herself with imagining it instead of doing it.

  Most of the time, she only imagined her violent episodes. The champagne flute had been the first one that she’d followed through on, which might explain why it was so vivid in her mind. If the technology does work as they claim, then it makes sense that that’s the memory it was going to project.

  Damn them. She should never have come. Her curiosity and her urge to get one up on her fellow influencers had been too strong to ignore – and getting to come along with Giles had sealed it. A fancy trip to a secluded island. What could possibly go wrong?

  Everything, it seems.

  She’s blocked out the sounds of the others now. Hasn’t even looked back to see if they’re following. She’s made her way over the rocks and is almost at the next section of the cliff path. She doesn’t know if this is the official route, but from her memory of where the big house is located, it seems right. She pauses for a moment to catch her breath, realising that she’s been half hiking, half climbing for quite some time. There’s an inlet behind the rocks, another small bay, with a narrow shingled beach in contrast to the sandy bay she’s left behind. Waves are already beginning to lap past the wrack line, seaweed and other debris swirling in the clear water as the retreat of the waves becomes ever smaller.

  The tide is coming in.

  She turns to look for the others and sees that although they’re still quite far behind, they are following her path. Brenda and Scott are both limping, and the other three are trying to help them along.

  The sea is much closer to the tiki hut now.

  Amelia will no doubt be trying to keep everyone calm, but she can’t have failed to notice that the sea is much closer to them than it was before.

  She thinks about waiting, or going back and offering to help. But, no. She doesn’t know them. She doesn’t owe them anything.

  Lucy is clearly wary of her now, after seeing the screening of the party. The others are a little less hostile, but they have definitely seen her in a different light. Even Brenda, who she was sure she’d won over with her inane chatter.

  She doesn’t even care about Giles anymore. She thought she would. She truly did think she loved him, for a while at least. But seeing him in full action with those two girls has brought her to her senses.

  Enough.

  No doubt the others think she’s done him in . . . and right now, she wishes she had.

  She scrambles up a jutting section of rocks onto the cliff path, heading towards the shingled inlet. She hauls herself up the final few steps, away from the cliff edge. Loose stones skitter across the narrow path, and she slides in closer still, hugging the bank. There are boulders up ahead, and as she heads towards them something moves in the corner of her eye, her peripheral vision just picking it up. Something in the shingled inlet below, washing in with the incoming tide. She stops walking and peers down. It’s either a plastic bag wrapped around seaweed or a dead fish. A big dead fish. A flash of turquoise and a flash of red under the clear water at the shore.

  She keeps staring at it, even after she’s realised what it is. She can’t peel her eyes away from it. There’s a heavy feeling deep in her stomach, and her heart starts to beat a little too fast, bringing a wave of nausea as she catches a strong briny smell from the seaweed below, and that strange off scent that comes from slimy algae around rocks. And something else, although it could be her imagination. A coppery tang, with a sour, rotten undertone. Slithering its way in and out of the inlet, until an incoming wave forces it further. And further. And then it is there, washed up on the rocks.

  His face swims into her vision. Beautiful eyes, sensual mouth. Desperate for her, ready to drink her up. Strong arms, pinning her down – now slapping weakly at the shoreline.

  ‘Giles,’ she says. To herself, because the others are still too far behind, and there’s no way Giles can hear her from down there.

  ‘Giles.’ She says it again. Then she starts to scream.

  Summer 2000

  George sits in the den alone, sad that Anne has gone. Hopefully she went straight back to her grandparents’ cottage, and she won’t tell – but you never know what someone is going to do. George always tries to be good. To be friendly and kind and do all the chores as requested. But still Father isn’t happy.

  Father wasn’t always so bad.

  But as he’s got older, and many of his loyal flock have deserted him – too tired of his old ways – he’s become angry.

  Disappointed.

  ‘Why do they choose the word of the Devil over mine?’ he says. ‘Why do they choose to live their unfulfilled, sinful lives?’

  Sometimes he takes the bellows from the fire and beats Mother. Sometimes he goes off for days on end, to stay with another of the mothers. Sometimes he forbids the siblings from playing together, leaving them all alone in their own rooms.

  Not that most of them are much use. Most of them are weak – it’s too easy to just go along with the rules.

  But George doesn’t like the rules.

  Sometimes Father tells George that if they aren’t careful, he will row them all over to the island and lock them in the lighthouse with a madman, just like Grand-Father did to Father, all those years ago.

  As Father gets older, he becomes more and more like Grand-Father, and everyone is scared now . . . and everyone wants to leave – even if they’ll never admit it. And sometimes some of the mothers whisper together, while washing the clothes or beating the rugs, ‘One of these days he’s going to kill us, you know.’

  And George sits quietly, helping with the chores, and thinks: Not if I kill him first.

  Amelia

  ‘
Oh God, what now?’ Amelia starts to run and James follows. ‘Lucy, please can you stay with the others?’ she calls over her shoulder.

  She can see Tiggy beyond the rocks, but she has no idea why she is screaming. Her heart thumps as she clambers up the rocks, using her hands for balance, then feeling James’s palms on her back, guiding her. She pulls away and climbs faster, her breath coming out in ragged gasps.

  Tiggy is standing still, her hands clutching the sides of her head. She’s screaming so loudly Amelia can almost feel the vibrations of the sound in her own chest. Something guttural and terrifying. Something that has made every nerve ending in her body start to tingle.

  ‘What is it, Tiggy? What’s happened?’ She reaches the cliff path and bolts up the hill, hardly daring to look down at the harsh drop to the inlet. It’s smaller than the bay they’ve just left, and with shingle instead of sand – and a dank smell that makes her want to turn back and get as far away from this place as she can. She keeps Tiggy in her sights, because Tiggy is standing too close to the edge. As she gets closer, a small flurry of stones tumbles off the side of the hill and down the deep drop below. She hears James close behind, the sound of his trainers hitting the loose dirt of the path.

  As she reaches her, Tiggy stops screaming. Instead she starts to shake uncontrollably before collapsing to her knees, sending more stones skittering over the side.

  James moves past Amelia and throws an arm around Tiggy, pulling her gently back from danger. ‘Tiggy! What—’

  Amelia sees it at the same time as James does. There’s no mistaking it’s a body, face down and trapped among the rocks in the inlet. Even from their vantage point high up on the hill, it’s obvious that it’s Giles, his T-shirt ripped across the back, a dark, open wound visible through the billowing fabric.