Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  II

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  III

  12

  13

  14

  IV

  15

  16

  17

  18

  V

  19

  20

  VI

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  VII

  28

  29

  30

  31

  VIII

  32

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  GREEN VALLEY

  GREEN VALLEY

  LOUIS GREENBERG

  TITAN BOOKS

  Green Valley

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789090239

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090246

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: June 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2019 Louis Greenberg

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  I

  1 ‘Yes, of course she’s here.’ David’s voice was a muffled echo, his impatience degraded to a hazy simulation.

  I twisted the tight spiral of the telephone cord around my finger, listening for forgotten inflections to prove to myself that it really was my brother-in-law and not a Zeroth fabrication. I hadn’t spoken to David in eight years, and for many of those years I’d hardly thought about him. ‘When did you last see her?’ I asked. ‘I mean, in reality?’

  ‘I don’t know. What difference does it make if I saw her physically or not, Lucie? What’s this all about?’

  Fabian stepped into the study doorway and gave me a concerned look. I raised my hand and mouthed, It’s okay, then rolled my chair across the floor and toed the door shut on him, the receiver’s spiral cord stretching, the phone dragging with a jangling clatter across the desk behind me.

  ‘We have information that something’s happening on your side of the wall. In Green Valley,’ I said into the phone. ‘That children are in serious danger.’ If you could call two dead boys ‘information’. I scanned Jordan’s message again. The second, a child of about nine, had been found that very morning in the memorial yard at Hershey Field, bristling with nanotech and Zeroth implants – like the other child, he could only have come from Green Valley. I could have just come right out and told David that children were dying, but it had been a long time, and I wasn’t sure yet how much I could trust him.

  ‘We?’ he batted back at me. ‘So you’re still with the police. Is this an official call?’

  ‘It’s not an official call – yet,’ I said, mustering a threat I had no authority to make. ‘I just want to know that Kira’s fine. When did you last see her, in the flesh?’ I repeated.

  David clicked his tongue, as if checking on his daughter’s safety was an annoying bind. ‘All right, all right. Maybe in the morning, yesterday. I’m sure I saw her eating something, and then she went on Mathcamp. I can check the logs.’

  Whatever David said next faded through flurries of static. I pressed the receiver closer to my ear. You’d have thought Zeroth Corporation, whatever remained of it, could at least still come up with a decent phone connection. Then the static ebbed again and David’s voice sighed through the line: ‘Oh, that’s weird.’

  ‘What is?’

  A pause and a scuffle. ‘Nothing. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘David, what’s weird?’

  ‘It’s just that I can’t… currently –’ a wash of blurring static swirling his words – ‘just a glitch, I’m sure.’

  I noticed Fabian’s shadow shifting protectively in the strip of light under the door. ‘I want to see her. I want to come in. Now,’ I murmured, my voice low into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Into Green Valley? You can’t,’ he said slowly and carefully, as if explaining to a child, as if I was the one who’d lost my mind. ‘Green Valley is a quarantined enclave. You can’t just drop in for a visit. Those are the terms of the agreement you people forced on us.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ I hissed. ‘There are supplies, there’ve been contractors in and out since you closed. I know you can get me a visitor’s pass.’ Fabian had retreated to the kitchen; I heard him ratcheting the coffee maker – but still I kept my voice down.

  ‘Yeah, and why would I?’ David said.

  ‘Because I want to see Kira – today. That’s why. Or would you prefer to wait for a warrant?’

  ‘You and I both know that won’t happen.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Any judge would rule that child endangerment counts as “exceptional circumstances”.’ The threat sounded unconvincing, even to me: the vague ‘exceptional circumstances’ clause stipulated in the Green Valley Partition Treaty of 2020 had never once been invoked in the eight years of its existence. Stanton and US law enforcement had turned a blind eye to Green Valley since the partition.

  ‘Child endangerment? Really, Lucie? An online math course?’ He sighed again. He clearly didn’t accept that Kira was in any danger. He was either unaware of the children missing from Green Valley, utterly deluded, or lying very well. Or maybe he just thought it had nothing to do with him or Kira. ‘All right. If only to get you off my back. I can do that. I’m important here,’ he added, to my surprise – David having to convince himself of his powers? That was something new. ‘Come to the liaison office. I’ll tell them to expect you.’

  I hung up, then dialled the office to call in sick.

  Barbra Reeve sniffed me out immediately. ‘You don’t sound sick to me.’

  ‘I’ve got a family situation,’ I said.

  ‘With whom?’

  I bristled. It was the imperious way she asked, and the fact that as director of Sentinel she knew all my secrets anyway. It didn’t take a spy to figure out that I didn’t have much family to speak of – my only sister dead, my mother gone soon after, a father who never even made the picture. There was no point in lying. ‘My brother-in-law.’

  ‘The one who lives in Green Valley?’

  My only brother-in-law, as you are well aware. ‘That’s right. He invited me in.’ I wasn’t going to let her put me off.

  But that wasn’t her intent. ‘That’s bloody marvellous, Lucie. Come and see me first.’

  * * *

  ‘Don’t go to Green Valley.’ Fabian advanced on me the instant I came out of the study, unashamed of listening in. ‘You know what it is.’

  ‘I don’t. Not really,’ I said.

  ‘You know what it isn’t,’ he insisted. ‘It’s not real.’

  ‘Those are lazy Omega catchphrases, Fabe. Of course it’s real. Fles
h and blood people living inside a great big warehouse because of a vote.’ A stupid, misguided vote, I wanted to say, but that would have started an argument I couldn’t finish right now. Fabian, after all, was one of the people who had brought the vote about, campaigned against the abuses and invasions of the ‘digital tyranny’. Twelve years ago, his beloved Omega group had stuck a stake through the heart of the global surveillance economy right here in ‘Silicon Stanton’, one of the first in a series of mini-revolutions across the world.

  ‘They’re the ones who chose to wall themselves in and live in that fake place,’ Fabian said. ‘They could have set aside their tech like the rest of us and lived an ethical, socially responsible life.’

  ‘Not everybody had a choice, Fabe.’ Before he could stop to think about that, I added, ‘Anyway, I have to go. Somebody needs my help.’

  ‘It’s David Coady who needs your help, isn’t it?’ Fabian trailed me into our bedroom and looked out at the wind and the glowering sky outside.

  When I didn’t respond, Fabian prodded for a reaction. ‘Yes, David. I heard you talking to him. I can’t believe you want anything to do with him. Chief evangelist for that… that mass-surveillance cult.’

  His patrician profile silhouetted against the stylish elegance of his flat, framed by his neat white shelves of dust-coiffed revolutionary texts, the righteous certitude painting his face, made me feel as safe as it had when we’d first met. It was hard to believe he still knew so little about me.

  ‘Trust me, Fabe. You don’t have to worry about David. Zeroth doesn’t have the power they did, and they’re not getting it back.’

  ‘I’m not worried about him. I’m worried for you. You don’t know what it’s like in there.’

  ‘And you do?’

  ‘No, of course not, but—’

  ‘Well, then. Aren’t you interested? You’ve spent all these years fighting the idea of Green Valley, of Zeroth, but you don’t even want to know what they’ve become.’

  ‘I don’t believe they can become anything other than what they always were: a malicious virus in society.’ He scraped the hair away from his brow, agitated, his heavy wristwatch jangling. ‘During the Turn, we saw them for what they were, Zeroth and the rest of them. I don’t even know why we conceded so much in the treaty. They should have all been prosecuted.’

  Fabian hated Green Valley, where it came from and what it stood for: digital surveillance and control, abuse of privacy rights, organised repression of dissent, complicity and conspiracy. Before we’d met, Fabian had been a key funder and abettor of Omega’s work, a central mind in its think-tank. The remnants of Green Valley’s dangerous vision were what he, the party backed by Omega’s might, and the whole post-Turn political establishment spent their days fighting. They were adamant that they would never allow that abusive cabal to rise again under their watch. But my methods, working for Sentinel… If he knew how I really spent my days, that I spied on Zeroth and Green Valley through illicit electronic screens, he’d see me as the enemy, no better than Zeroth, even though we shared the same target.

  What I told Fabian about my work wasn’t all a lie, I comforted myself. Fabian knew half the truth. Make it two-thirds. He knew I worked for the police as a consultant analyst. But he thought what I consulted on was cold-case management and analogue data-handling structures, which is what I’d originally been employed to do. In the past two years, though, my work had diversified into the Sentinel project, and that was the part Fabian couldn’t know about. The secret was poisoning the air between us.

  ‘You conceded so much because you were desperate to make them disappear,’ I said at length. ‘So that’s how it stands: they own the land and they’re not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘That we know of.’

  ‘Well, this is my opportunity to have a look and report back. Don’t you want to check your assumptions?’

  ‘Of course, but I don’t see why you have to go there. It could be dangerous.’

  ‘Jesus, Fabe, we can talk around and around this, but I need to go.’

  As I grabbed a jacket from the closet and zipped it up, he spoke to my back. ‘Who’s Kira?’

  ‘Kira’s my niece. Odille had a daughter.’

  I closed the door on his questions.

  2 I hurried to the station to see Barbra Reeve and came down the steps twenty minutes later, my mind whirling through everything I’d learned about Green Valley over the past couple of years. Intelligence blind spots, the enclave’s hardwiring, delivery and waste management systems, the logistics of their communications systems, what someone could bring in with them, and what, if anything, they could possibly smuggle out. After years of painstaking effort, Sentinel was one tranche of hardwired code away from activating a total tap on their information systems. Reeve had been planning a risky incursion into Green Valley to find the right component, but now I’d been issued with an invitation through the front door. Barbra Reeve could barely conceal her excitement as she delivered her instructions and the extraction kit.

  But on the ride out to Green Valley, my mind went to Kira. Why had I never told Fabian about her? I guess she felt like an echo from another life, when Odille was still alive, living with her perfect husband and her perfect baby in her perfect house in Green Valley. But then she died – cancer crashing the perfection party and leaving David alone with a ten-month-old baby girl just as the Partition Treaty was signed and Green Valley was sealed off. At first, I was torn at being so suddenly separated from Kira, my last living connection to my sister – but I had no choice, just like the other families who’d been split by the terms of that urgently expedited treaty.

  As time went by, I reconciled myself to the loss, convinced that Kira was fine in there. Despite the Turn, so many people secretly wished they could be inside – this was Green Valley, after all, so much safer and healthier than the real world: Reality 2.0, with its cutting-edge circadian lighting systems, far safer and more nourishing than our carcinogenic sunlight; taintless hydroponic food and natural vitamin blends for optimal nutrition, which was so much more efficient and environment-friendly than common farming; all underpinned by their humanely intelligent integral VR system, which many people still privately envied.

  I had allowed thoughts of Kira to fade away with my grief for Odille, confident that she was growing up pampered, happy and safe. Until a couple of hours ago, at least.

  ‘You sure you don’t want me to wait?’ the taxi driver asked as I stepped out. ‘For if you don’t make your meeting.’

  ‘Thanks, no,’ I said, handing him a large tip. His was the fourth cab I’d stopped outside the precinct, and the first prepared to come out here. The driver nodded and pulled off, and I watched his yellow car down the deserted road back to Stanton, dwarfed beside the concrete wall. It wasn’t the first time I’d been close to the wall, but I was shocked again by its massiveness, rising starkly to where the concrete roof met it in a seamless curve thirty-two metres up.

  Breeze-blown litter scurried on the tarmac; the taxi had disappeared and I’d been staring at empty space. Debilitating panic would not help Kira, I knew: I had to snap out of it and do something.

  To my left lay the boarded-up shops, the abandoned houses and the derelict park in what we’d come to think of as the exclusion zone. It had once been the peri-rural edge of a middle-class commuter suburb overlooking Zeroth Corporation’s lush campus, but the concrete wall – fast-tracked extraordinary planning permission paid for from Zeroth’s still-substantial war chest – meant that life in Stanton started a few streets further away now, cringing away from Green Valley.

  The air in the wall’s shadow was frigid and stagnant. There was nothing alive here, no evidence even of birds or rats. I could see only two or three rushed graffiti tags on the concrete expanse that should have been an ideal palette for blazers across the city. Those skittish scrawls spoke less of the kids who’d sprayed them than of the unseen ghosts that had chased them away. From what we knew, not even homeless squa
tters had risked taking up residence in those free houses. The shadow of the wall was a curse.

  Shivering myself deeper into my thin jacket, I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulder and crossed to the door set insignificantly into the concrete.

  * * *

  It was a small door, a reinforced glass door like any street-front office, labelled in Zeroth’s distinctive lettering that you used to see everywhere: Green Valley External Liaison Reception. As if it wasn’t a gigantic tomb I was checking myself into, as if it was a simple, everyday business transaction. I had to remind myself that Zeroth was still a legitimate business, as far as it went. No matter how they had metastasised in Stantonites’ imaginations, Zeroth remained a software and communications company, with people living in a swathe of land they legitimately occupied in a legally formed independent enclave, no matter how idiosyncratically built on. Stanton and the rest of the country had their fair share of huge, covered shopping malls, hotels and office parks, so why should Green Valley feel any different? Choosing to live inside a concrete dome didn’t automatically make you a criminal or a zombie or a vampire.

  Stop thinking, I told myself, pressing the button for the bell.

  After a few seconds, the magnetic lock buzzed and the door clicked open. I pushed through into the office’s reception area and a fug of incense-saturated air. There was the curved plywood desk I’d been expecting, a fading fitted carpet patterned in Zeroth’s eye icon in corporate lime green against a calming sky blue, but rather than an office, it felt like I’d just entered someone’s living room. A mismatched cluster of framed photographs lined the countertop, and the board-mounted Zeroth posters – Zeroth: better than first – on the walls had been draped with bright fabric hangings that looked like they were from Colombia or Bolivia. A loop of plastic Christmas lights in the shape of flamingos had been strung from one corner of a vacant television screen across the wall to the edge of a filing cabinet, which was topped with a fire-coloured batik cloth and a Japanese vase of plastic orchids.