I glanced behind me, towards the door, checking I was in the right place, but the sign was still clear enough. It was only now that I noticed a woman in blue jeans and bare feet and a tailored pink sweat top sitting on one of the couches, which was also upholstered in faded corporate blue and green, but layered over with throws and crocheted blankets. She was sipping from a pink plastic cup and looked at me with an open face.
Nodding at her, I went to the desk, looking for a bell on the countertop. Behind me, the woman on the couch siphoned the dregs of her drink noisily and after a moment said, ‘With you now.’ I turned to see her stretching as if she’d just been sleeping, and then she padded around to the end of the counter. She walked with confidence, elegantly languid. She had very pretty feet, brightly painted toenails. Her hair was smartly tinted and her skin smooth and healthy; she may have been around forty-five, I guessed, from the lines at her eyes, but looked younger. ‘Let’s see,’ she said, turning on the bulky computer at the desk, something that reminded me of my childhood.
As the computer started up, she looked me in the eyes and I immediately recognised a professional assessment in her glance; her eyes skittered over the ID points on my face, noting the angles and the ratios, ready to compare me to my photograph that she’d have on file.
‘We were expecting someone today. Wasn’t sure what time. You must be the someone.’
‘Yes, I’m Lucie Sterling,’ I said, and held out my hand.
She shook my hand firmly, holding my gaze with green eyes. ‘Gina Orban, external liaison.’ She glanced down at the screen and tapped a few buttons. She raised her eyebrows as she read the information in front of her. ‘Family, huh? Are you David Coady’s sister? None of my business, I suppose.’
‘Sister-in-law,’ I said.
Gina Orban frowned. ‘Oh, so you’re Eloise Parsons’ sister. She’s an interesting person.’
Eloise? Did that mean David was remarried? I did my best to swallow the surprise – did people even do things like marriage in here? ‘Oh, no. My sister was…’ I hesitated.
‘None of my business. It’s not often we get visitors, so I’m asking too many questions.’
‘How often do you process people out?’ I asked as casually as possible, just an interested tourist.
‘You mean Valley people going outside?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Never. None of them leave.’
‘Oh.’ Even though I knew it in theory, the extent of their confinement was a disconcerting thought, especially here, up close. Sentinel had watched the liaison office ever since the partition and the footage backed Gina up: there were very few visitors from outside, and it was only ever them who came out. The children hadn’t come through this office, we were certain, and the only other exit that we knew of was the supply bay.
She took a long-sighted squint back at the screen and raised her brow. ‘Personal authorisation from a subwizard, no less. Makes sense, I suppose.’
‘What’s a subwizard?’
‘Oh, you know. It’s tech speak. They were all little boys when they invented this. I guess they thought calling themselves wizards was more rad than calling themselves kings or gods or whatever. Mr Coady’s what normal people might call a community leader. Or was. I’m not sure. I don’t keep up.’
Her tone – irreverent, disobedient, disloyal? An attitude I wasn’t expecting in the front office of what we on the outside essentially viewed as a doctrinaire cult – put me off guard. I held my tongue.
‘Anyway,’ Gina Orban said, padding out from behind the desk again, ‘are you aware of the procedure? Have you been in before?’
‘No.’ She knew I hadn’t. Not even before the partition. Odille and David would always come and visit Mom and me in the city. Mom was already housebound by then.
‘We need to fit you with The I. I’m not sure how much you know about it, but it’s a complicated system and quite a rigmarole to install, so it’s particularly unusual to grant a short-term entry clearance like this. People don’t just drop in to Green Valley for tea. I’m guessing the visit is important.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’
‘It’s none of my business. I’m just curious. Not much comes through this office.’ I couldn’t tell whether she meant information, goods or people, or what.
I was eager to get into Green Valley, but didn’t want to be curt. Any information this casual and evidently lonely officer might let slip could be useful. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘What do I need to do?’
She led me to one of three doors at the far end of the reception room. ‘I’ll need you to take off everything you’re wearing and put it in one of the lockers, along with any devices, currency, contact lenses, jewellery, baggage, electronics, everything but your natural self you were born with. Cover yourself with the towel in the locker and let me know when you’re ready and we’ll begin.’
She said it so neutrally, it was almost like I was being asked to check into a spa, or an abattoir. I objected, ‘From what I knew of it before you… before Zeroth sealed, The I was a device you wore in one eye and it acted like a sort of personal computer screen. I’m not sure why you’re asking me to…’
She smiled at this, a waxen smile that only affected her lips and left the rest of her face frigid. ‘“Personal computer screen,”’ she mocked. ‘Wizard Whitebeard wouldn’t be pleased to hear his visionary work reduced to a “sort of personal computer screen”. Anyhow, it’s evolved. It’s how Green Valley functions, in its entirety. It is Green Valley, really. To be in Green Valley, you need The I. And The I’s evolved since the Turn.’
I tried to look politely surprised. I knew the technology was still being developed behind these walls; at Sentinel, I’d been analysing intelligence that suggested it, but I didn’t see all the information, and there was no one analyst who understood it fully. Anyway, I didn’t have to understand how it worked to use it, I told myself, repeating that complacent phrase that was almost blasphemous after the Turn. It had been such a comforting line to take back then, absolving ourselves of all responsibility, dropping our fates into the hands of seductive strangers, corporate entities in whose benignity we could feasibly believe.
Gina noticed my hesitation. ‘Nobody’s forcing you. You don’t have to come in. You could get a message to your brother – your brother-in-law – some other way.’
I took a deep breath. I had work to do. ‘No, of course I want to. David and I have something to discuss, and besides, I’m really interested to see what it’s like.’ Trying to convince myself, too, because my heart had started clawing at my ribcage.
She directed me to the changing room and handed me a small brass bell by its tongue – Tibetan or Persian, I guessed, when I saw the intricate etchings on it. ‘Ring this when you’re ready.’
* * *
Like the reception, the changing room’s institutional edges had been softened by domestic touches. The stand of four metal lockers had been painted in pastel tones – mint, lilac, peach and sky blue – and detailed with hippie flowers. The slatted wooden bench was covered with Arabian cushions, while the row of basins was ornamented by candles, one of them alight, bottles of scented hand creams and liquid soaps. A hand-scripted card was pasted to the broad mirror above the basins with a platitude that sounded somehow menacing: What You See Behind You Is Not What Lies Ahead.
I chose the peach-coloured locker. The rusty hinges scraped as I pulled it open and I wondered just how few people came through here, and just how bored Gina Orban was, and what sort of thing extended boredom might do to a person’s mind. Hand-painted daisies beamed at me as I pulled myself free of my turtleneck, but when I started on the button of my trousers darkness flashed in my peripheral vision. I whirled around and saw myself in the mirror, only me, but still that shadow was settling somewhere in this room. The candle’s flame danced and tugged as if something had hurried past it.
It’s just me, I said to myself. There’s nobody else here. But still, I went to the mir
ror, looking into it, my face pressed close, cupping my hand between my brow and the glass to check that someone wasn’t watching me from the other side. When I was pretty sure there were only the white tiles and the wall behind the mirror, I quickly stripped down to my underwear and reached for the large towel, which let off a small plume of stagnant white cotton dust as I unfolded it. The towel had probably never been used, but it had sat here for a long time. After shaking the towel out and wrapping it around me, I put my things into the locker, then rang the bell.
‘You’ll have to take that off, too,’ Gina said when she came in, barely glancing at me, but noticing my bra straps. ‘I’ve really seen it all,’ she said.
Reluctantly, I unhooked my bra and dropped my underwear. This was the price I had to pay to get into Green Valley, I reminded myself, but it was already rising higher than I was comfortable with.
Gina hooked a hanger with a green-trimmed blue tracksuit on the locker and placed an unused pair of trainers below them. ‘As soon as you’re fitted, you can wear this when you go in. Hardly the height of fashion, but it doesn’t matter in there. They won’t be seeing you; they’ll be seeing your avatar. Same goes for everything you see in there. You’ll be walking around a real place, of course, and talking to real people, mostly, but you’ll be seeing, feeling, tasting it in its enhanced state, as The I sees it. Sunshine, singing birds, unicorns, the works. In Green Valley, the virtual is reality. Or so I’m told.’ She took a tablet screen out of a small cabinet beside the lockers and slid her finger over it, then turned the screen to me where a photograph of a woman appeared. She was of medium build and medium height, wore blue slacks and a white blouse, low-heeled shoes and had unadorned shoulder-length blonde hair. She had a symmetrical face with full lips and a small nose, and slightly larger than normal eyes.
‘Who’s she?’ I asked.
‘That’s you.’
‘Me?’ I said, knowing what she meant, but demanding that she explain it as if I didn’t. It was the principle: you shouldn’t nonchalantly get away with giving someone a new body without comment.
‘That’s your avatar. It’s how people will see you in Green Valley. You’d be very welcome to customise her, but we’re running low on time.’
‘It’s really fine,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter to me at all.’ It did, though. Still, I was titillated by the idea of being this fantasy blonde for a day. I wondered if people would treat me differently.
‘I call her Plain Jane,’ Gina said. ‘But to be honest, I wouldn’t mind having her bone structure and her model face and her defiant boobs. The wizards designed her, of course.’
Again, it was hard to ignore the sarcasm dripping from her words, the undisguised resentment; referring to Jamie Egus as ‘Wizard Whitebeard’. She was inviting me to probe. ‘Tell me, Gina,’ I said. ‘Why are you here? You don’t seem to… fully buy into the Zeroth ethos.’
She laughed: a hoarse, empty rattle like an echo in an abandoned house. ‘Lie flat on your stomach and let me start.’
I did as she said. She knelt down next to me and zipped open a soft briefcase. ‘You could call me uniquely cynical, I suppose,’ she started. ‘About Green Valley, and about Stanton. I don’t belong to either of them.’ As she spoke, she folded the towel up and rubbed a cold liquid over the small of my back. ‘I used to be an occupational therapist on Zeroth’s staff in the heyday, before the Turn. When they were developing The I, I was offered an alpha trial. I suffered some of the worst recorded cases of motion sickness and aversion, so impressive that they made me the development team’s guinea pig. Voluntary, of course. They would never have forced me, but they paid me extremely well. At that time, they were launching simple virtual reality interfaces to the public – enhanced social networking, collaborative gaming, mindfucking porno experiences, you know. But half the potential clients got nauseous, puking on their POV sexbots and their dragon joust opponents rather than having fun.’ She rubbed the ointment up my spine, making it tingle, scratching or drawing something on my neck and then pinning patches of hair back on my head. ‘They suffered from what they call the uncanny valley effect,’ she continued, ‘suffering fight-or-flight panic attacks in the middle of virtual tropical holidays. Everything looked too real, but their cerebral cortices knew that it was all an illusion. On a primitive, instinctive, cellular level, the parts of their brains that hadn’t been fooled were screaming out that they were being tricked, that they were in mortal danger. This was obviously not good for business, not good for uptake of the new devices. Development figured if they could beat the symptoms in me, they’d beat it in ninety-nine per cent of cases and that would be good enough. It worked out well. I’m one of the guinea pigs who led to Zeroth’s VR dominance. It left me with certain… side effects… but they’ve been good to me, and I have a peaceful existence here.’
Then Gina rammed a spike into my lower back. I wanted to scream with pain, but then I realised there was no pain. A cold ripple rushed out from the spot and zapped through my spine in an electric rush. I bucked and arched with the pulse, and then it was gone. I groaned. ‘What the fuck was that?’
‘Sorry. A little discomfort, but that’s the lumbar transponder.’
Before I could ask any more, she’d stuck something into the base of my neck that paralysed me. That same seismic cold ripple, but this time either I couldn’t move my body to accommodate it or I couldn’t feel my body arching. I was vaguely aware of cushions scattering off the bench, Gina’s hands replacing them, a sense of better comfort, the mortification of seeing my bundled underpants crumpled under the bench. If I die here… I thought distantly. Claws pushed between my follicles, hooking my head, without physical pain but with the instinctive substrate of pain. My body screamed for me to move, to run, but I was paralysed and, to be honest, feeling all right, not bad at all, and I didn’t know what I was panicking about. I should just relax. And all the while, I was looking at the bundled pants and thinking of how I’d lie on my bed as a girl, rubbish strewn all around me, protected by the tinny clatter of my headphones, safe and soft and warm.
And then a gasp and a crash and a spike through all my veins and I realised I was lying naked on the bench and Gina’s warm hand was flat and calming on my back. ‘Okay,’ she was saying. ‘Ten seconds to calibrate. Hang in there.’ Rubbing my back with her warm, soft hand like a mother should when her child cries. ‘Got you. How’s that?’
At length, I was able to turn my head and see Gina looking at the tablet screen. I turned my head the other way, tested my limbs. Apart from a small added weight on my lower back and in my neck, a tug of trapped hair when I moved, it was okay. I reached down for the towel, which was half covering me again, and pulled it up my back. ‘Is that it? Can I get dressed?’
‘Sure. Give it a minute, then try to stand. If your balance is out, we’ll fine-tune.’
I pushed up to sitting, tightening the towel around me. I should have felt violated and angry, although this woman had only done what I’d asked her, and she had such soft, sympathetic hands and I couldn’t be angry even when I tried. And then I did try. I thought of those things that always made me angry – catcallers, bullies, cold-callers, power cuts – but the emotion shot by me like an express train through a station, and then it was gone. I tried to feel angry about the fact that some device was controlling my mind, but I couldn’t, so I tried fear. I thought of a group of drunken men on a quiet road, the sound of a wolf-whistle in the middle of the night. Briefly my adrenaline surged, but before I could catch the feeling it dissolved. Outrage, shame – gone. I tried to find it funny. I tried to laugh, but the sound died on my lips.
‘We put guests into full SSRI mode. Especially short-term. There’s no time for you to adapt to the environment, so we essentially balance your emotions by controlling your serotonin and dopamine levels with nanorobots. It may seem a little strange, I guess. But I’ve heard it’s pretty calming, too. It’s an electronic opiate. Do you like it?’
‘I don’t want t
o,’ I said, managing to stand. I hadn’t intended to be so honest with her, but I’d been somehow compelled.
‘Good. Your balance is great.’ Gina looked away, discreetly arranging her kit in her case as I changed into the tracksuit. I remembered to fold my underwear and placed it on the shelf in the locker, checking at the same time that the tight package I’d brought remained tightly tucked where I’d left it, in the inner pocket of my coat. ‘Now comes a part some have found pretty nasty, I’m afraid. I’m sorry for it, but it’s essential: we need to check your aversion levels. Come, sit comfortably.’
‘Aversion levels?’
Gina came to sit beside me, the tablet screen in her hand displaying a series of dials. ‘At first, when people came to visit Green Valley, they’d want to quit out manually. Maybe they had motion sickness, maybe the experience was overwhelming – who knows, maybe it was boring them. But some of them, despite all the advice to port out correctly, here and only here, saw fit to try to unplug The I and rip the interface off themselves. Let’s just say the results were not good. “Suboptimal” in Development’s terms. They needed to find a way to prevent this. Using the physiology behind the cortical aversion that users like me experienced when faced with the virtual world, they developed an aversion signal that would fire any time the system was tampered with. It would render a visitor physiologically unable to remove the rig, anywhere except here.’
‘Like an electronic dog collar?’ I said, acutely aware that my body had been attached to a dangerous electronic circuit. ‘The one that zaps the dog when it strays over the boundary?’
‘Yes.’ Gina raised her lips in that cold version of a smile. ‘Something like that.’ And without warning, she tried to kill me.
It started as a quiver somewhere deep in the lower part of my head, deeper than my head should go. Something – lots of somethings – were running through tunnels dug into my brain. They were running in mortal dread. And the closer they got to me, to the sensing part of me, over their vague blurring terror-coloured shoulders I could feel what they were running from and it was all I had ever feared and all that these thousands of fleeing shadows had ever feared bundled up into a mass like a fist that was coming so fast it was going to shatter me as it hit and before I could scream it was in me and I was flying in a thousand shards and each of them burning with an acid of fear and I needed to scour—
Green Valley Page 2