Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  But then it sucked back into itself like the vacuum of space eating an explosion.

  I was aware of faint light seeping through my eyelids and past my fists where I was pressing them into my face. Gradually, I sensed my locked muscles as I curled foetal on the floor; I relaxed them and heard the echo of my scream still ringing off the wall. I slowly relaxed my arms and moved my neck to see a puddle of my own piss spreading over the blue linoleum floor.

  ‘Aversion levels are calibrated well,’ Gina said.

  I pushed myself back onto the bench, not able to speak, not able to yell at this woman who was torturing me. If I could, I would have put my hands around her neck and wrung the life out of her, but as I thought it, the mood dissipated, and, knowing that it was wrong somewhere in a deep, muffled part of my mind, I felt grateful to her.

  Then I could open my mouth and make a word with it, and all I could say was, ‘Why?’

  ‘The I is Green Valley,’ she repeated. ‘It’s how it works. So just a reminder that that’s an indication of what you’ll start to feel if you tamper with The I in Green Valley. If you’re in any trouble at all and want to detach, you just come back here. Call me if you’re lost.’

  ‘You’ll need to give me your number. Do the payphones take regular money?’

  Gina stopped and looked at me and I realised how foolish I sounded. Of course there were no payphones in Green Valley, no telephone numbers. ‘Use The I. Ask a helper when you’re inside. I could explain it all to you, but we’d better get moving. You’re booked in until 5 p.m. You don’t want to spend the whole day talking to me, do you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Good, then,’ Gina said. ‘Just the lenses left and you’re ready to go.’ She glanced at the puddle on the floor and the front of my trousers. ‘I’ll get you some clean clothes. Should have foreseen that,’ she muttered as she left me sitting there, trying to steady my breathing.

  * * *

  The lenses were the oldest and most familiar part of The I’s rig, and that’s why Barbra Reeve and Bill Schindler, head of Sentinel tech, wanted one.

  At the height of Zeroth’s commercial success, over eighty per cent of Stantonians wore The I – you needed it to bank, to receive a salary, to find work, to access your driving points, to catch public transport, to buy tickets, to make cashless payments. Sure, there were billions of people on Earth who didn’t use The I, but they were the poor, invisible to the marketers, marginal. Very few people who had a choice would deliberately marginalise themselves.

  The I had started off as a single lens that fitted in one eye and provided a simple overlay rather than the alternate reality it became. You could look at a concrete factory wall, and see it overlaid with a virtual firework display; the fingers of a winter tree might be hung with sungold mangoes and flocked by scarlet macaws. It had started off fun and uplifting, an illustration of The I’s creative capabilities, but by the time the Turn came around, this playful augmentation had become an uneconomical legacy feature, hijacked by hard-sell advertising.

  When I got my first job out of university, I bought my own I, and for several years I kept just one release behind the latest version. The I developed rapidly – by the Turn, it could signal the user’s optical, auditory, olfactory and gustatory nerves to create sophisticated VR magic. And those of us working at Sentinel knew that The I was still being developed after the partition, despite Zeroth no longer having a market. Just what these developments involved was less clear. Barbra and Bill Schindler suspected that, given Zeroth’s lack of resources, any developments to the lens would be overlaid on successful old technology – and this offered the greatest chance of redundancies that would make it vulnerable to hacking. A current-model lens was their best chance of finding some of the new code hardwired behind outdated encryption. Also, it was small enough to hide somewhere and smuggle out, which is why they’d requisitioned me with a dummy lens and the signal-proof baggie, now hidden among my clothes in the locker. Barbra hadn’t warned me about the spinal transponder Gina had fitted to me, but I guessed it would have fine control over tactile senses and motion. The discomfort of the installation, and even the mortified terror of the aversion test, had receded to dark memories, and I was excited now, looking forward to trying Green Valley out, but especially to seeing my niece again, for the first time in years.

  Compared to the rest of The I’s rig, the contact lenses were painless. Just like the device I’d been familiar with, they slipped with minimal discomfort over my irises. I could sense them calibrating to my eyes, the tiniest wave of motion when they first went in. They settled so comfortably I could easily forget I was wearing them.

  Gina led me to the exit door, Green Valley Town Square printed on its opaque face. ‘I’ll guide you out at five,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your visit.’

  3 I tiptoed as if I were picking a way through marshland, even though I knew I was on solid floor. I could imagine – or was I really sensing? – the whir of my mind and the creak of the bones in my ears jostling to comprehend and to calibrate. In front of me, just as the sign had said, was Green Valley’s town square, and to my surprise, it looked precisely as it had when Green Valley closed. The iconic image used to serve as the centrefold in tourist brochures: Visit the beautiful campus of Stanton’s world-famous Zeroth Corporation, developer of Me Music, Z-Play and The I. See the eco-friendly office parks and residential village of Green Valley: soft technology with a diamond edge.

  That was before it had been entombed in concrete, and I had to remind myself that the clean blue sky and the puffy clouds and the sunlight were an illusion piped into my sensory nodes by the hardware embedded in my body. But the sunlight felt warm, like real sunlight. I took a few tentative steps beneath the spring-green alders – yes, warm in the dappled light, slightly cooler in the patches of shade. It was impossible, but I was being made to feel it. A bird pipped and took flight as a kid rattled by on a skateboard, gone before I could stop her.

  Under my feet were the cobblestones the brochures had called small-town hygge in a brand-new world, but at the same time, I knew I was walking on flat, hard ground. Geographically just inside the wall, I couldn’t be anywhere near the old town square – where it used to be. Then it struck me with a gut-floating lurch that the town square might be everywhere, anywhere a user wanted it to appear.

  I rapped my knuckles on one of the trees – it was solid wood. I reached up and picked one of the leaves, twisting and shearing it between my fingers. It broke apart and left green juice on my palm. This was a real tree, and a real leaf, I would have sworn. Squatting down, I ran my fingertips over the ground, and where part of me knew there was bare concrete, I felt the texture and the ridges of cool cobbles; I scratched up sand between them, seeing it under my fingernails and on the tips of my fingers. All the while, I imagined there was the slightest delay, a nanosecond of rendering happening in the circuits along my spine. Surely that was just paranoia. Standing again, I flaked a piece of bark off the tree and put it in my pocket, a talisman to anchor me to reality.

  Not your pocket, Lucie, some part of me spoke. The pocket in the outfit Zeroth has lent you.

  Nausea gurgled deep in my stomach; running shadows encroached from my peripheral vision, but as soon as the panic started, it was damped again and I could look up and take a deep breath, barely remembering the fear. Biocontrolling nanorobots were shooting signals between my synapses and along my spine.

  Now I could walk on, past young mothers with strollers and middle-aged people walking their dogs. A couple jogged by, wearing tight gym clothes and listening to music on players strapped to their upper arms. They smiled at me as I passed. I made my way to the whitewashed bandstand in the middle of a quadrant of lawn and looked out over the railing. In front of me was the row of Main Street shops the brochures used to proclaim, and lining the other three sides of the square were the smart townhouses we’d all envied. The wall had disappeared, replaced by a row of houses on the tree-lined street and blue sky behind
them. No cars. People walking, jogging, cycling.

  Three soothing notes sounded in my ears and a middle-aged man materialised in front of me. ‘Lucie?’ he said. He was wearing textured guanashina slacks, a sharp indigo suit jacket and hand-stitched lace-ups, his elegantly patterned tie adorned with a silver pin, and his gracefully silvering hair gelled into a perfect wave. He seemed to have matured from the expensive hoodies and designer jeans I recalled, but his face was the shape I remembered, the charming, idiosyncratic curves that had snagged Odille, and who could blame her?

  I stepped forward as if to shake his hand or give him a hug – I wasn’t sure – but before I could, David floated backwards and I realised two things: that this picture of my sister’s husband was an avatar, and that he – whatever physical substance of him lay under the image – was not here; this was a phone call.

  ‘Hi, David? Can you hear me? Can you see me?’ I said, as a smaller image of Plain Jane appeared floating to the top-right of my eyeline. A green halo shaded around her, indicating, I guessed, that the connection had been established.

  ‘You’re here,’ David said. ‘In Green Valley.’

  Self-consciously, looking at the casual blonde that was meant to represent me, I blurted, ‘It’s not really me, but I guess you know it’s me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I understand,’ David said, but vacantly, without smiling. ‘Listen, um, Lucie. It says here that I invited you. Thanks for coming, but I’m not sure if it was… I can’t remember why you’re here.’ An affectless vacancy reflected on the avatar’s face.

  ‘For God’s sake, David.’ I stepped forward again, but the image glided back in response, locked into its ratio. ‘I came to check on Kira.’

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to remember.’

  ‘It’s been ages,’ I blurted, trying to squeeze eight years into this tenuous connection. ‘How have things been in—’

  But he wasn’t listening. He whirled around to look at something behind him, something I couldn’t see, and I caught fear in those generated eyes. ‘No, I’m not—’ The connection cut out and David disappeared. The halo around Plain Jane went red, and her thumbnail image dissolved away.

  David’s absence ghosted in the air in front of me. A woman walking by, hand in hand with a toddler, didn’t seem to notice or care that I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at nothing, a bewildered expression on my face.

  Gina Orban said something about a helper. I should try to find one, I realised, and ask how to return the call, or how to find him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I called after the mother. She turned and smiled, the toddler staring up at me, chewing on his finger. This child, at least, didn’t seem distressed or in danger; the kids in here seemed all right – but at the same time, I knew I was seeing only what The I wanted me to see. ‘Can you tell me how I can—’

  But I was interrupted by three chimes in my head and a soothing voice. It was familiar, but it took me a moment to place her. Then I had it – this was the voice of Clara, Zeroth’s digital assistant, one of the three voice options on The I. Millions of people had woken every morning and spoken intimately with Clara before the Turn. As if nothing had changed in the world, she said, ‘Calendar entry received for Lucie Sterling,’ followed by a recorded clip of David’s voice, neutral again: ‘I’ll see you at the Asbury Café in five minutes.’ Then the computer followed up with, ‘Do you want to travel to the Asbury Café now?’

  ‘Yes?’ I tried, aware that the mother on the sidewalk was waiting for me patiently, the toddler tugging at her sleeve. I shook my head and made a don’t-worry-thanks face, not wanting to speak in case it confused the computer. The woman nodded and walked off.

  ‘How do you want to travel to the Asbury Café?’

  I had no idea how I’d get there in five minutes if it was far away. I still hadn’t seen a Green Valley shuttle or even a cycle hub. ‘How far is it?’ It was odd, after all this time, how natural it felt to slip back into conversation with The I as if it were human.

  ‘The Asbury Café is two hundred and thirty-seven metres from your current location. Estimated travel time in current traffic conditions is one minute and twenty seconds.’

  ‘I guess I’ll walk, then.’

  ‘Displaying directions to. Walk. To the Asbury Café,’ Clara said, as a map overlay appeared in front of me, with a pulsing arrow and a route charted across the town square.

  The café was in the row of shops fronting Main Street, a wall of glass displaying young professionals scattered along wooden counters against bare-brick walls and being productive at communal tables. It was exactly like a scene from Zeroth advertisements dating back ten or fifteen years, and I’m sure I recognised a hipster with a red folding computer with his green-haired partner, and a bald wrestler-strong man in a white T-shirt drinking a protein shake further down the communal table. I pushed through the smooth-hinged door and scanned the customers. Some looked up at me and some didn’t. I tried fruitlessly to gauge which were real and which were part of the scenery. They all looked as real as people in cafés did on the other side of the wall; except, of course, in Stanton people wrote with pens on paper, had facial blemishes, baggy eyes and thin hair, and usually were speaking to each other or reading books rather than staring into electronic devices.

  I sat at the counter in the window so that David would see me. An incredibly toned man in a tight shirt came over to ask me if I needed anything.

  ‘Just waiting for someone.’

  ‘Sure.’ He smiled, with perfect teeth. ‘Just shout when you’re ready. We have muffins fresh out of the oven.’ As he spoke, I sensed a whiff, right up my nose – emitting from inside my nose – of the rich, warm scent of chocolate and raspberry muffins, something I was sure I hadn’t smelled before he’d spoken. I was hungry and thirsty, a cosy feeling, because I knew I could be satisfied here. I found myself scratching the wood of the countertop, to prove to myself that I could make a mark in it. Scoring a rough L in the surface, I picked up some wood grit under my nails – my avatar’s nails – which by now were becoming quite dirty. I didn’t know if this meant the counter was real or just exceptional software design, but I repressed the question, or it was repressed for me.

  Then David was there, pushing through the door and indicating that I should follow him to a booth at the back of the café. ‘Not that it matters, really. It can see us everywhere,’ he said as we slid into the booth. Up close, off the call, he sounded like David, and the years tumbled away. For a second I fully expected to see Odille follow him through the door. But Odille was dead. Before I could even try to understand what he was saying, I was compelled to reach over and grab his arm. When he didn’t float away from me like his phone avatar had, I took his shoulders in both my hands and pulled him to me. He was solid and warm and real – the man who had once loved my sister.

  ‘It’s good to see you, David,’ I said.

  ‘You too,’ he said. ‘But it hurts. I loved Odille so much. You know that, right?’

  ‘Of course I do. I’m sorry for what I said on the phone.’

  He let me hold him for a while longer, but then extricated himself, touching his jawline, which was airbrush-smooth.

  ‘What did you mean, It can see us everywhere? What is it?’

  ‘The watcher,’ he said.

  ‘What is that? What does it watch for? Has it got anything to do with the—’ I cut myself off just in time. I hadn’t told David about the dead boys from Green Valley, and though I’d warned him of a danger to the children, he hadn’t asked what kind. He still thought I was being just another hysterical anti-tech outsider.

  ‘It watches for any unusual activity that might threaten the integrity of Green Valley. It’s here to protect us.’

  This sounded like a PR line, so I pressed him. ‘Protect you from what, David?’

  ‘Do you want a muffin?’

  I don’t want a fucking muffin, David. ‘I came here to see Kira. It’s time you took me to her.’
But then, unaccountably, I did want a muffin, and a large cup of coffee. That would feel very good. David had already beckoned the waiter over.

  ‘He’s not real, is he?’ I said, when he’d left with my order.

  David shrugged. ‘It’s hard to tell. Someone may have made him. He may have made himself.’

  * * *

  The bathroom was like something I’d seen in a magazine. The same varnished brick with beaten copper basins in a unisex washroom. As I pulled down my trousers to pee, the cubicle door hinged open. I jolted up and pulled at my trousers, but I realised there was nobody there – the catch wasn’t holding the deadbolt. I caught a glimpse of myself in the washroom mirror, a blonde woman’s hands pushing down the belted waistband of her jeans, while for a second I held the soft material of the Zeroth sweatpants. Then, with a subliminal shift, I was feeling denim and stiff faux-leather and metal studs between my fingers. I bolted the door again, and this time it caught.

  When I was washing my hands, warm water and subtly fragranced soap foaming from automatic, touchless dispensers, I stared into the face of Plain Jane in the bank of mirrors, her face moving seamlessly at my prompts: smiling, frowning, licking her reddened lips and baring her teeth, a silent scream. Over her shoulder, for a moment, something else was looking back. Someone shifting behind her. For a burning second, I saw a tall, dark form that shimmered with moving images. I couldn’t bring it into focus – the place where a mouth and the bottom of its nose should have been was smudged like coal-black pastel, and a jaundiced glow seeped out from its eyes. All this in a second, because I spun around to find nobody was behind me, and when I turned back to the mirror, only a scared-looking Jane peered back at me. As I watched, her face settled to contented neutrality as my own heart slowed and my mind calmed. I hadn’t forgotten the faceless creature, but I was unable to generate a strong emotion about it.