The fingerprint of fear reminded me that I had come here for a purpose. Something I had to keep reminding David of, too.
My order had arrived while I was away. I picked up the muffin and bit into it, and in my mouth for a split second wasn’t the fresh crumb of baked dough but a fungal sludge. Instinctively, I made to spit my mouthful out, but before I did, The I stepped in and made the flavour bready, delicious, chocolate-and-raspberryish. I frowned, swallowed, took another appreciative bite and swilled it back with some of the strong and fragrant brew. It was really good.
‘Where is Kira?’ I asked David. He gave me a questioning look. ‘Kira, David.’ I leaned in and whispered urgently, ‘You asked me here so that I could see her. Is there something you need to tell me?’
‘You wanted to see her,’ he said. ‘Here goes.’
An image flipped across my field of vision and I couldn’t stifle a gasp. The girl, smiling and tanned, hair raked nonchalantly away from her brow, had Odille’s face: her cat-like cheekbones curving in and then plumping out again at the jaw. A genetic copy of the sister I’d lost.
‘She’s beautiful. She must be nine now.’
He looked at his hands. Zeroth’s fast-track success story, hottest director in the industry back in the day – counting on his fingers. ‘Nine. Yes… nine. That’s right.’
A caption under the picture of the smiling girl asked if I wanted to save it. I blinked yes, even though I knew there wasn’t any point – I couldn’t keep the image once I’d left Green Valley. ‘Has she been… happy?’
‘Of course. Very.’
‘I didn’t even know you’d married again. Who is she?’
‘Eloise. We’ve… we knew each other before Green Valley closed.’
‘While you were still with Odille?’
‘No. Well, yes… We were friends. Colleagues.’ There was no emotion on David’s face.
‘Oh.’ It was all The I would allow me to say. The shock and rage were being ground up and expelled in the pit of my stomach. It allowed me to focus on the reason I was here, though. ‘Where did you last see Kira?’
‘At home, I’m pretty sure. But the record is corrupted.’ David’s attention was drifting. He glanced over his shoulder.
‘Jesus, David! Do you need an electronic record to remember everything?’
‘You don’t know what it’s like. I’ve been here a long time. Life is different. It’s hard to explain.’
‘And where is she now?’
‘At home.’
‘I want to see her.’
‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to take you to the house.’
‘Why not? That’s why I came here. The only reason.’
‘Eloise is there. She won’t be… happy that I invited you.’ He frowned at me again. ‘If you’re sure I did.’
‘Why? Has she got something to hide? I’ve told you that we have information that Kira could be in serious danger. Wouldn’t Eloise want to keep her safe?’ My voice had risen, spitting out a gout of anger that The I couldn’t process quickly enough, but I didn’t care. The computer people could stare. Nothing was truly private here, in any case. That’s how the technology worked, that’s how Zeroth worked, that’s how Green Valley worked. It’s exactly why the world turned away from it – so we could have a private goddamn conversation.
David raised his hands, his avatar visibly agitated by the conflict. ‘Relax. I’ll take you to the house.’
I tried to cling on to the anger, which was already being made to dissipate through the waste channels of my limbic system.
Natural anger and fear were rare commodities in Green Valley. They could be valuable, motivating weapons.
4 David’s house wasn’t far from Main Street. It lay towards the middle of the settlement, away from where the liaison office had been when I’d left it. I tried to keep the position of that doorway to reality lodged in my mind, like a beacon, as we walked, but the gentle curve of the suburban streets soon disoriented me.
I’d seen these streets before, in pre-Turn brochures, when Zeroth’s brand of utopia was a marketable vision – the wide, tidy sidewalks lined with trim lawns and lush subtropical plants that took advantage of the unique microclimate in the valley. Boles of ancient trees dripped with Spanish moss and fruit trees sparkled with blossom and flittering birds. This is how it had looked in the hagiographic videos people used to make about Green Valley years ago, and somehow they had made it look exactly the same now. There was no way it could really have survived eight years in a concrete bunker, even with the most advanced hydroponics; it was an incredible illusion.
Another thing nagged at me. If these birds and these trees and the smart whitewashed siding of the colonial-style houses were just a digital veneer, couldn’t the citizens design anything? Why wouldn’t they remodel their houses and customise their avatars? Someone could make themselves into a seven-winged fairy and live in a floating bubble of water with dolphins if they wanted to; someone could choose to live in an igloo in a moonscape. Why stick to human forms and the reality-bound design of Green Valley, circa a decade ago?
‘Jamie thought, and the collective agreed, that it would help with continuity,’ David told me, when I asked. ‘We knew that people might struggle to adapt to the fact that we had chosen to stay here and not leave. It would make it more familiar if we adhered to certain design rules.’ When he talked about Zeroth’s business, he sounded confident and professional, and I was starting to understand: The I was part of David’s consciousness, he’d become so used to its assistance that it had channelled and shaped his abilities. Talking about Zeroth’s vision was his job, so The I facilitated it. Trying to engage with an anomalous risk to his daughter was an extracurricular misdirection of his capacity, and The I wouldn’t abet it.
‘And you’re part of this collective,’ I asked, ‘with Jamie Egus and other senior Zeroth staff?’
‘Yes,’ he said, but his shoulders started to hunch and his stride began to shorten as we turned into the driveway of another pristine colonial-style house. He led me up the five steps and onto the porch, then tapped timidly on the front door – on his own front door. ‘Eloise? Elle, are you there?’
There was no answer, so David turned the knob and opened the front door.
‘You leave it unlocked,’ I said. ‘That’s impressive.’ But the moment I said it, I knew I was being stupid, and the uncomprehending glance he shot me as he led me into the house confirmed that.
The open-plan living room was stylishly but coldly decorated in tones of dove-grey and white: soft furnishings and objets artfully arrayed, a whitewashed stone wall framing a fireplace that didn’t look like it had ever been needed. The only blight on the neatness looked self-consciously styled too, a page from a catalogue suggesting joyful family life: a half-eaten cheese sandwich and a decorative sprig of tomato leaf on a green ceramic plate perched at the edge of the coffee table, three perfect half-moon bites cut out. A tumble of piously ethical wooden blocks on the floor next to a redand-blue wooden truck. A single tiger-striped sock lying in the middle of the pristine dove-grey carpet.
‘She’s probably in her workshop,’ David said. He glanced at a closed door to the left of the living room, from where a deep hum emanated, and his face and shoulders seemed to relax.
‘Why are you afraid of her?’ I asked.
He turned and smiled. ‘Afraid? No, I’m not afraid of Eloise. Honestly, I guess I’m embarrassed. I didn’t want to introduce you to her. She’s become so… strange. But she’s busy now, and won’t notice us, so I can show you around.’
David led me through the living room, down a short passageway, to a door decorated with a photo of a girl in a resin frame with seashells and sailing boats trapped in it. K I R A was spelled out in bright and chunky lopsided letters glued to the lower edge, as if I needed telling. The girl in the picture had Odille’s smile, her flyaway curls, the shape of her brow, all merged with David’s handsome features – she was breathtaking, and I felt like
I was looking at an image of a ghost.
David pushed the door open, and as we stepped into the bedroom, three identical little girls, about five years old, looked up from where they were sitting in bright, child-sized wicker chairs along a low whitewashed table, colouring pictures. There was nothing familiar in their faces, not like in Kira’s, but they were pretty and their hair was in cute, wild ringlets; they wore identical blue-striped T-shirts and knitted orange scarves with fox-head hoods. In triplicate, they turned their faces up and said, ‘Hello, Daddy.’ David nodded distractedly, twitching his mouth but not saying anything as he passed them, going to the bedside. Like mirror images, they followed their father with their big eyes.
I couldn’t let David get away with ignoring the girls, so I squatted down in front of the table and said, with overcompensating cheer, ‘Hi! I’m Lucie. Your dad’s… friend. What’re you drawing?’ I looked at the paper in front of them, but it was blank. They swivelled their heads towards me and stared at me with three sets of the same eyes.
‘Oh, ignore them, Lucie. Please. They’re not real. Eloise made them years ago, when she still had time for romantic gestures. They’re badly coded, but it’d hurt her feelings if I erased them. They’re going to go one of these days.’
‘Where are we going, Daddy?’ the girls said. ‘Are we going on holiday?’
‘Yeah, something like that,’ David muttered as he prowled to the nightstand, tidying the objects on it – a plastic water clock, a frog-shaped tape dispenser, collectors’ cards from a range of toys I didn’t recognise – picking each one up and turning it over. The girls turned their faces back to their blank drawings. My gut churned. When I stood up, the blood ran into my legs and I was swamped with grey numbness and then was hit with an underlaid vision of this room, the bedclothes all over the floor, an acrid wet patch in the middle of the sheets, the bedside lamp knocked over and those toys tipped and scattered. I stumbled back against the wall, hearing a hollow clunk that shouldn’t have come from solid brick. I felt the tug and struggle of The I calibrating my system, and within a minute, I was back to normal again.
‘Are you all right?’ David said.
‘Yes. I stood up too quickly.’ I turned my face away from the triplets as I joined David where he was leaning over the bedside cabinet. When he straightened, a low purple glow emitted from his right hand.
‘This is weird,’ he said. He showed me a small rectangle glowing in his palm. A picture of a proud yellow rooster was painted on the chit, a Spanish or Portuguese design, floral and bright against the rich purple background. ‘This isn’t hers. It’s not even… from here.’
‘What is it? A credit card?’ Like many people in Stanton, I still carried a couple of those defunct plastic cards with me, well after the Turn. I’m not sure why – a talisman against the past, or maybe just because the slots in my purse had stretched to accommodate them and if I threw them out, my library tickets and banking punchcards would slip out every time I opened it. But the rooster started moving in a cartoonish way, strutting to the right and puffing out its chest before belting out a soundless crow. ‘Oh,’ I corrected my guess, ‘it’s a screen. A super-thin cell phone, right?’
David responded by holding the chit up, and opening and withdrawing his fingers. The glowing rectangle remained suspended in the air between us, the rooster settling back into its side-on portrait position. When I tried to take hold of it, my finger went straight through the projection.
‘It’s a custom-built v-card. Not one of Zeroth’s.’
‘Like those stupid things we used to shoot each other before the Turn? Virtual animoji?’
‘Exactly. From that era.’
David glanced at me, as if remembering the woman we had in common in a long-distant life.
On the purple rectangle, the yellow rooster had roused himself and was starting his strutting routine again. I prodded at the v-card, surprised, despite experience, that my finger didn’t send it whirling or sliding, just glided right through. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘The only way someone could have left this in here is if they hacked their way into Green Valley, cloaking their presence very well, but not perfectly. This old card’s got outdated encryption. That’s why I detected it.’
I stared at the cartoon prancing through its routine again, understanding that it was just a column of unprotected code The I had snagged from an ancient, forgotten corner of the intruder’s dossier. ‘Where’s Kira, David? Do you even know? In the café, you said she was at home.’
‘That’s what the… It’s just a glitch. She’s perfectly fine. Just as she’s always been. I can show you the bloody records if you want me to.’ Defensive, the slick mask slipping.
A glitch. His words reminded me of what I’d seen a minute ago – the fallen bedsheets, the knocked-over lamp. ‘You say someone hacked in,’ I said, working to keep my tone level in front of the triplets. ‘But I think it’s more than that. What if someone’s been here – physically? What if a stranger’s been in your daughter’s bedroom? Why can’t you find her? Why are you so oblivious? You’re just plugged into your own personal reality, like everyone else here.’
‘We made a drawing of him, Daddy,’ the triplets piped up.
I wheeled around to face them. ‘Show me,’ I said, and they all turned and raised their blank pieces of paper.
‘Oh, go away,’ David said.
‘Is it possible that they know something?’ I asked. ‘That they saw something?’
‘No. They’re primitive programmed objects. They have a small selection of preset responses that trigger when you do or say something specific.’ He yawned and said, ‘I’m tired.’
‘Good night, Daddy,’ the girls said, vanishing.
‘You see? Now you start to understand.’
But I didn’t. We hadn’t said anything that would lead the triplets to say they’d made a drawing of him. How could that response have been programmed?
‘We should go. Eloise might come out,’ he said, leading me out of Kira’s bedroom.
‘I’d like to see her,’ I said. Of course I wanted to see David’s wife. Kira’s replacement mother. ‘She might know where Kira is.’
‘No. Really. I’d rather not do this.’ He tried to ward me towards the front door, but I dodged his arm and hurried over to the door he’d glanced at when we came in. The humming was louder from here, accompanied by a rushing sound.
‘No, Lucie, stop,’ David was saying behind me. ‘Please.’ But I twisted the door handle and pushed my way inside.
A thin, naked man was sitting on a blue-cushioned office chair in a green meadow at the edge of a blue pool. In the air in front of him floated four screens scrolling data and images. To his left, a rainbow waterfall jetted into the pool, releasing a deep hum as it streamed out of the back end of a gleaming white horse. No, not a horse – a unicorn.
‘She shouldn’t be rendering like this in Green Valley,’ David said. ‘It wastes energy we don’t have to spare. If the rest of the collective found out, she could get expelled to the Edges.’
At any other moment, I might have laughed. This was the first sign of humour I’d noticed within Zeroth’s sterile, corporate vision. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, my eyes still drawn to the rainbow fountaining out of the unicorn’s butt. By his grim expression, it was clear that David didn’t share the joke. ‘Surely they know everything. This is all online.’
‘She builds good encryption. And she relies on my discretion.’ David wasn’t trying to keep his voice down, talking about Eloise as if she wasn’t there. ‘She really doesn’t give a shit for the rules. And one day she’ll get us in trouble.’
For a second, I felt validated by David’s evident scorn for the woman who had taken Odille’s place in Kira’s life. How the fuck could someone like this be trusted with a little girl?
David pursed his lips as Eloise swivelled round on her office chair planted in the middle of the meadow, splaying her skinny, hairy legs, the little pouch
of her belly rolling over a scraggly bush of black pubic hair and a sleeping cock and balls. I stifled a prudish gasp. ‘How did you get her in?’ Eloise asked David as her avatar shimmered into a casually clothed woman of about forty, the skin of her face naturally lined, her hair simply pushed back with a green band.
‘Special request. She’s seeing to a… personal problem.’
‘Hmm,’ Eloise said. ‘Must be an important problem. Anything I can do?’
David peered closer at her screens. ‘What are you doing here?’
With a gesture, Eloise replaced the scrolling data with a picture of an octopus on a colourful reef. ‘I’ve mined eight coins today. Then I traded up on a spike.’ She swiped and plucked her fingers around the empty space in front of her, then turned back to face us. Eloise studied me with deep, intelligent eyes – not the eyes of a madwoman. Her gaze was still, reading something that nobody had told her, something that The I wasn’t feeding her. ‘So, how do you like our town? I see you’re wearing Jane. Short visit, huh?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Your town’s amazingly… real. It looks just like I imagined it.’ All I wanted from her was to know where Kira was, but I suspected I wouldn’t find that out by asking directly. I needed to coax, to come at the question obliquely. ‘I was asking David why the residents weren’t allowed to stretch their imaginations a little more. Why there isn’t more of this.’ I gestured around us.
She shrugged. ‘Lack of imagination? Lack of confidence? Lack of resources? Full-on fear? Who knows? I guess the collective is worried that if you let the Lambdas have their way there’d be dragons and Ferengi roaming the streets, everyone would be having gang-bangs with hydras in pink champagne jacuzzis.’
Green Valley Page 4