‘Only you can cast yourself into the void,’ she said. ‘Your ending cannot be simulated.’
‘You’re talking like you’re not from Green Valley. Outside, we don’t trust simulations either.’
She didn’t seem surprised that I was from outside. As if in thought, she raised one grey hand towards her mouth, her small, dark eyes intensely focussed, but then flicked a fingertip. The dots all around her turned bright yellow, leaving my eyes to struggle with the sudden glaring shift. In perfect synchrony, every dot suffered its own apocalypse, imploding like dead stars at the end of the universe, and the effect was a spectral ripple that was impossible to take in until it was over and the suburban street was just a suburban street with an old woman in a grey woollen kaftan talking to me. ‘This world is seductive. It’s impossible to leave.’
‘Can you tell me more about the Edges? Who else lives here?’
‘It’s a haven – from control. The people who come here are people who like to play.’ Her face moved in what I took for a smile. ‘You might encounter a few. Some of us like to be seen, some don’t.’
She gestured over her patch of street as if to encourage me on. I didn’t have much time, so I thanked her and walked away.
At the end of the road was a T-junction, the straightest stretch of road I’d seen apart from Main Street and the periphery of the town square. According to the map, I was at the physical edge of the enclave – there was nothing beyond the thick line denoting the wall and the boundary of Green Valley. Strung to my left and my right were a series of arches under what may have been designed originally as an aqueduct or a viaduct. Some of them had signs hanging over them and tables or small constructions arrayed outside. It could have been a gentrified artists’ market in any wealthy city in the real world and I wondered, given my brief exposure to the imagination of the polka-dot woman, why even rebels against Green Valley’s architectural strictures would line themselves up in such a space-bound arrangement. Perhaps it was a remnant of the tourist age, when physical tourists and cyber-tourists would flock here and buy digital art and comics and games and plans and software from the Green Valley creatives. The tourists would have appreciated the familiarity of a recognisable market, and it would be in the interests of the artists to draw them here without losing them.
But now, eight years after Green Valley had closed, there was none of the promised explosion of possibilities. Could it really be that humans are shackled to the earth, that utter freedom terrifies us? We like straight lines; we want the feel of the ground under our feet.
But as I turned left and approached the stalls, the renovated industrial façade of the first enclosure in the strip began to dissolve away subtly and merge with a starker space. I peered into the half-darkness, tripping over a soiled mattress jutting out of a studio’s doorway. A soft-fried egg, days old, trickled across the mattress towards a plucked, raw chicken wearing women’s underwear. ‘I’ll show you how it happened,’ the chicken said. There was a house made of chopped hardwood and rubble, solidly packed, crawling with living plastic crabs; a chrome-plated Mickey Mouse bent Donald Duck over a sale table; a woman dressed as a bird kept flying into a window. Although these artists had used the technology to enhance and activate their work, most of it felt sterile. This art show might have been made twenty years ago, a time-worn copy. It made sense that Green Valley, cut off from the world, might have become moribund, but it was disappointing. Perhaps some part of me had wanted to believe in their vision, some part of me applauded their bravery: I’d wanted to believe it had worked.
As I let The I tamp down a sense of deflation that might fester into a deeper depression, a message flashed up: Incoming call. Unlike on the video call with David earlier, only a small still image of Gina Orban’s face appeared in my eyeline. ‘Hello, Lucie. You have half an hour left. Can you find the office, or do you want me to get you?’
‘I’ll get back, thanks. See you soon.’ I checked my position on the map and set the liaison office as my destination. Near the T-junction, a bright light glared from the first studio in the row. Glancing through the wide, arched doorway, I saw that the walls and the floors were uniformly covered in high-gloss white tiles, and a handsome black ram with spiral horns stood near the doorway, sniffing the air and nervously tapping its hoof on the porcelain floor with a hollow, fragile knock. Curious, I slowed and stepped closer, catching a glimpse of a shallow white gully leading to a drain in the middle of the floor.
I turned away, but the ram spoke to me in an ancient accent. ‘Come inside. You know you want to. I’ll let you wield the knife.’
Despite the clean glare of the room, the air was tinged with a thick, foul odour of rot. It was all The I could do to push images of congealed blood away from my mind. I shook my head and tried to hurry off, but something was holding my legs. I looked down to find narrow and sticky rust-buckled leather straps around my ankles. I was being pulled inside the tiled room.
‘I didn’t ask, Lucie,’ the ram said. ‘Sacrifice isn’t optional. You came here to see what we do.’
Whatever was pulling the straps was too strong. I tried to keep up with the tug so that I could stay on my feet, but it started dragging me faster, and harder, and I twisted and tripped and slammed onto the ground and was dragged the final ten metres into the middle of the room. The entranceway became a fourth tiled wall as I was hauled upwards by my ankles and looped over a hook suspended in the ceiling. I think I was screaming, or I should have been, but I felt tired and docile hanging by my ankles amid a steel-hooked row of skinned sheep carcasses all disgorging blood from their necks. It was quite pretty, I thought, looking down from above, to see four neat streams of blood converging from each corner of the red-spattered white room into the drain in the middle. This is all we are, I thought, or I was made to think, or I heard said in my head in my own voice. Whichever way, it made sense.
The I was struggling to balance the mixture of terror and mind-saving evasion and the fact that I was hanging upside down and all the blood was pooling in my head, a massive pressure building, begging for release, crying to be let out.
The ram sauntered close enough to tickle my forehead with its woolly fringe.
‘This is what we do,’ it said, the foul stench of a million deaths smothering me as it spoke. ‘Sacrifice.’
* * *
‘It can get quite interesting, can’t it?’ Gina said.
I wanted to sit up and hit her, and that was good. It meant the retraction was happening as it should. I was gradually starting to become myself again. When the transponders were detached, I could feel their absence by the way my body wouldn’t level itself. The whole day, I’d been experiencing everything harder and deeper than normal, in an unconscious effort to assert myself over The I’s control, so I knew I’d need to recalibrate myself – in an analogue, human way. I’d have to let it pass, give myself time to recover.
I was glad that Gina had come to collect me at the Edges. I got disoriented after I left David’s house and I couldn’t remember my way out. It was almost as if I’d blacked out for a while and surfaced again, with only a nagging sense of dread, like a half-remembered nightmare. Gradually the fog lifted and I started to remember all I had experienced, but when it came to that pungent ram, my mind still battled to find the seam between reality and hallucination.
Gina left me to shower and get dressed into my own clothes. My feet were sore from walking, my muscles stiff with spent adrenaline from all the new impressions. I was developing a thick headache but I remembered Barbra’s mission before I left. I checked my jacket pockets – they were untouched. The signal-proof pouch was still there. I slipped the right lens of The I into the pouch and replaced it in Gina’s lens case with my old I lens, which had been safely disabled and wouldn’t be broadcasting any lies.
II
6 It was near six when I got to the precinct. Though it had felt like a week, I’d only been in Green Valley for five hours, and I guessed Barbra would still be in the o
ffice.
I took a stabilising breath before hurrying and greeting the desk officer. ‘Hi. I know I shouldn’t be here after hours, but I’ve left my keys behind. I got all the way home and scratched around in my damn bag… they have to be on my desk. Well, I goddamn hope so. You mind if I go take a look?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You gotta sign in, though.’
‘Of course,’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t look too closely at the dirt under my nails. Most of Green Valley had come off in the shower, but not all. After signing in, I patted my jacket’s inner pocket – the signal-proof pouch was still there. Even though I trusted the Sentinel tech’s capacity to block its signals, and the fact that I’d been able to smuggle it out of Zeroth’s liaison office undetected proved that it was working, I couldn’t help imagining radio-wave tendrils punching a microscopic hole through the pouch’s defences and speeding their way back to Zeroth to expose me. The sooner I handed this thing off, the better. And if Barbra wasn’t in the office? I’d have to hold onto it till the morning, feel Zeroth’s tentacles clawing out to it all night. Fuck, I hoped she was there.
Not for the first time, I found myself nostalgic for life before the Turn, when you could call someone on their cell phone and they’d speak to you immediately, or you might expect people in non-critical jobs to read their text messages in the middle of the night on the weekend. To follow this train of thought was cultural blasphemy, but I did it anyway. Were we really better off after the Turn? Or had our privacy been a fair price for the comforts we’d enjoyed?
On the far side of the fourth floor, Bert Halstrom, the Sentinel doorman, stood by a blank desk, guarding the grey door. ‘Ma’am,’ he greeted me as I approached. ‘You’re expected.’ I put my messenger bag on the table and allowed Bert to flip through the contents, shining his bright little torch, which was also a metal-detecting wand, into the darkest recesses. When he was done, I allowed him to frisk me.
If The I was emitting any signals, Bert’s wand didn’t seem to detect them. The pouch was evidently doing its job.
Shielding the keypad with my body, I pressed a code into the mechanical combination lock and flipped the lever. The grey door unlatched with a click. At a second door, I entered a different code into what was disguised as another manual press-button lock for the eager eyes outside, but which also read fingerprint biometrics and compared them with a database before clicking open. In the second anteroom, low-lit and featureless, a palm and retinal scan allowed a blast-proof, air-sealed resin door to slide aside for me, revealing the Sentinel common room. It was empty of analysts at this hour but Barbra Reeve and Bill Schindler emerged from a conference room.
‘Did you get it?’ Schindler asked.
‘Evening, Lucie,’ Barbra said, stopping me as I reached into my jacket pocket. ‘Come.’
She led us up the stairs to her office on the overlooking mezzanine, closed the door, and rendered the glass wall opaque with the touch of a button. I’d seen the effect before, but it still charmed me, the glass – or, more accurately, the thermal layer between two panes – shading so subtly, and the lighting in the room coming up so organically, that you didn’t notice when you could no longer see the common room outside.
I imagined what a regular voting, tax-paying citizen might think of this window. Simply because the glass was controlled by electronics, and especially because it was installed in a police office, the citizens outside would be suspicious of it. It wouldn’t make a difference to their knee-jerk paranoia if they stopped to consider that the window had nothing to do with surveillance, that it was simply an elegant and convenient variation on blinds. No, it would strike them as black magic, and they’d bring pitchforks and flames to it. As much as I understood their reaction to the abuses before the Turn, it meant we were missing out on aesthetic advances. It was because I harboured heretical thoughts like this that I was standing in Barbra Reeve’s office right now.
‘As Bill was saying’ – Barbra leaned against her desk, her pretended patience vanished – ‘did you get it?’
At last, I could take the pouch out of my pocket. I placed it on the desk, relieved to have it away from me. I couldn’t quite shake the thought that it was still communicating with Green Valley, distributing my biometric and positional information, and the wizards behind their green curtain were compiling and monitoring that information, biding their time. The thought betrayed my own superstition; I was just like everyone else, at heart. ‘I managed to bring out a lens, as we hoped. I have no idea whether you’ll be able to get anything from it. The tech’s changed a lot since The I we knew. Much more than I imagined.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Schindler said, reaching over and sliding the lens out of the pouch and into a transparent container. ‘We’ve been on top of it.’ He held the device up to the light, turning it this way and that, scrutinising the hardware with an unconscious smile widening on his face. He turned to Barbra. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Go ahead,’ she said.
Schindler pocketed the case and walked to the door. ‘Good work, Sterling.’
When he’d closed the door behind him, Barbra said, ‘His team’s on standby, ready to dissect it. If there’s any way in, they’ll find it. It’s what they’ve been preparing for.’
* * *
Fabian was angled on the couch in the bay window with a glass of wine in one hand and a novel in the other. His mouth twitched in tacit acknowledgement that he’d noticed me coming in but he carried on reading. We usually let each other finish our chapter, but not that evening. I dropped my things on the dining-room table and went right over to him, shoving his legs aside and wedging my way onto the couch. Then I took the glass from his hand, put it on the coffee table, and stuck my tongue into his mouth, grabbing him and pulling him over onto me. My core shuddered at the weight of his body; I wanted to be crushed by it, absorbed into him. I glanced at his face as he squirmed away. His smile had broadened, but he was still cheekily gripping the book above us and was side-eyeing it, trying doggedly to finish his page.
I worked my fingers at the cloth of his trousers, buried my face in his neck, breathing his scent in until it filled me, nipping at his skin, wanting to bite hard, wanting to eat him, to have him inside me, the flesh of him. I wanted to churn with him, every mass-bearing pound of us. I wanted him smeared all over me and me inside him and him smothering me. I needed something hefty and physical and hard and sore, something that would make me scream, something that would make me real again.
* * *
When I was convinced, at last, I stayed lying over him, looking out of the window at the alders gently sprinkling their leaves in the amber glow of the apartment’s lights onto the sidewalk three floors below. My clothes were half off, twisted around my legs and neck and arm, but I revelled in the discomfort as Fabian pulled a throw over me and ran his fingers along my spine.
‘What was that about?’ he asked.
‘You were right. Green Valley’s totally fucked up.’
‘Hm,’ he said, nuzzling his chin into my hair.
‘I’m sorry about earlier.’
‘Nothing to be sorry about.’
‘I should have let you have your say, at least.’
‘You would have done what you needed to anyway.’
‘Yeah.’ I laughed.
I reached for one of his hands and guided it to where Gina Orban had fitted the lumbar and cervical transponders. When I’d checked my reflection after being retracted at the liaison office, there was barely any evidence they had ever been there: three tiny pinpricks at each site that you’d only notice if you were looking for them, and a red suction indentation that had already faded and smoothed away. I pressed Fabian’s fingertips to my lower spine, wishing that if I pressed in just the right way, he would be able to see what I’d seen.
‘Listen. About Kira…’
‘Your mystery niece. I didn’t even know you had one.’
‘I’m sorry. I tried to figure out why I never told you. I w
asn’t trying to hide anything from you, honest. It’s just... it was long ago.’
‘Tell me about her.’
I reached for my wine. ‘Another time, okay? I promise. It’s been a bit of an overwhelming day.’
‘Is she all right, at least? Did you find that out? You sounded so worried about her on the phone this morning.’
‘Yes, it was a false alarm after all.’ I didn’t want to go into the reasons I had feared for Kira.
‘Well, I’m glad you’re back in one piece,’ he said, kissing the top of my head. Glancing at our reflection in the window, I saw a pietà: saintly Fabian cradling me, enveloping me, protecting me.
I pushed myself tighter into his warm nooks, comparing this with the odd sensation of hugging David. ‘After just a few hours there, I feel… dissolved, half real. I can’t imagine what it’s like for the people inside.’
Fabian’s body grew taut and he pushed up to a slump. ‘They get used to it, I suppose. We can normalise anything.’ His voice was brittle. ‘They chose it.’
I sat up and tugged my shirt straight, moved to the far end of the couch, my arms folded. ‘They chose this years ago. What if things have changed? What if they regret their decision? Do they have to be stuck with it for life?’ This was really something I should have asked David.
‘Those are the terms they agreed to. Anyhow, from what we know,’ Fabian said – the royal we, the Omega we – ‘they become so enmeshed, so dependent on the system that they wouldn’t be able to face life on the outside.’
I couldn’t tell him that I knew as much about life inside Green Valley as his Luddite research group. Kira, that little version of Odille with her whole life ahead of her, was surely trapped in a system she hadn’t chosen, addicted to a machine. Tears welled up in my eyes and I bent down to blink them away and pull up my underpants, untwisting them up my legs, then made a show of looking out the window, at the night-life cars and the people passing below.
Green Valley Page 6