Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  Fabian rubbed at my thigh with his foot, regretful. ‘Tell me more, then, Luce. What was it like in there? What did you do?’ I knew he was asking only to rekindle the dead air between us, not because he was interested in Green Valley, but still, I loved him for trying.

  I shook my head and said, my tone as conciliatory as possible, even though I was hammered by a weight of portent, ‘I need to get my head around it, then I’ll fill you in.’

  He stood up and headed to the kitchen to get something on for supper, relieved, perhaps, not to have to chat equably to me about Green Valley scum.

  * * *

  Fabian was sleeping with his back to me, allowing me to press into him for warmth and contact, but not turning and reconnecting to me when I flipped myself over. And I was flipping over a lot that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I descended through a curtain of grey mist and back into Green Valley, my mind churning with all the faces and the parade of simulacra I’d seen. Every time I drifted off, I was shunted awake by some bad image, the afterburn of flickering lights in blackness that I knew would harm me.

  At two o’clock, after listening to the alarm clock ticking until its officious little shuffle grew unbearable, I gave up, grabbed my clothes from the bedroom chair and went to the study.

  I’d lived with Fabian for six years, but still occupied his apartment like a guest. Or, even more, like one of the art installations he curated: Untamed Woman Trapped in Civilised Jar. The apartment was pearl-toned – all high ceilings with resounding space and artfully bevelled edges. Tall double-glazed sash windows looked over the healthy treetops and nonchalantly draped light over the shine-polished hardwood parquet; the living rooms were lined with custom-built bookshelves creaking with treatises on the functions of art and the philosophy of politics. The kitchen was buffed marble and steel; the beds and couches mohair and cashmere. The home of my nurturance, the home my mind still inhabited, had been a dingy space with a constrained, barred view of rusty iron and gum-spattered, weed-cracked sidewalk. I sometimes felt as if I’d been shaken out into this elegant, urbane place and left to scurry around, observed from outside and above by polite society.

  But that was my neurosis, none of Fabian’s doing. He accepted and tolerated and loved me, with a gracious equanimity that I suspected only someone from his privileged background, someone who hadn’t had to scrabble for care or sustenance, could muster.

  When Fabian worked at home, he generally sprawled his material across the dining table, and he’d invited me to call the study my own. Fabian’s luxurious books and cabinets of artistic treasures owned the room, but my little desk fitted snugly between the wall and the window, a calm, clear surface dotted only with a small pile of notebooks, a wooden tray of letters and documents – and the telephone, whose soft purr now rippled the silence. I snatched up the receiver.

  David spoke before I could say anything. ‘She is missing, Lucie. Someone’s taken her.’

  ‘What? Since this afternoon?’ The transgalactic static washed between his words, trying to keep them from me.

  ‘No. It wasn’t her in the garden.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean? I saw her. I touched her.’

  ‘The avatar was falsified, days ago. I’ve looked all over and I can’t find her. And… her bedroom. It’s been invaded.’ His voice was low, a desperate whisper. ‘Someone’s been in there. Someone’s taken her. I need your help, Lucie.’

  My heart gripped at my chest. ‘Oh, God. Is there anything I can do from here?’ And then anger pushed through – he had all the tech; how could Zeroth need my help tracking someone? ‘Surely there are records, footage?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s something wrong with the system. The playback’s corrupted in all the crucial places.’

  ‘It must be someone inside, then, who knows how to do that.’

  ‘I don’t think so. That rooster, the old code, you remember? There’s more like it. And that stuff doesn’t come from in here. It’s not compatible with Zeroth code. They might be getting help from inside, but whoever took her came from outside. I managed to filter and rebuild her location records and traced her all the way into Stanton, a location near Claymarket, before the signal disappeared – six days ago, Lucie. That’s why I think you can help. Someone in Stanton has taken her and is deliberately hiding her—’

  ‘How could you trace her outside Green Valley?’ There shouldn’t be any cell or Wi-Fi signals outside the wall… except for Sentinel’s covert systems. Had David just admitted that they were aware of Sentinel’s work, piggybacking on our devices?

  But, no. ‘GPS,’ he said. ‘You haven’t shot the satellites out of the sky yet.’

  ‘Oh, right. And when you say her location data disappeared, could it mean that it’s already… too late?’

  ‘Oh.’ He didn’t speak for a moment. ‘No. Whatever her condition, we’d still be able to locate the tracers. It doesn’t mean that, Lucie. You have to help me.’

  ‘All right. I’ll do what I can.’ I said it with false bravado. ‘I’ll call you if I find anything out.’

  ‘No, don’t call me. I’ll call you. I’ll set up a secure line.’

  ‘Why? Do you think someone inside is listening?’

  ‘They’re always listening, Lucie. Always. And this is something they won’t want to hear.’

  I tried Jordan Martinez’s desk on the off-chance that he’d be at the precinct, but it just rang. I followed up with a call to the charge office front desk and left a message for Jordan, dictating it to the constable at the answering service. ‘There’s a girl missing, nine years old. If you come across anyone, please let me know. I’m at home.’ That vague message wouldn’t express my urgency to Jordan, but I couldn’t leave any more details. I certainly couldn’t mention Green Valley or Zeroth to the front-desk constable who had no idea about Sentinel’s work. Maybe Jordan would read between the lines; we were often on the same wavelength. I considered him a friend in the precinct. His unadorned, unprivileged background, matched with a no-nonsense blend of honesty and practicality, resonated with me: maybe he was the sort of human I imagined I’d become if I ever got over myself.

  ‘He should call office hours or any time?’ the constable asked.

  ‘Any time, please. I’ll be here. It’s pretty important.’

  I could hear the constable’s shrug. ‘You don’t want to ask the detectives on duty? It’s Brydon and, let’s see… Rahman.’

  No, it had to be Jordan. A senior detective in the CID, Jordan was my go-to contact on the detective force, and he’d been the one saddled with the Green Valley kids’ dossier. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll check in with Martinez in the morning.’

  After taking a deep breath, I dialled the next number on my list, the one I had avoided earlier. I wasn’t expecting an answer, but if I didn’t try I’d spend the rest of the night roving about the house restlessly. The dial purred like a cat as it cycled through the numbers.

  ‘Stanton path lab, yeah?’

  ‘Hi, Maya? It’s Lucie Sterling. I’m surprised you’re there.’

  ‘Hey, Lucie. Yeah, late shift. I’m babysitting tonight.’

  ‘Who? What do you mean?’ For a moment I thought she was making a tasteless joke. Maya Kanté, the sharp-minded medical intern who kept shifts at the morgue for pocket money, had already developed the blunt sense of humour of a pathologist, but in her case it didn’t usually extend to laughing about the death of children. She was still young and retained some of the sensitivity a career in the field would eventually erode.

  ‘Jordan’s here too,’ she explained.

  ‘Oh, okay. Why’s he up?’

  ‘Tallying up patrol’s notes on the new little girl.’

  I sat up straight. ‘Which little girl?’

  ‘Found a few hours ago.’ Then, to someone else in the room: ‘Come again?’

  Something rustled, and clearly, behind the muffled tone of Maya’s voice, I heard her heart beating – a steady, untroubled double thump. A few more lines of u
nintelligible conversation, then Maya lifted the receiver from where she’d been muting it against her chest. ‘He says he sent you a pneum.’

  ‘Hang on.’ I leaned over, opened the hatch and found nothing inside. No capsules, and no noise of a sucking vacuum either. There’d been pump breakdowns at the Malvern junction down the road for weeks now, but I wouldn’t have got a pneum this soon anyhow. I jabbed at the send button pointlessly before going back to the phone. Why didn’t he just phone me? ‘Nothing yet. What did it say?’

  ‘He says if you’re looking for a little girl, to come down. We’ve got one… looks six or seven, but we’re thinking maybe she’s older.’

  I was already standing up, but I had to ask. ‘Any ID?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Not many seven-year-olds carrying passports or drivers’ licences.’

  Facial recognition used to help; computerised dental, retinal and fingerprint files, for your personal safety and security. All I had to compare against, thanks to the Turn, was the digital photo of Kira’s face in my memory. ‘I’ll be right there.’

  ‘Jordan says you’d better hurry. External’s likely to want her first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s a little underdeveloped, this girl. And there’s weird nanotech in her blood, just like the others. There’s only one place she could have come from.’

  7 Every time I walked through downtown Stanton from our flat to my office at the central police precinct, I was reminded of who I was. The route took me past the tenement where I had grown up, the Claymarket Hole nightclub in its basement, the laundromat and the Eet Mor twenty-four-hour convenience store, where one of Raj Khan’s sons still manned the counter on every dead shift. Tonight it was Bobby Khan, slumped on a stool behind the desk, his feet on the counter, an amazing balancing trick, flipping through a surfing magazine. When a customer carrying a cat and a large carton of milk and a bag of crisps approached the counter, Bobby looked up and caught sight of me peering in as I passed, and offered me a smile and a half-lifted wave. After the vacant perfection of the patrons of the Asbury Café in Green Valley, Bobby’s lopsided yellow teeth, the evacuated blast of spiced fry fat and the flickering, patently unsafe neon sign flashing NON ST P GOOD ESS under the steady drip of condensation from the air-con unit never looked better to me.

  My upbringing was common enough. My mother had raised Odille and me on her own, the three of us abandoned to quiet poverty by my addicted father. That’s all: a story of lack, like so many others.

  In the top drawer of my desk in the study, two photos were tucked into a notebook. Photos taken at school, both of them: me standing next to seventeen-year-old Odille when she won the district tech fair, and Odille standing next to fourteen-year-old me when I placed second in the regional debating contest. Both photos from not long before she left home. We had a sense, even then, I think, that we had an unusual relationship. No other kids photobombed their siblings’ school prizegiving pictures, but we were desperately, needfully proud of each other, and behind each photo, only the two of us would recognise the ghost of our mother standing proud and failing behind the lens. She worked herself to a sliver, as if she could never work hard enough. She died exhausted by sacrifices. That was motherhood to me; I’d promised myself then that I would never be like her.

  I’d made it out of here, hadn’t I? Although Claymarket and the miserable hole my mother left remained a smouldering wound in the centre of my being, there were stretches when I no longer believed that this grimy space defined me. Claymarket at root, my office and my work, and yes, the apartment on the leafy street by the museum, the cashmere activist who made me at home there – I was made up of all of them. I hadn’t changed; I’d expanded.

  Hauling my keys out of my messenger bag and sorting through the colour-coded tabs, I was painfully aware of the jangle and clatter shearing the pre-dawn streets. I glanced behind me to check that nobody was following. Total surveillance would have been a comfort, right about then. Eventually, I found the right three to unlock the security gate and vestibule door. After the Turn, several electronics companies had offered to remodel their systems to simple closed-circuit devices that wouldn’t record or report, but would simply unlock doors if you had the key-card that matched the lock, but they didn’t take off. Citizens didn’t trust them not to be secretly storing or distributing their information, and after the abuses and the blatant lies the digital industries had been complicit in before, who could blame us? Keys, cut from metal, and locks, made of rollers and pins, were once again our trusted, not-so-silent gatekeepers. After the Turn, like in the old days, you’d need to physically follow and steal someone’s keys to get through their door; you couldn’t hack into people’s private spaces en masse by remote control. Or so Stantonians believed.

  On the cusp of the Turn, an old schoolfriend of mine had been raped and robbed in a back alley. It hadn’t been fitted with the surveillance cameras that had sprouted over most streets in the city. I’d been as certain then as I was now that if there had been cameras in the alleyway, the police and the courts would have had evidence to confirm her account; they would have identified the men who’d arrived in place of the boy she’d gone there to meet, and someone would have been held to account. It was that sort of heretical thinking that kept one of my feet there in Claymarket and prevented me from fully inhabiting Fabian’s lush and idealistic world.

  * * *

  Locking the gate and the vestibule door behind me, I turned to the inner door and tried the latch. To my surprise, it was locked too; it shouldn’t have been, when a pathologist was in. I let myself in and found the corridor in near darkness, lit only by dim emergency strips.

  ‘Hello?’ I said. ‘Maya? Jordan? You here?’

  The lino flooring of the long corridor bloomed in little white-feathered mint-green patches as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. Four wide exam-room doors to my left, eight narrower office and supply-room doors to my right. At the far end, the corridor split towards the staff area, the library and the intern studies to the right, and towards receiving and storage to the left.

  Maya usually worked in the third path exam room, under Dr Rossetti, but if Jordan was with her, maybe she was in the library. I hurried along the corridor, avoiding looking through the porthole windows into the darkened labs, and turned right.

  Here, at last, yellow light was pouring from the door, and I heard voices.

  ‘Jesus, Maya,’ I said, rounding into the library. ‘Why don’t you answer when I call? You should keep the lights—’

  The stench of sheep fat and congealing blood was so thick I could hardly breathe. The room tilted upside down and I was being suspended through a hook by a rope around my ankles, waiting for the curved blade.

  The slit pupils of the black ram.

  The blood dripped like rain around me.

  ‘Look closely, Lucie,’ the ram said, and I opened my eyes.

  It stood up, lithely changing form from a skinny-legged ovine to a man and then going beyond a man, a giant haloed by shadow, which turned into light – a thousand lights of a thousand screens playing a thousand nightmares. I tried to look away. The ram was all I could see and when I tried to anchor my gaze on its face, there was nothing, just a constant, shifting smudge, like mud at the bottom of a river. He made me look with my eyes jammed open; he made me select my worst vision from the nightmares collected there.

  A screen flickering grey footage of a woman in a white coat, a man in a padded jacket, doing something to the body of a little girl. The yellow lights too bright, the spatter of the blood coating and recoating the tiles, clumps of it sliding as it thickened. A giant with yellow eyes burning from a smudged face. The straps at my ankles failing, the shudder as the buckle popped. I was falling, my head smashing into the crimson tiles.

  A soft landing.

  Thick hands under my arms, propping me up against the armchair’s edge.

  A glass of water in my face.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I’m
okay.’ I rubbed my eyes.

  ‘Come,’ Jordan said. ‘Sit properly.’ He lifted me up and into the chair with barely a heave, stuffing a cushion behind my back, another behind my head.

  I took the water Maya was offering me. ‘Are you sure you’re okay? We heard you stumbling about.’

  ‘I’m fine. Sorry,’ I said. Looking around, I saw the corridor was fully lit. Talk radio was playing from one of the labs. The chill had gone. ‘Have the lights always been on?’

  Maya gave a sideways twist of her face, the metal and ink there contorting to a smirk. ‘Uh, yeah. Like, tonight, I mean. Not for the whole of history, I guess.’

  ‘But they were off when I came in. I called for you and nobody answered. You were definitely not in lab three.’

  Maya shot a glance across at Jordan, who said, ‘We saw you come in. You looked a bit spaced out. We spoke to you but you just walked past us. Like you were sleepwalking. You sure you don’t need to get some rest?’

  But I just shook my head. ‘No. No.’

  Had Gina left some part of The I in my system? That could explain the double vision, the overlaid playback. The thought sent panic scurrying through my nerves, and this time it wasn’t tamped down by any mind-control drugs. ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘What is it?’ Jordan said, leaning forward.

  I knew I’d have to tell him something, but not yet. ‘Nothing,’ I said. I rubbed my hand over my face, then pushed tentatively up off my chair. My head was clearing and I was fine to stand. ‘Can I see the body, Maya?’ I asked, careful not to admit that the child in there might be more to me than a case, an administrative detail. The truth was, I couldn’t admit it to myself.

  ‘Sure.’ She led me out of the common room. Jordan picked up a dossier from the table and made a show of leafing through it, though his attention stayed on me till we’d left the room.

  In storage, Maya slid a drawer open. I concentrated on the green-tiled wall, the chrome fittings, the muted stainless steel, tracing my fingers over it, knocking my knuckles against the cold surfaces. This is real, I told myself; the ram’s slaughterhouse is a computer graphic. This is my actual life, these sensations are being made by physical external objects; those were virtual, falsified stimuli. Although it had felt like I was in hell, I’d only been in a real studio made of bricks and wood and iron on the outskirts of Green Valley, an actual room in a concrete shell on the Earth’s surface.