She was bundled up on the top level of the kiddies’ bunk bed he’d bought for her when Dierdra split, naively imagining it would have more use than the odd occasion that Dierdra needed him to babysit when she had a big night out. Now that Sofie was here full-time he really should have bought her a proper bed, but she said she didn’t mind, that it was comfortable, that it reminded her of home. She’d told him she always felt safe when she came to his place, like her little bed was a nest in a safe cave; it was quiet and calm and never disturbed.
Sofie’d been up too late the last few nights, and Vidal stood there wondering if he should wake her at all, whether she should just skip school today; but when she smelled the coffee, she worked her body over from its wallward curl to face him, half-open one eye and smile. God, she looked nothing like her mother. Where had this angel even come from? She protruded one arm from under the cover and made a gimme-gimme motion with her hand. Vidal passed her cup and rubbed her head.
‘Did you get any sleep, sweetie?’
‘Enough,’ she said, pushing up to sit against the wall and squinting her face awake before taking a deep slurp of the coffee.
‘Did anyone see you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Vidal looked at his daughter, apparently so calm and businesslike, while he was waging a hectic battle with the panic in his chest. How could you allow your daughter to get mixed up in this? someone was screaming in his head. But it wasn’t really his voice; it was the voice of society or propriety or Dierdra or something. When Sofie came back to him, all alone in the world, he knew he would keep no secrets from her, and when she found out what he’d decided to do, she wanted to be involved. As far as Vidal was concerned, his daughter was an adult, a partner, and his only job was to guide her and protect her and not to stop her from doing what she wanted to. Unless that involved harming herself. And he’d noticed it – being involved with the children was the one thing that had kept her mind off Dierdra’s death. God knows what lives in a sixteen-year-old girl’s mind, but she seemed to be thriving in this project, rather than circling deep inside herself.
This project – right. It had turned into an utter mess, and they were both on the verge of getting into serious trouble. The only thing in their favour at the moment was that the kids were from Green Valley and, as Vidal knew from his years of legal experience, Green Valley was a judicial and enforcement blind spot. People who had chosen to stay in Green Valley, and their wards and offspring, were invisible to the law outside. He’d worked on several cases that proved the state’s utter indifference to issues inside the wall. There were more of them eight years ago when the treaty sealed them off: families cut in half, contracts breached by a few yards of concrete, unsettled divorces, pending criminal cases. They were all shut down and made to disappear, every police and judicial palm greased by Zeroth’s exit fund. Though the cases had dwindled to a trickle over the past years, Jamie Egus still had an active and effective palm-greasing fund – there was still no way to reinvigorate old cases or start new ones. So Vidal had adapted, exploiting the blind spot in his little import–export sideline, and so far it’d been lucrative – hey, he’d had to up his earnings since he’d become a family man.
Involving Sofie was intended to help her heal; the plan was meant to be harmless. More than that: he’d intended it to be heroic.
What a fuck-up.
Sofie had been drinking her coffee, staring out of the window for so long, Vidal thought the conversation was over. He was about to rouse himself and go back out to the kitchen, but now she spoke again. ‘Rainbow and I washed him. We dressed him.’
‘Who?’
‘Cisco. The boy,’ she added, in case Vidal had forgotten. ‘We thought it would be… kind. Respectful.’ When Vidal didn’t answer, just fixed her with a frown, she said, ‘Do you think that’s a problem? A mistake?’
But he was frowning for another reason, maybe because his heart was cracking. ‘No. It was kind. Are you up to school today?’
She shrugged. ‘If I don’t go, I’ll just have to catch up. What’s more,’ she announced in a sudden radio voice, ‘it’s Thunderous Thursday. Chilli in the cafeteria. Yay.’ The disjuncture between the fake jovial tone and her deeply thoughtful look unsettled him. If she could act so well, how could he know the real her? You can trust her and shut up, that’s how, he chided himself. Don’t even go down that road.
‘Well, I’ve made some eggs you can fill up on.’
‘Yay.’
‘I’ll make you sandwiches if you prefer.’
She laughed, releasing Vidal from his anxiety. ‘It’s okay, Dad. It’s all good.’
* * *
Vidal pushed back into the car seat, watching Sofie walking into school, cutting a straight line through the cliques and the clusters in the front yard. God, he’d hated high school, and he couldn’t imagine what it was like for a girl who’d just lost her mother. Those animals would kick you while you were down if they saw any weakness, grind you into the filthy concrete. But as he was thinking this, Sofie stopped at a group of kids, flipped her hood and shared a couple of hugs. She pushed her hair away from her face and laughed. The kids looked wholesome enough; a bit of colour and a bit of shaving in their hair, a bit of metal in some of their faces, lots of white in the teeth. And they weren’t spitting on his daughter; they were welcoming her into the circle.
So he watched, hunkered down in the seat, as if this would stop her from noticing that his car was still parked fifty yards from the gate. He watched to see his daughter being happy, to bank a bit of confidence that everything was going to be all right. Some part of him was still waiting for something to give; she was too fine, carrying her sadness with such grace. But every morning he watched her, and every morning she got a day away from the trauma. Somehow, she was surviving.
Then he drove to the wall, parking in a derelict niche outside the liaison office. Going around to lock his briefcase in the back, he couldn’t help remembering the dead children who’d been carried in this trunk. The third one they’d lost, the little girl, was so thin Sofie could have carried her under one arm. Sofe didn’t need anyone’s help.
This goddamned wall was like an iceberg, sending out frigid wafts of dead air and killing everything in its shadow. He hurried through the shade and pushed the buzzer on the liaison door. After a Gina-length delay, the door buzzed. Vidal pushed it open, but hesitated on the threshold. Every time he came in here, he had to gird himself, and rather than getting easier each time, it got harder, his body resisting the electronic parasites, his mind rebelling against the voodoo fuckery he was forcing on it. Now, his back was almost in spasm as he stood, casting one nostalgic glance at the soupy grey light over the wasteland outside. But it was business – good business – and he had to meet his client. It wasn’t like Jamie Egus could come and see him at his office, meet on the terrace, have a normal cup of coffee in the sunshine. Could he? God knows what Jamie Egus was any more, what was left of him under all the video games.
‘Oh, close the door, Vidal,’ Gina snapped. ‘The light’s killing me.’
‘What light?’ he said, but he pushed himself in and closed the door.
‘They turned me into a vampire,’ Gina intoned, as if she’d been reading too many gothic novels. ‘And now, here I am, stuck in the half-life, half-world with Martin. Oh, woe is me.’ She pressed the back of her hand against her brow.
‘How is Martin?’
‘Dead.’ Vidal was surprised at the lack of emotion in Gina’s voice. The two liaison officers hadn’t had much in common – vivacious, broken Gina and fusty, nerdy little Martin – but they’d worked together for a long time.
Like Gina, Martin had been damaged in the Zeroth testing process. They’d both been handsomely compensated and sent to semi-retirement in this office, shuffling papers around for busywork to keep them on the payroll. Martin had loved to travel, and all the exotic touches in this office were his, from real-world journeys, before he became a virtual Ody
sseus.
‘I still have his template,’ Gina went on. ‘They run a simulation for me to keep me from going completely insane. It’s pretty effective. He talks to me sort of in the way he used to.’
‘What happened to him?’
Gina tilted her head, as if tuning in to some information she’d requested on him, but Vidal knew she was the last person in Green Valley who’d do that; the only person who wouldn’t – she was allergic to tech or something. ‘You know, I think it was natural causes.’
‘Hm,’ Vidal said. ‘Good for him, I guess. Are you all right in here? Alone.’
She frowned at him and pursed her lips, saying nothing for a moment. Then she breathed out. ‘So you’re here to see the wizard?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You know what to do.’ She nodded towards the changing room. ‘Though I don’t know why you don’t just keep the rig in. It would save us both a lot of effort.’
‘No fucking chance in hell.’
13 Through The I, the Zeroth campus was always sunny and always green, and Vidal had never got used to the bone-knowledge that he was walking on cold concrete in a murky warehouse while he could also feel the soft give of the earth, smell the just-watered richness of the turf, and sense the warmth of the sun on his skin. His mother would have called it Satan’s evil and left it at that, but then again she’d never been one for modernity. Still, the core of him couldn’t avoid superstition whenever he was in this place. He’d hurry in, see to business, and hurry out.
He walked through the front gardens of Zeroth’s head office, passing through a birch glade over a sylvan bridge that was meant to provoke serenity. Ducks with iridescent green and purple sheens stayed neatly on their pond to his left, and lithe-necked swans circled opulently in their territory on the other side of the bridge. They would be expensive creatures if they were real, Vidal thought as a birch leaf artfully detached from a branch and elegantly deposited itself on the water, rippling the water self-consciously.
Before the low office building, squatting against a wooded copse in an attitude of environmental harmony only wealth could allow, was a defunct turning circle. For a few years well before the Turn, partners would spin their Lamborghinis and Maseratis showily outside the door, as if they thought that would motivate and inspire the software engineers inside: one day, this could be you. But then Jamie Egus, crisply attuned to the popular mood before even the populace was aware of its own feelings, banned cars from Green Valley and provided sustainable transport for everyone. Where ‘everyone’ was a card-carrying Zeroth dependant. What turned in this circle now? Under this projection of Green Valley captured twenty years ago, far darker things lay.
See to business, and get the hell out of here, Vidal reminded himself, deliberately shunting the images away – or was The I helping him? – and repressing an icy clutch of fear about what was really crunching under his feet.
The lobby was all matte-white finish and glass, the sun and the natural colours from outside painting everything in a luscious, shifting tone. It was perfectly warm in here, amniotic.
The pretty woman in a tight sheath dress behind the reception desk smiled at him and he looked back at her, not wasting the muscles in his face because he knew she was not real. Checking his reflection in the mirror behind him, he neatened his hair. He always used the same avatar in here. It was an image he’d spent hours customising on his second visit, back when it seemed to matter, and it bore a fair resemblance to him, but idealised – smaller nose, rings lightened around the eyes, the pockmarks and blemishes and freak hairs removed for a smooth finish. He went through the redundant act of putting his thumb on the scanner to check in and taking the visitor’s tag, and the receptionist stood and showed him past the subtle security barrier at the end of the lobby. He watched her walk back to the desk in her needle-heeled slingbacks, the muscles up her legs and in her thighs and her ass working the material of the dress. He’d always assumed she wasn’t real.
What would sex be like in here? It could be anything you could imagine, or the sloppy wank of a bad coder, failing in every respect to match a real, warm body.
When she’d settled back into her chair, Vidal turned through an open-plan assortment of workers, climbed up a wide stairway and walked along the upper-floor passageway, skylit and art-hung. He made his way towards the office at the end, past the shaded frost-glass doors of the under-wizards, towards the lair of the wizard-in-chief himself. But he hadn’t reached the end of the whitewashed corridor before he heard someone’s soft tread behind him.
Vidal turned to see an avatar in a Bugs Bunny mask holding up its hand – wait.
‘Hi,’ he said, emoting neutral politeness and hoping his avatar was accurately representing it. ‘Are you in the meeting?’
‘No. I need to talk to you.’ Bugs’s face bent unnaturally as it spoke, the lips moulded static around the mouth hole.
Bugs ushered Vidal through a sliding glass door into a skylit atrium, planted with palm trees clustered artfully around a Japanese-style bridge over a patch of mangrove where jewelled carp lolled. If this was anywhere other than Green Valley, run by anyone other than Jamie Egus, this would be a smoking room and the carp would be growing tough and edgy on their nicotine habit.
Bugs glanced around to check for company. ‘I’ve located a few more children who need our help.’ A chunk of data reached Vidal on his private ID, with map coordinates and details. ‘Here, here and here.’
‘Are you sure Egus can’t see this?’ Vidal asked.
Bugs ignored the question. ‘Listen, Barrett. Why are they dying?’
‘It’s the withdrawal,’ he said. ‘It’s worse than we realised. We thought when Rainbow made it through that we’d found the solution, but I guess she was an anomaly. We lost another one yesterday.’
‘I know.’
‘Then you’ll also know that we’re trying our best.’
Now the bunny’s rubber face did something that creeped Vidal out. A plastic thing, warping like it was slightly too hot. One thing on a cartoon; another in real life. Fake life, whatever the fuck this was. Like a goddamned zombified doll. ‘You can’t keep dumping them out in the open,’ it said. ‘They’re attracting attention.’
I shouldn’t have brought Sofie into this. Trained as a lawyer, used to trying to read real people, he looked into Bugs’s dead, painted eyes, and in response they started to roll back, and they didn’t stop, falling back into their sockets and away.
‘You have to make the bodies disappear.’
Vidal looked into the mask’s eyeholes for longer than was comfortable, trying to recognise something in the blankness. He looked until his balance tipped, as if he might fall into the void. Then he dragged his gaze away. ‘All right. It won’t happen again.’
* * *
Outside Egus’s office, the windows opaque and the door closed, Vidal presented himself to a personal assistant he’d never seen before but who was possibly a real person’s avatar, given her practical outfit of slacks, low heels and a light and soft-looking emerald sweater. She was checking a quaint analogue appointment book when she glanced up and over his shoulder. David Coady was coming along the corridor.
‘Oh, David. You in on this meeting?’ Vidal asked.
‘Yes,’ David Coady said in his evasive tone. ‘Jamie asked me.’
Vidal zipped his lips. Coady – fussy and uptight compared to Egus’s fascinating nuttiness – sometimes appeared in their meetings, though God knew why. Maybe to give him some illusion of responsibility, since he was still officially a director of Zeroth and there was precious little need for marketing or product evangelism, as far as Vidal could tell. The woman showed them into the office and followed them, the appointment book changed into an electronic tablet in her hand. The door closed itself behind them and Vidal took in the simulation of Egus’s wide desk, with just a couple of slim and elegant screens, a stylus and a tablet positioned on it. Egus wasn’t here yet, so Vidal parked himself on one of the com
fortable visitors’ chairs, its pads of luxury imitation leather and ergonomic steel frame pushing back perfectly against his weight.
Behind Egus’s chair was a wide window taking in a vista of how this sector of Green Valley used to be, how it would have been at this time of year; the trees on the hills just about turned, mostly brown against a pale blue sky, but with a sparkle of red and yellow leaves shivering in the breeze. He swivelled on his chair and looked up at David, who hadn’t sat yet and was hovering in the centre of the room beside the assistant, who looked like she was ready to take a coffee order. Vidal never ate or drank in this place.
‘Why does he do it?’ he asked, the question so idle he hadn’t aimed it at anyone in particular.
‘Why does he do what?’ David said.
‘All of this. Meeting rooms and offices, receptionists and jobs. He could just as easily take his meetings sitting on top of a giant mushroom, smoking opium. Why does he choose to pretend to work in an office building, when his choices are unlimited?’
Vidal got more of David Coady’s opinion than he’d expected, expressed in the persuasive tones of his public voice. ‘This building, the campus, Green Valley – he made it all before the outsiders turned on him. It’s real, where we’re walking – Jamie Egus built it. It’s his legacy and he wants to hold onto it.’
‘He wants to carry on believing it’s real,’ the assistant added from behind them. Vidal turned to see her thousand-mile stare out of the window and into the hills. ‘He doesn’t want to let it all dissolve away.’
‘I wonder if he misses it.’ Vidal gestured towards the window.
‘I don’t,’ the assistant said, coming around the desk to sit on his chair. She spun halfway towards the window and pointed out of it. ‘It’s all out there still. And it’s all in here,’ she said, tapping her forehead.
Vidal straightened, annoyed at having been caught out by such a childish prank. For a churlish moment he resisted respecting the great man, but remembered that he was there to do business and decided to stand. ‘Oh, uh, Mr Egus. Good to see you again.’ He put out his hand, and as Egus shook it with his borrowed soft, slim fingers, David came to sit in the chair beside him, smirking at Vidal’s discomfort.
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