Green Valley

by Louis Greenberg

  Climbing a metal ladder to a chest-high concrete lip in the wall, Basson entered a code into a keypad to the side of the roller and raised it up. Two seconds later, an intense waft of pungent garbage fingered its way directly into the skip with us. ‘Jesus,’ I gagged.

  ‘Yeah,’ Vidal said. ‘Let’s switch you on.’ He twisted something at the back of my neck, where the shirt’s hood joined the hem, and the smell was replaced by a simulation of herbs and rain that swept away the molecules reacting in my olfactory system.

  Basson folded out the truck’s gangplank and approached our trolley, still wordless, and with that neutral, closed-down expression that wouldn’t raise any suspicion from anyone watching the delivery-bay feed – just a solitary farmer delivering his goods.

  ‘Keep down,’ Vidal whispered as Basson unlocked the straps over the trolley and unclamped the wheels, reversing us with a solid pair of bumps onto the rust-streaked and stained concrete floor of the delivery bay.

  Except, it was softer than that, more undulating; we were being wheeled over a quiet gravel pathway in an overgrown corner of what looked like a suburban park. Through the trolley’s eyehole, I saw a grove of silver birches, leaves perpetually gently turning in the warm sunlight, and then we were parked halfway into a verge of purple buddleia and berry-laden brambles. Then we were alone. Vidal flipped the lid open and stepped out of the trolley, and I stood up and looked around. Vidal’s avatar was a plastic-skinned, crop-haired, fake-muscled GI Joe in Hawaiian civvies – irony or wish-fulfilment, I wouldn’t guess. Intra-ocular lines of text, just like The I’s familiar readout, scrolled to the side of my sightline. My body knew I was still standing in a concrete delivery bay, but my mind was asserting the fragrance of crushed leaves and seed-blown autumn flowers, insisting that fecund wasps and bumblebees were drifting in the space in front of my face, that the muddy ground was spongy beneath my feet.

  When I caught the sight and sound of humans passing along the road just beyond the stand of shrubbery, my stomach lurched. My mind knew they were not real, and it knew at the same time that they needed to be engaged with and assessed on a full cerebro-social level – a swell of bile rose in the pit of my stomach, searching for equilibrium, then hacked its way out on a wave of retching. This is what it would feel like to see a horde of ghosts; I’d stumbled into Gina Orban’s uncanny valley. I folded double and retched out the contents of my stomach into the wood-chipped bed at the base of the shrubbery.

  ‘There’s no aversion control on our interface,’ Vidal mused as he stood a few discreet yards away from me, ‘so it isn’t as comfortable as Zeroth’s. But the flipside is that they don’t know you’re here unless they’re physically watching you, which they wouldn’t bother to do. They’ve grown lax, since The I does it all for them.’

  I stayed in my doubled-over crouch, hands on my knees, and scrutinised him with red and stinging eyes, bruised by the force of my nausea.

  ‘Their aversion control is an integral part of their biometric monitoring system,’ he continued, ‘that charts every resident’s movement, emotion and inclination, so—’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I interrupted him, wiping my mouth on the side of my hand and forcing myself up. ‘I’ll trade a bit of nausea for personal freedom. Let’s go. You wanted to show me something.’

  He shrugged his blocky shoulders. ‘Okay, let’s ease in by going somewhere familiar.’ He started off through the undergrowth like a robot, crackling right over saplings and through swathes of heavy-leafed branches as if they weren’t even there. They weren’t, of course, but still, the branches snapping back at me as I followed stung me just as if they were. ‘We’ll get to the town square this way. It will be safer to disconnect there. It’s more… It’s better.’

  ‘I’ll get used to it,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve had the worst of it already.’

  ‘There are different kinds of aversion.’ He came around behind me and touched the plastic toggle sewn into the base of the hood, attached to a transponder on my cervical spine. ‘Feel here?’ I moved my right hand behind me and touched against his as I felt for the knob. ‘You’ll just twist it a quarter-turn clockwise and you’re disconnected. Easier than extracting your soul from Zeroth, right? But I wouldn’t do it here. Really.’

  A few paces on, he pushed his way through the foliage and onto the pathway, where a perfect jogger in purple togs and with a small, acid-green music player strapped to her arm ran by. To our left, a toddler followed a duck, offering it a bunch of willow leaves, an exhausted-looking mother trailing them watchfully a few paces behind. Were these people real, or environmental detail in the program? I couldn’t fight the perverse impulse to check, and the scene seemed safe enough despite Vidal’s warnings, so I turned the dial and the world switched off around me; my stomach hit the roof of my mouth like I’d just teleported into a plummeting lift in the final second of its fall. Squeezing my eyes shut as my knees quaked, it was all I could do to stay upright. When the ground solidified, I looked around me. I was standing in a cavernous and dusty delivery bay filled with wooden pallets and a stack of the forty-gallon barrels I’d seen in the Misty Vale truck. Deep mounds of trash decayed into seeping puddles, a landfill with no ground to rot into; mountains of waste receding from the gloom into full dark a few dozen yards away. The silence was sudden: I hadn’t noticed the birdsong and the buzz of insects, the clink of bicycles and electric trolleys around the Green Valley park, the chatter of children playing, until they were gone. A cold, sterile quiet broken only by the unnatural echoes of my footscrape and my breath, which in this space sounded like gasping.

  And underneath, the hessian must of the starch barrels, replacing the herb-and-soil fakery – the deep, sweet rot of a mountain of overblown carcasses in the prime of their ripeness, so thick it held up the concrete roof. Wheeling around to try to locate the delivery-bay door, I stumbled over something dense and yielding on the floor beneath my feet and could swear I heard it squelch and crunch under my boot as I struggled for my balance. Willing myself not to look down, I hurried back towards Vidal where he – his real body – stood beside the dust-caked plastic wrap and cardboard piled haphazardly in the unloading area near the door.

  Eager not to gag again, I clutched at the back of my neck, ignoring movement in the piles of waste, squeezing my eyes closed and twisting the knob a quarter-turn back. The fresh smells wafted back in. Only when the rot had cycled out of my lungs and my nose did I open my eyes, to see the sunlit grove and the butterflies, and Vidal watching me, the text readout helpfully telling me the time and the temperature and that I had zero messages and zero likes.

  ‘Fuck this place,’ I managed.

  23 I wasn’t certain that Vidal deliberately lost me, but as we approached the familiar lines of the town square, he disappeared. I hadn’t been looking at him every second of our walk, so couldn’t say when he’d gone, but one minute he was walking beside me, and the next, he wasn’t.

  I figured at the time that he was playing some macho game with me, like an asshole father throwing his kid into the deep end to teach her to swim, so I spent only a few minutes searching among the avatars and the decorations walking around the square before seeking him on the interface’s contact list. He wasn’t listed on the directory. I knew I wouldn’t find him in there if he didn’t want to be found, and I had no intention of hanging around waiting for him, so I called David instead, to tell him that I’d found his daughter.

  I’m dialling David’s number, I thought to myself as I scan-typed his name and eye-touched his picture as Zeroth had taught us to do all those years ago. In here, there was no dial, and no number, and I was filled with an absurd longing for Fabian’s green plastic telephone with its analogue wheel, the way the digits under the plastic circles were increasingly worn from zero all the way down to one, the whir of the rotor, like the living purr of a cat, the notch in the finger guard; the double kink in the coil of the wire and the way the tone would affirm its life to me as I picked up the phone. The earpie
ce of his handset smelled of Fabian’s cologne and the mouthpiece of the mint and orange essence of his breath.

  In Green Valley, the false smells were thin, a patina of sensation masking reality, and seeded no memory behind them, leaving only a ghost-whisper of what they signified. As the green Calling halo throbbed around David’s avatar’s image, I imagined that he’d become a ghost himself, drifting and detached, nothing to anchor himself on. I wondered if he regretted that irreversible decision he’d made all that time ago, whether he ever dreamed of being rescued from this place and rehabilitated like those children in the shelter, back home in Stanton.

  David’s avatar throbbed along to the digital tone for a few more moments, then glowed red. ‘Call failed,’ Clara’s electronic voice said in my ear, without giving me the option to leave a message or request a call-back. That must be Vidal’s touch – calls didn’t fail in The I; Zeroth had never admitted the word ‘fail’. I’d once read an article on their lexicon, years ago, Jamie Egus and his Communications Director explaining that we can ‘actuate positivity by our lexical choices’. I remembered the phrase verbatim, because it had become a running joke in the office for weeks afterwards, someone even making a full-sized poster of a ginger kitten in a coffee cup saying ‘Fuck You’, and underneath, romantic hand-stencilled script in rainbow marker pens reading ‘Actuate Positivity By Your Lexical Choices’.

  The computerised voice pronounced that unfamiliar word bluntly and, it seemed to me, with a vaguely malicious satisfaction. Tech firms had always offered the illusion of choice to their end-users, but now Clara was only offering me a dead end. As if it knew I was trespassing and didn’t deserve the same platitudes it offered to its paying customers.

  It couldn’t know, Vidal had assured me. The alternative was worse – had David been disconnected from the system? Would he even survive disconnection?

  I tried the call again, two times, three, as I hurried through the town square in the direction of his house. Pushing past the avatars on the street, I followed the arrow on the map towards his address, dodging down unfamiliar side roads as the sky started to lower with heavy slate storm clouds. Angry skies had never been advertised in Zeroth catalogues.

  The cursor led me along a narrow footpath wedged between the backs of two rows of houses. As I hurried, my counterfeit I struggled to keep up with my pace, rendering the path into virgin panelled fencing and overhanging shrubbery a few metres ahead of me from a blur of pine-brown and foliage green. The solid sidewalk asphalt became patchy and pitted until it gave way to rutted mud. Vidal’s I was creating this route as I went, and I knew I should go back, but still the destination star, set over where David’s house should be, pulsed only a little way away on the map. I wanted to trust that this was a legitimate shortcut, so I did, and I followed the path which narrowed further, funnelling me into a wedge of backyard fencing and low-hanging branches. I came to a stop where the path became too overgrown to follow, the surrounding detail taking advantage of my pause, manically filling itself in. I pushed at the skein of hedge that had grown across the path. My arm sticky with spider webs, willing myself to remember that nothing The I was generating could really bite and poison me, I shoved my head and shoulders as far as I could into the overgrowth. I’d have to shuffle down and crawl through a stretch of around ten metres to get through to the other side of the funnel.

  Or I could turn back. But when I reversed from my squat in the hedge and stood and turned, the path behind me had closed in with equally heavy growth. When I took two paces back the way I came, Clara voiced in my ear, ‘No route found to destination. Turn around where possible.’

  I turned again, trusting only in the beacon throbbing above David’s house, and flicked on Try again as I got onto my knees and started to crawl under the hedge and through the muddy tunnel. The Calling halo throbbing over David’s portrait, just beyond me, always a few metres away, dragged me on, through the muddy tunnel, which I could imagine was made by dogs or children or small animals, not by a deranged businessman’s artificial intelligence. As I crawled, sharp stones bit into my knees, and the mud squelched between my fingers. This isn’t real, this isn’t real, I muttered to myself, in time with the throb of David’s halo; I’m just crawling along a dry warehouse floor. Because thinking too hard about what was real and what was not, about what could be coating the floor of a concrete dome where three thousand people had been locked for eight years and who kept an untamed, festering mountain of garbage at the only door where they received slop for food, was not a viable option.

  The crawl lasted too long, David’s image ever backing away out of reach, the undergrowth thickening when it should be opening up, the sting of brambles and nettles – they’re not real, Lucie – starting to scald my skin and seize my muscles, a reek of shit and rot starting to emerge from beneath the fresh-earth veneer of the mud. I pushed on and on, driven by the rhythm of the throbbing halo, the call failed, the try again, David’s fake face always retreating from me.

  When the pattern shattered and the halo went green, glowed solid. Connected.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Da—’

  ‘You’re pretty fucking persistent, aren’t you?’

  I came up off my hands and knees and found a space to sit on my heels. The image of David’s face didn’t resolve into a video feed. ‘Is that Eloise?’

  ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘David,’ I said, my teeth gritted. Like when you’ve been on hold for an hour and you want to tell the call-centre agent exactly how you feel, but you don’t want to lose the call. ‘I’m trying to get hold of David.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘What do you mean? This is his personal number… user ID, whatever you call it.’

  Eloise just sighed. ‘He’s in a meeting. Hush-hush, no comms.’

  ‘With who? About what?’ I asked, as if it would help me understand anything.

  ‘Wizards.’

  ‘Why are you answering his calls?’

  ‘Because you were calling and calling. I was busy minding my own business, but all I see is the flicker of Lucie Lucie Lucie. Calling from nowhere. Very interesting. Or not, depending on your angle. I wouldn’t have bothered. But after twenty, a hundred, a thousand calls, I kinda know you’re not going to go away. So what do you want, Lucie Lucie Lucie?’

  ‘I want to see David.’

  ‘He’ll be back soon. Maybe.’ I could almost hear her shrug. ‘Come by.’

  ‘That’s the problem. I’m lost. This map has sent me—’

  ‘The map? You’re following the map? When you’re visiting unofficially? Jeee-sus.’

  I took a deep breath, understanding that if I said what I wanted to say to Eloise, I might be adrift in this imaginary sphincter for ever, or until the whole of Green Valley lost power, whichever came first. Then I remembered: I had an off switch. I could disconnect any time I wanted. But, shifting my weight in the slop I was kneeling in, the mud oozing between my fingers and getting under my nails, I was pretty certain I wasn’t ready for that. And besides, I might not be able to find David or Vidal on my own here, in the dark. ‘Can you help me?’ I said.

  ‘There they are. Some of the hardest words for us to say.’

  I ground my fist into my thigh, but I couldn’t plug my mouth this time. ‘Christ, Eloise, stop being such an asshole. Will you tell me how to get to your house if I’m not supposed to use the map? I don’t live in this stupid dump, I don’t know its rules and I don’t give a crap about them. I just want to see David, if that’s okay with you.’

  She snorted briefly, a sort of impressed half-laugh, then said, ‘Here’s a beacon, entre nous, no snoops. Follow it. I’ll clear your path a bit. Give me a sec.’

  She dropped the call without another word and within a few seconds, the undergrowth and the overgrowth and the fences and the mud were dissolving away, and replaced by a yellow brick road through a kids’ cartoon candyland, towards a diamond floating off in the near distance w
reathed by a cartoonish neon sign flashing Lucie Lucie Lucie with a theatre-light spangled arrow pointing downwards from the blue heavens. To my left, a unicorn grazed on a marshmallow bush.

  24 Eloise’s graphic attempts at irony might have cost her energy or, more likely, she simply may have lost interest in goading me, because soon the cartoon-candy shell of the path she’d devised fell away to be replaced by the familiar veneer of suburban Green Valley. Perhaps she’d gone off to get another beer. And the thought set me wondering whether The I had the capacity to make you drunk on imaginary alcohol. Could you sit there sucking at a bottle of potato slop and feel a beer-buzz? Or perhaps Eloise had access to a store of real alcohol – fermenting alcohol from organic matter was one of the most basic technologies of any human settlement, no matter how straitened. I wanted a drink, but more, to be drinking red wine with Fabian on his couch in our apartment, feeling the mellow blur and the heightened touch, something deeper than the skin. I longed to be back home with an aching stretch across space that was too deep and sore to account for the fact that in the real world, I was standing fewer than ten miles away from that warm apartment and that anchoring man. I wished I’d never heard David’s voice again, never seen Odille’s face reproduced on the little girl in the shelter; I could have turned away, complacent and complicit, from all those dying, invisible children.

  I could already recognise how the sterile superficiality of this place made me crave touch, and yearn and ache and regret, and it was a sign that Vidal’s interface was working, that rather than having the anguish erased by The I’s nano-suppressors, I could feel that craving now, in here, both connected to The I and removed from it. That remove from total immersion in Green Valley, I thought, would help protect me from the worst of the aversion.