by Terry Kitto
‘Mrs Prideaux said you’ve been excusing yourself to go to the toilet all day,’ Rose continued.
‘It’s hot,’ Sam lied. ‘I drank a lot.’
‘Don’t think I can’t smell cigarettes on you because I can.’
What excuse was there for that? He’d frequented the graffitied boys’ bathroom every period. Tim from 10SM perched on the windowsill above the sinks and puffed his way through a pack of cigarettes.
‘Skiving,’ Sam had sneered that morning. Tim smiled. The next period, Tim joined Sam at the urinal and slid his hand down the waistband of Sam’s trousers. Twenty minutes into fifth period, he waited for Sam by the toilet cubicle. How could he tell his mum, in the front of the stuffy Beetle with no escape? Rose was a straggler of the seventies liberal punk era, but he didn’t know if she was that cool. A part of him screamed to tell her, to have a confidante. Surely she understood the allure boys had over him? He was also sure she understood about the dead boy in the woods — that she saw them, too.
‘You talk to yourself,’ Sam said. He’d caught her doing it often, usually late at night when Sam was in bed. Rose turned to him with pained eyes.
‘You’re mocking me. I’m not talking to you if you’re going to be in one of those moods.’
‘What moods?’
‘That pigheaded, arrogant voice. No, you know what, you’re so much like your father when you do that.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know, would I?’
‘You’re better off for it.’
Silence. Sam and Rose both opened their mouths, decided not to speak, and closed them.
‘Ghosts?’ he asked.
Rose turned the ignition off and faced him. Cars bleeped their horns as they overtook her Beetle. A few blurred middle fingers passed them by.
‘Sammy?’ she asked. ‘What have you seen?’
‘People who shouldn’t be there,’ he croaked. ‘They come out of the shadows . . .’
The summer light faded, and Sam found another room. Except, this was a room that he’d seen before, not so long ago.
A bare-bones doctor’s office. A portly doctor was splayed across the wooden floor, the needle of a syringe stuck in his eye, which leaked a clear liquid. Nika stood over the lifeless body and clutched her torn hospital gown around herself. She shivered; chemotherapy had made her body thin and hairless. She hadn’t felt warm since her treatment began, especially there in the presence of a dead body.
Sam circled the scene. Impossible, he thought. She can’t be here.
Nika turned and looked right at Sam.
‘Is it impossible?’ she asked.
‘How can you be here, occupying my mother? A week ago you were in Ted Lower.’
‘I don’t know anyone by that name,’ Nika said. ‘This is the first and only body I’ve occupied.’
She was agitated; Nika didn’t want to be there at all.
‘The ability to transcend time through emotional connectedness,’ Will had warned James. Nika hadn’t, in her own timeline, occupied Ted. It begged the question, one that Sam yearned to have answers for.
‘Why are you occupying Mum?’ Sam said. ‘Are you trying to transcend?’
‘Transcendence? No, never,’ she spat. ‘It’s an abomination. I didn’t want this. Becoming dasfurvya is a last defence.’
‘Dasfurvya?’
‘To be reborn into a new body. He doesn’t know . . .’
‘All those symbols you’ve drawn on the wall,’ Sam said. ‘They’re dates, aren’t they?’
‘Coordinates,’ Nika confirmed. ‘Unreliable coordinates, frankly, but it’s the best Abidemi has.’
‘Abi?’
‘If the dasfurvya doesn’t succeed, then Abidemi has to instigate the unthinkable.’
‘Which is what?’
‘A gywandras of our own.’
Sam didn’t like that idea. He nodded.
‘Just tell me, please,’ Sam said. ‘Where is she now? Where’s Mum’s imprint?’
‘I wasn’t meant to be in her body this long,’ Nika stammered. ‘But then the Network locked her up here and – ’
‘Where is she?’
‘She couldn’t make it to the frequency. The occupation whittled her imprint down . . .’
An absolute death.
‘No,’ Sam said, and beyond his mother’s body his own came back to him. Warm tears rolled down his face. ‘But I thought . . .’ He didn’t understand why he confessed to Nika. Perhaps it was because she occupied the remains of his mother. ‘I thought that maybe I’d see her one more time.’
‘There are traces of her still circulating this brain. It might be failing, but there are memories, and every one has you in it.’
‘Leave her body,’ Sam begged. ‘Give her dignity in death and let her go.’
Nika stared on. He worried she wouldn’t comply.
‘I want to, believe me,’ she cried. ‘But there are dampeners in these walls. If I leave this body whilst still inside the Refinery, I won’t make it either.’
A jolt coursed through Rose’s body, and the irregular heartbeat and lethargy was snatched from Sam’s senses.
Sam woke in the Refinery’s hallway, in his own body, damp with his own sweat and tears. Beside him, an EMP rotated to a standstill on the tiled floor. Mallory and Nathan towered over him, faces black against the ceiling lights. They said nothing for the longest time; Mallory twirled her tablet stylus between her fingers as if deciding which punishment to inflict upon him.
‘Her body,’ Sam slurred. He crawled to Rose’s cell door. His arms were heavy, and his mind was slow. ‘It’s empty. She’s gone.’
Sam reached into his pocket with an unsteady hand and ate the sugar cubes. When the sugar hit his system and the post-withdrawal fatigue subsided, Mallory asked, ‘Can you walk?’
Sam used the wall to steady himself and tried to climb to his feet. His body trembled, unable to make sense of gravity in that moment. Nathan slid beside him and propped Sam up with an arm. He steered Sam toward his cell.
‘No,’ Mallory said. ‘To the basement.’
‘No!’ Sam yelled. He thrashed against Nathan’s grip. ‘I’m staying here. Her body, her body . . .’
‘Where, exactly?’ Nathan asked Mallory. He ignored Sam’s blows as if he didn’t feel them at all.
‘The cradle,’ Mallory said. ‘It is time to meet the dasfurvya.’
The unlikely trio was buzzed through a door at the end of the hallway and paced down an iron spiral staircase into the basement levels. By the bottom of the stairs, Sam’s imprint reattached to his body enough to walk without support, so Mallory sent Nathan off to finish his meds round.
Mallory and Sam continued to subzero-two. Red brick walls, the foundation of the Refinery itself, shone in the white strobe lights. The air carried dampness, and the wind screeched from outside. They passed a cluster of mixed-sex nurses who all stared at him with the same steely expression. Another door opened, this time by a keypad, and Mallory led him into a circular chamber. At its centre stood a bulbous machine from which wires spouted out at six regular intervals. Each bundle of wires snaked outward to one of six beds. No, Sam realised as he tread closer through the dim lit room, they were not beds, but coffins: four-foot-high tin boxes with copper lids latched to mechanised hinges.
‘Wait,’ Mallory told Sam. She joined a straight-backed technician by the machine. They conferred amongst themselves and looked over data on tablets. The door behind them opened again; a ginger woman and a bespectacled amputee entered, each accompanied by a nurse. They were led to each of their own coffins – beds, they’re just beds. The door opened again, and three timid female patients were escorted to the last three beds. Mallory circled around them whilst the technician consulted a panel on the central machine. It whirred to life. Sam’s coffin was close enough to the screen that he could see a crawling bar measured in newtons: the machine generated an electromagnetic power source. Sam turned back to Mallory as she said, ‘You will simply have to climb i
nto your cradles and lie still. You may experience visions, emotional stimuli. Don’t let it worry you.’
‘What does it do?’ Sam asked. The nurses’ stares burned through him. Mallory raised her eyebrows as if to make a sarcastic remark. Sam was sick of finding out the effects of their equipment only once he was under their influence. ‘No, what does it do? We have every right to know.’
‘It measures your witnessing capabilities against others,’ Mallory explained. ‘A reactive process as your minds come into contact with those similar and those different to yourself. From there, we know how maladjusted you may be and what further treatment you will need here on out.’
The spiel didn’t ease the patients’ confusion. Mallory gestured with her hands, the way a vicar addresses their Sunday service, and invited the patients into their cradles. The other five were aided by their respective nurses. Thankfully, Mallory dared not assist Sam into his. He lifted his heavy legs into the cradle and lowered himself down. The tin was ice-cold, and only a thin yoga mat cushioned his sore spine from the metal base. Mallory’s face loomed over him.
‘Patients in position,’ she confirmed to the technician.
The last thing Sam saw before the copper lid creaked shut and spelled him into darkness was Mallory’s thin smile and her empty black eyes.
A thin strip of yellow light puckered at the edges of the lid, lighter than the sensory deprivation tank had been. The generator’s revolving sound was distant. The copper lid clattered on the lips of the coffin.
Sam’s body lightened. The darkness pulled him into sleep. His sciatica eased. Cravings for alcohol and worse subsided. Instead, hunger wrenched at his gut – a sensation he’d not experienced in a very long time. His head itched. He reached out, his limbs lighter than they’d been before, and in his fist was a plume of long scraggly hair – not the short, thin mess he’d sported when he’d lain down in the coffin. It wasn’t his body.
He was in someone else’s.
The copper lid rattled. A riptide of fatigue. The cradle grew smaller, and the cold tin sides pressed against Sam’s arms – the arms of whatever body he was in next. The electromagnet’s swoop intensified. His left shin itched. He reached down to it, only for his hand to meet the gym mat beneath him. His heart detonated in his chest. The hand he used clutched at the rubber mat, and his fingers brushed over the roundness of an amputated knee.
Sam laid the foreign body back to the ground. His head hit the mat, and metal slid down his nose. He reached out. Spectacles. A wedding band sat on his right third finger. Sam ran a hand across his head: a short buzz cut. He reached out with arms far more muscular than his own and pounded on the copper lid.
‘Stop this!’ said a strange voice. His words, but not his voice.
The sound of the loop generator beat faster, and Sam’s senses numbed as if it were a mechanical lullaby. He wondered if he’d ever make it back to his own body.
A mechanical whine. Yellow light danced around the coffin as Sam opened his eyes. Mallory’s shadow hung over him. He licked the insides of his teeth and found his chipped bottom left cuspid. Never had he been so relieved to find himself back in his own body.
He sat up. A spasm shot through his lower back, but he couldn’t think on it. He pushed Mallory back and flailed from the coffin onto the brick floor. His arms and legs seemed to be connected to the wrong part of his brain, like wires in a parallel circuit.
‘That wasn’t a measurement,’ Sam slurred.
‘No?’ Mallory asked as she straightened out her uniform. The technician came by, a tablet and stylus in hand. Around him, the other patients ambled from their tin boxes. The man with one leg got to his foot and found balance with his crutches. He looked up, eyes fearful, and found Sam. They understood what the other experienced.
‘You’re reverse engineering the dasfurvya,’ Sam growled.
Mallory wrote on her tablet, eyes glued to the screen.
He had lost all that meant anything to him, and brutally too, because of the experiments the Network conducted at the hands of awry witnesses who wanted to achieve a being greater than human. He was motherless and friendless, trapped in a place worse than a prison.
Only, his captors had taught him the key to escape.
He’d learnt to occupy other bodies.
Mallory grabbed him by the arm and escorted him from the room. His eyes lay on her keycard, strapped to the lanyard around her neck. Grief made Sam think before he spoke, and with that he had become observant. He’d noticed, with himself and other compliant patients, cell doors were automatically opened between lunch and tea. It meant beyond the patients’ living quarters was a security room chockablock with CCTV screens and computers that could open any door. Every nurse, Mallory included, wore a lanyard with a keycard attached. The Refinery, akin to the Network, used keycards to log witnesses into computers and grant access to software.
Sam stumbled through the basement levels alongside Mallory. His eyes never left her keycard. He was weak, body still tingling where his imprint was returning to it. Mallory was a bull of a woman, and there was no way he could overpower her to take her keycard.
There was, however, withdrawal.
Mallory had taken her time to confer with the technician. The four other patients were already upstairs. The hallway was desolate bar Sam and Mallory. He hadn’t seen one CCTV camera below ground level. It was time, or never at all.
Sam stopped to clutch the wall. He rubbed his head and shook his arms. Mallory supported his elbow.
‘You shouldn’t have eaten all that sugar, Bickle,’ she snarled. ‘Take a moment.’
With her taloned hand on his arm, withdrawal was quick. He let his imprint slide from his body and propel into hers.
A dark room. He hadn’t successfully fused with Mallory’s body. He’d slipped into the ombrederi, a cold and desolate place.
‘Did you think it would be that easy?’ Mallory said, except there was more than one voice.
Sam turned. Mallory’s imprint wasn’t alone. Fused with others, an ensemble of many hands and faces were bound to her. It was as Trish had described Vanessa’s imprint the day that Abidemi was trialled. Now Sam understood. She was dasfurvya, too. Sam would no longer be surprised if most of the board and the Refinery’s nurses had all been reborn in bodies not their own.
‘What number body is this?’
Mallory – if that was her original name at all – filled the space. The imprints imbedded within her writhed and struggled as they tried to break free.
‘Nine, I believe. When you’ve come as far as I have, well, all bodies feel the same. It’s all flesh, dirty and heavy.’
‘All the occupations – ’
‘Weren’t us. No matter how much you’ll dislike it, you will be dasfurvya, Bickle. The frequency will turn against us.’
Sam’s heartbeat thudded in his chest, distant but there. With his mind firmly in the ombrederi, Sam raised his arms in the physical.
‘That’s what the Refinery is,’ he continued. ‘It’s not treatment, and it’s not experimentation. They’re all here, all the ones ever occupied, hidden away so you can keep dasfurvya to yourselves.’
‘Not everyone can be post-human, nor should they.’
‘Being reborn isn’t about living forever, then? It’s to become something more.’
‘A gywandras, for all of time.’
‘More than one gywandras,’ Sam concluded.
‘So, Mr Bickle, are you going to return to your flesh cage?’
‘I already have.’
Sam released himself from the ombrederi.
Sam thrust himself back into his body. He tore the lanyard from Mallory’s neck and stepped away. Her hand shot up and grabbed his arm. She’d returned.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
With his right hand, Sam scooped the remains of the sugar in his pocket and threw the granules into Mallory’s eyes. She released Sam and rubbed her eyes. Sam scarpered as fast as was possible on his jellied l
egs and climbed the spiral staircase. Mallory was just steps behind, hands outstretched to feel for the bannister.
‘You can’t escape the frequency,’ Mallory cried. ‘You can’t deny the gywandras.’
‘The fuck I can,’ Sam stammered. He reached the door, swiped Mallory’s keycard against the sensor, went through, swiped again, and it was locked. He knew he didn’t have long. He had come out halfway down the hall, and it was vacant, but he only had until one of the nurses heard Mallory thump against the steel door or the technician came up for lunch.
Sam plunged Mallory’s lanyard into his pocket and darted right to the staff quarters. He imagined that the security room would be off from the reception, if anywhere. Without hesitation or the want to check where the CCTV cameras were pointed, Sam swiped himself into the reception area. It was, as were most of the rooms in the Refinery, vacant. Who’d want to visit if they could? Sam thought.
The door Sam needed was the third along: Security – Staff only.
With a swipe of Mallory’s keycard, he lumbered into the security room. There was one black-clad guard on duty, his hand half outstretched to the walkie-talkie on the desk. Sam’s imprint fled his body and seeped into the security guard.
Sam opened his eyes – no, not his, but the security guard’s. His lean arms shook as he leant toward the computer monitors and navigated through different menus. It was the same software used in the collieries for remote access: RemoteKey. The program required another scan of the keycard. Security-Sam swiped the card against the reader, and he was in. A multilayered three-dimensional map popped up. It highlighted over a hundred doors – all red. All locked. He clicked the button ‘Open All.’ An access window sprung up and asked for clearance from Vanessa. Plan B. Sam scoured the map and clicked multiple times to dismiss dialogue boxes. He opened each locked cell door and a string of fire exits to create the most efficient route from the wing to its closest exit.
A trail of go-green lit up the hallways of the east wing. Security-Sam stared intently at the monitor. A heat signature trailed from room twenty-one, then another from forty-three, and a flood of purple heat signatures swarmed out of their cells toward the reception. The prisoners were free.