by Mark Reece
After parking, Ethan looked around in amazement when finding himself outside his house, before relief hit him like a slap on the cheek. His rational sense told him to relax, that this was only an exaggerated version of a situation he had known throughout his working life. However, the memory of his illicit sleep was too strong, the previous breach in his discipline having more weight on his behaviour than the remainder of his life, and he could not get inside fast enough, fumbling his keys as if Aislin was waiting for him.
He shut the blinds in the lounge then stared into darkness, trying to calm himself. However, waiting only heightened the anticipation. It was only when he went into his bedroom that he realised the enormity of what he was doing, and was so ashamed that his exhaustion momentarily abated. He was only able to get into bed after half-convincing himself that he was merely going to lie down, not to make a conscious effort to sleep, that at least his intentions were pure. As he rolled back the sheets, he had to justify every step to himself; why he was taking his shirt off, why he was covering himself with the duvet, why he was closing his eyes…
He found himself swimming deep underwater in a dark blue ocean. Ethan continually debated with himself as to whether or not he was asleep, sometimes thinking that he was and deciding to pinch his legs to check, but always forgetting before he could move his hands. There were shoals of darting silver fish, always just out of reach. Suddenly, he thought that he could not breathe underwater and started to gasp. Pressure from above stopped him rising to the surface. There was something in the distance and he swam frantically. Breathing in hurt and he could sense his body filling with water. Eventually, he reached a reef with a pink tendril unfolded down its side. There were pulsating bulbous orbs at various points along its length, which became darker the further up it went. He grabbed it but his hands were stung and he drifted into the inky depths, screaming wordlessly…
When he woke, he looked around as sluggishly as if he had gone to bed at his usual time, and could not understand why the blinds were prominent silver, which they only were at night. He was too groggy to think about the significance of what had happened, or the curiosity that he was as tired now as if he had been starved of sleep rather than glutted with it. The temptation to lay his head back on the pillow was tremendous, and his movements were so slow that it seemed hours before he finally managed to drag himself to the bathroom, his every movement as laboured as those of an old man. Setting his alarm clock took the effort of a final breath, and his trousers fell off him as if he were shrinking. He did not remember getting back into bed.
He sat up listlessly for a few moments before realising that the light outside was flickering and patchy. His vision shook and he felt as if he had been shunted through time. Sun danced around his bed like light caught under his eyelids after he had been spun on a merry-go-round.
The two hours before his alarm went off were filled with lighter sleep, which flickered into semi-consciousness where he thought he was reaching out to touch clouds, moving them closer then further away by squinting. He had a constant feeling of floating, and imagined that he would never get up unless ordered to, that the early stage of NREM sleep, insubstantial and wanton in its hold over him, would keep him alive for a hundred years, untouched by material needs and safe in his bed.
When his alarm finally went off, Ethan jumped as if electrocuted. Sleepiness hit him like a wave and he rubbed his cheek on his pillow, wondering how long he could remain there before being caught. A few days, at least. There’s no way dweeb knows what the missing persons policy is; he’d just let things drift on like he always does. Aislin would do something before him. How good those stolen days would be, in which he could get rid of his sleep deficit and feel as good as now all the time. They’d put him in a DIA prison, of course, but after you’re ruined, you’re free. If I got sacked and became a nobody, I could do whatever I wanted. When I got out, I could lock the door and sleep away and no one would bother to check. And if they did find out, what would happen? More prison then back here again…
Somehow, he had become oblivious to the alarm, and when he finished daydreaming, it made him start as it reached a point in the tune that he had never heard before, after which, it went back to the beginning. It was then that Ethan got up.
When he went into the lounge, he realised that he must have been staring at the wall for ten minutes since the alarm had gone off, and he ran around the house, tripping over several times. He could not remember it being so messy the previous night, with several pairs of trousers slung over the arm of a sofa, including one that was inside out. There were crumbs everywhere and several computer game cases had fallen off a display in the lounge, leaving splinters of plastic on the floor. What the hell happened? Do I sleepwalk now?
Ethan had such energy as if he had drunk coffee and eaten chocolate bars all morning. He felt as if he could have run a marathon as well as Aislin, and brushed his teeth so hard that there was blood in the sink when he spat the toothpaste out.
As he drove to work, Ethan hummed tunelessly, becoming aware of the sound during pauses on the radio. When a traffic light turned green, he waited for a few seconds to annoy those behind him before driving off laughing when one of them honked their horn.
He was headily unselfconscious as he walked to the SDMA building, not seeing anything around him but having a vague impression that all the cameras and eyes of the city were turned on him, none of which would be able to identify anything wrong.
The additional security was gone and he only managed to suppress his cheerfulness with great difficulty as he got in a lift with half a dozen other workers, each of whom wore the familiar expression of weary dissatisfaction.
When he reached the office, he tapped Mohammed’s shoulder before quickly moving past him, making him turn around a fraction.
“Oh my god. This day will live in infamy. I can’t believe you fell for that.”
Mohammed shook his head then held it in his hands. “You’ll pay for that. This is no word of a lie, you’ll regret that. I’m gonna bring your whole world crashing down, mate. Let the games begin.”
“Doesn’t matter if you do, you can never take this moment away from me.”
Mohammed slowly shook his head with a wry smile. “What are you so happy about anyway? Did you propose last night?”
“Yeah right, nice try. Don’t change the subject.”
“We’ll see who has the last laugh. Give me a week.”
“Bring it on.”
The pain from the blood sample was so acute that it made him sit up in his seat. While Ethan waited for his computer to load, he sent Aislin a message:
Hi sweetie, sorry you couldnt come last night.love you loads… E XXX
When he logged into his e-mails, he saw that several agents had sent him the details of the cases he had asked for. There was nothing that could have improved his mood at that moment.
His fingers glided over his keyboard as if he were playing the piano that morning, doing more work more quickly than he could ever have imagined, words multiplying as if he had cast a spell over them.
After he had done as much as he could on Hypnos, Ethan decided to treat himself by opening one of his remaining cases. Given the progress he had made and the difficulties he had identified, he could easily justify himself if necessary. He logged into the secure intranet and opened the top case in the list.
There was a referral from the police in the reports section, which described how a warrant had been carried out at an address as a prelude to arresting a postman for a robbery that had occurred at three o’clock the previous morning. When the police arrived at seven in the evening, the man was sluggish and had clearly been sleeping. He did not have a shift licence. In addition to items stolen during the robbery, police had recovered subversive pamphlets, possibly Iklonian in origin, behind a sliding panel in a cupboard. The suspect had been released on police bail.
Ethan
leant back in his chair then stood and paced around his desk. Not only had the case been wrongly assessed as low risk, when it was clearly medium due to the links to serious crime, it had been wrongly classified as a single matter, when there were at least two: the illegal sleep and the pamphlets, in addition to possible wider links to subversion suggested by the fact that the suspect had a legitimate job. It was entirely possible that he was an Iklonian agent taking a ‘revolutionary tax’ from premises that were somehow linked to alarm clock manufacture. Worse yet, the police had requested a response by a deadline that had expired while he was on leave.
Ethan looked over a divider to see that Peter’s office was closed. This has happened one time too many, he can’t be long for this world. Ethan scanned through the report again to find the contact e-mail of the submitting officer. He then logged into the operation name generator, which was required whenever a case was likely to be assigned as level six or higher.
DS Tomalin,
I have been assigned the Inderjit case, as per your referral (henceforth: ‘Operation Amber 518’). Unfortunately, your initial deadline could not be met due to other operational commitments.
Please let me know when you are available so that we can discuss our requirements in this matter.
Yours,
SDMA
Hopefully, the police would be sufficiently intimidated by the mystique of the organisation not to complain about the delay. They usually were. Something’s going to have to be done about that idiot.
Ethan spent the following three hours researching the suspect on Mirror, wanting to make up for the initial poor impression the organisation had made. There was a lot to research.
He sent some of the documents to print, and when he went to the all-in-one, Hugo was casually putting a ream of paper into the machine. Ethan looked around the room then tapped his feet. Eventually, he said, “Is it working?”
“Think so.”
Hugo yawned, looked at his nails, then pressed more buttons. Eventually, the machine started printing. Pages stacked up and it stopped, making Ethan peer over. It started again.
“You got much more?”
“Almost done.” Hugo rocked backwards and forwards from his heels to the balls of his feet, before turning to Ethan. “It’s my personal strategy whatsit. Took ages that. Loads of copying and pasting.”
“Are you being serious? You know the consequences of doing that?”
“Kiss on the cheek?”
Hugo banged the papers on the side of the machine for some time to line the edges up straight before going back to his desk. Ethan ran a hand through his hair.
“You’re quiet,” Mohammed said.
“What?”
“I said you’ve been quiet this afternoon.”
“No different from normal then, is it?”
“Hmmm. You’re a funny ’un sometimes. I’m watching you, remember that.”
His voice was so deep that Ethan for a moment thought Mo was being serious, until he rolled his eyes. The break in Ethan’s concentration reminded him that he had to read through his notes for Hypnos before Daniel arrived. Preparing for a meeting with him was as hard as every other aspect of working with him, as he would not accept any ambiguity, despite how well they got on.
“I am going to talk to you now and you might have preferred it if I’d kept quiet.”
“Go on.”
“I’ve got to see Dan at twelve for him to check up on the work he gave me. I need to compile a list about how long everything’s going to take and any problems I’ve been having.”
“Oh right, okay. What do you want to know?”
“We’ll have to go through everything, you know what he’s like. Sorry about this.”
“No problem, go on.”
“Right, so… the stuff about the shift licences, where are you with that?”
“I’ve got the data. The problem is, I’ve found out that admin don’t input half the stuff from the forms into the system. Some crap about how they prioritise things when they don’t have enough people there. I’ve had to work with what’s on the system for now ’cos it’d be a nightmare even finding the paperwork, never mind typing it up.”
“Right… okay… have you spoke to admin about it, is there any chance of getting them to change their process?”
“I’ve not spoken to them, they’ll never listen to me. Perhaps that’s something Dan could sort out. They need rank to give them a kick up the arse.”
“Yeah yeah, I’ll mention it. Next thing, have you started filling in the document I sent over?”
“Yeah, I’ve started it.”
“Okay, can I have a quick look? Just so I can tell him enough to keep him happy.”
Mohammed opened the file then turned his screen around. He had not followed Ethan’s instructions exactly, and the graphs he had created to display the data looked untidy, with different fonts for the title and axes, and too many colours, meaning that he had to squint to work out what it meant.
Ethan nodded and said ‘thanks’, wishing that he had the access to do everything himself. It would be a nightmare, of course; he would not have been assigned any new cases for even longer, and would have to work like a slave for months, upsetting Aislin even more than he already had. But it would have been better than this. The problem with working in a team was that no one else ever did anything right. I can’t say anything until I don’t need them anymore. Ethan had made that mistake before but it took a lot of effort to remain calm.
He went through the other tasks he had assigned to Mohammed, cracking jokes whenever he sensed him becoming annoyed by all the questions. By the time they had finished, there was only an hour until his meeting. His energy level was such that the moment he stopped talking, he compulsively tapped his feet, banging his knees against the desk.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Well, unless there’s an earthquake going on, you’re doing something with the desk. It’s making me write in Chinese. Pack it in will ya, you’ve already got me once today, you don’t have to stamp me into the dirt.”
It was only then that Ethan realised what he was doing, and as his attention drifted, he found himself tapping again and had to put his hands on his legs. He looked around, but of course, hemmed in by dividers on all sides, no one could have seen anything.
Ethan did so much work in the hour before Daniel arrived that he had to revise his notes about his progress. How strange is it that in this place, where we monitor thousands of people in the minutest detail, the management don’t have the first idea what their own staff are doing? It’s not surprising we’ve got Icks working here. Are all the regulations myths? Perhaps we’ve got so many that they’re impossible to police and you only get caught by chance. We collect so much information that we don’t even know what we’ve got, never mind doing anything with it. The admin department doesn’t do something because it doesn’t feel like it, and no one cares. We’re more like a junkyard of information than ‘the trading standards of the mind’.
He was thinking about the best way to confront Peter about the wrongly assigned case when Daniel strode into his section.
“Busy?”
Ethan jumped, making his head jerk out of his hands, not knowing whether he was being serious. Daniel smiled wryly and he still didn’t know.
“Hi Dan, how you doin’?”
“Yeah, good. Solving the case for me?”
“What? Oh, yeah, yeah. This is no problem, you should give me something hard next time.”
Daniel looked at him knowingly. “Just wait, I’ve got plenty of things lined up. Have a seat in the conference room while I do a bit of meet and greet.”
Ethan did as he said, smiling to himself at how he did not feel the need to conceal the artificiality of what he was doing.
He waited for half an hour, as h
e knew he would. Inevitably, someone would have mentioned a problem to him without thinking, which would have prompted him to investigate, making whoever told him regret ever having mentioned it. Then he would have berated Pete for his latest idiocies. Despite their obviously frosty relationship, Daniel had always been too professional to criticise him in public, and Ethan wondered how he dressed people down: whether he shouted, or gave his arguments in a cool rational tone that brooked no response, or else was sarcastic, like a teacher. Whatever the case, Pete must dread the sight of him by now. It took some brass neck for him to even be here after all this time; anyone else would have left from embarrassment long ago.
When Daniel finally arrived, he spoke in the slow, laconic tone of a man whose perfect confidence means that he never expects to be challenged.
“How you doing then, Eth?”
“Yeah, good thanks. Battering through everything, you know how it is.”
“Good. Your eyes look like piss holes in the snow, have you had to extend your hours again?”
His words were unexpected; Ethan could not remember him swearing before and laughed nervously before the sound was cut down by the unceasing gaze of his sky-blue eyes. In a flash of panic, he wondered whether he had worked out what had happened.
“I’m fine, I’ve just got a lot on at the moment, that’s all. Aislin has had some issues with her dad, things like that.”
“Why, what’s wrong? Is he ill?”
“No no, nothing that serious. It’s just that he can’t do stuff round the house as easily anymore, so he needs help but won’t ask for it. Silly things really. Nothing to worry about.”
“Right. Be sensible with your hours then. Not too sensible, but look after yourself. I said before that I’ll have a vacancy for you soon, and I want you to be in a position to take it, yes?”