“Olivia?” said Pew. She snorted and snapped awake, suddenly ready and tense. Then she saw who it was.
“Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”
“I’m…”
“Out with it! I haven’t got all day!”
That stopped him for a moment. But he worked up the courage and said: “I’m going to kill myself.”
“Yeh. It’s not much fun when they bring you back. Good luck.” She pulled her hat brim down.
“I mean I’m going on the euthanasia track.”
She lifted her brim and looked up at him.
“I can’t… I can’t keep going on like…”
“You think you’ll do it again,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Is this your way of saying sorry?”
“I… kind of.”
She looked up at him, appalled. “What the bloody hell did those bastards do to you? They make you rape someone?”
He looked away. He couldn’t answer.
“For gods’ sake, boy, I’m a killer and a cannibal, how can you be worse?” He looked back at her, a little shocked. She went on: “If they put a gun to your head, it wasn’t your fault. It’s like a… it’s like a time of war, you do whatever you have to do to survive.”
“It wasn’t a war. We never fought.”
“War, genocide, call it what you like. You do what you have to do to survive.”
He blurted back: “So why do you want to die?”
It was her turn to go silent for a moment. Then she said, “That’s my business.” She didn’t add anything else. After a moment of floundering, Pew turned away and went back indoors. She watched him go, then pulled down her brim. But sleep was impossible and she threw the hat aside.
6. Liss & Iokan
The evening came, and I prepared for dinner. While I tried to get my hair into some kind of acceptable shape, I kept an eye out for Liss on the monitors. The troubles the rest of the group were experiencing made it difficult for them to find any time for her, and I was hoping to see some sign she wasn’t giving up. Iokan was the only one to make an effort, so of course we had to monitor their meeting in case he attempted any therapy.
He caught up with her in her room, which she’d spent much of the day resetting to something she could bear. The pink and the fluff were mostly gone, and it was nothing more nor less than a normal bedroom. Perhaps a little untidy with all the screendiscs piled up in one corner, but she said she couldn’t be bothered sorting them out. She only brought them for her cover story, and didn’t really need them any more.
She answered the door to Iokan and said: “That took you a while.”
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“I didn’t think you’d wait this long. Are you coming in?”
He gave her a brittle smile and entered the room.
“So what do you want?” she asked, sitting on the end of her bed, crossing her arms and giving him a harsh look. “If you want your clothes back you’re too late. They don’t fit you any more.”
“I have plenty,” he said. He was wearing his casual outfit now, having put the robes off after the group session. “I wanted to welcome you back.”
“That’s your religious duty, is it?”
“It’s the decent thing to do.”
“Does it get you points with the glowy shiny people?”
“That’s not what it’s about.”
“No. Of course not. So what else?”
“You know, you’re a lot less polite than you used to be.”
“I’m catching up on weeks of listening to your bullshit and not calling you on it.”
“I didn’t know you were so intolerant.”
She laughed, bitterly. “So your gods came back and murdered your whole planet and when someone doesn’t tippy toe around your religion, that’s intolerance?”
His smile was getting strained. “That’s not what I came here to talk about.”
“So get on with it.”
“Do you mind putting the privacy on?”
“Yes. I mind.”
He looked up at the ceiling. The cameras weren’t detectable by human eyes, but he couldn’t help it.
“It’s about the genocide.”
“Yours or mine?”
“I really can’t talk about it unless we have privacy.”
“If you can tell me, you can tell them.” She pointed at the ceiling.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“What, are you worried your antewhatevers’ll find out and stop you getting into heaven?”
“It’s got nothing to do with that.”
“Bullshit. That’s got everything to do with it.”
He was actually getting quite worked up. “There are things you know nothing about—”
“Well I’m just going to have to stay ignorant, aren’t I?” She went to the door to open it — but he grabbed her arm as she passed.
“This is about your species!”
She was instantly furious and threw his arm off. Or rather, she tried. He turned a full circle with the momentum she generated with her great strength, and simply grabbed her with his other arm.
“Get the hell off me!”
“Not until you listen.”
She tried again: this time a shove. It should have thrown him across the room and broken bones as he smashed into the wall. But he read the move, stepped to one side, and she found herself stumbling across the room.
“You’re not a soldier,” he said. “Don’t try and fight me. I’m here to help you!”
But she was pissed off now, and came back for another go. This time, he ducked under her attack and threw her over his head into the opposite wall, crashing down to the floor. She was still on her knees as four security guards in full power armour rushed in and surrounded her in a ring of weapons.
“On the floor! Hands behind your head!”
She held her anger in check. “I’m already on the floor.”
“Officers, it’s okay!” said Iokan. “It’s nothing serious! We were just…” One of the security officers looked round at him. “…sparring. That’s all. Just sparring.”
“You’re kidding,” said the security guard.
“She needs more training,” added Iokan. “Go on, Liss, tell them.”
“Sparring,” she said in a deadly monotone. A command buzzed over the comms and the guards relaxed.
“If you want to spar, schedule a session in the gym,” muttered the guard.
“Of course,” said Iokan, smiling to try and maintain the fiction that no one in the room seriously believed. Liss got to her feet.
“Are you going to let me out?” she asked the guards. They tried to shuffle aside in their armour, and she squeezed out of the room, marching away to be alone somewhere, still angry.
I should have gone after her, despite the fact I was supposed to be getting on the bus to Hub Metro in a few minutes. But another crisis drew my attention.
7. Elsbet
Elsbet would not speak to me. She kept a stony silence every time I saw her, and never looked me in the eye. Whatever she’d remembered in our last meeting, she was keeping it to herself. Over the last week or so, I’d gently encouraged the others to visit her, to see if that would help; Olivia had the greatest success, something that initially surprised me. But then the two of them had gotten on surprisingly well in the brief time they had known each other. They shared an earthy contempt for most of the others, but even so, Olivia was in no mood to mess about. She considered Elsbet to be malingering in bed and inflicting unnecessary suffering on herself. She accused her of giving up, and Elsbet retorted that she hadn’t given up in the slightest. She was still at war. Olivia demanded an explanation, but Elsbet fell silent again and Olivia left with nothing else to show for her efforts.
After we’d let Elsbet out of the infirmary, she’d spent most of her time in her room — a different one to Katie’s, which she set up with one of the preset options. But while she avoided any furnishings that recalled
her days on her home asteroid, the view outside the window was of space, the pale band of the Milky Way shining through, brighter and clearer than could be seen on Earth. For a few days, she simply went about her business in the centre. She would not venture outside, as much as we might encourage her, and only turned up to the group therapy session where Liss returned after some pleading on my part. Once that was done, she went back to her room, turned on privacy and refused to speak to anyone for the rest of the day.
Then she attempted suicide.
We always tried to give the group as much privacy as possible, but made an exception for medical crises. While we had no access to their moment-by-moment body monitors, automated systems alerted us as soon as trauma occurred.
I attended her room a minute after the medical staff had arrived, and found her twitching on the floor with foam coming from her mouth. Her artificial arm was lying detached a metre away, and a twisted, improvised cable ran from her shoulder stump to a power outlet in the wall.
“Turn the power off!” shouted a nurse. Someone evidently did, as Elsbet stopped twitching and relaxed into unconsciousness. “Shit, just look at this…” said the nurse.
The cable was something she must have put together piece by piece in her hours of privacy, made of twisted up foil, copper strands and a bent fork on the end to plug into the shoulder socket. Some parts might have been stolen from Kwame’s electrical workshop, but the rest was a mystery.
“She’s stable,” said the nurse, studying Elsbet’s pulse, breathing and brain function on a pad.
“What was she doing?” I asked. The nurse looked up at me with a moment’s surprise. I was already dressed up for going out, and they’d never seen me in heels.
“Self-harm? Suicide? I don’t know.”
Veofol came in, realising at once what had happened, but a chime drew his attention. Everyone looked up. A screen appeared on the wall showing a still image of Elsbet with a hard look straight at camera, and below the screen an invitation to press play.
“She left a note…” I said.
A trolley was floated in, and Elsbet was lifted onto it, still unconscious. “You might as well go,” said Veofol. “She’s not going to wake up for a while.”
I shook my head. “I have to take care of this.”
“I can write the report…”
“You weren’t even on duty when it happened.”
“Asha. I can handle it. You’re going to be late if you don’t go.”
I sighed. “All right. But I have to watch this.”
I started the video on the wall. Elsbet looked to one side of the screen, checking the system was recording; and then she spoke.
“I am Sergeant Designate Elsbet Carmon. I am at war with the machines that have destroyed my world and spread their filth throughout the system. This is my final act in the war. If I fail, I leave its commission to you. Therefore I must tell you what it was this creature whose body I control did to us.
“I am no longer human. I am a recording of a woman who died in battle more than ten years ago. Her mind was scanned and her body cloned so an infiltrator could be made. The machines pretended they held prisoners of war who would be executed if we did not surrender. Instead, we attacked, freed them, and fell into their trap.
“This infiltrator known as Katie was taken to a hospital while my persona was allowed to emerge to give her cover. They gave me medals and sent children to see me so they would be inspired by the ‘hero’. And when she was ready, the infiltrator took over and flushed the atmosphere from the hospital. Then she attacked the shipyards, disabled a dozen ships, stole a missile and escaped back to Earth.
“I remember every detail of the attack. I can see every soldier she killed. I can see the doctor she forced to seal the doors. I can see her ripping his spine out when she was finished with him. I can see the children falling and choking and dying while she watched and did nothing.
“Make no attempt to save me.
“This is an act of war.”
She took the arm off her shoulder, revealing gleaming contacts, and shoved her makeshift cable into them. She touched a control on a pad, then convulsed and fell below the frame.
8. Asha & Bell
The restaurant was designed to make people from Bell’s world feel at home, and everyone else feel they were in an exotic land, with firelight, rough-hewn pine, antler decorations and a slight chill to the air. Bell’s species had endured a full-scale ice age on their world before a friendly species provided the support necessary for them to reclaim the technological heritage buried under the ice. They get annoyed whenever their body fur makes people from other species think they’re cute, and become irritable with those who ask if they can stroke them. Not that stroking Bell’s fur was unpleasant, either for him or me. It had the sheen of an otter’s pelt, and the softness of a cat’s belly, or so I’m told. Grooming is a major psychological bonding tool among his species, and something I’d enjoyed learning about.
But Bell didn’t look like he wanted his fur stroked, combed, teased or groomed. He sat alone with a glass of water he’d barely touched. He didn’t look like a man waiting for a romantic meal. He hadn’t changed from his travelling clothes. I already felt like a fool for dressing up. He looked at his watch as I made my way to the table, apologising for being kept behind at work. He acknowledged the apology with a sigh.
“Well,” I said. “Thanks for coming…”
He nodded. I poured myself some water. I knew what I had to say: I’d been thinking about it all the way here and much of the day before. He was right. I’d been neglecting him. I couldn’t expect him to be there for me if I was never there for him. I couldn’t promise to be there all the time, but I knew I could share more of my life with him. We had to work together to overcome our difficulties. I was prepared to go to relationship counselling if he was.
“So… how are you?” I started.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
My mouth may have flapped a couple of times.
“I mean I’m leaving Hub. When I went back home, my clan, er…” he looked a little embarrassed. “Well, they’ve offered me a marriage. It’s a good opportunity. I need to take it.”
I found my voice from somewhere. “A… good opportunity…?”
He realised he needed to try harder to make this sound good. He took my hand. “It’s not you. Well it is, but…”
“Oh.”
“Asha, I’m serious, it’s not that I don’t want to be with you…” No. Of course it wasn’t. “But it has been difficult, and… I explained how things work on my world. A marriage isn’t just about the couple, it’s so much more important than that …”
“And we’re not,” I said, getting frostier by the second.
“I didn’t say that. It’s been great, being with you. But at some point I have to decide where I want my life to go. And I want to be on my world. You can understand that, surely…” I must have looked particularly hurt. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, that was… insensitive and stupid. I didn’t mean to say anything about your world—”
I pulled my hand back. “This is my world.”
“Of course! But… it’s not mine. And… well, when I have children I don’t want to do it with a genesplicer. It’s not fair on the children, they’d be neither one species nor the other…”
I must have been gaping in shock by now.
“I’m sorry, that didn’t come out the way I meant it. Let’s just have dinner. I’ll pay.”
I sat there, furious. I didn’t know what to say. Bell sighed.
“I’m not doing this because I want to leave you. It’s just…”
A chime sounded in my ear. Someone was calling from the centre, and it would be unbearably rude to accept a call in the middle of a conversation. I allowed it to connect.
Bell went on: “It’s just that it’s not going anywhere, we’ve hardly spoken for months, we never go out…”
Veofol’s voice overrode Bell’s: “Asha, we’ve
got a problem. It’s Olivia, well, Liss and Olivia, are you there?”
Bell said, “…I mean how could you call us a couple?”
“I’m here. Go on,” I said.
Veofol continued: “They’ve had a bust-up and Olivia wants out. I was trying to get them to make up but it went wrong and there was some shoving and Olivia’s put her back out…”
“Okay, slow down and give me the details. From the beginning.”
Bell realised he was no longer the focus of my attention. “You’re on the phone to work, aren’t you?”
He sighed and shook his head.
9. Liss & Olivia
Liss had been outside in the woods near the centre, avoiding company. Veofol appealed to her to talk to the others, pointing out that she really did need to make an effort. She chose to make this effort with Olivia, as Pew and Kwame were barely talking to anyone, Elsbet was in the infirmary, and she certainly wasn’t going to talk to Iokan again.
Olivia had retrieved her hat, but hadn’t gone back to sleep. Whatever she was brooding about, she kept it to herself, but was alert enough to hear Liss’s approach.
“Bugger off,” she said as Liss reached the garden.
“What did I do?” asked Liss.
“You came out and bothered me.”
“It’s not your garden.”
“I did all the work. So bugger off before you trample something.”
Liss took a breath to restrain herself. “I came by to see if you wanted any help.”
Olivia looked at her as if she’d offered to ritually behead herself. “What?”
“Do. You. Want. Any. Help.”
Olivia considered the offer.
“It’s too dark. Sun’s going down.”
“I can see well enough.”
“What, you got super eyes as well?”
Liss’s teeth were practically grinding. “Yes.”
Olivia gave her a look and considered her offer. “Well if you want to have a go, the whole place needs weeding.”
The Last Man on Earth Club Page 33