by Carl Neville
Perhaps it was there to calibrate both your responses and to ensure the manner of questioning, including body language, tone of voice and so on did not exceed guidelines. A citizens’ safeguarding protocol you have ignored.
I was brought in to be a little more explicitly hands-on, he says.
Brought in and given those instructions by Waterston? A flicker of satisfaction across her face.
He remains silent. A slip that, Barrow, getting sloppy. The conversation will have been recorded.
Thank you comrade, she says. If you could just remain in the office for a few moments. Almost the instant she leaves his ROD beeps, a dead tone signifying FUNCTIONALITY REMOVED. He glances at the Passocon, an ACCESS DENIED notice floating around the screen, bouncing off the sides. Knows someone will be coming up to escort him from the premises and decides to leave under his own steam, takes a stroll back down the corridor, goes past a large meeting as he leaves, sees Dusjevic, Squires’s PCSDF equivalent addressing it, seems that Pan-Co-Sphere forces are supplementing, he almost said supplanting, SSF with or without official approval.
He doesn’t know exactly what is happening, but he knows that his investigation is essentially at an end. Good that Abhi has set out to scan the intermediary, now that PRB 2003701’s ROD will have automatically become property of Squires’s department.
PRB 2003701 ROD: Private Cache/Block-Block Activated
A Conversation around the Dinner Table, Part 4/4
Squires: The report. It is interesting that you have not requested it yet, I would have thought it a matter of some urgency. We suspect you suspect what we no longer suspect but know.
Solchenko: (laughs) Wonderful British indirectness! The labyrinths one must negotiate here in order to understand a simple point. In order to be sure that this has been communicated fully and while your grandson is out of the room, let me say
(Redacted: Squires)
Tereza
In the journey up to the roof of the building in the lift, a sudden tumult. She feels a tremendous sense of a tension having broken, a surge of excitement that she has difficulty expressing in any way other than irritable busyness, why is she like that? Fear of pleasure, hard for her to enjoy anything, needs to be constantly distracted by some aggravating task. She knows she should see a therapist, but unless she is forced to of course she will tend to just direct her energy into finding something to make her angry, keep herself in the melancholy corner she has painted herself into. Katja seems to be able to enjoy life, seems to have no problem accepting others’ desire for her, expressing her own, she heard them together that first night in the room across the open living space, knows if she had just gone across and tapped on the door they would have invited her in. Yet she fears what she will see in the light from that open doorway the two of them, turned toward her, something…
… abandoned…
… in both senses of the word. She can’t participate, she might as well have become
a nun, a nun all dressed in white
And he became a canting priest and prayed for her by night.
What are these old words her memory has dredged up? Probably from a folk song she has heard around the Canteens. She half laughs to herself as she thinks about Franklin hitting on her when he first came in. Well, he seemed to desire her.
The sky looks a little overcast, maybe showers on the way, she watches a couple of helicopters come up off the building further down river and swing round towards the stadium, hears the sound of cars and bikes accelerating along the streets, a distant siren, thank god, a sense of movement and some sense of a response to the scale of what they need, no more dragging in hopelessly unqualified people, and she includes herself in this. What use have her textual analysis skills been after all? Perhaps this is what has made her so grumpy, this should have been a central PCSDF concern from the very start, she only hopes it isn’t too late but there must be serious questions around certain people’s competence and she is not altogether unhappy that Barrow for instance seems to be off the case completely, his lack of professionalism, especially around his obvious favouritism toward Katja, should have been enough, but this farrago of interrupting the opening ceremony and his obviously personal issues and concerns… She can understand why the PCSDF have worries about the PRB’s security, and when this is definitively over she will submit a departmental report that she is sure will get her noticed, perhaps even moved up the chain.
What is her own role now? She checks the ROD to see if anything has been assigned and PRB 2003701 ACTION NEEDED jumps out at her immediately, even though she thought she had permanently turned that notification off. The helicopters circle around the stadium, then two drop down to land, disembark the crews who are going to update and add more mobile sensors to the infrastructure. It’s interesting that though the equipment is highly sophisticated in many ways there is still that gap between the sensors and what a human can perceive, at the microlevel of another person’s behaviour in posture, attitude, manner. That can never be replaced. Some of those teams, the sainted Lewis among them, will be going in to mingle with the crowds, to stand inconspicuously at gates and checkpoints to try and ascertain from the whole range of human types which among them might be a threat, might be a person prepared to kill or die for a cause.
A beep from the ROD. She checks the messages: she has been relieved from giving Franklin the full results from his scan, for some reason one of the professional medical team will do it. Results held back in order to ensure his full compliance. She notes that Katja still has not acted in relation to the responsibility for PRB 2003701. Well, well, maybe the golden girl will be getting a ticking off, a dressing down herself when someone notices.
She seems to have no immediate duties, perhaps she should go down to the works Canteen to watch a little of the Games.
Lewis
They come in through one of the service tunnels and take the stairs up to ground level. There are already teams conducting searches around the stadium’s concentric rings of seating, Lewis wanders out into the centre of the arena to take it all in, she would like perhaps to have been an athlete of some kind, have devoted all her time to finding the fullest expression of the body she has been given, how it might have been supplemented, augmented, expanded.
She senses that what she is looking for is not here and decides to head back across the river. Vehicles are available but she will go on foot, reflexively calls for D7 only to realise with a pang that she is not there and is lying instead in a steel box under the central kennel, waiting for the appropriate moment to be buried, said goodbye to. She will go alone then, takes a deep breath to fend off the sadness and determines to time herself, gets the ROD to guide her down the least obstructed streets, through the nature reserve, semi-wild on the long peninsula that stretches out into the river, through the semi-dereliction that runs along the former industrial areas.
Eyes closed, sun on her face, feeling a guiding emptiness, spirit, at her side still somehow, she runs. Opens them again as the light shifts, shadowed between two long low buildings, moves on into the great old docks, glinting in the grey mid-afternoon, house boats bobbing, a few people swimming, some even fishing off the bridge she runs across, then back down into the clustered warehouses and depots given over to growing some resinous crop she can’t identify, a thick vegetable tinge to the air. Another dock appears in front of her and a man sitting next to a small rowing boat indicates he will take her across to the other side. You are passenger 4,023, he tells her as she steps in and sits down on the wooden slats, catches her breath. This is the widest part of the dock, he informs her. Hails a couple in a plastic pedalo bumping into one of the barges moored up on the east side. A number of intense aromas swirl around them as they wind between the hydroponic farms, a gaggle of ducks float serenely around the prow, the ducklings bobbing in the boat’s light wash as he holds the dripping oar aloft and they file beneath.
Where are you headed?
The observatory, she says.
/> Good view from up there. You not at the Games then?
She shakes her head.
Me neither. Seen enough Games I have to last me a lifetime.
Franklin
Fuck, he says. How?
At this stage we have no idea.
How much time do I have?
You have got a couple of hours. Maybe eight at the most.
And your PRB pan-tidote?
Doesn’t work on XV2. That’s why you brought it in.
Poetic justice, huh? Feels his chest tighten, mind races, how can he have been exposed unless somehow when he was carrying it? But he would already be dead by now. It must be a mistake. He looks at the results again.
Eight hours, an image of his daughter flashes up in his mind. He was going to take her a gift back, an authentic poster from one of those stupid PRB sci-fi shows they all watch semi-legally on bridge sites, Captain Tomorrow.
He was going to… he had some vague plan about trying to make things right and…
Eight hours, nowhere near enough time to get back home.
Fucking country.
So what does it matter, what did it matter? Might as well have let them do it, shoot shit up, bring the whole world down, he’s not going to see it anyway. Should have just sat tight, didn’t even get them, just fucked himself.
I guess I get a last request, right?
Lewis
The tunnel that takes her under the Thames seems to be longer than she imagined, the grey-green light and the off-white enamel tiles, the thick rings of rust red steel with their square rivets…
It’s one of the main crossing points from south to east, yet the tunnel is empty. Perhaps the crowds have taken other routes she doesn’t know about, for a second she imagines she might come up in a different London once on the other side, see herself gasping there at the rail, looking across at a different view entirely from the territory she has just run through. Up the steps in a gentle spiral and out into the day it all flashes at the edge of her vision for an instant, high-rise, gleaming, metal and glass, but as she glances back it is still the same lush, low-rise semi-populated and half-mapped maze she has come through, and before her the same half-derelict and overgrown squares, the same flats and prefabs, the market, the grand old imperial buildings of the Naval College reclaimed as art centres, crèches, Canteens, small workspaces, concert halls. Beyond that the park and then at the top of the hill the observatory that segmented the world and gridded it, reordered time and space and flesh. Off to the west, the Enthusiasm, in which the process of de-gridding and loosening the world into the rhythms of roaming and questing that are native to the species is taking another turn. Lewis feels its pull more intensely than ever, yet for all that, she has chosen the most regimented form of life that is left, SSF.
What does that say about you Lewis? That she needs the anchoring, the netting, to keep her pinned in this world?
Barrow
As he cuts back to the Union hotel he tries to get a face-to-face contact with Rose on her ROD but he receives an instant reply that says she is busy. Is she ignoring him? He has invited her up here then neglected her and… but no Barrow she is not a child and nor are you, she understands work and its demands just as you understand that you have no claim on the free play of each other’s desire. And yet those role-plays, games they indulged in. Perhaps one cannot act such things out without them leaving a mark, forming bonds, leaving…
Scars.
His side itches and he scratches it discreetly. He will go and see if he can catch her in the flat she has taken. On the train to the south he looks through his messages, opens the one from Goodridge that he received a few hours ago. Evan-Ess and so the words begin to disappear even as he reads it, dissolving beneath the movement of his eyes across the screen.
Information that you may find useful. I have been doing some research into your situation and condition tied so closely into all our lives, yet you seem to remember nothing
a set of instructions on how to find documents that
may help him to understand many things about his own role, about the life of the PRB
In the quarry by the old cottage outside Castleford that the car took him out to, the tree there, dig down among the roots, find an old army kitbag and inside in a sealed plastic bag, the file VC961-5/5.
He tries to contact Goodridge but the ROD is off-domain. Can this be right? Another prank, another wild goose chase. Well he still hasn’t had some of his privileges revoked and so he orders a car to send itself out to meet him at the flat.
In the flat nothing of Rose remains, nothing except that on the table in the bedroom, there is a photo he picks up and turns over. There she is, young, extremely beautiful, with her arm around a pale youth, looking a little lost, stunned even, something haunting his features even on that bright park-bound summer day. Crane, it must be. He recognizes him, remembers taking this photo.
That can’t be right. Can it?
He knows him from somewhere. Didn’t he? Wasn’t it around 1995, 1996 when he was deep undercover in the Contested Territories? Something stirs. They met, he’s sure of that, one night in a field out near Todmorden and Crane was saying imagine you just fell out of this life you have now, this person you are now and into another world, instead of being who you are, imagine you might get so scrambled you can’t come back.
And he said, I’ll show you, I’ll show you, perhaps you’ll be sucked into it with me, we’ll come out the other side transformed, in a different world, and he raised his hands up over the fire and Barrow could swear he saw the hands growing fainter, more transparent and raised his hands up too, saw them too losing substance, the trees blanch, begin slowly to fade to ash, the ground evaporating and with a great rush and a cry he didn’t know was his own the blackness was on him, in him, of him, and then the next morning face down in a tangle of roots and mud with no memory of what had gone on the night before but a terrible scream reverberating through him.
No this can’t be right. Whose memories are these?
Julia
A strange excitement moves through her, new life, a new world, new loves. She will have a child, here in the PRB, they are growing already inside her. How could she not have known, sensed it?
Perhaps she always felt she should have been born here and somehow all this was pre-ordained years ago when she was a child herself, she made some resolution that she forgot about but that she was always acting on unknown, one busy, superficial part of herself she thought was in control plotting all kind of paths and courses when there was only one destination that she was driving herself toward all along with a child’s quiet, hidden determination.
She lies in the semi-dark, the glow of the emergency light above her bunk, the Passocon’s screen, music playing, a PRB radio station.
Correct the mistake of her own birth, somehow. Her thoughts move to Dominic, a fantasy, probably silly, unrealistic but consolatory enfolds her.
The music swells and abates, an oboe, plump, friendly, wise, comes waddling slowly out of the silence and floats alongside her.
The hearing, first of the senses to develop. She will sing to her child, little mermaid, circling in its rosy cave, bathe her in beautiful sounds to soothe her fears, to set the fluid that surrounds her trembling, resonating to the frequencies of light and joy. A siren song to urge her on, a serenade to welcome her as she splashes, gurgling out into this divided world.
Lewis
Up the hill toward the observatory, the grass scattered with people lounging, some in mandatory orange work suits digging and carrying, a host of volunteer groups and maintenance crews tending and pruning; the simple joy of making things grow, of forms of life being nurtured and nurturing in turn, her heart rate is at its highest level as she aims for the top within the timeframe the ROD has allocated and closes her eyes, he is here somewhere and she will find him because she only has a day left now for whatever mission she has been appointed to and the sun is already past its highest point. She jogs out a
cross the park entrance and onto the heath, the plague dead are buried under there, she’s read.
Why is he here, she wonders, why not closer to the stadium, why not head out there immediately? She walks the quiet streets, large houses, allotments, gardens converted into small holdings, the roads clean and well maintained. Through a gap in the buildings she sees the stadium across in the distance and streams of people on foot and bike emptying into the tunnel under the river now as though they had held off to allow her through, or as though she had run through a different iteration of the same tunnel. A hush descends, a quiet city anyway, a quiet country, so little traffic, and she experiences a pocket of peace and calm, a small antechamber in time’s irresistible onward flow. Then, the voice reminds her: you only have one day.
And the ambiguity of the phrases strikes her for the first time, one day to complete her mission, however obscure that may be to her still, or one day to live?
She begins to jog again, involuntarily spurred on by the thought. The bullet that went past the suspect, killed D7, the way Franklin rubbed the air between his fingers, out of nowhere, tracking you from birth, death comes like that…
Katja
I’ll take you back, I’ll be releasing you into Jennifer Bewes’s custody, she smiles. It should be easy to get away, there are several automated goods trains that will take you out of Birmingham and up to the north, there are groups there who will help you unofficially defect, can get you a ROD and access to the Great Six.
I have to be honest with you I don’t fully know how this works, I am not registered in the PRB, this is just what I have been told. I think someone will be organising it for you, people will be looking out for you. That’s my understanding anyway. She glances in the mirror, sees Julia Verona’s face and is unsure what the expression means, she hasn’t seen one like it before. Grief perhaps, shock, loss, combined. And yet, perhaps there is something else in there too, something more like exhilaration, hope, release.