Hearts of Oak

by Eddie Robson

  Down the years, citizen had talked to citizen about the problem of the door but they had never spoken to the humans about it: they had just gotten on with the job. The guard now had access to a whole new perspective. It was the cognitive equivalent of a sprint for the finish line.

  Iona wasn’t sure just how close they were to finishing when she heard footsteps approaching from down the corridor. She stepped away from the door. The guard had fallen silent and from outward appearances it seemed just to be guarding. A voice told it to move aside and it did so. Then the door to the cell opened and Saori Kagawa stepped inside.

  Saori had not been involved in Iona’s interrogation. A great deal had changed since Iona last saw her at the site of the fire. The true nature of the citizens had since been revealed to Iona and now she could see Saori was not one of them. She was human. Everyone else she’d spoken to at the bureau had been a citizen.

  But why was Saori here in person? Was there something else she needed to know? They’d told the bureau staff everything. They’d even explained the nature of the cage, but to no response—as if the citizens weren’t supposed to acknowledge this fact, not in the presence of humans.

  Saori didn’t take a seat. She looked Iona up and down.

  If Saori was a human then presumably she came here on the ship. Which meant it was also possible she was the Poramutantur. The situation required caution.

  “Can I help you?” Iona asked.

  “How long had you known Alyssa for?”

  “Only a few days.”

  “Because there’s no record of her, you see. We have records of everyone in the city but not her. Did you steal her record? Destroy it? Or did she?”

  “No. Alyssa comes from—”

  “She’s dead,” said Saori and Iona could hear something unsteady in her voice. “We burned her. She was plotting to kill the king.”

  “That’s not true,” Iona replied. She could see Saori was confused. Hopefully this was a sign she was starting to work her way through the fog that had been thrown around her perceptions.

  “We’ve got evidence. She confessed.”

  “Confessed? Who to?”

  “Clarence.”

  “Who’s Clarence?”

  “The king’s . . . the king’s cat, of course.” As she spoke a change came over Saori’s expression, as if she had suddenly realized the absurdity of what she’d just said.

  * * *

  Clarence had not spent all these years in the company of the king without learning how to sense his mood. Things were changing. The intrusion of Alyssa had disrupted the city, possibly fatally—but it might also release him before everything collapsed.

  King’s Tower had many spare rooms below the king’s chambers. The king never went in any of them. Clarence opened the door to one of them now. Inside the room was a table and two chairs, where two citizens sat opposite one another.

  Clarence hopped up on the table, faced one of the citizens, and said: “Starlit sky.”

  * * *

  Iona knew the king had a cat—he sometimes mentioned this fact in his columns—but she didn’t know anything else about it. It was the only cat in the city—another of those privileges that were exclusive to the king. However, Iona had never heard anything about the cat acting as an advisor to the king, which Saori had just claimed as if it was perfectly normal.

  Saori explained that Clarence’s position, and his proximity to the king, gave him the ability to assume authority in such situations—and the simple fact was that when he did get involved in situations they were always resolved. It didn’t happen often but it was a natural part of how the city worked.

  Yet he was a cat. This executive power was routinely handed to a cat.

  “But everything Clarence does is on the king’s behalf,” Saori stated. “It’s all sanctioned. It’s safer for Clarence to handle it so the king doesn’t have to leave the tower—I mean we all saw what happened last time he left the tower.”

  “But the king doesn’t get citizens to do this stuff,” said Iona. “He gets his cat to do it.”

  “He does sometimes get citizens to do it, it’s just . . .” Saori tailed off. “The Mull of Kintyre,” she said suddenly.

  Iona was surprised, but also elated, to hear these words.

  “Clarence was the ship’s cat,” Saori went on, “and he didn’t talk then. Why does he talk now?”

  And in that moment Iona knew who their enemy was. Every human on the ship had been tested. Every one. But not every living thing. Iona wondered how she could even begin to explain it to Saori—there was too much to tell.

  “Oh fuck,” said Saori, looking from side to side in panic. “What have I done?”

  They were interrupted by a loud CRACK coming from the hallway and both of them turned to look. Saori stood, went to the door, and opened it—and she made no objection when Iona followed her.

  They stepped into the corridor and found the guard at the door kneeling down next to the body of another citizen. The guard had twisted the citizen’s arm off and was examining the joints like a doctor checking for broken bones.

  Saori, who had never before seen the citizens’ true nature, immediately turned and vomited against the wall. Iona approached the guard and asked: “What are you doing?”

  The guard looked up at her. “Making a key.”

  * * *

  Victor’s cell was farther down the corridor and he was aware there was activity outside but he was too far away to hear what exactly was going on. His curiosity about this was such that when the door of his own cell opened he was pleased he’d get the opportunity to ask someone what was happening, and had momentarily forgotten that someone might be taking him away to be executed.

  Saori walked in accompanied by a citizen, closed the door behind herself, and slid the grille shut so they couldn’t be overheard. Victor started to ask Saori what the noise was but she held up a finger to her lips, walked over to him, and bent down to speak close to his ear.

  “I’m told you understand how these work,” she said.

  And then she reached out and opened the hatch in the citizen’s back.

  11

  VICTOR WAS PESSIMISTIC about their chances of success but Iona had more confidence. While it was challenging to program a citizen to enter a program into other citizens, Iona argued surely it was simpler if the program was intended to self-replicate? They’d talked about how to make it as straightforward as possible and minimize the possibility of error. They might only get one chance to do this. Victor didn’t like the fact it involved replicating a mistake he’d made—it was always tricky to re-create circumstances you hadn’t intentionally brought about—but he admitted it was their best chance.

  Saori had told the rest of the bureau she needed to subject Victor and Iona to further interrogation and that she was not to be disturbed. Victor spent this time generating the program. Members of their citizen army were still in the other cells and Saori brought them to him as test subjects.

  In the meantime Saori looked through her records regarding the population of the city and the business that went on there. Now that she knew most of the people who lived here were wooden automata, she suspected she might be able to see clues as to who was human. She eventually found it in the plans of the city’s sanitation system.

  “Only the humans eat,” Saori said as she brought the plans to Iona and Victor. “The citizens have batteries that are charged by a clockwork mechanism at the power plants. So only the humans have toilets in their homes and workplaces.”

  It was hilariously mundane. But clearly true. Victor asked how many other humans there were, based on this finding.

  “Just one,” Saori said.

  They all knew who it was.

  By now Victor’s program was ready. He wanted more time to test it but Iona argued they couldn’t afford to delay. The guard from her cell had made the key and it seemed likely that other citizens had made the same breakthrough or were close to it. When this happened Iona fel
t sure they would bring the key to Clarence.

  Once the guard finished making the key, Saori and Iona took it off him and then disabled him by opening his hatch. Iona had watched the guard at work. It was grimly fascinating. He’d made the key with the nearest tools to hand—the component parts of one of his fellows. Having torn off the arm he had then cut it at the elbow, removed the citizen’s head, extracted parts of its brain, and attached them to the arm. The resultant severed forearm, with electronic components spliced into it, was the key. Iona believed she understood how it worked. She hoped so.

  Victor’s program was entered into a fresh citizen, who was then released into the city. Citizen Zero. Saori left for King’s Tower, and Iona and Victor waited in their cell while Citizen Zero did its work.

  * * *

  The king’s lunch arrived, borne by one of his personal attendants. It struck him now that he should perhaps get someone else to taste it in case of poison but of course he couldn’t ask them to do that, it was a disgusting idea. He could never suggest sharing food. It would be like suggesting they both sit in the same room and go to the toilet.

  When Saori barged into the king’s chambers while he was still eating, despite the attempted intervention of a guard, the king was furious and embarrassed. He spat the mouthful he was chewing into a corner of the room, then stood up and strode over to her.

  “What do you want?” screamed the king. “Can’t you see I’m—” And he stopped, reluctant even to admit to having been eating.

  “I have to speak to you,” Saori said.

  “It can wait. This is outrageous.”

  “Shut up! We don’t have long and this is more important than me walking in on you eating your fucking lunch.”

  The king didn’t know how to react at all. Nobody spoke to him this way, not even—

  “Where’s Clarence?” said Saori at the very moment the king was thinking about his cat.

  “Eating, I guess?”

  “He’s manipulating you—he gets you to run this whole city for his benefit, you understand?”

  The king wanted to deny this. It felt like an insult, an accusation of weakness, that he’d let this happen all these years. But he didn’t.

  “But why though?”

  “Because your cat is evil, Steve.”

  This is a hard thing for anyone to accept. Despite what Alyssa had said to him, despite his mounting suspicions in recent days, the king didn’t want to believe what, deep down, he knew.

  “It isn’t even your cat,” said Saori. “It’s a thing that takes over bodies and kills the mind of what’s inside. It killed your cat and took his place back when we were still on the ship.”

  This had the desired effect. “Yeah,” said the king, nodding. “I think it did kill my cat. I . . . don’t think I want to be king anymore. Bloody hell—you were on the ship too, weren’t you—”

  “Steve, there’s no time—we have to leave. Clarence is trying to get out—”

  “Get out of the tower?”

  “No no—out of the city.”

  “Out of the . . .” For a moment he didn’t understand, then he remembered there was something beyond the woods, something beyond the sky: so much more. He remembered steering ships through deep space, the infinite vacuum. He remembered it had once been his favorite thing. It had been his life and he’d forgotten it completely, agreeing instead to spend his life signing off paperwork in a room at the top of a tower. All this time he’d felt frustrated somewhere at the back of his mind, and it was because living here was like being in the cockpit of a rocket that never took off. As they built more floors on top of it he got higher and higher but never actually left the ground. And meanwhile he kept on building this city as if it was their destination and he’d get there eventually.

  “Can we get out?” he said to Saori.

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to try—but we can’t let Clarence out.”

  “Okay,” said the king, taking off his crown and tossing it out of the nearest window. Then he followed Saori and left his chambers for the last time.

  * * *

  Iona and Victor had given it about twenty minutes before leaving the cell at the bureau. Iona held the key. They were unsure what they’d find outside the cell, whether Citizen Zero had been effective. But as they descended it was clear the bureau was empty. Everyone had left the building.

  “It’s worked,” said Iona.

  “So far,” said Victor.

  They walked out through the unguarded front door and into the streets. The mood was already distinctly different. It was easy to tell at a glance which of the citizens had fallen victim to the new program and which had not. The reprogrammed ones were alert, focused, purposeful—and devoid of individual character. They all had only one thought now: to find others of their own kind and change them as they’d been changed. A reprogrammed citizen would stop another citizen, open the hatch in its back, and replicate the program. Then they would both go in search of another, so the rate of change was speeding up exponentially. Iona felt thrilled and a little scared to realize it was unstoppable now.

  Iona told herself the citizens weren’t people, that their personalities had been programmed in the first place—but those personalities had been shaped further by countless days of experience, just like any human being, and they were being rapidly washed away. There was nothing else to be done—it was impossible to get all the citizens out and even if just one was left behind it might hold the plans for the key and supply the Poramutantur with one. But as Iona watched it happen she realized she’d always regret it.

  Assuming she survived, of course.

  Nobody paid Iona or Victor any mind as they made their way to the tower, where they’d agreed to meet Saori at the entrance. There was no sign of her. If she’d been successful in getting the king out then she should be there by now. Saori had told them that in this eventuality they should move on to the second phase without her. But now as they were facing this prospect Iona didn’t like it at all.

  “She might need help,” said Iona. “Someone should go in.”

  Victor glanced through the open doors of the tower. “Alright. Who?” It was plain he didn’t want to and didn’t want to admit it. He’d been much more confident at the bureau with his army of citizens around him. Now it was just the two of them.

  “I’ll be as fast as I can,” said Iona, handing the key to Victor and stepping inside the tower.

  The program was spreading through the building. The citizens were all focused on each other and didn’t even register Iona as she walked through the lobby. The huge spiral stairwell at the center, which was usually well guarded, was completely open. It seemed too good to be true.

  But after a moment’s thought she realized it didn’t matter if it was too good to be true. She had to go up the stairs regardless. At this point every option might easily end in her death. She told herself this was a liberating state of affairs, in a way, as she started to climb.

  * * *

  Iona realized something was wrong as she approached the eleventh floor. Until now every floor she had passed had been occupied by citizens reprogramming each other and then looking for more citizens. Sometimes they passed Iona on the stairs as they ran out of citizens to convert on one floor and went up or down looking for more. Iona had called Saori’s name at each floor: she wondered if she ought to call the king’s name as well but she worried shouting “Your Highness” might attract the wrong sort of attention.

  Confirmation that something was wrong arrived when the severed head of a citizen rolled down the stairs past her and she had to dodge otherwise it would’ve hit her on the shin. The head was followed by the body, which almost knocked her off her feet.

  Iona looked up. She could hear scuffles coming from a higher floor. The sound of wood connecting with wood. And then another citizen—this one with its head still attached to its shoulders, but with a splintered left leg—came tumbling down toward her. It was trying to stand but was too badly
damaged. Iona gripped the handrail and pulled herself close to the wall but as the citizen continued its uncontrolled descent its head collided with hers. A dazed Iona clung to the railing, unable to focus: for a moment she could only tell which way was up and which was down from the sound of the citizen still falling away from her while the conflict continued somewhere above.

  As Iona prepared to go on climbing, a citizen ascended the stairs past her with the blandly determined countenance of the reprogrammed. She tried to warn it of the danger ahead but it wasn’t listening because they had programmed it not to listen. Iona walked up behind it—if she couldn’t divert it from its path then she could at least use it as a shield. Which seemed brutal but there it was.

  Just before the door to the twelfth floor, Iona and her shield encountered a row of citizens lined up on the same step, with another row behind them and more rows behind that, going back farther than Iona could see—the twist of the staircase took them out of view. The steps immediately below the citizens were littered with the bodies of more citizens, and those in the front rank kicked the bodies away down the stairs.

  The citizen who was walking up ahead of Iona approached the massed ranks, and as per its programming, tried to engage the nearest one so it could reprogram it. The reaction to this was a flurry of wooden fists. The reprogrammed citizen managed to stand its ground for a moment but one of the citizens opposing it grabbed its shoulders, dashed its head against the wall, and let it fall back onto the steps.

  Iona stepped aside and let it roll past. Then she looked up at the ranks of citizens. They looked back at her. They didn’t address her, they didn’t come to her, they just waited for her to approach.

  “Could you let me through, please?” said Iona.

  “No,” said the citizen who stood front and center.

  “What’s happening here?”

  “There’s a threat.”

  “Well I’m not a threat.”

  “She is,” said a new voice from somewhere in the midst of the crowd. The citizens stood at attention as a large ginger cat slalomed between their legs and came to sit at the front.