by Katie M John
*
“Excuse me please. I shan’t be long.” She smiles like sunlight and as she walks away she leaves behind her the scent of roses. I’m stabbed by a feeling of guilt. This is the fourth inquisition I have done in the last fortnight, but this is the first time I’ve felt something other than strategy. It’s as if she has awoken something in me that has been dormant, asleep.
I flick my wrist round and glance at it, checking the time on my watch that I still choose to wear. It is a natural habit. I still haven’t quite gotten used to the fact I now have an internal clock; which I can access in one easy synapse flash.
I’m distracted. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been plagued by emerging memories, senses of familiarity that I can’t quite compute. The ART hard drive and my brain, although connected, are in a parasitic rather than symbiotic relationship and it causes momentary crashes in my mind. They explained that I’m an Experimental and that such issues are to be expected. I’m lucky to have been given such a gift, especially considering my criminal past.
I wonder at which point Marie will know that she’s a fly caught in a web. Within the last twenty minutes, the voice recording application has stored enough evidence to condemn her. The tone of her voice will already have been analysed for irony and disapproval; the elegiac talk of her father; her genetic pre-disposition to opposition will all be stacked against her, just in case her original crime was not enough. Humans breeding outside of the ‘Breed to Succeed’ programme are breaking the law. The Sphere cannot support people reproducing – the Elites do not want a return to the old ways – which is why male and female sexual relationships are forbidden; which is why love is the only crime punishable by death.
*
Maria is back. There has been a dramatic shift in her manner as if clouds have come quickly crowding in on her sunlit day. She looks at me differently as if seeing me for the first time, her eyes connecting with mine. Up until this point we have glanced eye contact but now she is fixing mine with hers. They are a cold, storm grey; the same colour eyes as my daughter’s. It is only now, that I remember she too was called Maria.
Her eyes drop to my wrist, starring at my watch; frowning, as if trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together. We reach for the missing piece at the same time. It was a gift from my daughter for my fiftieth birthday. Maria gave it to me a month before I died. She reaches her hand out as if to touch it, to confirm that it is real. Her perfume is overpowering; the scent of roses, flood my brain. It is the smell of the roses in the Jardin de Musée de Rodin. They were blood red. The statues wept; screamed in terror as I smashed over and over again – imagining with each blow that it was the future I was destroying and not the past.
Three of Them have entered almost noiselessly. Two dressed in the black uniform of the Elite police force, their visors shielding their faces. Between them, white coat shining so brightly it almost gives off its own halo, emblazoned with the badge of ‘The Fusion Programme’ a scientist sporting a foot tall black top hat and monocle. They are here for Maria. The punk youth is trapped the other side of the glass doors, he is thumping the glass, shouting something. His banging takes Maria’s attention away from me to her captors. Because of the sound proofing, we can not hear his screams and he looks like a grotesque effigy of sorrow.
Download complete. Memory installed. I know exactly who I am.
“Daddy! Daddy, don’t let them take me.”
The room explodes with noise. The screams that issue from Marie are only drowned out by my own and above it all, like a symphony of emotion, is the laugh from the figure in the white coat, needle gleaming.