Or will it be Option B—We’re done here, you fail. Sandbag to the back of the skull from the lurking goon she’s got hidden in the broom closet—he casts the driver for that, supposing there is one and not merely a robot—then dragged into that creepy stealth car with the darkened windows and hauled off to Positron to be processed in whatever way they process people there. Then into the chicken-feed grinder, or wherever they dispose of the parts. The cake, the sandbagging—she’s capable of either.
He puts on his work clothes, listens at the top of the stairs. She’s in the kitchen. He descends gingerly, reconnoiters. She’s sitting at the kitchen table texting on her phone, a plate of breakfast leftovers in front of her. She’s wearing her I-mean-business outfit: tidy suit, gold earrings, the gray stockings. Her reading glasses are perched on her nose.
No cake. No goon. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Sleep in?” Jocelyn says pleasantly.
Should he say “Happy Valentine’s Day”? Maybe not. Maybe she’s forgotten. “Yeah,” he says.
“Bad dreams?”
“I don’t dream,” he says, lying.
“Everyone dreams,” she says. “Have an egg. Or two. I poached them for you. They might be a little hard. Coffee’s in the thermos.”
“Thanks,” he says. He’ll wolf the food, then get out of the house. Down to the scooter depot, make small talk, wire some circuits, hit something with a hammer. Take a breather.
“You won’t be going to your job today,” Jocelyn says, in a neutral voice. “You’ll be coming with me, in the car.”
The room darkens. “Why?” he says. “What’s up?” He peers down, over the edge. Mist, a sheer drop. He feels sick.
“I suggest you eat that other egg,” she says, smiling. “You’ll need the energy. You’re going to have a long day.”
* * *
They’re in the car, in the backseat; he can scarcely remember walking outside. In front of them there’s a driver—a real one, not a robot, as far as he can tell. The driver sits upright, his gray shoulders straight, the back of his head noncommittal. The car doesn’t move.
“I’m going to tell you this very quickly,” says Jocelyn. Her manner has changed completely. Gone is the awkward flirtation, the dominatrix pose. She’s urgent, straightforward. “Forget everything you think you know about me; and by the way, you kept your cool very well, which is why I’m asking you to do this: because I think you can. We need to get somebody to the outside—outside Consilience. I’ve already switched the database entries. You’ve been Phil these past months, and now you’re going to be Stan again, just for a few hours. Then after that we can get you out.”
Stan feels dizzy. “Out?” he says.
“Outside. It’s where we need you to be. We need you to—we need you to take some information. Make some connections for us.”
“Just a minute,” says Stan. “What’s going on?”
“Ed is right,” says Jocelyn. “You heard the Town Meeting. There are some saboteurs that want to destroy Consilience. But they aren’t all out there. Some of them are in here. In fact, some of them are here in this car.” She smiles: now her smile has an almost elvish quality. Dangerous though this is, she’s enjoying it in some way.
“Whoa, just a minute,” says Stan. This is far too much information for him all in one sound bite. “How come? I thought you were in charge of this place. Or the security, right?”
“I supported Consilience when it was launched. I worked hard on it. I thought it was for the best,” says Jocelyn. “I bought the good-news story. And it was true at first. But then people got greedy.”
“Greedy about what?” says Stan. “It’s not like this place makes much of a profit! On the fucking Brussels sprouts? And the chickens? … It’s like a charity thing, right? All that stuff we have to buy from the outside …”
Jocelyn sighs. “You don’t honestly believe this whole operation—this whole nationwide plan—has been put in place simply to rejuvenate the rust belt and create employment? Forget that. It’s a hugely profitable operation, and that’s not coming from hand-knitted teddy bears. They’ve got some very high-end exports.”
Stan can hardly follow. “I guess the contractors must be making …”
“Forget the contractors,” says Jocelyn. “Jails used to be about punishment, or reform, or penitence, or keeping dangerous offenders inside. Then for a while they were about crowd control—penning up the young, aggressive guys to keep them off the streets. And then they were about the attractive margins for the prepackaged jail-meal suppliers. But now a major slice of it is body parts. Organs, bones, DNA, whatever’s in demand. That’s one of the biggest earners for this place. There’s a big market for transplant material among all those aging millionaires in India and China, no? Not to mention right here in this country. The ones with the trillion-dollar offshore nest eggs.”
“But just a minute,” says Stan. “It’s still the same number of guys in Positron, I know them, they’re not being cut up for parts, it’s not as if they’re vanishing … Not once we got rid of the real criminals.”
“Those guys you know aren’t going anywhere,” says Jocelyn. “The good citizens of Consilience. They keep the place running day to day, they fix the plumbing, they know all the routines by now. They’re the worker ants. Now that the system’s functioning so smoothly, Ed and the boys are ramping up the production line. The raw material is being shipped in from outside.”
The truckloads. The parade of hooded, shuffling prisoners. Oh, great, thinks Stan. We’re stuck in a grainy black-and-white retro thriller movie. “You mean they’re rounding them up, carting them here? Killing them for parts?”
“Just undesirables,” says Jocelyn, smiling with her big teeth. She’s kept some of her badass sarcasm, anyway. “But they’ve broadened the definition of what’s undesirable. It used to be real criminals, but now it’s pretty much whoever they say.”
“Do people understand about this?” says Stan. “Out there? Have they put it together, shouldn’t they …”
“You’ll find out, “ says Jocelyn. “That’s why we’re sending you. To see if they know anything at all about what’s really going on in here. If not, you’ll help them know. You’ll be taking out some key documents. Names, numbers, classified e-mails. Then, once they know, we’ll see if they care.”
“So I’m supposed to be what?” says Stan. “The messenger?” The one who gets shot, he thinks.
“More or less,” says Jocelyn. “Now we’ll go to Positron. Have to get you prepped, then see you through the day. We have helpers in there; but this is not without risks, I should add.”
The driver, thinks Stan. It’s always the driver, in movies. Spying on everyone.
“What about him?” he says. “He’s heard all this.”
“Oh, that’s only Phil,” says Jocelyn. “Or Max. You’ll recognize him from the videos.”
Phil turns around, gives a brief smile. It’s him, all right—Charmaine’s Max, with his handsome, narrow, untrustworthy face, his too bright eyes.
“He’s been such a help in creating motive,” says Jocelyn. “We chose Charmaine because we thought she might be …”
“Susceptible,” says Phil. “It was a gamble. But she paid off.”
The lying bastard, he wasn’t even sincere, thinks Stan. He was shitting poor Charmaine all along. Setting her up. Leading her astray for reasons different from the ones you’re supposed to have when you lead someone astray. It’s as if Charmaine wasn’t good enough for him. Which, if you think about it, is actually a criticism of Stan.
His hands are burning: he’d like to strangle the guy. Or at least give him a solid punch in the teeth.
“Motive for what?” says Stan.
“Don’t be sulky,” says Jocelyn. “For why I’d want to have you eliminated.”
“Eliminated? You’re going to do what?” Stan almost shouts. This is getting more demented by the minute. Underneath the heroic talk, is she a psychopath after all? With d
esigns on his liver as a bonus?
“Whatever you want to call it,” says Jocelyn. “At Positron—among the management—they call it ‘repurposing.’ I have the discretionary power for that, and I’ve made those kinds of decisions before, when things have gone seriously … when I’ve had to. In this particular scenario—the one geared toward getting you out in one piece—anyone likely to be watching knows power corrupts. They’ll have experienced that firsthand. They’ll see how I’d be tempted to use that power for personal reasons. They may not approve, but they’ll get it. The evidence is all right there.”
“Such as?” says Stan. He’s feeling cold all over, and a little sick.
“It’s on record, every minute—everything you’d need to establish a reason. Phil and Charmaine, their torrid affair, which I have to say Phil threw himself into; but he’s good at that. Then my own degrading and jealous attempts to reenact that affair and punish Charmaine through you: why do you think we had to go through all that theatrical sex in front of the TV? Your reluctance was fully registered, believe me—the lighting was good, I’ve seen the clips.” She sighs. “From what Charmaine had to say about your temper, I was a little surprised you didn’t take a swipe at me. A lot of men would have, and I know you almost lost it a couple of times; I worried about your blood pressure. But you’ve shown impressive restraint.”
“Thanks,” says Stan. He has a moment of pleasure at having been tagged “impressive.” Cripes, he tells himself. Get a grip. Are you buying this, do you trust the two of them? No, he answers. But do you have any choice? Pull back, say you won’t do it, and they’ll likely kill you anyway. Though maybe it’s all posturing. But he can’t take that chance.
“It was a plus that you had to force yourself,” says Jocelyn. “I come across like a piece of leatherwork, gone desperate. Your reluctance played well, though it was hardly flattering: I almost had to beg. Or threaten; I guess I did sort of threaten, didn’t I? So anyone can see it was sex at virtual gunpoint.”
“She’s not really like that, underneath. She can be very attractive. And sexy,” says Phil gallantly. Or maybe even honestly, thinks Stan. Tastes differ.
Jocelyn crosses her legs, her quite good legs. She pats his thigh as if steadying him. “Anyway, those who’ll be watching will see—given the humiliation I’ve been subjected to by you, with your obvious dislike of my, what shall we say, my physical charms—why I might want to get rid of you. And by means of Charmaine, for, after all, she poached my husband, right? Double punishment. It has to be watertight, this stunt. Something that can fool Ed. He’ll buy that kind of malice, coming from me. He thinks I’m a hard bitch as it is.”
Is this leading where Stan thinks? His hands are clammy. “What stunt?”
“The part where Charmaine goes to work in Medications Administration and finds that the next procedure she has to perform is on you. And then she does perform it, and she’ll think she’s killed you. But don’t worry, you’ll wake up afterwards. And then we’ll be halfway there, because you won’t be in the database anymore, except in the past tense.”
Stan’s getting a headache. He’s not following this closely enough. “You haven’t told her?” he says. “Charmaine?”
“For her, it has to be real,” says Phil. “We don’t want her to act, they’d see through it: they have body-language and facial-expression analyzers. But Charmaine will believe the setup. She’s really good at believing.” He grins. “She enters readily into created fantasies.”
“Charmaine won’t kill me,” says Stan. “No matter …” No matter how far into her you got, you lying dickshit, he wants to say, but doesn’t. “If she thinks it’ll kill me, she won’t go through with it.”
“We’ll find that out, too, won’t we?” says Jocelyn, smiling.
Stan wants to say, Charmaine loves me, but he’s not completely sure of that anymore. And what if there’s a mistake? he’d like to ask. What if I really do die? But he’s too chickenshit to admit he’s chickenshit, so he keeps quiet.
Phil starts the car, moves them soundlessly along the street toward Positron. He turns on the dashboard radio: it’s the Doris Day playlist, again. “You Made Me Love You.” Stan relaxes. That crooning voice is such a safe place for him now. He closes his eyes.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” says Jocelyn softly. She pats his thigh again.
He hardly even feels the needle go in; it’s just a slight jab. Then he’s over the edge of the misty cliff. Then he’s falling.
Positron continues with …
Moppet Shop
In the third installment in Atwood’s latest dystopian thrill ride, the experiment in voluntary imprisonment that is the community of Consilience begins to show its cracks. Stan and Charmaine and thousands of couples like them thought they had signed up for paradise, but increasingly it’s plain there’s a horrifyingly fine line between heaven and hell. And what, exactly, is the Moppet Shop?
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About the Author
Margaret Atwood is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Handmaid’s Tale as well as forty other books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Her most recent collection of stories is Moral Disorder. She has written about utopias and dystopias in In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination. Atwood was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.
Read more of Margaret Atwood’s best stories at Byliner.com
Photograph by George Whiteside
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Positron by Margaret Atwood
Episode 1: I’m Starved for You Purchase this episode
Episode 2: Choke Collar
Episode 3: Moppet Shop Preorder this episode
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argaret Atwood, Choke Collar: Positron, Episode Two
Choke Collar: Positron, Episode Two Page 5