GLAZE

by Kim Curran

  He steps through the doors and collapses to his knees. I drop to mine and help him place Zizi on the floor beside us before wrapping my arms around his neck, ignoring the pain in my shoulder and jaw, or his sticky skin next to mine.

  I don’t know how long we stay like that, him with his hands tangled in my hair, pressing me into his chest, me with my arms wrapped around him so tight I don’t know how he can breathe.

  I hear an exaggerated cough from behind me. ‘Getta room,’ Shank says.

  We unravel ourselves and I try to pick Zizi up. Ethan takes one arm, I take the other, and we pull her down the corridor, the tips of her bare toes bent back on themselves, leaving a black trail on the floor.

  Once inside the flat, we lay her on the sofa, her head resting on a tatty pillow. Her hair is matted with dried blood and her skin is paler than I’ve ever seen it. I know I should get her to a hospital. That I have put her life at risk by taking her away from WhiteInc HQ. But I need her here.

  Leon gives her the briefest of looks, as if having an unconscious woman in his flat is a perfectly normal occurrence, then strides over to Ethan and pulls him into a tight hug. There’s none of the usual bravado of boys hugging, no handshakes or shoulder bumps. Just emotion.

  Ethan lets out an oof, then returns the hug.

  ‘When did you get out?’ he says, when Leon finally lets him go.

  ‘They let me out for Logan’s funeral. And I decided not to go back.’

  ‘You skipped?’ Corina says.

  ‘Let ‘em come and get me. Besides, I only had a month left. You think they’ll try and find a juve like me when they’ve bigger badasses on the loose? Like your girlfriend here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ethan says.

  ‘Max’s pumped Glaze full of nasty stuff about Petri being a killer,’ Corina says. ‘That’s why those people wanted to skin her alive.’

  Ethan shakes his head. ‘I’ve seen people angry, violent even, but that was something else. It was like they weren’t human any more. Like they were possessed by something.’

  There’s no hiding from the truth anymore. ‘They are.’ They all look at me. ‘It’s the chip. It’s controlling them.’

  ‘What? That’s not possible. Is it?’ Leon asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ethan presses his hand against the cut on his head. ‘I heard stuff at T-Raz about that chip making people do things. But I thought it was the kids using it as an excuse for stuff they wanted to forget they’d ever done while inside.’ Ethan turns to Leon. ‘Did it ever tell you to do anything?’

  ‘Not really. Eat your greens, don’t do drugs, you know? The usual crap.’

  ‘Look, I hate Glaze. More than anything,’ Corina says. ‘And sure he’s controlling the information. But actually controlling people?’ She shakes her head. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I could see it in their eyes,’ I say. ‘You too, Ethan. When you tried to strangle me. I should have known then. But I so wasn’t ready to see it. You had that same look as the man who tried to kill me earlier.’

  ‘Whoa!’ Leon says, holding up his hands. ‘You tried to kill her? What happened to all your pacifist bull?’

  ‘I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t mean to,’ Ethan says, looking at the red stain on his hand. He probably needs a doctor too.

  ‘What do you remember?’ Corina asks.

  ‘Not much. Rage mostly. So fierce it felt like it bubbled up from my soul.’

  ‘I wonder if this is what Logan found out?’ Corina says.

  ‘One way to know for sure.’ I turn and look at Leon. ‘Have you got Logan’s headset, the one he used to ghost ride his dog?’

  ‘I’ve been inside for the last three years. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It’s a black headset, with five wires coming out of it, and a set of glasses.’

  Leon walks over to a box by the door. ‘You mean these things?’ He pulls out two sets of headsets. ‘VR headsets? We used them as kids to play games. I was about to throw them out.’

  ‘That’s them.’ I take the sets off him and start to untangle the wires, sitting next to Zizi.

  ‘And what’s this all got to do with sleeping beauty here?’

  ‘I’m going to ghost ride her.’

  Corina lets out a sigh of approval. ‘Clever. Do you think it will work?’

  ‘No idea. But I can try.’

  I place the headset on Zizi’s head, pushing her hair out of the way of the receptors: it’s grown since the attack. The second set goes on my head and I plug the wires into each to each other. I pull the glasses on and everything goes black.

  ‘I really hope you’re still in there, Zizi. I really need your help.’

  I twist the dial on the headset controllers one tiny notch at a time. At first, it’s just static. Chatter begins to form out of the noise. I recognise the voice. It’s the actor from Corner Office. Her one indulgence. I recognise the monologue he’s giving about being seduced by power. It’s one of her favourite episodes.

  I’m on the right channel. Now, I need to push in. Like when I had the chip and I would reach out with my mind searching for the connection. It’s harder, like wading through thick weeds, but I can sense her there, waiting.

  ‘Petri?’ her voice is faint at first and I use it to guide me in. ‘Petri?’

  ‘I’m coming, Zizi!’

  ‘You can hear me? You can actually hear me?’ There’s panic and excitement in her voice.

  ‘Yes, keep talking. I’m coming.’

  Through the glasses I make out images of gardens and rooms with people sitting on their own doing nothing. Then I’m in a dark space, with nothing in it but a single, flickering screen. It’s playing an episode from Corner Office.

  A digitised Zizi stands in front of the screen, wearing a blue kimono. ‘Petri?’ she says. ‘Is it really you? I can hear your voice but I can’t see you. What’s happening to me, Petri?’

  ‘A virus was released on to Glaze.’

  ‘But how? The network is suppose to be hacker proof.’

  I couldn’t tell her that it was because of me. ‘It doesn’t matter how. Only that it happened and it sort of fried people’s brains.’

  ‘Everyone?’

  ‘No, just some people. About 40. We don’t know why.’

  She spins around, her kimono flapping. ‘Thirty-six? Was it 36?’

  ‘Around that. Thirty-seven, I think.’

  She gasps, her hands fluttering to her mouth. ‘I warned Max something like this would happen. I said we weren’t ready.’

  ‘What, Zizi? What did you warn him about?’

  ‘Thirty-six. That’s how many people were in the beta for the upgrade. On November fifth we were running some tests to see if we could release the upgrade automatically across the whole system. I assumed that was what caused the problems.’

  I stop, letting this information sink in. It was the upgrade that did this to people. Not Logan. Not me.

  ‘Thirty-seven? Who the other one would be, I don’t… Oh, no,’ Zizi says. ‘Your friend Kiara. I got her an early upgrade too. Please tell me she’s OK?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One of the new features of the 2.0 system was it balanced out brain chemistry. The early studies had very impressive results with test subjects suffering from depression. I’m sorry, Petri. I was only trying to help. But I was so selfish. I wouldn’t let you on, because I was already worried about what it was doing to people. And yet I thought the risk was worth it with your friend. I thought it would help... Grace will never forgive me.’

  ‘Zizi, slow down. You’re not making any sense.’

  ‘There was a report that landed on my desk … how long have I been here?’

  ‘Nearly three months.’

  ‘No,’ she staggers back. ‘But it only feels like hours.’ She takes a breath and steadies herself. ‘This report, it showed that over time the chip started to affect people.’

  ‘Change them?’

  ‘Yes. In ways
we hadn’t predicted. Made some of them more aggressive, while in others it made them more susceptible to suggestion. Max brushed it off. Said the data was anomalous and proved nothing. And yet he wouldn’t share any of the studies with me. I knew that was a very bad sign.’ She looks around, her eyes searching for me. ‘I’m so sorry, Petri. I should have explained why I didn’t fight for you in the police station. But when Detective Lee suggested a blank, I thought I’d been thrown a lifeline. It bought me some time to work out what was really happening.’

  ‘You were going to help me?’

  ‘Of course, Petri. I would do anything to help you. Although, I’m not sure what good I can do from in here.’ She stares around her, peering into the darkness. ‘I’m in a coma?’

  ‘Sort of, I guess.’

  ‘It explains a lot. But one thing it doesn’t explain: how are you here?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of ghost riding?

  ‘You’re piggybacking my signal? Why?’

  I’m hit by a wave of fondness for how clever my mother is. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘It’s going to take more time than I have to explain, but I had my chip hacked and was on Glaze—’

  ‘Petri!’

  ‘I’m not now,’ I say, cutting her off. ‘But someone slid me some information. Information I think might help us understand what’s happened. But now I’m disconnected I can’t get it.’

  ‘I think I understand. You want me to help you find it?’

  ‘Yes, can you do that?’

  ‘I can try. What username were you registered under?’

  ‘Petra Finn. Petra with an A.’

  The scene from Corner Office vanishes and is replaced with a blur of images: faces of girls and women whizzing past. It stops on a single face and a name. ‘Petra Finn.’ The girl bears a slight resemblance to me: the same nose, same chin maybe. But the rest is pure Photoshop.

  ‘That’s it!’

  ‘Max built in a back door, so that only he had remote access to the system,’ Zizi says. ‘He doesn’t know I know about it. He thought having biometric encryption would keep the network safe but he didn’t take into account that even DNA is just a string of code in the end.’

  I look at the image of Petra, whoever she is, as a chain of numbers appear under her name. Zizi breaking Max’s encryption. She hadn’t been lying about her hacker past then.

  The image of the girl I pretended to be vanishes and is replaced with a list of files. I scan them. There are messages there from Ryan that I don’t ever want to look at, messages welcoming me to Glaze and standard spam stuff. There’s a folder tagged with Logan’s name.

  ‘The file named “Logan”. Can you open that?’

  A second later the file opens up. In it there are two folders. One’s called ‘The Message’. The other has a long string of numbers as a name.

  ‘Open “The Message” first.’

  An animation of a skull surrounded in flames fills the screen. Its jaw bounces up and down, like a puppet, as a computerised voice speaks. ‘We have a message for the citizens of Glaze. It is time to wake up. You have been asleep too long. And while you have dreamt, the people you appointed to rule—rule your countries, your corporations, your schools—have been laughing at you. Laughing while they stole your money. Laughing while they robbed you of your potential. You dozed, happy and content in your mass apathy, while around you they stripped the world of its assets. Selling the very ground from beneath your sleeping heads.

  ‘No more. The time has come for action. We are here to pull you out of that sleep. To show you the world as it really is. We have seen the truth behind Glaze. And it is time for you to see it too. What you do with that truth is up to you. But unless we make changes now, there will be no hope for tomorrow. There will be no future.’

  The message cuts out.

  ‘What was that?’ Zizi asks.

  ‘That wasn’t the message you saw on bonfire night?’

  ‘All I saw was the screaming skull. And it was so terrifying, Petri, I can’t even begin to explain. But that… ’ She tilts her head. ‘That was by those hackers, wasn’t it? The NF?’

  Logan’s message must have become twisted when it went out. The true meaning of it lost in the broadcast.

  ‘Yes, they were my friends.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘I don’t have time to explain, Zizi. Can you open the other folder.’

  She does. This one is packed with data. Videos, text files, formats I don’t recognise.

  ‘That’s all the data on the upgrade,’ Zizi says. ‘Although, I’ve never seen some of these files before.’

  The next file, a video clip, opens up and starts playing.

  The image is grainy and black and white. A young woman is sitting in a chair in a white room, dressed in a hospital gown with a WhiteInc logo on it. She’s singing softly to herself.

  A disembodied voice from off screen speaks. ‘Test number 72.’

  Keyboard keys click. The woman in the gown changes. She stands up and charges at the camera, her teeth bared and hands outstretched. She slams into what I assume must be glass, through which all of this is being filmed, and scratches at it. Desperately trying to claw at what’s behind it.

  The voice speaks again. ‘Interesting.’

  Another click of keys and the woman changes once more. She’s calm. Happy again. She steps back from the window and smiles, her eyes glinting. She reaches up a pale hand and begins to undo the buttons of her white gown, revealing a deep cleavage.

  ‘OK, that’s quite enough,’ a voice I recognise only too well says. ‘Move on to the next test subject.’

  And the video ends.

  ‘My god,’ Zizi says. ‘What was Max doing?’

  I think I know only too well what he was doing. T-Raz all over again. Only this time, he’s gone even further.

  The expression on the girl’s face as she tried to claw her way through the glass is exactly the look I saw on the faces of the people outside. The question is, how?

  There are more videos. More files. Zizi flicks through them as I instruct her. I can’t bear to look at any more of the videos, so I stick to the data, the reports.

  Words jump out at me. Susceptible to suggestion. Primitive responses. Shows no resistance to exterior control.

  The last file is a simple image of the chip. One I’ve seen a hundred times before on the WhiteInc site and in all the materials about Glaze. A small white triangle with two micro-thin strands. One that plugs into the visual cortex, pumping images straight into the head. A second that connects to the aural cortex, for sound. Only I look closer this time.

  ‘There’s a third strand,’ I say.

  ‘But there can’t be. The nanotech is programmed to produce only two.’

  ‘Seems like Max had other plans,’ I say.

  ‘Trinity,’ Zizi says in a whisper. ‘The bastard. That was what he called Glaze at the start. Trinity. I told him the religious connotations would make it unpopular. But it was there all along.’

  ‘But what does the third strand do?’

  ‘It goes straight into the amygdala by the looks of it,’ she says.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s the part of the brain that controls our emotions. Pleasure, fear. If Max managed to send messages that deep into the brain—’

  ‘He can control anyone with a chip.’

  Zizi turns away from the screen, her hands covering her face. ‘How could he? How could he?’ she keeps saying over and over.

  ‘Is there any way you can download this somewhere? Somewhere I can get it?’

  ‘I could slide it to someone on Glaze?’

  ‘No. It has to be outside Glaze.’

  ‘I have a private folder, hidden away on old server. It’s where I store files I want to keep secret. You’ll be able to access it via any terminal.’ She gives me the location and password to access it. I repeat it over and over in my head, hoping my way with numbers won�
��t abandon me now.

  ‘OK. Do it.’

  I watch as the file flies across the screen to another destination.

  ‘I have to go now,’ I say.

  ‘You’ll come back, soon, won’t you?’

  I stop. I’ve spent my life lying to my mother and it seems she’s been pretty good at hiding things from me too. ‘If I can.’

  ‘I love you, Petri. I know I haven’t said it enough, and God knows I’ve not shown it. I was always so busy with the job I lost sight of what really mattered. Having you was the best decision I ever made.’

  ‘I love you too, Mum.’ I want to run to her. To hug her at last. But she’s not here. This is only a projection of her. An avatar. The real Zizi is lying on a couch not even able to move.

  I force myself to lift up the glasses, taking my mother away with it. I’m blinded by the light in the flat.

  ‘Did you get it?’ Corina asks. ‘Did you get Logan’s message.’

  ‘I got it.’

  ‘And?’ Ethan says.

  ‘And it could destroy Max.’

  32

  I FILL THEM IN ON WHAT LOGAN found and I give Corina the instructions on how to access Zizi’s server.

  She digs through crates piled up in the corner and plugs Logan’s equipment back in. After a few minutes, she has a jury-rigged terminal set up and she’s found the files.

  They all gather around the screen and watch what I’ve already seen. But I can’t bear to look at it again. I stare out the window as the darkness comes in.

  Max said that the change in people had been a natural side effect of being on Glaze, but there was nothing natural about it.

  It started with the information: he was honest about that at least. Glaze fed you the information you cared about, and nothing else. To give you a better, more personalised experience of the world.

  ‘Why bother giving people information they aren’t interested in,’ he used to say. ‘We filter it for them, so they only get what’s relevant to them.’

  Relevance was everything. The only thing that mattered.