The Transition

by Luke Kennard

  Keston looked at the ceiling.

  ‘Are you there, God?’ he muttered. ‘It’s me, Margaret.’

  45

  IT WAS AN HOUR before his alarm was set to go off, but Karl lay awake thinking about Genevieve’s body. The lightness as she drew away from him, the force as she drew towards him. He thought about her laughter. It was over a week since he’d seen her. He edited their marriage down to a highlights reel. He wanted to write her a letter. He wanted her to appear on the spiral staircase, to climb into the single bed, to roll on top of him. He wanted to say sorry for his ingratitude, his callousness, but already this felt like something he couldn’t tell the actual Genevieve. Actual Genevieve rarely behaved in the same way as his inner Genevieve. She told him, after a year of marriage, you have an idea of me that you’re in love with. When Karl protested, she told him that it was fine. She had an idea of him too. Nobody really wants to know anyone. We have an idea of someone and we get upset when they don’t behave in accordance with it. Karl told her that seemed kind of sad. Oh Karl, Genevieve said, and lit a cigarette.

  But he acknowledged, had always acknowledged, that he was a man who instantly idolised his wife the moment they parted. Actually it was worse: Karl idolised everybody when he wasn’t with them. He longed for reunions, but as soon as he was actually in the same room as his friends the only thing he could think to say or do was to organise the next reunion. I wish we saw more of each other. What are you doing in February? It was a wonder anyone ever wanted to see him. Once at a dinner party in a house Keston briefly shared, Genevieve drank too much sparkling wine with the starter and had to go upstairs to lie down. She slept through the rest of the meal and ensuing party. Keston had found Karl after dinner gazing at an old photograph framed on the wall – a student production of Shopping and Fucking, Genevieve as Lulu. He looked at nineteen-year-old Genevieve, her tied-back hair dyed a shade lighter, a silly self-conscious grin she didn’t really do any more. They hadn’t been getting on for a while and had rowed before the party, but looking at her in the photograph Karl saw a sparklingly charismatic, intensely pretty woman who had inexplicably elected to spend the rest of her life with him. He felt a clap on his shoulder, a squeeze on his collarbone. ‘Oh come on,’ Keston had said. ‘You’re like a monk staring at an icon. Karl, she’s upstairs.’

  She was just upstairs now, of course, in Janna and Stu’s house but further from him than ever. When he had finished dwelling on his love for his estranged wife, Karl rolled out of bed, kicked the square of red carpet which had corrugated in the damp and went to unfasten the drawing pins that held his makeshift curtain over the French windows. His untrimmed nails made this easy. He felt morose. A manila envelope stuck out from under the door.

  The letter was addressed to Mr Karl, no second name, and was pamphlet-thick. He tore it open. There was no covering letter, just a corner-stapled document of several pages. An attached handwritten note read: Karl, I’m doing what I can, okay? I have confirmation that she’s safe and will try to get you an address for the ward. Meantime you need to do what we discussed if you want a bargaining chip. See you tonight. Be strong. Alice x. Karl’s hands shook as he read the report.

  B17 – INCIDENT REPORT

  The alleged took place on the night of ____ and concerned myself, three further delegates from Toronto and the respondent, whose role was to entertain/relax us after a busy and challenging day. Dinner was consumed at an upmarket bar and grill. Two large glasses of IPA were consumed. A wooden plate of beef ribs and skillet of potatoes dauphinoise were consumed. Eight bottles of champagne were consumed. A white, bile-like substance was vomited and a severe episode of the hiccups began which continued for the rest of the night, mocked tirelessly by my party. Hiccups were mimicked, sighed at. An illegal substance offered by the respondent as a ‘pick-me-up’ was refused. Said illegal substance was accepted by two of my party, and one made his apologies and returned to the hotel. A collective level of intoxication beyond the usual was reached and a suggestion of adult entertainment was made in jest but seized upon by the respondent, who suggested a ‘crawl’. A cash withdrawal was made using a company credit card. A turn for the worse was taken. A private dance was purchased in the first club and several comments, commensurate with the party’s relative lack of experience, were made, to the dismay of all involved. Such comments, offensive and taboo in nature, reflected what might be termed a naïve sense of having already transgressed and therefore nothing being, as it were, off limits. The party was ejected from the club and sought another. Eighteen Long Island Iced Teas were consumed. Substance was proffered again and accepted. A further private dance was purchased from three dancers, followed by an unprovoked but not unwelcome level of intimacy between myself and the respondent. The bar was visited but on return to the table the respondent was found to have vanished along with one of my party. The club was searched by myself and a second member of my party. The streets in the immediate vicinity were searched. The second member of my party returned to the hotel. A pulled pork burger from a street van was consumed. Subsequently the respondent was found lying in the road with her feet up on the curb. Horns were sounded by passing cars as they manoeuvred around the respondent’s head, and epithets were shouted from windows. The finger was given by the respondent. The respondent was removed from the road by myself and the remaining member of our party. A heated exchange followed and some doubt was felt as to whether anything might be done to help the respondent. The respondent became violent. A passing ‘stag party’ involved itself in the fray and the respondent was asked if this man (i.e. me) was bothering her. The respondent stated that this was so and followed the group of strangers, linking arms with the interlocutor. At this point the remaining member of my party expressed frustration at the situation and returned to the hotel. Unwilling to abandon the respondent, I followed the group at a safe distance from which laughter, of a somewhat harsh quality, could be heard and these sounds developed in severity such that I broke into a run, finding the group outside an establishment named chicken.com. The respondent had scratched the stranger on the cheek and had been shoved onto the ground. The respondent was helped to her feet by me, following which a punch was taken to the side of the head and the right eye, following which I curled up on the floor and received several light-to-heavy kicks to my sides and back while the respondent screamed. The ‘stag party’ whooped as they departed. A state of sobriety seemed suddenly to have been entered by the respondent and she supported me back to the hotel and the egg-sized lump above my eye was tended to with ice from the minibar. A mutual attraction was felt in the process. A long-term partner was betrayed. Remorse was felt.

  46

  KARL FINISHED READING the report half an hour before Izzy was due to arrive to take him to work. Karl ran around to the front door, rang the doorbell, then struck the knocker, then beat the door with both fists. Nobody answered. He got down on his knees, pushed the letterbox open and put his mouth to it, as if a house could be a giant woodwind instrument and the letterbox the reed.

  ‘Genevieve?’ he shouted. ‘Janna? Stu?’

  The self-drive pulled up while he was shouting.

  ‘Ready?’

  Karl climbed into the passenger seat.

  ‘So, Izzy, Mr Roderick needs me to go to Boar Hill again, is that okay?’

  Izzy sighed.

  The lawn around Lorna and Samphire’s caravan had been trimmed severely. It looked scruffy and yellow. When he knocked, Samphire opened the door and he just had time to notice that she was wearing her white hair down or, to be precise, out, before she flew at him and shoved him back down the stepladder.

  ‘You motherfucker,’ she said. ‘You fucking …’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘You go after my mother? You fucking piece of shit.’

  She punched him several times rapidly on the chest.

  ‘Ow – Samphire, please.’

  ‘Fucking, fucking, fucker.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare her or al
arm her in any way.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Samphire, hitting him on the chest one last time so that he sat down on the bank, wheezing. ‘A court summons!’

  ‘Maybe she’ll end up on The Transition,’ said Karl. Samphire hit him again, sideways and hard enough to numb his upper arm, then she sat down next to him.

  ‘Tell me what you want,’ she said.

  ‘I was confused as to why they’d put an old woman and a teenager in charge of data security, but that was actually pretty convincing.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The reason you’re living out here.’ Karl could feel the warmth of bruises forming on his upper body. ‘I know. The data storage for The Transition. You’re …’

  ‘The caretakers,’ said Samphire. ‘All right, round of applause, Karl. You saw through the whole facade. Except I am actually taking my A levels and my mum is actually a violin teacher as well. We’d go out of our minds with boredom otherwise. I don’t know what you think is so confidential anyone might be interested in it, to be quite honest. But just to be clear, if you weren’t extorting my mother I would be tasering you to within an inch of your life right now and sitting on your pathetic unconscious body until the Transition security arrived.’

  ‘But seeing as I am?’

  ‘But seeing as you are, ask me anything.’

  ‘Where are the banks of computers? Not in the caravan, right? I was told The Transition used advanced technology.’

  ‘DNA data storage is apocalypse-proof, and extremely space-efficient,’ said Samphire. ‘You can fit a petabyte of information on a square centimetre.’

  ‘Where is it kept?’

  ‘You’re looking at it.’

  ‘Where?’ Karl looked over her shoulder.

  Samphire raised her arms and pulled out a single, uneven strand of white hair and handed it to Karl. It was nearly two feet long.

  ‘Every movie ever made,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  Karl imagined taking the strand of hair back to Mr Roderick, presenting it like a sacred relic, waiting for some kind of result.

  He twiddled the hair between his fingers.

  ‘What do you plug it into?’

  ‘You need a DNA reader, silly,’ said Samphire.

  ‘So it’s all … in … your hair?’

  Samphire laughed.

  She led him through an invisible gap in the hedge behind the caravan. Once on the other side he saw that a small, partially sunken World War II blockhouse had been encased in the hedgerow, adapted so that its lookouts were inlaid with shiny black metal.

  ‘I’m a side project, a case study. It’s completely of my own volition and I’m handsomely remunerated. In the future we’ll all have everything encoded in our little fingers, but for now it’s in the bunker. All we really do here is keep an eye on the temperature. Dry, dark place at seven degrees Celsius. One of us signs in and checks every three hours and the temperature is constantly displayed in the caravan.’

  Samphire drew a wire from a box mounted on the door. She appeared to touch it to her tongue and the door slid open.

  Inside, the bunker wasn’t quite big enough for Karl to stand up in. The walls were matte black and three flattish square objects, the size of pizza delivery boxes, were bolted to the floor. One wall contained three screens, two blank, one displaying 6.8°. A low hum intensified.

  ‘The air-con takes up more space than the units themselves,’ said Samphire. ‘To give you some idea, you could store the complete sensory memories of every human being who ever lived in one of those. And we’ve literally had to do nothing other than dust them in a year and a half.’

  Karl bumped his head on the ceiling.

  ‘That’s pretty much it. Any questions?’

  ‘What if I wanted to get something sent out to all of the current protégés, to every tablet? Would that have to be done here?’

  ‘Could be done remotely,’ said Samphire. ‘You’d need one of the parent tabs.’

  She opened a slim metal drawer in the wall and took out a square piece of red glass, roughly half the size of Karl’s tablet. She went to hand it over, then stopped.

  ‘Karl,’ she said. ‘You have to get this back to me as soon as you possibly can. Do you understand?’

  ‘My friend is a really good accountant,’ said Karl. ‘He can make the tax thing disappear again overnight – I promise you.’

  She looked him in the eye then turned and walked back to her caravan and muttered, ‘Fuck off, Karl,’ without looking back.

  47

  KESTON WAS OPENING and closing the yellow capsule from a Kinder egg. Alice was screwing and unscrewing the horn of a small blue plastic unicorn. Mr Roderick sat at Keston’s desk, the red tablet scrolling through numbers and locations. He was wearing a small pair of spectacles and tapped a larger, standard tablet and, occasionally, Keston’s laptop which was linked to both. Karl was pacing from Keston’s office to the kitchenette and back again.

  ‘This shouldn’t take long, Karl,’ said Alice. ‘I know you must be going out of your mind with worry.’

  ‘After a while you get used to being out of your mind with worry,’ said Karl.

  ‘You must want to just run to her straight away. I’ve got eyes on her,’ said Alice. ‘She’s in a private ward, she’s resting. Honestly, once this is done you’ll be compensated for the shit you’ve been through. You’ll be able to name your price.’

  ‘Twenty-two thousand, four hundred and eighty-six users, internationally,’ said Mr Roderick. ‘We can access any individual tab or we can make a global alteration to the system.’

  ‘And then our faces melt,’ said Keston.

  ‘How long do you think you’ll need?’ said Alice. ‘There’s a garage round the corner and I can go and get some supplies if anyone’s—’

  ‘I’ve just done it,’ said Mr Roderick, sitting back and putting his hands behind his head.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘No fireworks?’ said Keston. ‘Not even, like, an emoji of fireworks?’

  ‘How do we know it’s worked?’

  ‘Check your tab,’ said Mr Roderick and hunched forward in anticipation.

  Karl took out his tablet and handed it to Alice. They watched a list cascade from the Past Journals section, a waterfall of disgruntled B-streamers, their identity codes and a red RESOLVED against each entry. Karl hit one at random: a short video diary of a young woman in a surgical mask fastening the glass back panel onto an identical-looking tablet with a tiny electric screwdriver. She placed the tablet in an indented tray of six. Then they opened a document by a man who had been employed to clean rooms at a conference centre in Columbus, Ohio.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said.

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘A party popper, even,’ said Keston. ‘Nobody thought to bring a party popper.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ said Karl.

  ‘We wait,’ said Mr Roderick.

  ‘For the uprising,’ said Alice Jonke. ‘Which could take some time. Maybe I should do a snack run now?’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Keston.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Mr Roderick. ‘The parent tab gives us an alert when the file is accessed. I’ve had confirmation that someone in Albuquerque has opened the journals.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Alice. ‘This is going to be like a general election.’

  They sat in silence for a full minute.

  ‘That’s it so far,’ said Mr Roderick. ‘What I meant by waiting is that we go back to our lives and we wait for the truth to filter through and we never speak of this again.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Keston.

  Karl started pacing again. He made a lap of the kitchenette and Keston’s desk and then stopped in the doorway.

  ‘The red tablet,’ he said. ‘We need to get it back to Samphire before she gets into trouble.’

  Alice drove them, at lurching speed in her small bubble car, Karl in the back and Keston next to her.

  ‘I’ll
stop before we get there and you can walk the last bit,’ she said. ‘No point in us meeting her.’

  ‘That’s sensible.’

  Alice forced an estate car into a hedgerow as she overtook.

  ‘We need to start thinking about any little nudges we can make,’ she said. ‘Roderick’s playing it down, but this is huge, guys. This is like a kettle on an ants’ nest and all we need to do is … That’s not a good analogy. Karl, do you have friends on the programme? Anyone you got chatting to at the meetings? You need to contact them right now – just be like, oh, hey, have you noticed this? You tell a handful of people locally, it’ll spread. Within the hour the map’ll be lighting up.’

  Karl remembered his university friends – Pavel and Sumita – who had given him the copy of The Trapeze. He took out his tablet to compose a suitably breezy message.

  He could hear owls as he walked away from the theatrical glow of Alice’s headlights into total darkness. He looked up and followed Orion’s belt, up and right to the Pleiades. When he reached the gate he momentarily felt that Alice must have driven to the wrong address. But it was clearly the same approach, even in the dark, the same overhanging tree and wedged-open double gate. In the moonlight Karl could see a long, oblong patch of pale, sun-starved grass where the static caravan had been. It reminded him of the area left by the trampoline they had in their garden as kids once his sister broke her arm and their father sold it. To the left, timber and tarmacked canvas had been stacked in a neat pile. Karl made for the hedge and found the gap between the branches which Samphire had led him through. The bunker had been gutted, the metal windows removed. He wiped the red tab with the sleeve of his jumper and dropped it through the rifle slit.

  ‘When did you last see her?’ Alice sat with her legs out of the car, several files open on her tablet.

  ‘Three-ish?’ said Karl.

  ‘Samphire Randles, Lorna Randles,’ she said. ‘Been with us a long time. They’ve been relocated … to … Derby.’