The Living

by Anna Starobinets

  And then, while we’re still in luxury, but after the act, when he’s knackered, happy and trusting, when he is in sleep mode, that’s when I ask him a couple of questions and he answers them. And I note down his answers in a file called ‘Nameless’.

  …That’s what it’s normally like, but this time everything is different. There’s no jungle, no Wastes, no red dress. We stay in my cell and he hovers about stupidly then sits on the edge of the sofa. He’s completely passive, he is expecting something from me – I try to figure out what exactly. I ask him.

  cleo: you want me to do everything myself today?

  ef: yes

  This is a new one. This puts me on my guard.

  I make us some jungle with long, moist plants in all shades of ‘feeling lucky’. I put on a short, ‘busy’ dress… Something’s wrong with luxury. His reaction is paradoxical. I don’t feel any pleasure from his side. He carefully probes an oily liana, covered in sap, with his finger. He cancels it and pulls his hand away sharply when the plant disappears. He turns his face towards me, examines my dress. I can feel the hem creeping downward, the synthetic cloth catching on my uneven skin, tickling my legs. It’s nice… He laughs suddenly. He changes the cut and the colour and the material. Now I’m wearing a long black silk dress.

  So we stand there. Among the lianas, in the bright jungle. He’s obviously not planning on chasing me. He grudgingly, lazily, cancels another couple of plants…

  I say to him,

  cleo: do you want to go to the wastes of solitude?

  ef: lovely name

  cleo: thanks i thought of it myself

  i think it suits it

  ef: yes i like it

  i want to go to the wastes please

  cleo: you want to go to the wastes yourself?!

  ef: yeah

  Finally I realise. He wants to swap roles: not be the torturer, but the victim. He wants to feel what it’s like for me, sick bastard.

  Subject: chain letter

  You want a dog. A real, living dog in first layer. Follow Zero, and animals will love you like they love him

  !warning! this may be spam

  mark this message as spam?

  yes no

  I form the Wastes – I don’t manage to reproduce it absolutely accurately, I can see myself that certain details are missing, but overall it’s the same. He looks around with interest, he likes his new role. I say ‘wait’ and leave him there for a thousand days.

  Where does he normally go when he leaves me here alone? I don’t know; personally, I create a fantastic little house for myself with a swimming pool on the roof. And there on the roof I install a telescope pointed at the Wastes of Solitude… I lie in the water, my arms and legs thrown out like a starfish. Hundreds of ticklish streams envelop me like cold, restless tentacles. I enjoy the touch of these tentacles. I enjoy the sensation of weightlessness. And I like the fact that I have a hostage. From time to time I get out of the water and observe him through the telescope.

  He’s sitting on the ground, his head in his hands, rocking slightly from side to side. He looks despondent. He doesn’t try to change anything, or cancel it or reconfigure it… I enjoy the feeling of power. I like keeping him there. I say to myself: it’s not like I’ve got a cruel streak. Far from it. I’m full of mercy, like any part of the Living. It’s just that luxury is designed to excite my pleasure centres.

  On day three I get bored and I just wind forward a couple of weeks – just for me – hoping to discover some interesting shifts in the Wastes. I look through the telescope: what I see exceeds my expectations. The Wastes are not there anymore; in their place is a river with muddy banks overgrown with brown shrubs. Ef is sitting by the river, leaning back on some sort of dark formless heap which I can’t make out. He holds his face in his hands, something about it has changed, but for the first few seconds I can’t figure out what. Then I realise – his pale skin is showing through his fingers. He’s taken off his mask. For the first time in all this time he’s taken off his bloody mask.

  I cancel my little house with the swimming pool and the telescope. I delete the thousand-day waiting period. I can’t miss this. I go up to him, squat down next him, and carefully take his hands from his face.

  He doesn’t resist. His face is the face of a child, but it’s changing constantly. He seems like a twelve-year-old boy, then an eighteen-year-old girl, then a complete baby. He has full, disconsolate lips and eyes the colour of bitter chocolate. He’s crying.

  I suddenly see what the shapeless heap he’s leaning against is. The body of an elephant. The elephant is not alive. The beads of tears have frozen in his dull amber eyes.

  You get the feeling that Ef is weeping for this unliving elephant. You get the feeling that he can’t control his metamorphoses. The only thing which doesn’t change in his face is the expression of grief. He’s whimpering quietly and inconsolably, almost to the point of tears. His shoulders are shaking. They’re so broad, they don’t fit at all with his swollen, fluctuating child’s face.

  Something’s wrong with luxury. I don’t feel any pleasure anymore. I feel like I’m hurting a child’s feelings.

  I say to him,

  cleo: ef, what is it, ef, calm down!

  His chocolate eyes open wide, and he looks at me in shock: it seems like he’s only just noticed that he’s not alone anymore. His face freezes – somewhere between eight and twelve, then rapidly starts to mature, simultaneously becoming overgrown with that familiar mirrored encrustation.

  ef: you left me here on my own

  cleo: you’ve done that to me lots of times

  ef: awful feelings. i was scared like when i was a kid.

  like i was of the five seconds of darkness

  cleo: why that elephant?

  ef: i don’t know. i wasn’t feeling well

  He hurriedly cancels the elephant.

  cleo: tell me, how did Zero die?

  I can physically feel his mistrust.

  ef: why do you want to know?

  cleo: everyone wants to know. natural curiosity

  ef: you’re lying

  cleo: you’re insulting me

  ef: i can see right through you

  cleo: and what do you see?

  ef: a ray

  cleo: ?

  ef: the directed leo-lot ray

  From surprise, almost as a reflex, I become inviz. As if an invisibility cloak will protect me… He smiles. He reaches out his hand and calmly feels my invisible face. He kisses me politely on the forehead with his mirrored lips, and silently, without saying goodbye, leaves luxury. I’m left alone. I feel fear pouring down me in icy streams, all over my body, and it’s like it’s coming from the place on my forehead which he touched with his lips. The Leo-Lot ray… He’s figured it out. Of course he’s figured it out. He is going to destroy me. Lock me up in a House of Correction until the end of time.

  Only in luxury can fear be so thrilling. Somewhere by my solar plexus the streams of fear get warm and pour down past my stomach in thick, hot waves… I decide to stay on in luxury for a little while to enjoy this feeling of fear.

  It’s not like I’ll get any pleasure from it when I’m out of luxury.

  The Scientist

  Document No. 23 (leaseholder’s private entry) – access through SPO guest entry

  3rd September 451 A.V.

  Yesterday I visited the regional Farm with a group.

  I don’t like going out to the Farm. Two trips a year would be, I know, an unrealisable dream for most people, but personally I prefer working in the lab. I’ve never asked Lot if he likes it at the Farm: we rarely discuss things that aren’t directly connected to our project, but a few times I’ve noticed something in his expression, something… like disgust. So I think that he’s also less than thrilled about these trips.

  It’s all about fear. You can sense it from a few kilometres away, in your nostrils, in the pores of your skin and in your hair; the air is saturated with fear, like an electric sh
ock, and there are no words to describe its nightmarish essence. The closer you get to the Farm, the more the fear thickens, until, finally, it turns into a warm stench cloud which is very easy to describe – the evaporated fumes of animal urine, animal blood and sweat… We wait by the gate in the wall. It’s made of concrete, four metres high and half a metre thick. I can’t imagine that any of the animals here would suddenly take it on themselves to try to get over this barrier – but nevertheless, according to the Farmer, there have been incidents where their instincts stopped working, and, as they tried to escape, cows and goats hit the wall, ramming into it on the run, again and again, until… until it was all over. So now as well as the wall they’ve installed an electromagnetic barrier too.

  We wait for the Farmer to let us in, he turns off the electromagnetic barrier for a short time and opens the gates.

  And lets us onto the domain of death. The domain of the mortal.

  Lot and I always tell the correctees that these visits are part of their nature therapy. Studying nature, contact with living creatures unlike ourselves is an ancient form of relaxation. An extremely effective method for persons with destructively criminal incodes: it helps them develop empathy for the weak. Promotes kind thoughts. Creates a good constructive background… That’s what we always say.

  But it’s all lies.

  In actual fact we bring the correctees to the Farm to arouse entirely different emotions in them. Persons with DCIV are often inclined to perceive an animal as a potential victim (which can be explained by the fact that the animals fundamentally behave like victims), which is to say, an animal is, in this case, a PIA – a potential incitement to aggression. We test the correctees for cruelty. We want to know to what extent the cruel tendencies of those that gave a positive result last time round have progressed in half a year. And whether any such tendencies have emerged in those who reacted negatively before.

  For thirty minutes the correctees have the opportunity to observe the animals through the metal bars. The correctees are sure that their socio has been switched off for the duration of their visit to the Farm. We tell them that this is necessary for their therapy to be maximally effective, so that they are not distracted from visual contact with the animals in first layer. This is true to a certain extent: the correctees can’t be distracted from first layer – we block all the signals going in. But second layer is active. We record all the signals coming out in second layer. We calculate their potential threat coefficient, PTC, in this specific situation and determine the nature of their reaction to a PIA.

  So that I will understand later on, I’ll list a few examples.

  The standard signals for a low PTC are like this:

  ‘a real chicken!’

  ‘the goat is ugly’

  ‘the pig isn’t pink like on the pictures, but dark-inviz’

  ‘it’s lucky i’m in the house of correction, other people don’t get to go to the farm’

  ‘the dog is drooling’

  ‘after the pause i’m going to tell everyone i saw a real live horse’

  ‘i heard that before the nativity of the Living people and animals were friends’

  Those are negative reactions to a PIA.

  With an average PTC we observe transitional reactions. Characteristic for this condition are the following signals:

  ‘why do they squeal like that?’

  ‘what is death?’

  ‘i wonder if they know that they don’t get reproduced?’

  ‘the Living is stronger than these creatures’

  ‘of course, they’re afraid of the Living’

  ‘i heard that before the nativity of the Living people killed animals, cut them up into pieces and sold them in shops’

  ‘when i was little i was given little boxes of meat made at this farm. i wonder if the Farmer killed the animals himself, or whether some machine did it, or if the animals stopped living by themselves?’

  High PTC, examples of positive reactions to a PIA:

  ‘squeal, squeal, squeal, squeal louder!’

  ‘i wish they’d let me grab that bunny by the ears’

  ‘tear off their fur…’

  ‘if i cut off the tail the blood would flow for ages’

  High PTC, examples of maximally positive reaction:

  ‘i want to strangle the dog’

  ‘i want to throw stones at them’

  ‘i want to tie the pig to the bars and jab it with a stick’

  On contact with the animals some correctees produce mediated signals as a reflex action. They tend to be quotes from the Book of Life or from various educational and developmental programs:

  ‘the cow gives milk’

  ‘snoring horses, groaning sheep’

  ‘time runs by and night descends, we can’t help our little friends’

  ‘the Living is the friend and protector of the animals’

  ‘for the cats and for the deer, for them all the end is near’

  ‘our poor unfortunate brothers’

  Mediated signals prevent us from accurately determining the nature of the reaction to the PIA. In the absence of other signals, we classify this reaction as transitional, but we take into account that it could also belong to either the negative or positive type.

  The above is just a short professional digression. I’m trying, as I did in my previous reproductions, to pay a little attention to scientific aspects. I hope that at eight years old digressions like this will be interesting and useful and help me make my choice of specialisation…

  Now I’ll go back to yesterday’s visit to the Farm.

  Lot and I had brought a group of fifteen correctees. Among them was Zero – the very same. The person with no incode. I don’t know if I was expecting something special, but he turned out to be a completely ordinary eleven-year-old boy. Nothing remarkable about his appearance: in the evening when I went through what happened I tried to imagine him and I couldn’t. I only got flashes of different fragments of his face, like pieces of a picture in third layer that’s not loading. A lock of dark hair on his forehead. Narrow hazel eyes. Frowning brows. It was his first visit to the Farm.

  He kept himself apart from the group, but when people talked to him his reaction was entirely friendly. Lot and I registered only one vaguely positive signal from one of the teenage correctees (naked tail like an earthworm if i cut it off i wonder if it would crawl off or not), the majority of signals were standard (rats are gross) or mediated (before the nativity of the Living rats lived in people’s houses and carried all sorts of diseases).

  From a distance of several metres correctee Zero looked at the rats with something like interest, but what real conclusions can you make about someone when your only basis is observation in first layer?! Zero is not connected to socio. As a part of the Living, I realise that this is correct. I recognise the full extent of the danger of connecting him… But as a scientist I’m full of regret that I don’t have the chance to observe his behaviour in deeper layers… With all my respect for the Council of Eight’s decision, by not connecting Zero to socio we have, in essence, turned down a chance of understanding him, and, consequently, of controlling him.

  Then we let the group get up closer to the cages. The rats, as always, shrank back against the back wall, huddling together into one huge tangled ball, which trembled, squeaked and bit at itself. Several wounded rats fell out of this ball onto the bottom of the cage and at that moment froze and curled up, paralysed by fear. Then one of them convulsed and ceased living. None of the correctees, luckily, understood – we didn’t register any signals of alarm, for the most part they thought that the motionless animal was ‘tired’. Except perhaps Zero… if anyone might have guessed what happened to the rat, then it would have been him. He looked at it, only at it, with an expressionless stare. Even when everyone else went over to the cage with the cows, he stayed standing there. I called him over but he didn’t even turn round – I had to lead him away by the hand. His hand was cold and damp, and I
barely managed to put up with touching it. At that moment the thought struck me that I’d missed something important. Something was wrong, not how it should be, when he was standing there and looking at the rats. Something was wrong with the rats. I led him by the hand and tried to think about it, but disgust stopped me concentrating and the thought slipped away.

  I realised what was going on only when we got to the dogs.

  I know: what is a dog? Something very different from the creature whose image opens along with the file ‘Ancient domestic animals’ after you have had A Living Childhood installed. Something very different from the thing I can download in a socio-game. One ear hanging down sweetly, the other standing up, its face tilted to one side inquisitively, the shaggy tail making circles in the air… That’s just a reconstruction. If you believe the documentary evidence that has come down to us, this is more or less what a dog looked like before the birth of the Living. I repeat – if you believe it.

  Real dogs are different. Gruff beasts with bared teeth, ears sticking close to their heads, wrinkled noses, and lumps of dried foam around their dirty mouths. And the stink of them. I can’t imagine how once they could have lived in houses, how mankind managed to breathe the same air as them… After visiting the dog cage we always give out special respirators to the correctees, but even they can’t entirely block out the unpleasant odours… For this reason correctees rarely go up close to the cage. Zero went up close.

  He went right up to the bars, and then I, at last, realised what was going on. I remembered that ball of rats, which had fallen apart and crawled off in different directions when that little boy had been left alone with them. I remembered the cows and the pigs – so subdued and quiet (before I hadn’t thought that they were even capable of being silent). I looked at the dogs… They were not afraid of him.