The Living

by Anna Starobinets

  Back then we did not know much about what the experiment was about or what it was for: all sorts of different rumours were doing the rounds. For instance, the pre-pauser who was waiting his turn with us in the corridor kept assuring us that they were going to shine special ‘correcting ions’ on us to cure us. He was a little slow, this pre-pauser, the whole time he kept repeating that after treatment with the ray even in our next reproduction our PTC would be cut in half, then in half again, then again, and so on after every pause – our potential threat coefficient would be halved…

  ‘So, for instance, if my PTC is twelve, then in my next reproduction it’ll be six, then three, then…’ He suddenly wrinkled his brow, and his face started showing signs of intense mental work, then surprise, and then, finally, pure agony.

  ‘There will always be a half of a half left,’ he told us despondently.

  The one from the middle group gave a nasty chuckle: ‘That can’t be. Count again.’

  He himself held firmly to the opinion that they were planning to ‘roll out’ some experimental new features in socio on us. These ‘roll outs’ were indeed carried out regularly, but to Cracker and me it was entirely obvious that they would never have got either the Butcher’s Son or me to take part in that sort of experiment.

  Cracker kept insisting that, whatever the goal of the experiment was, it would certainly put us all on pause.

  I asked him where he got that idea from and he replied in his usual manner, ‘I had a quick look in the cell of that beardy, you know, professor, while he was taking us round that Farm. He’s researching the Five Seconds of Darkness… So draw your own conclusions.’

  Cracker often mentioned, in passing somehow, that he’d ‘taken a quick look’ in someone’s cell. And it was absolutely impossible to tell by his blank face whether he was being serious or just messing around.

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t have taken a look anywhere. They cut off everyone’s socio while we were at the Farm.’

  ‘But I am Cracker. And Cracker can break any password. Cracker can break through any defence…’

  I think, before I continue, I should explain to you who Cracker is. You probably know full well anyway, but just in case you don’t, it will make more sense if I explain. It’ll make more sense for me. I have to understand everything. Cracker isn’t just any old correctee, you know. Cracker is a genius.

  Cracker invented socio.

  Well, not exactly in the form in which socio exists now – the first version was a lot more primitive – but it was Cracker who developed the program which allowed us to get rid of our bi-pads and cerebrons and set up a B2B5 connection without using external transmitters. Cerebral installation.

  Everyone was connected. Mass cerebral installation took place nine months before the Nativity of the Living.

  He could have become a happy, decent part of the Living, my poor friend Cracker. After the Nativity, they invited him to join the Council of Eight with the eternal nickname ‘Founder’. After the Nativity he should have become the heart and soul of the Living, its apostle, its viceroy, its wise defender… But he refused. Cerebral installation coincided with the beginning of the Great Reduction – and this coincidence damaged Cracker’s judgment, ruined his life, changed his invector. The thing is that for some reason Cracker blamed himself. That’s right, he thought that he was the reason for all those wars, epidemics, murders, terrorist attacks… Cracker got it into his head that the cerebral installation developed by him – and applied across the world – had begun the Great Reduction. And led to the birth of the Living.

  How are the Great Reduction and the birth of the Living linked? I guess if you’re already eight you must know: the Living is our Saviour. He came into the world to conquer death. With His birth he put an end to the Great Reduction… You also know that the secret of the birth of the Living is one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. You know that we don’t need solutions or answers, all we have to do is believe that His birth is a life-giving miracle…

  You know all this. Every living knows this… But Cracker – the genius, the creator of socio, the heretic and madman – this Cracker, he turned everything inside out. For him the link between the Reduction and the Birth was obvious – but obvious in a different way, not like it is for the rest of us. He did not think the Living was our saviour. He thought he was a monster. He supposed that the Great Reduction was a sort of gestation period. The period when the embryo is being formed… The embryo, in his opinion, came about as a result of the fusion, and the fusion – you’ve guessed it already – happened as a result of mass cerebral installation. That is to say, Cracker thought that his work had personally brought the Living to life.

  And he also used to tell everyone that the Butcher’s Son was not to blame for his crimes, that the Butcher’s Son was obeying the will of the embryo, and that all his murders were just part of the Great Reduction.

  Nonsense, right? Just absurd. Don’t give it a thought. I just want you to realise how stubborn Cracker was. Cracker carried all this – his absurd sense of guilt, his absurd theory about the Great Reduction, his lack of respect for the Living, his confidence in the correctness of his own ideas – through the centuries, through many pauses and reproductions, through many bodies… And brought it to me.

  He shared his theory with me during therapy on the Available Terrace.

  Have I not told you about the Available Terrace? It was our second secret place, besides the hall with the Son’s chamber in it. Officially it was called the Green Terrace, in the old style, but this magnificent name had not caught on among the correctees, so we just gave it an ordinary name. As silly as this sounds, the Green Terrace wasn’t available-coloured (pink tiles with a black design on the floor, walls made of pinkish glass) – the name, as the warders explained to us, had survived from those distant times when the colours ‘available’ and ‘busy’ had additional symbolic meanings. ‘Busy’ was, for some reason, associated with physical drives (‘passion’) and ‘available’ with nature. In a word, the Terrace was called available because that’s where the terrariums with the pets were. Every correctee had two or three little friends each, which they looked after: the warders thought that insect-therapy helped with correction. We had to feed our pets, clean their cages, change their water, sand or earth (depending on the little friend’s habitat), and, as well as this, according to some sort of unwritten rule, it was customary to chat to them.

  It wasn’t that there was some rule which said we had to talk to them, no, it was just that certain correctees who were genuinely attached to their little friends always got the urge to coo at them a bit; the rest thought that silence would be interpreted as indifference or hard-heartedness, whereas a tender word addressed to a dragonfly or a caterpillar could only be a plus… There was no sound recording on the Available Terrace and the warders only occasionally observed us through the glass walls, but we knew that if we didn’t communicate with our pets the warders would know about it. ‘Get corrected: tell your warder everything,’ ‘Get corrected: help a friend with his correction,’ ‘Correct yourself: don’t hide anything’ – Cracker said that these banners kept flashing up for all of them. Informing a warder about suspicious behaviour is natural. Every word said to a warder can only be a plus. But silence will be interpreted as complicity.

  Basically, there were always correctees milling about on the Available Terrace and their voices – monotonously encouraging, breaking into a falsetto with tenderness, be it fake or genuine – merged with the buzzing, squeaking and chirping of their pets. It was certainly impossible to cut oneself off or get some quiet, and that was why the terrace was our secret place. In the crowd where everyone was saying something to their pets Cracker and I could discuss pretty much anything we liked in a whisper without drawing any attention to ourselves or arousing any suspicion.

  …It was there, on the Available Terrace, something like a week before the experiment, that Cracker unfurled one of those soft li
ttle paper tubes, placed it on the palm of his hand and whispered, seemingly not to me, but to his pet, ‘Take a look, I’ve done a little sketch…’

  Cracker had a big, podgy, slender-legged spider that was the absolute confirmation of the belief that pets resemble their owners. Cracker and he looked alike, they loved each other, they interacted well, during therapy Cracker always used to pick his pet up and stroke his matt, rounded body, and the spider would shiver in bliss. Cracker’s second pet was a snail: a nice, inoffensive creature with touching little twitching antennae, but Cracker despised her and didn’t take care of her properly, and she often got ill and would leave a murky, slimy trail behind her on the glass as she moved.

  ‘…It’s the history of our world,’ Cracker said, seemingly to the spider. Uninterested, the spider trampled over the half-worn little square of paper and wandered higher up Cracker’s arm, towards his elbow.

  On the piece of paper there were a series of rough drawings linked by short curved arrows. I remember it all well. Several separate little men (the scrawled caption: ‘ancient man’) – arrow – a person’s head with a nasty dark dot in the region of the forehead (caption: ‘cer. installation’) – arrow – a small incomprehensible little doodle (‘the embryo starts to form’) – arrow – something like an egg with busy-coloured lines inside (‘growth of embryo = great reduction’) – arrow – a funny many-headed, many-armed monster with a rattle in one of its hands (‘birth of the monster = number of livings becomes unchanging’).

  ‘Throw away that horrible piece of crap right now,’ I said quietly and sweetly, as I would if I were talking to my pet. ‘Get rid of that piece of paper, you poor idiot. Put it in with my termite, he’ll gobble it up in no time…’

  …At first, when I had only just been put in the House of Correction, I looked after a mosquito and a fly. I didn’t like them. The fly annoyed me with her random movements, her inability to concentrate on any specific aims or make a choice. After I fed her her dry feed – little beige balls that had a rich, rotten smell – she circled the cage for a long time, unable to decide which of the little balls to start her lunch with… I didn’t know what to talk to her about, so I normally just told her I hoped she had a nice meal and said ‘no death’. She didn’t feel anything for me either and, unlike the other correctees’ flies, she never sat on the glass between us if I came over. The female mosquito behaved differently: when she saw me she always got notably more animated, she liked my blood and, probably, liked me too. I didn’t get any particular pleasure from contact with her, but I never refused her her pleasure and did what she craved so much: I pressed the back of my hand or my cheek to the side wall of the cage. She acted with tact and care and didn’t take more than two portions of blood at a time. After her therapy two little soft pink raised mounds would be left on the surface of my skin; I rubbed them with a special cream which the entomologist gave me and they barely itched at all and disappeared completely after about three hours.

  After a year Ef said that he was glad that I was taking good care of my two pets. I had shown myself in a good light and now I had earned some encouragement: he would let me choose a third pet myself. Any of the species offered on the Available Terrace, it was up to me.

  Of all the pets on the terrace the only one I really liked was a stag beetle that was the little friend of one of the pre-pausers, and I wanted to ask Ef to bring me one like that or, perhaps, give me that one when his owner temporarily ceased to exist… But instead I announced that I wanted a termite. ‘One?’ Ef asked unpleasantly and I said, ‘Yes.’ I still don’t fully understand why I asked for a termite. Probably just out of curiosity. Or maybe to restore some justice.

  The termite colony was considered the pride and glory of our House of Correction (these insects often did not take to life in captivity); there was a whole special room dedicated to their needs, next to the Available Terrace, weakly lit and full of the smell of plastic and rotten wood. There, in the half-light, in the huge terrarium made of darkened plastic, half-filled with earth, the termite mound rose up. It reminded me of a castle, ravaged by winds and battered by time, built before the Nativity of the Living and inhabited by invisible ancient spirits. To my great disappointment, it was not possible to see the architectural details of this castle through the murky plastic. As for the ‘spirits’ that lived there, the termites never emerged outside, they were always hiding behind the castle walls, and of all the correctees – and this is what I thought was unfair – I was the only one who was not able to see the way they lived. The termites were never looked after by anyone except the staff entomologist: he had installed a lot of mini-cameras inside the termite mound on all the levels and in every section, which were directly linked to the correctees’ socio. So that they could always watch everything live in second layer. I didn’t have socio. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to have my own termite.

  ‘Termites are social insects,’ Ef said then. ‘But I figure that if we give you one, it will be a useful experience for you. I’ll discuss this issue with the management of the House of Correction and the entomologist.’

  They obviously discussed it immediately in deep layers: the staff entomologist appeared about ten minutes later and set off for the termite room. He looked away as he passed me. He looked annoyed, almost angry. The entomologist soon came back, holding a small cylindrical plastic container with a single termite inside. He set it up on the Available Terrace, next to my mosquito’s cage. Still not looking in my direction and twisting his mouth in irritation, he told me that the termite ate cellulose, that the termite was blind and asexual, that the termite could not tolerate sunlight and that the termite was a social insect. He told me everything I needed to know about my new pet. Then the entomologist gave me the feed – a silvery packet filled with damp shavings that smelled of mushrooms and woodland. I asked about the light – wouldn’t my termite suffer in his transparent container on the Available Terrace – and he explained with hostility that the walls of the container were made from a special light-filtering material. Then he left without even saying ‘no death’. I was surprised: before the entomologist had got on well with me and always been pleased with the health of my pets.

  I remember how, after he left, a crowd of correctees gathered on the terrace and swarmed round the container with my new pet – it struck me that the container was a little like the Son’s transparent chamber. I remember they were all silent for a long time, either shutting their eyes or looking round in agitation, discussing my insect on socio. And a correctee with the nickname Foxcub – he was pretty dumb and couldn’t keep second layer well, often verbalising his deep answers – exclaimed in a loud, monotonous voice, ‘Poor soldier!’

  A week later I understood everything: their looks, Foxcub’s outburst, and the entomologist’s irritation, and what Ef had said about ‘a useful experience for me’. The termite that was entrusted to me had been a member of the ‘warrior’ caste in the termite mound. The upper part of his body was encased in a hard brown shell, as if he were fitted out in armour like a knight. For a weapon he had huge sickle-shaped mandibles the same size as the rest of his body – so enormous that they prevented him from feeding himself. He spent the whole week in an awkward defensive pose, his blind, armoured head turned to face me and his back to the termite room, as if he were hoping to ward me off and save his home castle. He ceased living on the seventh day, from hunger, on a heap of the aromatic food shavings which I had, without fail, continued to throw into his container all this time… Cracker said that he had been doomed from the start, my new pet.

  Cracker said that there, in the mound, worker termites would feed soldier termites like that with the contents of their intestines: they would carefully place digested cellulose right into their mouths.

  Cracker said that every correctee knew that, anyone who had watched the live feed even once – anyone, but me.

  Only then, as I looked through the transparent plastic at my unliving pet, did I realise that Ef had, of course,
known in advance how me looking after this termite would end up. And the entomologist knew too – that’s why he had got angry, he had felt sorry for him… Ef wanted to teach me a lesson: loners are doomed. They can’t survive outside the mound.

  They can’t survive outside the Living.

  I learned my lesson well. I felt humiliated, pitiful and helpless, like that soldier that could not swallow his own food. When Ef came to visit me a day after the end of the termite, I couldn’t bring myself to look at him: not because I was offended, but because I was ashamed to see my reflection. And when Ef, in a conciliatory, almost affectionate way, offered to let me choose a third pet again (‘I think you like that stag beetle, don’t you?’) I was horrified to hear my own reply: ‘I would like a termite.’

  ‘You clearly haven’t understood,’ Ef buzzed monotonously. ‘Termites are social insects, you should look after a…’

  ‘A termite,’ I said. ‘Just not a soldier. I want a termite from a different caste.’

  They gave me a ‘nymph’ – a delicate, fragile creature, vaguely reminiscent of a winged ant. Her wings looked like the slender petals of a fantastic translucent daisy. In contrast to the soldier she had a sex (the entomologist, it’s true, didn’t want to tell me which, but I was sure that she was a little girl) and could see. For the first three hours she fluttered about the container full of joy, then settled down on a wall and gnawed off both her wings. Once they had fallen to the bottom of the container they stopped looking like silvery petals, but grew darker and started to look like husks. Her wingless body reminded me of the body of the soldier, except without the mandibles and the armour. She refused food, and I got a bad feeling, and Cracker told me that in the termite mound nymphs like this are also, just like the warriors, fed digested cellulose by the workers. But I tried to convince myself that this time everything would work out. I kept repeating to myself: there are no mandibles blocking her mouth, nothing except stubbornness and laziness is stopping her from taking some food. She’ll get hungry and then she’ll eat… She ceased living five days later from hunger, surrounded by the cellulose, like her predecessor the warrior.