by Guy Salvidge
“I know it is, but far out.”
“Don’t stress, I know these people,” Rion said. He had known them once anyway, or at least some of them. He’d barely known Callum.
A noise: the crunch of feet on gravel. The front door burst open, causing them to start, but before they had time to raise their shotguns in defence they were set upon by three pistol-toting men who kicked the shotguns away and booted Rion in the ribs for good measure. The men were unshaven, bleary-eyed and not one of them looked at all friendly.
“Who the fuck are you guys?” one of them said. “Nobody’s gonna get a bullet if they don’t try nothing.” Barely out of his teens, the speaker was a thin youth wearing a sweat-stained singlet.
“I’m Rion and that’s Vanya,” Rion said, his hands raised. “I’m from East Hills.”
“Bullshit you are,” one of the others said. He was a mean-looking mongrel with a shaved head and tattoos all down his arms. “Never fucken seen ya.”
“Yeah, I used to live on Fielding Street. Went down to the city a few years back. Lived in East Hills my whole life before that though.”
“Yeah, fuck off. You cunts are with that faggot police force, aren’t ya? What about you, fag boy? Can’t you speak or nothing?”
“I’m Vanya,” Vanya said.
“Yeah, that cunt just said. Where are you from, faggot?”
“Just from the city,” Vanya said, looking away.
“And you thought you’d come for a fucken trip, did ya?” the tattooed man roared. “You know what we do with fucken police faggots like you cunts? Do ya?”
The third man spoke for the first time. He was tall, menacing, and he had an ugly red scar down one cheek. “Nah, I remember this one now. He’s not a copper.”
Rion looked closely at the scarred man’s face and felt a twinge of recognition. “Tim Kennedy?” he ventured.
The man nodded and lowered his pistol. “Aren’t you gonna ask me what happened to my face? Every prick does.”
“To be honest I didn’t recognise you.”
“Yeah. Someone tried to fuck with my daughter but I fucked him up first, but not before he got in a good one on me. Just missed my eye.”
Rion searched his mind and retrieved a name. “Is Eleanor okay? She must be around ten now?”
“She’ll be ten in April, that’s right,” Tim said. “Yeah, she’s good.” Tim’s colleagues fidgeted, perhaps disappointed that the opportunity for making mayhem seemed to have passed. “Look,” Tim said, extending a hand to Rion. Rion got up. “Nobody gets to come here unless the Yew Boys say they can.”
“Maybe we can ask them?”
“Yeah,” Tim said, deliberately scuffing his foot on the floor. “But I dunno. It might be better for you two to just fuck off back where you came from. We’ve got those bluesie cunts making trouble for us in East Hills and everyone’s nervous. Callum and his crew bailed out of there and then you show up.”
“Blue faggots,” the tattooed man hissed, stepping closer, his boots crunching on broken glass.
“We’re not running from the blue boys,” Rion said. “We did see them though. Nah, we’re actually running from the federal police, not those local jokers.”
The youth laughed. “What did you do to piss off those cunts?”
“I was at a place called Yellowcake Springs when someone attacked the reactor there,” Rion explained. “The cops were after me but I got clear of them. I’ve been in Perth for a few years but now they’re onto me. I had to get out. I was working at the hospital with my mate Vanya here and he came along.”
“Feddies after you too, are they?” Tim asked Vanya.
“Nah, state police,” Vanya said. “Just possession and stuff.”
“Right,” Tim said. “I heard all about that shit at Yellowcake Springs. I took Rion here there myself one time, didn’t I? Rock solid story, guys. Doesn’t sound like one bit of bullshit at all.”
“If the Yew Boys don’t want us here, we can clear out,” Rion said. “I went back to East Hills but the place is a graveyard. The pool’s full of corpses. That’s the only reason we came here. I didn’t know where else to go.”
“The Yew Boys might not be too happy to have the Federal Police on their case as well as the boys in blue,” Tim said. “They might decide you’re more trouble than your runty asses are worth. Maybe they decide to hand you over to the feddies, if they come looking for you here. Nah, just quietly, I think you guys might be fucked.”
“Let’s see if anyone remembers ya first,” the tattooed man said. “Plenty of East Hills crew around here.”
“I remember you now,” Rion said. “You’re Taylor. You had a brother called Kyle but he’s dead. You probably won’t remember me. I used to steer clear of you guys. I did help to knock off that goods train, though. Remember that?”
The tattooed man nodded. “You’re that little poof that used to live on the southside. Used to hang out with that old lady, what’s her name?”
“Lydia, that’s right,” Rion said, ignoring the insult. His mouth was dry. “I looked for her in town but I couldn’t find her. Did she come here with Callum and that lot?”
“Nah, she’s croaked it,” Taylor said. “Well past her use-by date, that one.”
“Do you know what happened?”
Taylor frowned. “She your mum or something? Nah, I heard she pissed Callum off or something. You don’t ever piss Callum off. A lot of people carked it in East Hills recently, not just her.”
“I see,” Rion said.
“All right,” Tim said. “It’s too early to go see the Yew Boys now; they won’t be up yet. It’s a good thing that you ran into us first. And here’s me thinking that these night patrols don’t do any good.”
“Now you get to have a nice rest on a soft bed, not on the fucking floor like that,” Taylor said. “We’ll even take those heavy packs off you and those shotties as well. How good is that?”
Rion and Vanya were stripped of their possessions and led out of the house onto the dawn street. In this light, Rion could see that this part of town was all but abandoned. It reminded him of the streets he’d grown up on. The road followed the curve of the river, past an old stone church that looked more or less as it would have looked a hundred years before. There they crossed the riverbed next to a fallen footbridge. The children’s play equipment was just a handful of rusted spirals sticking out of the sand. Rion saw the grand old buildings of Yew’s main street up ahead, but now they were ushered toward a house on the street adjacent, next to an alleyway. Tim knocked on the door.
“Got some fresh meat for you, Frank,” Tim said to the fat man who opened the door to greet them. Then he turned to Rion. “That’s a joke.”
“Yum yum,” Frank said, rubbing his belly and winking at them. “You two look like you haven’t slept a bit. Come on in then.”
The place stank of piss and Rion soon saw. The bedrooms had been converted into cells with metal bars on the doors and windows.
“You’re lucky we’ve got a couple of free rooms right now,” Frank said, “or you’d have to bunk up together.” He opened a door and shoved Vanya through into a cell. Frank bolted the door and opened another one further down the hall. Rion sidestepped the big man into the room before force could be applied. “Here’s a keen one,” Frank said, shutting him in.
A dirty bed and a mercifully empty toilet bucket.
Chipped walls covered in decades of graffiti.
Rion went over to the window and saw through the bars that the sun was peeking over the ridge of hills in the east. Soon it would be a furnace in here. He lay on the bed.
5. Dreams of Waking
Jeremy had been dreaming and now he dreamed of waking to a terrible new day where the sun shone red and malignant. There was a pain in his chest and it expanded through his body, filling every ounce of him. He thrashed around in his blindness, injuring those around him and those he professed to care about. The illness was inside him, radiating from his core, exposing every fi
bre to its ruinous glow.
“I’m a sick man,” he moaned and the words reverberated through his cells, morphing them into corrupted facsimiles of their former states. He would soon boil away to nothing against a backdrop of engorged and pulsating stars. He would be vanquished if he could not gather up the strands of him and weave them back into a coherent whole. But as he bent to collect himself, the strands burst free of his grasp like hissing vipers.
“Pull yourself together, Jeremy,” Grand Director Li said, his stately voice occupying every corner of this demented doomscape. The scene shrivelled and was replaced by one more stable-looking, but no less ominous. Here Jeremy sat on a stool, his legs shackled and chained, in a vacuum. Li’s weathered face reared up before him, the old man’s mouth opening as if to speak, but the face grew to an impossible size and Jeremy knew then that the Grand Director intended to consume him. As the space between Li’s teeth enlarged or came closer – there was no frame of reference to tell which – Jeremy went to lift his hands to his face but found them manacled. The mouth closed around him and all was formless darkness again.
Here he floated for some indeterminate time before Li deposited him onto a featureless plateau beneath an empty sky. On the plateau Li built a huge manor and he populated it with chefs, servants, concubines, visiting dignitaries, guards, advisors, children and grandchildren, the old and the young, various household animals, Jeremy and finally the world-builder himself. The two men reposed on leather chairs in Li’s grand study, its walls adorned with thousands of books. They sat with glasses of port in their hands and cigars between their lips. A log fire crackled in the corner of the room.
“Welcome to my home,” Li said, puffing on his cigar. He was dressed in a silk dressing gown and a veil of smoke hung between them. “What do you think of it?”
Sipping at the rich fluid, Jeremy felt it envelop him, replacing his blood. “It’s wonderful,” he replied, “but I’m confused.” He put the smoking cigar in the ashtray on the coffee table.
Li smiled. “I’m not surprised. You thought I was dead, didn’t you? Or vacuum-packed into some cold half-life? Now you can see that it is yourself who is only half alive, marooned out there in the allegedly real.” He took another puff and the end of his cigar glowed red. “The only reality is this. You can be a slaver or you can be enslaved. You thought yourself the former but you were in truth the latter all along.”
“I still don’t understand,” Jeremy said. “I thought you were going to tell me about Controlled Waking State. Isn’t that what this is?”
Li laughed. “You’re under my control, you think you’re awake and you’re in quite a state. Is that what you meant? You bore me with your inanities, Jeremy. I’m an old man and I don’t have a lot of patience.” As Li spoke, the patchy white hair on his head sprouted, multiplied and darkened. The lines of his face retreated and he sat up straighter, his chest broader. “So, Controlled Waking State. We tried it at Yellowcake Springs and it worked fine for a while. But the subjects didn’t last. They burned out far too quickly. We’ve fixed that now, more or less.”
“And the Fearless Six? I must ask you about Yang Po and what happened to them.”
Li frowned and put down his cigar. Now he was a skinny youth. He knocked back the rest of his port in one gulp, wiping his lips with his wrist. “Yang Po did a clever thing. An immoral thing perhaps, but clever. He destroyed the evidence.”
“And yet you know. You promoted him.”
Li was a child and the gown was much too large for him. “When the Great Criminal attacked the reactor on June First, I asked Yang Po to tie up any loose ends. I didn’t specify how he should tie them up, so he used his initiative, which I’m afraid is more than I can say for you.”
“I see,” Jeremy said. “Sir, I must report that I cannot seem to get any closer to resolving the matter of Robert Given’s death. Furthermore, someone has hacked the Security system.”
Li was around four years old and his scowl was a distasteful thing. “And you call yourself the Director of Security,” he said, struggling to pronounce the longer words. “I’m very disappointed.”
The chair was empty and the cigar sat smoking on the table. Jeremy looked around but little Li was not hiding anywhere in the room. He walked over to the nearest bookcase. Selecting a slim, hard-back volume with a red spine, he opened it at random and read from the middle of the page:
You’re finished unless you squash that protest march, Jeremy. I want a clean resolution, no media frenzy and no bodies. If you can manage that, then I will continue to overlook your numerous failings. Really, you’ve made an awful hash of things, but the main goal remains: nullifying the protesters. Manage that and I don’t care who or what you drink and fuck.
He turned over but the next page was blank, as was the rest of the book, including the page he’d just read when he turned back to it. Replacing the volume on the shelf, he reached for another but found it to be completely devoid of text. He didn’t need to try a third to understand that he’d been dismissed. He walked over to the door and turned the handle. Instead of seeing the rest of the house that should have been there, he saw a featureless white void. He braced himself and stepped into it.
First nothing and then the relief of quotidian sensations: his own respiration; a light beyond the thin barrier of his eyelids; not manacles, but Velcro straps pinning his hands to his sides. He’d dreamed of waking and now he woke for real, inside the Controlled Dreaming State booth in the corner of his office at the Eye.
The situation seemed stable, the office apparently unchanged, and yet he remained uneasy. He felt certain that he was still a slave and not a slaver. He unstrapped himself, climbed out of the booth and took a few small steps across the plush carpet. He heard nothing except for the hum of the air-conditioner and the low buzz of his computer. Standing before the mirror, he saw his rumpled shirt and unshaven face. The clock on the wall told him that it was after four and there did not appear to be anyone here. He could see a line of empty cubicles through his open door. According to the computer it was Saturday 8th January, 4:14 pm. He sat down at the desk scratching his head. Why was he here on a Saturday? Had he come into work for half a day and stayed longer than he’d intended? Or had he been in CDS since yesterday? Impossible; his bladder wasn’t full and his stomach wasn’t empty. His staff wouldn’t have left him here alone.
Was he still in CDS?
He walked out into the warren of cubicles in search of a sign. He picked up a diary organiser from a random desk and opened it, but the words written there held no special meaning for him. He sat down at a desk with a view of the Amber Zone boulevard below. Nothing moved out there; not one person, not one automated bus.
He peered out at the profound wrongness of the scene, his heart sinking. Had the town been evacuated again, leaving him, the Director of Security, to go down with the ship? He got to his feet, his heart labouring, and somehow he stumbled back to his office. He opened the desk drawer and reached for the whisky bottle. He pulled it out, but the fluid in the bottle wasn’t whisky. It was clear: either vodka or water. Unscrewing the cap, he sniffed. Water. He drank a glass anyway, water being marginally better than no drink at all.
“Think,” he said aloud. “Either you’re still in CDS or something terrible has happened. Which is more likely?” It seemed more likely to him that he was still in CDS, so he went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. It didn’t alter anything.
He tried to recall the conversation he’d had with the Grand Director, but now the details were hazy. Seven words resurfaced in his mind: We’ve fixed that now, more or less. Fixed Controlled Waking State? If so, could it be used here somehow? Might he not turn it to his advantage? Now he knew where he should be: Yang Po’s barracks where the CWS trial had been held.
He saw no one on his way down to the Eye’s basement, not even the cleaners, but it no longer bothered him. His chest still hurt but he paid it no attention.
His private flitter sprang t
o life as he approached. He got inside and charted a course for the nearby barracks. Nothing moved at street level except for the flitter, but he paid the empty scene no heed. His mind worked feverishly at bringing a new scheme into being. The flitter deposited him near the entry to the barracks and he hurried across the hot pavement to the reception.
The doors slid open, revealing a familiar elderly gentleman standing behind the reception desk. “Ah, Jeremy,” the Grand Director said. “You aren’t entirely stupid then!”
“Did I really have to take the flitter over here, sir? And can’t we do without this heat?”
“It’s all for effect,” Li said, dismissing the grievance with a flick of the wrist. “If I can stand it, then so can you. Look at me: I’m standing on my own two feet, aren’t I?”
“But then this must be Controlled Waking State, for what life do you have left in the real world, sir, if you’ll forgive my impertinence?”
“You are forgiven. In answer to your question, I have very little life left, which is why I prefer to take my pleasures like this. I could be a young man here if I wanted to, but I think my advanced age lends me a certain gravitas, don’t you think?”
“So you spend all your time in CWS, sir?”
“Every moment, although for me the boundary between waking and sleeping has now lost its meaning. But as you can see, I still have my wits about me even if that’s all I have. Come.” He gestured for Jeremy to follow. “You recognise this place, don’t you?”
“It’s the barracks where the CWS trial was held,” Jeremy said, following the Grand Director through a network of corridors.
“Quite right. These are the very halls those brave men inhabited as they pioneered this technology. Indeed, you walk these halls yourself, right now, and yet for you it’s as though you’ve just set foot in here. Amazing, isn’t it?”
“And where are you, sir? Not walking alongside me?”
“Alas, no!” Li said, slapping Jeremy on the back. “I wish I was, but that frail, vestigial thing I call my body will never walk again, as you yourself have long suspected. Indeed, it may never leave its crypt. But I’m not complaining. Here I can be free of the slavery that is old age.”