by Daniel David
Zoe stepped in from the balcony and headed to the hub in the kitchen, waving her hand eagerly as she approached.
“Mum?” she asked softly.
There was a pause, this was normal as each new entity or system change took time to populate across the servers.
“Mum!” Zoe called again, this time with a firmer tone.
“Hi sweetie,” Sarah's voice finally came back to her, “How's life?”
“Ah, Mum!” Zoe made a come here gesture with her fingers, inviting Sarah to holler and she obediently cast in front of her.
Zoe gasped involuntarily. She had seen this a thousand times, maybe a hundred thousand times, but seeing Sarah appear gracefully in front of her still contained a magic that made her eyes widen and her skin prickle.
“You look beautiful,” she said after admiring her for a moment.
“I feel beautiful,” Sarah said, looking down her arms and examining her hands. “You know, you read so much about it, talk to so many people, but nothing quite prepares you for the feeling. I feel, perfect.”
Sarah beamed an enormous smile at Zoe, who was still staring awestruck at her. Zoe reached out her hand and slowly cut a wide arc through Sarah's middle and gave her a gentle smile.
“I saw you got your registration sorted,” said Sarah.
Ten seconds, Zoe thought. Ten seconds as a whole new entity before Sarah was back on the “doing the right thing”, “getting ready for migration” circuit. Her gaze dropped to some random patch of floor in the middle of the room.
“Yes. Next Monday at 11am, it's all done.” It came out sounding more flat than she had meant it to.
There was a silence between them, an unexpected impasse as they both stood opposite each other. It was Zoe who broke it.
“So, was everything OK? How did it go?”
“Yes, it was fine. Only took a few minutes and, well here I am!”
“What have you been doing?”
“Everything, sweetie. Just everything.”
Zoe reached her hand into her again. She knew what would happen, but felt compelled to do it anyway.
“You look great, Mum,” Zoe dropped her arm and glanced back out of the window, before checking the clock on the wall. “I might take a lie-down,” she said, “I feel really exhausted after today. Do you mind if we catch up a bit later?”
“No problem. I'm proud of you sweetie,” Sarah smiled warmly at her. “You're going to do so well.”
“Thanks Mum.”
“I might go back to the beach!” Sarah giggled.
“Ha, OK. Love you, Mum,” and Zoe brushed her away with a flick of her fingers.
Silence descended on the room again, bringing the sound of her breathing up into Zoe's ears. She glanced around at the empty chairs and spaces, feeling a little lost for the first time in this tiny home, before setting off down the hall to her room, her shoes squeaking a little on the vinyl floor.
In her room, Zoe lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling as it blushed at the touch of the early evening sun. She thought of Sarah standing on some digital beach somewhere, waves of code washing over her simulcrum feet. But most of all, she thought about her plan. Zoe's plan had been years in the making, she had dreamt about it every night for as long as she could remember, had pieced it together carefully through hearsay and darknet research. Now she had two days to get it done. Two days to get out of the Metropolis and into the Outland Forest, before her no-show on Monday morning would set the Drones out looking for her.
There was no law that stopped anyone from going beyond the wall, but any kind of pro-physical radicalisation was jumped on by teachers and councillors, ever since the failed uprisings in the early years. There were initiatives to spot those at risk and education and care programmes that supported individuals and whole families, whilst the benefits of migration and the failures of the physical world were stressed and re-learnt. If none of that worked and you still wanted a life beyond AarBee you were eventually timed-out, immediately evaporating your rights and access to any services. Once that happened, if you made it beyond the savannahs you were lucky. So Zoe had kept her escape plan a secret and instead turned it over and over in her mind for years, ever since she had found the note.
She’d found it completely by chance a few weeks after her Dad had disappeared, an old movie poster folded up and stuffed under her bed. It was a picture of a man and woman kissing in the middle of the street in some ancient town. They had faint smiles on their puckered lips, and they leant over their young child who sat on an old bicycle in a white utility suit and hat, gazing up at them. “Life is Beautiful,” it said, and in faint blue pen he’d written “Never forget x” in the bottom right corner. She never knew whether it was meant for her or just happened to be there, but the words had haunted her ever since and fuelled an insatiable desire to discover more of life than apprenticeships, credits and AarBee. She had tried to find out about the film, to watch it even, but it was one of the hundreds of thousands of things lost forever in the Great Corruption thirty years before she was born. Regardless, she had known from the moment she found the poster that someday she would leave and today was final confirmation that she had to go.
She loved Sarah, but she didn't want to be like her. Sarah had been there for her without condition when her Dad had disappeared, she had given Zoe everything she needed to navigate the path away from that dreadful day, but Zoe hated that she had let him go so easily, that she hadn’t gone looking for him, that she hadn’t asked questions, that she had let all that pain come down on them both without a fight. She hated that she had spent the years afterwards just trying to make it to migration, with a crappy job, a low-level apartment and an empty bed. She hated her for giving out all the love she could have ever needed and she hated herself for taking it. Sarah had given every bit of herself away to earn the right to do it for eternity. Zoe couldn't be like her.
She called for the time and mouthed the four digits that floated above her, before turning silently back towards the window to measure the fading light. Zoe had picked up a day pass for the Vac earlier on, so as not to get held up in the terminals. She would get the 7pm train, which would get her out of the Metropolis and to the last terminal on the line just after 9pm. It wouldn't be too dark then and there would be other trains coming and going until midnight, so she wouldn't attract any attention. Then she would cross the parks and wait behind a small power substation she had found, until the dark shrouded her escape route.
She tucked her hands under her head and let her mind wander into her future. She imagined wide open spaces and forests that smelled of tree sap, groups of attractive young Lifers, just like her, sat around fires drinking spirit and laughing as they told stories and stupid jokes. Couples kissed whilst others danced and, on a spit above the fire, rabbits were roasting as the smoke flavoured the mountain air with the sweet taste of adventure.
Lifers. She had heard so many stories but never met any, not one. Well, apart from Richard that is. When she was ten, her second cousin Richard was nineteen and about to get his implant and start his Higher Apprenticeship. He was a high achiever, stronger and smarter than all of his peers and set to join Regional Enforcement, the most prestigious apprenticeship you could hope for and a recruiting platform for the Drones. But he never did. Four days before his induction he vanished and, after the first few days of panic, was never spoken about again. His family and friends talked about abduction and then secret missions, but Zoe knew where he really was.
She had met plenty of Ghosts, but they weren't really the same. Ghosts were the remnants of the first generation of Migrants, those that had decided not to go over, with their numbers made up by the unfortunate few who timed out. There used to be thousands of them, but now age, sickness and violence had whittled their numbers down to almost none and they had an almost mystical – though not sacred – place in Metropolitan life.
The Drones left them alone, spending their efforts instead tracking down the young refusers and bringin
g them into line. Lifers were a threat to AarBee, but the Ghosts were nothing. As invisible as their name suggested, they were a memory of a life that didn't exist anymore. AarBee knew that a wholesale round up and cull of the Ghosts would only stir up anxieties and fear, doing more harm than good, so it just let them die.
Without civic housing, work or credits, the Ghosts that remained in the Metropolis found what comfort they could sleeping in the dark spaces between the towering apartment blocks and the malls. They begged on the street corners for food and kindness and lived in fear of thrillseekers. The rest had disappeared into the wilderness beyond the big cities and the farmlands, to the empty savannahs, mountains and outland forest where they took their chances with wild animals and ‘Safaris’.
Zoe jumped out of her daydream with a start. Somehow forty minutes had drifted by in the briefest dream and it was already time for her to set off. She changed her clothes, putting on a navy blue utility suit and reached under her bed for her backpack. In it was a raincoat, some new underwear, a torch, a bottle of water, some basic provisions and energy pills, a length of rope and a knife. She took out the torch, flashed its ultra-bright beam twice against the wall and put it back. Then she unfolded the knife, scratching her thumb cautiously over the gleaming blade, before stowing it in the front pocket.
As she stood up, she glanced at the hub by her bed and for a second her hand reached out towards it. It blinked at her twice. Waiting. She paused and stared hard at the small black box, then with a deep sigh dropped her arm and walked out of the room and the tiny apartment, letting the door close softly behind her.
The corridors and lobbies of the block were clean and odourless, making the dusty and hot Metropolitan air intense and deliciously sweet as she stepped through the threshold into the dusk. In the fading light of the side streets, shadows scurried for somewhere safe to disappear, whilst on the boulevards bright spotlights flickered on to light up the vendors as Holler advertisements threw great arcs of liquid colour up the sides of buildings.
Once Zoe had turned the corner from her apartment block, she ducked into a side street and found a quiet corner behind a waste processor. The air was cool and still, rich with the stench of rotting food and urine. She pulled a small matchbox-sized tub from her pocket and took one small metallic straw from inside. These were the stems that had taken her six months and a fair amount of risk to come by.
Zoe quickly jabbed the back of her left hand with the stem, waited a few seconds for the anaesthetic to work and then inserted the other end into the vein which traced a faint blue line from her wrist to her index finger. She squatted down and held her arm down by her side and allowed the slow trickle of blood to drip onto the floor, taking with it the ident nanobots that had been circling her body since she was a baby. She would do it again at the border, to be sure they were all out, but this would at least drain most of them. The clock was ticking now. When the bots ran out of power they would send their location to AarBee and the Drones would come to investigate.
When she was done, Zoe drew out the stem, snapped it in half and threw the pieces into the waste processor. She wiped her hand with a tissue and headed back onto the boulevard, heading downhill towards the Vac terminal. The atrium was as busy as she'd hoped and Zoe slipped through the gates with the evening crowds and onto the train that would take her to the borders.
The compartment was packed, filled with apprentices heading home, groups of friends heading out for the night and layer upon layer of Hollers circling around and overlapping. Zoe tried to relax but felt her guilt with every casual glance, and couldn't think how to look like it was just another Friday night. As she bobbed her gaze from floor to faces, scanning intermittently left and right, she noticed a familiar silhouette that made her stop dead and a hot flush of adrenalin prickle across her face. It was Sarah. She had her back to her but both her shape and manner were unmistakeable, talking enthusiastically to a woman in her late twenties at the far end of the carriage.
Zoe immediately dropped her head, finding cover behind a tall boy who stood to her left, but once she recovered from her start, she found herself slowly peeking around his shoulder to watch. The fear of being spotted was riding high in her chest, but watching Sarah again, an excited Holler no doubt gushing with the joys of her new world, was so enticing she couldn't keep her gaze away for more than a second.
When a seat became free behind her she sat down and continued to study this new Sarah, who had so unexpectedly invaded her deviance. She chastised herself for not having even considered that this might happen and, as her curiosity waned, thought about what to do now.
She couldn't get off the train, it would completely mess up her timings. Plus she'd have to wait at the next station for 40 minutes which, now that she thought of it, could be just as risky. So, when a tall boy sat next to her at the next stop, she put the hood up on her utility suit, smiled at him sweetly and put her head on his shoulder. She knew he would be wondering what on earth she was doing, but also figured that if he was shy, or liked it, he wouldn't say a word.
She was right. For stop after stop Zoe rested on the boy’s shoulder with her eyes firmly shut, whilst he sat dutifully still, not wanting to wake, or perhaps annoy her. The temptation to open her eyes and look back up the carriage was immense, but she knew that he would most certainly move at that point, perhaps blowing her cover, so she had to stick it out.
A good three-quarters of the way through the journey the boy finally whispered, “Excuse me,” in Zoe's ear, gently shaking her hand and Zoe performed the best surprised waking up and apology she could manage. The boy offered a “not a problem” when he stood up and held her gaze for a moment, but Zoe stared off down the carriage and he took this as his cue to go. Sarah, mercifully, had gone. Zoe let out a huge sigh of relief, which she turned into a yawn for the benefit of the handful of passengers left, brought her feet onto the seat and cuddled her knees. For the first time, she felt the power of being an outsider, a rebel, free and unaffected.
After another few minutes Zoe reached the final stop and as she walked off the train and onto the end-of-the-line platform, was pleased to see a good few people still around, just as she'd planned. She dropped her hood back down and tried to look breezy, walking purposefully out of the station and away from the flats and stores, towards the fading light of the park.
Tramping over the damp evening grass, the air temperature dropped a little, clinging in tiny droplets to her eyelashes and making her zip up her suit to the top of her neck and throw her hood back up. It was quiet here. The hiss of transit and the clatter of people replaced by nothing, as she took a pause to look back at the lights of the Metropolis that pulsed and flickered on through the silence. She stared excitedly at the distance between her and everything else, feeling the butterflies dance in her tummy, before swinging round and continuing her trek.
The parks were huge spaces, beautifully manicured by the apprentices to surround every urban cluster with elegant expanses of perfection. They reminded users of the sophistication of life after AarBee and that the wild and untrustworthy nature of the wilderness could be tamed, or at least shut out. Kites swept the area regularly to look for anyone straying too far from the edges of the Metropolis, particularly after dark. Zoe had done her research though and tonight she had a two-hour window, to travel the nine miles of open parkland to the shadows of the power plant, before another sweep came through.
As the ambient light faded further into darkness, Zoe's legs began to cramp a little with her pace. The backpack bounced awkwardly on her shoulder blades and the acrylic weight down her back made a patch of sweat above her hips that chilled each time the evening air brushed over it. The rhythm of her feet pounding over the dew lulled her into a determined trance. Every now and again she would stop and shake out her arms, re-centring the backpack along her spine and twisting the torch to stop it prodding her. The night sky was a sumptuous purple velvet blanket now, which undulated languorously with every passing cloud. Stars
emerged shyly here and there, and the silhouette of the power plant slowly grew a black shadow on the horizon.
She ran the last few hundred yards, her legs begging her not to, but the mix of excitement and fear that she would be discovered this close to her goal compelled her to run at top speed. She reached the building with a satisfied slap on its smooth carbon walls and rested her forehead on her knuckles as she regained her breath. She felt a sense of triumph at this first planned victory, as happy that she had finally done it as she was to have made it this far.
Recovered, Zoe ducked around the far side of the building and rummaged in her rucksack for the box with the last stem in it. It was much darker than she had thought it would be, so after carefully taking it from the box, finding the vein in her other hand was tricky. She needed light, but there was no way she could risk turning on the torch. Peering back around the side of the building, she spotted the faint red light coming from the biometric scan by the side door. It wasn't much, but it would have to do.
Zoe left her rucksack where it was and crept back around to the building, jabbing her hand with the anaesthetic as she went. She would have to be quick, it wasn't safe hanging around on this side. So as soon as she reached the door, she stuck her hand under the light and scanned for her vein. She pumped her fingers a few times and when it bulged up, stuck the stem in. She couldn't have gotten the anaesthetic in the right place, because this time it stung as the stem pushed in. The blood came though and she dropped her hand to let the last few bots run out.