by J. P. Smythe
Polly’s flesh is torn from her prosthetic. I can see the cylinders working in it, the liquid metal sluicing up and down inside transparent tubes as she twitches her fingers. Her shirt is torn as well, ripped away at the chest. I see scars there—exposed, faded, but the tops of the letters that I once watched her carve into her own skin the day she killed her predecessor, the day that I killed my mother, still remain.
Her name isn’t Polly. I don’t know if it’s ever been Polly. I don’t know if that was her name before she became leader of the Lows—before she became Rex—but I know it doesn’t suit her. She’s Rex. Nothing more, nothing less. And she’s alive.
Rex says something, something that I don’t hear. I get closer because I want to know. I don’t care if Gibson sees me now. Some of the other prisoners—that’s what we are—have crept off their duties to watch this. I’m not scared of Gibson and I’m not scared of Rex.
I’ve already killed her once and I can do it again.
“Let me go,” she says. Her voice sounds calmer than it ever did on Australia. Her hair has been cut back in the crudest way, hanging at different lengths. I can see cuts on her head from where she’s mangled her scalp. She looks different than when we were on Australia. Softer. They must have tried to treat the scars, to whittle them away with lasers. They were too deep, I think. Too much a part of her.
I think about rushing forward, taking her by surprise. Pulling a striker from the holsters on the backs of the wardens and slamming it into her face.
But I don’t have a chance. She doesn’t see the guard who’s crept up behind her, she doesn’t see the fizz of the striker as it slams into the back of her head. She convulses, vomits, collapses to the floor. The other wardens rush forward, Gibson stamping his foot excitedly, running his hands through what’s left of his hair. She’s dragged off, vomit and spit trailing from her slack mouth. She knew that something was wrong here; that she wasn’t the person she was being turned into. Something of Rex survived. She killed people I loved, tried to take everything away from me, and came so close to succeeding. She was ruthless and cold; the worst person that I have ever known. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work, why she didn’t become Polly—the rot was simply set too deep inside her for it to ever be cleaned out.
She looks at me as they pull her away. She looks right at me and I know that she recognizes me as well. And something else, something deeper. A shared understanding that we are not meant to be here.
TEN
Gibson asks me to tell him about my day, but I ask him about Rex—about Polly.
“What happened?” I ask. He pours himself a glass of water.
“You want some?” he asks, gesturing at the bottle.
“Yes, please,” I say. They’ve taught us good manners here. That’s the first thing they try and get us to learn. I can’t show any signs of slipping now. He hands it over: chilled glass, chilled water. It’s immediately slippery in my warm hands.
“Polly is a difficult case. Do you understand what we’re trying to do here, Chan? I mean, really do. How this works?” He sits down and he drinks from his glass, half of it gone in two gulps. He wipes his mouth.
“You want us to be productive members of society.”
“I’m a doctor,” he says. “I’ve always been a doctor. That’s what I wanted to be from the minute I knew that there was a way to help this world. So that’s what I try to do. There were attempts to deal with criminals before this, you understand.” That’s the first time anybody here has used that word—criminals—to describe what we are. No, what they think we are; how they treat us. He must notice me react to this—something passes across his face so quickly that I almost miss it. I want to say that I’m not a criminal. I haven’t done anything wrong.
“Crime can’t be tolerated now. There’s not enough room in the cities and I mean that quite literally. So we need solutions. This is one.”
He brings up a screen. “Show Brain,” he says, and a picture appears: a lump of something organic, swirled in patterns, like a maze. “This is what’s in your head—in everybody’s heads. And it controls you: all your desires, your fears, your hopes. It develops over your life, and sometimes that development is . . . stunted. There are crucial points—toddler, teenager—where external forces can alter the brain’s growth, changing who you are becoming. That can make you more susceptible to other external forces. It can make you selfish. But we need to make sure everyone understands that it’s not all about you, never is, never will be. Living life in our society is about the people around you, the people who brought you up, the people you’ll bring up. It starts with your home. Do you know where you lived?”
“No,” I say. I wonder what happens to the brain when it’s lying.
“It wasn’t a good place. It wasn’t. I can promise you that. You can choose to believe me or not—but know that I wouldn’t lie to you. We tell you the truth. No sense in us not. What happened to you . . .” He drinks the rest of his water and he holds the empty glass in between his hands, cradling it, swirling the last few drops around the bottom of the glass in a spiral. “There’s a theory, in psychology. The idea of nature versus nurture—one is what’s inherently inside you (your genes, the things that make you who you are) and the other is the external influences I mentioned. So we’re here to see that the nature doesn’t win. You’re genetically predisposed to being a criminal, Chan. You can’t help it. Your ancestors did terrible things and there are triggers, signifiers inside you, that say that you will follow their path. You’re what the people who came before you made you. The environment that you grew up in only made that worse. So here, we change that. We get rid of the only nurture that you’ve known, replacing it with something new, something that can—cross your fingers—balance out the nature part of you, the part that cannot help who you are on a base genetic level. Does that make sense?”
I nod. I don’t know why he’s telling me this. He’s only ever been vague before. He’s telling me all of his secrets, all of the things that go on behind the scenes. That’s a phrase that Ziegler taught me. He took me to see a play on our third meeting, a performance in a park. He said it would help me understand the city a bit more, what people in it are like, what they value—art, music, life itself. It was a comedy hundreds and hundreds of years old. A man dressed as a donkey (“An ass!” Ziegler said, explaining the joke, explaining the dual meaning) and fairies and magic—all set in this world, a world that I barely understood. But I didn’t get it. Before it, I saw the actors in their costumes; when it had finished, one of them spoke to the audience to thank them for coming. That’s not the real world. That’s a story and nothing more. There’s nothing behind it. It’s a lie. Ziegler told me that everything in the city is a lie, really; behind the scenes of everything we’re told is make-believe—layers upon layers of pretense in the stories we tell or that we are told.
Layers of lies.
As he speaks, I know that Gibson is wrong. I’m not a bad person and my mother wasn’t a bad person. Most people on the ship were not bad people. They were trying and they were surviving. My father was a bad person however, but he wasn’t from Australia. I never knew him. He was nothing to me. I survived Australia and it made me who I am. And that’s what Gibson wants to take away from me.
He can’t. I won’t let him.
“This program,” he says, “is hugely important. We don’t have the space in this world for people who can’t contribute. Do you understand that we cannot sustain the lifestyles we used to live? Can you believe that we used to pack our criminals into prisons, into fortresses, huge concrete castles where we isolated those people we saw as a threat? We didn’t try to help them, or work with them, or make them better, or discover what went wrong with our own society to keep it from happening again. Instead we locked them up. Some people even got locked up on spaceships. Can you believe that?” He examines my face closely as he says this. Does he know? I am careful and give away nothing.
“We sent them into space to o
rbit the Earth, and then . . . Well, then the collapse of everything here happened and we forgot about them. Can you imagine that? What it must have been like, growing up there?” I look around his office for a way to escape. There’s the door and the window. What happens if I run? What happens if I’m chased out of here, into the desert? How long could I survive? “One of those ships landed. It came from a country far away but it landed here because we’re the only place that still has the program active that would guide it back to Earth. That country doesn’t even exist now, so the people the ship brought to us . . . They became our problem. Some of them were beyond saving, but some of them? I knew we could make them better. Give them to me, I said. I can revise them. I can fix them, turn them into constructive members of society.”
“But what if they didn’t need fixing?” I hear myself saying, my voice small and quiet. I could hurl myself through the window. I’d probably have a minute before they were onto me. The guards, maybe I could outrun them. They’ve got vehicles but I could hide. Do they have birds? I haven’t seen any—doesn’t mean they’re not lying dormant somewhere for a worst-case scenario. Ziegler would tell me to be careful, to come up with a plan before I rush into anything. But I haven’t got the time to make a plan. Back on Australia, I would have improvised. Taking the time to plan something was time that would get you killed.
“They did,” he says, “oh, they did. Everybody needs fixing. Even I do. We all have baggage, Chan, but they had so much . . . Some of them weren’t able to be saved, like I said. And that is where we come to Polly. She was up there on that ship—came to us scarred and broken, barely even human as we understand it. And we have tried, but there’s something about how ingrained it is with her, how deep her rot runs. She’s been here six months longer than you and we’ve barely cracked her. We’ve removed what she remembers, but how she wants to act? Her drive? That’s exactly the same as it was before. When we brought her here she was nearly dead, yet she still found the strength to fight us. Bit us—she had no weapons so she used herself. We clamped her jaw until she calmed down.” He puts the glass down on the table between us, right next to mine, so close that they’re touching. “Do you want more water?”
“No,” I say. I can feel my fists balling. I remember this feeling—the tension welling up, needing to come out. The desire to act.
“Did you recognize her?” He swipes away the holo of the brain. “Show Polly A,” he says, and her image comes up between us. Or, images—her now, as she looked outside: frantic, her hair torn, her skin scratched and broken. And her when I last saw her, when we landed here: the marks on her face from our fight, her eyes lolling backward, looking dead or as close to it as a person can be while still breathing. And then a holo of her at some point between then and now: hair, clear skin, tight lips, wide eyes.
“How long have I been here?” I ask Gibson.
“Half a year, give or take. Some patients fight really hard against the help we offer. Your friend Polly, for example.” He rolls his sleeve back, to show me the scars of a bite on his forearm, thick indents that must have gone so deep they drew blood. “And she’s still fighting. Not you, though. You didn’t fight at all. It was like you gave yourself up to us as soon as you arrived. Like you were relieved to have us take your memories away. But then, you were tired. You kept telling us that, how tired you were.”
“I still am.”
“And yet you haven’t been sleeping.” He puts his hand to his mouth, covers it. Rubs his chin. “You remember her? Polly, I mean.”
“Yes,” I say, and I realize that this was never the comfortable normal conversation it was presented as. This is a trick, an interrogation.
I won’t need a plan. I’m going to have to act now: take my chance, stick with it.
“You knew each other,” Gibson says. His voice is calm and controlled. There’s sweat on his brow. Most of the time here, sweat means you’re hot. Not this time. Now, this is him being tense. “You came from the same place. I gathered, from what you told us when you arrived here, that you even had some . . . conflict.”
“You could say that.”
“One of the worries that’s come up about this little project is that people who knew each other before might break down each other’s barriers. But that’s the test. You can’t run a project like this and run the risk of you bumping into somebody in a city, when you’re healthy, revised, with kids, a family, a job. That would undo all the good you’ve gone through. You have to be perfect. So I had to make you work together.”
“You’ve taken away who we are,” I say. I’m furious now, but anger won’t help me. I don’t know what will, but I know that I have to control myself until I know how to get out of here, how to survive this conversation. “You’ve taken so much.”
“For the better. Have you tried to kill her here? You have not. We took that away from you and you want that instinct back?” He’s exasperated, raised voice, spit on his lips. “You want to be an animal?”
“I want to be me,” I say.
“And you are! Or, you were. You were you, just different. Better. So was she, I thought. She’s too broken, Chan, I know that now. We did six months of reconditioning. Six months! That’s more than anybody else. Some of the Australia survivors, they took weeks before they were on board with the new program. That’s because the brain wants an easy life. It wants simplicity, normality. It rejects the things it wants to reject. It wants to be rid of death and torment and pain. It seeks a baseline of stillness and calm. Yours did. You had three months of the process. That’s it. We had you.”
“You never had me,” I say. I wonder how long Jonah took. I imagine him, fighting to keep ahold of me, of us.
“You can think that, but I tell you, Chan, some things aren’t definite. They aren’t set. You were fluid, receptive. And now look at you.” He’s disgusted. I’m nothing to him now. Not a project, not a success.
To him I’m a criminal.
“You know that I remember everything,” I say. I look at the window, trying to work out how damaged I’ll be if I dive through it—if I’ll even be able to break the glass. I look at the door, wondering if he’s locked it. He’ll have been sensible, too.
“I worked it out. Too much contact. And then we heard about your conversation with Jonah earlier.” Heard about it. How? A camera? Or worse, worst of all—the thought making me lose a breath, the air briefly choking in my throat—from Jonah?
But I can’t show that I’m worried about that. I need to keep control.
“What happens now?” I ask. I’m ready. If he’s going to do something drastic, I’m ready for it. I’ll fight my way out of here if I have to. Don’t die, my mother’s voice says, and there’s something so reassuring about hearing her now, here, in this place.
“Now? We start over again. We spend months helping you, making you better. If it takes twice as long, three times, four times, I don’t care. I’ll fix you.”
“But I’m not broken,” I reply.
“Not yet.” I hear the sound of something in the distance. The same sound as in the cities: birds. I’m almost honored. Gibson knows how dangerous I am. I reach for my glass, my hand faster than his, clasped around it, ready to smash it, to use it as a weapon. “You can’t,” he says, but I absolutely can. I smash it into his head, and it explodes into something like dust, harmlessly clouding his head before falling to the ground. He looks instantly smug that they planned for this, that these glasses couldn’t be used as weapons. The door opens and the wardens are there along with three birds, buzzing into the room, circling us, glowing and primed. “Don’t fight us too much,” Gibson says, “or your story will have to end a different way.” I want to ask what he means but the birds don’t give me a chance. They pulse, and then the whips come from them—the strings of metal which snap and curl around my arms, tightening to coils—then one around my neck, while I’m being held tight. They drag me toward the door. I kick and scream but I can’t make a sound the whip is so tight around my neck
. They drag me down the hall and I try to fight back but it’s pointless. They’re too strong. We go down past the dormitories, past the dining halls, all the way to the end where they’re keeping her. Polly, Rex, whatever she calls herself here.
Gibson comes up behind me as a warden runs to open the door. He leans in and whispers to me, so quiet that the birds won’t hear him and his words won’t be logged. “I can’t do anything to you, legally or ethically,” he says. “But she can. We’ve stopped her treatments entirely, to see how fast her regression is. So this will be a different sort of test. I wonder if she remembers you now?”
Through the door I see her, lying on the floor, facing us. Her new arm is shut down, limp and useless; her hair gone, scraps of it cluttering the floor around her; her clothes torn and those letters on her chest—those scars, freshly opened, traced into the skin anew. She looks up at me, barely moving; I am pushed inside. I hear the coils of the whips untying themselves and I can breathe properly again. I stand there as the door shuts behind me, as the lock fastens.
She slams me hard against the door, which groans—the metal in the frame creaking with an abnormally human sound. It hurts—really, really hurts. I slam my forearm into her head over and over as she pushes me forward, driving into me as if she’s trying to force me through the metal itself. She pushes and I beat her.
Slam, into the side of her head. She moves.
Slam, my arm into her neck. Again.
She pulls back. This isn’t like when we fought on Australia. We’re out of practice. We’re tired and we’re so hot we can barely breathe. This room is sweltering, the air conditioning turned off. She charges again and I move, but not enough. Her shoulder pushes into my side and I gasp, but the air’s too warm in here to give anything like relief. I push back and she stumbles. I swing down, grab her leg, and yank it; she falls backward, her back thudding into the floor, her head colliding a second later with a clang.