Review of Australian Fiction
Vol 9: Issue 2
Sean Williams & Deborah Biancotti
Review of Australian Fiction
Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2014 by Authors.
Contents
Imprint
Editorial Matthew Lamb
Incomplete No. 7 Sean Williams
The Executioner Goes Home Deborah Biancotti
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“Incomplete No. 7” Copyright © 2014 by Sean Williams
“The Executioner Goes Home” Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Biancotti
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
Editorial
Matthew Lamb
When the RAF Manager told me that the current issue marks the 100th story that we’ve published, it was suggested that we ought to celebrate. My suggestion was that we just have a cup of tea and a lie down.
When we started RAF we didn’t really consider the workload of publishing two stories every two weeks. In many respects, we are still in denial as to the work involved. Instead, we prefer to keep in mind some of the consequences of publishing these stories. For many of the emerging writers published by RAF, this has been their first publication. Some of the stories published have been singled out for praise, others have been shortlisted for awards. Some stories have even produced the seeds for longer stories that have since been published as stand-alone novellas.
Most importantly, RAF has introduced writers to new readers.
As the editor, one of the reasons I started RAF was that I wanted to explore the world of Australian fiction, to introduce myself to new reading experiences.
One of the great new reading experiences that editing RAF has given to me is to engage more closely with the world of Australian science-fiction and speculative fiction. This is not something I have read much of prior to editing this journal. The reason for this was that my own preferences were mainly for literary fiction. However, the reason for this was not because my preferences were based upon some notion that literary fiction was somehow better than so-called genre fiction. For starters, I’ve always considered literary fiction to be itself a genre. But, more to the point, so-called genre fiction—such as science-fiction and speculative fiction, for example—has always intimidated me.
Why?
Because literary fiction creates figures that operate on a ground that exists outside of the work. The fictional ground is the very same one that is shared by the reader in reality. It is only the figures that are imaginary. Science-fiction and speculative fiction, on the other hand, have to create both figures and a ground within the work itself, while still retaining some degree of plausibility, some point of entry for the reader to alternate between the reality in which they live outside the work, to the fictional world that operates within.
That’s really hard to do well.
Fortunately, in the current issue of the Review of Australian Fiction we have two writers—Sean Williams and Deborah Biancotti—who do this very well indeed.
Enjoy.
Incomplete No. 7
Sean Williams
November 8 – Lund, Swedish Protectorate – Freedom Zeist
Something about the eyes: I’ve seen them before. What particular quality triggers this flash of recognition, so powerful I almost slip over on the icy street, I cannot say. Not colour or shape or anything physical like that, since those properties do not commute. The gaze slides towards me, then darts away on catching me looking back. It’s either nervousness or coyness, and I’ve seen it before.
I am in the body of a twelve-year-old girl who calls herself Freda because she thinks her real name is lame. I am working alone. There is another version of me watching the front of the house, but we keep our distance as protocol dictates. Today’s mission is to plant precautionary evidence in the home of Freda’s older sister, a girl who has come to the Boss’s attention. If something goes wrong with the Operation, her family will need to be blackmailed, so I move silently through the house, uploading and altering data, leaving biomarkers that cleaners would miss but forensic teams would undoubtedly find. Freda’s thoughts are a churn of desperate resentment carefully contained by my own. She doesn’t understand me or what I am doing. She is confused. That confusion will not last long. I am excellent at my job.
When I finish, I leave the house via its rear door rather than take the booth back for immediate Renovation. I walk along the cobbled lanes and deliberately lose myself among the stately homes and gardens. I have never been to Lund before. I willingly lose track of time, knowing that I could return to the Yard at any moment. There are d-mat booths on every block.
It is then I see the eyes, eyes that I am certain belong to someone I know.
An elderly woman heavily rugged up against the cold is walking towards me along the street, breath coming in rapid puffs. The tip of her nose is bright pink. We look at each other. She looks away that way, and I come to a sudden halt, skidding a little. Freda is wearing slippers with very little grip. It’s cold for November. There’s been no snow, but some are predicting falls before the end of the month. I read this in the child’s memories.
On the street, the old woman has also stopped and glances at me again. Again, that connection. I look away, afraid of what I might reveal. I know this person, even though I have never seen this face before. Who is it?
‘Is something wrong, dear?’ she asks.
‘I’m jazzy,’ I say, and walk on, responding as Freda would, knowing that if my suspicion is true the person opposite me can no more speak openly about our awareness of each other than I. We are bound by our roles, by the conventions that conceal the Operation from public knowledge. We must be discrete. We must dance without touching. It is the price we pay for otherness, for immortality.
All thoughts of Lund are forgotten, now. Trying to walk normally while marvelling at this new thing, this unexpected and secret encounter, I hurry to the next d-mat station and say ‘Home’. The booth does the rest.
Home for me is the Yard, where all good dupes live.
‘You cut it fine,’ Mallory says. ‘Two hours is too long.’
Freda’s mind has already been reset to the original of the pattern I borrowed for my mission. ‘She won’t notice. Kids are always losing track of time.’
Mallory is second only to the Boss. She can be cruel and unreliable, but she is in charge. I commit myself properly during my report and she is reassured—as she ought to be—that I have made no mistakes. Freda’s family will never know that I was in their home just as Freda will never know that I was in her mind.
‘Something rattled you,’ Mallory says when I am finished. ‘You’re not telling me everything.’
She is right on both counts. I am thinking of my clandestine encounter with the owner of those eyes.
‘I met someone,’ I say, knowing there’s no point lying. ‘Someone who seemed to know who I was.’
‘Impossible.’
‘I know what I saw.’
‘You’re imagining it, then. I’ve seen it happen.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s only natural. People like us, we can’t share or connect. We can only dream. Sometimes dreams bleed into waking life. That’s all.’
I nod, absorbing what she’s saying. What part of my life wouldn’t seem strange to anyone on the outside? Sometimes I imagine that I am trying to tell my great-grandmother what I do. There’s this machine that takes anything and turns it into data, I would tell her. That data, called a pattern, can be sent anywhere and turned back into matter exactly as it was. There are other kinds of machines that check to make sure noth
ing goes wrong on the way, but machines can be corrupted, so patterns can be too. I am one of those corruptions.
I wouldn’t really say that last line. Great-gram would be scared. She was a frail, white-haired woman with barcode tattoos on the back of both wrists from the Water Wars and ruined lungs thanks to some toxin or other. Instead of the truth, I’d tell her that I worked for the government. A spy with numerous secret identities. She might buy that.
Only… why would she even talk to me? I don’t own my original face anymore. Today I look like Freda. Next time I will look like someone else. Underneath I am still me, but no one would ever know. Not even my mother.
So why does Mallory think she understands me so well?
‘This feeling of yours,’ she says. ‘Don’t let it get a hold of you. It can eat you up.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Probably just hormones. Teenagers are a pain. Can I Renovate now?’
‘Of course, if you want to. We’ll activate you again in a couple of days. The target should be ripe by then.’
I hate it when she talks like that. The whole Operation is creepy, but she doesn’t have to rub it in. We steal the bodies of the young and stuff them full of old minds whose original lives are ending. Mallory is herself one of those minds. Me, my goal is to pass through lives without impact, leaving no traces behind. I am a ghost, not a thief.
November 9 – Sacramento Bay, Californian Protectorate – Wesley Shaklin
The date is not right. Mallory said ‘a couple of days’ but it has been only one.
‘Something’s wrong,’ whispers one of my colleagues as we assemble on the west coast of North America. I don’t respond. Gossip is frowned upon, as is contact between us of any kind, inside or outside our mission guidelines. I recognise none of them, although I keenly check their eyes for any sign of recognition.
Mallory is probably right. I should not hope to see those eyes again, but I do.
There are three of us, in strong, male bodies. I have been Wesley before; part of him welcomes the loss of control I bring, even though he doesn’t remember the other times. The target’s name is Dylan Linwood. It’s our job to intercept him when he arrives. He is a member of the terrorist organisation called WHOLE, which stands for World Holistic Leadership. Members of WHOLE believe that d-mat is evil, that taking people apart kills them and replaces them with facsimiles that look and act exactly like a real person but are hollow inside. I know that’s wrong, because I am inside a person right now, and I am real.
My task is to break into the empty house next door and prepare the booth for a null jump. We work silently, professionally. Everything proceeds exactly as expected. I am ready when the whine of an electrobike sounds through the suburban stillness.
Dylan Linwood is nothing to look at, a short, grizzled man in scruffy clothes. He fights, but there’s no escaping his fate. We take him on his doorstep and drag him to the booth I have prepared. He is stunned, thanks to a blow to the head, and I sit with him for a moment to make sure he’s going to be okay. No use duping someone with concussion.
‘I know what you are,’ he hisses at me. ‘You’re dupes. You’re things. You’re zombies.’
One of his eyes fills with blood, the other with hatred.
‘He’ll be okay,’ I tell the others.
They throw him in the booth. A null jump is when a person is scanned and rebuilt in exactly the same place. WHOLE would call it an execution. We regard it as an opportunity to take a pattern from someone who’s never been scanned. People who don’t use d-mat are very inconvenient if we want to become them.
The booth takes a couple of minutes. When the door opens, Dylan Linwood looks exactly the same as he did before… except for the eyes.
There’s something about them.
I straighten in recognition and am about to indicate that I see and I know and I recognise and I am not afraid… but how can I convey this without the others noticing? They are already moving on, oblivious. This duped Dylan Linwood is required to infiltrate WHOLE and report on a potentially troubling development. He has a mission, just like us.
But who is he? That is all I can wonder as he prepares to take on his new role. He glances at me and I try to hold that gaze, try to dig a little deeper. Again, real communication is impossible. I am teased by the elusiveness of this strange attraction. It is real. But what is it? What am I to do next?
The body of Dylan Linwood leaves the neighbour’s house and crosses the lawn. I am left feeling empty and alone.
People have dreamed for millennia of experiencing life from someone else’s perspective. We have that now, I would tell my Great-gram, and eternal life as well, if we are prepared to break the law to steal our temporary bodies. Each new life can’t last long: the connection degrades within seventy-two hours. Occasionally, there are accidents. But always we can be brought back to new bodies, new experiences, new lives.
In the early days, I revelled in what seemed to me an amazing kind of freedom. I’d fuck or hurt everybody I was assigned just to see how it felt, knowing I’d escape the consequences when my time ran out. If I died in that body, those experiences died with me—‘Incomplete’, we call it. Only if I made it back for Renovation would they become part of the core me, the one who would be brought back next time, in the next body. Each time I Renovate I grow a little more, just as ordinary people do every time they learn something new.
When passion and pain lost their allure, I began seeking new kinds of experiences, sometimes simpler, sometimes more complex. The smell of winter in Sweden. The feel of different skulls. What exactly is red? Tone deafness, synaesthesia, paralysis, dementia, genius, twinship, tall and female, short and male… When there are many of me active at once only one can Renovate, in which case brief biographical packets pass between us so the one who carries the torch onward will know something of that other extra life that might have been, had their positions been reversed. We are allowed that much.
That is how I know that the other version of me in Sweden and another in California too both also saw the mysterious person who caught my attention. Sadly, both versions of me failed to Renovate, so their full memories are lost. The one in California died when WHOLE discovered the duped Dylan Linwood and took retaliatory action. But I know enough, now, to understand that I am being pursued. Mallory is wrong: the attraction is real, and it is mutual.
The Yard is busy when I return from the Dylan Linwood expedition. My virtual environment is modelled after an underground home, with high, rounded ceilings, many levels and no windows. I am alone here, as my fellow dupes are alone in their environments, apart from Mallory, who watches over us all with the severity of a school nurse. There is a restless quality to the air today, which I have learned from experience to equate with increased activity.
‘Tell me what’s going on,’ I say to her, instead of challenging her with the truth of my realisation. ‘It must be big.’
‘Must it? Perhaps the Boss is just being careful.’
‘Has someone found out?’ Were that to happen, it would end everything. Not just the Operation, but the world itself. If people ever learned that d-mat exposed their bodies to invasion, no one would ever step into a booth again.
Mallory doesn’t answer.
‘You would tell us, wouldn’t you?’
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Don’t you want to Renovate now?’
I hesitate. Renovation is a break in time between one moment and the next. It’s hard sometimes to catch up on returning. If something disastrous occurs while I’m out, I might never realise. I might be erased by an angry mob without knowing.
On the other hand, if disaster occurs I am sure to be recalled. The Boss would not go into battle without me. I am one of the first and most loyal.
‘All right,’ I tell Mallory. ‘Just give me a second.’
I don’t want my last thought to be an anxious one. The eyes are what I want to remember. Sensation isn’t everything, I
now realise. I have missed connection. It seems I am not the only one. If I Renovate, that understanding will continue and not be forgotten.
November 10 – New Salem, Dakotan Protectorate – Arabelle Miens
When I return I am besieged by instructions and also by bio packets. Many of me are active today, in many different places. There is a hunt on. Some troublesome girl is digging too deeply into the Operation. She was Freda’s sister’s best friend, and therefore the threats and blackmail I put in place won’t work on her. It’s our job to clean up.
I am sent to a farm in North America where fruit is grown under conditions designed to maximise genetic variation, creating new varieties the old-fashioned way. One could simply scan an apple and alter its pattern at the molecular level, but these farmers believe that predetermination takes all the fun out of it. It’s not that they are anti-d-mat, like WHOLE. They simply like to be surprised.
They will be surprised when we arrive. They believe their defences impregnable. But we can get anywhere. In our black camouflage suits we are wraiths, shadows, spectres.
The mission is led by Mallory herself. I am in the body of an older woman, a captured member of WHOLE. Yesterday she was confined to a wheelchair, but today she has been made combat-ready with a few quick fixes, improvements that confuse her, undermine her resistance. There is another dupe of me in this mission, my bio packets tell me, and my stalker is with me too. I saw the eyes when we arrived, but—again!—there was no time for more than mutual recognition.
I feel them glance at me as we move through the expansive property, overpowering sentries as we go. One, two, three—there are six we know of. We spread out to find the stragglers, and to seek out our targets.
Incomplete No. 7 / The Executioner Goes Home Page 1