by Emma Newman
Then, when I knew what I wanted to do with my life, it became painfully clear that growing up in a community like ours was going to work against me. And it wasn’t just the skills I needed to acquire and the ones I could forget. It was all about being able to pass myself off as someone who could work in a team. Who could thrive in an environment where it was all about goal setting and project management and allocation of resources. There were mersives that provided scenarios designed to help corporates refine their soft skills. I devoured them, learning the language of the corporate world and working out the kind of person I needed to be to succeed in it: sociable, bright, ambitious and above all else, willing to value the goals of my employer above my own.
Gov-corps say that marital status makes no difference to career progression, but everyone knows that’s a lie. Society is far less screwed up about gender than it used to be but still somehow wants to lock us down in stable relationships. It’s like some part of Western mentality simply couldn’t escape the idea that if two people are married, they are somehow safer. More predictable. And when it comes to balancing the books, they’re cheaper. With minimal living-space guarantees shrinking year on year, there is no getting away from the fact that a married couple can now fit into a flat that five years ago was allocated to a single person. They may not be happy crammed into their shoe box, but it’s better than living in a singleton cube at the equivalent pay grade.
It’s not that I married Charlie so we could get a bigger place. That larger space still has to be shared, after all. For a time I really did believe he was good for me. Stable. Supportive. Driven to climb the corporate ladder just enough to be interesting but not enough to be bullish about it. With my sights fixed on reaching the necessary pay grade, it was easy to overlook the parts that didn’t really fit. I just remolded myself to accommodate. He never learned to adapt to me because I never made it necessary.
It started to unravel when Drew hired me. It’s like I could plot my happiness with Charlie on a graph; as the satisfaction of getting to where I wanted to increases career happiness, the line showing marital happiness starts to take a nosedive. The pretense of being happy to socialize more in mersives than in the real world—that was the first to fail. I just couldn’t live without seeing people in person, so I dialed back on the use of the social games he’d drawn me into and went back to some of the clubs I’d been part of before we married.
We never agreed on whether mersives were the best way to relax. For him, the ideal Sunday afternoon would be a couple of hours meeting up in a puzzle game with a group of friends on a shared server, then going off for a stroll through some exotic location, rendered fully immersively. I never liked those, though of course I never said so in the early days, when I was suppressing my own preferences to be that successful corporate climber. As time went on though, I visited Mum more, desperate for long walks around the loch and real fresh air. He couldn’t handle the insects. “Why do you want to go somewhere with thousands of little flying bastards everywhere who just want to eat you?” he’d moan every time I packed to go. I could never find the words to express why mersives were never quite good enough for me.
We were so poorly matched, but I didn’t see it at the time. I suppose I didn’t want to admit to myself how fake I had become and how false our relationship was. How I had used him.
But it wasn’t like there was nothing in it for him. JeeMuh, am I really this awful? Can’t I let him just be a nice guy who fell in love with who I was pretending to be?
I can, right up until he started getting moody, started asking why I was at the lab all the time, why I couldn’t change my schedule to fit better with his. I can think kindly of him right up until I remember the way he started to act whenever friends came to visit, or when we went out. As the lab took more of me, he seemed to resent anyone else having even a moment of my attention. It got to the point where I started canceling social plans because I simply couldn’t face going through the tedious bullshit of explaining who would be there and what we’d be doing. Taking him with me no longer worked; he’d drink too much and insult my friends.
That should have been enough of a warning. I should have left him then. But I didn’t really care about dropping ties with the people I’d simply tagged along with to look like I had a life. All carefully chosen so that when GaborCorp reviewed my social activity I looked normal. None of them really knew me. None of them missed me either.
I didn’t notice my world shrinking because I had my work and that was all I cared about. I filled the gaps left by my abandoned social life with painting. Charlie loved that: something I could do at home, that he could talk to his colleagues about. I know he showed them my videos. “Look at how talented my wife is” was one of his favorite things to boast. Then it started to feel like there was a subtext. “Look at what I caught. Surely I’m a better man for being able to find someone like her.”
But the more I painted, the more I remembered who I really was. It started to be as much about having something I could focus on that wasn’t Charlie, something that was indisputably mine. I could forget he was in the flat when I was painting Mars, shutting everything else out as I talked through the process. It got to the point where the only thing I looked forward to when I was heading home from the lab was getting the canvas out again. When we made love, I was thinking about what to paint next. Just going through the motions, detached from my body, doing enough to make him think I was still present. It was no way to live. So I decided to leave.
I packed my bags when he had a rare site visit and would have been gone by the time he got back if the taxi hadn’t been late. When he came home to find me in the living room, shouting at a virtual booking AI, surrounded by my art supplies bagged up and resting against one tiny suitcase, he lost it. He wasn’t angry, as I’d feared he’d be. He was devastated.
He cried; then I cried; then somehow he persuaded me to stay. I don’t even remember what he said. I wonder if it was as much a desire to just end the emotional barrage from him. I knew that if I left, he wouldn’t let me go. “Just give me two more months,” he said, weeping. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy. Just two months, and then if you want to go, go.”
It seemed so reasonable at the time. And yet now, lying in bed on another planet, I feel such anger at myself for being so weak. I should have just walked out. I should have grown a fucking backbone and said, “Actually, Charlie, I have all the data I need about our relationship and another two months is not going to change the conclusion.” But seeing him cry, watching him fall apart and having the chance to end that distress . . . That was too powerful to resist.
So I stayed. And I did try. We talked, I tried to explain how I felt, he pretended to understand and then we spent three hours discussing his needs and feelings. He did make an effort, but the tragedy of it all was that it didn’t matter what he did. A better version of himself was never going to be enough because I just wanted to be alone and have some space to breathe. A singleton cube would be like a palace because I would be able to fill every square centimeter of it, instead of shrinking myself down to accommodate him.
Looking back at his charm offensive, at those six weeks of the Very Best of Charlie, I’m even more convinced that he knew what he was doing all along. As soon as I decided to leave I should have made different contraceptive arrangements. I should have been more careful. But it was always something he took care of, like making sure we always had spare canisters for the food printer and sorting the recycling.
He said it was an accident. That he’d been so upset by the crisis and so focused on making it better that he’d forgotten to get his treatment topped up. With so many MyPhys notifications about stress levels, he’d just muted it and forgotten to review the messages waiting for him. All of that considerate, loving, making-so-much-effort-to-please-me sex had resulted in a pregnancy I never wanted.
I didn’t even think it was possible to have an unplanned
pregnancy anymore. I’d seen stories on news feeds about it but never really believed that someone could be so careless or ignorant. Nevertheless, there I was, pregnant and in shock. For days I kept it secret, telling myself it was just a bunch of cells, that I should get rid of it and not even think about it. But it would be impossible to arrange without his knowledge. While he couldn’t stop me from having an abortion, I couldn’t keep it a secret from him. It was one of the many compromises that hung over from the last days of democracy, in which the Far Right practically removed a woman’s control over her own body. The gov-corps that emerged from that time dialed a lot of it back, but not all of it. Charlie had a legal right to know about any termination. It was stipulated in the marriage contract that I had skimmed over, thinking that since we’d agreed not to have children, it wouldn’t be relevant.
Back then, I thought there were only two routes ahead of me. One was to leave, notify him of my intent to terminate and fight it out in court if he objected to my decision. With so much of the legal process run by AIs, it would have taken only a week, long enough for a human judge to review the case once all the information was in place. I would have a strong position; he had always ensured his contraception was up to date until I had almost left him and I was unaware of his failure to have the hormonal treatment updated.
The other route was to stay and make the best of it. I could have left and had the child, of course, but I simply couldn’t face it. Just as I simply couldn’t face the prospect of telling him I wanted a termination. The week before I told him, I agonized over it. Did I really want to abort? Did I really want to go through with it? The truth was, I couldn’t bear the thought of any of those options. When I imagined what it would be like to have won the right to abort if he stood against it, really thought about what it would be like to go into the clinic and have the cells removed . . . I felt awful. Even though I knew that was exactly what it was: a bunch of cells. But equally, when I imagined the pregnancy, my body no longer being my own, I was filled with the purest dread. I was simply incapable of imagining myself with a baby. It was never something I ever saw in my future.
I took to crying as soon as I left the house for work. I’d give myself the walk from the apartment block to the tram just to feel sorry for my stupid self, and then once I was on the tram, I’d scour the Web for images of babies in the vain hope that something would light up some circuit in my brain that could make the thought of motherhood palatable. But there was nothing. It was already missing. I ended up drifting to the rare communities with public settings that let people view without declaring their presence, reading countless entries written by women talking about why they’d decided not to have children. Talking about the last corners of society in which the idea that women were only for bearing children still existed and how they had left them.
Then I would cry the rest of the way to the lab.
Of course, I had to tell Charlie in the end. I think some part of me was hoping that he’d say it was the wrong time, that given the difficulties we were having, perhaps it would be best to abort. But of course he didn’t. In Charlie’s world, the last seven weeks since I’d almost walked out had been great. We’d “come so far” and he felt really good about all the ways he’d been proving he was a good husband. My hesitant confession that I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, seeing as we never wanted children, was pushed aside. “But that was before we grew together, right?” I felt so sick when he rested his hand over my lower stomach, cooing about the thought of life blossoming within me. I wanted to smash a vase over his head and run out of the apartment and never go back. Find someone at the commune who could put me in touch with people who could hide me. But I didn’t. I just smiled. I just smiled and said what he wanted to hear. Because I always fucking do that.
A notification saves me from the bottomless well of self-hatred. It’s a message from Mum. Oh good, something else I can flagellate myself with.
“Hello, Sprout!” She’s sitting by the fire, Frigg stretched out on the sofa next to her, Odin sitting on her lap. He’s so big, the top of his head is pushing her chin up and the struggle for who gets to decide where Mum’s face is allowed to rest is obviously still ongoing. “So it’s”—she squints at the clock across the room—“sometime after midnight and the wind is howling away. Can you hear it? This storm is on the way out now but it’s been a belter. These two reprobates haven’t left the house for days, have you, your majesty?” She looks down at Odin, who rubs his face against her chin and starts purring. “He’s all love and cuddles now, but you should have seen him earlier. Grumpy sod. Anyway. I got your message.Thank you, darling. You do look a little bit tired. Are they working you too hard? Is that why you haven’t sent a message to your father?”
I sit up. What the hell? I told her why!
“I know it must be hard. I may not be an expert on these things—you know I was always better at coding software than understanding people—but I do think it’s important to make an effort.”
Mum never talks about when she was a software engineer. That was her life before the commune. Why talk about it now?
“There was a feature on you on Norope Tonight! I thought they would have shown some of your artwork, but they didn’t. They didn’t even mention the painting part. They just talked about you being a geologist. They talked about the Mars show and that lovely Dr. Banks. Is he just as handsome in person? Are you going to be on that show? They said it’s the season break or something but it will start up again soon, after the capsule has been opened. It’s all very exciting. Everyone here sends their love and they are so proud of you. Not as proud as me, obviously.” She gives one of her wicked grins and Odin meows loudly at her.
“Shush—I wasn’t talking to you. I talked to Charlie earlier. I think Mia might be teething. She’s so bonny and bright as a bulb. You must be proud of her too. I never thought you’d have children. Funny, isn’t it, how things change? And I know you struggled in the early days, Sprout, but you made it through, and imagine how proud she’s going to be when she knows her mummy went to Mars!”
I lie down again. Trust Mum to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time and be totally oblivious to it. Not that she can see my face right now, in fairness, but she never did pick up on the subtleties of human interaction.
“Right, I should go to bed. Don’t look at me like that, Odin. I’m allowed to get up if I want to. You’ll soon have most of my bed anyway. Yes, I know, you’re beautiful, yes.” She kisses him on the top of his head. “Bye, then, Sprout. Oh, and if you could film a message with Dr. Banks in it, that would be lovely. You know, for science.” She adds a wink to that wicked grin and the recording ends.
First Charlie, then Mum. Neither of them addressed the things I talked about. Maybe Principia is censoring what I say and hiding it from me. I could understand that about the mention of the footprint—even though that NDA should make that concern invalid—but asking Mum to explain why she believes Dad? Why stop that from getting through? And if I didn’t ask for that, the message would have been just a few seconds long, surely? Something isn’t adding up.
I know that heading straight into a mersive is not going to look good when my usage is reviewed by Arnolfi and Elvan, but I have to go back to Travis. He might have predicted this and he might have set something up to help me. Maybe that information dead drop he’s planned could be used for messages home.
But if I go back to talk to Travis, I have to think about Dad again. What did Travis say? Dad has everything to do with why I’m here? On Mars? It makes no sense.
I wrack my brain trying to remember if there was anything Travis said at the dinner party that could hint at a connection between him and Dad, but there’s nothing. I take a mental step back. Everything to do with why I’m here . . . Did Travis know my Dad, years ago? No, Travis would have been a kid when Dad was locked up. How could they know each other?
But Dad might have corresponded with
him. He is allowed to send messages to people. Over the past ten years he’s sent dozens to me that I’ve deleted as soon as they’ve arrived. It was just too painful to watch them, to be taken back to that room, listening to him ranting. Why invite that into my own living room, or worse, just the confines of my head? But why would there even be a correspondence between the two of them? No, I simply can’t imagine it.
I clench my teeth and groan. I need to stop being such a coward and face this. I know where this hesitation comes from: it’s the fear that I’ll go and play back that same mersive and it will just end as normal, Travis a figment of either my imagination or a deepening psychosis. Both seem far more probable than his explanation. Preloading my chip? How could he have arranged that so quickly? It was upgraded only a week after I signed the contract to come to Mars. There’s no way he could have gotten everything recorded, set up and found a dodgy technician in time. Unless . . .
Oh shit. Forgetting my fears, I open the menu, select the relevant mersive and go back, barely paying attention to Mia and Charlie as I wrestle with my suspicion. Then everything freezes and Mia disappears, along with the sofa and the dog, and in moments the table appears again.
“Hello, Dr. Kubrin. You came back. I’m glad; we have more to discuss.”
“You’re damn right we do,” I say, sitting in the same chair as before so I line up with where he’s looking. “Did you set all of this up, right from the start?”
He nods. “GaborCorp employs hundreds of thousands of people. Do you really think that my husband often goes to dinner parties to listen to midlevel managers beg for funding? If he did that, he wouldn’t have time to do all the other shitty things he does.”
I think back to that night, how enthused Travis was about my artwork. “You weren’t really a fan of my art channel at all, were you? You were laying it on a bit thick.”