The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  “Do you want to go on again then, Kate? We can be slow tomorrow night instead.”

  But before I can reply, it happens like a wave. Clatters of cutlery and chairs thrown back. Gasps and a gabble of confused words actually vocalized out in the real, and then silence again, like everyone has taken a breath but what has happened is everyone’s eyes have started to flicker even more rapidly. Someone sobs; the blond girl’s hands are clasped over her mouth. The waiter runs for the door.

  “Tom?”

  “Get back on!” he says, and he’s on a snap second before I am and—

  —I’m deluged with mysister. Martha is hystericallyshouting so I blockher & gland testosterone to counter the adrenalspike I feel, her panic contagious, & Mum is desperatelymessaging, Where are you, where are you? I’ve been messaging you for seconds, Kate, what’s the matter with you? I blockher too & notice myboards have thousands of newmesssages & I’ve never felt anything like it: theFeed warps with a coalescingweight that nearly makes me fall off my chair in the real. I try to slow myendocrinesystem down because Mum’s now chat-screeching at me that Martha’s shouting at her whydidIblockmysister? Then a silence falls on theFeed as billions of FeedIDs pause, like a wave drawing out, before breakingnews gushes like a tsunami. Memes flood & rumors ripple like a swellingcontagion. Newspools burst into form in a swollentide. Clusters grow around them as people swarm to look, & Mum’s panic-bursting me, What’s happening? My adrenal medulla pumps mysystem with epinephrine as I rush to look at one of the pools, but something slams down in front of it. But nothing’s dammed: theFeed is free & people swarmflow to other pools, which are dammed & dammed again, blocked by . . . the company? The government? Within 3nanosecs 127,734pools are created & dammed & I tell Mum I don’t know what’s happening & I panic-nudge Tom, but he flash-messages me he’s trying to message hisbrother, Ben, & then something filters out from the seething Feedchatter & there is a vid, a vid is going viral, it’s spreading faster than anything before & they’re trying to stop it & [dariancharles] the news is that PresidentTaylor1 has been killed. Everything goes quiet. All FeedIDs are stilled. PresidentTaylor1 has been killed. It fractals across theFeed, then mutates to say assassinated. Already there’s chaos in the U.S., contagious panic, the economy has flatlined & weapons have been mobilized toward the east. My cortisol levels are up 18.2%, my heartrate beating 2.93times too fast, & there are now 100,000s of thisvid & as fast as 1pool is dammed, 2,000others appear, & I’m looking up what’s the difference between murder & assassination & Mum is still shouting but she’s drowned out by the roar & it’s something to do with the word hash, which is an archaic term for C21H30O2, & I access one of the newspools & what’s there, the thing that everyone’s absorbing, that’s at the center of all these newspools coming repeatedly and unstoppably into existence, is a vid tagged [RichardDrake62SeniorSecurityAnalystWH.USA.StaffFID#22886284912] and time-stamped 7.23secs ago. I go into his memory bundle. I have no idea where this room is because the GPSloc is blocked, but it looks like every special-ops room from any ent I’ve ever gulped. A lacquered table reflects cold-buzzing neons. Thinscreens & decks adorn the soundproofed walls. Then PresidentTaylor1 walks in with a creamsweater (the new line from [Muitton], an ident links me) slung across his shoulders, a big mug of dark and fragrant coffee (the [arabeanica] blend from [Nesspro], an ident links me) in one hand, & this is the WhiteHouseUSA, this was the WhiteHouseUSA 7.34secs ago, & this mundle getting out is an insane security breach, no wonder pools are being dammed, &—

  —Good morning all, PresidentTaylor1 says in thereal with that warm-gruff tone, & sits. I understand, he says, given Energen’s surprising news, that the race is now on for the ArcticSouth. We will not let it fall into the wrong hands. Folks, we have war in a cold climate. But before the president’s smile can fully form, RichardDrake62’s view is obscured as a silhouetted figure—PatrickVaughn59, it’s tagged—stands & raises a gun. The president’s head becomes a cloud of red. The room upturns as RichardDrake62 dives for cover & RichardDrake62’s mundle crashes to black & there’s the sounds of upheaval & someone screams something that sounds like “Dariancharles!” & right away [dariancharles] is spurting off into thousands of pools saying [whoisdariancharles?] & then the vid repeats—repeats—repeats. Whoever’s sprayed it zooms in each time on the president’s face as his head bursts apart and the mundle slows to split-frame grabs—the president’s head splits open in slo-mo & this vid is streaming into 47,196,255FeedIDs from this pool alone & in a stomachdropping cascade all pools are suddenly dammed. Everything stops—

  It’s like going over the edge of the world. There is nothing; just the samemessage appearing everywhere on theFeed, wherever I look. It’s from the government, telling me to go home quietly, to go home now. All other content is dammed, & in thereal, in the restaurant, we all stand like a herd & flood into the street. Everywhere people stumble, stunned in the hilltop dusk by the absence of anything on theFeed. All communications are culled. The tower, the Hub of theFeed, is still lit in the distance, but it’s broadcasting nothing now but the government. On as I am, the quickcodes now make the billboards alive with the samemessage endlessly reproducing itself in spooling neonbrights, expanding off the boards, filling the air, choking the eveningsky with gaudycolors telling us to gohome, there is a curfew, gohome, there is a curfew, gohome, there is a curfew, gohome.

  Six Years Later

  Tom

  The Memory Facility

  He leaves through the double doors at the side of the facility and loops the chain back around the handles as he’d found it. Chains are good weapons now. He considers taking it with him—it’s not too rusty—but no: better to secure the place and protect what he’s found.

  The forecourt is empty, the windows in the high walls dust-stained in the still, early light. In places pipes have cracked and the concrete has exploded outward in gaping rocky wounds. Tom thumps the yellow fuel tanks again, dirt-streaked and resonant, and nods in satisfaction. He has weathered skin now and wind-tousled hair. His smile is a crevice in a hardened face. This unlikely discovery could save their lives.

  Across the deserted parking area, he climbs a verge and walks along the perimeter fence, still keeping an eye on the storage facility to see if there’s anybody there. Finding where he cut the wire, he stoops through. A road leads off north. There’s a car and a trailer farther up, jackknifed. The tarmac is crumbling, in some places chasm-deep, and in the distance he can see the facility’s main entrance: a thick, dirty gateway that, like the entrances to all his father’s places, used to be translucent, fluid, and clean.

  He drops off the other side of the road and goes into the wood. From the inside, its run of beeches strikes silhouettes against the clouded sky. Dark and light, it’s like trudging through an old-fashioned bar code. It’s cool for summer as another cold dip rips unpredictably across the land, the stormy weather, still turbulent, scudding in from the east. Will it ever settle now? They used to smell bad things carried on the wind, but that was a long time ago.

  As Tom’s boots crush the long grass, a cackling brings him up short and two magpies beat away into the woods, swerving around the trees. “Bring on the joy,” he says, and scans the surroundings for any other movement. He pats the bulges in his pockets to check his bounties are still there, then opens his arms to the canopy above. Through the trees, the hulk of the storage facility sits silently behind him, slowly decaying into the hills, as he forgets his way and has to backtrack to find the glade where the breeze wrestles the branches and the long grasses writhe.

  “Guy?” he whisper-calls, and a horde of squirrels chatter amid the conspiring leaves.

  Something smacks the earth by his feet. Something else speeds past his face, and then a hard object hits him on the shoulder. Another cracks the side of his head. Semi-stunned, he turns around to finally see Guy posing on a branch tossing unsplit, unripened chestnuts between his hands, an expectant smile filling his face beneath his frenetic ash-blond hair.

  �
��What’s the password, then?”

  “Well done, you got me.” Tom rubs his head and raises his hands in surrender.

  “Incorrect.”

  Another chestnut scuds past Tom’s cheek. “Careful, Guy!”

  “Still not right!”

  Guy throws the final chestnut in the air, a high lob, and dangles himself from the branch, his sweater riding up around his skinny stomach before he tumbles to the ground. He smooths his hair back, grinning with his mouth though his eyes, as always, are worried. “So?”

  “Empty. The place was deserted.”

  “Already ripped out?”

  “No. There are tanks of fuel. And the seals looked good.”

  Guy rubs his powder-white, thin-fingered hands together, clearly nearly daring to hope. “And were there cables?”

  Tom nods slowly.

  “And transistors?”

  Tom pulls from one pocket in slo-mo victory an angular lump of metal with many pins for legs and a trailing wire for a tail. Guy beams. He actually claps. “This is going to change everything, Tom! With the turbines working we can use the fuel for the plow. We can dig deep, we can plant things better. We can relax, Tom, we can relax.”

  They pat each other’s shoulders, sharing the triumph. How life has changed. They hug.

  “You haven’t been asleep?” Tom asks Guy, breaking the embrace at last.

  “No, Tom, I have not. You?”

  “Guy,” he says pointedly, “what do you think?”

  Walking fast, and halfway home, they camp in a gentle fold in the hill. Rocks penetrate the earth above them and long fronds of grass give the place a fringe. The sides of the dip have been rubbed at until the earth is smoothed.

  “The dogs have been here,” Guy muses as he spreads the dry soil with a foot, peering at the horizon around them.

  “Then it’s good enough for us.”

  They build a fire, a small one. They haven’t seen anyone else for a long time, but it’s not worth the risk: when things go wrong now, they do it more absolutely than before. So: just five sticks to heat their tins as the sun sets and the clouds pull apart. A skyful of stars is scattered overhead. The fire tinks and snaps, its core a fluttering orange, as Guy lies back, arms behind his head, the transistor bulging his backpack pillow. The silence of the world.

  “Pretty perfect, hey, Tom?”

  Tom nods, holding his knees for balance as he looks up, lines etched around his eyes as he squints. Night skies. So clear. They’ve become the norm. He can barely remember the scuzzed-out faded grays of yesteryear, those skies bleached by city lights. A poorly recalled dream.

  Guy watches Tom first as he sleeps, as he must, then they swap. Tom stretches his legs in the cooling air, yawning, running in place to wake up as Guy clambers under the rugs. He watches the young man’s face relax. Guy is soon asleep. His mind blank, Tom stares up at the stars again, at the moon, whose light catches the grasses above them like large silver lashes, until, just before dawn, the colors in the sky meld through black to blue to the beginnings of green as the stars slowly fade to nothing. Guy jerks abruptly beside him. Then, still asleep, he seems to stop breathing. His fists curl and his face twitches, then his eyes screw tight.

  “Guy?” Tom whispers, his heart suddenly painful, all his senses alert. The morning is at that moment brighter than he’d realized.

  Guy continues to twist and chew on nothing, even as Tom hauls him up and shakes him. But he will not wake—it’s like he’s tethered too hard to sleep. His eyelids flutter and his mouth stretches into a tighter and tighter grimace until suddenly the spasms stop. Then a breath escapes his lips, his face eases to peace, and he starts to breathe normally again.

  Tom’s eyes fill. His own breath is now ragged. The lonely silence of this place is so dense. He wants to run, but instead he strokes Guy’s cheek; he touches where the skin looks sore around the young man’s mouth and traces the soft part of Guy’s neck with his fingers. Then he wraps his hands around Guy’s throat and chokes him. He digs between the tendons with his thumbs and feels the cartilage warp. Guy’s eyes burst open. His mouth gapes, his tongue gags out, and his hands swipe ineffectually through the air.

  It takes a long time. The noise is animal, until something snaps. Tom keeps on squeezing, keeps shouting, keeps clutching the bones as Guy’s body gradually stops jerking.

  Keeping constant lookout, his brain scoured with sleeplessness, Tom hurries through the next day homeward, dozing briefly at intervals, never letting sleep take him deeply away. He avoids the roads and villages, preferring to work his way across the fields, which have mostly merged into one. Panicked and exhaustion-fuzzed, he sees a tree stump as a person, but no, of course, it’s not. His mind is deeply agitated. His thoughts have, over time, generally relaxed. Raw with panic like everyone else’s during the years following the Collapse, they now tend toward peace. They have all learned methods to calm the disconnected fear, and the regrowth of hope has gradually soothed Tom’s mind; he can feel it even now embalming the panic as he forces himself to breathe. He sits in the deep grass and breathes. Explores the earth with his fingertips. Smells the sap of nearby trees. The sun suddenly smacks his skin as it breaks a cloud. He concentrates on the air in his throat.

  He hasn’t killed anybody since he killed his brother.

  It comes from nowhere, this memory, this sickening revelation, long buried. It’s as if the muscles in his hands have remembered it: the softness of Guy’s throat snapping under his palms, but instead of Guy’s face it’s suddenly Ben’s, as twisted with surprise in his bedroom as Guy’s had been there on that hill. Ben’s face. Tom hasn’t seen it for years, but there it is. Twisted. How had he forgotten this? It should have haunted him daily. Shards of broken memories cascade, and amid them some tiny voice tells him he has to calm down. He vaguely senses tears on his face and that his body is jerking in the grass, but he’s trapped here in an ancient maze, smothered and surrounded by these images from before.

  He had to do it. He’d had no choice. Their mother. He almost feels memories of snatches of her Feed, the scorched silhouette of how she used to chat—but no, they’re gone. Other scraps of memory are dislodged by the strength of his thumping heart: the smoke-filled sky; jagged piles of vehicles crushed up around the tower; staring down at them from the apartment. And then a big one, detaching like an iceberg: child-height in a darkened room, hiding from his brother when they were boys. Tom had buzzed him, turning his Feed on and off. It had driven Ben to a frenzy. What y . . . doing? . . . upid! . . . Tom! . . . Dad’ll kill you . . . stop turni . . . om! . . . Off and on and off and on. And then stunning pain as he was cuffed about the head. His father towered over him. He simply forced Tom’s Feed on. I don’t have time for this, Tom. I’m working. Ben’s face, his smile, as he reached up to take their father’s hand. Tom had watched them leave the room, and now he forces himself up out of the grass, shaking, gasping, blinking, barely seeing the world around him, picking up rocks and throwing them at trees to focus on the now. Some memories are better left lost.

  He rubs his fingers into his straining eyes. He runs for a while and slowly the memories subside, and with them his body calms. He walks. He breathes. The heat comes off the day and the animals emerge. At dusk he startles an army of rabbits. A pack of dogs has taken a horse down and is halfway through it. A kestrel follows him for hours, riding the thermals, carving through the sky.

  He marches through the second day, calm again. Then, that night, dogs prowl. Hearing their breathing, a guttural pack of sniffing and growling sounds not far enough away, Tom finds a nook up an oak to hide in. He thinks, tentatively, about the first time he had tried to remember things after the Collapse, after they had lost the Feed. Even the rough, warped memory of it is sickening as he’d tried to access things that were no longer there and his body had stalled in panic. The stunning rawness of a hacked-away limb. Exhausted, aware of the tumult of his thoughts below, his eyes droop and he pinches his face to stay awake. Birds pace. He
mustn’t sleep. The stars are brushed by the shadows of the tree’s hushing leaves, and by the time they have faded and the sky has turned opal, he is finally stumbling down the hill toward home.

  With the dew undisturbed and the sun topping the hill, the camp is peaceful before the others awake. Corridors of trellises branch out from the farmhouse toward the shower stall and huts. The house itself has patched-up walls and scavenged, rusted turbines hammered to the roof by Guy. As an Electrician, they had coaxed that valuable knowledge out, so he had partially remembered what to do. The turbines spin gratingly in the morning breeze, so close to giving them power, so close to saving their lives, but so far, useless.

  Tom heaves himself up onto the porch of the children’s hut and glances through the window, breathless. There she is: Bea, in bed, a frown of dreaming concentration crumpling her face. Jack, too large for his cot, is squeezed in nonetheless. Danny is the adult watching them this morning. A slice of sunlight catches the young man’s rusty hair while he points an earth-caked finger at a book’s scuffed page. Unaware he is being observed, his mouth curls around the shape of each slow word.

  At the farmhouse’s sun-peeled door, Tom toes off his boots by the shells of upturned monitor cases filled with herbs, where insects buzz. He pats the remaining lump in his pocket to check it’s there again, fixes a smile in place, and flips the latch, and there she is too. Kate, skinning something he can’t see, turns from the kitchen counter. The light from the window halos her head, her blond hair glowing while shadows hide her face.