The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  “Me too. I never learned to read. Never had to until . . .” Danny rolls his eyes around them, at the world. The firelight collects in his irises and catches on his rusty stubble. “How come you did?”

  “Oh, I was a bit perverse.” Tom sighs. “I wanted to rebel. The Feed was too easy—”

  “That was the beauty of it, mate.”

  “Of course. No need to think, no need to leave the house. But is that what life’s about?”

  “I always pitied your generation,” Graham says forlornly. “Being a child. For me, before all that stuff was invented, that’s when I felt most alive. So many joys you never had. You were never actually present. You lacked the opportunity for anything worked at. Your knowledge was transitory, not deep. You didn’t invest in it and most of the time you didn’t understand it. You certainly can’t remember it. Mem it,” he says, doing a strange little imitation of a jig. “The Feed implanted forgetfulness in your souls. You’re living the most natural life you’ve ever lived right now.”

  “You’re such a typical Resister, Graham,” Danny snorts. He sounds bored but for a tightness in his voice: a keenness bordering on need. “It was everything. My mum, my dad, my uncle, they were miles away but with me all the time. And they were so proud when I went to college. Know how I know that? Because I felt it, raw pride, directly from them. First in my family, I was, and that would have been impossible without the Feed. It cost them a fortune to have me enabled, to give me all that knowledge at the flash of thought. Why take time to read when I knew it in a gulp? I didn’t have money to travel but I saw the world. Vegas. Bangkok. Dubai. I was smart back then, cultured. The Feed made me more than I am. I was never alone. Total knowledge—”

  “Blissful ignorance,” Graham interrupts.

  “There was everything you could wish for!” Danny exclaims.

  “But you were just a conduit.” Graham’s lips barely move. “Nothing stuck, did it, Danny?”

  “But I’d do anything,” Danny croaks, “to have it back. For an instant, to—I’d, I’d—”

  “My mother had dementia but she had a dignified death; none of this being saved on a machine like all of you!”

  Danny’s hands are shaking, his eyes twitching as he pounces on a point, the workings of his brain nearly visible: “But if your m-mum had been saved, she’d be with us n-now, right, Graham? They could have r-restored her.”

  Graham smiles. “Would she, Danny? Are your parents saved?”

  Tom’s pulse pumps his neck. His mind is fizzed without his noticing it, knee-jerk instincts that make adrenaline flow. His eyes flick and try to lock on to something no longer there: a dizzying fall that repeats, repeats as he misses the connection as he tries to message Kate, as he tries to message Ben, as panic rises, his breath high, his vision swimming . . .

  “I don’t, I—” Danny drops to the ground, gagging. “Mum—Da-Da-Da—”

  Tom, blinking furiously, fumbles Danny onto his back. Tries to ignore the man’s panic, to stop it from infecting him too. “D-Danny! What are you l-l-looking for?”

  “My m-mum,” Danny chokes out. “Where’s my mum? It’s bla-black, there’s nothing here—”

  Graham strains to lift him. He sounds almost tired. So weary of it all. On the one hand there’s the terror in Danny’s eyes as he glitches and gasps in the old man’s arms; on the other hand it’s familiar. It’s a tedious way to live.

  “Danny,” Graham says quietly, his voice hoarse. “Open your eyes: see what’s here. See what’s real!”

  A tired smile melts Danny’s contorted features, and a quick nod. His tongue flicks from his mouth, his breathing slows, and his muscles relax as he leans back into Graham’s embrace. He sighs in the end: “Fuuuuuuck.”

  Up early, as the first touch of blue lines the horizon, and Tom’s mind is running straightaway. It’s been running all night without him, processing things, and the tempo of his dreams continues in his heart, uninterrupted by his waking. He’s not here; he’s there again, back before the Collapse. His hands shake as he wets his face with a little water and dresses. He dreamed of Ben again, he knows it; it’s more a lurking sensation than a memory. He eats little and they move out as the facility’s blocky shadow becomes distinct from the gloom. Then, as they reach its perimeter fence just after dawn, Tom’s mind dislocates again. It plummets. With the wire in his fingers, the backpack straps biting his arms, on the crest of a heartbeat he travels back through time as another memory comes loose: breaking into the building site of the tower with Ben and imagining themselves to be a pair of survivors in a postapocalyptic scene. Kids, neither even ten, they had playacted parts of whatever ent they’d been streaming. A Mirror for Monsters, was it called? And here he is, breaking into his father’s property again, decades later. Now. Without Ben.

  He blinks in the cool air, stomach lurching. His aching eye muscles spasm hopefully, an addiction reignited, looking for his brother. And he finds him, a refound memory suddenly icy clear in his mind’s eye: Ben waiting for them in the expanse of the apartment, topping the sky at the tip of the tower. President Taylor had been killed weeks before, and many more had been murdered since then. Destruction surrounded them. Ben had airily offered them coffee as plumes of smoke grew from all over the city below them, like black daisies on a dead gray lawn, but Kate had ignored him and asked immediately about her parents. In the split second that Ben had checked himself, it was evident he’d forgotten to search for them. His eyes glazed as he went on.

  “They’re in . . . ?”

  “Southampton,” Tom had said, exhaling in disgust.

  But they hadn’t heard a thing from Southampton since the power station had blown. Two million people offline, off-grid. Most likely dead. Ben had asked Kate, “Do they have SaveYou?” and of course they did—she had set it up for them—but after accessing more information, he put a hand on her shoulder and told her they’d never used it; no BackUps had been transmitted from their Feeds. They hadn’t been saved, he told her. Then: “You’re pregnant?” he asked. “Does Dad know?” he inquired, turning to Tom.

  Tom had deflected the question—“So where is Dad?”—and that had been enough. He’d never seen his brother like this as Ben’s voice was suddenly ready to break and he raised a finger and thumb and held them a shaking centimeter apart. “We’re this close, Tom. To coming down. Dad’s . . . we’re fighting to keep the world going . . .” He focused on the gap between his fingers. Squeezed it and squeezed it, that centimeter of air, until he collapsed and cried. “We believe that something is . . . invading people while they sleep. That Sergeant Vaughn, when he killed President Taylor, wasn’t Sergeant Vaughn . . .” He chewed his lip again, purple bags sloughing down his face as he told them people were going to sleep as themselves but waking up someone else. They looked the same, they sounded the same, but inside . . . something lurked. Waiting. To kill. “We have one held captive but he’s resisting interrogation. His Feed’s locked off. All of these murderers—their Feeds are locked off from the moment they wake—”

  Tom had consciously used the tone he employed with his clients; this situation had needed taking under control. “Personality is just a bias of reaction, Ben. The way we behave once encourages a likelihood of how we’ll behave again. Our brains aren’t like hard drives; they can’t be wiped. People can’t be taken over.”

  Ben had merely sighed as he stood. “I didn’t bring you here to argue.” As he padded away, his words had been carried up into the glassy vaults toward the bedrooms and, above them, the pinnacle of the tower, the family’s homeHub. “We’re being invaded, Tom. Something, or someone, is hacking us while we sleep. Then they kill. We don’t know what they want or why they’re doing it, but we believe that things will get worse. Billions may die. I’m giving you a heads-up. That’s what family does. Dad thought you’d be difficult, so we have people clearing your house already. They’ll bring your dog too. So would you like that coffee?”

  Tom shoulders through the gap in the dew-dripped
fence, takes the bolt cutters and cracks through the chain around the gate. As it cascades to the ground, the padlock thwacks the broken tarmac like a python’s head from a children’s ent. He can suddenly smell—can he?—burned coffee on the breeze; can feel the joyful rush of Kate being pregnant and the overwhelming grief of loss, the vertigo of it, of being in his father’s lofty apartment while the world is in free fall around him. He tries to stop thinking about the past but something has been unleashed by the night before, by Guy’s death, by Jane’s, by them being taken and that familiar panic again. It grates his insides. He is energized, on high alert, and utterly, utterly exhausted. Even the act of walking suddenly feels too much—as if reaching out, stepping forward, whispering a plea for help to Graham and Danny beside him could disturb the world and bring everything down around him.

  Graham pushes the squealing gate open as Tom just stands there, stunned, and Danny yanks the cart through.

  He hadn’t noticed the smell when he’d scouted the place before, but he can feel it now in his teeth: rust. The oxidized fire escapes, a deep burnt red, overgrow the buildings like roots. They walk under them, through the narrow crevices between blocks, like excavation pits in tombs, and when they finally reach the forecourt, the bulbous yellow tanks are there waiting as before, emblazoned with the triangular logo of Energen.

  “Here we go!” Danny claps his hands and does a little dance. “We’re gonna live, we’re gonna li-iii-ive! Oooooh, baby, yeah!”

  Birds flurry away as the echo of the song rolls around the forecourt’s walls. Tom grabs Danny’s shoulder and peers up at the formidable storage towers. There are many darkened windows, many escarpments and places to hide. People could be anywhere, and the building is deep inside. “You’re not going to do that again, are you?” he murmurs, giving Danny a dirty look before scanning the shadows and reflections in the glass once more for movement.

  “Of course not,” Danny mutters back. “But no one’s here. Calm down.”

  Slowly they move again. Graham quietly reads out the instructions on the pumps, and once the fuel has slugged into the kegs, they enter the facility to find cables for the wind turbines and anything else worth taking. Murky growth over the skylights makes the corridor feel underground. Stale and dusty air. The shadows echo and the doors squeal. Beneath flappy holes in the ceiling, puddles and tidemarks spread across the vinyl floor. At school, Tom suddenly remembers, he dripped ink onto paper and watched it spread. A chromatogram: the ink dividing into its constituent colors, each running at a different speed. It’s like what the Collapse did to them all: those who ran faster had the better chance of survival; the old, the infirm, the slow, all those who couldn’t get away from the cities before the Feed collapsed, became . . . what? Prey? And his parents? If they had survived the brain trauma when the Feed went down, had they tried to run too, finally brought down from the tower to everyone else’s level?

  Tom sees Danny peer through milky fire glass ahead and kick the door open. Banked with memory towers, this vast room would have been automatically cooled before, people’s mundles, vids, and grabs in frozen storage in energy-hungry machines. But now it’s just cold. The skylight has collapsed and, weakened by rain, ceiling tiles have sloughed off to reveal a skeleton of struts around which hundreds of wires run like veins.

  “Bingo,” Danny says.

  “Jane used to—” Graham laughs and then stops.

  Skidding across the room, Danny rips open a tower. The hinges cry out. The displays are dead. By the time Tom reaches him, the circuit board that Danny has yanked out has crumbled away. He pulls out another, which flakes similarly, until he is cradling so much rust in his palms.

  “These are people,” Danny whispers. “All that’s left of people.”

  Graham’s face, shifting through different gradations of horror, is unable to settle.

  “Are my parents here, do you think?” Danny asks Tom.

  “There were storage units like this all over the country. Maybe this isn’t even one of the SaveYou facilities. Maybe where your parents’ BackUps are saved, it’s better preserved.”

  “Let’s be honest, though, that’s pretty damn unlikely.” Danny lets the fragments of rust trickle between his fingers, then turns to hide his tears. He pushes his forehead against a grille. After some time he sniffs and mutters, “Come on, Danny. We’re here for Jack and Bea,” and Tom watches as, galvanized, Danny uses the sheets of circuits like splintering ladder rungs to scrabble up the tower. At the top, it’s still a leap to snare some cables, but he brings a clutch down and crashes to the floor, tiles cascading, as billows of dust mushroom like downward clouds.

  “Will these work?” Tom splutters through the murk. “For the turbines?”

  Danny examines them. In the end, he shrugs. “Guy would have known. I think so.”

  And all their hopes for survival, for the culmination of Guy’s plan for a self-sufficient future, resting on that, they set to work. They climb, pull, and coil in the dust-hazy room. They reap the cables, slicing them off, and soon multicolored bales lie by the door. Graham sits on one, head in hands. “Haven’t we found enough?” he murmurs behind Tom as Danny reaches the end of the room. “Can we go now? Let’s get back to the camp, Tom.”

  Tom hesitates, looking around. “Well, let’s see what else is here. More bulbs would be good. I want to give Bea a party for her birthday. Light up the place like magic.” He chuckles. “Maybe some acetate to color them?”

  The word, that word, acetate, sits surprisingly on Tom’s teeth. With the Feed, with some spasms in his eyes, he would already have had information on its chemical structure, the etymology of the word, and the last time he had used it. He would have asked his mother about his childhood parties and filtered through her mundles and grabs, not so much remembering as reexperiencing them. She had always enjoyed those parties more than he had. She had always loved a crowd. All this information assimilated without thinking, his mind and muscles working in synchrony, seeing things without them being there, knowing things without words. A deeper, connected, malleable world, and all his thoughts, his memories, stored on a private Hub back home, in machines like these but just for his family, and seamlessly integrated and activated by instinct, by the tiniest muscle movements sending messages to and from the implant in his brain.

  Tom’s heart lurches with panic as he looks for the Feed and it isn’t there. Instead of connectivity, there is a void, horrifically huge. Silence and slowness. Blackness, thick and deep. Tired muscles twitch painfully in his eyes, locking like a faulty mechanism. He looks for the link to his father, his mother, to find out where they are. He tries to link to Kate. There is nothing. Breath without air. Nothing in his gaze except the room, this depressed and disintegrating room in the tomb of an obsolete storage facility in the ruin of a world. And Danny, he sees, has slipped away through doors still swinging, loops turning in the dusty air.

  “Danny!” Tom hisses down another stairwell. Nothing. His voice is swallowed by the rough twilight darkness, then something rustles in response. A rat, not a man, and barely a rat at that.

  Tom runs up dingy corridors, searching for footprints in the dust. Nothing. He retraces his steps, running. He turns a corner and pulls up short to avoid colliding with Graham, whose eyes are unfocused, his mind still stuck somewhere else, somewhere sad. Rust-mottled memory banks loom in the murk as they walk slowly, silently, listening. The dead silence in those cavernous rooms, swollen with time, makes Tom’s ears ring. Then he hears the distant screeching swing of doors. He passes Graham the rucksack, creeps down the corridor to a stairwell that stretches vertical darkness above. Nothing. Then a movement catches in the corner of his eye and he leaps, turning, going down, his hands over his head as glass detonates around him.

  “Shit! Sorry, Tom! I’ll get you next time, yeah?”

  He takes the stairs two at a time and finds Danny on the next floor up, a machine held unsteadily between his thigh and elbow, and another in his arms.

 
“What the hell is that?”

  “Microwave. And that”—Danny nods over the banister—“was a fucking TV!”

  “What do we want a TV for?”

  “I don’t know, I thought you’d want to see it. This is a mini-oven. I’ve already put a music machine in the cart—”

  “We don’t need this stuff, Danny,” Tom snaps.

  “Radios. Maybe we can contact people!” Danny’s keen green eyes catch the little light in the darkness. Fragile hope pools in them. “If there’s anyone out there. To help. Listen, we’ve come all this way, Tom, you may as well take a look.”

  Tom, after a moment, grunts and leans over into the stairwell. “Graham?”

  In the silence of the shadows below someone moves but no one speaks.

  “Graham, are you with us or waiting?”

  Danny nudges Tom’s arm. “Leave him be. We’ll be quicker without him,” he whispers.

  Upstairs, the windows are smeared with tar. The flooring is crumpled, the walls rotten, but there’s less dust than in the corridors below. It’s clean. Danny kicks open the door to a large room and reveals thinscreens and radio kits spread across desks. It’s quite a find, Tom sees as he riffles through the machinery, twists dials, and lifts speakers to his ears. Nothing—of course nothing. He isn’t expecting anything, but reality and hope live parallel lives. He moves between the desks, thinking through what they can use back in the camp, and it’s as he rests his thumb on the screen of an ancient monitor and draws his skin juddering across the glass—a feeling unfelt for a long time—that three things happen at once. What he has been looking at makes sense: a dark and bundled mess on the other side of the table is a heap of blankets on the floor, and there are others, he sees, beyond. The kettle he just rested his palm on, wondering how they’d been able to live without one that worked—and his heart suddenly pounds in an animal way—is warm. A man ducks into the room, toweling his hair.