The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  Tom is laughing near silently again, his mouth a rictus grin. “Well, congratulations anyway; you’ve made humanity destroy the world twice, then!”

  He kneels by the stream in the gloaming. Midges fuzz the air. The sound of the water seems sharper for its coldness: a precise and high-pitched ripple. He cascades the icy stuff over his head and rubs it into his chest. Sylene is in her tent already, lit up by the murky light of her flashlight. The grasses are dark. The running water is silver stippled black. The earth feels so cold and the water so true, so perfectly real, that what Sylene told him feels impossible but somehow inevitably true. Kate had always been saying it. With her pools where people sprayed about saving the world. Other people, with influence, had lobbied for it too, but the future was a far-flung place. Was this threat real? Who honestly cared what happened there? Devastated people there didn’t count. And besides, technology would solve it. That was what he always thought, though he would never have admitted it to Kate: history showed that people came up with solutions only once the problem was really dire. That was when self-preservation kicked in, when business and survival meshed. It was just a question of when that solution would be found; everybody knew that, right?

  That night, he watches the world. He is exhausted but cannot sleep. His thoughts turn with the stars. He watches the shadows on the inside of Sylene’s tent until she turns off the flashlight. He walks. He washes again. And then, just before dawn, he lies down.

  He is in a dreamscape world in his father’s office, hanging in the air. He can hear the skin-creeping rustling of leaves, but it’s only the city he can see, stretching to the horizon, gray and granulated, a constant veneer of buildings being consumed by fire as the Collapse takes final hold. The Feed holds on by a thread—just one last power station’s collapse away. On a bank of machines behind him, under a static-laden screen, Bea drums her feet on the memory banks of the homeHub, where all the family are stored. She’s not been abducted; she’s been saved somehow, and she’s singing a song whose words he can’t quite hear with a mouth that looks like her mother’s, with a face like Kate’s, while her girlish song-voice sings—

  He’s awake, looking at the smudge of skylight below the upside-down curve of his tent, the mountains where the sky should be. His face is freezing. His limbs are dewy, solid with cold. He’s on his feet and running across the stream. “Sylene! Sylene!” By the time he gets to her tent, she has halfway emerged. Tom grabs her shoulders and she screams. They tumble as she hits his leg and he has to hold her tight to stop her blows. “Stop, stop, stop! Sylene, listen!”

  Her hands are up, her eyes wide with fear, her skin made paler by the early light of day.

  “SaveYou!” he pants. “If that’s what you’re using to come back through time, then it’s still working! Whatever’s happened to the rest of the Feed, SaveYou is still on! We can find out where she is, Sylene. We can find out where she is!”

  There is frost on the grass when they leave. The stars are still visible, just, and the mountains like bite marks in the sky. They make hurriedly for the road.

  “But isn’t it more dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there another route we can take? One more sheltered?”

  “No.”

  “You’re no use to Bea dead, Tom.”

  His breath steams, his fingers flex against the air. He looks around them, spinning, for another way. “We have to take the road,” he appeals in the end. “It’s the fastest route. We have to get to the tower; we must get to the Hub.”

  “Tom. You are no use to Bea dead.”

  He steels himself. “So we must be on our guard.”

  Sylene holds his gaze. Something pulls at the sides of her mouth, something in her eyes nearly smiles, but then she nods, sternly, and with that they both turn for the road. They scramble up onto the tarmac and set off. Tom is silent, determined. It’s all Sylene can do to keep up.

  They walk half the morning at full pelt, and their pace has only slightly slowed when he stops dead. He stares at the horizon, unmoving. Sylene stops too and follows his gaze. They are at a place where the road hugs a hill, curling around a valley. A flock of birds circles like a black cloud in the pass. Closer around them, animals have fought over something. Clumps of fur, bloody chunks clinging to their roots, are scattered around the burst tires of a car . . .

  “What is it, Tom? What have you seen?”

  Some birds on a fallen pylon. Old girders, rusted and wilting like flowers . . .

  Tom goes to the ground, breathing loudly, and cradles his head in his hands.

  “Tom? What is it?”

  “I was wrong,” he moans. “I’m . . . an idiot. She doesn’t have it.” He punches the ground.

  “Have what?”

  “She doesn’t have the Feed.”

  “But everybody has the Feed. Come on. Let’s get to the Hub now.”

  Tom swipes her away and shouts while she stumbles back. “Maybe where you come from, but don’t tell me about my own daughter! She wasn’t enabled, Sylene!”

  Sylene stands some distance away, her hair falling loose from her hat. She stretches her hands out to slow him down or keep him away; he doesn’t care what she’s doing as he paces up and down. He kicks the car. Kicks it and kicks it again and again until the rusted metal ruptures. Birds launch up all around them.

  “Tom. Listen to me. Please. You’ll hurt yourself. Listen. Did you have it removed?”

  “She was born after the Collapse, Sylene. She—never—had—one!”

  “But, Tom, the Feed’s genetic.”

  Wind rolls, blowing leaves off the edge of the road toward the valley floor. They stand apart, facing each other. Tom searches her eyes. “Maybe when you’re from, in the future, but not here. Not now. It’s not.”

  But Sylene is nodding before he’s finished. “Yes, Tom, it is. You’re in ute, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right. You were the first. I saw the vids of when your father launched the product. It was revolutionary, implanted while you were still in the womb. And the implant was genetic. It bonded with the human machine.”

  Tom’s face creases. He looks past her, over the barriers at the side of the road and across to the scree and the hills and the space over the valley. He remembers the tests, the bone-deep samples taken from his body. The scientists, some of whom he knew better than his family by the end. His blood, thick and dark as it was drawn into syringes throughout his early years. Tissue samples being tested—“For what?” he’d asked. Ben’s face, and his father’s face, when they found out Kate was pregnant. Expressionless. Thinking very hard. The fait accompli.

  All he can say is: “What?”

  “It all came out when you were running the Feed, that the implant in utero was genetic. Some people said it was your idea, but you maintained it was your father’s. You said you were ‘the Experiment’; you told the world, full disclosure, and people, by and large, believed you. They trusted you even more. Whatever the truth, the Feed blended with us, became indistinct, the first true wetware, passed from parent to child, a living part of our brain.”

  He points at her stomach. “And that one?”

  She nods. “Yes, of course, it’ll have the Feed.”

  Tom is hushed. “It’s immoral.”

  Sylene shakes her head. “The Feed became free for all: you bought it once and you bought it for all the generations to come. Knowledge became a human right. Everyone knew everything! It closed geography, it closed class. It leveled society in a decade. Eons of evolution—biological and social—in a life span. It took us past human versus machine; it was human with machine, a pure entity, a bio-algorithm, and you made it free.”

  “I would never allow something like this!”

  Sylene moves uncomfortably. “Tom, all I know is what I learned in the future, from the Feed, about you, your father, and your son. You were running the company when the Feed’s coverage went global, when it was in us all, in everyone in the
world. You completed it, Tom.”

  Tom puts a hand out. “My son?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a son?”

  “In my version of your future, you had a son. Daniel Hatfield.”

  “But no daughter? Not Bea?”

  “Different things happened, Tom, different paths,” Sylene explains tersely. “We have changed things by coming back in time. We’re in some sort of parallel event, I guess from the first moment one of us got successfully back, so any time from when SaveYou was first installed, my world and this one parted ways. Cleaved away from each other. Changing, probably very subtly at first, before things got so extreme. In my future there was no Collapse. Society continued. The Feed evolved for centuries. Everyone was corrected. Knowledge and communication became basic human rights. You made travel instantaneous, Tom, flipping a mind state around the world. You stopped brain death, because everybody was backed up, everyone was saved. You made us immortal in effect, until the world was destroyed.”

  “What about Kate?”

  “What about her?”

  “Was she . . . ?”

  “Yes. You were married. I’m wearing a dead celebrity’s face.” Sylene stops herself, and although her expression drops, she does not break his gaze. She reaches out for his hand. “I’m sorry. That was unthinking of me.”

  Tom walks away to the barrier by the ravine. Sylene stands watching him, from the body of his wife; he can feel it. He can ignore it, forget it even maybe, and then it thumps him in the guts. He closes his eyes. The fizz of tears takes him back to the tower, after Ben and his father had found out she was pregnant. Kate had woken one morning adamant that someone had trespassed in her mind. He had taken a lot of persuading, because what she wanted him to do was immoral; but that afternoon they had gone to his father’s office and accessed the homeHub. With her permission—but still—he had entered Kate’s BackUps and tunneled into her dreams. And there he had found, like footprints between her thoughts, places his father had been. He had been analyzing their baby, the data around their child. At the time, Tom had felt horror. Disgust. An animal instinct to escape, to protect his wife and child. But now it makes sense: his father was looking for early traces of the Feed, when Bea was still inside. The experiment hadn’t just been with Tom. He had only been the start.

  Eventually he wipes his face dry. “We have a lot to discuss.” He turns to Sylene. He is surprised by how calm his voice sounds. “But for now: Bea has the Feed.”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And SaveYou has been backing her up, it will have been storing her memory states.”

  “If—”

  “If there’s enough latent power in the implant to act as a beacon for you, to attract you people through time to use us as hosts, then there’s enough power to send out the BackUps! Am I right, Sylene? We are its battery. So even though there’s no power in the Hubs to transmit at us, we have enough power to send signals out. And if that’s right, we can see her latest BackUps! Is that right, Sylene? We can see exactly where she is?”

  “I don’t know, Tom. It looks like it.”

  “Well, that’s good enough for me.”

  The seasons change in the weeks that follow, but Tom’s determination doesn’t. The slight clouds high in the cooling sky lower and thicken like wicking until they are scaled and lumpen. The sun moves on a different plane. The rains break. Thrown on harsher winds, they blot the sun for days. The birds withdraw. Cobwebs thicken, heavy with dew. And Tom and Sylene continue, heading for the tower.

  One evening, after countless weeks, the clouds dissolve around the setting sun. The light is different now. It carries none of its previous warmth, but things are dry tonight. Tom finds the least wet wood he can. He uses five big firelighters and, after rolls of heavy smoke, flames suck at even the damper logs.

  He glances at Sylene, sitting with her legs out of the tent as he makes supports on one side of the fire. He’s sure he saw people doing this in the ents he streamed with Ben. People marooned, cooking things on a spit. Or . . .

  “If madam would like any clothes to be dried . . .”

  Soon socks, trousers, and T-shirts steam over the flames. Sylene burrows back into her tent for more, and as the door flaps close, Tom can half see, half imagine, as the tent shakes, her sliding her trousers off. As she stretches to remove her T-shirt, her foot pushes the flap open again and he sees the curve of her stomach: the way her tummy now protrudes. By the time she has pulled on a sweater and new socks, he finds his hands are shaking. He remembers the first time, when Kate had told him she was pregnant; he’d shaken uncontrollably then too. Shaken with excitement and joy, and he’d promised her that he’d protect them, that he’d never abandon them—absolutely no matter what.

  They make a stew of what soft-looking roots they can find. They make enough to eat and more to store, banking on more rain to come, which it does, for days. They walk through the sideways-slicing sheets sometimes, and other days they rest. Sometimes they lie in their tents with their door flaps apart and the rain cascading between them as they talk. Other days they zip themselves away and grow sticky with their tent-contained sweat. He asks Sylene about the future, he asks about her family, but she shrugs and won’t reply.

  Warm days return for a while, and the land looks lush and green. Grass snakes bask on the road. Somewhere the landscape changes. They walk. The muscular folds of foothills slide into gentler rolls. The woodland becomes thicker, the trees more round, the horizon lower down. They avoid the villages nestled in the nooks between hills, eyeing them warily as they approach and then checking over their shoulders for days. The landscape will have to change again before they reach the tower, many times more. The villages must merge into long expanses of town, of suburb, and then city, with buildings lumped and crushed together and high roads looping between.

  Weeks later, they are halfway up a rise, looking back over the land they have traversed. Dark clouds clog the east and the earth is unnaturally black. The sky is a mix of citrus, and a river running toward them looks like it has leaked wetly from the horizon.

  “Shall we stop here?” Sylene asks. “Make some food. Enjoy the view.”

  Tom looks around. The air is fresh, the vista expansive. “Why not?”

  Sylene starts to lay out her tent as Tom pulls the air deep into his lungs. “Back in a while,” he says, and leaves toward the trees. Soon he can see far back behind them, the way they have come, and yet the silence is complete. He stops kicking the leaves, under whose sludgy matter he finds only disintegrating lumps of wood, and pulls thin branches off the trunks. The hilltop is small and he is soon on the other side. Walking has become their way of life. Planning routes, gauging distances, setting the best direction. He looks out at the way ahead, and close enough to shock him is a sodden hulk he recognizes: the angular concrete blocks of the old storage facility. The same one near the camp. Threading through his mind from now to his memories of those months past.

  The fire that night does not take. Tom scratches a stick on the ground. They drink rainwater and sit in the doorways of their tents eating soggy biscuits and nuts.

  “Do you have enough?”

  Sylene rubs her hands on her trousers. “It was one of those things,” she says, nodding, “getting used to food. Mostly ours was synthesized. The air in the Scrapers had bumps: vitamins and things for our health. So the volume of food you eat here is . . . I’ve never felt this full.”

  Tom purses his mouth. “I’ve never eaten this little.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Constantly. But I’m more worried about you. Are you getting enough of all the things that you need? I don’t know. Before, Kate took all sorts of pills. She was always monitoring stuff. Levels of . . . I don’t know what you . . .” Tom gestures at her swollen waistline. The quiet here is far removed from the vortex of swirling stats and numbers that Kate had streamed him from the moment she was pregnant, showing him the progress of the baby, sending him gulps of info
rmation, dolloping it directly into his brain.

  Sylene places both hands on her stomach. “Well, it’s getting bigger, so I think we’re fine.”

  Her expression makes him laugh, and Sylene laughs too.

  “You can come over here if you want,” she says. “I could use you to heat my tent.”

  Tom throws the stick away as she shuffles over to make room for him in the doorway. Night is falling, darkness draining into the sky.

  “If you snore, though,” she says, “you’re out.”

  The following day, Tom glimpses the facility again fleetingly between the hills. They must be near the camp. They cross a road whose sides have collapsed and whose tarmac is powdered and sodden. It leads directly to the facility. The dirtied glass curve above the main entrance is dwarfed by the building’s size. Graham comes to his mind, a recent memory that he’d already nearly forgotten, and Danny after him with the cart. Concrete fragments as they’re shot at and running as fast as they can. Such a recent long time ago.

  He jumps down the other side and continues into the field, away from the facility.

  “Can I have a hand?”

  Sylene skids down the bank, holding her hair out of her face. He hurries back to her, takes her hand, and helps her reach the ground.

  “Where was Kate from?” she asks as they set out across the grass.

  Tom opens his mouth, but says nothing and closes it again.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No. It’s not that—”

  “No, I’m sorry, it’s not my business. It was a stupid thing to ask.”

  “Listen. At our camp, we were trying out rules of how the world might work again. We . . . I thought it was healthy not to dwell. So we weren’t allowed to talk about the past.”

  “At all?”

  “We had to live in the present and look to the future. So, of course, if we could remember knowledge that could help, we would. One of the camp members, Graham, he was writing it down. He used to be a journalist and old habits die hard. But emotions stopped us from being present. They paralyzed people. They made Feed reflexes kick in to try to solve what was wrong. People had fits trying to connect to the Feed. Seriously. It killed most people, the shock. For us, the survivors, the question was how to deal with that grief. How to process it. Our brains were fried, the emotional stuff was raw. The Feed had done everything for us before: stored information; told us what to eat, when to exercise, how much to sleep. It communicated for us more efficiently than we ever could on our own; it recorded our memories. It’s only recently that mine have started to come back.”