by Julian Gough
And Naomi says, ‘No. I don’t do that any more.’
She stares at Ryan.
Her husband. Ex-husband. The man she once loved, or thought she loved, back before she knew what love was. Back before she had a child who loved her. A child she loved.
She studies her ex-husband.
He said he loved her. Maybe even believed it. He promised to love her for ever.
Maybe even meant it.
And now he wants to kill them both.
No. Love that can become its opposite so easily was never really love.
But she has one thing left. One thing she hasn’t tried.
It’s getting so hot in the house now, that the gap between the heat she feels and the snow she can see is too big, it’s breaking the illusion, and she closes her eyes.
Takes a deep breath.
Then she spits a single word into the whirling storm.
It is a word she has never spoken before.
‘What?’ says Ryan, leaning forward. ‘What did you say?’
Naomi opens her eyes. Looks straight into Ryan’s eyes.
Repeats the word. Louder.
Ryan sinks back in his chair. ‘Oh, Naomi.’ He closes his eyes.
‘What?’ says Colt, panicked. ‘What does it mean?’
Ryan opens his eyes. ‘You want me to stop?’
‘Yes,’ says Naomi. ‘I want you to stop, now.’
Ryan breathes out. A huge breath.
‘What does that word mean?’ asks Colt.
‘It’s our safe word,’ says Ryan. ‘When we . . .’
He glances at Naomi.
‘Back when we loved each other. Before you were born,’ says Naomi. ‘Your father and I . . . sometimes we would do things together that were dangerous. Dangerous for me.’ She sees the question form on Colt’s face, and shakes her head before he can speak it. No. I don’t want to have to explain how those wires got crossed. ‘It doesn’t matter why . . . The point is that I trusted him. I trusted him with my life. And he made me a promise, that he would always stop, if I spoke our safe word.’ She looks across at Ryan, at his flickering avatar. ‘But I never said the word.’
‘That was the word,’ says Colt.
Naomi nods. Still looking at Ryan, she says, ‘I don’t want pleasure. And I don’t want pain. I want you to let me go now. Stop. As you promised you would.’
Ryan looks away from Naomi; looks away from the camera; looks around his office in the real world, at the souvenirs of his life. The debris. The wreckage. ‘I have other promises, babe. To my country, to . . .’
‘Your promise to me came first,’ says Naomi. ‘I never released you from it.’
‘You divorced me, babe.’
Babe? She shrugs, lets it go. ‘I ended the marriage. Look, marriage is a public thing, to let people know, let everybody know, a couple are together. But this was different. This was earlier. This was just us.’
‘It wasn’t a fair . . . agreement.’
‘Why not?’
‘I loved you; but you didn’t love me.’
She’s spent so many years telling herself she never loved him. That he never loved her. She’s astonished to find herself saying, ‘I did. I did love you. It’s just . . . we hadn’t grown up. We didn’t know who we were yet. It wasn’t enough.’
‘Oh, Naomi . . . If I could . . .’ Ryan drags in a deep breath. ‘But you know that, later on, I had . . . other loves. You could call them. They came with other responsibilities. I signed . . . I made other promises.’
‘You were always free to have other loves,’ says Naomi. ‘I never owned you.’
‘You loved other women?’ says Colt to Ryan. The idea is astonishing.
‘Other women?’ Ryan smiles. ‘No. But a man can love a country and a woman and a gun.’
‘But which do you love the most, Dad?’ says Colt.
Ryan does something with his face that looks like a smile; but it isn’t a smile.
The safe word is still echoing through Ryan’s brain, setting off associations, triggering memories, changing moods.
Like a bomb going off.
The committee of his selves makes a decision. ‘My country . . . has betrayed me,’ says Ryan. ‘And a gun – even a drone cloud, even the immune system – is just a machine. But I really did love your mother.’
Colt stares at his father.
‘I know, she doesn’t believe me,’ says Ryan. ‘You don’t believe me. But it’s true.’
Naomi shakes her head. Takes off her helmet, and vanishes from the game.
Colt’s never seen emotions move freely across his father’s face. It is fascinating, and terrifying. Like watching a tornado dance unpredictably through a familiar neighbourhood, casually ripping off a roof to expose the fragile interior.
Colt realizes Naomi has run another program in Ryan. Activated something.
Love?
Desire?
Need?
Honour?
It doesn’t matter. The more complicated and unresolved, the harder to name, the better.
His father is no longer single-minded.
Now, conflicted, neurotic, he can’t act.
And that thought leads to another, and another. Patterns form. Colt’s mind connects, connects, connects, until he sees it. The weakness.
The flaw in security, leading straight to his father.
I can destroy him now. Take advantage of this moment. High risk. Very high. But if it works . . .
Colt’s mouth is abruptly dry.
Outgame, he extends a shaking hand to pick up the mug of water from the table.
Ingame, Colt’s hardly aware of his action as he lifts the crude clay drinking vessel from the low boulder.
It’s just part of the game.
But as the cool mug touches his lip, there is a sharp, distant crack, an echo; nearby, ingame, a buffalo collapses with a low moan, as the immune system takes out another node.
Another shot. Another buffalo drops.
The gameworld, exhausted, throws everything available into defence.
It’s not enough.
To free more resources, the game asks Colt’s permission to cease mapping unimportant items.
Colt models the possible consequences, checks for conflicts or problems. His enhanced brain makes the decision in milliseconds.
Yes.
‘My God,’ says Ryan sharply, ‘you’re in the house. Why can’t the system see you? What’s going on?’
Colt, mug still touching his lips, stares at his father; sees where his father is staring.
Colt glances down.
The crude clay mug in his hands has turned into a Doctor Who mug.
‘I ♥ ♥ The Doctor.’
Signed by Peter Capaldi.
His favourite mug.
Ingame, unchanged.
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Ryan, ‘you’ve blinded the drones . . . But then where the hell are the ravens getting their pictures from?’
Ryan’s head jerks around as he looks across the game’s desert from horizon to horizon.
His eyes widen as he works it out.
And Ryan vanishes from the game.
129
‘The Internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.’
— John Perry Barlow
‘He knows,’ says Colt.
‘What?’ says Naomi faintly, outgame, the whisper of a ghost.
‘He knows where we are, Mama. I have to kill him.’
‘No,’ says Naomi faintly.
‘If I don’t, he’s going to kill you, Mama. Kill us.’
Naomi says something too quiet to hear.
Colt switches off the game, and he’s back in his room.
He puts down the mug on his table, carefully, as though it might explode. Lifts the visor of his helmet, to look directly into his mother’s eyes.
‘I have to, Mama.’
‘Colt . . .’
‘I have to.’
He closes the visor and turns away.
130
‘For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them.’
— Philip K. Dick
Oh, wow.
All the anger he ever felt towards his father, and suppressed, because he was afraid to express it; it’s all leaking and bubbling to the surface now, under tremendous pressure, like the boiling groundwater and steam that can precede a volcanic eruption.
A song goes round and around his head, a song his father loved.
Anger is an energy.
ANGER IS AN ENERGY . . .
He goes ingame, and gets to work.
And this is unfamiliar work.
He has never tried to kill anyone before.
He doesn’t want to kill anyone.
Words appear in his head.
I hate my father.
Colt marvels at the words.
They sit there, beside other words now.
I love my father.
Which of them is true?
I love Dada.
I hate Dada.
Colt looks from one to the other; testing them, feeling them. Trying them on like two T-shirts, between which he must decide.
But they both fit.
Both are true, at the same time. How can that be?
A hot gush of anger bubbles up in a stutter of images, old emotions, memories, and now he can’t see the words.
An image of his father shouting at him; an image of his father shouting at his mother; an image of his father turning away.
A door, slamming. His father’s footsteps, receding, growing quieter, gone.
Dimly, distantly, he feels his mother, outgame, touching his arm.
Pulling on his arm.
He shrugs her off.
‘Get out, Mama.’
The words emerge so loud, so angry, that he flinches at the sound of his own voice.
His father’s voice.
She touches his arm, and says something so quietly that the filters and noise-cancellation in the helmet don’t let it in, and now he is shouting at his invisible, whispering mother, ‘GO AWAY!’ and outgame the words bounce and distort off the walls of his bedroom so loud he can hear them through the filters, and ingame they echo back off the hills.
And now he can’t hear her, can’t feel her. She’s gone.
Oh mano, the house is getting hot . . .
He assembles his tools with meticulous care. If this doesn’t work first time, he’s in a lot of trouble.
He’s dead.
There’s a subtle vulnerability running right through the security structure of the immune system. Leading directly to his father, to his father’s office.
He can’t believe he didn’t see it earlier. Maybe he wouldn’t even have seen it, before his enhancement.
If it works, his father is dead.
Something pops up discreetly in the corner of his vision. He glances at it. An ingame request for contact, for his exact location.
Surely he’s blocked everybody . . . oh.
Sasha is trying to find him, ingame.
He gets a queasy, uneasy feeling about that, alongside a brief mental image of her frowning at him, but he doesn’t examine the feeling. Not now. He moves abruptly to another sector of the test range, and blocks Sasha too.
It’s almost ready.
He hesitates. What a thing, to try to kill your father. To try to kill anyone.
But if he doesn’t, his father will tip off the immune system. Tell it where they are.
He’s forcing me to choose between killing him, and allowing Mama to die.
Tears prick at Colt’s eyes.
It isn’t fair.
No one should have to make that choice.
It isn’t fair.
I hate him.
He launches his final attack.
131
‘But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.’
— Thoreau, Walden
A tremendous pressure, across his chest and back.
Outgame, Colt is jerked erect as his arms and legs snap straight and lock, rigid, jerking him erect. He lifts from his chair, sways, and topples to the floor.
Ingame, he falls, astonished, cruciform, to the sand.
My suit.
The immune system’s taken over my suit.
The micromesh tightens again, and Colt grunts involuntarily as air is pushed out of his lungs.
Colt can’t move his feet, legs, torso, arms, hands, head . . . he flicks his eyes up along the tilted horizon of the game and back, twice; flick flick; calls up the eye control menu.
The big, crude menu comes up, superimposed in blocky text and icons on the landscape. Good.
But . . . if it’s taken control of the suit, knows where he is; why doesn’t it just kill him? Why has he still got menu access?
Lying immobile on the hard ground, and using just the eye and voice controls, Colt pushes forward the attack against his father in the base, penetrating deeper and deeper through layers of security; but the harder Colt pushes, the worse the pain in his chest, the pressure on his limbs, until he can hardly feel his fingertips, his toes.
His genitals are crushed up against his body until his testicles feel like they’re going to pop under the pressure. The pain is more intense than anything he’s ever felt; his eyes water so hard that he can’t work the eye controls, can’t see the menus through the shimmer of tears.
The micromesh is contracting.
Contracting past the pain-tolerance threshold.
Way past the point where the contraction of the suit should stop.
The suit emits a hazy, high-frequency sound, as tens of thousands of invisibly fine fibres tighten further, rub past each other along the surface of his skin, put each other under more tension.
Anger is an energy.
Colt lashes out again at his father; and again the suit pulls a little tighter, with a thin, high creak as the fibres rub past each other.
Like guitar strings, tuning higher, thinks Colt. Till something snaps.
The strings; or the neck.
*
A shadow falls across his face, ingame. Eagle?
He tries to move his limbs; to roll away; but nothing happens.
It feels tremendously wrong; a draining effort of will, yet with no physical result at all.
This must be what it’s like to be totally paralysed, thinks Colt. What if it squeezes harder? Will I be paralysed?
No. That’s not going to be a problem. It wants to kill me.
The shadow above him, around him, darkens.
Something’s getting closer.
He twists his eyes hard over, as far as they’ll go, till the muscles hurt, trying to make out the shape of the shadow on the pale, dusty ground.
A human figure?
But his peripheral vision is too poor, since the implants; he can make out nothing.
Boots appear, a blur of black, at the edge of his vision. He tries again to roll away; can’t.
The figure bends, till he can see its face.
Through lips that are turning numb, he mumbles, ‘Sasha.’
‘Colt,’ she says. ‘Stop.’
‘Stop . . .’ He pauses to take a breath; but breathing out deeply is a mistake. As his chest falls, the suit tightens smoothly, and he can’t pull in any new air to replace what he’s just exhaled. ‘. . . what?’
‘Stop fighting.’
‘It’s . . . killing . . . me.’ The words are barely audible, and now, as the suit tightens another notch, he cannot speak at all.
‘You’re killing you,’ says Sasha.
And she bends closer, and holds him. Hugs him.
He relaxes into the great wave of warmth that comes from her arms, her body; from her gesture; as his micromesh suit transmits a totally different kind of pressure. He relaxes into the answering wave of warmth that wells up from inside him, in response.
Not the heat of anger, the warmth of . . .
Love.
I love her.
Oh, Sasha.
He tries to speak as he lies there in her arms, but he can’t.
I love you.
His lips shape the words, but there is no breath left in him to exhale, to move the vocal cords.
I love you.
He stops fighting.
The micromesh suit gasps a high pure note, holds it.
And then the note begins, very gradually, to deepen in pitch.
Fade in volume.
It’s falling.
Detuning, as the tension is released.
The suit is loosening.
He can move.
He can breathe.
132
‘Myth is the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments . . . it is a spell the soul casts on itself.’
— Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, translated by Tim Parks
She loosens her embrace. Ends the hug. Steps back.
The mesh unlocks.
He stretches out on the ground, and gulps in air. Groans as the blood returns to his fingertips, toes. Shakes the pins and needles from his arms, his legs. Adjusts his crotch awkwardly, with another groan, this time of relief. Stands.
Faces Sasha.
She looks so real. Realer than real.
She has her leather jacket on. Thin red T-shirt, over the faint outline of a black bra.
He leans forward, can’t help it, can’t stop it.
His lips touch hers.
The helmet does its best. Pressure is transmitted.
But not by lips. Not by her lips. Not by her.
He inhales, but he can’t smell her soap, her leather jacket. She’s blocked all olfactory data, or maybe her unit is just switched off; either way, it won’t let his helmet reproduce her smell.
Colt is hyperaware of every aspect that isn’t fully mapped. All that isn’t there.
He breaks away, steps back.
‘You’re not . . . safe,’ he says. ‘Being seen with me. Ingame. You need to go.’
‘No,’ she says calmly.
‘But they must have found me . . . they broke my suit security . . .’