The Raft: A Novel

by Fred Strydom

  We waited outside the glass doors at the tube stop among a small crowd of early commuters. I was the only child in the group and the adults towered around me, each looking lifeless and disgruntled, the sort of expression you’d expect at the end of a long day, not the start of one.

  One of the long white vertical tubes raced towards us—thrust down by the water pressure that powered each of them through the building—coming to an almost soundless halt in front of the silent group. The doors opened and four people entered. They sat. Their seats were raised and the next four available seats rose in their place. Eventually the robot and I were able to enter and take a seat.

  Sitting in the tube as it raced downwards from floor to floor, watching and waiting as people stepped on and off, I still had no idea where we were going. The park raced past. Then the floor with the restaurants and entertainment facilities. I looked at the robot sitting beside me, but there were no clues to be read off its empty metal face.

  The tube cleared out until only the robot and I were left. Finally it stopped on the first floor of the scraper. I thought we would be getting out there, but the robot stayed in its seat. The nose of the vertical tube extended below ground, a space I had always assumed to be reserved for leftover track. This, as I was about to discover, was incorrect.

  The robot stood, pushed a red button beside the door, and the carousel of seats began to move. We were lifted up, across the top of the tube, and began our descent on the opposite side. The chair-lift stopped and the bottom doors opened, revealing a floor I had not known existed until then.

  A floor below ground level.

  A thrill rushed through me.

  My mother willed the robot to stand up and I did the same. We stepped off the tube and into a long white corridor. The door closed behind us and the tube raced upwards.

  The robot walked and I followed. The lights above the corridor were warm and yellow. On both walls of the long corridor were rows of framed pictures: photographs of my father shaking the hands of suited men (looking as if they’d like to suck the powers out of each other), schematics of unknown machinery and devices, certificates, a map of some kind, as well as what I now reckon must have been architectural floor plans. At the time I had no clue about any of those sorts of things.

  At the end of the corridor, a door came into view. My mother lifted the robot’s arm to punch a code into a keypad. The door opened and we stepped inside. The lights inside buzzed to life, revealing one part of the large space at a time.

  It was a house.

  A living room with three chocolate coloured sofas, various ornaments, paintings and paraphernalia—even a piano in the corner. There was a kitchen with all the accessories and amenities, as well as a fully stocked pantry-hall with enough food to feed a family for years. At the top of a spiralling steel staircase, I could see a number of bedrooms. We wasted no time, bee-lining through it all, making our way to the large steel door behind the staircase. The robot opened it by punching the same code into a keypad, and we went into a new room. It was large and filled with things I had never seen before. Things that, quite frankly, scared me. Strange weapons hung on racks attached to the walls. Three sets of body armour were on exhibit behind three glass cubicles. There were oxygen tanks. Gas masks.

  I’ve since realised that the entire house was a protective bunker of some sort. My father was either more paranoid than I had imagined, or expecting some war or catastrophe to occur—one that would force the three of us to vacate the city-scraper and take up residence in that large, furnished, underground house.

  My mother’s robot offered no tour of the house. We had come for a specific reason and she went straight to it. She opened a large drawer and pulled out a brown cardboard folder. She turned and held it out and I took it from her slowly. I was about to open it but my mother’s robot extended its hand and shook its head. I was not supposed to open it straight away.

  After that, the robot closed up the room, switched off the lights, and we left the house. The tube returned to our underground floor and took us back home.

  There, my mother’s robot prepared lunch and dinner and marched back to the recharge unit for the rest of the day. It was not like her to shut down so early, but I felt guiltily relieved that I would have a break from our increasingly awkward interactions.

  The rest of the day proceeded normally. I received private instruction from my regular old tutor, as boring as ever. I had my lunch, and I managed to push thoughts of that unsettling morning trip from my mind until the evening.

  As usual, my father and I ate dinner in silence. Afterwards, he mentioned he’d go for a swim upstairs and, once he’d left, I went to my bedroom.

  I sat on the bed for a long time holding the dossier. Should I open it? Something inside me said I should wait, and I decided to heed the instinct. I put the dossier in my bottom dresser drawer and went to sleep.

  The next morning, I awoke as usual, but the robot did not come by with anything particular for me to wear. I showered and dressed. I remembered the dossier, but a growing sense of unease had surpassed my curiosity. I was afraid of what I’d discover inside. There was no reason to believe it would be bad news, but I felt it. The moment I opened it, horrible things would be set free. They’d fly out into the world and I’d never be able to put them back in.

  The robot wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was it in the living room. Perhaps it was standing like a palace guard in its recharge unit? But when I opened the door, the unit stood empty. Finally, I entered my mother’s bedroom.

  The machine was standing beside my mother as she sat in her chair. The plasma-window behind them showed the wide digital image of a mist-draped lake in the valley of two green cliffs. Both the robot and my mother were standing on the rippling surface of the lake; they appeared to be part of the image. Then the image changed and they were on a grassy, wind-flattened plain beneath a cloudy blue sky.

  At first I thought the robot was assisting my mother in some way. Feeding or cleaning her. But it wasn’t doing anything. It was bent over her with its arms out. My mind ticked over slowly and the horrific truth of the situation became apparent. The robot wasn’t helping her. It was stooped over her body and its metal claws were clasped firmly around her floppy neck.

  My mother was dead, her face inert and blue. She had used her robot to strangle herself, and the robot, having disconnected as soon as my mother’s brain had ceased to function, was still frozen in its final, merciful act.

  I could do nothing but stand and gawk. I was in a strange and surreal place and I couldn’t register anything. I remembered seeing my mother in the bed more than three months earlier, but this time there was no running for help. No scream.

  Instead, a kind of strange thoughtlessness was promptly followed by grief. The grief entered and settled in my gut like a dark and slippery creature, living off my pain. For two days, I refused to leave my room. I hardly ate. I moved in and out of understanding her final act, feeling furious and broken-hearted at the same time. And underlying that, in the deepest part of me, guilt simmered steadily.

  Perhaps I had created too great a divide between the machine and my mother. That’s why she’d killed herself. I’d treated her avatar like an intruder and had grown to despise it. All she had wanted was to walk and explore the tower—to spend as much time with me as she could. I had never considered that. I had never adapted, as hard as she had tried for me. I had never truly considered her feelings. I had been a selfish child. She had taken her life because of me … Once I allowed these thoughts to surface, I couldn’t escape them.

  It was not long afterwards that I entertained my first serious thoughts about life outside. I was only able to see a fraction of the world through any of the windows in the tower—mostly the thick ribbons of mist partially cloaking the mountains—but still, I dreamed of faraway places. These thoughts were the only thing that could distract me from my grief.

  As time passed, the dreams grew stronger. The need to be out in the world int
ensified. My heart ached for freedom. I tried to tell myself none of these dreams really mattered since I lacked the most important ingredient for such an escape: courage. Only later did I realise that it wasn’t courage I needed. It was hatred.

  Hatred of the life I had been given, as well as the one I had been denied. A hatred strong enough to strip me of my fears and insecurities. A hatred that filled me two weeks after her death—the morning I remembered the dossier still tucked in my dresser drawer.

  I took it out of my drawer, sat on my bed, and cautiously flipped it open. I looked towards the bedroom door, knowing nobody would be coming anytime soon. I reached into the brown dossier and pulled out a thin stack of senso-sheets. Flipping through each page, I could not work out the gist of the subject matter, but tried to pick up what I could. There were walls of printed text and signatures on the bottom corners of each sheet. An application form had been filled in, by either my father or my mother; their names were scrawled all over it. From the letterhead I determined it had been issued by the hospital.

  I laid the documents on the bed and looked inside the dossier again. There were a few other items I had missed: pages with letters and codes, the moving image of what appeared to be a brain, and a handwritten note on a folded scrap of digital paper.

  My name was on it: Jai-Li.

  I unfolded it hurriedly, leaned against the wall, and began to read my letter.

  I have read my mother’s letter so many times since that moment that the memory of each word is etched into my mind. It went as follows:

  Dear Jai-Li

  You are only a baby as I write this, but I have spent so many nights wondering about the right time to show you the contents of this dossier. Hopefully, you are now almost an adult. If you are only a young girl, it means I’ve had to give you this difficult news early. I can’t imagine the reason for such a thing, but if it means I am no longer around, I hope you find the strength and courage to see yourself through your years. I am sure that you will.

  I’m not sure there is a right time to read such a thing as this. Nor do I know if your father ever plans on telling you—indeed, I fear he may not. I must be the one.

  Just after you were born, I made a terrible mistake, and agreed to something I shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have been easy to disagree with what was planned, to go against your father, but I should have done more to resist him. I should have fled, found a way out of this place. There must have been something I could have done. I don’t know. What I do know, though, is that you must be told what I did, what happened to me. Hopefully, one day, you will find it in yourself to forgive me, although I do not expect your forgiveness to come easily.

  When I met your father he was not the man you probably believe him to be. In the very beginning, we were young and we were in love. We dreamed about leaving the Huang family, the company, about eloping to avoid the terrible trap of a life of laid plans. But those years of hopefulness were short-lived. Somewhere along the line, the pressure from our families became too great. Somewhere along the line, I lost your father.

  His own father, the grandfather you never met, filled his head with fear. The world was a wasteland, he said, a place in which your father would stand no chance of surviving. Furthermore, he added, your father was a wretched disappointment of an heir, a boy who could never hope to satisfy a woman like me. (Yes, this is what he actually said to him.)

  This went on and on. Never once did your grandmother stand up for him. Mostly she smiled behind her husband and kept her tongue.

  I turned to my own parents for help, but they would hear nothing of it. They told me to do whatever the Huang family wished. They were meek people of modest origins, overwhelmed by the prospect of their daughter marrying into an empire of such power and repute. I don’t know if they hoped some of that power would come trickling down their way, or if they were relieved I’d be protected from the world in a way they had never been, but they brushed off the thought of the psychological torment that accompanied such a “merger.”

  Eventually, it reached a point where your father felt he could do nothing but submit—and he has been submitting ever since.

  Day by day, I watched him slip away from me. In the beginning he was furious about his father’s cruel taunts and threats, and we promised we’d find a way to deal with it all together. But fury cannot be channelled as one might hope. We can harness a few rays of the sun to do what we need—power a building like the one we live in, for instance—but we cannot harness the sun itself. It will burn as it wishes. And so it is with fury. The rage your father held in his heart for his father began to burn for me. His fuse shortened. Everything I did became an annoyance to him. At first, after one of his explosions, he would apologise, but these moments of contrition were brief, showing the fading remnants of the man I once knew and loved, the final few wisps of smoke before the embers of his love and compassion turned to ash. As if by death or the devil, he was finally lost. To me, and to himself.

  Then came the day when the blood clot in your grandfather’s head finally ended him, as embittered and pitiless as he had always been. With his death, something changed in your father. A change that took him from me forever. On that day he truly became a Huang.

  For a while he simply withdrew into himself, barely finding the energy to fight with me, let alone communicate his feelings. When this detachment was replaced by something else, it was not by love, anger or even indifference. It was by the work to be done. Your father was consumed by the need to feed the shackled monster in the basement that runs on its wheel to keep the company going. The family legacy. The empire of guilt and shame.

  And so came the plans for expansion. Everything was to be heightened and widened. Blueprints were drawn to extend the tower in which you were later born, and in which you are probably reading this: a prison of steel and glass where the outside world would have no domain. A place where every son of a Huang would be able to play out the role of God, a sinister, bloated pantomime for a crowd of spectators held hostage.

  When he was satisfied (as much as he could feel for a short period of time), your father decided it was time to get on with the business of producing his son.

  Of course, instead of a son, you were born. Since he had never insisted on genetic preparations to ensure your gender, you must understand your father has always accepted you for who you are. Unfortunately, there was more to this acceptance than meets the eye. It was the decision that was later made that haunts me each and every day. This is what I must confess to you.

  Your father was not that concerned when you were born because he already had another plan firmly in place. Since he is relatively young, having only recently been made the head of the company, his plan is to hold his position for a significant amount of time, perhaps even until he is a hundred years old, or more. He knows the baton of leadership must be passed on, but he is equally determined to have his own time to reign. He also knows I am getting older and the window for me to have more children is closing.

  And so, he told me of his plan: You, his daughter, will provide him with the son he needs. One day you will give birth to a boy and this son of yours will be your father’s heir. In order to ensure this, however, my darling, I’m afraid some choices were made that I can no longer keep to myself.

  You must know what is to come.

  Merely a few weeks after you were born, on your father’s wishes, you were sent back to the hospital. You were isolated in a laboratory for just under a month, during which time certain preparations were put in place. Your genes were altered so that, using genes extracted from your father’s own skin, your body was set like an alarm clock to fall pregnant on the day you turn twenty years old. Within your blood a genetic clock is ticking, counting down the days until your body begins to produce a child.

  Your belly will swell as the months go on. As far as I know, the child you give birth to will look and behave exactly like one produced from normal conception, but it will not be the child of any man you mee
t and love. It will not be a child of your choice, or even of a chance meeting. In truth, it will not be your child. It will come as close to physical and intellectual perfection as your father has ordered. It will exist for one reason and one reason alone: to follow in your father’s footsteps and take over at the end of his years of control. He anticipates being in power for a good sixty to seventy years.

  This heir, the one you will incubate, will allow him two things: his long and selfish time at the helm, and you, a caretaker for the child in the early years, for I will be too old to be of any worth. Your father has no intention of ever releasing you from this tower, and this is why. You will remain here for the rest of your life, first as the daughter who will never be allowed to fall in love, or marry, or have children and a home of her own, and later as the guardian to his new son …

  I do not know whether you understand what it is that I am trying to tell you. You may be too young to grasp all of these details, but take care of this letter and reread it at a later stage if it is too difficult to make sense of right now.

  All I can say is that there are no words to express my regret for having allowed this to happen. Once you’ve read this, you may reject every good thought and memory you’ve ever had of me, drench it all in bitterness or hatred. And while I remain the coward who has given up on finding a way to save you from this fate, all I can do is tell you this and pray you have enough courage to find a way of fighting this cruel plot against you.

  I love you, and have always loved you, but that has never been enough. I have never been able to tell you all the things I’ve wanted to. You have been fed lies your entire life. You’ve been separated from the other children in this tower so that you never find a partner and fall in love, but also so that you continue to believe this tower is all that remains of a deserted and inhospitable world. This is not true. It is a fear put into your head to contain you.