‘The money, the resources, the luxuries that were being lavished on so few … It made me feel a little more ill each day. Imagine if we spread that a bit further – and I’m talking about access to stimulating education, clean air, food.’ He waved his arms around the greenhouse. ‘There’s such an extraordinary range of potential that can be reached. Makes you wonder how small a part the design itself plays in the outcomes – and yet people spend so much on it. What if a child simply received that kind of support without having a design?’ He was about to continue, but then he stopped abruptly. ‘I’m talking too much. I didn’t bring you here to lecture you. I just wanted you to enjoy this.’
He looked around him with pride. Next to the Halston gardens, it wasn’t much, but in itself, it was an extraordinary achievement.
‘We can’t feed everyone on this,’ he said. ‘But it means we don’t have to be completely reliant on illegal BioPerfect products. Maybe one day we won’t need them at all.’ He stood up. ‘Although I fear that time is some way off.’
I spent the day with him, working as we used to work together, sometimes chatting, often lapsing into an easy silence. Over lunch he told me that I wasn’t to forget Miss Margaret loved us. ‘All of this has been very difficult for her. She’s been torn. It’s in her nature to care for you.’
There was a lot I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to disturb the peace of the day with an argument. For the first time since I’d arrived, I was content.
Back at the compound, I found Miss Margaret waiting for me in the room I shared with Lark.
‘I’m afraid she’s ill,’ she said, indicating Lark’s neatly made bed. ‘We’ve had to take her to the infirmary.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ The fear and anger that was just below the surface was ready to erupt. Had they hurt her? Had she come to harm like Wren?
Miss Margaret smiled and told me it was all right. ‘Lark hasn’t adjusted as well as you have – physically, that is. It happens to most people when they first change environments. You seem to be particularly hardy.’
‘Can I see her?’ I asked.
‘Of course. I’m sure it would do her good.’
Lark was in bed, her long, pale hair damp around her face, her skin flushed with fever. I wasn’t allowed in the room with her, so I sat by her bedside and spoke through the monitor.
‘Wren?’ She tried to sit up, her eyes glazed as she looked at me.
I shook my head. ‘It’s me, Fern.’
‘Why aren’t you swimming?’
I didn’t understand.
‘We all went to the river together, but you wouldn’t go in. I called and called to you. It was so beautiful and cool. But you said you didn’t want to. You wanted to go back to our room.’ She smiled at me, her hand on the glass. ‘We were all in there – Miss Margaret, Ivy, me and Wren – but not you. You held back … You held back.’
I told her that I’d be happy to go in with her, of course I would be. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘It’s so sweet and clear.’
Her eyes were closed.
‘Do you remember that night?’
I saw the faintest flicker of a smile on her face.
‘It was your birthday and we all went down to the river. And you sang that beautiful song.’
Miss Margaret touched my shoulder. ‘She needs to rest.’
I sat with her outside the room and cried. I cried for the loss of Wren, for fear of losing Lark as well and, if I’m honest, for my loss of self.
‘She’ll be all right,’ Miss Margaret assured me. ‘I’ve seen new arrivals react to the change far more virulently – and they’ve recovered. When I brought Ivy here, she was ill for quite some time. We have access to a range of the best BioPerfect pharmaceuticals and a few of our own.’
She was walking briskly as she spoke. She looked anxious, I realised. Distracted.
When we reached my room, she sat on Lark’s bed, patting the space next to her. ‘I know you’re still angry, Fern.’
‘Of course I am,’ I said, my voice barely controlled.
She reached for my hand, but I stepped back.
‘Don’t.’ I began to cry, just wanting her to leave me alone.
But she didn’t. She waited.
‘You liked being at Halston,’ she said gently. ‘You’re different to the others. Wren struggled. Ivy knew something wasn’t right, but you and Lark just felt blessed. You, especially.’ She leant back, stretching out her legs. Her feet were tired, she said. She had been rushing around too much. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to give you the time you need. I miss Halston too.’
I glanced across at her.
‘I look back on my first few years of caring as some of the happiest in my life. I was determined to be the best carer I knew how to be. I made no contact with the sieves and I felt I had succeeded in putting my questioning behind me. It was just an inevitable part of growing up, I told myself. Perhaps it had even been an intended part of my education – I needed to have experienced doubt in order to reject it.
‘I look back on that period of my life as a time of peace and contentment. I wish I could have stayed that way.’ She shook her head and turned to me. ‘Have you never questioned who you are? In all your years at Halston?’
I could see she genuinely wanted to know, and it was the first time she had ever come to me wanting rather than simply giving, seeking an affirmation that I wasn’t going to be able to supply.
‘No,’ I said.
It was mostly true. I had always been so proud of who I was. I was gifted. I was destined for great things. I might have been a Lotto Girl, but even that couldn’t dampen this sense I had of my own unique abilities. If anything, it made me all the more special. My gifts hadn’t been purchased. The fates had singled me out. And yet I had also doubted my own capabilities.
‘I don’t want to question,’ I told her. ‘If this is part of my education, I don’t want it. Or if it’s an attempt to pull me into the sieves, I don’t want it either.’ I stared at her, exhausted. ‘I just want to go back to how it was.’
‘I know,’ she said, putting an arm around me. ‘But we are thinking, living beings and we cannot deny that.’ She turned me to face her. ‘You cannot. You, in particular. I know you, Fern Marlow, and you are even more special than you realise. You are so important. You need to understand that what BioPerfect does isn’t always good. It’s harmful.’
I didn’t look at her. But I didn’t move away. I’d had years of seeing her as the source of comfort and wisdom, as the person who knew the answers, who would care for me no matter what. Such a long history. It kept me there in that room with her, I suppose.
‘I didn’t want my doubt to return, I wanted to stay content. But once you’ve opened the door to it even a little, it will always be there, waiting, ready.’
Then why are you doing this to me now, I wanted to ask. Why are you forcing that door open for me?
‘It wasn’t until I’d spent three years at Halston, until the first group of Lotto Girls under my care arrived, that I began to seriously question again. Myself and another carer from Redgrove, a boys’ school, were given special training. We were to look after these children, they were our special charges. We would be given extensive data about each, about the aims and questions behind their design, we were to be part of a monitoring team – although, of course, these children had no idea. They were to feel as though they were like any other child at the school.
‘I listened. I took notes. I did courses. And, increasingly, I became aware of a growing sense of unease – but even that isn’t quite the right word. It was more like a chill – sharp and uncomfortable, impossible to contain – seeping through the cracks before I knew it. The return of doubt.
‘How extensively had I been monitored? I wondered. I remembered that conversation I’d overheard. I remembered Rachel. I still had no idea what had happened to her. I felt ashamed for having let her go so easily.’
As I listened to Miss Margaret I, too, felt th
e chill. Had I been monitored in ways I didn’t know? I glanced across at her and she nodded, aware of what I was thinking, but eager to still me.
‘It’s more complex than you realise,’ she said. ‘My first four girls settled in relatively easily, as did the boys. With my second lot – the lot before you – there was one girl. Clare was her name. She was frail. Far too sickly for a design. She struggled with her studies. She was dreamy, imaginative, vague – completely unsuited to data pathway development.
‘From a very young age, she would come into my room and we would talk. She wanted to go home. She was the only child of loving parents who had been so happy to win the Lotto. They were both teachers – gentle and kind, older. They contacted me far more often than they were supposed to, but I didn’t stop them. I liked them. I liked Clare. She had a whimsy, a delicate floating charm, a laugh that used to make me smile.
‘I hated having to test and monitor her, to report on her lack of progress, her physical problems. She had frequent chest infections – in some way she hadn’t adapted to the BioPerfect environment – and her eyesight was deteriorating rapidly, as were her autoimmune functions.
‘I feared she was going to be asked to leave. I was anxious for her future. At least at the school she received top medical treatment. At home, in a far harsher environment, she wouldn’t survive for long.
‘I remember sitting at my desk one night, poised to complete a report on her. With the datastream in front of me, I knew I had nothing “favourable” to say because they didn’t want to know about how delightful she was, how enjoyable her company and her humour.
‘I found myself dipping a toe into the sieves – just quickly, furtively, but also more directed than I dared to admit to myself. It wasn’t hard to find a line back. Marcus was my first point of contact. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left for Halston and he’d gone to work on a farm. I’d wanted to let him go. He was so pleased to hear from me, and I …’ She turned and smiled at me then, her eyes sad. ‘I still loved him.’
I looked at her, sitting opposite, her tight grey curls framing her face, her skin slightly wrinkled, tissue-soft, her expression gentle. She was so familiar to me. A mother, really. And yet, I had never known her.
‘What happened to Clare?’ I asked.
She ran her hands through her hair, smoothing it as she spoke. ‘Do you remember the young woman diagonally opposite you at lunch yesterday?’
I didn’t, but then I saw her for an instant – slender and very pale, coughing as she passed a plate of food further down the table.
‘That was her?’ I asked.
Miss Margaret nodded. ‘She was our first rescue. Well, the first I knew about.’
I waited for her to continue.
‘Marcus gradually began to tell me more, to introduce me to other BioPerfect subversives. I remember the first time I linked up with a network – carers at other schools, designers, modifiers, all secretly working together against the Parents. One knew of Rachel – she’d been involved in her design and the design of her friend Euan. She, too, didn’t know what had happened to them. She could only assume they’d been wiped. Like me, Rachel had no biological parents to speak of, so she would have been sent to a compound in a place like ReCorp, where she was unlikely to have survived.
‘Nowadays they might send you back to where you came from, depending on the circumstances, never admitting to failure on their part, of course, simply stating that your education had been completed and there were no positions suitable for you at the present time. If your failings were particularly marked or you had the potential to be difficult, you would be wiped.
‘It’s wrong,’ she told me. ‘My job is to care for you. How could I allow that? Clare was sent to a care facility in a last attempt to work on her health, but it was clear that she wouldn’t gain any strength. The fear was that she would be seen as a major failure, one that needed to be wiped. We had a doctor there who advised BioPerfect to stop treatment and let her die, but of course he didn’t do that. He wiped her and brought her here.
‘I know she misses her family but I think she’s become happy here. We are a community. We work collectively. We share food production, health, education, access to data – everyone bringing whatever skills and knowledge they have to the group. We hook up with other networks, we take in people, we move them on – basically, we try to run our own lives without the domination of a Parent.’
‘Was Ivy one of your rescues?’
Miss Margaret nodded. ‘The first that I actually undertook.’
I could understand why they had taken Ivy. I could understand Wren as well. Neither appeared to be successful designs. Both would have been in danger of being wiped and dumped. But myself? Lark? Were we failures too? Had I been deluding myself?
‘Why am I here?’ I asked, barely trusting myself to speak.
‘Oh, Fern.’ Miss Margaret came over to me then and sat close, one arm around me as she brushed my hair off my face and let me cry. ‘You are not a failure.’ She held my hands and waited for me to face her. ‘My contact with this group has taught me to dislike terms such as “failure” and “success”, to question them to the very core and to rail against them.’ She smiled. ‘But, still, you are not a failure. For want of a better term, you are a success – so is Lark – in so many extraordinary ways.’
Holding my face in her hands, she turned me to look at her, her pale eyes intent on mine.
‘We must get Lark well.’ She brushed away the last of my tears. ‘I need you to help me with that. Sit with her. Talk to her. It will help her immensely.’
Chimo and I crouch together in the darkness, our backs pressed against a wall. We are away from the mediastreams, the noise of the street, the sounds of cooking and eating and talking, autocarriers and traders a distant rumble. It’s just me and him.
It has been so long since I have uttered my real name and it hangs heavy in the air between us.
‘So, Fern Marlow.’ His teeth are white as he smiles at me. His eyes are glittering black, opaque as he holds my hand in his own. His hair shines like the plume of a midnight bird. ‘It’s a beautiful name.’ He strokes my wrist gently. ‘Who are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I reply truthfully. I have no idea who I am anymore. ‘You know as much as I do.’
I lower my eyes. I’ve given so much away that any attempts at secrecy are a waste of time now. It would be so easy for him to trace me, although I’m not entirely sure what story he would discover – the one told by BioPerfect, I presume.
‘How did you end up here?’
I shake my head again and hold out my hand. ‘I want to see my message.’
He hands me his mobie. ‘The request was sent through my streams,’ he says, looking at me.
I glance at the screen.
‘I know you wanted to hide yourself, but it was too near the surface.’ He looks at me. ‘I could discover it with no trouble. You need to learn to delve deeper,’ he says. ‘I can show you.’
On the screen is the replica I made of my childhood home. Lewis has returned it to me, but with far more care than I’d managed. It is buried far below the level on which I sent the image, its pathway up to the surface so complicated I’m surprised it ever reached Chimo.
This is his reply.
My hand hovers over it for a moment, unsure of what it means. I stare at it, trying to find some way in. And then I see it: there on the tiny copy of the table at which I used to do my work, a mobie sits, just as I left it in the box, unchanged except for a message blinking from my brother. You think you’re so special.
It’s strange how comforting the words that he once used to taunt me now seem.
I touch them and the sieves open up before me, taking me down, deep down, racing me through a maze of data, dipping and diving, resurfacing and then plunging once more.
He’s good, I think to myself.
I look around nervously as I come to a skidding halt. Chimo is standing in front of me, shielding me from
any passers-by, body tensed, on the alert for any sign of trouble.
I’m holding my breath without even realising it. I’m dizzy from the speed at which I have raced. And then he is there in front of me – my brother, Lewis.
‘It’s you,’ I whisper.
I’m surprised at how overwhelmed I am. I’d like to tell him I’m sorry. I was terrible to him. I’m not special – not at all – and I wish I could go back, but I don’t know where I want to return to. I used to think it was Halston, but now I find myself dreaming of the place I have recreated in that box, the two rooms I never thought of as home, but that have now come to feel like the one place where I was safe, where I was loved for who I am, whatever that may be.
‘It’s me,’ he says.
He is older, of course, and there is an intensity in the straight line of his mouth, the prominent cheekbones, the nervous tapping of his fingers. There is a scar near his left eye, and I wonder whether he had this as a child. This is not how I remember him, but then I gave him so little regard as I was growing up, I’d be a fool to turn to any of my memories for the truth.
‘You’re okay?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘Where are you?’
He shakes his head.
‘Mum? Dad?’ It feels wrong to use those words. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them. The whole time I was at Halston, they never felt like my parents. I had always believed that my design somehow separated me from them. They were simply people who had a limited role in caring for me before I went off to be educated. Or so I believed.
Lewis tells me they are gone.
‘Dead?’
He nods. ‘BioPerfect searched for you at their place first. God knows why they thought the subversives would have been so stupid as to send you there. But perhaps they thought they might have heard from you. They stripped Mum’s and Dad’s data right back, trying to get information from them. Not that they had any. Maybe BioPerfect thought they were involved in the set-up, that they were subversives. Because of me, I suppose. I don’t know.’ He scratches at the jagged white line of that scar. ‘They threatened a major datawipe. Mum and Dad were old and they were terrified. Dad had a heart attack, and Mum …’ He rubs his hand across his chin. ‘She didn’t last much longer. She didn’t want to be on her own.’
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