A Calculated Life

by Anne Charnock

  All was now clear.

  Nicole had formed a relationship with a man called Barry. He worked at the IFA in maintenance and cleaning services. That is, Nicole had formed an intimate relationship with an organic male. Strange! Jayna detected outrage in the communication streams. Not only had Nicole violated her protocols but apparently she had also shown appalling taste. Jayna found no official reason for her recall and it seemed only a handful of people within the IFA knew about her cavortings with Barry in the broom cupboards. Senior colleagues expressed bemusement that the organic could be sexually interested in a simulant but they inferred that Barry was too thick to realize what a sick bastard he was. Nevertheless, it appeared he had been dismissed with a payout from the Constructor to keep his mouth shut.

  Jayna felt herself slump. She couldn’t compete with that; Nicole had gone too far. And what had prompted her? Simulants didn’t do sex.

  A final exploratory foray unearthed a statement by the organic Barry.

  How careless of them to leave that lying around. But she couldn’t dwell on Barry’s version of events; time was pressing. She withdrew from the IFA data, dusting her path, laying false trails, creating diversions, and finally she was back in friendly territory. Her heart was thumping.

  Immediately, she prioritized her studies for Mayhew McCline and spent the rest of her working day weaving through official and unofficial texts, dispatching requests for clarifications, proposing hypotheses, and conducting tests through mathematical models; rejecting, refining, reiterating. She compiled a progress statement and dispatched it to Benjamin.

  The communication from Dave was short and achingly sweet: Would you like to meet up tomorrow afternoon?

  Jayna made no reply. She deleted the message from the entire Mayhew McCline system—a rigorous exercise that resulted in her working ten minutes late. On the way out, she called into Archives. “Don’t do that again,” she said, and placed a paper note in front of Dave. She turned on her heel and left. Dave unfolded the note: 13:15 hours, Antiquarian Bookshop on Portland.

  Julie called by Jayna’s room that evening. The atmosphere over dinner had seemed subdued.

  “Am I disturbing you, Jayna?”

  “No, but I’m pretty tired tonight.”

  “I won’t keep you. Just wondered if you want to do anything tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Rather not make any firm plans, Julie.” She had to invent something. “I may need to work some extra hours.”

  “More than your contracted hours? You know you can report them.”

  “I know. But I want some solid results for my boss. I’d like to see him doing well—become a vice president.”

  “He’s not your responsibility.”

  “I know but I feel I owe him. It was largely his decision to take my lease. And if he gets promotion, I think I’ll be there long term. I don’t like the idea of being reassigned.”

  “Oh! Jayna. I hadn’t thought of that possibility.”

  “I expect you have more job security in the state sector.”

  “Maybe. But I think you’re worried about nothing.”

  Jayna yawned. “I’m definitely not worried.”

  “Well, anyway, let me know if you want to meet up tomorrow.” And she left.

  Jayna flopped back on her bed and kicked off her shoes. She could quite happily have slept there fully clothed. She decided she’d try that some time.

  As she studied the cracks in her ceiling plasterwork, she re-enacted the day’s events: her morning detour to work, meeting Dave in the park, her reckless incursion into IFA data, Dave’s potentially incriminating message, her reply, and the revelation of Nicole and Barry stealing moments together among mop buckets and paper towels. I tell yer, there’s no difference. It was right there in his fragmented verbal statement, made in answer to a string of questions from a panel of directors and a constructor’s representative:

  I saw Nicole most days around the place, in the corridors. She usually spoke to me. Nothing much, just “Hello!” or “How are you?” She was polite and always smiled. Then we started having a bit of a banter…Yeah, I thought she fancied me. I know she did. Other women do, too…So what’s the big deal?…What’s the difference? I tell yer, there’s no difference. That’s a fact…Mind yer own fuckin’ business. All right, she responded…It was her fault if she missed important meetings…Well, sack me! It’s a shit job anyway.

  Fascinating. But Jayna was none the wiser about Nicole’s motivation. She hadn’t attended any disciplinary meeting. She hadn’t made a statement. She’d simply disappeared.

  One thing Jayna did notice from IFA timesheets—a correlation between a small number of Nicole’s absences and the company chauffeur’s stand-down time. They’d missed that.

  CHAPTER 6

  There was no actual rule about sitting in the recliner but its intended purpose as an aid to deep thinking was clear. So, for the first time, Jayna abandoned the recliner, stretched out on the bed, shut her eyes, and launched her Saturday processing session. Let’s stir things up, she said to herself. A less rational, less pedantic interrogation of the data…see what happens. Selecting a three-dimensional oceanic construct, she scattered her data sets with a sower’s sweep, forcing random encounters within the data, lots of them. She added churning currents; they would shift the data sets during the session. Maybe too complex but worth a try. She dived into her virtual ocean, straight through the statistics on world hydrogen production. Absorbing the information in an instant, she reached towards a cluster of data sets below—electrical goods recycling, locations of community nuclear power plants, water purification costs—sifted, regressed, correlated, pushed aside. She swam down through a vast swarm of data lying near the base of her construct—transport profiles for Londoners and New Yorkers, fueling depots across the road and rail networks, hydrocarbon production and refinery capacity, rare earth prices. Pointing her fingertips to the surface, she floated up through the energy stocks and modeled each company’s performance, searching for those with statistically significant, positive alphas—those that out-performed the market.

  She opened her eyes—an hour and a half had passed—and rested her mind awhile. One more attempt. This time she plunged through Europe-wide data for car ownership, fuel types, manufacturers, dealerships, scrap prices. She glimpsed a near-perfect proposition. But it lay beyond her grasp.

  Patience. Something will emerge soon.

  Most of the residents had dispersed by the time Jayna reached the canteen for lunch. She bowed low over her soup and noticed a scattering of crumbs across the table and three water rings. Good: the others had been and gone.

  As normal for a Saturday afternoon, she set out from the rest station towards the Entertainment Quarter. Two blocks along, however, she turned southwest into Portland Street. Automated road cleaners were slowly clearing and spraying the gutters, sucking debris from the pavements. Steeling herself against any loss of nerve, she resumed her ongoing study of the city streets: the pattern of paving slabs and kerbstones, the incidence of cracking, and the distribution of manhole covers and grids. But her thoughts still bolted ahead. I do actually like Dave. She swept her colloquialisms. He wears his heart on his sleeve. That’s it…he’s emotional, raw. He’s even slightly unpredictable; perfect for me. I can learn so much from him, if he lets me.

  The bookshop came into view and, as though she might otherwise turn tail, she made a rapid-fire commercial assessment. An unprepossessing frontage, shop floor area, say, of thirty square meters, a gross profit margin of between 10 and 15 per cent of turnover, depending on their stock control, working capital, and liquidity ratios. Behind-the-wall earnings, most likely, many times the shop’s turnover. The bookshop itself was a brand-building operation, she guessed…a myriad of unseen trading operations generating the bulk of the profits, and hence shareholder dividends, related to less exciting products delivered from warehouses located at transport hubs…

  And now she stood at the shop entrance. Judging by the
restricted opening hours, Jayna decided the shop assistant must be a simulant of the Frank or Freda variety, no doubt stuffed full of data on all things bookish—paper and binding quality, number of printings in each edition, number of issues incorporating minor changes, preferred editions, etc., etc. The perfect shop manager to deal with an erudite customer base.

  Entering, she saw Dave at the far end of the shop but she turned to the female assistant. “May I browse?”

  “Feel free. We have something for everyone—literature, classics, children’s and illustrated, local history, travel and topography, decorative arts, things Japanese”—exactly, Jayna thought, a Freda—“and a section on regional maps printed mostly pre-1800…”

  Dave guessed that Jayna had deliberately ignored him and he played along. “Jayna. Hi! Thought I knew the voice.”

  “Hello, Dave. I didn’t expect to see anyone I knew here. Do you come here often?”

  He hid a broad smirk by looking down at his feet. For all her brains, she came out with some rubbish lines. Forcing the smile off his face, he looked up. “I bought a couple of books for Olivia from here. What about you?”

  “Just passing; thought I’d look in.” She selected a book at random, flicking the pages, settling on the imprint.

  “Don’t you love the smell of old books?” he said.

  Jayna was a blank. What was he talking about? Of course. An olfactory signal—pleasant memories. She looked at the small book in her hands then turned her back to the assistant to shield their conversation. “Let’s go to your place, Dave. How long will it take?”

  “Err…it’s five stops out from the terminus on Line 3.” This was all moving a bit fast and his eyebrows were darting. “How long have you got?”

  “I need to be back by five-thirty.”

  “Okay. That’s do-able.”

  “You leave now ahead of me and I’ll follow you in three minutes. Wait at the platform till you see me and I’ll join you on the shuttle.”

  “What’s the cloak and dagger for?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  Slowly he returned his book to the shelf, making time to think. “You look a bit too tidy for my neighborhood. I’ll give you my top shirt when we meet up.”

  “All right. Now say ‘goodbye’ to me and go. Please.”

  He complied in a roundabout way partly for Freda’s benefit. “Look, Jayna, I’m sorry. I have to rush. Great to see you, though.” He leaned towards her—tilting his head twenty-five degrees from the vertical—moved his face towards her right cheek and placed his mouth against her skin. Simultaneously, he grasped her right upper arm and pulled her towards him; she pitched a half step forward, off balance. He pressed his mouth more firmly against her cheek. He released her. “Let’s meet up soon.” And he headed off.

  She didn’t think. She simply preserved the impression; his mouth on her face, his hand on her arm. And she held on to his smell. She waited. Waited. But no memories were triggered. Jayna couldn’t work out why she liked the smell of his hair, his skin. This was something very simple; too basic for words. Only a shadow of Dave’s touch remained. As she stared at the open book in her hands, she predicted that whenever she thought of this encounter she would always recall this little book. She flicked the pages, lifted the book, and inhaled molecules of old ink and paper. That too. She’d remember that.

  Striking southwards, she tried to conjure images of Dave’s life in the enclaves. And because the evidence of her eyes might later obliterate these imaginings, she decided to fix her mind-images—his street, his apartment, his belongings, his beehives. She could test her reality gap. But beyond the images, what else? Could she and Dave become so familiar and so totally at ease in one another’s company, if she visited him often, got to know his neighbors well enough to pass conversation, if she and Dave shopped for groceries, walked through his local park on Sunday afternoons…Could they become the very best of friends? She imagined one possible future: he’s meeting me at the shuttle station and I’m waving, he’s walking towards me, we’re holding hands and walking through the streets together…we’re drinking coffee at a pavement café.

  Leaving the commercial district, she walked along the glass-walled buildings of the sprawling university complex. The pavements widened and the dense canopies of whitebeam gave intermittent shade to the weekend pedestrians. Relegated, she thought, these whitebeam; just a form of sunblock now. But, once upon a time, they were the stuff of industry—the cogs, literally! As the sun flashed at her each time she strode out of the shade, it seemed the trees and sunlight conspired to send a message. For she made a firm decision to do more of this—take more walks through the city. Only, in future, she would walk without purpose, finding new places by chance. She passed two young women lying like bookends along a low wall, head to head; the space around them filled with chatter and shrill laughter. Luxury. Empty time.

  Out in the open, she crossed the no-man’s-land in front of the terminus. What were the chances, she wondered, of meeting someone from Mayhew McCline? And what would she tell them? Part of the truth: she’d been modeling the transport sector on and off for six months and not once had she traveled down a shuttle line. Anyway, if she had to, she could justify visiting Dave. Benjamin had given her clearance, of a kind.

  Dave watched from the platform and held his over-shirt in his hand. Seeing Jayna approach, he stepped onto the waiting shuttle. She followed. There were nine other passengers in the compartment and Dave led her to a bench seat at the far end. The carriage was more utilitarian than she had expected: stripped down metal, no livery, wooden slatted seats, windows that opened manually, no air-conditioning.

  “So what was all that about?” said Dave.

  “I don’t want anyone to know I’m meeting you.”

  “Why should the shop assistant matter? What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know for sure, Dave, but I don’t think it would go down too well at the office. And the shop assistant was a simulant so if anyone asked questions she’d have perfect recall.”

  “It’s your weekend. It’s nobody else’s business.”

  “They wouldn’t see it like that.”

  “They don’t fucking own you.”

  “No. Not quite. Well, yes, they do really.”

  The carriage juddered. They looked out as the shuttle gathered speed and within half a minute they were flying noiselessly away from the city center. The buildings blurred; she hunted for a recognizable feature. It made her eyes hurt. So she relaxed and tried to absorb the visual cacophony. And, this way, she sensed that the built forms were gradually changing in character from large bulks with shiny, reflective surfaces to smaller, less dazzling blocks with irregular rooflines; more complexity and more greenery. She grasped she was witnessing the compactness and semi-structured order of the suburbs. Despite the shuttle’s speed, it was apparent that security wires lined the tracks.

  At the precise moment this realization crystallized, the shuttle burst into a landscape so unrestricted that she gasped. An almost unreachable horizon, a high blue sky stretching across the entire landscape. She placed her hand flat against the window, for she wanted to stand out there, alone amid the giant discs of green and yellow that lay squat and unbounded on chocolate brown soils. She wanted to stand out there and feel the size of the planet through her feet. This was the first time she had appreciated—through the kind of revelation only granted, she now realized, to a witness—that the Earth really did curve, but so slightly. She felt less than tiny. She felt like a negative presence; a scratch of an entity on the skin of a planetary body.

  The circular fields’ bright colors grayed towards the horizon. These were the irrigated expanses of Outer Manchester, at one time a rain-fed region for cereals and livestock. Now, crops sprang to attention only at the command of overhead gantries with their clouds of water droplets. The discs gave way to endless, fuzzy lines etched across the bare earth as though the farmers were primarily tasked with an empirical study in per
spective.

  “The vineyards,” she said.

  “The olive farms lie south of here. And the citrus groves are farther west, closer to where I live,” said Dave.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I know,” he said. “But way out of reach.”

  She turned to him. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a business; no room for day-trippers.”

  Facing forward again, she detected something low and shapeless emerging through the heat haze. Even as they sped closer she discerned no punctuations; no towers, no spires, no cranes. This had to be the first enclave, she thought. The shuttle slowed towards the station and the new urban landscape became a reality. No clear signs of economic activity, no factories, only three small warehouses on a siding; minor distribution depots, she supposed. She caught sight of street lights but no vehicles, and monotonous blocks of low-rise housing units, four to six storeys high, clearly set out on a grid pattern, untidy with clothes hanging from balconies, which—as far as she could make out—were largely relegated to household storage. Several balconies, however, were boarded up, possibly to make additional rooms. She wondered if the architects for these miserly buildings had sketched patio furniture for these ostensibly desirable indoor-outdoor spaces.

  The shuttle pulled into the station. Functionality laid bare; no advertising hoardings, no wrought-iron squirls hinting at former glory days. No romance had ever been connected to this place, she thought. “It’s not what I expected.”

  “I did warn you.”

  “Yes, but are all the enclaves like this? Aren’t there any parks?”

  “Parks? You’re thinking of the inner suburbs. We’ve passed those. Our shuttles don’t even stop there. We’re pushed out to the enclaves as fast as possible.”