Everything Belongs to the Future

by Laurie Penny

  Don’t eat the fairy food. Don’t make deals with demons. They play under the table with cards you can’t see, and they can make you pay forever, and they are always smiling.

  Do you ever regret what you paid?

  Write to me, write to me, and tell me that you’re not paying it still.

  * * *

  Time exfoliates the stones of Oxford University in slow circles. Walk down the wide, quiet high street and you’ll see it secreting itself in the deep pores of the university, the fairy-tale libraries and perfect emerald lawns of the college quads appearing and disappearing behind oak gates stuffed with discreetly expensive modern security systems, guarded by porters in black outfits that were already old-fashioned a century ago.

  Time moves differently at Oxford. It had done ever since Daisy first came there, two generations before. The sandstone crenellations of the Queen’s College and University College still glared at each other across the high street as they would do long after they put everyone Daisy loved in the ground.

  They had cars that could drive you right to jail and dirigibles that could get you to London in twenty minutes without burning a lick of carbon. Cambridge was entirely underwater, which is what happens when you build an eminent university in the middle of a swamp. People who could afford the treatments lived for a hundred years and more, but Oxford—Oxford changes slow. Oxford is ritual and tradition and sandstone worn by the wind.

  More so now, if anything, because they didn’t have to replace the dons as often.

  Meanwhile, the other city swirls around the university, moving under the skin but never quite touching. Walk a mile in any direction from the grand worn stump of Carfax Tower, as few of the college people do, head off beyond the checkpoints to the inner city rim, and you’ll see it face to face. The slums of Cowley and Headington and Blackbird Leys, crawling with disease beyond the checkpoints. Cramped houses and unswept gutters, the plastic shop hoardings and wind-bitten bus stops where kids with pinched faces loiter in packs, trying to look as fearful as they feel. Their parents all work for the colleges, in one way or another. This is where you’ll find the kitchen staff, the college cleaners and maintenance crews, the waiters and shop assistants and sex workers and the men who sell arcane bits of offal in the Covered Market. The people whose job it is to fish the drunken undergraduates out of the river and supply the anxious ones with top-of-the-range psychotropics. There was that other Oxford, clinging to the underside of the leviathan university like a swarm of bright sea creatures cleaning and steering a great blind shark, leading to the inevitable question: Who is feeding off whom? Who is predator, and who is prey?

  For the professors, this had become a rhetorical question, a matter for deep discourse and endless undergraduate theses to be printed, delivered and filed away in libraries under philosophical inquiry: contemporary, unresolved, forgotten. For everyone else, the answer arrived each week with a paycheck, if you were lucky.

  Daisy rarely came out here these days, and certainly not to the top of Headington Hill. The cemetery wall dragged at her utility overalls as she hauled herself up beside the others. From the top, they could see the whole university spread out like a picnic blanket of rare treats.

  Sandstone spires and domes made suggestive gestures at the dawn. Chill mist coiled away from the graves and cupped their faces in its hands.

  “It’s beautiful,” the one called Fidget said behind her—a small, dark young trans man with neat cornrows and clothes that fit like they’d been tailored. Daisy hadn’t done anything like this in years—was still unsure if she was only daring herself out of boredom.

  She would know as soon as they opened the grave.

  Rose Hill Cemetery was where wealthy graduates and faculty members were buried. There was a fresh grave fifty feet away, damp earth tossed before a headstone that managed to be both enormous and tasteful at once.

  The rich didn’t die like everyone else anymore, but when they did, they did it in style.

  “There,” said Daisy. “That’s where we dig.”

  Margo, the large, gruff one, rounded on Daisy. “Not okay, little miss. Not at all okay. You said you were here to show us something. You didn’t mention grave robbing.”

  “If I had, you wouldn’t have come.”

  “Not the point. Extremely far from the point.”

  “It’s up to you, of course,” said Daisy, keeping her voice steady. Margo was clearly the leader they pretended not to have, the one to convince and impress. “But what’s in that hole is going to change your life, and the lives of everyone you know, for the better.”

  “I don’t like this one bit,” said Alex, the boring, handsome one attached to Nina. Daisy wondered if he had become an activist so he could pretend he was in an old adventure movie and come out with lines like that. Any second now, he was going to say that it was quiet—too quiet.

  “You’re secure for at least an hour,” said Daisy. “Nobody knows you’re here. Trust me.”

  Margo thought about it. Then she nodded.

  “If you’re going to be stupid, I’ll stand watch,” said Alex.

  “No,” said Daisy. “You won’t. Everyone digs, including me. You’re all in this.”

  The soil was fresh, and they got to the coffin within minutes. Daisy kicked the lid aside with care but without ceremony.

  The corpse was young, male, fresh. Daisy heard someone, possibly Fidget, make a strangled sound.

  Something was growing on the dead boy’s face.

  Something gray-green and florid and faintly luminescent. His cheeks were veined cheese marbled with furry fungus.

  “Aspergillus aevitas,” said Daisy. “The fungus that’s the raw material for the fix. A strain of it, anyway. It grows on the bodies of fixers after death, unless there are extraneous drugs or corroding viruses in the system. Hard to get a control sample. Most of the suicides are overdoses. This kid drowned himself.”

  Daisy spat out her words like grape seeds into a napkin, swallowing the emotion.

  “I heard about that,” said the pretty girl, the one called Nina, peering down at the dead boy. Daisy got the impression that this girl at least had seen dead bodies before. “I read it on the local feed. Didn’t he throw himself in the Isis?”

  “That’s right. Poor kid,” said Daisy. “Some of them work themselves beyond reason over finals. Need the good results to pay down family debts. Or to prove themselves to the extension-by-merit board. This kid, I don’t know. He wasn’t one of mine.”

  Alex made a surprised face.

  “One of my students,” Daisy clarified. “I don’t have kids. Not anymore, anyway.”

  She pulled on some sterile gloves and began scraping samples of the fungus into jellied culture trays. She pocketed a few, passed the rest over.

  “We’re violating sixteen international patent treaties just by holding these samples outside a lab,” said Daisy.

  Boring Alex dropped his tray with a yelp, as if it were red-hot. Daisy glared at him, and so did Nina. He picked it up again and put it in his pocket.

  Nina cleared her throat. “Daisy has been liberating papers,” she said. “She thinks it’s possible to develop and culture a generic version of the fix direct from the fungus. Rougher, but it’ll do. She needs space and support.”

  Alex stared at her.

  They all did.

  “Good grief. That’s huge,” said Fidget, eventually.

  “Are we up for it?” asked Margo.

  They all nodded.

  “I’ll leave by the front gate,” said Daisy. “I’ll be in touch when I can. I can’t stop them picking me up, but I won’t get anything more than a smack on the wrist. I’m their weird little pet. You get away out the back. They don’t know you’re here. They only know I’m here.”

  “I like the way she thinks,” said Margo. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Does anyone think it’s a bit too quiet?” said Alex.

  A scream from the road. The dyin
g-robot scream of a police siren.

  “Run,” said Daisy, quite calmly. “All of you, run away now. I’ll find you.”

  Nina did not hesitate. She ran. She had made it halfway up the wall by the time Alex caught up to her.

  Daisy waited until she heard them hit the grass on the other side. Then she opened a flask of coffee and strolled out the front gate, fixing on her best don’t-fuck-with-me scowl even though she was in a better mood than she had been in ages. Sometimes, being a rich man’s pet eccentric worked to your advantage.

  Daisy had been working that one for years.

  * * *

  Alex didn’t feel like a cunt one hundred percent of the time. Certainly, he hadn’t at the beginning. It was a job, and a good one, too, and after his mum and sister died, he had needed any work at all. When the company made their offer, it seemed—appropriate.

  Everyone Alex had ever known had died too young, although he struggled to think of anyone of whom you could definitely, absolutely say, “That was old enough.” All death was untimely. If that was changing, he wanted in.

  It started out with an ad for plain old drug trials, literally bleeding for pay in small hot rooms where they gave you a cup of tea and a biscuit and fifty euros under the table. Then there were the psychiatric trials. They were testing a new anxiety treatment, and Alex had fit the bill: under thirty, in good health, poor and desperate and wracked with daily dread that shook him awake every night with the sound of his own heart shaking the walls of his chest.

  The treatment didn’t help, but the job they offered him did, after he was found to have a gift for manipulating the truth in situations of extreme stress. Work filled the fearful hours. And then, of course, there was the benefits package.

  Alex was a survivor. Alex wanted the fix, and that was the deal, the box of Turkish delight to sweeten the work of professional betrayal: half a century. Standard offer to all TeamThreeHundred employees with security clearance. Shit pay and long hours, but what did that matter when at the end of it all, you got fifty more years, at least?

  It was the perk to end all perks.

  And all it took was the daily understanding that you were lying to the only people who’d ever actually liked you.

  They all lived together in a beaten-up old house at the arse end of Cowley. Alex, Nina, Fidget, Margo, Jasper and a rotating cast of crust punks and lost kids whose names Alex wouldn’t have been able to remember if it hadn’t been his job to remember their names.

  They were all artists in one way or another, and some of them had known each other since school. Margo was a filmmaker who had trained as a state therapist. She was working on a series of documentaries about how mandatory psychoanalysis made people sicker and it would be much better to just give them money. Jasper made clothes out of reclaimed material and bits of scrap metal, and he and Fidget had a comedy sketch show together that went out whenever Jasper’s manic moods coincided with the equipment working. Fidget also painted murals, huge angry gray-black things scratched into the plasterboard by an emotion far larger and more terrible than Fidget’s small, neat body could contain. The walls were covered, apart from some places where he’d gone right over the peeling posters that had later fallen down, leaving off-white stamps in the chaos, windows opening to nothing, flickering under the LED lights that failed to make much of a dent in the gloom.

  Nina wrote prose poems and song lyrics. Some of them were about the tyranny of science over nature, and some of them were pornographic, and some were both. She had even had a book of them published by a small press that used to run out of the basement of a nearby house before the structure rotted and the tenants had to leave. But she hadn’t written for a while and was shy to publish. Alex played bass guitar in a band that had never recorded an album. Then there were the various friends, friends of friends, waifs and strays and lovers and second cousins trying to dry out from drugs, who always seemed to be littered around the sofas and the floor mattresses in the basement.

  Making art was a decent excuse for breathing.

  Making good art was one of very few ways to earn an honest living.

  Make great art and you can cheat death.

  They had found each other by chance, through friends and online listings, and pooled their money to long-lease the house. An art colony, like they used to have in the 1920s and the 1970s and the 2040s. It was an end-of-row 1960s pile so dilapidated that it was held together by mold spores and plywood supports. Three out of the five front windows were boarded up, and the garden was full of the corpses of small robots that Fidget, Margo and Jasper had made two years before and tried to train to recognize human emotions. It hadn’t worked.

  It had all been an adventure for the first year, or two or three, even when there was too little to eat and not enough money to heat the house, no matter how many extra jobs everyone worked when they could. Then, at some point, it stopped being fun. There was more communal drinking than communal cooking, and someone stole someone else’s boyfriend, and it all could have gone horribly wrong if they hadn’t become political.

  It started with simple flyers, just bits of bright cut-and-paste propaganda signifying little. Then it was impromptu bits of street theater. The comedy show got more radical and had to be rehosted somewhere it wouldn’t be blocked for extremist content. That was around the time Alex had showed up, running into Nina as if by accident at a housing protest where they’d all been rounded up and spent a cold night together at the local precinct, shivering and encouraging one another to give no information, whatever they were offered. The next night, they were all let out together and ended up in the pub.

  It didn’t take long for them to come up with the idea of the truck. It was an ancient kebab van with the word “Hasan’s” still printed on one side, abandoned in the junkyard at the end of Iffley Road, and as soon as they saw it, it felt like fate. Hasan was Nina’s surname.

  They paid for the truck out of what was left in the house kitty—the junkyard owner had been glad to get rid of it—and stashed it in the front garden with its nicotine-tipped grass, but Alex was the one with the real skills to fix it up. He worked for weeks that summer, sweat shining off his close-cropped skull, until it was finished. Until it was perfect.

  A truck that had been the scene of so many late-night student romances, so many chance meetings over hot chips and curry sauce. By September, Hasan’s food truck rode again, under new management, offering one option, mystery stew in sandwich bread, at one, extremely competitive price—free.

  It was Margo’s idea to take Daisy out on the truck. A test, to see if she was really on board, plus they needed an extra pair of hands to cope with the lunch rush. The engine was so old, it still ran on diesel, and it was always a struggle getting hold of it, especially with the carbon tax so high. But there was enough to drive it to the market every Wednesday and Saturday.

  Daisy’s head swam with noise and the stink of cooking oil and cheap sugar as she stirred the stewpot. Half of it was reclaimed food rescued from skips—not strictly legal, but not the sort of thing the police paid much attention to, either, unless they were feeling particularly vindictive.

  Nina cooked, her long brown hands fluttering over the packets of herbs and bottles of spice. Somehow, she could take any collection of stale, leftover ingredients and suspicious cans of vegetables and turn them into something exquisite, hearty and hot and fragrant, as long as you did not mind that it always came out as a vaguely brown slop with the consistency of fresh vomit.

  It tasted fine, though, especially with toasted bread, and there was always a queue of local families, squatters and punks and drifters, lining up for the sandwiches with their mystery grains and multicolored sauces.

  And then there was the secret ingredient. At the bottom of each sandwich, smeared with pungent, good-smelling sauce and wrapped in silver foil, a little blue pill, or even two or three.

  No second helpings, no money exchanged, no questions asked.

  Cheating death was an art, like
everything else.

  They did it incredibly well.

  It was magnificently illegal to resell patented pharmaceuticals on the street, but there was no law against giving them away. There was a donation bucket to cover the cost of running the heaters plus whatever extra ingredients Nina simply had to have to make that day’s mystery stew taste so curiously good. Preserved lemon peel. Garlic flakes. Black onion seeds that popped and crackled in the hot oil, filling the rusty little truck with strange perfume.

  They worked for eight hours, and Daisy barely said a word. She just watched the line of people in their dingy clothes shuffle past until the blur of their faces resolved and focused into personhood.

  “Do you get it now?” asked Margo as they cleared up.

  “Yes,” said Daisy. “I think I do.”

  “As a therapist,” said Margo, “I’d say you’re making progress.”

  Then they went home.

  * * *

  The house was surrounded by sandbags and floods every September no matter what they did. That’s why they had it so cheap. There was a crawling-rot stink that no amount of lavender incense could hide, and black mold was always inching its way up the walls because of the damp, leaving everyone with constant allergies and chest infections.

  A lot of the house budget went on knockoff medicine. This was the sort of minor patent infringement that Alex should really have been reporting, but he didn’t. What with the damp and the drains, they all needed it.

  Especially Daisy, who wasn’t used to these sorts of conditions.

  Alex didn’t remember the exact moment when Daisy became part of the household. They had made her a small laboratory in the shed. Easier to do this work away from cameras, away from techs watching your every move and science as a dry dead thing under glass. After a few weeks, she would work through the nights and be there in the mornings, making coffee in her meticulous way in the huge kettle. She’d sleep for a few hours in her chair, eat some jam with a spoon and then go right back to the shed in the garden, where she’d set up a small sterile workspace with some help from Margo.