Expiration Day

by William Campbell Powell

“No.”

  “How can I help?”

  Good question. I could hear the voices outside. Gary and Mike were there, too, asking if I was all right. But I still felt scared. I needed to feel safe. The cubicle was safe. Outside was not.…

  “John, can you hold my hand?”

  “Can you open the door?”

  “No. Put your hand under the door.”

  I’ve got to give John credit, he didn’t argue, but knelt down on the smelly floor of the ladies’. A moment later his hand appeared, and I seized it, eagerly, ignoring the “Ow!” from the other side. The butterflies started to fade, and after a minute, I reached up with my other hand, and fumbled with the latch. The door swung open, and I scrabbled about in the awkward space to ease myself round it.

  John pulled me gently into the space under his arm, and the last of the butterflies faded. He must have felt me relax, because he asked, “Can you do it now, Raven?”

  “Can do, Ginger Mop.”

  Second song. “Ace.” I’m in the groove. It’s their—our—slow song, the one that works deep down in the unconscious, shivery parts of the brain. If it was like that to listen to, it is doubly so as I stand here and coax the first glissando notes from the fret-board, to blend with Mike’s ethereal vocal phrasing. I remember thinking the first time I heard it, how it was a mountain journey, draining, yet fulfilling. I find each note outside of time, reach for it, and bring it into being. I hold it, modulate it, let it grow and diminish, catch it on the edge of extinction, and sustain it a final moment. Gone! But the next is already there and I’m transforming it into audible sparks of molten bronze.

  Time starts and stops in curious fashion. I seem to have far too much time to find each note, yet now we’re on the fourth song, racing through the set. For a moment I can look out into the audience, where I see John, alone in space and time, yellow stage lights casting impossibly deep, coal-black shadows about his face.

  Aiee! This is so intense. It is birth, it is death, it is my life squeezed into a point of time, that weaves in and out of the here and now and opens a gate into what might be, in some other universe, some other when.

  It is done. Twelve songs. Our tale is told, the journey ended. My precious Warwick Corvette is once more a simple plank of wood. And I am plain Tania Deeley, R, late of Mike Clip and the Stands. Around me is a seedy little club, run by a Welshman of Italian blood, where the food is prepacked and greasy and the drinks are marked up and watered down. And somewhere outside there is a gray English day half done. London buses and fast-food stores. Car horns and hawkers.

  My little plank needs wiping down, and so do I for I’m drenched with sweat from the heat of the lights. A bath would feel really good right now, but I’m not going to get one. I’ve a bass to clean and put away, and I’ve got to help Mike and Co. break down the kit and load it onto their van, and I’ve got to find Siân and get back home.

  Anyway, thank you, John. I didn’t know how much I needed you.

  Thursday, January 1, 2054

  New Year’s Day.

  Christmas came and went—not a lot of fun because we have mock exams in a week, and I spent a lot of time revising. I really can’t get on with maths, at least, not the stuff they’re giving us to do now. I was okay with algebra, and trigonometry, but we’re moving off into calculus and stuff that I can’t see the point of. I mean, measuring the gradient of a line—why is that so important?

  I happened to mention it to John, and he tried to explain, but it didn’t help.

  “You should talk to Kieran,” he suggested.

  I didn’t realize, but Kieran’s an absolute whiz at maths. A dead cert for Cambridge already, apparently. But I don’t think I’ll call him. He’s nice enough, but I wouldn’t want to be calling him, in case Siân got the wrong idea.

  It’s amazing how little you can know about someone—I mean it was months before I found out that Kieran was Kieran Roberts. I knew his favorite drummers, of course, and he’d introduced me to some great bands from the past. I knew that when he got absorbed in music, his stammer faded. But the maths was a revelation, and I wondered how somebody so academically brilliant had ended up pairing off with someone like Siân.

  Don’t get me wrong—Siân is my best friend, leaving aside John—but she is not academic. I’ve got to know Siân really well, and she has some good people skills and fantastic intuition. But nothing that you could capture in an exam.

  Anyway, maths is a bit of a problem, and the sciences, too. But my languages are okay—I’ve stuck with Latin and French—and I love English, history, and ethics. My IT skills aren’t bad, either, with the stimulus of needing to tread the TeraNet without leaving a trail, and having John to teach me.

  The band’s gone into hibernation, a bit, which is a shame, but we’ve not found anywhere to practice, courtesy of Ted’s whispering campaign. There’s only so far you can go rehearsing over the TeraNet. That’s the latency problem that John talks about. I start to understand it better now. It’s to do with the speed of light, which you’d think would be fast enough, but apparently in music and video there’s a lot of bits of information that have to go from A to B and back to A again really quickly. And there are all sorts of conversions and bufferings that have to take place along the way, and it’s there that the speed of light really hurts you, because the speed of light affects how quickly you can switch the bits onto the right path. You can make the switches smaller, which makes them faster and lower power, but, as you go smaller, quantum effects start to interfere. Anyway, Mister Zog, you probably know all that stuff because you’re a star traveler, and your physicists have found some sort of back door around light speed and quantum effects, and you’re probably laughing at us poor earthlings. Gently, I hope.

  How did I get there?

  So no band, and loads of revision. I’ve not seen a lot of Siân as a result—and it doesn’t help that there’s a break in the rehearsals for Merchant, until after the exams. Somewhere in all the busyness of the autumn term we marked the first anniversary of Mum’s death, which was very painful, and Christmas itself, which wasn’t too bad, as it was our second Christmas without Mum.

  I did a second gig at Antonio’s with Mike’s band, which went really well, and they’ve asked me if I’ll do some more. It looks like Amanda’s more poorly than they realized, though they’re still not sure what’s wrong with her. I’d like to go and see her—maybe after the exams. Anyway, I’ve said yes to Mike about doing some more gigs. And, er, I’ve not told John yet. I’m not sure what he’ll say. Except that I think he’ll call me Paddy.

  Friday, February 6, 2054

  There are more people like Miss James. People who think robots are more than just property. I got my Eicon working again on the TeraNet, to see if there were other people like her, and who weren’t afraid to try to change things.

  They’re there.

  I guess, if they held a fair, they’d be right next to the animal welfare stall. Right next to the “Penguins First” fringe. Pardon me if I sound bitter, Mister Zog, but they didn’t strike me as the best our society has to offer. At least half of them can’t apostrophize “its” correctly, which is never a good sign.

  Of the remainder, 90 percent want to free Soames and his ilk. Soames doesn’t have any free will, my dears. Don’t waste your time trying to liberate a machine that can’t pass a Turing Test—there’s nobody home.

  But at least there is a core of people who are concerned about the “children.” And there is also a well-organized opposition that tracks down such sites and closes them down. The links I find always end up at “husk” sites—domains that have been blitzed of all content.

  Sometimes there’s a relic—a fragment that’s been picked up and cached by one of the “independent,” read illegal, search engines. If it weren’t for these occasional relics, I’d swear that no one cared. But the opposition—whoever they are—must have massive resources to track down these sites so quickly, and close them down leaving so little trace. Who,
though? The government? Or … Oxted?

  I don’t think I’ll carry on looking. These people are powerful. Hiding behind an Eicon doesn’t seem as safe as it used to be.

  Thursday, March 26, 2054

  Well, they’re over. My last exam was this morning. History. It was full of those open-ended questions, like: “Adolf Hitler gave Germany six years of peace and six years of war—discuss.” And questions on the Troubles, of course, though there’s a lot of overlap there with the ethics paper. General LeClerc—the man who nuked Lourdes—features a lot in both papers. As did the Anglo-French Sabine War.

  So I went to look for Siân, because it felt like weeks since I’d seen her to talk. I found her sitting by herself in the fifth-form common room.

  “Hey, Siân! I brought you a coffee.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  She took the coffee from me and put it down on the table beside her, and left it. She’d been reading a small booklet when I came in and poured the coffee, but it was turned cover down on the table now.

  There was a short silence, and I was about to ask how the exams had gone, when she took a deep breath, and I could see her trying to reach a decision. I waited.

  “Look, Tania, can we take a walk?”

  “Yes, but … I just poured you a coffee.”

  “Leave it, I’m not allowed.…”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ask. Wait till we’re outside.”

  So we made our way to the playing fields. There was a chill in the air still, and frost on the ground—the sun hadn’t yet got over the school buildings to melt it. We walked, and I waited for Siân to say what she needed, in her own time and in her own way. We completed the short side of the field and turned the corner. We were about as far from the school buildings as we could get, when she spoke.

  “Tania, I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh … Siân, that’s…”

  What? Wonderful news? A bit rash? Rather careless? When you’re fifteen and still at school, what’s an appropriate response?

  “Kieran’s the father.”

  Thanks for not making me ask.

  “Does he know?”

  “No. I’m not allowed to tell him. They don’t know whether to be angry or delighted.…”

  “Who? Your parents?”

  “Oh, no—they’re really proud and happy for me. No, it’s the government. They’re delighted that I’m fertile, but very annoyed that they didn’t choose the donor. I know it wouldn’t have been Kieran.”

  Ah. Siân, you’re not dumb.

  “So you took the decision out of their hands.”

  “Deliberately. Yes. I worked out the best time for me to conceive, and arranged to meet Kieran. It was the night of your first gig with Mike and the Stands.”

  She looked straight at me.

  “You know, you nearly ruined things when you had your little panic episode. It wrecked the mood I’d been building with Kieran. But when John walked you back to the lounge, everyone’s attention was on the two of you, so I practically grabbed Kieran and led him away to an unused room, full of cleaning equipment and furniture all covered with dust sheets.”

  “Oh.” I must think of more original things to say.

  “It was very uncomfortable”—though she grinned rather too smugly as she spoke—“but Kieran was happy with the arrangements, and this”—she patted her stomach—“was conceived to the sounds of your debut number with Mike and the Stands.”

  I remembered vaguely seeing John alone in the gig, and being annoyed at not being able to find Siân at the end. Now I knew why, I couldn’t stop a grin myself.

  “So now…”

  “It was only just in time. The government people had already made plans for my first insemination, and they’re checking me pretty regularly. So they picked up practically straightaway that I was pregnant, and they were in a right tizz what to do about it.”

  I counted weeks and months.

  “That’s still less than four months, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, so there’s still some risk. Quite a lot of risk, in fact. Which is why I’m now on a very carefully controlled diet—no coffee, by the way—and exercise management regime. That’s what I was reading in the common room. But four months is really pretty good going already, they tell me. Ninety percent of eggs don’t fertilize. Ninety percent of fertilized eggs don’t implant successfully. Ninety percent of implanted eggs fail to develop past one month. So I’m already a minor miracle.”

  “You sound quite happy about it.…”

  “I’m clutching at the few straws of happiness I can find. I’m a Mother now, Tania. The career I dreaded. I have no more choices now. Kieran was the first, the last, and only free choice, and he’ll never be allowed to know…”

  “Siân! He deserves to know.”

  “And if he ever let it slip, he’d be lynched. All men are encouraged to donate, but it’s anonymous. Every man consoles himself with the thought that he might be a father, however unlikely. It’s one of those clever psychological factors that helps keep society from exploding. The other factor is the robots, which keep the mother instinct satisfied.”

  Yeah. Me and my brothers and sisters.

  I sensed there was still more, though.

  “What else, Siân? There’s something else you’re not telling me.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes then.

  “All this”—she gestured around her at the school—“all this is coming to an end for me. The exams don’t matter now. At four months, I’m officially a Mother. A member of the most elite group of people on the whole planet. The most pampered, protected, and envied people that have ever existed. And a people totally without freedom. From here on, my life is dictated by the government.”

  An enormous sob wracked her.

  “I’m going away, Tania. Maybe as soon as tomorrow. Leaving you. Leaving the school. Leaving Kieran. Leaving everybody and everything that’s ever mattered to me…”

  Leaving the band.

  Sunday, March 29, 2054

  We have two new members in our flock—Mr. and Mrs. Fuller. I don’t know how much they’ll attend the services, but they showed up last night at the vicarage, totally distraught. I’ve seen it a few times over the years, the parents showing up late at night, their hearts ripped and bleeding. Figuratively speaking, Mister Zog, figuratively speaking.

  That was when I knew that Siân had been taken. Not, for once, a robot taken from a couple and returned to Oxted, but a real, live human girl.

  I answered the door, as it happened. Dad was in a Steering Committee meeting, so I showed them into our living room to wait until he could see them.

  “Siân?” I made it a question, though what else would have brought them both here on a March night?

  Mrs. Fuller answered me, sobbing, “Yes. She’s been taken.”

  “By the government?” Though again I knew the answer.

  “Yes,” she replied. “They had all the legal papers that said she had to go. There were a dozen policemen. There was nothing we could do. Our poor daughter…”

  “Our foster-daughter, dear,” added Mr. Fuller. “We can admit that, now.”

  Now that was a total shock.

  “I thought … never mind, let me get my father.”

  I left Dad with them, while I escorted the Steering Committee to the door. Ted, being a churchwarden, was of course on the Steering Committee.

  “Who was that?” he asked. “It sounded like the Fullers.”

  Trust Ted to pry.

  “I’m sure the vicar will update you with anything you need to know about parishioner visits.”

  Which was what Dad had told me to say to anyone prying into confidential pastoral matters. It didn’t stop Ted from giving me a poisonous look. Oh, well, what did one more glare from Ted matter?

  Back in my room I pondered that last bombshell. Siân was a foster child. And of course, it made sense. Siân had told me herself that her own children would be fostered. Here was the other sid
e of the coin—Siân being taken from her foster parents. Were all human children being fostered, then? It must be so, because every Mother had to give up her children.

  The government said so.

  No. The State said so.

  The State. That word feels more appropriate, I think. Not a benevolent government of the twentieth century—that’s a luxury humanity can no longer afford. We have a State, in the best Stalinist sense of the word. For the good of humanity, every Mother was kept prisoner, albeit in luxury. For the good of humanity, every child was taken away from its Mother and fostered. For the good of humanity, no man could knowingly father a child. For the good of humanity, robots were given to comfort those who wanted children. For the good of humanity, the TeraNet was rigidly policed and all dangerous information blitzed. For the good of humanity, we are kept ignorant of how much freedom we’ve lost.

  Hmm. Next to the State, Ted was beginning to look like Saint Francis of Assisi.

  After an hour or so of that sort of scary thinking, I heard the sounds of movement downstairs, and I guessed that Mr. and Mrs. Fuller were leaving. I hoped they might call for me to say good-bye, rather than just disappearing, and to my delight, Dad summoned me down to see them leave.

  Mr. Fuller spoke to me.

  “Tania, you were a good friend to our Siân, and I want to thank you for that. Right now, we’re feeling rather raw, but I’d like to think there’ll come a time when we can all share our favorite memories of Siân. You’ll always be welcome in our house.”

  He made it sound like Siân was dead, but even so—Oh, my! What a lovely father you had, Siân. So open and generous. I flung my arms around his neck and gave him my best hug. And one for Mrs. Fuller, too.

  When they had gone, Dad asked me what I knew. I told him about my conclusions. He sighed.

  “The State, eh? Well, it makes sense, Tania, but it’s not the only explanation. I’m not sure I agree with Siân’s rather gloomy prediction of her future, nor with this picture you have of a modern Stalinist state. I do see a government trying hard to prevent a return to the Troubles, and I think it has to protect people from certain realities that would tend to push our civilization a bit off the rails.”