'Funny pregnant?'
'No!'
Lady snorted. 'And how would you know? Been pregnant lately?'
'I'm sealed.' Cherry tried not to raise her voice. Even if she hadn't been sealed, raising the subject of pregnancy with her, a seeker of disease, seemed in bad taste to say the least.
'I forget.'
Lady sounded as if she had genuinely forgotten this about Cherry. It was possible that she had. She had forty-two or forty-three seekers working for her right now, a lot to keep a track of. On the other hand, Cherry was the only one from central London. Girls who lived outside the big cities tended not to be sealed. The governors believed that it encouraged promiscuity and so it was frowned upon. This wasn't a problem in the cities, where everyone had nanoscreens fitted thanks to the key workers scheme. They could do whatever they wanted and get away with it, disease-wise – one less disincentive to having sex – so in the name of either population control, infant rights, or youth preservation depending on who you listened to, they would have their female children cervically sealed age ten.
For Cherry, being ex-London had its benefits. The screen made her a good seeker, as it flagged up unknown infections and dealt with known ones. Never mind that, it meant that she was guaranteed a job as a seeker, going out to find viruses, rather than being stuck in the Hospital knocking shop waiting for viruses to come to her. She could get uploads on the blacknet to keep her up to date with all the logged and registered viruses that were out there. A registered virus was worth nothing to Lady and could put a worker out of service for weeks, maybe permanently. She needed one of two things: new mutations of high presentation STVs, or commissioned exclusives caught somewhere down the chain from the buyer, both of which could be sold on to the collectives who ran the Pigs.
Lady tottered round and round, drawing a neat circle about the sofa where Cherry sat, as if there was some invisible line there that she didn't want to cross. Her lips were pursed and her eyes darted around the room, as if she was looking for something.
Cherry looked up to the window. From where she sat she could just see the giant billboards that lined the opposite side of the retail park. She straightened her back to get a better view. They had just uploaded new ads. Staring Cherry in the eye, five times life-size was Galletti, Barcelona's newly signed striker. Creeping down from the outer edges of his eyes were two neat spikes of rash, red raw, as if two triangles of flesh had been peeled from his cheekbones. It couldn't be real – nothing she'd seen was that neat. Then she noticed the Glaxo logo in the bottom corner. It was real then; a paid for exclusive. Airbrushed though. It must be brand new, as it hadn't been featured in yesterday's seeker bulletin. Either that or Lady was slipping behind on her admin.
As Cherry watched, the image zoomed out to show Galletti performing tricks with a Nike football. He was in good company: the next billboard featured the actress Tilly Harrison wearing a sheer gown, blown against her by an unseen source of wind to reveal shadows of red on her thighs. Droplets of Dior Rash flew towards her from a giant atomiser as she writhed on the spot, scratching herself. That one would be real. Wearing was rife in the fashion world. To Galletti's other side, New York band The Itch were silently slamming away at their guitars, the singer periodically lifting his by the neck to show his fukpunk-style smeary crotch-window. Cherry shuddered.
'It costs me if you're wrong, you know.' Lady stopped mid-circle.
Cherry looked up at her. She wasn't sure if she was supposed to answer. 'I know.'
'Testing has just gone up again.'
'I…' Cherry paused, unsure of the correct thing to say. 'We could wait.'
'Wait? I need you fit to seek at the Global Finance Conference next week.'
'I feel…funny, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I mean it might not even be an STV.'
'Didn't you get your uploads?'
'Yes, but you know sometimes they can be out of date.'
'You should be careful where you get them.'
'I am, but we could wait for some proper signs – wait and be sure.'
'We can't wait. Not if there's a possibility. What if Franco's lot has picked it up? Rumour has it he picked up an exclusive and a mute last month alone. He's got ten girls and fifteen boys now all out seeking. And he's got all the bases covered – sends them all over; sends them to all types of places.'
'Spreads them thin.'
'Did I say that?'
'Yes Lady.'
'Then yes, he does. But he's got more than before.'
Lady started another circle of the couch then paused right behind where Cherry was sitting. Cherry could feel Lady's breaths stirring the hair on the top of her head. She felt for a moment like something might come down on her crown. She braced herself.
'You logged all your encounters?' Lady asked. 'Did anybody claim to have anything? Anybody look like they had something new?'
'There was a guy with sores, but I think it was an oldie. His skin smelled like ointment and I could see the shadow of where the sores had extended originally. I think he was trying to shape them to look like an exclusive.'
'Tosser.' Lady strode over to her door. 'Bring up Cherry's log,' she ordered as she walked in. 'I want to see her account of everyone she's tried for the past two weeks – no, three to be certain. And mark up likely candidates for me. Thank you Ben.'
Lady was already closing her office door when Cherry got up from the couch. She was visible through the frosted glass, pacing up and down. Ben isn't in there, Cherry thought. Lady would never show her emotion like that in front of her secretary, surely. But then she was increasingly frantic these days when she did her rounds. The threat of the big companies catching up and taking all the business in-City was getting to her. Rumour had it that she had had to let Ben go but was too proud to admit it. Cherry watched as Lady's silhouette moved to merge with that of her desk, continuing to fidget.
The ads outside changed again and drew Cherry's eye. Standing, she could see the traffic moving around the busy retail park. She watched as a dad dropped off a clutch of pre-teens at the cinema, parked, then walked a roundabout route to the Hospital, glancing over his shoulder now and again. At the far corner of the park, a trickle of red and white figures started to appear, waving their scarves, dancing and singing. Beyond the crop of housing she could see the top of the stadium rising up. Past that there was nothing until the City's north eastern boundary, its ludicrous buildings appearing from this distance as an impenetrable wall. Time to go, Cherry thought. With the football out and a movie just about to start most of the hookers would be busy – prime time to use the showers.
As Cherry walked to the door, she caught sight of herself in the full length mirror. The mirror here was much better than the one they had in the wardrobe room, which was poorly lit because the windows were rarely washed. It usually had a hoard of girls jostling for position in front of it, too. If you got to see what you looked like, it was what you might look like shouldering for position at a market stall; a portrait in motion.
Cherry looked funny in her terry towelling tunic. Like an inmate of the old children's hospital, she thought. Her hair needed cut. It was starting to look wild. She was surprised that Lady hadn't pulled her up for it. Her pale brown skin looked darker against the boil-wash white of her tunic. The tunic had been laundered so much that she could see the shadow of her nipples through it. She glanced round to Lady's office door. Seeing that the silhouette was still ensconced behind the desk, she grabbed the hem of her skirt and lifted it up quickly to her neck. Her pubes were squint again – she knew it. Barbara was rubbish, or she did it on purpose. One of the two.
Cherry pulled back her long mane of straightened black hair and tried to look objectively at her body. She seemed thinner – just on the cusp of being too thin, girlish. Satisfactory though, she thought to herself, maybe more. Her years on the job had certainly given her toned muscles – that was for sure. And unlike some of the workers, she laid off the junk. But then she had an advantage, the on
e good thing she had brought with her from the city. She turned and twisted round to see herself from the side, from the back. She was sinewy, tough. Could have been a ninja, she thought.
Her Book beeped: a scan update. Through the glass door, Lady's silhouette stopped and stiffened. Cherry let her tunic drop and took her Book out of the small thread-bare pocket at her hip. H1N1 mute. Flu. Another small-mutation causing delays on her nanoscreen. She sighed, walked over to the glass door and knocked.
-o-
It was a couple of hours until Cherry started her shift. She lay on her back in her runk and stared at the low ceiling above her. She stretched as well as she could, her arms meeting with cold plastic behind her and to the sides. She trailed them bent along the white walls.
'That's just brilliant,' she said to herself. She put on her Lady face. 'Who wants to buy flu, Cherry? Would you want to buy it? Is it sexually transmitted? Does it look impressive on a business man?'
She had the second runk from the bottom in her stack. Most of the workers on the lower level runks were hookers, but there were a few exceptions, chiefly seekers who didn't like heights or couldn't be bothered with the climb. Ten shelves above her was the top runk, most of the seekers' ultimate aim. Cherry understood the ambition though she didn't share it. She had climbed up to visit seekers further up the stack before and had sat with them, dangling her feet over the edge, making paper airplanes to send messages to their mates in the runks across the room, laughing as they flew off course and landed wherever they wished. She liked the slight feeling of vertigo, the feeling that she might at any minute just launch herself out into the air and fall. She imagined them all doing it at once, drifting to the floor like terry-towelling snowflakes.
Cherry sat up and pushed herself into a crouch, then leaned forward to the locker that walled the foot end of her mattress, taking care not to bang her head on the ceiling. There was nothing much in there, really. Her old Book from when she lived in London. It still worked, and though she still used it to update her screenware, it spent most of the time as a picture frame, showing an old photo of her mother.
Her Book beeped, and her mother's face was momentarily obscured by a message reminding her to do her updates. She grimaced, then picked it up and pressed her thumb onto the ID pad. It beeped a welcome and she scrolled the menu and chose 'updates'. The display went slow, then white, and eventually a garbled message appeared. The blacknet update server she'd been using had been shut down.
'Damnit.' She held the Book tightly, restraining herself, swallowing down the urge to smash it against the wall. She couldn't break it. It would be too hard to get another one that would work with her old screen, besides which the blackmarket versions were expensive and buggy as hell. She started a search on the blacknet for a new update server, adding a few filters and leaving it to do its thing. There was so much information out there now, so many unregulated servers, that it was a slow process. The advertisers and so-called help sites were always one step ahead of the search engines, dominating the results lists. She touched the Book's fingerplate and propped it back up, a picture frame once more.
There was a dull knock at Cherry's front wall. She grabbed the handle on the back of the rigid plastic panel and pulled it up and back along its runners so that it became a second ceiling. There, filling her exit, leaning in from a few rungs up the ladder was Marlene, naked. Using her free hand Marlene lifted her breasts one by one so that they rested on the edge of Cherry's mattress. A higher runk would spare her this view every shift. Cherry tried to peer round her ample friend.
'Hi, sweetie,' said Marlene, then in a deep voice, 'Morning Cherry.' She jiggled her breasts from beneath. 'Thought we'd tell you your favourite dress is still up for grabs.' She continued in her own voice, 'How'd you get on last night?'
'More dead ends.' Cherry glanced over at the picture of her mother and frowned.
'You need to get into the City, get pillow talking with someone at the records office.'
'I know, I know. But I'm fresh out of friends in high places and my guardian angel seems to have misplaced my number.'
'They're notoriously bad for that, though we've never had any trouble with ours, have we girls?' Marlene looked down at her breasts again, then shot Cherry a disturbing grin. 'Anyway, I sent you three planes, but I guess you didn't get them.'
Cherry laughed, then yawned. 'You going out too?'
'Yes.' Marlene gathered her frizzy brown hair with one hand and twisted it over her shoulder. 'Thought you might want to buddy up for the first part of the night. We're both working the airport.'
'Yeah, sure.' It would be nice to have some company, Cherry thought. Seeking in a pair was sometimes easier, definitely safer and always more fun.
'Come on, then.' Marlene descended the ladder and waddled away from the runk stack, beckoning with a bearlike arm. 'Let's get tooled up.'
Cherry hung her legs down over the edge of her runk.
'Hey,' came a shout from the runk below, 'get your feet out of my face, Cherry.'
'Sorry babes.' Cherry jumped down to the floor.
'Jeez, you're going to break my nose one day,' said the girl in the runk below. She was new to the Hospital and was still getting used to things. Some of the other seekers would have gone all diva if a hooker had spoken to them like that, but Cherry had never got the hang of feeling superior.
'Come on,' Marlene said, already halfway across the room.
The runkroom was in the old teaching theatre. It must have been circular when it was built, with seating up the sides for the trainee surgeons to observe their masters at work. It had since been transformed into a many-sided polygon by the twenty runk stacks that had been installed around the walls and the narrow ladder panels which ran up in-between them.
Cherry looked around. Most of the doors were closed. The once-white panels had been decorated by their owners in different styles: classical, abstract, graffiti, but mostly in block colour. The room looked as if it had been hung with a patchwork quilt. Here and there a panel was open and the occupant was lounging in their runk, rummaging in their locker at the foot of their mattress, or just sitting, legs hanging out, watching what was going on below.
An open shower unit stood in the middle of the room. Each shower stand had a set of cleanser dispensers, and a large extractor above the showers sucked out the steam. Right now the whole theatre smelled of just-used shower. Cherry liked it. It reminded her of being little, of going into the bathroom after her mother had washed. It was a welcome break from the dreadful changing room aroma that filled the room at shift change: Lynx, Source, Impulse, Sensorra; Ocean Lotion, Spice it Up, Manjack Musk, Mint Tingle; a muddy blend of hormone-tinged scent.
'I need to shower,' Cherry called after Marlene.
'Well, hurry up,' Marlene said. 'I'll go down and pretend to try that dress on for you so no-one else snags it.' She laughed to herself, and threw the double doors wide open before her.
Cherry wriggled out of her tunic and put it on the floor at her feet before soaping up. Picking it up again she scrubbed herself red with it, then rubbed and rinsed the tunic itself. She finished just as the water stopped. She wrung her tunic out, then opened it out again and gave it a shake so it wouldn't dry creased. She half danced back to her runk and flicked it over the rail on her closed door.
'You're in a good mood,' the new girl said, smiling up at her.
'Yes! Just woke up feeling good.' Cherry realised she had goosebumps. 'Cold today. I'd better get downstairs.'
Holding one arm across her boobs to stop them bouncing – she'd once heard that running-bounce could stretch them prematurely – Cherry jogged across the room to the double doors that led to the stairs.
The staircase was as it had been when the building was still a hospital: painted two different offensive tones of olive, floored with flaking lino, cold. Cherry took the stairs two at a time, until a door opened with voices on the floor above. She changed her gait suddenly, taking more demure single steps.
It was first come first served. There was no sensible way of having your own clothes in the Hospital, unless you wanted to waste time going out into the town to get them cleaned at the launderette. That cost money too, and none of the seekers really wanted to waste a coin when they could wear what they chose from the communal wardrobe and have it washed for them in the old Hospital laundry rooms.
'Imagine no possessions…' Marlene crooned and then hollered, 'Shop every day at the House of Lady!'
Cherry burst out laughing. Marlene was standing by the rail with Cherry's favourite dress over her head. That was as far as it would go.
'Come on, Marlene,' another girl was saying, 'it doesn't even fit you – you're going to rip it. Let someone else have a go.'
'Fair enough,' Marlene said, hearing Cherry's laugh. She pulled the dress off her head and tossed it into Cherry's arms.
'Oh, come on!' the other girl said, stamping her bare foot and swearing.
'Sorry, honey,' Cherry said. 'How about you have it tomorrow?'
The girl snorted and started rummaging through the rest of her size section of the rail.
Cherry slipped into the dress. It was old fashioned, or classic as Marlene described it, but it fitted Cherry perfectly. It was black satin, with a small print of the kind that you never saw any more. The berries on the print looked a little bit like cherries and though she knew they were too small and a bit too red to be, it pleased her. Its skinny belt fitted her waist perfectly on the tightest hole and the flared skirt swung just at her knees. She thought of it as her dress.
She felt drips from her long wet hair starting to seep through the fabric at her back.
'Will you do my hair tonight, Marlene?' she asked, twisting it up out of the way and tying it in a knot.
'Sure thing, Madame C.' Marlene was round the other side of the rail, trying on dresses that were more her size. 'You know Lady never buys in any new stuff that fits me – still the same five things. I'm sure this one isn't even a dress.' She appeared from behind the rail in a brown sack-like get up. 'I look like a giant shit.'
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