Yellowcake Springs

by Salvidge, Guy

  The bus eventually stopped in front of a vast, silver building in a street of similarly massive structures. The noise of the city was bewildering, enveloping; a million sounds thrown together in unintended harmony. Stepping off the bus, Rion craned his neck back to take in the building’s upward extent. Never in his life had he seen structures such as these, although he knew of their existence from his reading. There was nothing in East Hills, or Yellowcake Springs for that matter, to compare. Rion was very much afraid of what might happen to him here. He had survived the Waste by keeping what remained of humanity at arm’s length. That would not be possible here. He would have to adapt.

  The building was a hotel complex and here they intended him, at least temporarily, to reside. There was no question of having to pay: CIQ Sinocorp would cover the expense. Again, he was struck by the difference between himself and his fellow citizens, for as they tended to grumble about the apparently seedy neighbourhood the hotel was located in and the cramped accommodation they would be offered – a ‘dog box,’ one man called it – while he himself was ecstatic. He was given a pass card with a number on it – room 1578 on the fifteenth floor – and although it was true that the quarters were smaller than those to which he was accustomed, there was running water, a clean bed, a toilet and shower. Even a fridge. No Controlled Dreaming State console, although one could be hired from reception for a fee. And here was his problem: Rion had no money, no identification, and thus no identity.

  This was troubling to him, but it did not appear to be an immediately pressing issue, for he found that the food would be paid for too. Three times a day he could dine downstairs or even have the food brought to him here! Rion spent the rest of Sunday in a state of disbelief, half thinking that a knock would come at the door and he would be turfed out onto the street. But no such thing happened. As night fell, he began to allow himself to relax. Nothing further would be required of him until morning, at which time he had an interview at the nearby Hub-Nexus office. This had been organised on his behalf. If he was going to stay in the city long term, then he would need a job.

  The waiting room was colourful and brightly lit. The chairs were soft, padded and yellow, the music was calming and ambient, and the automated voice informing customers of their place in the queue was gentle and reassuring. There was no standing in line here. No jostling, no anger. The Hub-Nexus office wasn’t particularly busy this morning and Rion did not have long to wait before his number was called. He went to the designated glass-walled booth and sat down on an even softer, maroon-coloured chair.

  But there was no one sitting on the other side of the window. Perhaps there was some mistake? He saw no employees at the other booths either, and yet the customers appeared to be engaged in some kind of transaction.

  “Hello?” he said to the empty space in front of him.

  “Welcome to Hub-Nexus,” a voice said. It was the same voice that had spoken his number a moment before. “How can I help you today?”

  “Hello,” he said. “I need a job, and I was told that this was the place to come for one.”

  “Hub-Nexus connects people with employment opportunities across the state. With the right attitude, you’re sure to find the path to a satisfying career. Hub-Nexus is the gateway to a world of limitless potential. Please insert your Hub-Nexus card into the reader.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t have a Hub-Nexus card.”

  “Perhaps your card has been mislaid or stolen? Do you require a replacement card?”

  “I suppose I do,” Rion said slowly. “Yes, I’ve lost my card.”

  “Please state your full name and address.”

  “I don’t really have a current address, you see. I’ve temporarily been displaced from Yellowcake Springs, due to the accident there.”

  “Then please state your full name and last known address.”

  “Okay. It’s Rion. No – Orion. Orion...” He froze. What was his last name? Rion’s palms started to sweat as they always did when he was pressured. How can a man live for twenty-two years without knowing his own last name? He felt ashamed. Suddenly he had an idea. “Just a second,” he said, rummaging in his pockets for the crumpled picture of his mother he always carried with him. “Orion…Matthews,” he said in triumph. “That’s my name.”

  “Please state your last known address.”

  His last address had been the one on Fielding Street in East Hills, but of course he hadn’t lived there officially. He hadn’t lived anywhere officially for as long as he could remember. And it was no good giving Sylvia’s address in Yellowcake Springs. What street had he and his mother lived on before she’d died? It was on the tip of his tongue. “I think it’s Lyon Street,” he said. “Maybe 27? In East Hills.”

  “Orion Matthews, 27 Lyon Street, East Hills,” the voice said. “No such record exists.”

  “But that’s where I lived,” he protested. “Maybe it was 72? I can’t quite remember the number.”

  There was a long pause. Finally the voice said: “A Hub-Nexus employee will be in attendance shortly.”

  Rion waited five minutes, then ten. It was hopeless. He had lived and he would die strictly off the record. It was his fate. After fifteen minutes, he was tempted to go back to the hotel and forget the whole thing. People were coming and going from the other booths, and he could feel the weight of curious eyes upon him. After he had been waiting almost twenty minutes, a young man dressed no differently from the customers walked around to the far side of the booth and sat down.

  “You’ve managed to upset the system,” the man said. “I’m a Hub-Nexus employee.”

  “Thanks,” Rion said. “I’m new here and I haven’t got all the information I seem to need.”

  “I just had a look at the notes,” the man, who hadn’t introduced himself, said. “Orion Matthews, 27 Lyon Street, East Hills. East Hills is in the restricted area, incidentally.”

  The restricted area. “I’m sorry?” Rion said.

  “What we call the badlands. The notorious Belt. Colloquially of course,” the man said.

  “No one told me that it was a restricted area. I mean, I was born there.”

  “East Hills, that whole area, is supposed to be in total lockdown, meaning no travel in or out. The border is closed, but you say you’re from there?” The man looked up at him keenly.

  “That’s right,” Rion said. “I came via Yellowcake Springs.”

  That raised an eyebrow. “The CIQ Sinocorp Protectorate?”

  “I’ve got an implant to prove it. I’ve been granted citizenship status, I believe.”

  “You’re already a citizen – an Australian citizen – even if you are from East Hills. What Sinocorp probably offered you is Chinese citizenship. The whole area around Yellowcake Springs is regarded as Chinese soil.”

  “But I’m an Australian citizen, you said?”

  “If you were born in this country, then you’re an Australian citizen even if you don’t have the identification. Christ, we’re going to have to work this out. If you’re from East Hills, we can deport you back there any time we want. In fact, that’s what I’m supposed to do with illegals like yourself. However, if Sinocorp will vouch for you, say you’re an upstanding guy, then that probably changes things. It’s a grey area. So if you’ve been granted Chinese citizenship, probably a provisional citizenship affixing you to Yellowcake Springs, then you’ll have to return there.”

  “But the town’s been evacuated. There was an accident at the reactor.”

  The man reclined slightly. “So you’ve got no identification at all, except for the implant the Chinese gave you? And who knows what information they put on that.”

  “That’s correct.”

  The man considered this. “We’ll need to find you on the system. If you were born in a hospital in this country, even if it was in East Hills, then you’ll be on the system.” The man brought up a display in the air in front of him, as if by magic. He seemed wholly unconcerned with his own sorcery. “Let’s fo
rget the address for a minute. Orion Matthews. No record at all. That’s an unusual first name. You sure that’s your official name?”

  “I know my first name is Orion. Matthews was my mother’s name. It says here.” He offered the newspaper article.

  “What about your father?” the man said, ignoring Rion’s offering. “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew him.”

  “You’ve probably got his last name. Okay, Orion is an unusual enough name that we might find you without the surname. Now you say you were born in the hospital in East Hills, correct?”

  “I don’t know,” Rion said, “but I expect that’s right.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. My mother died when I was very young. But I think I was born in ‘35. Maybe ‘36.”

  The man shook his head slowly, then tapped away at the swirling colours. “Incredible to think that people can slip through the net like this for so long. I suppose you don’t have a tax file number either. This must be you: Orion Saunders, born 3rd August 2035, East Hills General Hospital. Mother Lisa Matthews, born 2005, died of diphtheria June 2041. There’s no record of your father at all here, but my assumption is that his surname was Saunders. And there’s nothing on you after ‘41 at all. Some early childhood vaccinations, kindergarten enrolment, but nothing after that.”

  “That sounds about right,” Rion said.

  “You say you lived alone after your mother died, and that you have no memory of your father?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Then you should have been picked up by Child Protection Services. There would still have been a functioning office in East Hills in the ‘forties.”

  “The child what?”

  “Um, never mind.”

  “So I can have a Hub-Nexus card?” Rion asked. Nothing more and nothing less than this would suffice. If the man refused to issue him one, then he would have to beg on the streets.

  “Why not? I don’t see why you should have to go back to East Hills. This is an unusual enough circumstance that I think I can use my discretion here. Here comes your card now.”

  Rion’s new identity popped out of a slot in front of him. He snatched it up quickly.

  “I need a job as well,” Rion said. “Somewhere to live. I’m staying in a hotel at the moment, but I need somewhere of my own.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place. I think Jenna can take it from here.”

  “Jenna?”

  “The AI.” The man got up to leave, then paused. “Good luck with your job hunting. Oh, and one small piece of advice for you: don’t let Sinocorp get you to renounce your Australian citizenship. You’ll lose your rights.”

  “Thank you,” Rion said, and the unnamed man left. He had wanted to convey something of his gratitude to the man, but it was already too late.

  “Welcome to Hub-Nexus,” Jenna said, startling him. “How can I help you today?”

  43. Youth in Asia

  Lui Ping held Jiang Wei in her arms, stroking his head. They were in bed together and she never wanted to let him go. The bed was in their cabin in the forest. It was one of their favourite places.

  “I’m frightened,” he whispered.

  “Shhh,” she said. “I know.” She would protect him; here in the cabin they could come to no harm. The log fire warmed their naked bodies.

  “She’s over there, in the corner,” Wei said.

  “Who is?”

  “Lijia.”

  “Our daughter?” Ping looked, but of course there was nothing in the corner. Just an empty space. He was right in a way though; the child would be a girl and she would be named Lijia. She would make it so. “What does she look like? How old is she?”

  Wei stared at nothing. “She says she’s six. She never met me, but she says you’ve told her who I am. She knows I’m her father. You’ll tell her, won’t you? When she’s old enough?”

  “Of course I will. What does she look like?”

  “She’s got dark hair, dark eyes. Very pale skin. She’s sad though.”

  “I know you love her,” Ping said. “You’re a good father.”

  “I’m a dead father,” he said. “Or had you forgotten? What kind of father is that?”

  Ping hadn’t forgotten, of course, even though she desperately wanted to. The cabin wasn’t real; the only reality was her fiancée’s sickness. Now that he was floating away on a raft of delusions, she would have to be the steady one.

  “Tell me what happened to you,” she said.

  “I was lost in a place like this,” Wei said, his eyes closed. “But I couldn’t get out. They wouldn’t let me out and I couldn’t tell what was real. How was I supposed to tell? And then I was cleaning something. I thought it was our house. Lijia was there, but so were my men. I was confused.”

  “So they tricked you into going into the reactor.”

  “They might just as well have put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.”

  “You’re not dead yet,” she said, rubbing his upper arm.

  He laughed, but it was not a Wei laugh at all. “You don’t come back from eight sieverts of radiation, Ping. Nobody does.” He said this as though he were explaining a simple mathematical equation to a small child. His anger had already blown itself out.

  “They didn’t give you a suit, but they gave me one. Why is that?”

  He shrugged. “We were expendable. It was an emergency. And I think Yang Po wanted to get rid of me; I had a strange dream...”

  “I wonder...” she said, but trailed off, her thought incomplete.

  “I’m not going to fight,” he said. “Do you understand? I’d rather die now.”

  “But they said fourteen days. This is what, day three?”

  He sat upright in bed. “See this? I can never sit up like this again. I can never fuck you again. I’m falling apart hour by hour. Pieces of me are peeling away.”

  “Not in CDS you aren’t. There’s still time.”

  He stared at her, but his eyes were no longer the eyes she knew. “Can they make time stop for me? Turn fourteen days into fourteen years? I’d take that. Even if I had to stay in this cabin the whole time. Can they do that?”

  “I don’t think so. I could ask the doctor.”

  He threw himself down. “I’m going to tell them to stop giving me the drugs.”

  “But you’ll die!”

  “Have you seen Zhou Sen? He’s in a world of torment. That’ll be me tomorrow, maybe the day after. You want me to live through that? For what? So I can die in a few more days?”

  “For me,” Ping said. “I’m not ready to let you go.”

  He said nothing.

  “Don’t you want to make love to me?”

  He propped himself up on one elbow. “What’s the point?”

  “It’s all we’ve got left.” She kissed him. His mouth on hers was hard, devoid of passion.

  “Lijia, go play outside,” he said.

  Ping looked down at Wei asleep in his tube. He was still hooked up to the CDS console. In his mind, for all she knew, he was still in the cabin. Ulcers were beginning to break out on his lips and eyelids. His face was puffy and swollen and he had difficulty swallowing. Looking at him like that – his hands twitching feebly, his body periodically convulsing – she made her decision.

  “He ready to die,” she said to Leona in her best English when she had completed the already-familiar routine of clambering out of the heavy radiation suit, progressing through the disinfecting chamber and back into the outside world. “He knows what will happen.”

  “We do have legal euthanasia in this country,” Leona said. “It’s a simple matter of signing the necessary forms.”

  Ping stared at the screen. “Youth in Asia?”

  “No, euthanasia. The right to die. Of course he can’t sign the forms, but he can give verbal permission.”

  “Can he...speak?”

  “That’s the idea. It will take a couple of days for the appli
cation to be processed, and I’ll need his consent immediately to begin the process. His employer has instructed this hospital to spare no expense in trying to save the lives of these men. They might not be happy to hear that he’s elected for euthanasia already.”

  “They want him alive,” Ping said, “they should have give him suit.”

  Leona nodded. “I’ll speak to Jiang Wei myself. May I enquire, do you have children together?”

  “A daughter,” Ping said. “Her name is Lijia.”

  44. Ridge Point

  When she woke, Sylvia thought she was in her bed at home. It was dark and quiet except for a persistent humming that she felt more than heard. This wasn’t her bedroom. Memory intruded, informing her that this wasn’t her apartment either – not her couch – and that she could never return there again. Her job, her home, her husband – all of these things had been taken from her. Even the clothes she wore were not her own.

  Her eyes began to adjust to the unfamiliar shapes around her. There was a red light winking at her from an appliance. This, she recalled, was an office. The desks were all vacant. There was no one here.

  It had been morning when she’d fallen asleep, but now it was night. She must have slept all day. Sylvia stood up and walked over to the fridge, but then, before her hand reached out to open it, she stopped herself. What if someone was here in the building? The night shift perhaps? Then she would be Janice, as it said on her uniform. She turned and looked through the glass at the vast, dim space on the other side, but there did not appear to be anyone there. Sylvia had the idea that by some cruel fate she had been left to walk this planet while everyone else had vanished. Could it be so? Could humanity have disappeared through some sudden epidemic or a subtle trick of the light? Was she mad? At any rate, there was nobody and nothing out there. Just a void.