Wilfully, he draws his hand across the console on his bike and feels the propulsion ring change up a couple of magnet sizes. The greater resistance is overcome by a spasm of power in his quads, and he surges past a couple of secondaries dawdling on the Euston Road. The blast of a siren alerts him to the presence of a security aero behind. He turns to watch the sleek black craft glide past, its front cabin inscrutable, rear windows transparent. A pale-faced young man in the navy of the primary classes sits in the back, his head hung low, as he is delivered to the IC. Dusty looks away.
He enters the gate to ReSure on the Euston Road, parks his bike and crosses the piazza to the main entrance. The ReSure building stands separate from the glass and carbon fibre that is the fabric of Perpetual London. The warm red bricks and sprawling, asymmetric configuration lend it an air of softness, like a smile from Alanis, against the clean confidence of the prevailing architecture. Dusty passes a heavy plinth on his left bearing the statue of a runner in dark bronze. From there he descends a few steps and heads for the far corner, where the entrance lies.
When Dusty passes into the vast white entrance hall, he heads left behind one of the spiral staircases, holds the palm of his hand against the scanner by the personnel entrance and continues on to his chamber. It isn’t long before the director of ReSure, Juno Distelle, breezes in.
‘Afternoon, Dusty,’ she says in a voice deeper than his. ‘Ready to file some assets? You’ll love it, I promise! There’s something very satisfying about keeping the population in check. Meet me in the foyer at 14.25. We have a 14.30 consignment of primaries.’
It’s always a ‘consignment’. Dusty dislikes the term. He notices that Juno is still looking at him, her head cocked in that faux-sympathetic manner, which speaks either of her extravagant eccentricity or a desire to scrutinise him more closely.
She smiles. ‘Trust me, Dusty. Once you’ve dispatched a consignment, you’ll only want to dispatch another. Sometimes I have to stop myself! Repeat after me, Distelle: “The population of London must be maintained at two million, no more – and certainly no less!”’
For a second or two after she’s gone the corridors resound with her laughter. Juno was an elite wrestler during her years of engagement, a pedigree it would be easy to guess at, even without her frequent allusions to it. The polished vaults of ReSure echo with a personality that extends well beyond her squat frame. She is a peculiarity against convention, isolated for years in the antechamber to stasis, which no normal citizen cares to confront until the day they have to.
Dusty releases the seal at his neck, and his day suit falls away. Stepping out of it, he scans open the slide that presents him with his official suit. The shimmering emerald climbs up and around his body. He feels his pride swell. For a moment he is on duty again for London Cricket; then when he applies the international’s sash of white gold across the micro-magnets of his suit, from right shoulder to left hip, he is on duty again for England. He turns the Iron Joule between thumb and forefinger, but consigns that to the slide. No, he doesn’t want to put it on, after all. The trappings of his official suit he can still wear with a pride that rises from the collective; this little trinket wants to elevate him above his fellow citizens, worthy and true, just as he ushers them to stasis. Intolerable.
Juno is already in the foyer. When he arrives she smiles, breathes in and stretches her arms out wide, turning slowly in the grand hallway, as if summoning from suspension the countless assets she has filed in her time. ‘All this will be yours when I go in there,’ she says. She will go ‘in there’ in three years, seven months and twenty-nine days. There is a countdown clock above her desk.
‘Have any of these primaries shown symptoms?’ asks Dusty.
Juno nods with exaggerated approval. ‘Very good, Dusty! You’re getting the hang of this! No. Their dossiers are ready for download. There’s a complete surveillance record of the final month for each of them. All model citizens.’ She looks up from her tablet through eyes a little too close together for so wide a face. ‘Although not as model as they will be in an hour or two!’
Tucking the tablet under her wrist like a discus, she walks off. ‘We’re in Portal 317 today.’
Dusty follows as she charges up the first steps of Spiral Staircase 2 on the way to the third floor. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘So it’s important to affect a certain manner when filing assets. Never forget, it might be a normal working day for you, but for each of them it is almost certainly their last animate day on Earth.’ Once on the third floor, Juno leads Dusty through corridors of warm red. ‘Generally speaking there are no incidents – but you can get the odd wobble, particularly among the primary classes. When you do, it’s important to be sympathetic but firm. It’s not often we get a veteran international apply for a position here – those fortunate enough to be filed by you will consider your presence reassuring, just as they do mine. Ah! Here we are!’
It is a standard primary portal they walk into, rectangular and bare, with a console in one corner, an isotonic dispenser in another and, along the opposite wall, ten docking bays, each with stasis pod open and waiting. Dusty shudders at the sight of those vessels towards which they are all gravitating, but he maintains his composure.
At 14.30 precisely, the primaries file in. Five men, five women, each firm of countenance and body, their rank distinguished by navy day suits, their hair cropped. There is a haggard look about some of them – when times are tough, it is the primaries who suffer most – but there are surely more years of service left in those strong limbs. Perpetual policy is to harvest them before their decline.
Dusty and Juno greet each one with a handshake. He can detect not the slightest distress in their faces. Maybe a certain distance in the eyes of some, but this group are prepared. Dusty is relieved. And impressed. He feels uneasy about stasis, yet as an elite he has another eleven years till his. These primaries they are about to consign are forty-five today, four years younger than he is. Inferior at sport they may have been, but some were doubtless intelligent. He has seen their files. Can it be so easy to shrug off animation?
‘Welcome, all of you,’ says Juno, ‘to your future in suspension. Firstly, may I congratulate you on the lives you have led thus far. You may not have been much use at sport, but I can assure you that the exploits of elite assets such as Dusty Noble here and myself would have meant nothing without the base of support that the lower classes provide. You have never tasted action on the field, but your selfless devotion sets an example of citizenship that is relevant to us all, particularly now, when results aren’t going the commune’s way.’
Juno invites them to take an isotonic before cryopreservation. As they mill about, one of the primaries points at Dusty’s sash. ‘So, you were an international, were you?’
Dusty nods.
‘Which sport?’
‘Cricket.’
‘That was my field. I had a trial at secondary level. Didn’t make it.’ He holds his arms out to present himself. ‘Obviously.’
Juno clears her throat. ‘Now, I trust none of you has taken food today.’
Dusty’s new friend leans across to him. ‘Today, she says. Feels as if I haven’t eaten this year.’
‘No chance of a last meal, then?’ says another, to general laughter. ‘My calorific deficit has stretched to 23 per cent this month.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ says Juno. ‘I know it’s been hard lately, but going into stasis lean is actually the best way. Rest assured, if and when you are recalled, it will be to more prosperous conditions.’
Dusty notes the fine figures as the primaries let fall their suits and climb naked into the pods. For all his confusion since decommission, he feels a layer of discipline return to his withered soul and that old love, once so unquestioning, for London and England. He is proud to usher these citizens to stasis. According to their files, one was a medic, another a scientist, there’s a physio, a stadium manager…but a mere accident of genetics has compromised their aptitude for sport and
consigned them to roles in the lower classes, working the levers and boards when other people score, filling the air with sound energy. Theirs have been lives led in dutiful service, exemplars of conditioning, never questioning the Sanctity of Physical Fitness.
When the last of them has been dispatched to holding, Dusty breathes out. He and Juno gather the discarded day suits and deliver them to a slide in the wall.
‘That’s really all there is to it, Dusty. I think you’re going to be very good at this. Do you see how pleasing it is? Today, seventy neonates will emerge into the primary class and seventy forty-five-year-olds will leave.’
She looks up at him, and he down at her. Her manner changes. ‘Oh, Dusty, I can tell you’re thrown by this! I found it a little disconcerting myself, when I was first tutored in it. It’s perfectly natural. You know the best thing for it, don’t you? A hard, fast bout in one of the ReSure cots. And I can assure you, I go hard and fast, even at my age.’
Dusty does not doubt it. Juno is of no appeal aesthetically, but there is likely to be great power in those sawn-off limbs. There was a time when he might have considered it his duty to draw the energy from them, but such a sense of citizenship has been neutered in him by the peculiarity of these feelings of his for Alanis. So much so, that the prospect of a bout with Juno makes him feel quite nauseous.
‘I’m comping at the Twenty20 in an hour,’ he replies. ‘And I’ve already coupled once this afternoon.’
‘Very well. But we must engage soon. You’ve been here for a few days now, and you haven’t yet coupled with your superior.’
She shuts down the console and sweeps out of the portal.
Dusty takes his pre-match meal at the ReSure refectory on his own. He shovels down his 61-gram ration of enhanced pasta. Personnel come and go around him, primaries, secondaries and tertiaries, but he cannot look any in the eye, thrown as he is by his first brush with stasis. Instead, a troubling vision hangs behind his eyes of the trusting, honest faces of that afternoon’s group of primaries, the lid of a pod closing on each.
The vision dogs him as he cycles from ReSure, west along the Euston Road, past the bullet-train station and the arboretums of the Regent’s Park Expansion to the right, the long solar panels of the Bloomsbury Sun Farm to the left. He is cycling in the fast lane, surging past citizens whose fate he has become party to. He turns up Lisson Grove and stares dead ahead as he knifes through the neatly arranged maisonettes of the Marylebone Tertiary Quarter. Every so often, the late-afternoon sun glimmers in the corner of his eye, ricocheting off a glass panel, but it does not break his focus.
Soon he is pulling into the bike park at Lord’s. This is the edifice he knows better than any other, a second home for thirty-one years. The foreground is dominated by the stainless-steel statue of ‘The Cricketer’, knees bent, elbow held high some 50 feet above the ground, upturned bat slanting gently down and away from the head, in the pose of a classic cover drive. The heavy lines of the wrought metal at this distance blend into a model of poise and elegance. It could almost be a study of Dusty.
The end of the bat, suspended 45 feet in the air, dips in deference towards Lord’s, the mighty stadium generator behind it. From where Dusty approaches, its twin domes appear as one, an arch that peaks 150 feet higher than the raised elbow of the statue below. The aluminium structure is smooth, with a blueish hue. Dusty has always found it a comforting look, but in his heyday it was to visiting teams a fortress without a chink.
Lord’s is a monument of simplicity, but the generator seething to the north is a chaotic structure of right angles, which rises from the flank of its stadium into a monstrosity of roughly equal size. Already, its menacing hum fills the air, primed for match day.
Dusty takes the gangway that leads up to a concourse running above the turbine shafts on the north side of the stadium. He walks with thousands of other complements now, none of them aware that for thirty-one years he trod the turf they are to gather round. At the appropriate gate, he penetrates the outer shell and navigates the inner concourse, teeming with secondaries and tertiaries, to the veteran elites’ block. Out he comes into the arena, which is filling steadily with comps. From the inside, the twin domes create an echoing vault fit to harness the energy of 81 500 people.
On the field, the visiting team’s fielders are in position. East Anglia are the evening’s opponents, one of the weakest communes, but nothing can be taken for granted these days. London’s great clashes with Yorkshire or the North West have long since lost their moment. East Anglia is now the defining fixture.
Dusty does not dwell over the familiar greensward. Instead, he shuffles towards his station, nodding occasionally to an acquaintance as he passes. He takes up position next to Max Innocent, a former comrade of his. The ergonomic seat holds him firmly and tenderly, and he flips it into its active position to start a gentle warm-up, working the pump boards with his feet and the levers with his arms. The stadium throbs as thousands of complements prepare for the match in the same way.
‘Afternoon, Dusty.’
Dusty nods. ‘Max.’
Max was decommissioned at the same time as Dusty, which has consolidated the bond they’d formed after many partnerships at the crease.
‘You ready for this evening’s exercise in lost-cause fighting?’
‘Come on, Max. That’s not the attitude, and you know it.’
‘Difficult, though, isn’t it?’ says Max, who stops pumping and sits forward to hydrate, satisfied with his preparation. ‘Watching us lose the whole time. Not being able to do anything about it.’
‘It’ll come good. We’re too big a commune for this losing run to carry on much longer.’
‘Let’s hope so. I heard that we’re now producing more energy from coitus than we are from the stadiums. That’s incredible!’
‘At least we’re still shagging.’
‘Well, that’s all we’ve got. I mean, for us to be winning so rarely that these massive stadium-generators are producing less of the sparky stuff than our collective shagging…’ Max shakes his head. ‘Ridiculous.’
London’s batsmen enter the arena, and Dusty eases his limbs to a halt. ‘You never know. It may just be that coitus is one thing we’re still really good at. It’s all relative.’
‘Yeah, well, less time in the cots, more time in the simulators, and maybe our elites will start to turn things round.’
‘The footballers are doing all right.’
‘Mid-table.’
‘Don’t sniff at it.’
Max grunts, and the two men settle into position, the match about to start. A hush descends as the warm-ups give way to the latency of a stadium generator ready for action. Dusty gazes up at the vault, which arches vastly over them, then closes his eyes.
Within moments, the siren of the stadium computer sounds in steady, staccato blasts of urgency to signal the successful scoring of runs. The pumps are live! Dusty slams his right foot down, then his left, and heaves with his arms. The sound of the siren is overwhelmed by the deafening commotion of 81 500 comps pumping the boards and levers of a Perpetual Era stadium, chanting exhortations to add to the general din. Dusty looks to the rafters and sees by the number of lights that one of the London batsmen has hit a four. For 40 seconds, 10 for each run, the vast turbine shafts turn, and the generator next door roars into life.
‘I hate it when we start with a boundary,’ says Max, once the last of the green lights goes out and the stadium takes time to catch its breath.
‘You can’t complain about results one minute, then about how many runs we’re scoring the next!’
‘No, but I’d rather limber up with a quick single first. It might be all right for those guys over there,’ says Max, nodding in the direction of the elite comps in a nearby block, who massage their rippling sinews, ‘but they’ve spent their lives training to do this. I’m a decommissioned cricketer, for joules’ sake!’
‘That’s why you only have to comp once a week. Look, we were grateful
for the comps when we were out there; now it’s a chance to give a little back.’
The siren sounds again, this time for a single, but Dusty is able to catch Max’s last quip as they start to work the pumps again.
‘You’re so shitting perfect, aren’t you.’
Dusty cycles home with a heavy heart. And an empty stomach. There will be no nutrition pouches distributed this evening. London were all out for 123 in the 18th over. Max stopped complaining about the workload at some point in the third over. And the opposition innings was even more restful, with just three wickets to pump through. Dusty imagines the East Anglia comps in the modest stadium generator in Cambridge finishing off their evening’s work with the meat of a victory pump, one last, 40-minute bout of energy generation. In time, London will learn how much they generated in their paltry 32 minutes 30 seconds of pumping, but it won’t be enough to buck the recent trend.
Even so, Dusty’s spirits rise on the climb towards Hampstead and the Veteran Elite Quarter for London Cricket, just beside the heath. The points of reference he has lived his life by are dissolving, but still he finds solace in the return home. That sacred mother of Perpetual society. Let austerity bite, every citizen has a haven to return to at the end of each day, the basic right of humanity, ‘a home of your own and for you alone’, where none shall trespass, the soul’s repose to disturb.
He may not have as spacious a home now as he did when he was an active elite, but it is his, and that is enough, as it has
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