by Claire North
She strips naked in the bathroom one day, and stares at herself in the full-length, internally heated zero-condensation Minetti-brand mirror that frames the shower. They’ve had a lot of sex, she and Jiannis, in that shower. Last time, she thought she might even get bored of it, had never imagined she could be bored of his perfect body, his skin tanned to a dusky perfection without ever being exposed to sunlight, melanin fine-tuned to a healthy glow; he was all man. Thrusting man, he was so strong and of course she enjoyed the sex – Elevation made it hard not to have a good shag really – but since it was taken that she’d enjoy the sex he didn’t really need to try, and neither did she, and sure her body reacted but there were times when she found herself watching them writhing in the mirror, and it was all . . . It wasn’t quite what she’d . . .
So this is Harmony Meads, alone in the shower without the water running, studying her body as if for the very first time. Jiannis is late home. He’s often out feasting these days, dining with his friends and their digestive upgrades. The stink in the toilet when he gets home is incredible, barely digested slush pumped straight in one end, out the other. Harmony says she has to do “girl things” on those days, and that’s OK – there are man things, and there are girl things, and that’s the way the world works.
She runs her fingers over her stomach, perfectly flat, not stuffed with chipolata layers of muscle like some women, but feminine, soft, warm skin to brush, and a firm wall of abs just beneath, a treat to explore, a privilege to touch. She hasn’t had any pubic hair for years; but when she lathers her legs, armpits and groin with soap they seem to puff up into something different and hot, as if sensing the change in skin, the sealing touch of the nanos over the place where once hair grew.
Her nails are shellac-hard without needing treatments. Once, when she was at university, she went for a mani-pedi, and it was a real treat, and kinda peculiar, a little uncomfortable in a way, but also amazing, like when a hairdresser washes your hair before cutting. The touch of a stranger’s skin on yours, the care taken, a sensation like nothing she’s ever been able to mimic on her own since.
Sometimes on her “girl nights” she goes and has her hair washed at the local salon, though it hasn’t needed cutting or products for years. The woman who cleans her hair is chubby, overweight. She can’t afford that many upgrades but says proudly that she’s got one for her hands to keep her skin fresh and healthy, because her hands – her hands are her life.
Harmony likes that. It feels like the woman is a craftswoman, protecting a skill.
Harmony’s thighs are skinny, a sudden pop out where they meet her buttocks, the most graceful of curves down towards the tender insides of her knees. She got them modded when Jiannis started buying her the short dresses that he really likes her in. He never told her that they looked fat when she sat down, flesh expanding out either side against the seat of the chair. What were his words?
“Your legs are hilarious,” he said, and laughed as if it was funny, but though she was sure he saw the look on her face, he didn’t apologise after, or say it was just a joke, or that she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
She had to take out another credit card to pay for the upgrade, but it was worth it when, four days later, he kissed the inside of her thighs and whispered, “Much better,” quiet enough that she might have missed it, but just loud enough that she could hear.
“You’re not smiling much these days,” muttered Jiannis one weekend as they drove home from a dinner with his golfing friends. “You’re such a downer.”
The next day, he sent her a link.
Dazzling Smile – no more sad mornings! Before we created Dazzling Smile, women would have to regularly inject themselves with a deadly, paralysing toxin to bring the joy of youth back to their faces. How relieved they are to have a better, nano choice! In the event of sudden blindness, contact your healthcare provider.
She didn’t activate it, deleted the email, had a bad day at work.
He said nothing when she came home that evening, and they ordered Chinese – a whole crispy duck, pancakes, plum sauce, chow mein, sweet and sour pork, chicken and cashew nuts, sea bream, egg fried rice, beef and black bean sauce, chilli king prawns and prawn crackers – and watched the TV in silence.
The next day she stood in front of the mirror, and tried to smile, and it hurt.
She bought Dazzling Smile that evening.
It made her face ache for a while, and she didn’t like how it made her teeth so prominent, dragging her lips up and back while squeezing her eyes down so her vision sometimes fuzzed round the edge, but everyone else seemed to think it was much better.
Chapter 16
She saw her mum that Christmas, and realised it was the first time in ten months.
Karen Meads didn’t like to phone her daughter too much. “You have to live your life, don’t you?” she’d exclaim. “Don’t need to be worrying about me – I’m a coper!”
Jiannis was busy, so it was just her on the train to Bracknell. Karen met her at the station, which she’d never done before, leaning a little on a stick, head beginning to jut forward, shoulders high, swathed in a pale-blue coat.
Harmony tangled behind a small gaggle of boys pushing through the ticket barrier before breaking out on to the overhanging grey concourse opposite the empty bus station, squinting to bring her mum into focus against the ever-bright, ever-brilliant crinkle in her eyes.
“Dear God!” blurted Karen. “What on earth have you done to your face?!”
Dazzling Smile means that she is grinning ear to ear, a delighted, delightful presence, a laughing, merry explosion of joy as she starts screaming, then and there at her mother. She is pleasurable ecstasy, she is a measure of the goodness and wonder of the world, as she calls her mother a stupid interfering bitch, an ignorant old cow, a fucking shit excuse for a fucking mother, before marching back the way she came, in search of a train for London.
The train to London wasn’t for twenty minutes, which was bloody typical, and gave her mum time to talk the man behind the glass into letting her on to the platform, hobbling up behind Harmony to whimper, the horror and pain written on every part of her wrinkled, shrivelled, fungus of a face, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it, darling, I’m so sorry, I’m just . . . ”
In the end, after ten minutes, and with Karen on the verge of tears, Harmony relented, and they went over the road to the pub and had a really crap Sunday lunch, with tepid gravy and wet veg, and didn’t really talk, except a little bit about the telly.
Chapter 17
She doesn’t ask Jiannis what he’s done to his penis, but she knows he’s done something, because after it hurts.
“Babe, you’re really stiff these days, you’re really – just not yourself. Is it work?”
Her eyes laugh with the merriment of Aphrodite, her body a sculpture in bronze, and her voice is dull, cold. “No. It’s not work.”
“You’re not like yourself. You should really try to lighten up.”
When he sends her a link to Beta Uplift, she barely bothers to read it before activating the package.
For depressive treatment blah blah blah helping to restore balance to the brain blah blah blah dopamine release over a slow blah blah in the event of stroke please blah blah blah.
It doesn’t make her feel better, but she doesn’t feel as bad as much. The world becomes a little duller, a little grey. Summer days are merely bright rather than radiant. The sound of rain is just a tapping on metal rather than a dance, majestic from an endless sky. The River Thames, rolling beneath Blackfriars Bridge, is a body of muddy water she has to cross to get to the next party. Credit card debt is a problem, but these things don’t matter much. Nothing much matters much. It’s all just OK.
He takes her places again, and she hangs out with his friends, and they all smile, and the men are really very strong and fit and beautiful, and the women have magnificent breasts and delightful laughter, and so does she, and that’s
fine too. That’s fine. That’s the world that Harmony Meads wanted. That’s what she reads about in the magazines.
She does all right at work. Not as well as she used to, but no one seems to care. She is still projecting the right brand aesthetic, and a lot of the customers seem to like the way she’s not pushing the hard sell, letting them have space, even though she’s clearly desperate. She’s useful for a certain niche, Graham informs her. A certain, puppy-dog niche.
She thinks that these words should shock her, and wonders whether she should think about that revelation a bit more later, and doesn’t, because it doesn’t matter.
And when Jiannis says, “You shouldn’t hang out with those guys any more. They’re no good for you,” she doesn’t argue.
And when Jiannis says, “I’ve never liked that dress. You should bin it,” she does, even though she’s had it for years and it’s always been her favourite, always looked great in it, because it’s easier to bin it than have the fight.
And when he says, “Give me your phone,” she does, and he goes through deleting contacts and tweaking her nanos on the app, altering customer-lead parameters, and she sits next to him silent and is grateful that he isn’t calling her ugly, or fat, or stupid, and how much he clearly loves her, and how deeply he cares for her well-being.
He proposes marriage, and she would have cried with gratitude, or relief, or the overwhelming sense that yes, this, this is obviously where they were going and once they’re married it’ll be better, it’ll be the best, marriage is the solution for it all – but her tear ducts haven’t worked for months, and so she daubs very gently at the lower rim of her eyes with a tissue, careful not to nick her skin with her perfect, pointed nails, thinking that’ll achieve much the same effect.
He pays for the wedding dress, and her mum chips in £300 towards the cost of catering. Jiannis roars with laughter when she tells him, head back and chest shaking, brighter with merriment than she’s seen him for months. “Is that—? Well, I suppose it means a lot to her!”
The dress is too small.
She tries a corset, but can’t breathe properly in it, ribcage popping against the side.
Jiannis says, “Give me your phone,” and she does, and as he murmurs, “Babe, this is perfect, you’re so perfect, this is going to be the perfect . . . ” he buys another app on her credit card, and she watches over his shoulder as it uploads from the Wi-Fi to her phone, from her phone to the nanos in her body, and wonders at the millions of tiny machines running through her blood, self-replicating, sustaining, healing, nurturing, and suddenly thinks that when she is pregnant – and she will obviously be pregnant one day – she’s not sure she wants the nanos to be involved, that there is something almost obscene about the idea of a baby engineered with binary code, every piece of it curated by a pre-natal DNA tweak, a diet of data siphoned through her placenta.
And she has just enough time to feel sick at the thought, to feel repulsed at the idea of the monster that’s going to grow inside her, before the app on her phone freezes, an error code pops up on the screen, and her world goes black.
Chapter 18
The doctors were quite excited when Harmony Meads nearly died.
They were obviously very worried, very concerned; it is a terrible thing that has happened to her, a really terrible . . . but very interesting thing that has happened.
Medical programmers from the Royal London and the Whittington rushed down to join the dissection of faulty and clashing code, to trawl through her logged nano history and poke at her control panel interface. They even got in a couple of ancient old surgeons, with their knives and saws and squelchy old-fashioned ways, just in case they needed to cut her open and do something horrendously, enthrallingly, bloodily analogue. Students flocked to her bed to marvel at her temperature, peer into her vacant, gummy eyes and bicker about the error messages flooding their screens as they prodded and poked at her skin, her bones, her nanos.
She only vaguely knew some of this. Shapes moved and sounds were made, but they were forms without meaning, syllables in the air. When she was awake, it seemed to her that she had never before seen white as white as the lights in the ceiling, or felt the touch of fabric against her skin before, an explosion of contact, nerves roaring a response from ankle to throat, clamouring to be heard. Then she slept, and the darkness was an infinite falling, full of feelings that language could not name, and sights that exceeded colour.
She thought that the machines were dreaming, the nanos in her blood.
She thought that perhaps some part of her had died, and in the place where thought might have been, there were only the nanos, learning to think, live, becoming a part of a new creature’s soul.
For three days she lay, breathing through a pipe shoved down her throat, peeing into a bag, while junior doctors with their tablets live-downloading her nano data leaned over to drain fluid from her spine every eight hours, and tutted when she had a fever, and gossiped with the nurses whenever they thought she couldn’t hear them speak.
They sedated her at the end of the fourth day after they realised the extent of the problem. Even through the mist of drugs, she lay awake in the darkness, her mouth open and screaming, screaming, screaming, though no one seemed to hear, her ears roaring with the thump, thump, thump of the sea, her skin dead and numb, her mouth dry no matter how much they gave her to drink, a pinprick of woman trapped in a black hole and screaming, still screaming, until at last they put her into a chemically induced coma after a nurse pointed out that they had drugs for that sort of thing for when the Wi-Fi failed.
Jiannis sat by her side, holding her hand.
Karen arrived on the fifth day, having only just been informed by, of all people, Jazzy from work, who just assumed that Karen knew anyway and wanted to make sure she wasn’t coming up to visit by Waterloo, because there were works at Clapham Junction and she’d be better going by Paddington.
When Karen walked through the door, Jiannis took one look at her and said he needed to go and get a fresh shirt, and phoned the hospital during visiting hours to check to see if Karen was still there, and she was, so he wasn’t.
Harmony regained consciousness after a consultant from St Mary’s suggested they turned her nanos off and back on again. They had tried this before, of course – they weren’t amateurs – but this time they ran a staggered reboot, activating only her immune packages, then a couple of the nutritional and cardiac services, and finally uploading an emergency healthcare prescription to start fixing the damage to her organs and nerves, while the rest of her upgrades and boosts sat idle in the Wi-Fi, firewalled off.
There had been, said the leading medic, a conflict of priorities which had led to a catastrophic glitch.
In layman’s terms – there were too many programs running on Harmony’s system.
The nanos had tried to do too much, and it had broken her.
Jiannis swore he’d sue the backside off Fullife.
Fullife replied, “You will see that there are strict guidelines on programming and cache limits which you exceed at your own risk and in this case we cannot accept liability for . . . ”
Karen held Harmony’s hand in hers, didn’t seem to care about the cannulas shoved into her veins, the pallor of her skin, the stink of sweat on her warped, crinkled body, and whispered, “If you need to come home, it’d be lovely to have you. I’ll cook pasta . . . ”
“Nonsense!” blurted Jiannis. “Harmony will come home with me, and we’ll get her back to normal in a few weeks. There’s a wedding to plan!”
Harmony lay on the hospital bed, back raised up a little too high, bottom sliding perpetually down towards a little trough in the mattress, and let them talk while the nanos dreamed of electric darkness.
Chapter 19
This is Harmony Meads, aged twenty-nine, as Ibrahim the estate agent lets her cry in his office and gives her more tissues from the little travel pack his wife always makes him carry because she can’t stand his sneezing.
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sp; Her backside spills out over the edges of the chair she sits on. When she nods, layers of skin bubble and flow, walrus-like, beneath her chin. When she shakes her head, the soft flesh around her jaw seems to trail a little bit behind the rest of her, like a flag caught in the wind. Her chubby fingers poke, futile, at the screen of her mobile phone. She has to sleep with a hot water bottle beneath her right hip, even in summer, because there’s an ache there that she can’t get rid of but which Fullife assures her is just the side effect of her bone structure changing now she’s no longer being supported by Hale and Hearty and her body is reverting to running things for itself. She has athlete’s foot, the skin peeling in thick white strands. The acne down her back and chest is less individual spots than contours poked with cathedrals and churches of pus, an ordnance survey of rupturing, diseased flesh.
Ibrahim lends her £500 from his own pocket.
She does the sensible thing and pays off what she still owes to her landlady, the outstanding bailiff’s fee from her old place and her water bill. That leaves her £80. She tries to give it to Fullife, but before she can make the transfer, the money is gone, sucked away automatically by the credit card company to cover her outstanding debt.
She doesn’t notice particularly when Fullife tunes down her libido to a dull, grey nothing on continued non-payment. It’s not like she’s going to get much anyway. The nanos shut down her L-cones after three months at the maxed-out debt cap, and the colours red and green vanish from her world.
She goes back to Ibrahim.
“I just . . . £500 was kind, you were so kind, but I’m . . . I’m . . . begging. That’s what I’m doing. I’m begging. I’m begging you. I can’t—I’m begging.”