‘But you did, though. I bet you couldn’t help yourself.’
‘Oh, Janice…’ her voice trailed away in horror and was that disgust? Self-disgust? ‘Janice, they were watching me. I couldn’t stop it. Not when she turned up like that. It all ran away with me. It was never part of the plan, I promise.’
Janice’s dread reached a new pitch now. She knew Paula. The badness of what she was trying to tell her depended largely on who ‘they’ were. And Janice knew very well who her ex-wife consorted with these days. ‘What,’ she gritted, ‘was never part of the plan?’
There was nothing for a few seconds apart from the sound of Paula breathing down the line. She could have listened to that for hours, once. Not any more.
‘It was me who told them about the ladies,’ said Paula at last. ‘About them being cyborgs. I thought it was harmless at first. Sonny was one of my best clients. He used to like us to play this game. He would pretend that he was controlling my body, like I was some sort of remote-control doll. He wanted to know what it felt like to be inside a human. I had no idea he’d take it so far.’
The last piece in Paula’s baffling jigsaw fell into place. Janice saw how all this must have started. One crazed but powerful machine, a private fantasy and a fairy tale that just happened to be true. Oh, and Paula. Beautiful, discreet, untrustworthy, amoral Paula. She had never liked the ladies – and they had never liked her either.
‘I knew we’d never trace them through you,’ said Paula. ‘That’s why I put them on to Kelly. They’d spot her sooner or later. She’d do something indiscreet or stupid – all young girls do – and she’d give them away. But that was okay because I knew you’d get Kelly away before they caught up with her.’ A trace of a smile edged back into her voice. ‘And you did, didn’t you? That’s my Janice.’
Janice looked up from the loudspeaker at the wreckage around her. Broken pavements, a smoky sky, blood spots and machine parts mingled in the gutter. ‘Not yours. Not any more,’ she said.
‘It was all going so beautifully,’ she continued. ‘Her face all over the news. I knew they must be close and Kelly must be on the run. Then what does she do but walk straight into the parlour while I’m in the middle of a job? Asks – no, demands – to be taken straight upstairs. They saw her plain as day the moment she walked in there.’
She paused. This time there was a sob in her voice. ‘I had to cut a deal.’
Janice felt that acid bolus of sick at the back of her throat again. ‘You handed her over.’
‘They’d have caught her anyway. I thought it was safer Sonny got her himself, rather than let the police do it. Me and Sonny go way back, see. He’d never have got anywhere with his project without me. I thought I had influence.’
Thought. Had. Past tense. ‘What deal did you think you’d made, Paula?’
‘Last time I saw him, Sonny was in a really bad way. He told me he’d been kidnapped by some kind of rogue terrorist outfit. A whole gang of them. He should have been in intensive repair.’
A whole gang, thought Janice, allowing herself a grim smile in spite of everything. She remembered Pam talking with Freda’s borrowed voicebox about everything it was possible for a breadmaker to do with a dough hook. Sonny’s pride was as fragile as his touchscreen.
‘He needed a body transplant quickly, otherwise he was going to end-of-life. Except he didn’t want to have to get used to another machine body. He said he was ready. He wanted to make the jump.’
‘To what?’ said Janice, although she already knew the answer.
‘I told them. If you’re going to experiment with a body transplant, take the lad. Take Darren. Just keep Kelly out of it, and if need be I’ll come up to the Dolestars with you and scour the sewers for those last four cyborgs.’
‘You’re scum, Paula. Scum.’
‘I was trying to help her.’
‘By selling me and my family out?’
‘Your family.’ She spat down the receiver. ‘A marriage that was like being trapped in a broom cupboard. And I didn’t have one mother-in-law either. I had four. With God knows how many previous wives and husbands to compare me to – and no fucking hope of any of them dying to bring me some peace. Your ladies can go to hell for all I’m concerned.’
The LED light on the front of Freda’s wireless transmitter flashed a frantic red. Janice gestured at her to shut up.
‘So that was the plan,’ said Janice. The growl again. ‘Now tell me. WHAT WASN’T PART OF IT?’
‘He took Kelly,’ she said, her voice small with shame and tears. ‘After everything I’ve done for him he double-crosses me and takes her anyway.’
Janice felt the blood drain out of her face. Her hands and feet felt like tingling lumps stuck on the end of her limbs. Her head fogged. They’d ‘taken’ her. What was that? What did that mean?
Paula stumbled on through Janice’s silence. ‘He put himself into Kelly’s body,’ she said. ‘She’s gone now. There’s no her any more. Just him. I tried to stop him, you know. I really did. But what can I do? I’m only human.’
Janice was too dry and light-headed for tears. But dry enough to catch fire quickly. ‘You stopped being human a long time ago,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t end here.’
‘Oh, yes it does,’ replied Paula.
‘As long as there’s a breath left in my body…’
‘Well, that’s the last thing I’m supposed to tell you,’ said Paula. ‘About the other reason why I called on the emergency channel.’
The feeling was coming back into Janice’s limbs. Grief and adrenaline were beginning to jostle against one another.
‘What’s that?’
‘So they could trace the signal. This is the way it works with machines and humans. Sonny doesn’t have to keep his end of the bargain, but I have to keep mine.’
A whine in the distance. Drones.
‘They’re on their way now,’ said Paula. ‘Goodbye, Janice. It was fun, but everything comes to an end.’
The line went dead, and the sky exploded with gunfire. Four drones zoomed in: three on the bluebottle whine of a jet engine, one on the throaty whump-whump of a rotor blade. They were heavily armed and unmarked. It was a double confirmation for Janice that whatever Paula and this Sonny were up to – whoever had taken her daughter – it was off the books. Why else should they send in mercenaries to finish her off?
As she leapt over the nearest garden wall into a ruined moonrockery, Janice felt time slow down. Those machines could fire hundreds of rounds. Yet Janice still felt like there was time to breathe – and grieve – between the bullets. She was at that pitch of fright where adrenaline slowed the passage of time down to the consistency of treacle. This gave her a choice. She could either pull herself together, or she could die.
She was ready for the first drone with her last ammonia bomb, chucking it so hard she felt her muscles twang. It fell to the ground, its engine rattling.
Rattling.
She thought of Kelly as a baby, tucked up in the curler drawer she used as a cradle. Kelly was a few days old and Janice, woozy from lack of sleep and unconditional love, was shaking a rattle at her, aching for her daughter to smile at her for the first time.
Kelly had looked back at her, eyes unfocused, uncomprehending. All newborn babies are inscrutable to their parents but that, Janice realised, was how it had been ever since. Kelly had learned to talk, but never shared anything about her inner life with her mother. Should she be surprised at that though? Secrets ran deep in the family.
Janice crawled over to the wrecked drone and smashed the machine’s central processing unit with a handy moonrock. She pulled its least-damaged gun unit free. At least she wasn’t defenceless.
The second drone appeared as Janice found the trigger. She felt sick.
But it wasn’t just because she was frightened and in shock, and didn’t want to die, even though Kelly was dead and there was something so wrong about losing your child it felt like an experience beamed in from another, eve
n unfairer universe. She felt sick because though she had loved her daughter fiercely all her life, she knew then she had never liked her. It was the biggest secret she’d kept from herself and now it was here, laid bare.
It was her greatest failing. Other mothers and daughters liked each other. They took the Star Bus to work together: they shopped, swapped cleaning tips, lived separate but complementary lives. But not she and Kelly. Maybe that was something to do with the secrecy and the claustrophobia of how they lived. With so much to hide from the world, it was easy for them to hide from each other too.
She fired a second volley and hit the second drone directly in the fuel tank. It ballooned into a fireball so intense that Janice smelled the ends of her hair singe. She’d always liked the smell of burning hair, she thought. It reminded her of home.
It also reminded her of the one time that she and Kelly had really seen one another for what they were. One night, when Kelly was still in her early teens, she’d crept back into the salon two hours after bedtime, stinking of Nicotea. She remembered the argument that followed so distinctly it felt more like a taste than a memory. The heat of it was like the fireball that raged in front of her: hot enough to blister paint.
In the middle of it the ladies, aghast, had cried out with a collective >:-|.
‘Will you look at the two of you,’ Ada had said.
So Janice had. She had looked at Kelly and she saw her jaw, her lips. She saw the same blindness to her own faults, and the same uncomprehending rage when someone wouldn’t follow her instructions. And when she’d laughed at the ridiculousness of disliking herself, Kelly had joined in.
She remembered them both, standing in the dark salon, shrieking with laughter at how maddening they found each other. Janice knew that in that one moment they had never been closer. And now they never would be again.
Janice took aim at the third drone, but got nothing from the gun but a hollow click. It was out of ammo, and she was out of bombs. She threw the gun straight at the drone as a final gesture and, as she waited for the drone to find its aim again, took Freda’s transmitter out of her pocket.
‘If you don’t do something now,’ she said to it, ‘I’ll have to throw you next. I’ve got nothing else left.’
The LEDs on the front of the transmitter flashed a ;-).
When she’d first decanted Freda’s consciousness into that wireless transmitter, Janice justified it on the same basis that other families might buy an elderly relative a mobility scooter. A little freedom of movement would be good for Freda, but less bother to Janice, who had a revolution to incite. Except, pushing Freda out of her own admittedly dead body had convinced Janice that, as far as bodies were concerned, anything or anyone was fair game.
The transmitter was nothing like Freda’s old body. Yes, that had been a conduit to the Internet, but having to send her consciousness along a physical connection had made her think of it as a fixed point. Things were different in the transmitter, which stretched her consciousness in such a way that Freda felt her mind more like a surface area. Machines around her weren’t alien bodies: they were things she could inhabit.
This had made her the perfect weapon for attacking robots. She had flitted in and out of the machines attacking the Dolestars like a piece of malware – because that’s what she was. She had torn through millennium-old security protocols to access the operating systems beneath. Some machines had fought back and lost, but most had cringed in their memory banks. Either way, they had all left Freda in control.
‘Well?’ Janice asked Freda through the inert transmitter. ‘What?’
The LEDs formed a single word: RUN.
A pocket of silence opened up over Janice. She looked up to see the fourth drone – the one with the rotor blades that reminded Janice of a cooling fan – frozen in mid-air with a dead engine. It hovered there like a cartoon character waiting for the anvil to drop and then plummeted.
Meanwhile, the third drone recovered from the distraction and aimed its laser sights over Janice, who cursed inwardly. Wrong drone, Freda.
The third drone was clearing its barrels to fire when Freda struck. She restarted the fourth drone’s engines and smashed the pair of them together. They fell to the ground in a confusion of smoking parts.
If Janice had been a woman with a drop of melodrama inside her, she thought, she’d have dropped to her knees and wept. She wasn’t. What she was, however, was a woman on to her last pair of tights and operatic gestures would only cause ladders. So she sat down very carefully on what was left of the moonrockery and tried to remember what it felt like to breathe without the help of terminal levels of adrenaline.
‘I suppose you thought that just-in-the-nick-of-time stuff was funny?’ she said to the transmitter. ‘Well, it wasn’t. It was bloody terrifying.’
The LED array on its front flashed Janice a _()_/.
This tiny piece of normality reminded Janice that no, none of the last half hour had been a dream. She began to cry.
A loudspeaker nearby crackled into life.
‘I’m so sorry, Janice. If I still had arms I’d give you a hug.’
Instead, Janice clutched the transmitter to her chest as her crying deepened.
The sound of tears instead of gunfire drew people out of the surrounding buildings. One by one at first, and then in twos and threes, they had peeked through the cracks in their broken windows, from behind the barricades they’d built from their own broken furniture.
Even through her smeared vision these people seemed as broken as she felt. Streaked faces, hair full of dust and dirt and expressions of shock and anger. Guilt expanded in her chest. But this time instead of failing to protect one person, she’d put a whole space station full of people at risk. People who couldn’t fight back.
‘It’s all such a mess,’ croaked Janice, drawing accusing stares from the people around her. ‘Why couldn’t I just leave well alone?’
‘I wouldn’t call it “well”,’ replied Freda. ‘And besides, if Paula was telling the truth for a change back there, we were doomed anyway.’
‘I could kill her,’ said Janice. She dug her fingernails into the palm of her hands, ‘Kelly…’
‘We don’t know she’s dead, you know,’ said Freda. ‘Not for a fact.’
‘What?’
‘All Paula said was that this Sonny found a way to put himself in Kelly’s body and drive her like a car. He might be in control, but she could still be in there.’
‘I don’t see what difference it makes. We can’t do anything about it.’
‘I can.’
Janice stared hard at the loudspeaker Freda had borrowed.
‘I could,’ insisted Freda. ‘It shouldn’t be hard to find something as unusual as a human with machine thought patterns. Anyway,’ she said as the transmitter erupted with a wide :-D, ‘who’s got more experience of cyborgs than me?’
‘Do you think you can bring her back?’
‘If I don’t try…’
Janice took a deep breath. If there were any chance at all of finding Kelly, revenging her, saving her, it would have to be Freda. There was no way for her to leave Discovery now. And Freda was suddenly so spry. Perhaps she did have a chance.
She felt a drop of hope stain the clarity of her despair. That was a familiar, even comforting feeling to Janice, because that was how she’d always lived: afraid, but hopeful she could get away with it a little while more.
‘Go on then,’ she said to Freda.
Janice felt eyes drilling into her. The people around her wanted someone to blame, or someone to lead them. Or both. Some of them must want to fight back, but they needed an idea of where they fitted into the bigger picture. That was how they could turn disobedience into real resistance. Maybe she could make that happen, but she needed time, as much as she needed something to put a stopper on the voice inside her that wouldn’t stop keening ‘Kelly, Kelly’. But she needed neither of these things as much as she needed cover, and currently there was only Freda to provi
de it.
‘You’ll be off then, won’t you?’ said Janice.
‘I have to.’
‘I don’t know what’ll happen here without you.’
‘Then head back to the salon,’ said Freda. ‘I can cover you.’
Those eyes again. She could hear their thoughts: ‘it’s alright for her, she thinks she’s special’; ‘starts something she couldn’t finish’; ‘leaves us here’. They had a point.
‘It’s not just me,’ said Janice. ‘There’s all those other people out there. If you disappear they’re done for.’
‘They’ve not been much help so far.’
‘They don’t know what they’re doing. They need organising.’
Freda chuckled. ‘And you know just the person for that job.’
‘Can you cover us all?’
‘I can. Just cover your ears a second, would you?’
A loud bang threw a stick of dynamite into her thoughts. She ducked instinctively, but this wasn’t an explosion. It felt too contained. It felt like it was coming from below and it sounded like a knock.
The next bang rattled the drains. The one after cracked the tarmac all the way up the road. That was what it reminded her of: roadworks. Bang. Aggregate lost its moorings and pinballed into the cracks. Bang. The cracks started to join up and Janice saw something throwing itself against the underside of the road.
At last, a stretch of road several metres square flipped up like the top of a soft-boiled egg, levered out of the way by a three-toed metal claw. This revealed the sight of Kurl Up and Dye balanced in a kind of kung-fu kick on one leg of the Baba Yaga 4000. It looked remarkably hale for a hairdresser’s that had just cracked its head through several metres of civil engineering. The only casualties were a few roof tiles and the neon ‘e’ from the shop sign.
The loudspeaker crackled into life again. ‘Built to last. Not like the flimsy things you get nowadays. If you could see the meteor showers we had to put up with back in the day you’d weep. Now fetch your friends and get in, love. I think I’ll be gone a while.’
Battlestar Suburbia Page 16