The Wipe

by Nik Abnett

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “How do we get home?”

  She paused again for several seconds, listening. “Thanks, Pa,” she finally said. “Love you too.”

  “What did he say?” asked Sage.

  “It’s all fine,” she said, bending at the waist, her hands on her thighs, knees bent, as she took a breath and steadied herself.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “Just panicked for a minute. Really, I’m Okay.”

  Verity stood up, and smiled at Sage. “It’s nothing. We’ve just got a bit of a walk ahead of us. It’ll be fun; we’ll see some sites.”

  “A bit of a walk?” Sage asked.

  “Pa reckons it’s nine miles. It’s basically a straight line from here to Catford, on the A2.”

  “Nine miles. We can walk nine miles.”

  “Of course we can.”

  “At four miles an hour, it’ll only take a couple of hours or so.”

  “Let’s try for three hours, and be happy with four,” said Verity. “I’m just glad I put my sneakers on this morning.”

  “Shall we?” asked Sage, offering Verity his hand.

  She took it, and they looked around to get their bearings before heading south.

  Eight

  “Don’t you usually go out for lunch about now, Concord?” Blythe asked.

  She’d been waiting for him to leave so that she could have the cubicle to herself for forty minutes, and have some more contact with Dharma.

  “Not today,” said Con. “And I rather like that you call me Concord. I’ve never been a big fan of the abbreviation; makes me feel like a villain.”

  “Aren’t you?” asked Blythe.

  “Nope.”

  “But you’re not going to lunch?”

  “I’m afraid you might have another shocking shock while I’m gone, and I’d feel horribly responsible, so I thought I’d stay, and keep you company.”

  “I’d rather be alone,” said Blythe.

  “Which only worries me more. It’s decided, I’m staying here to make sure you don’t faint or swoon or something.”

  “Swoon?” said Blythe, smiling.

  “So, I like nineteenth century novels,” said Con. “What of it?”

  “I might be funny, but you’re just plain weird.”

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that.”

  “You seem different.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know, but I see the way you are with Joy, and it doesn’t make me like you.”

  “It doesn’t make me like me, either,” said Con, “but I haven’t had a peep out of you in… how many years? I admit it, I’m one of those people for whom any company is better than no company, even if it means listening to Joy moaning for hours at a time.”

  “Then I feel sorry for you,” said Blythe.

  “Don’t. It might have taken me a while to realise it, but now that I see how funny and mysterious you are, you’ve got my interest.”

  “Well, now I feel sorry for Joy,” said Blythe, smiling. “And a little bit sorry for myself. You’re a user Concord Penn.”

  “And now my heart is broken,” said Con, clutching at his chest in dramatic fashion. “But can we stop messing about, now, and get on with whatever it is you’re secretly getting on with.”

  Blythe had felt alone in the cubicle since she’d arrived, and it’d been far too long. She liked that Con thought her funny. She was funny. She hardly had anyone, except for her frightful mother, at least not until she got to know Dharma better. Con was in the cubicle with her and, okay, he was nosy, but he was also amusing, warmer than she expected, and nicer than she had ever thought possible.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll send you what I got yesterday, and you can read it, but you can also keep your comments to yourself.”

  “Done!” said Con, rolling his chair back up to his station, and opening the document she’d uploaded to him.

  Five minutes later, Blythe asked, over her shoulder, “You sure you don’t want to get out for your lunch? You’ve still got half an hour.”

  “Shh, I’m reading.”

  Blythe turned back to her own screen, and the private connection she’d opened with Dharma. Overnight, or, at least since she’d closed the private connection the previous day, more stuff had dropped into her box, much more. Dharma had gathered a massive amount of information. There were data sheets with charts and names, dates and places, and there were lots of text documents, mostly in the form of stream of consciousness. Dharma had obviously been talking fast when she’d opened the connection.

  “Do you believe this stuff?” asked Con, several minutes later. “I mean, how can this Dharma person possibly think she’s related to you?”

  “What part of ‘keep your comments to yourself’ did you not understand?” asked Blythe.

  “You can’t just drop this on me, and not talk about it. It’s pretty huge.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” said Blythe, smiling.

  “Seriously,” said Con, “how could anyone possibly find out this kind of stuff?”

  “That’s the first thing I asked her. She’s a data analyst, working for W.W. and she’s ninetieth percentile. So, I guess, that’s how.”

  “All that proves is that she wanted to stay home with her mother for as long as possible.”

  “Maybe,” said Blythe, “but plenty of people manage that without getting her level of education.”

  “But you only know what she’s telling you. There’s no way to verify this stuff. Aren’t you suspicious?”

  “What’s to be suspicious about?”

  “Well, for a start,” said Con. “She’s a total stranger.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “You and me aren’t strangers.”

  “All I know about you is that you like your coffee too sweet and too nutty,” said Blythe. “It’s not a whole lot, is it?”

  Con stopped reading the data, and turned his chair to face her. The sound of the moving casters made Blythe look around.

  “I know even less about you,” said Con. “Except that you’re beautiful and funny, and too quiet. It’s still more than we know about her.”

  “Not now,” said Blythe. She didn’t know Con well enough for him to get personal, and it made her uncomfortable.

  “We could get to know each other,” said Con.

  Blythe turned her chair to face him.

  “Look Con,” she said. “We’ve been sitting in this cubicle for three years, and barely spoken a dozen words, what makes you think I want to get to know you now?”

  Con looked a little crestfallen.

  “My first priority is Dharma. She’s taken some time and effort, not to mention connection power, to find me and reach out to me. What did you ever do?”

  “You’re right,” said Con.

  “It might be better if you took your lunch break,” said Blythe. “You’ve still got time to get a cup of coffee, at least.”

  “Right.” Con cleared his screen, pulled on a sweater, and left the cubicle.

  Blythe sighed, and turned back to her screen. Dharma’s uploads were comprehensive but there was a lot of data. It had been well organised, and Dharma had made notes so that Blythe could navigate the material, but it was still a huge amount, and, if true, it was an awful lot to take in.

  “Dharma Tuke,” said Blythe, closing her eyes for a moment, “and Blythe Dole.” The names felt good to her, side-by-side in her head. They sounded good out loud, too.

  Time was almost up, so Blythe cleared her connection, and a new invoice for Anley Corp filled her screen. She stood up, stretched, and looked out through the acrylic wall. The floor was quiet.

  The door opened behind her as Con entered the cubicle. She didn’t turn around.

  “Peace offering,” he said. “I guess you like yours without hazelnut, but I took a punt on the milk. You’re right, I never did make an effort with you.”

  Blythe turned around, and took the coffee that Con
held out to her.

  “Thank you.”

  “We could be friends,” said Con, sitting at his station, ready to get back to work. “Maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  It was true that he hadn’t ever taken an interest in her, but that worked both ways. She’d been the last into the cubicle, so Joy and Con already knew each other. She could have been more forthcoming when she’d first arrived.

  Blythe had always struggled with social connections. She liked to have people physically close, partly because her mother had always been such a huge presence in her life. It wasn’t her choice, and her mother was demanding of her shy daughter. Nevertheless, Blythe knew that she could make more of an effort, especially with her co-workers.

  Her excitement over her new connection with Dharma was palpable. She had thought about little else for the past couple of days. She had only three days remaining to cement the relationship, three forty minute sessions. She hoped it would be enough.

  She hoped that Dharma would find her as interesting as she found Dharma. She wasn’t sure that was possible. Tomorrow, she’d stop looking at data, and spend those forty minutes keying in some information about herself. She’d send Dharma a proper introductory e-mail.

  Blythe and Concord didn’t speak for the next couple of hours. They simply worked at their computer stations, as usual. Only the sounds of the circulating air, and fingers on keyboards broke the silence.

  “The coffee was good,” Blythe said, when a new invoice appeared in front of her for the umpteenth time. She didn’t turn to look at Con, speaking to the screen. “Just how I like it.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Con.

  It was a beginning.

  Nine

  Dharma sat at home all weekend, taking notes and making plans for her search.

  Most weekends she still jogged; she felt it kept her sane while she grieved the loss of her mother. She never took the long, circuitous route back to where her mother had lived. She changed routes often, but always made circuits, so that she didn’t need to fill in forms for travelling outside the two square miles of her own district. BRd1 was old, built almost entirely before the Deluge, and the streets were tightly packed and at odd angles. If she’d been able to jog to her mother’s as the crow flies, it would be a little less than two miles, but following the streets, tacking this way and that, it ended up being three miles.

  Like everyone else, Dharma took the most direct routes from home to work, and anywhere else she had to visit: the medical centre for her check-ups, and the market for supplies on her allotted days. There were streets, even within her two-square-mile world, that she had never been down before, buildings she had never seen, and faces, too. Some of those faces looked back at her with suspicion, many crossed the street or walked into a building if she came within ten metres of them. During one jog, she had come very close to a sallow-skinned man with a large nose, as she turned a corner. They had both put up their hands, and Dharma had scheduled a check-up for the following day. She assumed that the man had too, if the horror on his face was any indication.

  Changing her route regularly, to get her three mile jog, Dharma began to think there were a great many more things to see and do, and more people to know, than she had ever considered before. She reminded herself that they were not her blood. She reminded herself that she worked alone from choice.

  Since she was alone in her apartment and no longer pursuing an education, Dharma’s computer access was limited to personal data, including photos, and entertainment streaming. She could read a book or watch shows and movies. She’d always been a keen reader, but had never bothered with visual art forms much. Once in a while she’d watch the latest movie, but since the Deluge, they were all animated or CGI. Her mother had liked watching the old archived stuff, acted by real people. The trouble was they were antiquated, and it was difficult to watch people crowded together or touching each other without the protocols. As a child, she’d once seen a movie where two people had touched their mouths together. It had made her cry with fear, but her mother had reassured her that it was called kissing, and that people had done it for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

  “That doesn’t make it right,” Dharma had said, and her mother had turned off the screen so that her daughter could read out-loud to her instead. She was a good reader, even at eight years old.

  Dharma went to work as normal the following Monday, determined to broaden her search efficiently. She wasn’t allowed to bring anything to work, nobody was, but she retained data easily, especially once she’d written it down, and she could reproduce the notes she’d made over the weekend without a second’s thought or hesitation.

  At one o’clock, Dharma switched from the W.W. intranet connection to her internet access. Her first search was for a list of ‘boroughs of London’. She looked at the thirty or so names in dismay. This could be a long search.

  Summoning a map, she quickly identified the London Borough of Bromley by its shape. It sat squarely in the lower right quadrant. If her mother had been right when she’d called BRd1 ‘Bromley’, then this section of the map represented home.

  Dharma needed to broaden her search. The town of Bromley was in the top left quadrant of the borough map, so she looked first at the boroughs closest to the red boundary line: Croydon to the west and Lewisham to the north.

  Dharma called up a map of the London Borough of Croydon, since it was next alphabetically.

  She pulled up the birth registry.

  “Constance Tuke,” she said, “25th October 2042. Croydon.”

  +Data not found+

  “Correction: Addington.”

  +Data not found+

  “Correction: Addiscombe.”

  +Data not found+

  Dharma continued through all the grey patches on the green map, starting with the largest. The answer always came back the same.

  She began to wonder how long this was going to take her, and, if she succeeded, how long it would then take her to find any details about her grandmother. And, even if it was possible to find her grandmother, where would she go from there?

  “I’m a data analyst,” she said to the screen. “This isn’t going to beat me.”

  The screen blinked.

  +Data not recognised+

  +Communication?+

  “Negative,” said Dharma. “Constance Tuke, 25th October, 2042. Thornton Heath.”

  +Data not found+

  When Dharma went back to work an hour later, her job seemed infinitely easier than this search had become. She’d drawn blank after blank, and she’d only just managed to exhaust the place names in the borough of Croydon before her time was up. She hadn’t started on Lewisham yet, and what if that didn’t give her a result? There were more than thirty boroughs in London alone. What if her mother had been born even further afield?

  Surely that wasn’t possible.

  “Nobody moves,” said Dharma, as she paced in her cubicle, thinking more about her search than about her job. “Nobody moved during the Deluge. People were assigned housing in the New Wave. She can’t be far away. She’s got to be here, somewhere.”

  A data box was glowing on the screen as Dharma glanced at it.

  +Data discontinued+

  She hadn’t offered a VR command or made a keystroke in more than five minutes. She must get back to work.

  “Download data R478/J field F.”

  The data box disappeared, and Dharma concentrated on her job for the rest of the afternoon. This thing could wait until tomorrow, or the day after that, or next week, next month, or even next year, if necessary.

  Dharma was used to working on projects over extended periods of time. It was her job. She could treat her personal project like a job, too. It meant that she could only spend five computer hours a week on this, but, if she worked fast enough, and organised the data efficiently, analysing it would be straightforward.

  The records were all in the public domain, all she had to do was verify and cross refe
rence them once she’d found them. It was nothing.

  Dharma pushed back her lunch break to two o’clock on Tuesday. The anticipation was easier to deal with than the disappointment, and, this way, her working afternoon would be shortened.

  At precisely two o’clock, Dharma switched to the internet, and began her search through the place names in the London Borough of Lewisham.

  “Constance Tuke, 25th October 2042. Lewisham,” she said.

  +Data not found+

  “Constance Tuke, 25th October 2042. Catford.”

  There was no data box.

  Dharma held her breath, and stared intently at the screen. A form appeared on it with her mother’s name, and date and place of birth. So far, so good.

  Down the right hand side of the screen there was an insert with further options. Dharma read one of them out, “View full certificate,” she said.

  Another data box.

  +Payment required+

  “Checkout.” She had no idea what charge would be made for viewing the certificate. She was on a decent wage, but much of her pay cheque was allocated for her accommodation and services, and she’d chosen a reasonably high tariff, valuing comfort at home above other things. If the charges were significant, she might have to make an adjustment to her service tariff to allow her to spend money on finding a living, genetic relation.

  +Four tix+

  Dharma smiled. It was nothing. She could call up dozens of certificates, if she had to, before the cost would make a dent in her standard of living.

  She held her id card up to the scanner, and a moment later the certificate was displayed on the screen.

  Dharma studied it long and hard. She ignored the geographical data along the top, except to confirm that the birth had been registered in Catford. Date of birth matched her mother’s birthday and place of birth was given as 131, Engleheart Road, Catford, SE6, in accordance with the old form of address. It made sense that, during the Deluge, a birth would take place at home rather than a hospital, as seemed the norm pre-Deluge. As yet, she saw no reason to distrust this certificate.

  She zoomed in and scrolled right, revealing two more columns. The first listed the father’s name as ‘Sage Endeavour Tuke’, which settled it. She already knew that her grandfather had been called Sage Tuke.”