The Wipe

by Nik Abnett

  Charity lay on the single bed in the box room, listening for sounds in the house. Verity was already snoring, softly. Sage was quiet, but Sage was always quiet.

  She looked at her watch. It was a little after eleven-thirty. A few minutes later, she heard a bedroom door open, and Sage walk along the landing to the bathroom. A minute later she heard him walk back to his room. Charity thought she heard the light-switch being thrown, before Sage closed the bedroom door.

  She was surprised how long it took her parents to go to bed. She waited for another hour before they came up the stairs, long after midnight. She wondered what they’d been talking about for so long in the kitchen. She knew that’s why her mum had sent her to bed, so that they could have some private time to chat, and go over the day’s events.

  No one in the house had much time alone. Charity was lucky in that respect. She didn’t blame her parents for wanting to spend that time together. Twenty minutes later, she heard her pa turn off the landing light, and close his bedroom door.

  Charity felt ready, but she knew the timing was wrong.

  When she was a child, Charity had run with the other kids, in the streets and down the many alleys that ran behind and between the older houses. She’d worked out a good route. She’d also sat up and listened every night for a week, her window open to the balmy June air. It was nice to feel the cool of the night, by contrast to the intense warmth of the days. The cool air had the added advantage of keeping her awake while she listened.

  For the past week, she’d made a note of the times when she’d heard footfalls, or a cough or sneeze somewhere close to the house, and she’d kept a record of when the street lights went out, as dawn rose.

  She still had a couple of hours to wait. At least.

  At ten past the hour, every hour, give or take a minute or two, Charity heard someone outside. She even thought she heard someone peeing up against a wall at eight minutes past three.

  The streetlights would start to fade out at four-thirty, and the sun would start to come up within ten minutes, so there’d be a crossover between the natural light, and the artificial.

  Charity made her move at half past four. She’d decided not to take anything with her, except for her phone and id. The dress didn’t have pockets, so she simply carried them. Taking the id was a risk; if she was stopped, the guards would immediately know who she was. On the other hand, her id entitled her to rations.

  Charity needed to pee, but decided to wait. She didn’t want to risk waking her parents. She tiptoed down the stairs to the kitchen, where she’d left her trainers by the back door that morning. Nobody had moved them. She picked up her trainers, and opened the door as quietly as she could. She wouldn’t be able to lock it behind her, but that didn’t matter; Pax would probably be up in a couple of hours, and crime had taken a dramatic downturn since the lockdown.

  She closed the door behind her and walked down to the garden gate. She thought better of opening it, remembering that it squeaked, badly. Charity looked at the phone and id in her hand. She lifted her dress, and tucked them into the elastic in the back of her knickers. It had been a long time since she’d done it in gym class, at school, but Charity positioned her hands, and then raised a leg. Her gate-vault wasn’t perfect, but it got her out of the garden and into the alley behind, and she was still on her feet.

  Charity rubbed her hands together to get rid of the dust that had accumulated on the gate, retrieved her phone and id, and jogged down the alley. She stopped when she came to the exit onto Sangley Road, which she’d have to cross. She listened for a moment, hidden in the shadows at the mouth of the alley, and then darted across the road. Almost opposite, only three houses over, there was another back alley, but she decided to cut across the primary school grounds, instead. The guards would be patrolling the residential areas; they wouldn’t bother with the school. Besides, there were no street lights on the school grounds, and she had good cover.

  All she had to do was cross Culverley Road and it was back alleys all the way. She listened, her back against the wall that ran behind the school, and, hearing nothing, darted across the road. She didn’t have to look out for traffic. No one had been allowed out at night for months, and during the lockdown nobody was using their cars. There were still a few vehicles on the roads: delivery trucks, ambulances and hazmat, but not at dawn.

  Two minutes later, Charity was in the back alley of Bargery Road. She had to walk the entire length of the alley, so that she could start at the end house, number two, because the garden gates didn’t have house numbers on them. She counted in twos, until she got to the gate that should belong to number 86.

  She paused for a moment, hoping she was right. She thumbed the latch on the gate, and opened it, tentatively. People had given up locking their garden gates, and many left windows open and back doors unlocked. Charity was relieved that she didn’t have to perform another gate vault, since the gate hinge had clearly been oiled regularly, and the gate opened almost without making a sound.

  Once she was in the garden, the gate closed behind her, Charity looked down at herself in the green, silk dress, and wiped a little dust off it. She walked halfway across the lawn that covered most of the back garden, and then took off the trainers. They looked incongruous with the dress.

  When Charity got to the back door of 86 Bargery Road she began by tapping, lightly. She didn’t want to disturb anyone in the adjoining house, and she didn’t want to be heard if there was a guard anywhere in the street nearby.

  Charity didn’t expect the first tap to be answered. She tapped again, but only slightly louder, expecting that she’d have to tap harder before she’d get an answer.

  Almost immediately, a light was turned on in the kitchen, and she could hear someone moving around. Charity shifted a couple of steps to the left from the back door, to look through the kitchen window. She watched a figure, standing in the middle of the kitchen, blinking against the harsh, bright light. It rubbed its eyes.

  When he had finished rubbing his eyes, and had adjusted to the light, Able looked around the kitchen. He thought he’d heard knocking, but perhaps it was his imagination.

  Then he saw movement.

  Charity was waving at Able from outside the kitchen window, trying to catch his attention.

  His eyes turned towards her.

  She waved again, just to be sure that he’d seen her.

  Able stared.

  Charity smiled.

  Able stared some more.

  Charity kept smiling.

  Finally, Able broke into a wide smile, and then went out of sight as he rushed to the door. Charity stepped to the other side of the door, and listened to Able fumbling for the key, before, finally, pulling the door open.

  “Come in,” he said, through tears. “You’re here!”

  Thirty-six

  Dharma scrutinised the New Wave documents the following lunch time. They were heavily redacted, but they were standard forms and, as a data analyst, Dharma had access to templates for all current registration documents.

  It was a matter of a moment to bring up templates for work contracts and employment severance records, and for allocated housing. Dharma was familiar with the forms, since she’d had to fill most of them out at some time or another. She hadn’t ever filled out an employment severance record, so she looked at that first.

  Employment severance records were almost universally filled out by women for the purposes of having a child. There was a different form of record-keeping for retirees. The only other reasons for severance were employer requests to dispense with an employee, and most of those cases involved crime. Dharma knew this from some statistical analysis she’d done on white-collar crime, about eighteen months earlier. Her memories of it were particularly clear, because almost all of the crime had been trivial, but it had almost all been committed by men. Her data analysis was currently being used to implement changes in some forms of employment contract, to maintain productivity while limiting crime. It was a proj
ect she was particularly proud of, since it mostly dealt with the welfare of manual workers.

  Dharma hesitated for a moment.

  Most of her data analysis involved community and human behaviour. She had completed projects on juvenile delinquency, employee crime, senior well-being… The list went on and on. Sometimes, when new data came available, she completed more advanced analysis. She had been instrumental in alterations to school downloads and senior housing, as well as men in the workforce among other things.

  She felt stupid. She had more access to more data than almost anyone, and she wasn’t using it efficiently.

  Dharma pulled up Liberty Dole’s New Wave documents, and scrutinised them. Her original employment contract was heavily redacted, but, there, in the top right hand corner was her id number.

  Dharma clapped her hands.

  +Communication+

  “Negative,” said Dharma.

  She shut down her internet connection, and logged back in on the W.W. intranet. It was monitored, of course, but the company would not know where she’d got the id number from, or who it related to. This search would be an outlier, but Dharma had made leaps of faith in some of her analysis that had sent her down similar paths in the past. This outlier should not register as a concern with the company. If it did, she could simply suggest that she might have misread the id number, and brush it off as a mistake.

  Dharma’s work record was impeccable, and she was a much-valued member of the team at W.W. She’d earned a number of incentives and bonuses, during her time with the company.

  Dharma had memorised the number, since the sequence was very familiar to her, consisting of initials, birth year, parentage, and district code. She spoke the letters and numbers clearly into the VR.

  Liberty Dole’s education record was the first document to fill the screen. Dharma moved on to the next, and passed through several more, until she reached the first severance record, for 2080. Liberty Dole had left work in the hope of having a child, and yet she had returned to work within a year.

  “Medical records,” said Dharma.

  The screen blinked, and the record began on the date of Liberty Dole’s birth on the 22nd January 2044

  “Scroll down, continuous.” The document scrolled through at a little faster than reading speed, but Dharma got the gist of Liberty’s childhood and early adulthood. “Pause,” she said.

  Dharma read the date for 2080. Liberty had become pregnant with a child, but had suffered a late miscarriage in her sixth month of pregnancy. She had returned to work only six weeks later.

  Dharma had done data analysis for numbers of live births from sperm donation. Some of her work had been used to match donors with prospective mothers, but Liberty’s miscarriage had happened forty years ago. The data was pretty basic then, and clearly Liberty had not found a good match. Her struggle moved Dharma, and she understood why the woman would want to return to work, and get on with her life.

  “Scroll down, continuous,” she said.

  When the records reached 2088, Dharma paused again.

  She read carefully through a number of pages. Liberty had been through a great deal to have her child. She had suffered a number of miscarriages, and undergone several minor procedures. Eventually, a diagnosis was made. Liberty Dole was producing antibodies that were dangerous to the sperm donations she was receiving. A sperm donor had been chosen, and the sperm had been processed and introduced directly to Liberty’s eggs, which had been harvested. Liberty Dole had finally become pregnant, and given birth shortly before her fiftieth birthday. There was a note on her file that she was in the ninety-ninth percentile, by age, of women giving birth to live offspring.

  “Scroll up.” She had never heard of this kind of medical technology, and there must be a very particular reason why Liberty would be allowed to follow this course of action, or be subjected to it.

  “Pause.”

  She was looking at the second contract of employment. Liberty Dole had worked as a genetic data technician at a sperm bank. She was responsible for one of the steps in the genetic matching of donors to recipients.

  Dharma felt some surprise, but she liked the links that were forming through the generations of her family. Pax Mott had been a pharmacist, and Faith Mott had been a midwife. Their grand-daughter, Liberty Mott, was in genetics, working with data, and she, Dharma was a data analyst.

  Dharma could not help enjoying the evolution of her family’s work, down the generations.

  “Scroll down, continuous.” She watched the pages go by for a few seconds, and then said, “Pause.”

  She looked at some data that showed Liberty Dole had been part of a fertility study run by the company that she had worked for. It explained why she’d had an extended period of unemployment before having her child.

  A few moments later, Dharma was looking at the medical data for October 2093. October seemed to be a good month for births in her family. This child had been born on 11th October 2093, by caesarean section. She had been given a genetic code number within minutes of her birth at a facility in SEd6. That was unusual in the New Wave, and suggested that the child was at some risk. Codes were usually allocated when the child was released into its mother’s permanent care, at five days old. A child couldn’t be buried without an id number, and an id number couldn’t be issued without a genetic code, so the codes were issued at birth to babies with health problems.

  Dharma could hardly believe her luck. She already knew that there had been a child, a child who was now twenty-six years old, but she never expected to have access to her id number, and it would be easy enough to find Blythe’s now that she had the genetic code. She found it, memorised it, and cleared her screen.

  “BD1093CF1555/SEd6. All data,” she said, into the VR.

  All of the documents were New Wave, and some of them were partially redacted, but the first thing Dharma looked at was the name on the top left hand side of the screen, opposite the id number: Blythe Dole.

  Dharma had a cousin, or a second-cousin, or a cousin-removed… She didn’t know the exact relationship… But Dharma had a twenty-six year old cousin called Blythe Dole. Her birthday was 11th October 2093, and she lived and worked in SEd6. Her request connections code was easy. This was the New Wave, and one size fit all. Dharma hadn’t needed to pull up Blythe’s records to know her request connections code, because it was her id number. She just wanted to know something about her cousin, before she contacted her.

  Dharma checked the time code at the top of the screen. She’d been looking at Blythe’s data for 90 seconds, and she’d spent almost four minutes on checking Liberty’s record. It was time to stop. She knew that the over-under on her record checks was in the three minute range, and she didn’t want to raise any red flags with W.W. by stepping too far outside that range.

  Blythe’s id number was locked in her memory. It was one of those things that she would never forget.

  Thirty-seven

  “I said you’d get to see me in this dress.” Charity was beaming.

  “You told me I could trust you, and I can,” said Able. “You do know what’s best, and you do keep your promises.”

  “All true,” said Charity, still beaming, her cheeks flushed.

  They hadn’t touched. They wanted to, but they didn’t know where to begin, after months of texting each other. They hadn’t even heard each other’s voices.

  “Your voice,” said Able.

  “What’s wrong with it?” asked Charity, putting her hand up to cover her mouth.

  “It’s lovely,” said Able. “It’s lovely to hear it. It’s deeper than I remember, more musical.”

  “Now you’re just being silly,” said Charity. “You sound just the way I imagined you would.”

  “And how is that?”

  “I don’t know. You just sound like you.”

  “Well that’s good… I guess,” said Able. “Why didn’t we speak?”

  “Texting was better. My house is pretty full and there’s nowh
ere to go where I can’t be overheard. Texting’s more private.”

  “There’s no one to overhear us now.”

  “Just us,” said Charity.

  “For how long?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long can you be here? When do you have to go home?”

  “I am home,” said Charity. “If you’ll have me?”

  Able almost rushed at Charity, putting his arms around her clumsily, and pushing too much weight against her. Charity braced herself, and leant into him to steady them both.

  The embrace might have been clumsy, but it was warm and caring, and intense.

  They stood together, like that, in the kitchen of his father’s house, for what seemed like a long time. Able’s head was close to Charity’s, his neck bent so that he could rest it on her shoulder.

  She realised very quickly that he was crying, silently. His body pulsed against her as he sobbed. All she could do was cling to him while he allowed his emotions to pour out. He cried for his father and for himself. He cried with grief and loneliness. Then he cried for the solace of being held, for the comfort. Then he cried for joy.

  Charity realised that she was crying, too. She didn’t weep or sob, but she shed a tear for her old life, and for her family. She knew that she’d miss being with them. Mostly, she cried for Able, and for all that he had been through, alone. She did not know what that felt like, and she hoped that she would never know.

  When this was over, Able would be like Sage; they would be brothers. Pa and Mum would love him and look after him too, this man that she loved so much.

  When Able was finally still, Charity loosened her grip and he stepped back a little. Charity smiled at him.

  “You should wash your face,” she said.

  “I should. I should have a bath, too. I haven’t had a bath since Dad… I’ve put on clean clothes, though,” he reassured her… “Pyjamas, anyway.”

  “You don’t have to explain. Go and run yourself a bath and I’ll make some tea. I don’t suppose you’ve got something I could wear?”