Ectopia (25 page)

Right now the way is smudged a bit, sweat and tears soak the view, but what the fuck is there to see? Baked earth. Bleary sky. Orange pennants. They hang limp at ankle height. I know what they're there for. They're back-up to a lie. If forcefields were that good they wouldn't put a fence round Cromozone. They wouldn't man it with armed guards. No way have they planted a forcefield round this place. In Malik's fucked up head maybe, they've lodged some plan of a killer forcefield inside his skull, but that's what he wants. That's easy. It's easy to make people believe in what they want. Mal wants a forcefield to keep him in paradise. He wants Karen to himself. Fuck him. He can have her. She can have him. I'm leaving.

Speed, Bender. Speed up. That pennant there's your marker. Land your right foot on it and leap. Take to the air. You'll land on the other side.

You will. You will.

 

- You're lucky, Malik says.

Malik smiles. His hand's cool. It lay on my forehead but he takes it away as I open my eyes.

Maybe he's right. Maybe it isn't a lie. Maybe I am lucky. Malik's here, he's smiling, he tells me I'm lucky. Maybe it's just him and me. Maybe that's what lucky means.

- You see? I say – There's nothing we can't run through. Thanks for coming. Thanks for following.

- The doctor drove us, Malik says – I would have run but the doctor said not to. He said you'd need some of the equipment in the van. You were fast but he was faster. He reprogrammed the co-ordinates. He guessed you'd take a leap at the fence and shifted the second shock curtain back some lengths. You were stunned and fell before you got to it. That's lucky, Bender. Two shocks of that force could have killed you.

I sit up and look around. I'm not in the van. I'm not on the ground at the far side of any forcefield either.

- You're in the house, Malik explains – The house they built for us. The doctor gave you a sedative to ease your system through the shock. He said it was important you came round gradually. You've had enough shocks for one day. Stay cool, Bender. Lie down.

He puts his hands on my shoulders. My shoulders are bare. I'm naked. Someone's peeled me out of my slinksuit. I'm lying on a single bed, covered by a white sheet. Malik presses me down onto the pillow. Some things I fight. Some things I don't. Malik wants to press me down onto a bed, that's OK. I can take that. I stare up at the ceiling in this new house. It's made of logs, still covered in their bark.

- So you brought me back? I didn't get away. You didn't follow.

- We put you on oxygen. Wrapped you in a foil blanket. The flatbed scanner diagnosed your condition then heat got to work. That's how I understand it. Heat and light are targeted through and around your body to regenerate stunned and shredded tissue. The doctor says it's no different to the natural healing process, only infinitely faster. We don't have to wait on nature, he says. We don't ever have to do that. We can make it work for us. Left to nature you'd be dead. Your guts would be fried inside the electric perimeter. The doctor's taken the van with him. You run at that forcefield again, you won't survive. We can't pick you up and set you right again. You understand that, Bender? You're going to stay easy for a while? You're not going to run?

- Are you going to stop breathing? I ask him – It's dusty out there. You don't want dust in your lungs. You'd better stop breathing.

- Are you OK, Bender? Are you OK in the head? The doctor said you'd be OK.

- I'm a runner. Don't tell me not to run, Mal. I've got to run.

I either say those words or think em as I drift back into sleep.

2.02

Karen sits on the edge of my bed. Her weight makes me roll toward her.

- How are you feeling? she asks

I look up at her. She's got bags under her eyes.

- Mom used to come in to my bedroom in the mornings, I say. I don't say ex-Mom. Names are made for shortening – She pulled on my nipples. Wanted to give me big tits. She wanted me to be a girl. Did you know that?

- I'm not Mom, Karen says.

- It's a shitline, all that stuff about me being pregnant. It's a lie. You do know that, don't you?

- You're Bender. You're my twin. I'm the girl, you're the boy. It doesn't matter what they've done to you. It doesn't change that.

- You believe em. You believe the lie. You think I've got a girl growing inside of me.

- There's a lab attached to the house. It's filled with cages and pens. A rat's in one of the cages. A pig's in a pen. There's a sheep too. I've only examined the rat so far. It's male. It's pregnant. They've left me notes. I'm meant to slice into the creature, deliver the baby female rat, then seal the father up again. It's practice, they say. With any luck the female offspring will bear females of their own. If you've got a baby in there we'll get her out. We'll get her out and life will go on. We've got a solar computer in the house. My surgical program for ectopic births is loaded into it. I've just practiced. I'll keep on practicing. I'm getting past step three every time. The baby lives. The parent lives. No problem.

- It's sick. You're as sick as Mom. You'd slice anything open to find a baby inside. That's antique, Karen. That's some primeval instinct playing itself out inside you. Forget it. Boys are born instead of girls. Fact. Why change it? It's great. Get used to it. You know what it means? It means there's no second chance. Parents can't have kids to live their lives for em. This life is it. It ends here. We've got to live it for ourselves.

- For each other, Karen said.

- You think this is Eden? It's just one more extension of Cromozone. They've installed us in a breeding program.

- The doctor calls it Project Naamah. Naamah was the wife of Noah.

Some things you can take lying down. Some things you have to sit up for.

I sit up.

- He told you that? I ask her.

- He confirmed it. My ectopic birthing program has that same title for its master file. Project Naamah. Call it that. Call this Eden. Call it the Ark. Call it what you like it's a big deal, Bender. We're it. You're carrying one possible future of the whole human race.

She stares at me. It's enough having a sister that looks like a mirror. This is worse. Fuck knows how she does it, her eyes are just eyes, just that average crazy complex of a cosmic journey stuffed into a pupil that everybody has. Maybe the trick's in the whites that surround it, maybe the whites are whirling and revolving to suck me in, maybe that's where the intensity lies. It's some blend of compassion and intelligence. She means well but those looks are killers. They break me up.

- It's your baby inside you, she steams on – Some other geek's sperm and some weird wannabe Mom's egg but it's in you so it's yours. Your daughter's going to come out of your body. She'll have babies. Maybe daughters. That's not some parasite you're carrying, Bender. It's the future. The whole future of the world is going to trace itself back to you.

I shake my head. I close my eyes. I open em again. She's still staring. I get out of bed. I see it shocks her. It's not that I'm naked though I am. She's used to seeing me naked. She's used to stitching up my wound and flipping her anthead view to a distant perspective so she can take in my whole body. My body's something she takes apart and puts together again. I'm the virtual naked being that lays on a slab while she flashes her fiberoptics around. Laying on a bed is close to how I should be. She can whisk out her fiberoptics and cope with that. Walking round the room is playing it all wrong. It's virtual reality run amok.

- You should rest, she tells me – That's what the doctor said. He said you should rest.

My slinksuit's folded on a wooden chair at the end of the bed. I pick it up and let it hang like shed skin, then start climbing inside it.

- The doctor says rest, I tell her – Then I'll run. Run till I drop.

I fit my arms inside the sleeves of the slinksuit then slip the skypumps onto my feet.

- Whatever, Karen says – You've got to do whatever you want. That's part of the deal. They didn't choose you for your perfect body. Your body's not that hot. They chose you because you're you. They had a choice of anyone in the world and they've gone for Bender. You've got an electrical implant in your brain. The doctor explained it to me. They can emit a signal to paralyze you. They've done it before, he tells me, when you were trying to cut open your own head. Is that right?

It's not right and it's not wrong. It's part of a story. Who knows what the fuck to believe. I stay quiet.

- They knew you were going to run through their electric curtain. They could have stopped you in your tracks. They always can. They can go as far with you as they want. They can keep you numb on drains and dripfeeds and grow baby after baby in your abdominal cavity till your body gives out. There's so much they could do with you, Bender. And they don't. Ever wondered why?

She waits for an answer but not for long. Not even for a second. She's got her own answer so doesn't need mine. She heads to the door and opens it. A smell comes in. Lots of smells, a package of smells, but wrapped in the smell of fried onion.

- We've cooked dinner. We'll talk at table.

She walks out. It's an old trick of hers. She walks out of a room so fast she leaves a wake, a wake that sucks you into it.

The room I'm in is as simple as rooms get. Logs for ceiling, logs for walls, two single beds, two wooden chairs, no lights but one small window. The view takes in trees. A few light green leaves hang on the branches.

I follow Karen out of the room, but only because she's gone first.

I was going in any case.

 

The food smell comes from the left, along a narrow corridor.

I cross the corridor and open a door into a room like the one I've left. It's got the same ceiling, walls, chairs and beds. The same window with what looks like an identical view. One of the beds has been slept in. I smell the pillow, pull back the sheet, then go back to the second bed in the room where I woke and do the same. Smells are mixed on the pillow but I see no stains, find no pubes.

- We all slept in here, Karen says. She's come back to find me. She could always move around a house like hot breath. She didn't need skypumps to float to where she wants without you hearing her. Now she's got em she's going one better. She's ghosting into my thoughts without a sound – We took it in turns to sleep with you. One in this other little bed, one with you.

She knows what I'm thinking. I may as well say it.

- Have you fucked yet? You and Malik?

- Get real, Bender. I'm your sister. Don't warp me. I'm not you. Don't mix me up. You've fucked. You and him. Not him and me. Do you remember what real is?

She stares at me. I stare back. Then the stare breaks. I hold out my arms and she walks into em.

- This is fucked, I say – All fucked.

Her shoulders shake a little like she's crying. We hold on, quiet, then she presses home a gentle hug and steps back. The tears are drying on her face. She tries a smile.

- We'll get through, she says.

 

The house is a log cabin. The kitchen's made of the same barked wood as the bedrooms. I call it a kitchen coz I walked toward its smell of food but it's just a big room. The house has two bedrooms and this room. Two shutters are drawn back from a hole in the back wall. The food smell is coming in through that hole, sliding out from under a lid that rattles on top of a single pot. The pot sits on a rack above a wood fire. The smoke from the fire goes straight up into the air.

- That's our new stove, Malik says –We're in a hi-tech, low-tech world. That stove's the low. They've left us a supply of matches. Over here's the high.

The room's got two tables. One is a dining table in the middle of the room. The other is smaller and set against a side wall, away from the window's light. It's more like a desk. Malik shows it off. A vidscreen hangs on the wall above the desk, and the desk's surface is filled with chrome. Chrome racks, speakers, a keyboard and computer.

- It's solar powered, Malik explains – A solar computer. The panels are fixed to the outside wall. It's the best, Bender. This machine could run whole nations and still sell off spare capacity, but you know what it gets to run? Us. That's it. It's dedicated to us. You see this little bank of chrome? It's a library. Take the British Library, shrink it, streamline and update it, make it user-friendly, and it comes down to this. It's got no transmitter and no receiver. What the old world knows is already here. Anything new that we learn, we get to keep. This machine is God. We want to know something, it has to tell us. And when God sucks, when we don't want the answers, when we know better than God, we can tell him to shut the fuck up. It's our pet house-God, Bender. We turn him on, we turn him off.

Malik presses his thumb on a button on the keyboard. The screen on the wall goes blank.

- Who was that? Karen asks.

- Who?

- On the vidscreen. That morphfile. It looked like a kid but kept changing. I thought I knew him. Then I didn't. Who was it?

- You want to see? Malik asks.

A face forms across the vidscreen, eyes first. They're the eyes of a baby. They start blue, but as the face morphs the eyes change. The baby becomes an infant and the eyes turn brown. I focus on the eyes and I could be looking at Malik. The face could be his too, him when he was young. I see traces of his cheekbones, and olive tones to the skin. But the cheekbones aren't as high as Malik's, the skin isn't as dark as his. The face is too long. It's more like mine. This young boy's nose isn't straight like Malik's. It bumps a little at the end like mine.

- What have you been doing? Karen asks.

Malik smiles, a happy smile that flashes teeth.

- You know that rap of Bender's? he says – The future's now, now's all there is, all of that shit. Well that picture's it. It's the future. The future's us. It's a picture of you, of me, of Karen.

- Are you on qual? I ask him.

- We've got no qual. We're set to be self-sufficient. There's a patch of shrooms out back though. I wanted to stick em in the soup but Karen said no. She wants to get to know me sane first, so she recognizes crazy when it happens.

I go closer and stare at the vidscreen.

- Is this your kid? I ask, and the answer's obvious. The machine's running a DNA spawn program. These things are a feature of girlchat, girls rubbing their DNA up against the DNA of a celebrity mate and drooling over the results. I never thought I'd catch Malik at the game.

- Sex is random. The results aren't accurate. Tweak this DNA program and I come up with a different screenkid each time. Some look more like you, some look more like me, but they all look like each other. That picture's not our boy. It's like our boy

- Our boy?

- Karen's and mine, but with the twin thing you and Karen are the same so it's ours.

- Get a brainwipe, Malik, Karen says. She lifts the pot onto bricks in the middle of the table and slops soup into three blue bowls – You want a baby you might as well keep fucking Steven. I deliver babies. I don't do em.

– She needs time, Malik says, and pulls a chair up to the table – She had a bad role model with your Mom and Dad. She's not used to playing happy families. Look at this! Veggie soup with tin beans and too much salt. It's crap but it's our crap.

The empty bean tin is in the middle of the table. It's filled with water, and a flower full of red petals sits in it. I pick it up and hold the flower while I pour half the water into my soup.

- You've not tasted it, Karen says.

I stir it up and test it with my finger. It's cool enough. I pick up the bowl and drink in gulps from its edge.

- So? Karen asks.

- It tastes like piss. Great. Thanks. Great piss. Just what I needed.

I take hold of the flower, bite off its head, chew it round my mouth till it's pulp, then swallow it down with the rest of the flower water. I don't do domestic. I'm wild. I want em to see I'm wild.

- Great flower too. Thanks.

The image on the vidscreen keeps changing. A label at the top says it's seventeen years old. A face stares out. It's not me, it's not Malik, it's not Karen. It's its own thing. It doesn't smile.

- Is that kid of yours into girls? I ask Malik - Does he grow up to fuck the girl that's leeched on to my stomach? Do their kids grow up to breed more of themselves? Is that the future of the human race, fucking and breeding and fucking and breeding?

- Sounds good to me, Malik says – What's up with you? Why so moody? It must be the hormones talking.

- What hormones?

- They pumped you full of em in your qual rations, so the pregnancy would take hold. Now the embryo inside you has taken over, it creates all the hormones it needs to grow. That's bound to affect you

- Shitline. There's no embryo. No hormones.

- We fucked. You got pregnant. It happens all the time.

- Not to boys. Not to men.

- Boy, girl, man, woman, get modern, Bender. You're into difference all the time. We're all just people.