Ectopia (5 page)

0.08

7.17am

Spent the night on qual.

The usual effects.

I've been watching Paul a while, blue light fizzing from his head. My heart opened toward the little freak. Sleep flutters his lips, and now I'm in the downing. The sun beats at the window to start another heatblast day. Love will never touch Paul. It'll burn up in his atmosphere.

On qual you don't love for return. You love for love's sake. That's the difference between qual and non-qual.

A frenzy of dots, all different colors, like a cosmos of stars, filled the room in the night. I watched em shift in and out of shapes. Then they licked into flames, blue with orange flashes. People ran through em. Not silhouettes coz it was all 3D, these were more like ghosts waiting for substance. They ran through the flames and I watched them ignite. Their screams were notes of beautiful music.

It'll happen. Not long now. The day's so close I can almost smell it. The fire that's coming will end my world.

 

8.40pm

The downing ended. I got of sick of watching Paul sleep. I crossed the room, grabbed hold of his pudgy white shoulder, and shook him awake.

- You've had Jan Stovok's genebank card too long, I told him – The undertow needs feedback. We're getting bored with waiting. Give em something back or they'll chop you in.

The freak blinked up at me and took notice. I was talking computers. It's the one thing that gets him going. He put on his shorts, wandered downstairs, and plugged himself in. He was ready for us by noon. Teensquad got cancelled so I fetched him. We convened as undertow and sat in a circle in the dust of a cleared house with Paul at the center. He spouted, we listened.

- I'll talk frank, he starts off – I'm not one of you, never will be, never want to be. You all get by on state qual handouts. You think it makes you elite.

- Qual gives hope, Runt says. Sandyhaired Runt, he's our teensquad's smallest and quickest. He parrots statesquad slogans like dogma. We listen
to him when we're starting to doubt.

- Qual is medicine, Paul tells us – You get it on prescription coz we know you're sick.

Paul's not one for false endearments. The group stirs. They don't have to put up with shit like that. They'll silence him. They'll slice his tongue first then cut up the rest of his body while he squirms.

- Thanks for this, he says, and tosses Jan Stovok's card onto the ground – I used it to key myself in with full access. Stovok worked homebase. So long as his brain turns up onscreen every day his body won't be missed. I've routed myself through his terminal. I am Stovok's brain.

Malik flicks his knife.

- Brains don't work without a body, he says.

- Stovok was good, Paul goes on - His brain's got lots of responsibilities. One of em is assembling statesquad's hitlist every day. Now I'm keyed in as Stovok's brain, the fun of that hitlist falls to me. It's finalized at noon. You're all on tomorrow's list. You'll be collected and no doubt eliminated by 2 tomorrow unless I get back to revise it. It's the cull for you lot.

Paul's the image of Dad now I look at him. The blond hair's gone grey in Dad but it sticks out in the same places. They've both got the same high cheeks, long jaw and sunken eyes. Dad wears retro steel specs, Paul's had laser correction, but the pupils have the same intense blue-green bulge. Paul's as close to my looks as an alien.

- So you'd best listen and let me walk, Paul adds – Tomorrow's list won't change till I find good reason to change it. Stovok took qual.

- You know that? Malik asks, and flashes a look at me.

- It's your fault that I know it, Malik, Paul tells him - Don't blame Steven. For prime examiner of your teensquad you're far too free with texting. I've read every message you've sent these past weeks. Stovok took one dose of qual. His first and his last. His eyes would have given him away on his next sign-on. He's been eliminating qual squads one by one. You think you rise to 28
th
in the league just by merit blips? Squads above and below you are gone. Wiped out. I guess Stovok stepped from his screen to take a look from the inside for once. He wanted to be a fucking empath, just like Steven. Guess it got to him. One qual trip like that, you're fused. Individuality's gone. Plug yourself back into the mainframe, you carry the qual virus with you. You caught him on a downing. You gave him the only way out he had. The next day's hitlist for statesquad was programmed. You were it. All of you. Jan Stovok wasn't going alone. He was taking his new qual buddies with him.

- But we're here, Runt says.

- I made it. Got through with twenty minutes to spare. Won you a reprieve. That's the best I can do without a reason. Names on that list get bedded deeper in the system than I can reach. I can't pull qualheads off it without good cause. I've checked your gene data. Stovok was right. You're worthless. The future needs nothing from you. You should all be zeroed. Any ideas? Any thoughts on how to save yourselves?

Undertow once had an idea that Paul was bright. We gave him the card so he could work wonders for us. I watch that old idea start to shift. Thanks for the warning, the shift says. Since you've sent death coming you can show us the way. You can die. Let's slice the freak and split. Let's go outlaw.

Give a thought like that one more minute to develop, and it expresses itself. Paul will get to watch his tongue flap on the ground.

- The gene data, I say – You have access to our gene data. So change it.

Malik, the other part of mainbrain, catches on.

- You can do that? he asks.

- Ask empath here, Paul says.

I read his eyes.

- He can do it, I say – But he's got terms.

- He lives, Malik says, fingering his knife - That's the deal. He changes our data, we don't slice him.

- A little gratitude, Paul suggests - You gave me the card. You want something out of it for yourselves? Here's what you're getting. You're getting your lives. When you sign on at your terminal, when the monitor scans you, your location won't be beamed straight to statesquad's elimination troop. Your food rations, your qual rations, they'll keep on coming. OK, I agree, your lives aren't worth much but they're all I've got to give. I'm giving you your lives. Be thankful for small mercies.

- How do we know? Malik asks - You do nothing, then we're all taken. What have you got to lose?

- I'm doing you a favor. A favor this big deserves one in return. You owe me one. That's all I've got to lose. The big favor you all owe me some day.

He walks away. No-one stops him. We each take a half dose of qual.

Not enough for a high.

Just enough to ease the urge to slice the freak.

 

10.38pm

Paul's reading this. (Fuck you Paul!)

He says wherever I hide it he'll find it. I won't hide this bit.

This is the flaw in Paul. He can't just know stuff. He has to tell you what stuff he knows.

It's a tactic, he says. Tell the enemy their own secrets and they have to start again. Their capacity's limited. Keep on doing it, keep on telling em their own secrets, and the enemy runs out of ideas.
Soon they're running on empty. You're cruising where you want, no problem.

I don't get him. I don't get YOU Paul! You're so bright yet you're so dim. You're a cold star. YOUR ideas aren't worth a toss. OUR ideas keep you alive. Take em away and you're dead.

For all your ideas, one idea saved you today. My idea. The idea to keep you alive to change the genebank data. That idea.

We're the force in the world, Paul. Don't prig yourself. Ideas don't stay brilliant when your brain pulps the dirt.

 

0.09

I'm speaking this to card and that's how it stays. No downloads to screen from now on. Paul's in bed across the room, his eyes closed like he's sleeping, listening. This is the big fuck you, Paul. No text, Paul. Just voiceprints on card. I'm making records, Paul. The record of our lives. A record you'll never break into. A record you'll never change.

This is a favor, little bro. You flash round the console till everything's hacked, nothing's secret, nothing's secure. This is a taste of how the rest of us live. Your life's stored away somewhere. Your life as I tell it. On card. Here in my pocket. You've no access. No control.

Sweat it, Paul.

Sweat it.

 

The wooden hatch that opens onto the attic's gone. Karen's door's open. She sees me standing on the landing, looking up, and calls me in.

- Is that creepy or what? she asks.

We stand at the window. Dad's outside twenty feet away, at the same height as us. He's finished his scaffold by the gate and built a box on top of it. Four thin posts at its corners hold the hatch door over his head for shade. He's holding binoculars to his face and looking down the street.

- You see I've moved my bed?

Karen likes to lie in bed and look up at the sky. Now the bed's set along the outer wall, so her feet are under the window.

- I opened my eyes this morning and there's Dad, staring back, perving at me through his binos. What do you reckon, Steven? Is this as good as it gets? A girl gets to lie in bed and be her father's jerkoff material?

- Dad's just sick, I tell her.

- You're sick. Mom's sick. Paul's sick. The whole fucking planet's sick. Sick's not so special. Dad's beyond sick. He's to sick what malaria is to a mosquito. Sick's just his vector. He uses it to get around, then lays his poison inside you. He's a one-man plague. A fly that spews on you before chewing you up. A viral overload. He comes upstairs to the bathroom, his breath slinks under the door and feels me up. I can't breathe when he's near. He snatches all the air and makes it foul, leaves me choking. See this?

She lifts her pillow. A paper knife is under it, with a thin brass blade and a serpent's head made of ebony for a handle.

- It's Dad's. Some relic. I got it from his desk. If he ever comes in and lays a finger on me, it's going through his heart.

I don't know what to say. You should get out more? Go make yourself some friends? Find yourself something to do? None of those old things work anymore.

- Why wait? I say – Knife him if you want to. Forget about his heart. Go for his throat. How good's the knife? You want me to sharpen it for you?

- Where's that get me?

-
Y
ou're studying medicine. You've got to get beyond the computer course some day. Dad can be your first cadaver. He's got those fridges in the cellar. We'll turn em on, make the place down there into a mortuary. Take out his eyes first. We'll pop em on stalks and poke em at the screen for his biofeedback time. That way his supplies keep coming while you cut up his body. See that trench?

I nod outside. A spade's leaning against a fence near where a short line of Dad's latest defense project is dug into the earth. He means the trench to spread right round the garden, but the few feet he's dug are already big enough to serve our plans.

- Bit by bit, as you grow tired of him, as his lungs and his kidneys and his heart and his balls start to rot, we'll bury him out there. Dad thinks he's digging a trench? He's digging his own grave.

We laugh.

Not enough for him to hear.

He spins round though. Adjusts his binos so he's staring straight into our faces. Lowers em so we see his eyes.

It's like a chill fills the room. We both shiver.

- Fucking Dad, Karen says.

She scuttles into the corner of the bed where cushions are stacked high, pulls in her knees and hugs em.

She'll be back in the bathroom soon. She'll turn on the spigot till the water sputters brown, then sit in the inch of it in the bottom of the tub and scrub and scrub herself. Dad's stare does that. He strips you naked then ferrets through the guts and bones. It soils you, having a man like that look you over.

I look around her room. It's good what she's done. No chair, just these cushions on the bed. No furniture, just clothes hung on lines of string stretched along one wall. She's taken paints to the other clear wall and made a picture of it. Blue sky with white clouds is at the back, and a pale orange sun with yellow rays. Then come a series of low hills, green all the way up. In front of em are flowers, tiny at the back but the ones at the front as tall as me. You have to look through em, like looking out through a forest. One tree stands on the left, another on the right. Their leaves are different shapes but their branches join to frame the whole picture in an arch, and in the middle the leaves are mixed.

Karen's dreams aren't like this. Her dreams aren't soft landscapes of rivers and sunshine and green hills. Her dreams are nightmares. I hear her tossing and moaning in the night. She's painted a picture of the dream she wants to have.

- It won't be long, I tell her – You'll get away.

She looks at me. She's Dad's daughter alright. Her looks can burn as much as his do.

- How? she asks – Paul's way? My IQ goes so strato they take me in for their breeding program?

- It's one way. Cut down on the girlchat, plug in for more stat sessions, your scores would shoot up.

- Like you? Paul's checked your stats record. You were stellar. Then you fell. A researcher's been assigned to your apathy count, he tells me. They're about to brand you a niyo. Someone whose not giving a fuck is so total it's dangerous. You know that?

It's news to me.

- What's to believe in? I ask her – We're all dying out. If now's no good, fuck the future.

- Paul said you were plotting. Flames and chaos and the end, he said. He read it in your journal.

- Not plotting. I just see it. See it coming.

Karen's holds her stare.

- If this big moment comes don't you dare leave me behind, she says – You do that and I'll get you. I swear I'll come and I'll get you. That's when you'll know the end has really come.

 

Paul comes off the motherboard for us to sign in. It's Family Biofeedback time. First though he makes me look at the screen. It shows a page of data.

- I don't do data, I tell him.

- It's you, he answers – This is your genemap.

- You've changed the data?

- No need. So far as I can see, you're near perfect. I've just scanned the essentials. Disease immunity, right handedness, clear color perception, they're all here.

- The others? The rest of the undertow? You've altered their genemaps?

- Don't know that I can. Don't know that I want to.

- So I'm saved? Is that what you're saying? The others are still on the statesquad list for today?

- You think I still get around on that dead guy's card? He signed in at 2pm daily. How am I going to eyeball my way onto his system? The moment the screen doesn't flash his eyes on his biofeedback appointment, the system goes alert. I'd be locoed in an instant. System shutdown and statesquad at the gate.

- So there's no hitlist?

- Today? Who knows. I've no access. The morning I had access, you were on that day's list. It went by teensquad so I saved you all. Put another teensquad in your place.

- Why?

- The truth? Ignorance. I don't know what happens after statesquad swoops. Are you eliminated? Put into service? Your own gene data's so good maybe they just harvest you in some way. One thing I know. No-one who's chosen for the breeding program has a sibling who's disappeared. My scores are good. Family data might not boost me much, but it doesn't drag me down. I'm going to make it. I'm about to make it. So long as your disappearance doesn't impact my score.

- So it's your self-preservation that keeps me alive?

- You're an empath. You think you know about people and you don't even know the golden rule of politics.

- Which is?

- Self-preservation.

 

Karen hooks the repospecs behind her ears, sets em on the bridge of her nose, and stares dry-eyed at the screen. As statesquad's eagle symbol swells to fill the screen you're supposed to stare into its eyes, but that's just a control thing. Stare at the wall and the repospecs would still go about their business, reaping info from your pupils and sucking it back through the wires.

Karen turns her body away even while her head is still. She ha
tes being catalogued.

Mom's eyes stream tears when her turn comes. She appreciates attention even from a machine. The eagle blinks slowly to show her session's over and she wipes the tears from her cheeks with the flesh of her fingers.

Dad comes in from his lookout post, takes off his own specs to make room for the repo ones, glares the necessary second after login, and paces out again.

My turn.

The screen flashes goggles-alert on login. I put the goggles on instead of the specs and try and think blank while the machine strobes me. The pulses feel a bit like qual, white light that collects in my head till it's all there is.

Paul snaps the goggles from my head as the signal fades.

- Great, he says – I've got a headfuck for a brother. So warped he registers for mindwipe.

He puts on the visor and reconnects. His program scrolls across the screen and his pupils dilate. He's pushing up his score. Thinks he's earning his way out of here. He'll stay logged on till we drag him off to feed him.

I get the qual, but Paul's the one who's hooked.

 

Air crosses the landing. I feel it on my skin. I get up to check it out.

Karen's door's open. Her window's open too, and she's standing in front of it. Her back's to me and she's looking out.

- It's Dad and me, she explains - We're psyching each other.

It's more than just Dad and her. I come up behind her and look out. The undertow's on the far side of the street. They're just standing, one line of em, and looking up.

They're studying Karen.

It's the best they've ever seen her.

She does nothing special, just stands there in her lilac halter and silver shorts, but her top holds the weight of her breasts and her arms are so white they're naked. I get to see her as the others do, just for this moment. We run so much, stripped down in the sun, the flesh we get to see is brown. White flesh like this is when shorts are hooked down. It's a come-on.

She's not posing. She's just standing, naked white arms and hands by her side. She's not even looking at the gang.

Her stare is fixed on Dad.

He's on lookout. His head turns through half degrees, like a surveillance camera. He's scanning the line, taking in every detail of every boy.

I know his game. He'll play em back, every image he's trapped in this sunlight, as he works the wood and metal in the cellar. He calls it picturing the enemy.

His head continues its sweep. He stops when he connects with Karen's stare.

She does well to keep standing. Dad's stares are killers. She holds the stare till he breaks it. Dad climbs down the ladder, then Karen turns her attention to the undertow.

Each of em shifts. I watch em shuffle and try to stand taller.

We hear Dad coming. He slams the front door and runs up the stairs. I step to one side but Karen doesn't move. Dad crosses the room in two strides. Taking hold of her right shoulder he shoves.

Karen doesn't fall. She springs her legs somehow, and leaps. Her feet land on her bed. The cushions muffle the blow of her body against the wall.

Dad points at the door.

- Out! he says to me – Carry a message to that scum of yours. Tell em next time they line up for me, I'll pick em off one by one.

- Steven stays, Karen says – No-one lays a hand on me, Dad. No-one. Steven stays till you're out my door. I'm not getting locked in with a perv.

Dad stops still. He's not good with words till he's had a chance to build up steam. Now Karen's gone for the insult he's out of his depth. He'll have to get physical.

Karen's crouched near the end of her bed. The fingers of her right hand are under her pillow. I know what's there.

- Mom! I yell.

A yell as loud as that, Mom's on her way.

- You're right, I tell Dad – Karen's out of control. Leave her be. Mom'll sort her. I'll go, Dad. I'll follow you downstairs. I'll clear the street like you want. I'll tell em what you said.

Mom was in her room. Coming up the stairs she'd have been ten minutes. Coming from her room she just had to roll off the bed and follow the momentum. She's squeezing through the door as I finish speaking.

- Who wants me? she asks.

I point to Karen. Dad has to move to one side to give Mom a direct path.

- My baby? Mom says. She holds out her arms and heads for Karen's bed.

The room's crowded.

Dad leaves. I follow and shut the door. Dad pauses at the top of the stairs.

- That scum? he says – Tell em nothing. I don't need you running messages for me. Run with scum and you fall with scum. Is that clear, Steven?

He takes off his specs. They magnify his eyes so as he takes em off his eyes go smaller but the effect is worse without em. Like that tunnel you see through the wrong end of binos. You get to glimpse inside him, and see through to the dark bubbles of his thoughts.