Sequela (3 page)

'Mum,
I
work in a lab – I'm a lab person.'

It's not that calling someone a lab person was particularly offensive. She could have been calling them anything – it was the way she said it. Kester had heard her use it with all sorts of job titles, from sales attendant to managing director, and she could make all of them sound like they were just playing at work. He could imagine the look on her face, as if she had tasted them and found them sour.

'Mum, some of those lab people are eminent scientists – far better than me!'

Kester was aware of a few passersby looking at him. He thought initially that their attention had been drawn by his tone, but then he noticed that before each person looked at his face, their eyes were darting up and down his body, automatically scanning for logos and ads, and failing to find them.

'Hm. We'll see about that, when you've got a top floor office in the tallest building in the City and they're still plugging away in the old world.' She flitted onto her favourite subject. 'How is Delilah?'

'I keep telling you, Mum, it's Dee now. She hates Delilah.'

'Well, it's the name her father gave her and Lord knows that man knew what was what.'

Kester recalled his mother's admiration for their neighbours' memorabilia collection and the mortification it caused Dee. How her father's judgement had any bearing on whether Delilah liked her name or not was a mystery to Kester.

'Delilah will keep you on the straight and narrow. She's good for you, you know.'

'Mum, how many times, she's just a friend.' Kester emerged from the other side of the Bloom to a fleeting dry spell.

'Can't friends be good for one another?'

'Yes, I suppose so.'

'So, what will you be doing in this new job?'

Kester toyed with the idea of trying to explain to his mother what it was he was going to do and then dismissed it.

'It's pretty much the same as I do now, Mum.'

'Oh I see, good…that's good, isn't it?'

'Yes, Mum.' Kester knew she had never got farther than the title of his thesis, but it touched him that she wanted to understand.

'Yes, pretty much the same but with better money, better perks, better location, better everything really.'

'Better lab people?'

'Better colleagues?' Kester hummed and hawed. 'That remains to be seen.'

'I'm so proud of you Kester! Give my love to Delilah. Bye, darling.'

The phone call ended abruptly, as they always did. His mother had got what she wanted from the conversation, so that was the end of it. It irked him sometimes, but not today.

Kester's mind wandered, blurring time as he weaved through the streets to the Blackfriars City checkpoint. This morning, walking through the City towards V, he had had a curious shrinking feeling as the buildings around him increased in height almost exponentially. Now it was he who grew as the City fell away, becoming larger than himself, dwarfing the buildings around him.

The checkpoint had been fashioned from an old archway, rescued in pieces from the rubble after the riots in the early part of the Century. It was one of the largest of the City boundary checkpoints, a classic example of the fusion of old and new, stone and glass, that dominated the aesthetics of the City and a neat reminder of why the City had been securitised in the first place. Kester glanced up as he passed under the archway and caught sight of a plaque showing a list of dates: 1840 – the building of the original archway; 2017 – the year it was burned down; 2047 – the year the permanent checkpoint was erected. He passed through the wide glass doors. They would close automatically if there were ever a break in the stream of pedestrians.

Up ahead, there was a scream. There was a temporary hush and everyone looked towards the source – a man trapped in the barriers.

'I've had a haircut!' screamed the man, before launching into a tirade about securitisation.

He gripped the top of the barrier, holding himself up as his legs failed, their muscles disabled by an invisible NTS beam, triggered when the bioscanner failed to recognise him. Two guards, holding Bruzless batons, marched through the crowd to the barriers and dragged the offender to a door at the side of the hall. There was a thick wave of snuffing and humfing and the commuters continued on through the barriers.

Kester readied his Book as he approached the barriers, paranoid that it wouldn't be read. A brief tone sounded between his biometrics being scanned and the barriers registering the pass on his Book, but the two were matched in a split second and Kester passed through without incident as he always did.

Out of the City, Kester headed down to the river and back west towards the Institute. Under Blackfriars Bridge the fukpunk he had seen earlier was in a deep sleep, crouched, his knees drawn up in front of him, his coloured clothes and hair making him look like a dejected bird, a piece of totem pole sawn off and abandoned.

At the edge of the underpass a few more fukpunks were gathered, a different gang, either more careful or more experienced in their narcotics dosage. Two of the five were bare-chested, showing rashes creeping up from their low waistbands. They looked like twins, had the same side-ways Mohican and bandaged fingertips. The other three were dressed variously in studs and leather with strategically placed PVC windows. They must be hardcore – the viruses weren't even mods, just plain STVs and street mutes that had been going round for donkeys'. Kester shuddered as he noticed a green smear on the window of one boy's transparent crotch-piece. He just didn't get it. They were passing round a bottle of Quicksilver. No wonder. The street drugs they used as painkillers were generations behind those the City wearers used. He looked away as he passed them.

'Fucking nouveau-pox!' one of them shouted.

Kester jumped and took a small skip out of his path as another spat at him.

'What?' he replied involuntarily, hurrying on.

'Where's your pansy bracelet?'

Puzzled, Kester looked down at himself and noticed he was still wearing his V visitor pass.   

'Right,' he said, unclipping it and sticking it in his pocket. They'd never do anything to him, but better to walk the rest of the way back in peace.

-o-

Alexis Farrell darkened the glass partition between her office and the rest of the floor.

You'll feel queasy
,
Doctor Lowe had warned her.

The room was still set up for interview, the desk still in disarray. She walked unsteadily across the floor to the side wall where a concealed door led to her apartment. It sensed her approach and slid back to allow her through. She kept on walking across the wide, glass-fronted room, closing her arms around her body and squeezing her triceps in her sweaty palms.

The light faded up in the wet-room. Farrell flicked a manual switch by the large mirror above her dressing counter. An arch of old-style light bulbs spluttered into life around the edge of the mirror, creating little white windows in the pupils of her eyes. She looked pale. Did she look pale? She put a hand up to the soft surface of her image and watched the small pressure rainbows pulse at her fingertips. Whatever the virus, this happened – the sudden sideways push of anxiety leaving her dissociated, nauseous. It would pass, leaving the real symptoms behind; she knew that, but she couldn't switch off the fear. She automatically pinched the band around her wrist, releasing a pain-relieving shot, though Kester had assured her she wouldn't need it.

At least this time she knew what was happening to her. Alexis clung to this thought and forced herself to remember.

The virus infects only the cells in the border area between your irises and the whites of your eyes – it can't unlock the neighbouring cells, so it's self-limiting.

 
Alexis had concealed her horror. Her eyes?

In any case I've programmed in a forced rapid shift which means that any tertiary viruses revert fully to the inert form in which they are unable to reproduce. It's also very stable which means the chances of it throwing up a mutation that can spread further are beyond negligible.

She leaned in to the mirror. Her eyes felt different. Did her eyes feel different? She could feel the muscle movements as her focus shifted, could see her pupils contract as she moved closer to the lights.

You'll only need the uploads if you want to reverse or arrest the effect, or if you don't wish to remain infectious; no more cells will be infected or damaged once the effect has presented. And I only work with tissues that can regenerate fully to their pre-infected state so there's no fallout and no scarring. You may experience a blurring of your vision, but it will pass. It's just your irises recalibrating their muscular movement to account for the altered cells – the body's pretty clever like that.

Was her vision blurred? When would it blur? He hadn't said. She breathed in for the count of four, out for nine, in for four, out for nine, willing herself to calm down.

You'll notice bloodspots first, just around your irises. The virus needs to destroy some cells to reproduce – it uses these first cells as factories, which burst, releasing more viruses into your system, but like I said, after three rounds, when the viruses reach their inert form, all they do is enter the cell, express the genes we've programmed them to and remain there. It's a small area and a limited population of viruses so there won't be much bleeding. The effect will wear off gradually as your cells regenerate. The bloodspots will quickly be disguised by the effect in most people and will probably be gone within a day or two.

Alexis looked up at her eyes again. The first bloodspots were appearing in a ring around her irises.

'Oh my god.' She shook her head.

This is really a small-scale demonstration of my approach – once the virus gets stuck in, it will do its work very quickly. I just think that viral displays…well they should be attractive, you know, like the displays of birds.

Sleep was what she needed. Sleep, the only thing that could shut down her anxiety and reset her body to its default. She lay flat on her hard mattress and tapped her Book to black out the windows. It could have been her first time; the corrosive whole-head scent of freshly chlorined public toilets gushed into Farrell's mind, taking her back:

Cold porcelain on the heels of her hands, the burn of a rash rising on her thighs and forearms, a deep itch. In the mirror, Gaunt's reflection behind hers, amused; his Sabotage aftershave, scent of the '70s, flowing out of his sleeve and up over her shoulders, warm and sickening against the rough background of chlorine; his hand steady between her shoulder blades, its heat and weight bleeding through her suit jacket, building like that of an iron left sitting at a child's scream. She had let loose at him.

'Whose fucking idiot idea was all this? This is miserable. Getting yourself on the proof pages is fun – screwing on a helipad, seducing an idiot fatcat – that's fun – this is fucking miserable. Some bored alpha-cock thinks it's a good idea to show you he's been screwing by cracking his nanoscreen like a fukpunk and cutting the crotch out of his Armani and a bunch of other alpha-cocks are impressed by his spotted dick flapping in the wind.'

An acid upward trickle in her gullet; a dry-retch.

'And all because some geek hacker teen fuckwit wants to prove to his mates he's had sex.
'

Gaunt had laughed and rubbed her back. 'Well you bought into sex is success, Alexis, just like the rest of us, just like that fine young geek. Why would you be screwing fatcats on helipads otherwise?'

 Her throat opening like a forced valve; the splatter of half-digested coleslaw.

Alexis shook her head to clear the memory and employed her breathing again.

Even the enforced night of the black-out couldn't convince her body to sleep. She stroked her forehead, set the bed to vibrate, counted. She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids and watched as geometric patterns pulsed and churned in the red darkness. Each time she checked the clock, only a few minutes had passed. It was hours since the blood-spots had appeared. In her mind they had grown, they had taken over her eyeballs, she was weeping blood.

Eventually, she gave up trying to distract herself, raised the lighting and walked quickly back to the bathroom. As she approached, she could see that something had changed. Her eyes looked dark from a distance. Her heart rattled. It was blood.