A Calculated Life (15 page)

The slated main roof was set back from the building’s perimeter and Jayna took short, deliberate steps along the access path to an open area at the western end of the building. The strength of the breeze surprised her. She sat down cross-legged and, closing her eyes, she allowed her hair to blow unchecked. It licked and whipped her face but she didn’t care. The city hummed and honked below her.

Late afternoon had softened into early evening when a man’s voice reached her from below. She knelt up, peered over the parapet, and saw a lorry being reversed into the storage yard opposite the rest station. A man shouted and banged the side of the lorry as the driver maneuvered ridiculously close to the pillared gateway. The iron hinges of the gate scraped along the side of the vehicle.

On the far side of the city, the low spring sun reflected brilliant orange off a single tower block in the suburbs. It must be positioned at the perfect angle to the sun’s rays, she thought. Surely, she was one of
many
people seeing this explosion of color. And maybe Dave was checking his beehives. Was he looking across the enclave rooftops at the sunset? She felt warmer towards him now, she realized, but even so…

She imagined an orange fog flowing out from the dazzling tower block. It seeped, slowly, through the streets of the metropolis. And she decided to mimic Dave; she imagined herself flying high. She saw the metropolis now as a low-lying, lumpy scab causing a minor, almost imperceptible, drag on the shifting air masses that crossed farmland and the enclaves, sweeping on and on, across other scabs to other continents.

The orange reflection burned her eyes and she looked down. At the foot of the parapet wall she noticed bits of detritus, leftovers from previous maintenance work, nuggets of congealed tar. How many years had it been lying around? Slowly, she teased out individual pieces from the pile and tossed them one at a time across the street towards the neighboring roof. They didn’t all reach.

Evening slipped into night-time. She stood up—no one could see her now. She looked across at the apartment blocks on the opposite side of the shuttle lines. Lights were on in nearly all the apartments and several blinds were open. Lights flickered from consoles. People walked around. Some seemed to be cooking. She imagined that a woman in one apartment was talking through solid walls to a man in the adjacent apartment. Many of them seemed to be alone.

Back in her bed, she held the bedclothes tight around her and came to a conclusion. For, in her mind, she’d skimmed a series of flat pebbles that made contact with her memories almost at random. She
pinpointed a Saturday afternoon, in week ten, when she’d bought the stick insects on her way to the Repertory Domes.
That’s when this journey began
, she told herself.
The ladybirds made me stop—on a screen in the shop window. So perfect. And then I went inside. It wasn’t the ladybirds, though, but the stick insects in the next tank that I couldn’t resist. They almost weren’t there. I had to have them.

CHAPTER 9

E
arly mornings at C7 were fine-tuned,
as in any home, to minimize the time spent on the aggregation of minor but essential acts of preparation. Nevertheless, Jayna incorporated one unwarranted performance in her own morning rituals, namely, brushing her straight and obedient hair, because it allowed more time for her deodorant to dry. Putting on her blouse, then, became a far more satisfying experience: minimal contact between cloth and damp underarms. So, the full process comprised undressing; wrapping a towel around her torso; washing at her small sink; drying herself;
applying deodorant;
cleaning her teeth; donning underwear, trousers, or skirt; brushing her hair; and, finally,
the blouse
.

What occupied her thoughts as she ambled through this procedure was how she could alter her behavior, further than she had already, without attracting attention. While fastening her shoes, she also wondered if she could make changes to her own person. She ruled out anything that would be noticed at work or at the rest station: cutting her hair, painting her nails, customizing her clothes. Reluctantly, she also ruled out making any discrete skin markings; someone would notice in the showers. So, no home-made tattoos or body painting. Decorating her scalp—now there was a possibility.

As she tended her stick insects, she came to a decision. Marking her body was altogether too reckless. Safer, instead, to carry a secret
about her person, conceal something in a pocket or wear something under her standard-issue attire. If discovered it would be easier to explain away.

She knelt alongside her bed and sprayed water through the netted wall of the cage. Then she turned and looked up to the top of the wardrobe. Good idea. She lifted down both the handbook and the small package atop. She scanned the lines of type on the stick insect’s paper shroud and with a pen she circled three “m”s, two “e”s, two “o”s, one “n,” one “t,” one “r” and one “i.” She took her jacket from the wardrobe, slipped the shroud into the inside pocket and murmured: “Memento mori.”

The canteen assistant winked at her but breakfast was otherwise the usual perfunctory weekday affair: porridge, toast, and tea. She ate hastily as she formulated a list of requests for specific backup data on her hydrogen research. She looked around at her friends—no one in conversation. No doubt they were foregrounding their own duties to their licensors. By the time they reached their offices they would be super-crunching at a phenomenal rate; the speed was beyond the grasp of their employers. Remarkable. If their bosses truly appreciated these processing powers they might have reservations. Strange that no one asked how they deployed their spare capacity; they should.

Breakfast over, she rushed her tray to the clearing hatch and, surprising herself, she belched.

With a heavy day ahead, Jayna reverted to her normal short route to the office. As she turned on to Granby Row she noticed a feather dancing along the pavement, a white feather from the underbelly of a pigeon, most likely. It was carried this way and that at the whim of the local air movements—an amalgamation of the prevailing winds with super-impositions from swirling local eddies
caused by people and vehicles traversing the now-busy street. By some eerie coincidence, the feather caught a more violent burst of energy and Jayna reached out her hand and caught it at chest height. She felt giggly, scatty. Smiling, she slipped the feather into her breast pocket alongside the paper sarcophagus.

A collection. But a collection of what? A random gathering of ephemera, things that touched her life briefly in some obscure way. She sidestepped two men walking towards her, shoulder-to-shoulder, oblivious, deep in animated exchanges.
Should my collection relate to living things—animals, birds, insects? Difficult to decide when I only have two things. If I really wanted to be a major-league obsessive I know what I’d collect
—she dodged another pedestrian—
I’d collect coffee paraphernalia. And I’d mix odd cups and saucers like…No, I don’t want to think about Dave just yet…They could all be white, or off-white, with chips and cracks, which could be fascinating in themselves. I could make still lifes…bring out minor differences in shape and curvature. But maybe I should rely on instinct and chance; it’s working well so far.

One of those awkward commuter moments occurred. Jayna heard clackety heels gaining ground. It was too intimate for strangers to walk side-by-side. Should she slow down, let the woman pass, or maintain her pace…make the woman walk faster? Judging by the rapid approach, she was intent on passing. Over several steps, the woman started to draw alongside but Jayna held her pace. On the verge of losing her conviction, she felt tight grips on both her arms. In seconds she was at the end of an alley, pushed and shoved to the dark back corner behind a black shiny car. She couldn’t see who it was, but then: “I want to speak to you.” Jayna knew the voice. Yanked around, pushed back, and winded against the brick wall, she gasped, “Ingrid, what—?”

“You’ve no idea, have you?
Stupid cow
.”

“Please, Ingrid, you’re hurting.”

“I’m telling you, shut it! I’ve never been so…
humiliated
.” Her face was hideous. Ingrid tried to shake Jayna but she wasn’t big
enough. “I had to go home and tell my family. I had to tell them I’d been replaced by a fucking…clone.”

Jayna’s jaw dropped. “I’m
not
a clone, and it
wasn’t
like that.” She could smell coconut hair.

Ingrid grabbed Jayna in the crook of her arm and ground her elbow into a brick edge. “Oh? Well, what was it like then, Jayna? Enlighten me, please.”

She couldn’t bear to look at Ingrid; she spoke to the side wall. “Benjamin took out a contract. I turned up for work. I didn’t know you’d be made redundant.”

“Well, that’s exactly what did happen.”

“Ingrid, there wasn’t enough work.”

She grabbed two handfuls of Jayna’s hair and shoved her back against the wall. “You were fucking piling through everything. And I’d had a bad quarter, that’s all. Just one bad quarter.”

“I’m sorry. But if you hadn’t been so mad at Benjamin you’d have got your job back. Tom Blenkinsop—”

“I know about Tom Blenkinsop. What a prize bastard!” She pressed her palms to her temples. “Always taking credit for other people’s ideas…
my
ideas.” And just as Ingrid turned to retreat she swung back and landed her small fist into Jayna’s belly. Low and dirty. She doubled over. Ingrid clutched her wrist. “Christ! Look what you made me do.” And she left the alley.

Mid-morning, Hester walked over to Jayna and as she opened her mouth to speak she hesitated. “You look pale.” But immediately pressed on: “I hear you’re on to something. Eloise says you’re seeing Benjamin this morning. Well, we always score brownie points for energy intelligence.”

Jayna ignored the first remark. “It’s taken some ferreting out.”

“By fair means or foul?” Jayna attempted a smile but made no reply. “As long as the report stands up. We may need to release it as an Energy Confidential—fewer takers but a much higher fee. Copy me in on progress.”

The pain from Ingrid’s punch had given way to soreness and a hard ache. Jayna had taken ten minutes in the alleyway to recover. Setting out towards Mayhew McCline, leaving vomit on the polished wheels of the parked car, she’d struggled to keep pace with the other walking commuters. And, entering the cavernous lobby of the Grace Hopper Building for the one-hundred-and-thirty-sixth time, she’d refused the doorman’s greeting and ignored Eloise on entering the elevator. As though smoothing the line of her garment, Jayna had slowly brushed her right hand from her left shoulder downwards across the slight stiffness of the paper shroud in her inside breast pocket. That’s when she decided. She would not report the incident.
A mugging, for heaven’s sake
. There would be so much fuss; they would watch her too closely. And she also decided on a new level of risk-taking:

An Experiment: (As Dave might put it) To fucking show them all.