Inkers (7 page)

Despite his fear, Hardwick felt a little righteous anger within him. “If you listen to the sort of people who leave reviews of their colleagues on the darknet – well you deserve to be deceived. Do you have a patent?” Hardwick said.

Lwazi said, more firmly, “I do not want to work with you.
We
do not want to work with you.”

“Without the patent you’ve got nothing, nothing at all. Is there even really a prototype?” Hardwick said. “If there isn’t, you’ve got nothing anyway, I’ll happily leave right now, if you don’t have a prototype.”

“There is a prototype, I wrote it in the email that you ignored,” Lwazi said. “You will leave anyway. This invention, this technology, is to help my community. It’s not to help white people. White people have enough, they’ve taken enough from us already. I want this to help my community, my friends, my home. Not you. You will use us and take from us. Your words are just empty. You only care about money.”

“No,” Hardwick said. “You and your friends will screw yourselves over. You will. However smart you are, without experience, without investment, without the advice and protection that I could offer, you will lose your invention almost straight away. The government will take it, or other businesses will just steal it and copy it, people less honest than me – and there are many. Many of them in this country. The Chinese will copy it anyway, and you won’t know how to deal with that. No, you will screw yourself over. I want to see the prototype in action right now.”

“Mr. Hardwick, you are starting to upset me,” Lwazi said. “I want you to leave now. We have been polite, I am sorry you have wasted your time, but it is time for you to go now.”

“Do you know start–up survival rates? Especially ones started at university, especially those started by, excuse me, poor blacks? The business side is the hard part, the expensive part. That’s what amateurs just don’t understand, at all.”

“Mr. Hardwick, my friends are getting very tired of you.”

Hardwick glanced up at them. Some of them did look annoyed. Last chance.

“The reason I came,” Hardwick said, “To this middle–of–nowhere meeting, at night, is that I have heard of a technology that can do this. The Chinese have it. It will be released very soon. And then your technology will be worthless, and your community will get nothing for your work. You will get nothing. So your only chance, and my only chance to make money here, is to act very quickly. To release first. Your only chance is to go in with me.”

“And you say you are honest?” Lwazi said, rising to his feet. “You are not honest. That is a lie. You must leave, right now, now, now.” His friends rose too. Hardwick stood up, picking up his umbrella.

“You’ve got nothing,” he said, but Lwazi was ignoring him, looking at his own large, cheap–looking watch, blinking through his glasses. Hardwick shook his head and turned away.

He had crossed halfway to the stairwell when Lwazi called out behind him.

“Hardwick,” he said. Hardwick looked back.

“Your pocket, eh?” Lwazi said, face serious, patting his own left pocket. “You have ink in your pocket. It works, you know? And you cannot have it.”

Hardwick flushed, blinked and walked away from the most valuable business opportunity of his life.

Lily crept down the corridor, heart beating
hard. They were all in the ink barn, but there was always the possibility of someone coming back to the house. She pushed open the door to Brian and Annie’s bedroom. It was stuffy inside. The curtains were still closed. She crossed over to Annie’s side of the bed, the little bedside table covered in hairclips and textbooks. She opened the drawer and rifled through, bits of electronics, a manual on bovine breeding, a tube of moisturiser. Nothing.

Voices in the courtyard. She turned and ran across to the wardrobe and pulled open the top drawer – underwear – the second drawer down – more clothes – the bottom drawer. More clothes, but on the left a plastic box. She prised off the lid. Inside were boxes of painkillers, anti–histamines, a tube of suncream – and a single cardboard box labelled
surething
. She grabbed it, pressed the lid back on the plastic box, closed the drawer with a bang that made her flinch, and crept out of the bedroom, closing the door softly behind her, shoving the pregnancy test in the pocket of her jeans.

She went downstairs, retrieved her backpack from the shelf and took the back door out of the farmhouse, Brian’s voice still echoing in the courtyard. She left through the small front gate and was halfway across the grass when she heard a shout behind her. She turned. It was Tom, waving at her. He ran down to her.

“Hey, wait up a second,” he said. “I’ve got something for you. I got it in Glasgow last week but I forgot all about it – look.” He held out a watch. It was like the ones she’d seen people wear on VR movies, but bulkier – a black strap with a dark screen running all the way round the wrist.

“It’s a darknet watch,” he said. “I got it pretty cheap off this guy I was selling the ink to. You won’t be able to pick anything up out here, but it’s got a bunch of stuff on it, lots of encyclopaedias and stuff. Very illegal. Don’t tell the cops,” he said, grinning.

She took it gently. “Thanks,” she said, blushing from the thought of the pregnancy test in her pocket and blushing more at the thought of blushing.

“Just tap it to turn it on.” He tapped the screen and it glowed orange. A message appeared —
No Signal
. He tapped again and the little screen went black again. She pressed the watch carefully onto her wrist and felt it gently tighten to fit her.

“Ignore the “No Signal” bit,” he said. “Just ask it to look things up for you and it will, it’s got lots in its memory. It can take photos and stuff too. Ask me if you get stuck. See you for some food later, OK?”

“Sure,” she said. “Thanks.”

“No worries,” he grinned, ruffling her hair. She grinned back.

He went back to the farmhouse and she ascended into the woods without looking back, bearing left this time, heading for a secluded place. As soon as she was sure she was too far for anyone to find her, she sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree and pulled out the pregnancy test. She opened it and pulled the thin black tube out. She shook it a little.

A green arrow appeared on the side of the stick. It spoke with a female voice, making her jump – “To test for pregnancy, at least one week must have passed since conception. Press the end of the device with firm pressure against any point on the arm and hold for ten seconds. You may feel a slight pinprick.”

Her heart pounded. She pressed the tube against the inside of her lower arm and counted slowly. She felt nothing. She counted all the way to fifteen and then pulled it away. The tube lit up. “You are pregnant, with ninety–eight percent certainty,” the voice said happily. “You are pregnant,” it repeated. “This pregnancy test cannot be reused. Please recycle responsibly.”

Lily shoved the test into her pocket, grabbed her bag and ran up the hill, jumping over roots, scrambling through the leaves and pulling herself up past tree trunks. The ground was wet in places but she ignored it, her boots keeping the worst out. She ran and climbed until she was gasping for air and her legs were screaming for her to stop. Finally she slumped down onto the ground, sitting looking out through the trees. She was about half way up the hill that dominated the centre of the island. Everything was lit by a thin winter sunshine. Across the bay she could see a few houses, lights on inside. A sailing boat with a tall mast was moored just offshore.

Visitors passing through.

She was pregnant.

Four years ago, when she arrived, they had told her clearly that she could not leave. She had stowed away in the back of Tom’s van, a stupid plan to get her next hit. He had found her when he arrived at the jetty on the mainland, and taken her over to the island, not knowing what to do with her, unwilling to leave a thirteen–year old girl alone in a strange place. Brian had shouted at him for hours. She had heard it from in the kitchen while Annie fed her hot chocolate. She had seen too much; if she left she would speak of the place where the ink came from, and ITSA would come and destroy everything, probably kill them all. So she had to stay, until she was old enough to keep her mouth shut, if such a time ever came. At first she hadn’t minded. Brian gave her all the ink she wanted, Annie all the food, and the island was very safe. The nightly dream of the sealed room continued, but she had had that every time she slept inside since her parents were taken. Sometimes she had watched the low black Royal Navy battleships slink past along the Firth of Clyde and fantasised about escape. Until recently she had mostly been content.

And now, somehow, she was pregnant. She couldn’t remember much of that night. Despite how much Tom sometimes annoyed her, she trusted him completely. However much ink he took, she didn’t think he’d have sex with her. But he
had
been acting strangely, mutating a little, even in the night when she went to speak to him at the gate. And there were the little holes. Was it some kind of experiment? The idea made her sick. He wondered if they would ever let her leave. Ever since she had told Tom she would steal the boat he had always kept the keys on him.

She could take Leonard’s kayak, but where would she go?

Where would they go?

She lifted her shirt and rested her hand on her flat, well–muscled belly. It would keep growing until it came out, alive and separate to her. She wanted to protect it. She hoped the ink wouldn’t hurt it. She tapped at the watch on her wrist, wondering if she could find some information about pregnancy on there. About how to care for it. There was the orange glow again, and then a message in the centre of the screen.

Signal weak
.

Lily frowned and tapped at it. The screen seemed to grow in her vision until it had almost filled it. She knew it was just projecting onto her retinas, but she wasn’t used to the sensation, and she looked away, blinking. After a moment she looked back and it filled her vision again. The screen read
Front Forum
. There was a warning at the top –
Welcome to the darknet. This forum is monitored by all kinds of security services and many dodgy fuckers, please cover your meatspace traces with care.
The rest was a lot of text, like the pre–VR internet, and seemed to be constantly updating, new topics appearing at the top and pushing others down. Most of them were about a signal:
the source of the signal
,
Chinese involvement in the signal
,
ITSA and the signal
. She saw several references to the GSE and felt a rush of horror.

There was a button at the top titled
New Topic
. She pressed it cautiously and a white box appeared. “Help,” she said, experimentally, and the word appeared in the box. “I am a prisoner in a massive ink den,” she said softly. The text obliged, filling out below
Help
. She continued – “I am a prisoner in a massive ink den, they make thousands of gallons of ink for experiments, and they’re experimenting on me, and I’m pregnant, and they wont let me leave!”

Suddenly the skin on her neck prickled. She stared around.

The island was quiet. A little bird flitted nearby, resting for half a second on a branch before fluttering away in a burst of feathers. There was nobody there.

She looked back at the watch. Her heart jumped into her mouth —the text field was gone. Her message had saved and there were two responses underneath.
Pics pls
, the top one read, and the next,
proof and i’ll come rescue u and the ink
. Lily gasped and tore the watch off her wrist. She tapped the screen hard and it went dark, the orange forum disappearing.

Proof. Rescue. She put her hand on her belly. There was new life inside her.

“Take photo,” she said to the watch. The screen blinked to life, showing her own face staring back at her, miniaturised and frozen.

Lily got to her feet and ran back down the hill.

Lily crept between the tanks. The little windows which showed the bright contents of the tanks faced away from the door. She would have to go up there, where the desks were. There was almost always someone in the barn. Brian barely seemed to sleep these days, and Annie and Mark liked to work at night, while Leonard had spent each day in the barn for as long as she could remember.

She rolled her sleeve down to hide the watch and walked up between the tanks. She knew them by the shape of their bodies. Brian, Mark and Leonard were all there, hanging from the ceiling in their dirty off–white VR suits. She moved as quickly as she dared. At any moment any one of them could decide to take a break from their virtual work and look out through the suit’s sensors.

They were silent. If they were speaking in VR it was subvocalised.

Lily crept forward until she was underneath them. She had to turn her back to get all the vats in. Her skin crawled to think of the three of them hanging behind her. “Photo,” Lily said, as softly as she could, and the screen of the watch changed to show the floor on the other side of her wrist. She tilted it to take in the big vats of ink, the tanks for the cow blood, the huge air conditioning units. Annie’s potted bush. The yellow
hazmat
signs on the vats.