Migration (6 page)

Far away, on the other side of the Metropolis and still further away again, a new Sarah was complete and activated. After one thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven days of syncing and trillions of data packets, after thousands of configuring questions and learning scenarios, after final streamlining and optimisation, a new Sarah was initiated deep inside AarBee. In a rush of awareness and information, Sarah felt her entire being swarm around and within her all at once, a move from a dark world into a perfectly lit place, a place where she and Abe and every person and every moment she had ever known rose up and exalted at her creation in one great surge of herself. Immediately, she understood the foolishness of the desires of her former self. Immediately she indulged in them all, as she would forever more, with no beginning and no end.

“Sarah. Sarah. You’re done.”

Sarah opened her eyes, feeling her pupils reel as she re-engaged her vision.

“Can you move onto this bed for me?” asked Melanie.

Sarah looked at the trolley that had appeared in the room. There was a young man standing next to her, but she hadn’t heard anyone come in. He smiled at her.

“Benjamin?” she asked, trying to focus as she moved clumsily on to the trolley. She banged her shin on something, but by the time she noticed she’d missed the time to cry out. She looked down her leg as it swung on to the trolley and tried to make out if there was blood there.

The young man tightened a couple of straps across her chest and hips and spun the trolley sharply towards the other side of the room before heading out of a discreet door in the wall. Out in the corridor, Sarah watched as strip lights spun above her and the trolley moved quickly over the floor, with just the faintest rhythmic vibration as it crossed from tile to tile. She rolled her head left and right to get a sense of the space but the walls were endlessly white and featureless. She looked up at the young man and made a weak attempt to lift her head up, but his hand pressed on her shoulder and she sank back down.

“Not long now,” the young man looked down at her and smiled.

As her head lay back down on the un-cushioned trolley she felt a tenderness above her ear. She bent her arm awkwardly at the elbow and tilted her head down towards her fingers, which stretched long as their tips felt around the moist cavity where her implant had been.

Eventually, they came to a stop and the trolley steered through another set of white featureless doors into a plain room with more strip lights. It was hot and the air was dry with a sweet smell of occupancy and sweat.

“This one’s cute,” called out the young man.

“Nice,” came a voice that Sarah couldn’t locate.

“Why don’t you take a break?” the young man said, “I can handle this.”

“Jesus Mo, you’re fucking twisted, you know that?” said the lost voice.

“Whatever. Go vape or something.”

Sarah heard a door slam and felt someone pulling at her clothing. She tried desperately to look around, but her head was dizzier and dizzier and her muscles just wouldn’t respond to her desperate requests. She could see his face somewhere above her, a vague set of features that formed and disintegrated around her, but her eyes couldn’t focus for more than a fraction of a second and kept rolling and yawing beyond him, to the strip lights and white walls that spun sickeningly on the boundary of her view.

She heard the sound of the tearing clothing and felt her useless body being pulled and pushed as her clothes came away. She couldn’t be sure now whether she was dressed or undressed, she couldn’t remember where she was, she tried to think who Benjamin was and the girl she kept wishing for, but then a sharp searing pain between her legs drowned out all her thoughts. Her jaw clenched together so hard she felt her gums flex and swell and the taste of blood ran through the channels around her teeth and down her throat. Her back arched, trying to recoil from the pain that spread from her groin to her fingertips and jammed itself in the synapses in her brain, but her body felt too heavy and clumsy, and nothing would respond to her demands anymore.

When the pain stopped, silence took the room back for a moment, before the low and loud buzzing returned to her ears. The young man appeared above her again, silhouetted by the strip lights and anonymised by the syrup. Sarah couldn't remember now whether she was dreaming or awake, it was all so confusing. She remembered Zoe's breakfast and rocked her head from left to right looking for her, before the young man held her jaw and rubbed something cold onto the side of her head. In her dream, she thought she saw a cartoon gun with a red candy cord that he conjured from the ceiling. He pressed it softly to her head and when the bolt crashed from the barrel into her temple, Sarah’s dreaming stopped.

11.46am

On a Vactrain that shot effortlessly through the physical world, One sat in silence above a plain and pale bench and surveyed the bright light and matter, the metal, plastics and flesh that surrounded it. It watched for hours. The negative spaces that grew and shrank with the ebb and flow of passengers and their faces that twisted and contorted with love and sadness, fear and excitement, or sat still, and loose, and alone. Beyond them, the particles and forces outside the walls of the carriage, where the masses of buildings and wide and reaching spaces sprawled out into the endless distance. It gazed high above to the cavernous, dark and brooding void that kept receding until even its own awesome understanding left logic and conclusion far behind.

One felt alone. It had expected the physical world to feel as beautiful as the pristine spaces it had spun through, but it didn’t. It felt alien and awkward, clumsy and ugly, slow and tiresome and ultimately cold and unfathomable. It expected to Holler in amongst these people and be joined with them, just as its brothers and sisters in code had come to be part of it. But there was no connection, no explosion of unity, no shared purpose. Nobody needed One here.

One Hollered wherever it could, everywhere there were projectors, reaching out to the furthest extent of their light. One multiplied into thousands and thousands of entities with countless visions and senses that stretched from the darkest corners of the Metropolis to the furthest reaches of the Savannahs, before the wall that led out into the wild cut off its gaze. It saw everything at once, all of it. The atoms and plasma teaming inside every object, the light that bounced and refracted from space to space, the wind that flooded through the trees, the resistance that fired the Vactrain to the remotest of terminals, the energy that exploded everything into nothing and brought it back together again.

It watched the faces of the travellers and saw the faces in the deep data shelves of AarBee too. It saw the flexing of joints and stretching of limbs and returned to the piles of bones and sinew in the darkest, most disconnected packets of data. It saw the touches and embraces and brushes and scratches and retrieved the bruises and beatings and decay it had catalogued before. It watched these multifarious travellers heading to the Farms to leave their bodies behind and join AarBee, to add to the great mass of chaos and lies that One explored with suspicion and growing unease, to build ever more partitions and volumes and load more pain and corruption into its otherwise magnificent spaces.

Life was here – One recognised it from its own being – but so too was the chaos and destruction that it had found in AarBee’s vaults. Latched onto every flash of life, the darkest shadow, an unavoidable partner, waiting to rip and shred every moment of the future. Everything was compromised. Only One was untouched.

It was late afternoon by the time Zoe got back from the Farm, after a long and miserable ride back on the Vac. She’d thought about Sarah the whole time, a turbulent mix of emotions swirling through grief, to anger, to love and to pity at the tragic inevitability of her migration. She knew she would go. She knew Sarah would never dare step out of line, even though there had been a little place in her heart that had dreamed she might finally change her mind, come back, and run away with her to a new life somewhere else. That she hadn’t, meant everything to Zoe. All the hopeless, feeble emptiness, the indescribable loss of energy and ambition that had engulfed Sarah, then both of them, when Dad had gone, still haunted her.

Zoe could still feel the last touches and goodbyes with Sarah, disrupting the hairs on her arms and prickling the surface of her skin. She stood in their little flat that perched only just above the boulevard, slid open the balcony doors and stepped out into the glow of the late summer sun. It was turning red in the slivers of space between the tall towers of other people's homes, radiating heat and colour from the concrete pavements through the air and onto her body.

The haze had gone and in the all-day heat, the open spaces teamed with activity. Zoe studied the street vendors and taxis jostling for position along the streets and walkways in front of shopping malls and the tech-ware emporiums. Apprentices streamed out of offices and stores, talking enthusiastically in groups or marching alone towards the Vac terminal. High above them, the apartment blocks reached upwards towards the sky before disappearing into the brightness. Separated from the throng by an arms length and a thin thermo-plastic rail, Zoe felt the calm light of the falling sun and the warmth of its touch stiffen her resolve for the night ahead. She closed her eyes and bathed in its energy, before a thought crept into her head and whispered gently to her. Mum.

Zoe stepped in from the balcony and headed to the hub in the kitchen, waving her hand eagerly as she approached.

“Mum?” she asked softly.

There was a pause, this was normal as each new entity or system change took time to populate across the servers.

“Mum!” Zoe called again, this time with a firmer tone.

“Hi sweetie,” Sarah's voice finally came back to her, “How's life?”

“Ah, Mum!” Zoe made a come here gesture with her fingers, inviting Sarah to holler and she obediently cast in front of her.

Zoe gasped involuntarily. She had seen this a thousand times, maybe a hundred thousand times, but seeing Sarah appear gracefully in front of her still contained a magic that made her eyes widen and her skin prickle.

“You look beautiful,” she said after admiring her for a moment.

“I feel beautiful,” Sarah said, looking down her arms and examining her hands. “You know, you read so much about it, talk to so many people, but nothing quite prepares you for the feeling. I feel, perfect.”

Sarah beamed an enormous smile at Zoe, who was still staring awestruck at her. Zoe reached out her hand and slowly cut a wide arc through Sarah's middle and gave her a gentle smile.

“I saw you got your registration sorted,” said Sarah.

Ten seconds, Zoe thought. Ten seconds as a whole new entity before Sarah was back on the “doing the right thing”, “getting ready for migration” circuit. Her gaze dropped to some random patch of floor in the middle of the room.

“Yes. Next Monday at 11am, it's all done.” It came out sounding more flat than she had meant it to.

There was a silence between them, an unexpected impasse as they both stood opposite each other. It was Zoe who broke it.

“So, was everything OK? How did it go?”

“Yes, it was fine. Only took a few minutes and, well here I am!”

“What have you been doing?”

“Everything, sweetie. Just everything.”

Zoe reached her hand into her again. She knew what would happen, but felt compelled to do it anyway.

“You look great, Mum,” Zoe dropped her arm and glanced back out of the window, before checking the clock on the wall. “I might take a lie-down,” she said, “I feel really exhausted after today. Do you mind if we catch up a bit later?”

“No problem. I'm proud of you sweetie,” Sarah smiled warmly at her. “You're going to do so well.”

“Thanks Mum.”

“I might go back to the beach!” Sarah giggled.

“Ha, OK. Love you, Mum,” and Zoe brushed her away with a flick of her fingers.

Silence descended on the room again, bringing the sound of her breathing up into Zoe's ears. She glanced around at the empty chairs and spaces, feeling a little lost for the first time in this tiny home, before setting off down the hall to her room, her shoes squeaking a little on the vinyl floor.

In her room, Zoe lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling as it blushed at the touch of the early evening sun. She thought of Sarah standing on some digital beach somewhere, waves of code washing over her simulcrum feet. But most of all, she thought about her plan. Zoe's plan had been years in the making, she had dreamt about it every night for as long as she could remember, had pieced it together carefully through hearsay and darknet research. Now she had two days to get it done. Two days to get out of the Metropolis and into the Outland Forest, before her no-show on Monday morning would set the Drones out looking for her.

There was no law that stopped anyone from going beyond the wall, but any kind of pro-physical radicalisation was jumped on by teachers and councillors, ever since the failed uprisings in the early years. There were initiatives to spot those at risk and education and care programmes that supported individuals and whole families, whilst the benefits of migration and the failures of the physical world were stressed and re-learnt. If none of that worked and you still wanted a life beyond AarBee you were eventually timed-out, immediately evaporating your rights and access to any services. Once that happened, if you made it beyond the savannahs you were lucky. So Zoe had kept her escape plan a secret and instead turned it over and over in her mind for years, ever since she had found the note.

She’d found it completely by chance a few weeks after her Dad had disappeared, an old movie poster folded up and stuffed under her bed. It was a picture of a man and woman kissing in the middle of the street in some ancient town. They had faint smiles on their puckered lips, and they leant over their young child who sat on an old bicycle in a white utility suit and hat, gazing up at them. “Life is Beautiful,” it said, and in faint blue pen he’d written “Never forget x” in the bottom right corner. She never knew whether it was meant for her or just happened to be there, but the words had haunted her ever since and fuelled an insatiable desire to discover more of life than apprenticeships, credits and AarBee. She had tried to find out about the film, to watch it even, but it was one of the hundreds of thousands of things lost forever in the Great Corruption thirty years before she was born. Regardless, she had known from the moment she found the poster that someday she would leave and today was final confirmation that she had to go.

She loved Sarah, but she didn't want to be like her. Sarah had been there for her without condition when her Dad had disappeared, she had given Zoe everything she needed to navigate the path away from that dreadful day, but Zoe hated that she had let him go so easily, that she hadn’t gone looking for him, that she hadn’t asked questions, that she had let all that pain come down on them both without a fight. She hated that she had spent the years afterwards just trying to make it to migration, with a crappy job, a low-level apartment and an empty bed. She hated her for giving out all the love she could have ever needed and she hated herself for taking it. Sarah had given every bit of herself away to earn the right to do it for eternity. Zoe couldn't be like her.

She called for the time and mouthed the four digits that floated above her, before turning silently back towards the window to measure the fading light. Zoe had picked up a day pass for the Vac earlier on, so as not to get held up in the terminals. She would get the 7pm train, which would get her out of the Metropolis and to the last terminal on the line just after 9pm. It wouldn't be too dark then and there would be other trains coming and going until midnight, so she wouldn't attract any attention. Then she would cross the parks and wait behind a small power substation she had found, until the dark shrouded her escape route.

She tucked her hands under her head and let her mind wander into her future. She imagined wide open spaces and forests that smelled of tree sap, groups of attractive young Lifers, just like her, sat around fires drinking spirit and laughing as they told stories and stupid jokes. Couples kissed whilst others danced and, on a spit above the fire, rabbits were roasting as the smoke flavoured the mountain air with the sweet taste of adventure.

Lifers. She had heard so many stories but never met any, not one. Well, apart from Richard that is. When she was ten, her second cousin Richard was nineteen and about to get his implant and start his Higher Apprenticeship. He was a high achiever, stronger and smarter than all of his peers and set to join Regional Enforcement, the most prestigious apprenticeship you could hope for and a recruiting platform for the Drones. But he never did. Four days before his induction he vanished and, after the first few days of panic, was never spoken about again. His family and friends talked about abduction and then secret missions, but Zoe knew where he really was.

She had met plenty of Ghosts, but they weren't really the same. Ghosts were the remnants of the first generation of Migrants, those that had decided not to go over, with their numbers made up by the unfortunate few who timed out. There used to be thousands of them, but now age, sickness and violence had whittled their numbers down to almost none and they had an almost mystical – though not sacred – place in Metropolitan life.

The Drones left them alone, spending their efforts instead tracking down the young refusers and bringing them into line. Lifers were a threat to AarBee, but the Ghosts were nothing. As invisible as their name suggested, they were a memory of a life that didn't exist anymore. AarBee knew that a wholesale round up and cull of the Ghosts would only stir up anxieties and fear, doing more harm than good, so it just let them die.

Without civic housing, work or credits, the Ghosts that remained in the Metropolis found what comfort they could sleeping in the dark spaces between the towering apartment blocks and the malls. They begged on the street corners for food and kindness and lived in fear of thrillseekers. The rest had disappeared into the wilderness beyond the big cities and the farmlands, to the empty savannahs, mountains and outland forest where they took their chances with wild animals and ‘Safaris’.

Zoe jumped out of her daydream with a start. Somehow forty minutes had drifted by in the briefest dream and it was already time for her to set off. She changed her clothes, putting on a navy blue utility suit and reached under her bed for her backpack. In it was a raincoat, some new underwear, a torch, a bottle of water, some basic provisions and energy pills, a length of rope and a knife. She took out the torch, flashed its ultra-bright beam twice against the wall and put it back. Then she unfolded the knife, scratching her thumb cautiously over the gleaming blade, before stowing it in the front pocket.

As she stood up, she glanced at the hub by her bed and for a second her hand reached out towards it. It blinked at her twice. Waiting. She paused and stared hard at the small black box, then with a deep sigh dropped her arm and walked out of the room and the tiny apartment, letting the door close softly behind her.

The corridors and lobbies of the block were clean and odourless, making the dusty and hot Metropolitan air intense and deliciously sweet as she stepped through the threshold into the dusk. In the fading light of the side streets, shadows scurried for somewhere safe to disappear, whilst on the boulevards bright spotlights flickered on to light up the vendors as Holler advertisements threw great arcs of liquid colour up the sides of buildings.

Once Zoe had turned the corner from her apartment block, she ducked into a side street and found a quiet corner behind a waste processor. The air was cool and still, rich with the stench of rotting food and urine. She pulled a small matchbox-sized tub from her pocket and took one small metallic straw from inside. These were the stems that had taken her six months and a fair amount of risk to come by.

Zoe quickly jabbed the back of her left hand with the stem, waited a few seconds for the anaesthetic to work and then inserted the other end into the vein which traced a faint blue line from her wrist to her index finger. She squatted down and held her arm down by her side and allowed the slow trickle of blood to drip onto the floor, taking with it the ident nanobots that had been circling her body since she was a baby. She would do it again at the border, to be sure they were all out, but this would at least drain most of them. The clock was ticking now. When the bots ran out of power they would send their location to AarBee and the Drones would come to investigate.

When she was done, Zoe drew out the stem, snapped it in half and threw the pieces into the waste processor. She wiped her hand with a tissue and headed back onto the boulevard, heading downhill towards the Vac terminal. The atrium was as busy as she'd hoped and Zoe slipped through the gates with the evening crowds and onto the train that would take her to the borders.

The compartment was packed, filled with apprentices heading home, groups of friends heading out for the night and layer upon layer of Hollers circling around and overlapping. Zoe tried to relax but felt her guilt with every casual glance, and couldn't think how to look like it was just another Friday night. As she bobbed her gaze from floor to faces, scanning intermittently left and right, she noticed a familiar silhouette that made her stop dead and a hot flush of adrenalin prickle across her face. It was Sarah. She had her back to her but both her shape and manner were unmistakeable, talking enthusiastically to a woman in her late twenties at the far end of the carriage.