Prospero's Half-Life (40 page)

Richard had
been sceptical about the amount of work for servants of even the
important people during a static interval like a siege, but it
quickly became apparent that he had been wrong about that. Even
with the threat of destruction lurking somewhere outside of the
twin circles of defence, the House Speakers and the rich free men
demanded the best of everything, and that right quick. Richard at
first found himself more exhausted then he had been in decades;
eventually he got the hang of it, but he still managed to fall
asleep at night with very little provocation. Carolyn was the only
factor in his staying awake; after hours of serving the only thing
that kept him from falling asleep once his head hit the pillow was
her touch, reaching into his bunk in the darkness to run her hands
over him and to bring her naked, impossibly warm flesh into his own
hands. These midnight trysts were silent affairs at first, but
after they heard others coupling in the darkness they let
themselves express their desires vocally. The release was bigger
that way, and the resulting rest that much deeper. Richard would
awaken in the morning after these grasping, rutting nights with
more energy than he had felt in a very long time.

The man that
he had been servant to before Karl had been demanding, or so he had
thought at the time. He had been a drunken lecher, throwing wild,
infamous parties in the capital of the Republic where drugs,
alcohol, and raw sexuality were on display in every corner. He had
seen any number of strange, mind-shaking things, but on the whole
the job had been fairly easy. People on lethargy-inducing drugs
rarely needed much checking up on; they needed their clothes
changed once in a while and they needed to be fed, but besides that
they were often capable of taking care of their own affairs. These
men that had taken up refuge in the inner keep of the castle they
had constructed out of downtown Stratford put all of them to shame.
They needed their meals brought to them at exact times; they
refused to dress themselves and would often switch through several
changes of clothes within the course of a given day; they needed
massages, quick rub-downs, scented oils; they had sexual urges that
the younger servants satisfied whenever asked. Richard found
himself disgusted with them at first, and later he found himself
actively hating them.

There were
only a few who tried to make the lives of the servants easier; Karl
Tiegert was one of those men. Whenever Richard was forced to wait
on one of the more demanding citizens, he would sometimes see Karl
looking apologetically at him from the corner of his eye. Richard
would shake his head whenever he saw that; Karl could be as
apologetic as he wanted to be, he decided, but he never said
anything against the others. He simply let them ride over the
exhausted, frightened serving staff, and quietly refused to do the
same. In a way, Richard found himself hating his master as much as
he hated the others.

He brought
this up in a conspiratorial whisper to Carolyn one night and she
sighed heavily.

“
There’s nothing we can do about it,” she warned him. “This
isn’t like Brantford. We’re trapped in here and we have to make do
in the best way we can”.

“
It shouldn’t
have
to be like this,” he seethed. “Why should they continue to
live the high life while everyone else fades and shrinks from the
way we’re living here? They’ve cut back on the food rations
outside, you know. All the people in tents will be eating less this
week, and probably even less the week after”.

“
I know,” Carolyn whispered. “We’re going to be in the same
place, soon enough”. She paused, and the discomfort embedded within
her was palpable even in the near-total darkness. “Richard, are we
winning this thing?”

“
We?” he asked cynically, but he knew what she meant. “I don’t
know. I honestly don’t. They obviously aren’t able to get food to
us, even if we are winning”.

“
I don’t want to die anymore,” she whispered, her voice
breaking, and Richard felt an intense sadness crush his heart. He
found her hand in the blackness and squeezed it
confidentially.

“
We’ll get out of here somehow,” he assured her. “We’ve done it
before”.

“
Sort of,” she replied, uncertain. “We left that situation and
found ourselves in this one. It’s almost like we never got away at
all”.

“
The rest of them did,” he said, remembering the story he’d
heard from Troy Larkson. “They made it to Niagara and from what I
know they became free”. A sudden thought struck him. “Maybe some of
them are out there, in the army surrounding us”.

“
They’d be pretty old if they were,” Carolyn replied
doubtfully. “I suppose some of their children might be,
though”.

They lay in
silence for a long time, until Richard became convinced that she
had fallen asleep. He was about to make a concerted effort to do
the same when she whispered once more.

“
Promise me we’ll die together, if we have to die”.

Richard
swallowed several times before he could reply. The tears suddenly
seemed to stream down his face.

“
Of course,” he replied, forcing his voice to remain steady.
“If we have to, we go together”.

The next day,
the rich and political were meeting with a messenger that had come
through the inner gates at dawn. Carolyn was amongst the staff
serving them but Richard was not; at first he spent the day
wandering through the ground floor but eventually he found himself
on the top floor holding the tablet. He found an empty room and
curled up next to the window; the light that was coming through the
dirty glass was steely grey, and he couldn’t pinpoint where the sun
was. From somewhere not far off, a pair of those strange coughing
thumps came.

He switched on
the tablet and eyed the battery level with trepidation. He brushed
through the folders dully, skipping through essays, lecture notes,
and instant messaging logs without really reading much of anything.
He exited out of the document folders and began flicking through
the settings, going idly over everything that could be disabled or
altered in the system. At first he was fascinated with the control
the system offered the user in terms of their experience, but then
he grew utterly bored with it. None of the controls would really
mean anything now, when the thing was devoid of any context with
regards to other devices. He found the panel for the wireless
settings and with an impulsive finger-swipe he opened them up. He
saw that the wireless adapter had been turned off; Samantha had
likely disabled it to save power. He wondered if she had done it
that morning before they left, before they discovered how hard the
new world could be. He thought back to that morning and could not
believe that he had lived it. In his mind it seemed to be something
that he had observed, like the memory of a movie he had seen two or
three times. He tried to shake the cobwebs of these thoughts out of
his head and turned the wireless adapter on. The spinning circle
that denoted a process running in the background appeared and after
a time Richard thought that it might have crashed. He was about to
shut the tablet down to kill the process when it jolted back into
life. The adapter was on, and was now searching for networks. He
snorted and wished it luck.

He peeked out of the window while the tablet was working and
saw that nothing had changed. The tents shifted and billowed in the
stiff wind that was blowing through the inner defences, and many of
the people seemed to be taking shelter inside. At the walls between
the buildings, the soldiers loitered much as they had for weeks. He
turned back to the tablet and saw that the screen had changed. A
box had popped up overtop of the control panel.
The following wireless networks have been detected
it read. Beneath that was a list of one entry,
which read
Linksys
. Below that were two buttons, asking him if he wanted
to
CONNECT
or
CANCEL
. He
stared at it for a moment before the full import of the dialogue
box hit him.

He shook slightly as he ran his finger over the edge of the
tablet. There was a wireless network out there. An active wireless
network. With a shaking finger he pressed
CONNECT
. Within a moment he tablet
connected to the network and showed that he had full access. With a
growing sense of unreality, he exited the control panel and opened
up the tablet’s browser. The browser defaulted to Google, as so
many of them once had; Google was long gone, however, and the page
that came up apologized for the website being unavailable. It
continued on to suggest that he retry at a later time or perhaps
contact his network administrator. He laughed at this. At that
moment he would give almost anything to know who his network
administrator
was
.
He tapped a few more sites into the address bar but all of them
came up with the same “page not found” error. He was about to try
one last site when another dialogue box popped up overtop of the
browser. It was a simple rectangle with a small
OpenChat
logo in the top left
corner.

WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?
was all that it
said.

EIGHT

Richard stared at the message on the tablet’s screen for a
long time, shock overwhelming him. Then, his fingers shaking, he
typed out
WHO THE HELL ARE
YOU??
. There was a long pause, and then a
reply came:
NOT IMPORTANT. YOU OBVIOUSLY
HAVE A WORKING ELECTRONIC DEVICE CAPABLE OF ACCESSING A NETWORK.
WHERE ARE YOU?
. Richard tapped the back of
the tablet nervously. He felt paranoid, and had to physically stop
himself from looking around for whoever was speaking with him. The
upper floor of the old city hall was silent, except for the low
murmur of voices that went on and on behind the walls.

WHY DO YOU WANT TO KNOW?
he typed.
His mouth was dry.
This is getting
circular
he thought. The whole thing was
becoming surreal, and he wondered if he was actually deeply asleep
and dreaming. He dismissed this thought, however. The colours were
too dreary, too real. The feel of the tablet beneath his fingertips
was too normal; the light filtering in through the window was
exactly the right hue of reality. The tablet screen
flickered.

WELL I’M GOING
TO GO AHEAD AND GUESS THAT YOU’RE NEAR STRATFORD. I’VE BOOSTED THE
SIGNAL ON THIS THING MORE THAN IT WAS EVER INTENDED TO GO BUT IT
STILL ISN’T GOING TO REACH THAT FAR. SO LET’S TRY THIS AGAIN. I
KNOW YOU’RE WITHIN A CERTAIN AREA. WHEREABOUTS IN IT ARE YOU?

Richard looked
out at the iron-grey sky. He felt himself slowly losing control.
Then a sudden thought occurred to him.

TROY LARKSON?
he typed. There was a
long delay and Richard eyed the battery indicator on the tablet
nervously. It had reduced slightly, but there was still over a
quarter of its life left. He licked his lips, trying to generate
some moisture in his mouth.

THIS IS HE
the response came, and
Richard didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

RICHARD ADAMS,
SIR. STRANGE PLACE TO MEET AGAIN, DON’T YOU THINK?

WOW, YOU JUST KEEP TURNING UP
the
response came.
HOW’S THAT OLD TABLET
COMING ALONG? STILL WORKING, OBVIOUSLY. I BET IT NEEDS A CHARGE,
EH?

Richard
laughed; he was unable to control the volume of it, and he felt
nervous and embarrassed.

IT DOES INDEED
he typed.

WELL, WHERE
ARE YOU, THEN? YOU MUST BE SORT OF CLOSE BY, IF YOU CAN GET THIS
SIGNAL.

SORT OF, I GUESS
Richard
responded.
I’M INSIDE THE INNER WALLS OF
STRATFORD. I’M ACTUALLY RIGHT IN THE CITY HALL. ARE YOU OUT IN THE
TENT CITY? I DIDN’T SEE YOU OUT THERE BUT THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE
THAT I GUESS I MIGHT HAVE MISSED YOU
.

Troy did not
respond for a long time. From behind the wood paneled walls Richard
heard the scraping of chairs. The council of the rich and the free
were wrapping up their meeting, he realized. The screen flickered
again and when Richard read what Troy had sent the colour drained
out of his face completely.

WELL THIS IS
AWKWARD. I GUESS I AM NEARBY, THEN, BUT NOT IN A GOOD WAY. I’M
ACTUALLY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THOSE WALLS YOU GUYS HAVE ERECTED
AROUND THE CENTER SQUARE. I’M, UH, WITH THE ARMY OUTSIDE. THE ONE
LAYING SIEGE TO YOU.

Richard stared
at this message for a long time; he was having trouble
comprehending exactly what Troy was saying. Then it struck him. The
outer walls had fallen. Troy and his wireless signal were just on
the other side of those walls that had seemed so comforting just
weeks before. The sound of footsteps leaving the room on the other
side of the wall brought everything home for him. This was the
purpose of their sudden meeting. This was why they had been locked
away inside of there all morning. They knew that their first line
of defence had failed, and that all they had between them and a
pair of large armies were the hastily-erected walls between the
decaying buildings that ringed the square at the core of
Stratford.

He heard
footsteps at the doorway to the room he was huddled in. He looked
up fearfully and saw Carolyn. Her face held the same overlay of
fear that he felt his own did.