The Repossession (11 page)

Marshall was sympathetic to her anger. The girl looked hurt and suddenly quite frail. She’d been through a lot.

He wasn’t going to pry. She’d tell him or not, either way, it wasn’t his business.

‘I’m sorry I asked about your leg,’ Genie told him.

‘None of my business. I always ask stupid questions and get myself into trouble. One thing my mother got right about me. I always know how to make an embarrassing moment worse.’

‘Actually, you probably do need to know,’ Marshall attempted a reassuring smile. ‘There’s a lot you need to know, Genie. You might not believe me, but it has to be said. I’m hoping it might change your mind about what direction you and Rian take.’

‘If you’re going to tell me to go home, it won’t work, I

can tell you that now. You’ve no idea of how crazy my mother is. She thinks I’m possessed. She believes I’m the devil’s bride or something.’ Genie could hardly even speak anymore. The sudden horror of home hit hard.

Marshall could see the distress on her face. Perhaps sometimes broken things couldn’t be put back together.

The lump in Genie’s throat was painful again. She wasn’t as better as she thought.

‘Why’ve you got all those cuttings pinned up in your bathroom? Why? Do you know where the kids are? Should I be afraid? I don’t know what’s happening any more. Life is stupid. Ri and me should be miles away from here by now.’

Marshall stirred some syrup into his coffee. He was trying to think of where to start. This girl had intelligent eyes, but would she believe anything he told her?

He doubted it.

‘It’s complicated, but no, you don’t have to be afraid of me, at least. Others, maybe.’

‘But why the newspaper clippings of the missing kids?

You got some upstairs too. I don’t get it. It’s weird. What’s with those kids – did you know them? I need to know.’

‘I began collecting the cuttings after my nephew, Dale, disappeared. Kind of puzzled me that no one was out there looking for them, y’know. Like they’d pray they’d

return in church, do the crying for the local paper, but secretly I suspected some folks were kind of glad these kids were out of their hair.’

Genie coughed, her chest sounded bubbly. She told herself to calm down, hear him out. It sounded exactly like her situation. She couldn’t imagine her mother would ever care one way or the other.

‘You kind of expect two or three kids to go a year.

Disagreements, rows about drugs or unreasonable behaviour, any number of things can drive a wedge between parents and their kids. But it takes a lot to totally disappear. In other towns or cities, they go and they eventually call. Might be a month, maybe two, but they call collect, ask for money and turn up on the next Greyhound bus or whatever, looking a lot thinner.

Everyone is just glad they got back safe.’

‘You’re dreaming if you think my ma would send me bus fare.’

‘And that’s what’s odd about Spurlake. No one calls.

No one comes home. OK, you’d expect some kids to be so angry about stuff they’ll never call home, or at least one might end up arrested or something, somewhere, but no one
ever
hears from these kids again. Thirty-four now.

Thirty-six with you and the boy. I started collecting the cuttings when I got home from my accident and I

was living upstairs. Then I started getting these fits . . .

I had a bad fall coming down the stairs last fall. I had to move downstairs permanently.’

He pointed to the wall and a photograph of himself by a chestnut horse looking younger, healthier, wearing shorts and with two healthy tanned legs. Genie looked at it more carefully. It was dated just four years earlier – but Marshall looked twenty years younger.

‘How did you get so old so fast?’ Instantly she put up a hand to apologize. ‘Sorry, that sounded harsh.’

Marshall grimaced, unused to anyone being so blunt.

‘I’m forty-five, Genie. Got a grown-up son of twenty-four. But you’re right. I look sixty. Lot of things happened. Lot of things
still
happening to me. Nothing that can be fixed, I’m afraid.’

Genie swallowed with difficulty, her throat definitely sore again.

‘I used to work at a place called the Fortress. You’ve probably seen their trucks in town. Fortransco Synetics is their real name. It’s based in two buildings, pretty much equidistant from here. I believe you and the boy have already been close to the Synchro building during the flood when the riverbank collapsed. Topographically they are exactly level, if you understand that.’

Genie shook her head. ‘Something to do with maps.’

‘It’s hard to grasp I think. Both are built at one hundred and sixty feet above sea level. Identical twenty storey buildings, but one is underground, buried under the mountain below the reservoir. There’s thirty-five kilometres between them, but you could draw a straight line between the floors of each building and they’d line up. Their real purpose, secret.’

Genie sipped her hot coffee to numb her throat.

‘There’s a huge hydro-electric power station down the valley fed by the Spur river and a reservoir not far from here. The generators can produce 1,350 megawatts of power at peak. Fully operational it might use up to 10,000

gigawatt-hours of electricity in one year. Might mean nothing to you, but that’s a lot of power and not one volt of it feeds into the national grid. That’s secret two. There’s pylons marching off into the distance but they connect to nothing. The whole power station was built just for the Fortress.’

‘The Fortress is like military stuff?’

Marshall shook his head.

‘Fortransco Synetics is a private, but military-funded, experimental site.’

‘And you worked there?’ Genie had vague memories of seeing a white Fortransco truck in Spurlake from time to time. Never thought much about it.

‘I was a researcher. I was there from the beginning when it was something UTEC University was interested in. Just theory in the beginning, you understand. We got a little funding, attracted some attention and we tried a few experiments but we never really had powerful enough computers or enough electric power to make a difference.

Then Fortransco came along and invested billions. Built fantastic new facilities – gave us everything we wanted. It changed everything, but they were always pushing for results. It’s hard science, frontier stuff, and results don’t come easy. We needed a breakthrough, or we knew they’d want to close us down.

‘One day we tried for a big leap. We knew that unless we could prove it worked, the money would dry up and we’d all lose our jobs.

‘We set up this huge test. Grabbed all the hydro power we could and it actually worked. For three crucial seconds, it actually worked . . . before it blew up and took my leg with it. Nearly took my mind too.’

Genie frowned. Tried to imagine what it would be like to have your leg blown off.

‘I was pretty badly shook up for a few months. I was sent to a specialist burns hospital in Toronto. They taught me how to walk again. Never could fix the fits though.

That’s what I must have had last night. It’s like I get an

electric shock and my brain shuts down. They say it’s epilepsy but I know it isn’t. I got rewired that day and nothing has been right since. Hardly anyone recognized me when I returned. You’re right. I look twenty years older.

‘I was retired on full pension. I guess they didn’t think I’d live so long.’

Genie didn’t understand what this had to do with her or the missing kids.

‘You look disappointed,’ Marshall said.

‘I don’t get the connection. You lost your leg, but that’s not unusual around Spurlake what with so many guys killing trees for a living.’

‘Ah, you’re a tree-hugger.’

‘I respect trees. They’re here for a reason. They help the planet breathe,’ she replied defensively. Being Green in Spurlake wasn’t an easy choice.

Marshall shrugged. ‘Well we weren’t killing trees, OK.

We were experimenting with matter transfer. You know what that means?’

Genie shook her head still unimpressed.

‘Teleportation. That mean anything to you?’

Genie blinked, then laughed. ‘You mean, like
Star Trek
? Beaming up Scotty and stuff? No way.’ She laughed again, not mocking, but caught by surprise. ‘Really?

Teleportation? Isn’t that just science fiction? I mean . . .’

Marshall took a swig of his coffee. ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me. Sixty years ago the idea of everyone having a telephone in their pockets was science fiction.

Our whole way of life is science fiction, if you look at it from the past.’

‘And you invented teleportation?’

‘No. I told you, I was a researcher. We were working on the Steeple project for NASA. They had this idea of setting up a base on the moon and once you had that, well you wouldn’t need rockets to get up there anymore. It’s easy to swallow a billion dollars on a project like that. It was cancelled in the mid-Nineties. I was seconded to another parallel project based here, but that too was cancelled in ’98.

‘I was taken on by Fortransco, who had development money and could get things done. My specialism is genetic holding patterns. DNA stability in photon transmission.’

Genie almost made sense of that. ‘Like making sure your arms and legs come out in the right order.’

He smiled. ‘I knew you were bright.’

‘And they’re still experimenting? They made it work yet? It would be cool to go anywhere you wanted without using a plane or car . . .’

‘And that’s why the money pours in to develop it.

Only it was hijacked by the military and some other investors. Think about it, Genie, you could ship a whole division of GIs to a trouble spot, catch the locals unawares and you’d stop a revolution or take out a dictator in no time at all. They’d never see you coming.’

Genie frowned. ‘Sounded better when it was aiming for the moon. So, how does this connect to the kids on your bathroom wall?’

‘It’s connected. The people in charge now. They’re new.

Got a different agenda. They are searching for something else entirely.’

‘What?’

‘Eternal life.’

Genie laughed with surprise. It sounded like a sick joke. ‘Eternal life? Who’d want to live forever? Why?’

‘We were supposed to be developing teleportation.

Matter transference. But, and this is theory only, you could take out the ageing genes. You could add new DNA strings, renew, replenish, rebuild. Every ten years you could completely renew yourself. Discard fat, old skin, thinning hair, renew your heart, lungs, liver. It’s Pearson’s Law.’

‘Pearson?’

‘Whatever your purpose in experimentation is, you will find three alternative uses for it and each one will be greater than your first idea. Pearson invented a chewing

gum that never lost its flavour.’

‘No such thing.’

‘Of course there isn’t. You’d never need to spit it out.

The gum business would go under overnight. What he was really looking for was something to make gum disintegrate on the sidewalks in the rain. I knew him. He’s just one of the many bums on Hastings now. Total breakdown. No one even cares. That’s what happened at the Fortress and the missing kids are part of it.’

Genie knew what he was going to tell her. Knew everything suddenly. ‘They’re experimenting on these kids.’

Marshall nodded. ‘I can’t prove it. I don’t even want to believe it, but somehow the kids know how to hook up with the Fortress and—’

‘Rian thinks some kids are finding it on some chat forum. It’s aimed at kids thinking about suicide. Y’know, promising money for participating in experiments. All you have to do is get to some place near here and they’ll pick you up and pay you two thousand dollars.’

Marshall looked surprised. ‘I hope you’re kidding. I need to speak to my son about that. He’d be interested –he’s been trying to find a link for a while now.’

‘Promise any kid two thousand dollars for doing practically nothing, you’re going to get plenty of volunteers,’ Genie said with a shrug.

‘Not you though?’

‘I might be crazy, but experiments? No way. You really think all those kids on your bathroom wall were suicidal?

Spurlake’s a snake pit, but I don’t believe it.’

‘You and Rian made it thirty-six. That’s how it grows.

God knows how many more disappeared in the flood.’

Marshall searched his dressing gown pockets and took out his pipe. He stared at her for a while before speaking again.

‘If they ended up at the Fortress, those kids are dead, for sure. I don’t have any proof of course. Teleportation is an impossible quest. You can’t keep it stable. It’s possible there will never be enough computer memory to keep that much information stable for any length of time.’

Genie was thinking about a face on the wall. She was thinking about a boy in a glass building, a boy called Denis Malone. Was he a dream or was he real?

‘Denis Malone,’ she said suddenly. ‘Is he on your wall?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’

Genie left the table. Ran out of the room towards Marshall’s bathroom. She had an urgent need to see all their faces. She arrived short of breath, her chest was tight as a drum and the porridge still burned in her stomach.

She sat on the edge of the bath and stared at the wall in the gloom of the unlit bathroom.

Sixth picture. Denis looked just like he had in her dream. The room began to move, the pictures on the wall shook loose. Denis slid off his poster, other kids began to do the same. She was hallucinating, but she checked them all, the photographs were disappearing, one by one, they were going, sliding into the bath. Her eyes began to flutter, she felt light as a feather again, sensed she was falling.

Denis was kneeling beside her. She was back in the glass building, lying on the floor beside the computers. It was warm. Denis was smiling.

‘You came back.’

‘Denis?’

Other faces came into view. Some boys, a couple of girls, one she knew vaguely as Julia. They were almost naked or wearing odd one-piece body stockings.

Something was wrong with their skin, some had arms and necks that were red or burned like they’d been over exposed at a tanning store, but they all looked happy to see her.