“We know about Simran, Miss Walker. A shame. It was not part of the plan. Let’s see what we can do for you.”
“How do you know about her?”
“You have been watched.”
“The man in the moon. Is he real?”
“As real as you are, as I am.”
Celeste turned her head and saw several preservation jars on a shelving unit. Inside each was something tuberous, paste-grey and unsightly serpentine. Capillary-wires trailed in the amniotic fluid, hanging from loose vestigial skin that had developed over each growth. Duller, harder shapes could be seen embedded in the translucent semi-flesh: trace cybernetic elements.
Celeste realised what she was looking at. These were soulwires; naked and exposed to the outside world as they so rarely were. There were no official images, nascent or mature. To circulate them by public channel would get you zeroed in an instant – and she could see why. To think everyone on the Crawl had something like this nesting inside them since birth: enhanced cancers designed to supposedly enhance life itself.
What have we done to ourselves?
“Are we locked down?” the surgeon asked.
One of his compatriots nodded. A light flashed on overhead, a low-hanging halogen bulb suspended on a strip of old wiring. It illuminated the cubicle’s dingy, blood-spattered interior. She could’ve done without it.
“Now, let’s have a look at you.” The surgeon pushed a narco-patch into Celeste’s neck, below her jawline. “A little something to make things easier.”
She felt sensation draining away from her extremities. Everything went technicolour and widescreen before narrowing down to a zero point. She heard the surgeon’s voice as an echo working its way across the lifeless distance of infinite space, “Now then, Celeste Walker, who are you?”
She struggled to get words out over the dead weight of her tongue. “What d’you mean?”
“You are someone. You have a name. Tell me what it is. We need to know.”
“Celeste Walker.”
“No, that’s not your name. It’s a story, a fiction wrapped around a ghost. I want to get to know the real you. Who you really are.”
A flicker of light. The feeling of needles being forcibly pushed under fragile epidermal layers. Celeste tasted something bitter and narcotic on her tongue. “What did you give me?”
“A cocktail of hallucinogen and paralytic. It’ll take you places. Wherever we need to go until we find the real you. Once we’ve done that, we can get you fixed.”
“Fixed?”
“We put something in you a while ago but it seems to have gone a bit wrong. You know what I mean? Do you remember?”
The seed.
“We will find you. We know you’re in there.” The surgeon said.
Light was descending, bright and intense. It was touching her, finding its way in through the wound in her forehead that was and was not there. It was searching for the most elusive and damning of all things: the truth. She felt rather than heard the surgeon’s last words before she passed out. “We know the revolution is here and we want to burn it out of you.”
Chapter Twelve
Whenever she thought of Mom, it was more of the word than a person.
Each time, all it brought to mind was a woman with a lightly lined face and ragged hair, laughing on a sunny day under a clear blue sky. There were no more sunny days or clear blue skies, except as overlays. Mom felt like an edited memory, a commercial break to ease the mind, rather than someone who’d actually happened. But she must’ve existed for Celeste to remember her. Or am I that far gone? Have I ingested so many traces that I can’t even remember who I am or where I come from?
She was on a hill and there was parkland rolling away in every direction, broken only by copses, trees and bramble-bushes. In the distance, red mountains reared up in dark, crenellated folds. The sun shone under a flawless sky, and she was sitting on a gingham picnic blanket with a basket of ham, cheese, apples, and oranges within hand’s reach. Her fingers were sticky from the grapes she’d eaten, and there was an odour of burnt ozone in the air.
Mom was there, standing on the hill, but she wasn’t smiling. She was standing still, gazing out at the mountains. Celeste took an orange from the basket and began to peel it clumsily. When she’d finished and looked up again, the sky was growing dark around the faraway peaks. It wasn’t clouds. It was a darkness unlike night spreading out from behind them. No stars nested in it, and there was no sign of the moon. Celeste chewed on a slice of orange, got to her feet, and toddled over to Mom. She reached up and Mom took her hand. Mom smiled down at her, though it wasn’t the smile from the memory-edit. This was a sad smile, one that felt real. A happy smile can always be faked. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
Mom looked back towards the growing darkness and the unnamed colours growing in its wake as it spread across the sky. “There’s a storm coming, Celeste,” she said. “A very bad one. We should get away from here.”
There’s no place like home.
She picked up the picnic basket, and Celeste tried to help her roll up the blanket. They walked down the hill, away from the darkness, as birds began to fall from the sky. They passed animals – rabbits and foxes – lying still in the grass. Their eyes were blind glass marbles, and Celeste knew they were all dead.
“Mom, what’s happened to the animals?”
“It’s the storm, sweetheart. That’s why we’ve got to stay ahead of it. If we’re caught up in it, we’ll be dead too. We must hurry.”
As they ran, Celeste could see the colours of the world becoming those of a bad data transfer: corrupted yellow, degraded pink, and hazes of noise passed by like uncomfortable ghosts. Beyond the hill were trees – a small wood – and Mom led her in there, where all was silent. Hiding from shadows among shadows. How close the storm was, whether it was overhead or not, Celeste could no longer tell. The rustling in the trees could’ve been disturbed leaves or the ambient distortion of raw feedback. Mom had stopped running, so she stopped too. The way ahead was blocked. And there was a smelclass="underline" petrochemical and metal-sour, an odour that didn’t belong in a small wood.
“Mom, what is it?”
“Nothing, precious. You wait here for me. Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll come back for you.”
“Don’t go, Mom. It’s dark. I can’t see right. I don’t know where to go. I don’t like it.”
“I know. No-one does. That’s life. Wait and be patient. For me. Wait for me, my love.”
Mom’s hand was no longer in her own.
She’d waited. She’d been patient.
Mom hadn’t come back for her.
She’d been left in the dark, abandoned, alone.
I’ve never been to a park. I’ve never seen real trees. Never been lost in them. How can that be my last memory of her? Which traces and extracted elements came together to compose this?
It was a question she couldn’t answer. The traces were defused, gone, lost, dead. The next night, she’d probably dreamed a completely different life-story for herself. Perhaps she would have a father, or brothers and sisters. Then again, she might be an orphan or a rogue v-born.
Yesterday and today are different and the same. Memories come and go. Some are ours, and some not. The feeling that we have them is the only constancy. Every day, we try to remember something and find it’s not there, and our store gets emptier as life goes on. No wonder we made the Flood. All those free-floating pieces of other lives to latch onto and steal, so we could feel more whole and not notice how many holes there were in our own lives.
She closed her eyes and thought of Dad.