He came to her distinct: a dark-faced, bespectacled man with receding tightly curled hair. She remembered him as thin, quiet and kind, but also angry underneath it all – not at her, or at Mom, but at the world they were a part of. He hated the Crawl. He wanted it to come to an end. He worked, but never said what he was working on. It was just his work. The secrecy of it had intrigued young Celeste.
One night, she’d dialled down her comp-couch so she didn’t sleep and could see what he did. He was going into the Flood after everyone was asleep. When she asked him, he said that he was trying to wake up the Crawl. That even though it was a machine – many machines – it was alive in its own way, just sleeping. It needed someone to wake it up, but he was afraid that he was too old and not strong enough to do it. She remembered him placing his hands on her shoulders and saying solemnly, “The revolution is in you, Celeste.”
Then, they came and took him away.
She remembered crying when the men in black fibe-suits took him out onto the platform and pushed him into a hub-car she’d never seen before or since; it was a quarter the size of the usual hub-car, gleaming under the surrounding light pollution, and its windows were tinted black so she couldn’t see inside. See what happened to her Dad. That day, she learned the word opaque for the first time, even though that day never actually happened.
She never heard from this Dad again. She wasn’t sure what happened to the Mom that went with this Dad either. She’d dreamed three different versions of what came next. Mom bringing different men back to the module and sleeping with them while Celeste dialled her couch all the way up, so as not to hear what they were up to. Mom walking out of the module one day and never coming back. Mom being killed in a pressure-elevator accident, crushed to death.
Real memory was in there somewhere, but Celeste had not been able to work out where it was. The deeper she dug, the more it hurt, like picking away at scabs with dirty, broken fingernails. A life lost, and a family imagined – such was the way of things when you’d been a chaser for so long. The Real was no longer real. Your hopes and dreams were multiple choice.
She remembered familial designations, rather than names. She wasn’t even sure she remembered their faces correctly. Too many faces were on offer, all lo-quality. None to choose from. She remembered waking up one morning and being alone. There were people who should’ve been there but weren’t. There was space around her that should’ve been occupied but was vacant. She missed them, had been alone since they left, and was unsure how to stop being alone. So there it was – her life and history: a vague sense of loss with a memory of abandonment that was itself a hollow shell. It’d been so long since she’d brought the truth to mind, it had rotted away inside her. So many other lives had passed through her they’d wiped the last traces of who she was clean away. There was nothing left.
All she had was her name. Celeste Walker.
I am Celeste Walker.
Please. Don’t let them take that away from me too.
“Nothing. There’s nothing here. Just bits and pieces. It’s been obliterated. There’s no point in going on with this.”
The light was extinguished. The surgeon removed the face-mask and goggles, showing her face to Celeste. Underlit gloom revealed the girl she kept on seeing: the one from the drop, the one in the trace. Wherever she went, this Grace followed.
“Who are you?” Celeste demanded. “Why do this to me? Make me remember I’m nothing, a nobody walking around in alien skin? Who are you?”
Grace merely smiled down at her, “I’m sorry. I don’t think we’ve met.”
Sensation was burning through Celeste. Painful, brutal sensation. The need to do something about what’d been done to her. And something more than that: how could this Grace not remember her?
You are nothing to me.
They’d taken the straps off while she’d been unconscious. That’d been a mistake.
Celeste threw herself at Grace. She threw her back against the cubicle’s wall. Grace’s skull cracked hard against the carbon surface, and she slumped to the floor, leaving an ugly smear of red behind. Her face rolled to the side and Celeste watched the girl’s features degrade, leaving behind a pale, blond man with bad teeth. No-one she knew.
“Shit.”
She’d killed again. This time on purpose – or had she?
Celeste staggered over and kicked the body. She made contact with metal, hurting her toes. Peeling back the man’s med-tunic, she found the torso beneath was a poly-alloy shell. She pulled at the face, and it came away in her hands, along with the hair, leaving a droid-skull of reinforced steel behind. Its mouth was set in a hideous leer. The red smear on the wall was discharge from the processing unit in the cranium. It’d smashed open on impact. Not Grace. Not a man. A programmed surgeon. Layer over layer over layer. Nothing was constant. Everything was in flux, changing and changing. Fluid and moving like the Flood. The wheels on the bus go round and round – but what happens when they come off?
“People die,” Celeste whispered to herself.
The lighting in the cubicle winked out. All she could see was fragmented after-images reflected off the grinning teeth of the droid’s head.
Stop laughing at me.
She could hear voices shouting outside, echo chasing echo back and forth in all directions.
The door to the cubicle cycled open.
Disoriented, she stumbled out into the dark and started to run.
Chapter Thirteen
Celeste wondered how much time she’d lost and how deep she was. The Crawl’s buried interior spaces – where the wipe-clinics resided – were populated only by gloom and neon ambience filtered in from the outside. She passed along platforms where hub-cars hung like rusted ruins. Nothing passed this way anymore. Holes gaped where numerous modules had once been. All dropped. All zeroed. All gone. It was all depleted this far down. It meant something, but she didn’t want to know what. This was too deep for her, far too deep. The surviving modules were empty, abandoned wrecks. When she looked into one of them, she saw a child sitting alone, watching an empty screen. The child looked up and held her in place with its saltwater gaze. “You need to be careful,” the child said, “the man in the moon is watching, always watching down us here.”
Celeste walked on quickly, before the child could say more.
She passed stacks piled high with remnants of the old: VHS video recorders and cathode-ray tube television sets – not a single one in working order, all little more than preserved shells. She was surrounded on all sides by monuments to the past.
This stuff was legacy. It was where everything had started: the Crawl, the Flood, soulwires. Without the cathode ray tube, none of this would be here. Television, the very first overlay. Light viewing. The big reality-escape, which went on and on growing until the escape became better than reality. The revolution was lost then, and people took over their own oppression. Self-regulation began, and the road to the future was laid open. She went over and touched one of the television screens. It felt warm rather than cold, was clean, smooth and gave off a slight frisson of static as if it’d been switched on recently. Strange.
Just because something is old, should you throw it away?
Should we stop loving it because it’s broken-down?
No, she thought, we just leave things to rot, inside or out, and try to forget they exist.
The television set burst into life.
Celeste stared at her own face.