And so, nearly twenty years ago, SafetyNet was born.
The company was founded by a biochemist who combined scientific ability with genius for cold-hearted, bloody-minded pragmatism which I trust will earn him a long stretch in the hottest corner of Hell. Almost certainly not, though. I’m sure Heaven takes Amex just as readily as everywhere else.
The idea was very simple. “Hey,” this man said to himself, one long dark evening in the lab, “we’ve got a problem here. People keep fucking up bits of themselves, and their bodies respond with a hard-line ‘accept no substitutes’ approach. Maybe we have to stop trying to fob them off. Perhaps we should try giving them something they’ll recognize.”
This biochemist approached his richest clients, got a positive response and venture capital, and so the Farms were born. For a sum which is not generally known, but which must be well in excess of a million dollars, when you have a child you can take out a little life insurance for it. You do this by creating a life, and then systematically destroying it.
After the child has been conceived, surgeons remove a couple of cells from the emerging fetus. These cloned cells are grown in a variety of cultures, test tubes, and incubators, the process matched to normal development as closely as possible. As soon as the fake twin can breathe, it is left with droids for a while, until it’s got the basic motor skills and perception stuff worked out. Then they bring it out to a Farm, put it in a tunnel, and forget about it until they need it.
Twice a day, a medic droid checks vital responses and gives each spare a carefully designed package of foodstuffs to ensure that it grows and develops in tandem with its twin. Sometimes the droids’ll get them to move around a bit, so their muscles don’t atrophy. Apart from that, all the spares know is one long endless twilight of blue heat, the mindless noise of other spares, and the slow blur of meaningless movement that takes place around them. Then, when a spare’s real-life twin is injured, or gets ill, the alarm goes off and an ambulance comes. The doctors find the right spare, cut off what they need, and then shove it back in the tunnel. There it lies, and rolls, and persists, until they need it again.
Example. There was a spare on the Farm called Steven Two, and I read his records. His brother out in the big room was a real piece of work. When he was ten he smashed up his right hand by getting it crunched in a car door. Okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely his fault, but the way life is you’re supposed to have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The real Steven never had to. The ambulance came and the doctors put Steven Two’s arm on the table and hacked his hand off at the wrist. They went away, and sewed it onto Steven. A little discomfort for a while, some tiresome physio sessions, but he ended up whole again.
At sixteen, Steven rolled his car while drunk and lost his leg, but that was okay because the doctors could come back and take one of Steven Two’s. After the operation the orderly carried him back to the tunnel, leaned him against the wall just inside the door, and locked it. Steven Two tried to shamble forward, fell on his face, and remained that way for three days.
At seventeen, Steven got a pan full of scalding water in the face from a local woman he’d been cheating on. Not only cheating on, in fact: He’d stolen her car and forced her to have sex with two of his friends. But Steven probably looks pretty much all right now, because they came and took his brother’s face away.
That was what the spares’ lives were. Living in tunnels waiting to be whittled down, while mangled and dissected bodies stumped around them, clapping hands with no fingers together, rubbing their faces against the walls and letting shit run down their legs. Once every two days, with no warning or explanation, the tunnels would fill with disinfectant. A warning would have been irrelevant, of course, because none of the spares could speak. None of them could read. None of them could think. The tunnels were a butcher’s shop where the meat still moved occasionally, always and forever bathed in a dead blue light.
They have no clothes, no possessions, no family. They’re like dead code segments, cut off from the rest of the program and left alone in darkness. All they have are the Farm droids, and the caretaker, I guess—though they’re generally worse than nothing. There’s no “duty of care” crap in the caretaker’s job description. All he does is sit and do nothing at all while the worst parts of his soul fester and grow. Some let people in at night—for a small fee, of course. It was rumored that one of the shadowy venture capitalists was a big customer of this illicit service. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh while they watched the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them.
When I woke, Ratchet was vacuuming the vomit up from around my face, and a pot of coffee was already on the stove. The sounds and smell filtered slowly into my consciousness, like water through semiporous rock. Eventually I got up, showered, and dressed, and then I sat at the table as I always did. My brain felt as if it had been roughly buffed with coarse sandpaper, I had the chills from the Rapt I’d taken, and my hands were shaking so much I spilled coffee all over the table.
But this time it was different. For the first time I was thinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.
For better or worse, I made them.
That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I picked my way through the bodies and chose some of the children that had been least used so far. In the first tunnel I found David and Ragald, in the second Suej and Nanune, and in the third, Jenny. At that stage all were unharmed apart from Suej, who’d lost a swath of skin on her thigh. I brought them out of the tunnels and into the main room, and got them to sit on chairs. Tried to, anyway: They’d never seen chairs before. David and Nanune fell off immediately, Suej slumped forward onto the table, and Ragald stood up unsteadily and careened away across the room. Eventually, I herded them into a corner where they sat with their backs up against the wall. By then they’d stopped squinting against the relative brightness of the light and were goggling wide eyed at the complexity of the room—its surfaces and objects, its space, the fact the walls did not slope.
I squatted down in front of them and held their faces in turn, staring into their eyes, trying to find something in there. There was nothing, or as good as nothing, and for a moment my resolution wavered. They’d gone too long with nothing, missed out on too many things. Most of them couldn’t use their limbs properly. They sat unsteadily, like babies whose bodies had been accidentally stretched by years.
I wasn’t qualified to make up everything they had lost, or perhaps even any part of it. I couldn’t make a reasonable stab at my own life, never mind give them one of their own. The wave of decisiveness I’d ridden all morning was ebbing fast, leaving me adrift in a tired and anxious dead zone.
“What are you doing?”
I turned, heart thumping. Ratchet and the medic droid were standing in the doorway. For a moment I built a lie to tell, but then gave up. People always think that it’s what happens when you’re awake that shapes your life and makes decisions, but it isn’t. When you’re asleep and go away, things happen. That time counts too, and in my case the last seventy-two hours had altered me. Unless something changed, I was going to have to go back out into the world. It would probably be the death of me, but if I stayed and watched the children slowly dismantled over the years I would die just as surely. I would be no different from them except I didn’t live in the tunnels.
That’s what I told myself, anyway. But I didn’t think I could have left the Farm then, couldn’t have faced going back outside again. Don’t ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.