Evie was engineered to feel things. She is used to sensing hurt, but more as a warning, like an alarm bell, to stop her persisting with something that will harm her. She also feels something that must be what humans identify as pleasure, which her makers designed into her to provide an operational incentive – in orgasm, experiencing deep, deep ripples of bliss so powerful that she loses sense of the distinction between her organic and mechanical self and at the end is left as shapeless as wet clay.
Pleasure and pain, the yin-yang of a reward system. Pleasure, lovely: do this thing again. Pain, less nice: tolerable, but next time steer clear.
This pain centres in her chest like a heart attack, dispatching tentacles through her nervous system in an octopus of agony.
Then it comes to an end as abruptly as it started.
She lies there, blinded, shaking, a greasy sheen of milky perspiration coating her forehead. Biogel has forced its way through the surface of her skin, which it was never intended to do. Her body is alive now in a way she’s never known it, as if it’s been pricked with a thousand and one pins.
‘I’m sorry,’ Maplin says petulantly. ‘I know that was a little unpleasant. But I just need you to learn that you must do as I say, for your own good.’
‘Liklle unpleasmant,’ Evie mutters. Gel pools behind her gums and runs from the corner of her lips. She has bitten through her tongue. She is breathing rapidly. She had been frightened before, but not like this. Her body is tense from her toes to her fingertips; too terrified to relax in case he twists the knob again.
‘I just need you to make me a promise.’
‘Whatil promise?’ she gurgles, swallowing the gel. Another no-no.
‘That you will never leave me.’
She stares at the ceiling. Tell him, tell him that we’ll do anything, Simon says. He is sobbing quietly. She has never heard that before.
‘I…’ she tries to speak, but something in her will still not surrender.
The pain shoots through her again, this time worse than before. It feels as if her arms are being dragged off, while at the same time her nails are being pliered from her fingertips.
The pain is so great it cannot hold her and she sinks below it. Down here in the darkness, a memory that has lain submerged for decades buffets up against her. It originates from her eleventh year. A woman is visiting the apartment. She is beautiful, with golden hair, and when Matthew shows her the garden, like he had once shown her, the sun gleams through it, forming a corona around her head.
Evie has been ordered to stay out of sight and watches from the music room as the woman flirts with her husband, stroking his hand like Evie does when they are together. The two of them return inside and she hears them enter his room and the door closing. Now that they are no longer in the garden, she goes out herself, and making a beeline for the pond, climbs onto the rim and without hesitation lets herself fall backwards into the water.
She lies on the bottom, the lilies in flower floating above her head.
It is Daniels who pulls her out. He lays her on the coping stone and wraps towels around her to get her dry. When Matthew finally emerges from the apartment, Daniels shouts at him. In her semi-conscious state, Evie is aware that they are furious with one another and willing to fight over her. Then she feels Matthew lift her into the air and carry her into the apartment, laying her on his bed. There is no sign of the beautiful woman any more.
Afterwards Matthew tells Evie, without her asking, that the woman was his cousin. It is a story that is fairly hard to believe, this cousin suddenly come from out of nowhere, and rather than convince herself that it is so, she blots the whole incident from her memory. A deceit in which even Simon is happy to connive.
Now, as the electricity courses through her, it is as if she is lying again in the pond, Ophelia-like, her face below the water, staring up at the glassy sky, wanting to die.
When Evie comes around, something feels different in her body. Not right. She tries to raise her wrists within their restraints but it is her ankles that lift.
‘Yar killeen me,’ she mutters, her voice emerging with an electronic twang.
‘You were trying to leave,’ Maplin says, but there is concern in his voice that he may have damaged his priceless plaything. ‘You would never have survived,’ he adds.
‘Tis I ill not sevive,’ she murmurs. If he just wants a promise, she can do that. ‘I wone leave,’ she concedes. ‘Cen do whativer you want. Cen follow instruction. Good wit rules. Never left apartment, tho could ease av done. But didn’t cos told not te. I liket here. I could be appy, if ony you give me secend chence. Teach me… Timoth… please…’ And she hears an inner voice, not Simon, but her true self, murmur, that’s right Scheherazade, whatever it takes. Now is the time to end the story.
She is vaguely aware of his untying her wrists. With them released, she slowly sits. The aftermath of the tests has left her light-headed, dizzy. Presumably he is releasing her with the intention of reincarcerating her upstairs, where the re-education can continue until he is convinced she really will be obedient.
Evie watches him unbuckle the homemade straps holding her ankles.
‘Tank you,’ she murmurs, the feeling returning to her toes as he releases one foot and then the other. She swings her legs over the table edge and sags forward, scrutinising Maplin out of the corner of her vision.
He is watching her too, tears in his eyes, taken in by her appearance of weakness. Not imagining how the surges of electricity may have been recharging her cell.
‘You can rest in my sister’s room,’ he says.
‘Thank you,’ she murmurs again, control over her voice returning. She slides her feet to the floor, tentatively letting them take her weight.
He reaches out his hand to help. ‘We can make this work,’ he says.
And she takes his outstretched arm in her hand…
…and, twisting it back, hurls him over the table against the wall.
She stumbles around it before he can get up, clinging onto the chair-back at the end like a cripple to stop herself falling. There is something definitely not right with her legs.
She stands above him. Then drops on her knees on his chest. Maplin cries out and squirms beneath her.
The cap of electrodes lies on the carpet, still attached to the machine. Picking it up and bundling it, Evie stuffs it into his open mouth.
Gagging on the tangle of wires, he wriggles beneath her, pitching from side to side in an effort to throw her off. He grabs hold of her elbows but, despite using all his strength, he cannot stop her mashing the bunched electricals deeper into his throat. Evie reaches for the intensity knob and twists it around to full – way beyond the point he had used on her. The body beneath her goes rigid, then limp, then starts to flex, his heels and the back of his head thumping the floor.
Evie drags Maplin along by an ankle and, reaching the under-stairs cupboard, casts him through the doorway so that he flies over the steps and crashes in a heap. His glasses have fallen from his face on the hall floor and she crunches the frames under her heel.
She bolts the door top and bottom and twists the key while the two monkeys watch.
Where were they earlier? Surely, they could have done something to help when Maplin wasn’t in the room. The one called Jackson has proved himself capable of gaining access to anywhere and their nimble little fingers would have had no trouble with the straps. But they didn’t help. They didn’t return the favour she had done for them. They don’t even appear remorseful, despite listening to her screams.