Closing the blinds in her little room, Jessie carefully slid the laptop from out of its hiding place. The plastic casing actually creaked as she opened up the lid and wiped dust from the grubby screen. She hit the power button and the battered old machine’s hard drive made an alarming grinding sound as it booted up. She should have gotten used to the noise by now of course but the skittering growl, like that of an ancient pet cat, never failed to give her the willies. It was a deeply unsettling sound to her, the sound of the island’s only unauthorized laptop threatening to die horribly, taking with it her only hope of hacking into the network. She felt nervous, twitchy, and gnawed on one of her fingernails. Jessie hoped she’d been convincing enough about the party, that Marla wouldn’t suspect anything. Getting inside the Big House, all that was true of course, but merely a by-product of what was really at stake here. The machine’s tiny screen flickered into glorious life (if slightly burned out through the layer of grime)—the expanse of pixels lighting up her face with the red glow of The Consortium Inc. corporate logo. She’d been tempted to grab a different desktop wallpaper off the net, a picture of the New York skyline, civilization, anything—heck, even a picture of The Hoff in his Speedos would do. But to do so would be too high a risk; she needed to stay within the intranet parameters wherever possible, only straying outside at the last moment. She remembered the thrill of first hacking the communications protocols and finding the island’s satellite uplink. It had taken a week of solid decoding—all so Vera could make a call home. What a mistake that had turned out to be. Jessie tried to put such bitter regrets to the back of her mind and focus on with the job in hand. Even after months away from the mainland, her grasp of operating code had not diminished. In fact on an archaic machine like this, which forced her to learn everything all over again, she could genuinely say her coding had improved. She involuntarily crossed her fingers, willing herself to be lucky when the time came. She would only have a few minutes to hack in and she’d better be ready. The laptop had better be ready too. Jessie hissed through her teeth as the dirty glow of the screen dipped suddenly. She had almost forgotten to plug the power cable into the wall socket to charge the baby up. Quickly rectifying the problem, she flicked on the wall power. The laptop’s little yellow light came on, just below the border of the screen, to tell Jessie the battery was charging. She kicked back tensely and smoked a cigarette, waiting for the light to turn green.
Chief of Security Fowler wrestled the pistachio nut from its shell and bit into it, never once taking his eyes off of the bank of monitor screens in front of him. The observation room, affectionately known as “The Snug”, was both his sanctuary and the nerve center of his entire security operation. He had as many eyes as a fly in this place, one screen giving him a view of sandy coastline, another floating high above the jetty. Dozens of cameras, dotted around the island, constantly feeding him visual intelligence about what the hell these goddamn Lamplighters (not to mention his own work-shy grunts) were up to. Still no goddamned sign of Anders. Fowler was beginning to suspect the worst. His best guy, washed out to sea or worse. What a waste.
Flicking the pistachio shell into the wastepaper basket, he selected another nut without looking away from the screens for one second. Fucking blink and you’ll fucking miss it, the foul-mouthed Senior Prison Warden used to say to him. His old boss was a man with a sense of humor so dry you needed to take a glass of water with every joke. Fowler marveled at the clockwork precision with which the screens clicked from one scene to the next, on a never-ending cycle of pan and track back, pan and track back. Looking at the screens, the Chief was reminded of the three-sixty degree view of the watchtower at the Prison—Bentham’s Panopticon, a favorite invention of Fowler’s from the nineteenth century. It featured a central watchtower around which prison cells were situated. The effect was such that the inmates began to police themselves, as they were unsure when they were being watched—either by the guards or by each other. Rather like the Panopticon, the cameras not only served to monitor, but to subtly discipline the island’s inhabitants. The Snug was his very own watchtower, and he was so very pleased whenever he saw the fruits of his labors being projected onto the screens in front of him. Like right now, for instance.
The Neuborn girl had surprised him by beginning a morning jogging routine, lasting exactly thirty minutes and therefore burning at least two hundred fifty calories. Give them a rulebook and they will learn self-discipline, it is in the nature of the subservient. He switched camera views, watching the girl working her way along the coast path, perspiration forming dark patches on her vest. He’d always liked to watch, to look. His eyes had done so from an early age—right from when he was a young boy. He recalled the time he’d been watching his mother from the garden, seeing her brushing her long black hair, unaware of his inquisitive gaze. His father had beaten him later that day with a thick leather belt. Fowler felt his cock stiffen as he watched Marla and leaned closer to the screen, biting into the pistachio nut. An unpleasantly sour taste filled his mouth like bile and, cursing, he spat the bad nut out into the waste paper basket. Wiping his mouth on a handkerchief he turned his attention back to the screen, which reflected the light of the room’s single light bulb. Marla was now a dark indistinct shape, like a trapped fly buzzing on the other side of his window onto the world. He reached out and touched the screen, a little frisson of static crackling against his fingers. Look, but don’t touch.
As she ran, Marla found herself thinking of London again. Taking a deep breath of fresh sea air (in through the nose, out through the mouth), she remembered the stink of the city. Subway air had been her least favorite aspect of metropolitan life, the strangely metallic smell and stagnant closeness was overbearing especially during the summer months. Up on street level it hadn’t been much better. Even on her walks through the park she could still taste the fumes from the millions of car exhausts clogging up the arterial city streets. Whenever summer came, albeit briefly, Marla had enjoyed the sun but dreaded seeing the dense menstrual smog hanging over the tower blocks in her neighborhood. Then when the rain came to wash the last rays away, the streets felt like they were disintegrating into a mass of slime. Rotting garbage and leaf matter pounded by relentless acid rain became an indistinct gloopy mess. This in turn was replaced by the grim black and brown sludge that passed for snow during a London winter. Running past a palm tree, Marla glanced up at it and recalled a holiday poster campaign that had, for what seemed like an eternity, adorned every bus shelter and every billboard in town. “Who would live in the city?” the caption asked, emblazoned in bold letters over a split screen view of a polluted industrial cityscape giving way to a deserted island beach. Weren’t they always deserted and yours only, in the ads? Jogging here now on Meditrine Island in the middle of nowhere, Marla smiled to herself, realizing she had found that very place the adverts always promised but never delivered. Deserted, and hers only. If your average city dweller even got a taste of the clean air here, they’d probably go into a kind of reverse toxic shock. And the peacefulness, the soothing, lulling quiet of it all might drive them to hurl themselves into the sea—thrashing wildly in the water just to make some noise, desperate to make some city-sense of the place. Marla’s ears tuned in on the little sounds that when combined, formed the subtle background noise of the island. The insects chirping and clicking like tiny watch mechanisms, birds singing to one another, their chorus an agreement that this was indeed paradise. In the distance the shushing lullaby of ocean waves massaged the shore. No, this wasn’t background noise, thought Marla. This was background atmos—the very sound a masseuse or aromatherapist might try to recreate using a crummy recording. This was the real thing. As Marla finally came to halt, panting from her exertions, she wondered if she could ever live in the city again after this place. Stretching out the burn from her leg muscles, she looked out to sea. Perhaps there was something out there for her on the mainland, but what it was she didn’t know right now. Maybe she had to come here first, to the island, in order to find it. Wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead, she prepared herself for the jog back to the summerhouse—her temporary home here in paradise.