He runs a hand across his broad brow. He feels slightly feverish. And despite the Boss’s white, humming presence next to him, slightly alone.
The conversations he has monitored in-house show how far the creeping poison of disillusion has spread. Every organisation contains a hard-core of secret doubters, and the Corporation is no exception; they are low-level operators, mostly – the types that get referred to R and R, and end up questionnaired out of the system altogether.
But suddenly, they’re getting numerous. Vocal too. The e-mails are insolent little texts – sarcastic, nit-picking, accusatory. Some signed, others arriving anonymously, through back-routes. The kind of toxic electronic paperwork which – only a few months ago – would have led to need-profiling. What solution, they ask, with thinly veiled hostility, does the Boss have up her sleeve, when it comes to dealing with the eco-geological crisis brought on by the waste leaks? As Facilitator General, might he liaise with the Liberty Machine to provide them with an answer? The atmosphere at Head Office is becoming tainted with a mutant mistrust; the lingering bad smell of lost nerve. In his darker, more paranoid moments, Pike has almost wondered whether some kind of… network might be operating. Oh, he has no proof. A wink here, a twisted glance there, a stifled whisper as he enters a room. It only takes a couple of dysfunctionals to start an insurrection: look at what the geology lobby tried to stir up a few years back, before the flush-out. Leo Hurley was eliminated long ago. Hannah Park likewise. But –
But. He reaches for his coffee, sips, winces.
– Fallings from us, vanishings, he murmurs. Blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised…
He leans against the Boss’s smooth white flank and stares out of the floor-to-ceiling window across the cityscape. It is a view to die for.
– High instincts before which our mortal nature did tremble like a guilty thing surprised…
Is our own mortal nature the problem? Is that why the unfathomable 15 per cent seems to be doing its own thing?
As morning breaks over Atlantica, centimetre by centimetre the flat grey rectangle of the Sea Hero slides closer to land.
LIBERTY DAY 6 A.M.
The Libertycare system looks set for a triumphant victory in the United States, mouths Craig Devon earnestly from Tilda Park’s television. But she can’t hear him; she keeps the sound right down, and anyway she’s wearing earplugs to block the sirens which have been shrieking all night. Despite the recent upheavals on Atlantica, Libertycare’s global status has flourished, Craig Devon is saying. Tilda passes her hand over her eyes: how’s anyone supposed to sleep? As the polls close in the United States after an unprecedented turnout, Earl Murphy is keen to stress that Atlantica’s terrorism crisis is no more than a ‘people hiccup’. If it’s the only problem the island has faced in ten years, he argues, and it’s down to humans, then it confirms what he has been saying all along…
Tilda removes her little earplugs and measures out an early morning Vanillo in her sloping apartment. What we are witnessing today, finishes Craig Devon, is the dawn of a new era.
Adapting her walk to the ever-changing gravitational whims of her home was hard at first, but Tilda managed. It doesn’t take much to factor a simple tilt into your gait, once you get accustomed to the idea. It’s the rest that’s hard.
On the shelf above the TV, next to the miniature pill-chest and the hologram of Hannah where Tilda has trained her eyes not to rest for long, stands the spirit level, its elliptic bubble trapped in fluorescent green liquid. Tilda hobbles to the shelf, picks it up, turns it round, puts it back and watches the bubble move through the oil and settle. Seven degrees: severe subsidence, just as Benedict Sommers warned when he first told her about the Sect and its plans. St Placid is the worst hit, being closest to sea level. And the Hoggs to blame. You don’t realise how smoothly daily life runs until it’s disrupted.
And it’s been disrupted all right. Tilda takes a swig of 68 proof Vanillo and winces, then feels the sweet after-tang velvet its way down. She’ll get a Gourmet Special delivery, later, foodwise. She doesn’t bother choosing from the menu any more; too much hassle. She just orders number seventeen, that way you get your little surprises; she’s had everything from potato skins to bisque. Sometimes she’ll switch on the TV, but the soap operas have died on her. To look at them, you’d think the scriptwriters and the actors have started to despise their work. Even the medical crises look weak and fake, as though while he’s shooting the resuscitation scene, the director’s on his mobile, looking for another job. And the commercials have definitely lost their X factor. She used to love that one for diabetic butterscotch, where Nefertiti hurtles out of a giant fridge, bristling with frozen popsicles. But the Nefertiti woman’s doing rape alarms now, and the doctor from Moment of Crisis, he’s selling surveillance equipment. And as for the news –
There’s a new drug Sid Hogg’s started peddling, especially aimed at the elderly. One capsule and you’re hooked for the rest of your life, because it’s a parasite, and your blood’s the host; she’s seen the diagrams.
Her eyes flit to the window. She used to see joggers going past. She misses them, now they don’t come any more. They’re stuck at home too, most likely, doing it on an exercise machine instead, put off the streets by the muggings and the toxic leaks.
She can’t summon up the words to talk about what happened. The shame and the grief that mash inside her, they block her throat. She picked up the phone to the Customer Hotline once, opened her mouth, but all that came out was a gutted croak like a euthanasia victim breathing their last. If you can’t even speak to the Hotline about it, how can you begin to talk to your friends? It’s the thought of their pity that makes it worse. They say there’s not a family in the country hasn’t been affected in some way, so it’s not as though she’s alone. Oh, there are all sorts of support groups. Customer Care organises them. Or you can set up your own little circle, register it with Libertycare – she’s had all the bumf through her door, and Benedict’s been on about it.
It’s just, those groups are for losers, aren’t they?
The tears well up. They say the colour of death is pure white. That it’s the last thing you’ll see. All those years, trying to get rid of Hannah’s Block, and then the Hoggs do it, easy as pulling a plug! Betrayal’s a slippery slope, and Hannah was in up to her neck before she knew it. She even defended them! After the documentary, she said they weren’t that bad!
Another swig. Vanilla tang. Blunt feeling that comes after. Tilda would like to be small enough to dive into the bottle, and drown, and become pickled inside it like a dumb, innocent gherkin. It’d numb the grief, maybe. Dull the anger that attacks her sometimes, unexpectedly – a vicious bite, the kind a spoilt lap-dog might give you out of sheer yappy spite. Cruel and shameful as a senior sexual urge.
Hannah’s visit to the crater was captured on video. The CCTV cameras at the purity zone picked up everything, apparently: how Hannah used her Liberty pass to get in, how she added enzymes to the filtration system, how, when the security staff spotted her, she ran and slipped and –
– Please stop, Tilda begged the bereavement associate in a tiny whisper. I don’t think I –