GLAZE (25 page)

He slides off the sideboard and walks over, reaches into the bag to pull out a sweet then takes a seat next to me. It’s shaped like an animal of some sort, a monkey I think. He considers it then pops it into his mouth. ‘Nope. Not me.’
 

I throw my hands up, sending bright green and red gums flying over the duvet.
 

‘What?’ Ethan says, crouching down to pick up the sweets.

‘You is what! I don’t know anything about you. You’re so... so bloody mysterious all the time. It’s annoying.’

‘And you’d rather know every single thing about me, is that it? No secrets, like they promise on Glaze. Like Ryan promised you?’ He laughs, an angry exhalation of breath that lets me know exactly what he thinks about Ryan and his secrets.
 

I face him. ‘Not everything. Just something. All I know is you’re called Ethan and you seem to be living like a mushroom.’ I indicate the damp walls with a wave of my hand.
 

‘A mushroom?’ Ethan says, shocked. ‘A mushroom?’ He sounds amused now, a smile creeping over his face. He bites his bottom lip like he’s trying to stop himself from laughing.
 

‘Yes, in the dark. Like a mushroom.’

We laugh and it feels so good, so normal. Ethan sits next to me, closer this time, and nudges me in the side.
 

‘OK, Ms Nosy, what do you want to know?’

I look at him. ‘Now that you ask, I can’t think of a single thing!’ This sets us off again. And I know we’re laughing because we’re both scared and exhausted and I, for one, am a heartbeat away from crying and I know that if I start, I may never stop.
 

I lie back on the lumpy bed and Ethan lies next to me, as our laughing fades away. Our bodies are only inches apart, the backs of our hands resting against each other. I reach out a finger and hook it around one of his.
 

‘Tell me how you ended up here.’
 

I slide over an inch so I can lean on his shoulder. Ethan is uncomfortable with the intimacy at first, then he wraps his arm around my shoulder, and begins to speak.

22

‘MUM AND DAD DIVORCED
when I was ten,’ he says, his fingertips brushing against my collarbone. ‘After that I spent most of my time bouncing from one to the other, like a ping-pong ball. One weekend here. One weekend there. Which was OK by me. At least it meant I didn’t need to listen to them screaming at each other anymore.’

‘Wasn’t it difficult?’ I ask. At least living with only Zizi, even with all her weirdness, meant I never had to deal with anything like that.
 

Ethan shrugs and the movement pulls me even closer into him. ‘Not really. I kind of liked it. It was almost like having two lives. But then, Dad lost his job and started drinking. Don’t get me wrong. He didn’t hit me or anything. In fact, he was great. Too great maybe. He’d let me go out and do whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t wake him up when I got home.’

As he talks, I find my grip on Kiara’s feed weakening and new images start to seep in. Glimpses of people drinking, staring into glasses of golden liquids, hoping to find some answers in there. I hop from one feed to another, like stones across a lake.

‘That kind of freedom is a bit of a trip, you know?’ Ethan says with a soft sigh. ‘No one telling you where to be and who to hang with. Mum was the total opposite. She didn’t want me staying out late. I didn’t understand that she only wanted me to be safe. And I hated her for it. She hated me a bit too, I think. I don’t blame her. I made her life hell.

‘So I spent more and more time with Dad and less and less time with her. Mostly, I spent time with my friends. Hanging out on the streets. And that worked just fine for everyone. Till…’ he pauses. And I sense he’s weighing up whether to finish or not.
 

‘Till what?’

‘Till I got arrested.’ He looks down at his shoes.
 

A month ago, I would have recoiled from him. I would have been afraid. But then, a month ago, I was living in a make-believe world where only the bad guys got arrested. I was an idiot. I squeeze his hand, letting him know I’m not going anywhere.
 

‘It wasn’t for anything bad,’ he says. ‘Or at least, I didn’t think it was. It started with me and some friends hacking vidboards and uploading our own stuff. Loops we’d made of ourselves skateboarding. Tracks we’d mixed. Whatever. Playing, really, cos we could. A lot of us didn’t have access privileges at home, after the government put lock downs on any IP addresses found pirating. And we didn’t have Corina or Logan’s skills to get our way around the blocks. So this was our way of fighting back.’

‘You were an adjacker? Zizi was always complaining about you guys and her wasted media spend.’
 

‘I’ll tell her I’m sorry when I get the chance.’
 

The memory of Zizi lying on the bed, her eyes dead and empty, blends in with an image from the feed; a man preaching about the end of days. I know that Ethan may never get a chance to apologise, and even worse, neither may I.

‘One night,’ Ethan continues, ‘I was uploading a vid when I felt a tap on my shoulder. The police were always bothering us, searching us in the street without warrants, telling us to move on. So I wasn’t bothered.
 

‘But when I turned around, I saw it wasn’t the normal five-oh. They were dressed in these stupid pillar-box hats and blue jumpsuits. It was the first time I’d seen a member of WhiteShield. I laughed in their faces as they told me that I was defacing WhiteInc company property, and I’d have to come with them. I stopped laughing after they slapped cuffs on me and dragged me away in their van. It didn’t matter how much I screamed about my rights. Because the truth was, I didn’t have any rights. I just didn’t know it.’

The shame of being part of the WhiteInc family eats away another layer of who I was. I thought WhiteShield were protecting society, when they were only protecting the company’s interests.
 

‘What did your parents do?’ I say.
 

‘Dad wasn’t much use when they called him; he was stinking drunk. Mum actually encouraged them to take me away. She said that some discipline would be good for me.’ He sounds angry and bitter. But more sad than either.

‘And that’s how I wound up being sent to a radical new rehabilitation programme. Tabula Rasa. It means blank slate,’ he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
 

Without willing it, I’m hit with a tonne of data on Tabula Rasa. Reports from the press on how it was the bright new hope for young offenders. Files from the programme itself. Files no one outside the programme should have access to. I let Ethan carry on talking while I sort through them all.
 

‘By entering I had my record wiped clean, along with everything else. Although I didn’t know that then, didn’t know that by becoming part of the programme I technically no longer existed. Blank slate was right.’
 

That explained why I couldn’t find any record of him when I looked. No public records anyway. I wonder if he knows about all the files Tabula Rasa kept. The ones I now have access to.
 

‘When I first arrived,’ he says. ‘I thought I had it made. The building was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. So clean and white. And most of the other boys in there were cool. Like me, mostly. Bored troublemakers, rather than your typical nutters. Although there were a few of them in there too. There were about five hundred of us in all. Totally cut off from the outside world. No internet. No phone calls. It was tough at first, but after a while, I liked it. The silence. The focus.
 

‘We had classes. Took exams. Exercised in the yard. Grew stuff in the garden. I actually enjoyed all the hard work.’
 

The image Ethan paints contradicts what I’m seeing: films of pale-faced boys in white laboratories; reports about success ratios; plans on how to roll out the programme across the country. Across the world. One word is repeated again and again.
Compliance
.
 

I focus my mind on searching for a name: Ethan Fisher.
 

The shock of finding him after all of this time makes me sit up. I stare into the darkness of the hotel room and at Ethan’s file.
 

He looks so young in his photo, he can’t have been more than twelve. Thirteen.
 

‘What? What is it?’ Ethan says, sitting up. ‘Has White found us?’
 

‘Your file,’ I say. ‘From Tabula Rasa.’
 

‘No,’ he shouts, jumping up and off the bed. ‘Don’t read it.’
 

There are two of him. The footage of him back then, scowling at whoever filmed it. The him now, begging me not to go any further. But I have to. As much as it feels like a betrayal, I have to. Because I think I’ve worked out the truth behind Tabula Rasa.

// E
THAN
F
ISHER
APPEARS
TO
BE
ESPECIALLY
SUSCEPTIBLE
TO
SUGGESTION
AND
WOULD
MAKE
A
PERFECT
SUBJECT
FOR
CHIP
IMPLANTATION
. //

‘Implantation?’ I say.
 

Ethan grabs at his hair. Despair distorts his face. ‘You weren’t supposed to know.’
 

‘Not meant to know what? Are you on Glaze?’ He shakes his head and turns away. I stand up and pull him back around. ‘Tell me. Are you chipped!’

‘No. I mean, yes. But not I’m not on Glaze. You’re still safe with me.’ He lets his hands fall to his sides and he drops his head.
 

‘Then what kind of chip is it?’
 

Ethan bites down on his lip, then arches his neck towards me and pulls his hair aside. I brush the last few strands away and feel three raised dots, in the shape of a triangle, buried under the skin behind his ear. ‘We didn’t have a choice about being part of it. In T-Raz, you had no choice in anything. It didn’t work like the chips do now. We didn’t see anything. We heard it. They put a chip in our heads and…’
 

‘And what?’
 

‘We could hear each other.’ He sighs, and it’s filled with a sad longing. ‘Chat with kids in cells three floors down, on the other side of the compound. At first it was just noise. But then you started to get control over it. Tuning in to different voices.’
 

‘Like a radio?’ I say.
 

‘Kind of. But then there was the voice,’ he says, reaching up to rub the side of his neck. ‘It bypassed your ears and boomed straight into your heart. Like the voice of God speaking to you or something. I can’t tell you how amazing it felt. It was like being wrapped in the warmest hug you can ever imagine. It felt like you were finally… I don’t know. Part of something. A family. And like you’d never be alone again. That voice could have asked me to do anything, and I’d have done it.’
 

‘Did it? Did it ask you to do anything?’

‘Me? No, not really. Just to be kind to each other. To behave. Not to swear.’ He chews on his lip, as if there’s something he doesn’t want to say. Something he’s frightened of saying.
 

‘What? Tell me.’
 

He walks over to the window, unable to look at me. ‘The voice.’
 

‘What about it?’

‘I know now who it was. Who was behind the whole thing.’ He stares through a crack in the boarded-up window on to the street outside. A car rumbles by, its lights illuminating the room like a strobe.
 

I know the answer without him even having to say. All the files on T-Raz were tagged with the WhiteInc logo.
 

‘Max.’

I sit back on the bed, sinking into it. After a while of staring into the darkness, Ethan comes and sits next to me.
 

‘But why? Why would he do that to you?’
 

I remember when I was young and Zizi and Max were just getting to know each other. They’d talk about the power of community and creating social bonds and how much better the world was going to be once we all worked together. And about the family he was going to build himself.
 

‘Why do you think, Petri? We were his guinea pigs. His lab rats.’ He picks at a loose thread on the duvet, his hands shaking slightly. ‘When I met Logan and Corina, they were digging around in Glaze for the fun of it, to see how they could use it. But I saw how it operated. How it was changing people, making them comply, bending them to the will of society. Exactly like life in T-Raz.’ He meets my eyes once more. ‘Locked up, cut off from the world, we had no other influences to muddy his results. We were a closed system. That’s what Logan called it, where he’d test viruses before sending them live. A test ground before launching his dream worldwide. That’s all we were to Max.’

I cover my face with my hands, so ashamed that I ever trusted Max. The man who would do anything to protect his network. He turned five hundred boys into an experiment, used people like disposable tools, just to learn something. Just to perfect his vision of a united world.

I can’t bear to see any more of the images from Max’s experiment. I reach out and find Kiara’s stars again. They’re starting to glow stronger as the night comes in.

‘I’m so sorry, Ethan.’ I say, looking up at him.
 

‘That’s why I can never be on Glaze. Why I will never let him control me again. No matter how alone it makes me feel.’
 

‘You’re not alone,’ I say, laying my hand on his face.
 

He places his hand over mine, holding it against his cheek. I feel the sandpaper roughness of his stubble against my palm. Slowly, his gaze moves up from my chin to my mouth, till he meets my eyes. Then, he turns, pushing my hand away.
 

‘I should have told you,’ he says, his hair falling over his eyes. ‘But I needed you.’

‘For what?’

He looks up at me. His bottle-brown eyes cutting into me. ‘To help me stop him.’
 

‘There’s nothing we can do, Ethan. He’s untouchable.’