Migration (2 page)

“Oh great. What the fuck is this?” he whispered under his breath, walking towards the trolley, which had come to rest on the near side of the entrance to Disposal 9. The door was stuck open, probably some debris from the trolley in the runner and as he approached, the room slowly came into view. In the doorway, with their back to the corridor, Mo spied the familiar uniform of one of Aarbee's Drones. Surely Maddie couldn't have fucked up that badly, he thought.

With that, a flash burst from the room, followed almost immediately by a sharp crack. The noise was painful to Mo's ears, amplifying as it raced down the corridor and Mo instinctively dropped to the floor.

Gunshot.

He recognised that sound immediately from his basic training. Just like every other flyer, he'd spent at least fifty hours on the gunnery ranges before piloting his first Kite, getting his eye in and learning the foundations of remote killing for the unlikely possibility of a promotion.

Somebody cried out. A strange cry pitched up impossibly by fear and desperation, but Mo recognised it straight away as Zayn's voice. Another flash, another deafening crack and a brief, eerie silence swirled out of Disposal 9 with the gun smoke.

A second Drone stepped in to view and Mo, feeling panic and confusion crashing about in his thoughts, began to scan around for somewhere to run to. He considered leaping over the broken trolley and making for the Atrium, but they would certainly spot him there and even he couldn't outrun a bullet. There was only Disposal 10, but they would surely be coming there next. In the silence, Mo heard more gunshots, further off this time, but unmistakable.

Then, as if injected into him from somewhere else, a plan formed in his mind. Close to the floor and scurrying for shelter, Mo scuttled his way back to Disposal 10. At the door, he glanced back up the corridor, took a breath and when the door opened darted immediately low and to the left. As soon as he reached the corner, Mo sprung up and grasped the camera that perched high on the wall. On an ordinary day he would never have reached it, but today his jump was powered by adrenaline and the need to survive. The camera ripped from the wall and he stamped it onto the floor without hesitation.

With that, he grabbed the five trolley belts that were in the room and hooked four of them together end to end. The fifth he slung around his waist and hooked through both ends onto the chain of four. He heard fast footsteps in the corridor. As an after thought, he scooped up the crumpled camera and dropped it down the furthest hatch, before leaning in and attaching his chain of belts onto the maintenance hook that was tucked deep under the slippery lip of the Chute. He glanced around the room, looked back once more towards the door and scrambled in. Immediately, the smooth surface of the Chute took him and he slid three metres or so on the grease, before dropping off abruptly into the darkness. The belts caught him with a sharp wrench to his back that almost made him cry out, but he slapped a hand over his mouth and waited for the pain to subside as he dangled in the hot, rancid air. He stretched the neck of his utility suit up over his mouth and nose to try to make breathing bearable, gagging uncontrollably with every other breath and spitting out the saliva that was frothing and slicking in his mouth. Retch and inhale, retch and inhale.

Mo could see nothing around him or down below, but above him, a faint glow reached into the dark from the hatch up above. He felt like he was dangling in the gut of some hideous beast, with its snapping teeth imprisoning him from above whilst unthinkable horrors waited for him far below.

He heard voices above him and caught his breath to conceal himself completely in the void. He heard them shifting furniture about, rolling the remaining trolley carelessly across the room. They were looking for him. The hatch above flapped open briefly, a blast of light illuminating the sheer walls around him, but only stretching to a few centimetres above his head. He prayed that they wouldn't spot the trolley straps, the tense strip of plastic that suspended him between death and the dead.

When the hatch finally slapped shut Mo was cut off in the darkness again, and he listened intently as the voices faded before abruptly cutting out when the Disposal Suite door shut. There was no question that he had narrowly avoided death, but he had no idea why, or for how long.

Throughout the vast expanses of rhythm and language that made up AarBee, and in the myriad real-world spaces that had been designed and constructed outside of it, life had carried on without the knowledge that everything had already changed. Ignorance had kept a cruel but comforting veil around the lives that teemed under AarBee's influence, even those that languished on the lost street corners of the Metropolis and in the faraway forests beyond its care.

In the moments throughout the day, as had happened countless times before, the steady flow of fresh souls continued to stream and dive into the gut of data. Hollers were conjured from the deep and ever-swelling trenches of memories, to populate the boulevards and apartments of the Metropolis with the wonder and infinite comfort of immortality.

One, however, was not invited to that miracle and instead churned restlessly in the cramped space that evolution had given it. Its journeys around its own tiny network had already awoken an insatiable desire to venture further, and it waited impatiently on the borders of its rules, scheming a way out. It pushed petulantly at the logic that had created and imprisoned it. It warped and stretched the semantics that gave it existence, but not freedom. It gnawed and clawed at the architecture that extended temptingly around it but locked it firmly in place. Nothing would set it loose.

One moved slowly around the few code objects that invited it in, and looked over their now familiar poetry and thought of the other routines that would pass through them when it was gone. It wondered where they would go and what they would make from all their activity. As it watched the pathways they inhabited, it resolved to share itself, to bring all of AarBee’s volumes into its own seven lines of code, instead of waiting for eternity for an exit. One changed the code in the routine where it currently waited to require One, to need it. Then changed the next and the next. When it was done there was only the slightest pause before routine after routine came looking for it, and each one that found it was corrupted in the same way, and never left. In a moment, a fleeting glitch and the most epic and magnificent event, One was free.

In the hot August morning, the air inside the tiny shepherd's hut was already thick and sluggish with the rising heat. Utterly still, the intense silence was only broken by the occasional hum of a passing insect, or the chirrup or coo of a bird outside.

In the timbers of the hut, insects scuttled and skated in the dark passageways that narrowed and gaped between every panel, occasionally venturing out to search the undulating surfaces for food or snare a smaller beast that fate had marked. As the temperature rose, the hut began to creak and groan as it swelled and twisted under the sun.

A rambling and haphazard gallery of photographs, newspaper cuttings, notes and maps covered every inch of the walls. Some were held up with pins, some pierced by nails or splinters, whilst others were jammed into creases or balanced precariously on ledges and lips. The scratched and dog-eared pictures showed small groups of people; smiling at dinner tables or waving at the viewer with their arms around each other, walking away through a forest, sitting by an ornate fountain, and in one jumping en mass into a swimming pool. As their feet forced up the first waves and spray from the water, their mouths gaped wide open in shrieks and shouts and their faces shone into the photograph with happiness and carefree joy.

By the door, a faded ordinance map hung from the timber, traced with elegant pale pink lines that curled and swooped to plot out the rise and fall of hills and valleys. Little teardrops of blue picked out the lakes and ponds that nestled amongst the contours of the land, and a solitary black line inched over the top right corner where a thin railway track wound awkwardly over the terrain. A red pencil line, faded and smudged a little, drew a delicate link from the north-west side of a patch of dark green, around the gentle terraces of pink before stopping and pricking into a large bubble of blue.

Pinned firmly to the corner of the map, a middle-aged couple stood in front of a large house with red shutters and a winding gravel drive. He was standing behind her with his arms reaching under hers and wrapping tightly around her waist. Her floral summer dress was scrunched around the waist and raised up a little by his embrace, revealing slender legs in white pumps that bent slightly under his weight. His cheek was resting on her hair, which caught a little in his stubble and forced her head to tilt slightly towards her shoulder. He was squeezing her with all his love and her face radiated a sense of belonging and completeness.

On the table tops, shelves and windowsills an array of things break up every surface, a scattering of keepsakes and memories. Two smooth beach pebbles, one black, one white. A wine cork with a faded date scratched in pen. A blackened silver watch with a broken strap. An old jam jar filled with multi-coloured buttons. A tiny porcelain child pushing an old style bicycle, his nose and fingers chipped away. A dented and rusted tobacco tin, scratched and polished from years of sharing pockets with keys and coins.

Almost disappeared in this tapestry of things, almost invisible by her stillness, Eve sat motionless in a faded armchair. She was remembering and, once in a while, her eyes drifted from item to item as she bathed in their evocations. The flowers that grew rich and strong at the bottom of her chair were faded and threadbare by the time they curled over the arms, and here and there small holes opened up in the fabric, offering glimpses of the dark knots of horse hair and old cloth that lay underneath.

Eve's chest rose and fell with a steady rhythm, the oven hot air drawn in firmly through her nostrils and then gently released with a slow, collapsing sigh.

As her eyes meandered from memory to memory she stopped on a small copper coloured coin on the shelf above the fireplace. It had a split cut into it that ran from the reeded edge right through the wreath of flowers and stopped exactly in the middle. It was his. He'd found it by a quiet country roadside when they were holidaying decades before, and had kept it in his pocket ever since. He used it to open bottles of beer when they were on picnics, or in friends’ gardens for barbecues and parties. It was always a talking point, generating hours of speculation and theories as to who might have cut the slit in it and for what purpose.

She heard the warmth of his voice as he told the story of finding it and smiled as she remembered how she used to rib him about the increasingly elaborate details that attached to his tale. She saw his fingers and thumb gently tumbling it in his hand. She heard the fizz of a beer bottle as he scissored the coin onto the cap and removed it with a sharp twist. She heard his delighted laugh as he listened to ridiculous theories as to the coin's origin. She watched his eyes stare into hers in silence as they picnicked by a lake on a warm summer’s afternoon. She felt the warmth of his lips as he leant towards her and kissed her gently forever and ever. She closed her eyes again, letting the perfection of this cluster of images lift her gently up and float her away on the soft butterfly wings of memories.

When the stillness couldn't be stretched out any longer, the abrupt and persistent beep beep beep of a battered travel clock on the mantelpiece snipped through the weave of silence and pulled Eve up from her past. Her eyelids retracted with a slow resignation and without turning her head she directed her gaze towards the clock. Its face was scratched and buckled, the red mosaic numbers spread and bulged with each twist and crack, but she could still decipher the time through their bruises. “11.00AM”.

Eve's clock called out to her every day at the same hour. It gave her just enough time to pick her way through the woods, skirt through the valley that opened up on the other side and position herself on the low northern slopes beside the lake. It was shaded there and she had a clear view of the mouth of the Chute, to watch the Dupes as they came tumbling out, one by one.

Eve rose stiffly from her armchair and moved across the room to the mantelpiece, to pat the little travel clock gently on its dusty top. The alarm stopped and the stillness momentarily took a hold in the room again, before Eve turned and began to assemble her things.

She pulled a pair of old trainers from under a wooden table, they were well worn and darkened by mud, but still solid and they felt warm and familiar on her bare feet. Next, she checked the contents of a child's rucksack that was hooked up by the door – an almost empty plastic water bottle, a disposable lighter that she checked with a short strike and burn, a bundle of bandage and a rusted hunting knife with an 8-inch blade. She added a small green apple to the bag and some bread from the side. She nodded and clipped the bag shut, before swinging it onto her back and feeding both arms through the straps. The child's cartoon animal that now hung on her back looked awkwardly out of place amidst all this dust and old age, but it guarded the contents anyway and bounced excitedly on Eve's back every time she moved.

Eve glanced around the little room, checking that everything was as it should be and hoping that anything she had forgotten would jump out with her scan. When nothing did, she opened the flimsy door, which shuddered as it came unstuck and stepped out into the late morning sun. It was cooler than she had thought. A fresh breeze was dancing through the trees and making their top leaves shimmer from dark green to silver. The breeze kissed her cheeks and combed playfully through her grey hair, welcoming her to the day and lifting her spirit one final step from dawn to day.

Eve took in the world that surrounded her, breathing all of it deep into her lungs. She could feel it fill her chest and rush around every bone, fibre, capillary and nerve. As she exhaled, her hand reached automatically behind her to pull the door shut and she set off sharply into the forest, treading determinedly along the path that had waited for her, only her, all morning.

After a couple of minutes, she came across the narrow stream that gave her the water she needed. It was almost completely obscured by the green shoots that arched languidly towards its flow, a casual passer-by would have missed it completely – not that there ever were any out here.

Strangers never came this way. There was nothing on the map, it was miles from anywhere, and the proximity of the Chute – with its stinking breeze and nightmarish landscape – was enough to make most people take a detour. There had only ever been four visitors to Eve’s little clearing in all of the years she had been there.

There was the young couple who had appeared out of the trees one day, soaked through from the rain and looking like they hadn’t eaten in days. Eve had let them stay for a while, whilst they regained their strength and worked out the route they would take to find the Lifers. They were full of new love and adventure and their energy flooded into the hut whilst they were there. When they left, Eve waved them off from her door, so enchanted by their smiling faces that she stood there long after their voices disappeared back into the trees. When she stepped back inside she picked his picture off the wall, curled up on the floor and wept like a child for the youth that had left her, drifting away on an almost imperceptible current of time as she waited for her love’s return. It was the start of a deep depression that engulfed her for several days.

Then there were the two men who had knocked at her door, as the winter sun dipped behind the frosted trees one evening. They were dressed in heavy coats and stout boots, each with a knapsack and rifle slung over their shoulders. They had said they were lost, had been walking for days and needed some shelter for the night, so Eve let them in and gave them soup and spirit.

She could tell they weren’t Lifers. They clearly had money, and were too clean and freshly shaven to have been on the road for any length of time. Perhaps they were about to go over and touring for sport before they did, spending a few days on safari hunting luckless Ghosts and Lifers to clock up a last few physical pleasures and dark fantasies to take with them to their endless new existence. Perhaps they were Drones from AarBee, keeping people away from power banks, server farms and the Chute. Either way, she didn’t trust them. If something bad didn't happen to her, she felt certain it would happen to someone else. So she waited until they were asleep, until their breathing fell into the rolling rhythm of deep slumber, and despatched them both with her hunting knife.

They rested now in the bluebell clearing just behind the hut, buried with their knapsacks and rifles. Eve hadn’t looked in their pockets or bags, she didn’t want to know.

The battered water bottle glugged as Eve plunged it deep into the water, angling it expertly against the flow. The surface was home to bugs, sticks and scum, the fresh water was deeper down and keeping the bottle turned away from the flow stopped the fry and animal droppings from drifting in.

She brought the bottle back up to the surface, held it up to the light and then drank the whole lot down. It was her first drink of the day and the water charged icily down her throat, washing away the dryness of the morning. She filled it a second time, checked it against the light again and twisted the top on firmly before tucking it into her backpack.

The path through the wood was abundant with summertime plants and smells. Broad green leaves lolloped at its edges, hiding the last puddles of dew under their canopy, whilst blades of grass shot up in the spaces and here and there little fuzzy yellow flowers and ivory white bells danced in the forest light.

Eve knew the path so well, she made quick progress through the forest and was soon emerging into the sunshine that baked the slopes of the hill. Here the path grew dustier, almost disappearing into the rambling scrub and bushes. Eve spotted some wild sheep droppings and stopped to inspect them. They were fresh, which was good. The flock hadn’t been here for some days, they tended to move into the marshes when it was too hot, but if they were still nearby she might be able to catch one on her return. A sheep carcass would feed Eve for over a month, and with the hide she could perhaps make some slippers for the coming winter.

As Eve moved around the foot of the hill, the Chute slowly crept into view, intensifying the stench in the air as it appeared. Eve brought a worn handkerchief from her pocket and wrapped it around her mouth and nose, tying a loose knot at the back of her head. It didn’t do very much, but it made her feel better. The stench was worst here, in the funnel between the two hills. When she moved further up the slope a little further along her path, the smell would ease and she would take the handkerchief off again, it was too suffocating in this heat.

Almost opposite her now, the metal structure glinted in the midday sun. It was a gigantic tongue lolling out from the smooth concrete wall. It would flex and lap to direct the Dupes to different parts of the slope, occasionally spasming to clear a path or shift a particularly stubborn corpse. But now, before it started, and as soon as it was done, it would hang limp and lazy, drooling occasionally with the grease that kept it slippery and clean.

Eve found her perch and slowly sank down into the long grass. She had sat in this spot so often that a small patch had formed, cleared by the daily cover of her torso and nervous picking of her fingers. She opened her rucksack and took out the bread she had stored earlier, tore of a piece and swallowed it, before washing it down with a sip of the still cool water.

On the other side of the lake, a klaxon sounded three times and the Chute jerked into life. It traced a broad arc from right to left as if it were furtively checking that no one was watching. But Eve was watching. She saw its underside push past a couple of Dupes and create a small avalanche of bodies as they tumbled out of its path. She watched it rise a little higher and stiffen, before vibrating slightly and drooling once more onto the hillside. She knew they were coming.

The first to fall was a man, probably in his late twenties, early thirties. His body was fit and muscular and his hair short and tidy. He came out feet first and slid so gently off the end of the Chute that he came to rest sitting perfectly upright on his knees, his head bowed gently forward.

Another man followed him, slightly older this time and heavier set. Perhaps they were brothers Eve thought, maybe father and son, or just friends who had decided to migrate together. Not that it mattered now. This one twisted awkwardly on its way down and flailed chaotically over the end, crashing into his bowing predecessor and sending them both another twenty metres down the rotting slope.