Spares (8 page)

Example. There was a spare on the Farm called Steven Two, and I read his records. His brother out in the big room was a real piece of work. When he was ten he smashed up his right hand by getting it crunched in a car door. Okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely his fault, but the way life is you’re supposed to have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The real Steven never had to. The ambulance came and the doctors put Steven Two’s arm on the table and hacked his hand off at the wrist. They went away, and sewed it onto Steven. A little discomfort for a while, some tiresome physio sessions, but he ended up whole again.

At sixteen, Steven rolled his car while drunk and lost his leg, but that was okay because the doctors could come back and take one of Steven Two’s. After the operation the orderly carried him back to the tunnel, leaned him against the wall just inside the door, and locked it. Steven Two tried to shamble forward, fell on his face, and remained that way for three days.

At seventeen, Steven got a pan full of scalding water in the face from a local woman he’d been cheating
on. Not only cheating on, in fact: He’d stolen her car and forced her to have sex with two of his friends. But Steven probably looks pretty much all right now, because they came and took his brother’s face away.

That was what the spares’ lives were. Living in tunnels waiting to be whittled down, while mangled and dissected bodies stumped around them, clapping hands with no fingers together, rubbing their faces against the walls and letting shit run down their legs. Once every two days, with no warning or explanation, the tunnels would fill with disinfectant. A warning would have been irrelevant, of course, because none of the spares could speak. None of them could read. None of them could think. The tunnels were a butcher’s shop where the meat still moved occasionally, always and forever bathed in a dead blue light.

They have no clothes, no possessions, no family. They’re like dead code segments, cut off from the rest of the program and left alone in darkness. All they have are the Farm droids, and the caretaker, I guess—though they’re generally worse than nothing. There’s no “duty of care” crap in the caretaker’s job description. All he does is sit and do nothing at all while the worst parts of his soul fester and grow. Some let people in at night—for a small fee, of course. It was rumored that one of the shadowy venture capitalists was a big customer of this illicit service. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh while they watched the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them.

When I woke, Ratchet was vacuuming the vomit up from around my face, and a pot of coffee was already on the stove. The sounds and smell filtered slowly into my consciousness, like water through semiporous rock. Eventually I got up, showered, and dressed, and then I sat at the table as I always did. My brain felt as if it had been roughly buffed with coarse sandpaper, I had the chills from the Rapt I’d taken, and my hands were shaking so much I spilled coffee all over the table.

But this time it was different. For the first time I was
thinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.

For better or worse, I made them.

That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I picked my way through the bodies and chose some of the children that had been least used so far. In the first tunnel I found David and Ragald, in the second Suej and Nanune, and in the third, Jenny. At that stage all were unharmed apart from Suej, who’d lost a swath of skin on her thigh. I brought them out of the tunnels and into the main room, and got them to sit on chairs. Tried to, anyway: They’d never seen chairs before. David and Nanune fell off immediately, Suej slumped forward onto the table, and Ragald stood up unsteadily and careened away across the room. Eventually, I herded them into a corner where they sat with their backs up against the wall. By then they’d stopped squinting against the relative brightness of the light and were goggling wide eyed at the complexity of the room—its surfaces and objects, its space, the fact the walls did not slope.

I squatted down in front of them and held their faces in turn, staring into their eyes, trying to find something in there. There was nothing, or as good as nothing, and for a moment my resolution wavered. They’d gone too long with nothing, missed out on too many things. Most of them couldn’t use their limbs properly. They sat unsteadily, like babies whose bodies had been accidentally stretched by years.

I wasn’t qualified to make up everything they had lost, or perhaps even any part of it. I couldn’t make a reasonable stab at my own life, never mind give them one of their own. The wave of decisiveness I’d ridden all morning was ebbing fast, leaving me adrift in a tired and anxious dead zone.

“What are you doing?”

I turned, heart thumping. Ratchet and the medic droid were standing in the doorway. For a moment I built a lie to tell, but then gave up. People always think
that it’s what happens when you’re awake that shapes your life and makes decisions, but it isn’t. When you’re asleep and go away, things happen. That time counts too, and in my case the last seventy-two hours had altered me. Unless something changed, I was going to have to go back out into the world. It would probably be the death of me, but if I stayed and watched the children slowly dismantled over the years I would die just as surely. I would be no different from them except I didn’t live in the tunnels.

That’s what I told myself, anyway. But I didn’t think I could have left the Farm then, couldn’t have faced going back outside again. Don’t ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

“I want to help them,” I said. Both droids watched me impassively.

“How?” Ratchet asked. Behind me, Nanune slumped sideways onto the floor. I turned and propped her back up.

“Let them walk around. Teach them.”

Ratchet held up one of his manipulating extensions and I shut up. With nothing being said on an audible wavelength, the medic droid appeared to suddenly lose interest, turned and disappeared back into the corridor. Ratchet waited until it had gone.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why do you fucking think?” I shouted, hoping he could provide an answer. When he didn’t, I tried to find one myself. “They have a right to be able to speak. To see outside. To understand.”

“No, they haven’t, Jack.” Ratchet was impassive but interested, as if he was watching something in a petri dish that had suddenly started juggling knives. “The spares only exist to fulfill their function.”

“Half the people outside were born for worse reasons than that. They still have rights.” I was beginning to shake again, and the bands of muscle across my stomach had cramped. I wasn’t really up to a metaphysical
discussion with a robot. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down my temple and dripped heavily onto my shirt. That’s the problem with Rapt. You don’t get much time off.

“Do they?” asked the droid, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re proposing, against the express instructions of Safety Net, to allow spares out of the tunnels. To attempt to teach them to read. To give them a pointless scrap of life.”

“Yes,” I said, with weak defiance, sensing how stupid and idealistic I sounded. The strange thing was that it wasn’t like me. I had my idealism kicked out of me many years ago, round about the time I learned about skinFix. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said I didn’t give a shit, that I didn’t really care about the spares or anything else. I didn’t know why I was doing this.

“You’ll need help,” the droid said.

It took a while for this to sink in. “From
you?”

“There is a price,” Ratchet said, and then the bad news came. “You come off your drug.”

“Fuck off,” I said, and strode unsteadily out of the room.

Half an hour later Ratchet came and found me. I was slumped at the end of the long corridor, as far away as possible from any life-forms, either carbon- or silicon-based. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, my long muscles twitching in true Rapt-withdrawal style, and I was losing it. Cold so bitter it felt like liquid fire was spreading up my back, and I was starting to hallucinate. I looked blearily up at the droid when he appeared, and then turned away again. He wasn’t interesting to me. Certainly not as interesting as the inch-high men who were trying to climb onto my leg. Some of them looked like people I had known in the war, people I knew were dead. I was convinced they were trying to warn me of something, but their speech was so high-pitched I couldn’t hear it. I was trying to turn myself into a dog so I’d have a better chance.

You know how it is with these things.

The droid didn’t leave, and after a moment his extensible tray slid toward me, bearing a syringe. I stared at him, my eyes hot and bright.

“The dose you take would kill four normal people,” he said. “Immediately, within seconds of injection. You need this today, or you’re going to die. But tomorrow you have less.”

“Ratchet,” I mumbled, “you don’t understand.”

“I do. I know why you are here. But you will kill yourself in weeks like this, and I want you to remain alive.”

“Why?”

“To teach them.”

In the end I don’t know which of us won—whether I’d convinced Ratchet with my initial inarticulate outburst, or he blackmailed me into colluding in some bizarre impossible idea that had seeped into my mind while it teetered on the edge of slipping forever beneath deep water. Maybe Ratchet was Jesus all along, and I was just his fucked-up John the Baptist.

Either way, I kicked Rapt over the next eight months, and life within the Farm began to change.

The phone rang in Howie’s office, and he reached across to pick it up. The first part had taken an hour to tell, and Suej had fallen asleep, lying crumpled in the chair. As Howie listened to whoever was on the line I stood up, took off my coat, and laid it over her. She stirred distantly, a long way away, and then settled down again. Her eyelids were flickering, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. I hoped it was something good.

Howie put the phone down. “That was Dath,” he said. “No one below thirty knows shit.”

“What about Paulie? Nothing from him?”

“He’s out in the Portal.” Howie shrugged. “He’ll call if he gets anything.”

He sat, and waited, and I told him the rest.

The first thing I did was introduce some new wiring into the Farm complex, setting up a subsidiary alarm system. Then, with Ratchet’s help, I disabled the automatic relays which would trip if the tunnel doors were left open
for longer than five minutes. As the relays would flash lights on panels in both Roanoke General and the SafetyNet headquarters, they had to be cut out before step one of the plan could be put in place. We couldn’t just destroy them, because that would set off a different alarm.

When we were convinced that it was safe, we opened the doors. From then on they were left that way all the time, unless the alarm went off. I let the spares pretty much come and go as they pleased in the facility, distressing though that sometimes was it was never a relaxing experience to look under the table and find a naked man with no eyes or a girl with no legs lying underneath.