The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller (55 page)

You hear that? You don’t give a toss. I know you don’t. I’m not an idiot. I don’t know why you want this pissing recording, either. The fucking camera gives you enough Big-Brother-is-watching-you jollies, I’d have thought, but apparently not. So I will externalise, but not for you. I’m going to record this, and then wipe it. Stick it up your arse.

Ah … balls. I don’t know. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe I’m having one of my bad days. Some days are certainly worse than others. A lot worse. I thought today was one of my ‘good mood’ days—that’s why I finally thought I’d give this a go—but maybe I was wrong.

They don’t
have
to send the therapist, I suppose. And they didn’t have to make this cabin so nice. It could have just been a bed and a TV. But it’s like a little flat, albeit one on wheels, and I even get to cook my own meals, have my own fridge. I even get beer, and decent beer at that, albeit in limited qualities. Hell, they even managed to soundproof it a bit, so in terms of noise, you wouldn’t really know you were moving.

You can feel it though. You can always feel it. The guys doing the driving are good, really good, and even when they change they keep the rhythm the same. And that can’t be for anybody’s benefit but mine, after all. They know I’m used to the rhythm of it. I told the therapist. They know I’m used to grabbing the handles on the turn, the reverse, the brake; if I’m honest, for some reason I have a bit of a sense of pride in my doing it without thinking, at the perfect time, just before it happens. They send the physio in too, twice a week, to check I’m okay and work the kinks out of my back.

My knees and hips worry me though. I think it was in the twenty-third month when I first noticed the ache in the right, and that’s since started in the left too. I only get it if I’m standing, obviously, when even the grab handles can’t really make a difference to the momentum on your knees. I try to sit down most of the time now, unless I’m working out on the multigym. I’m in the best shape of my life, of course, but it’s typical that I’m stuck in a fucking box. Either way, the new cabin can’t come quick enough. Exactly the same as this one—strangely enough, I hope it is, anyway—but the new one is fitted with some kind of gyroscopic base, super suspension, I don’t know, but basically I’m told it should cancel out eighty percent of the momentum. I’m not holding my breath though. They’ve been talking about it since we passed the one-year mark, when they saw it might be a long game after all. I think it must have taken them all of the second year to decide that it definitely was.
Then
they started to budget for it. Whatever. As I say, they’re more worried about their ‘research’ than the poor bastard at the heart of it.

They let me get my food orders in though, within reason, and one day a week they go through the same rigmarole; drop off units at either corner, handing bags over, me taking them in before we move again. Usually takes about half an hour to get the shopping in. Even now though, they have a guy waiting at either end with a tranquiliser gun. I
think
it’s a tranquiliser gun. I’ve tried to get the names of the soldiers I deal with regularly, and they’re friendly—I think they think I’m an all right bloke—but they’ve always politely refused or changed the subject. I think overall, the military trust me more now, but who knows? Maybe they think I’m starting to go a bit twitchy. They could be right, I don’t bloody know. I hope not.

They top up the water for the shower cubicle and the sink, the taps, the lot of it, and it’s pretty impressive how they do it. The drivers are very good, as I say. They hook up the hose to the mini-tanker and drive together as a unit until it’s done. Got to be good at your job to do that, I reckon.

I’m allowed TV on demand, but no news and no live footage. Films are okay as well, but I don’t get the Internet, and that was a major problem for me at first. Now I can barely imagine having such a luxury. They let me request hobby materials, too. It’s almost laughable that I asked for a load of craft stuff first, thinking it would pass the time. It just went bloody everywhere. Maybe I’ll try again once the gyro stuff is built in. That’d be great if it worked. I started on a few language tapes too, but it was hard to stay motivated when I don’t know if I’ll ever get to use it. They send me porn as well, and I don’t even have to ask. That was a pleasant surprise.

The first two weeks were the worst, though. In the jeep. That was bad. Really bad. I couldn’t even sleep. Then they got me into a van with a mattress in the back, and that was almost like heaven for a while. I don’t know why they left it that long to switch me over. Nerves? Expecting something fancy from the big bastard at any moment? I don’t know. It took them a month to get the cabin sorted. Everything was done on the fly, everything, and to be fair to them, I didn’t think they thought it would work anyway. They must have expected it to end out of the blue, and when it didn’t, my needs were low on the list when they were scurrying around trying to see what they could do next. I shouldn’t really blame them, but I do. Ah ... do I? Jesus, I don’t know. I used to be able to see it from their point of view easily, but it’s been three years now and it’s hard to keep perspective.

The window is almost a bit of a piss-take though. What the hell is the point? I keep the curtains closed most of the time now. In the early days I used to check—literally, every few minutes—that Caementum ... shit ... I mean the Stone Man was still following. It took a good seven or eight months before I stopped. Now I just keep the curtains drawn.

I don’t know what they told the media. I don’t know what they’ve told my family. I’ve asked if I can have visitors, but I’m not allowed. The therapist, the physio guy, they’re my visitors, and although the therapy is obviously one way, Tony the physio is a chatty guy. If I ask about stuff I’m not allowed to know about, he tells me straight out that I know I’m not supposed to ask about that and changes the subject. I think he’d tell me more if the guard wasn’t there when he visits, or if the camera wasn’t on. Discussing anything from before my time in here is okay, anything going on in the world after that is out. Apparently it’s better for me, Dr Palmer says—said it several times actually, especially the time I got a bit wound up when he said it, like, and they had to board my cabin and put me out—but I disagree. Especially because ... well, never mind. I don’t know how good that camera is. Not that I have to hide things from the ‘Bad Guys’—I don’t think they are the bad guys, they have a job to do and are doing it—I just don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Before I came in, there was a recession on, after all, and jobs were hard to come by. That might still be the same.

Anyway.
The people I actually deal with in here are kind, is what I’m trying to say. The rules they’re enforcing are for good reasons, I believe that. They do keep me abreast of
some
developments, I will give them that. Straub has even visited four or five times, and that was a surprise, even a pleasant one, I dare say. She lets me know what they’ve tried, and learned, and even though it’s usually a thinly disguised story of failure, they have made some headway towards understanding its ‘molecular structure’. She struggled a bit with some of terminology herself (she’s no scientist, after all), but from what I can gather the thing is made up of nothing they’ve ever seen before on earth. They’re only just beginning to get their heads around it because it goes against so much of what they already know, but she won’t tell me if they have any idea about how they can use that info to shut it down. The term ‘classified’ makes me wince whenever I hear it now.

There are theories about why whoever sent them might be wanting to make more Stone Men. The general consensus is that they aren’t amassing any kind of army to invade us with. Why would they need to? After all, they could just send three or four and wait for them to smash our infrastructure to smithereens. One of the more popular ideas, I gather, is that they are some kind of workforce.

Strange to think of them as anything other than murder machines after what I’ve seen, and how I’m living, but there it is. Based on their ‘indestructibility, wedge-like hands and seeming ability to control their own mass’, Straub tells me that lots of people think their main function—other than to come here and reproduce more of themselves—would be as earth movers, perhaps for dangerous work like channelling rivers, or simpler stuff like preparing land for construction. Lots of people have asked how they built the first one if they need parts of us to build more, but more people have replied with the fairly obvious answer; they don’t necessarily
need
us to build more, but maybe our parts make it
easier
to build more, or to build the bigger, blue Stone Men that might have other functions that we haven’t seen yet.

I don’t know how I feel about those ideas. It makes their masters, or even them, into something else in my mind. I think of them as, I suppose, evil.
They
are the bad guys. But thoughts like that suggest something else; that they think of us simply as cattle, a means to an end. We’ve been seeing it all along as some kind of sinister master plan, but this might be something basic to them, something that they’ve been doing for centuries, coming from wherever they are and going to other places like ours and creating … what, Stone Men, other things, other workers, other helpers? Whatever it is that makes their place function. It might be as common to them as working out the council budget for the year.

I don’t like all that though. It makes it harder to hate them. Whatever the reason, they come here and they scare people into their gruesome deaths. Fuck their reasons. I hate them.

Ah … I don’t like using this thing. It makes me think of Andy. They let me hear his recording, after I kept asking for months and months. They did a few assessments beforehand. It was a hard listen, very hard, but I was glad I did. There were things on there he wanted me to hear. I heard them, mate. I liked you too. I don’t blame you for getting me into this. Which you did, by the way, but anyway.

I don’t regret not taking Andy’s way. I don’t regret it at all. He was a hero? Good. Good for him. I mean that. But let’s see who saved more lives in the end, eh?
That’s
what counts. He was brave? Absolutely. Incredibly brave, or at least I think so. He didn’t sound so sure. And did I delay, did I hesitate, did I risk lives because I was too scared to do the right thing? Fuck it, yes. I can say that. Enough years have passed. The therapy is about keeping me sane in here, but we’ve talked about the past as well, and I’ve come to terms with it. I was scared. Who the fuck wouldn’t be? But here’s what I
did
do, what I
did
have.

I thought on my feet. I thought of a solution. And here I am, and as bad as it gets—and sometimes it does get very bad—I’m still pretty sure it’s better than the alternative (ask me again, if I’m still here in ten years, and see what I say then, but for now I’m pretty sure). And thinking of that solution not only kept me alive—and let’s be honest, let’s be
really
honest, that was why I thought of it, anything else that comes of it is a bonus—but might well mean we figure out how to beat them. So Andy might well have been the braver man, but I might be the guy who made the difference, and I was the ‘coward’. So what the hell does that mean then, eh?

And for me, personally, what’s come of it? I might be saved yet. I might get to live
and
go free, whilst Andy’s in the ground somewhere. I’d have been rewarded, and what would that mean then? The brave man dies and the coward lives, how does that work?

Yeah, okay, it might still go the other way, especially as ... actually, sod it, I’m gonna delete this anyway, but hang on …

Right.
I’ve made it look like I’ve finished and I’ve gotten into bed, so they can’t read my lips. If I talk quietly, they shouldn’t hear me under the duvet, and this is being deleted anyway, but I need to say this out loud. For me.

Tony slipped up last week. Just briefly, and he moved on, but it’s been a different physio that’s come back since. Told me Tony was on holiday, but I don’t know. Anyway, the last time he was here, Tony was chattering away about traffic where he lives—he has a tendency to rant sometimes, Tony, I don’t think he realises that he does it—when he said that his wife was in the car with him.

“She says to me I shouldn’t complain,” Tony said to me, “as it’s not as bad as it was a few years back. She says I should remember what it was like, back when we kept having all the bother every couple of months—” Then he suddenly stopped dead, and the pause was only very brief, but I looked to my right, at the guard—obviously, Tony was stood up behind me, working on my back, but I could see the guard’s face all right, a young guy—and he was glaring at Tony, but not even angrily; more like he was worried too. He didn’t want to get in trouble either, and they both knew the camera and mic would be on. Then Tony had started talking again, rounding off the story by talking about football traffic. The change was quite smooth, but the way the guard had looked at me afterwards—and then looked away suddenly—told me that something had nearly been given away. And I still haven’t decided whether it’s good or bad news for me.