Peter James: Perfect People

John led Naomi towards the window, and the section rose up for them as they approached. They went through into the air-conditioned chill of a huge, deserted atrium with a marble floor, and a massive Foucault pendulum suspended from the ceiling. It felt like the lobby of a grand hotel, except there was no front desk, no staff. Just twin elevator doors on the far side. The children had disappeared.

Where?

The elevators? It was the only possible place they could have gone, John thought, and, still holding Naomi’s hand, dragged her over. He couldn’t see any buttons. He looked up and down. Nothing, no apparent means of summoning the damned thing. There must be! He turned and looked behind them. The place was still deserted. There must be a staircase, a fire exit route. Moments later there was a chime, and a light went on above the right-hand elevator door.

John tightened his grip on Naomi’s hand. The door opened.

The car was empty. They went in; John looked at the panel and pressed the bottom button.

Then from across the atrium he heard a shout. Two figures in white jumpsuits, teenagers, were running across the floor towards them. More were coming in through the glass door.

Panicking, John stabbed the button again, then again. The first two were getting nearer, yards away. Then the doors closed.

Furious banging on them.

Naomi was staring at him like a zombie. The car started sinking. John pulled out his phone, stared futilely at the display. As before, it said, NO SIGNAL.

There had to be some means of getting through to the outside world. There had been a phone in Dettore’s office, must be satellite phones around. There must be supplies coming in by plane or boat, or both; there had to be some way of getting word out, or getting away from here.

How?

The doors opened onto a deserted monorail platform. He pulled Naomi out, looked right and left. Two dark tunnels. A narrow gridded inspection sidewalk went into the tunnel in both directions. He pulled her to the left, into the tunnel, running as fast as he could into the darkness.

They covered a few hundred yards, then heard shouting behind them. He turned and saw several flashlight beams following them. Naomi stumbled, recovered. There was light ahead of them, a long way in the distance. The flashlights behind them were getting closer. His lungs were aching, Naomi was silent, following him, clinging to his hand. He ran even faster now.

The light ahead was getting closer. The voices behind them getting closer, too. Gaining on them. They burst out of the darkness onto another platform. An elevator door, and beside it, an emergency exit door. He pulled it and led her through into a dimly lit concrete stairwell that only went up.

He pounded up the stairs, two, sometimes three at a time; Naomi, close to collapse, tripped repeatedly so that he was almost dragging her up by her hand. He could hear voices at the bottom. Then they reached the top and a door with a push-bar. He jerked the bar and shoved the door, and they both stumbled forward into a long, brightly lit corridor with a tiled floor and walls that looked like they were made of brushed aluminium. There was a double door with two glass portholes, like a hospital ER entrance, at the far end.

They raced down towards it, but a few yards before they reached it, two figures came through.

Luke and Phoebe.

More small figures began crowding in behind them.

Luke spoke sharply. ‘You have done a terrible thing, Parent People. You have brought your old ways to this place. You have shamed us. You have only been here a few hours and already you have sullied the place. No one has ever been violent on this island. The New People here didn’t even know what violence is. Now you’ve shown them. Are you proud of that?’

‘We…’ John started to reply, not sure what he was going to say, then his voice trailed away.

Naomi was trembling in shock at what she had done. ‘Where are we?’ she asked in a faltering voice. ‘What is this place? What is going on?’

‘You are not capable of understanding even if we were to explain it to you.’

‘You brought us into the world,’ Luke said. ‘Would you like to tell us why you did that?’

‘Yes, what exactly was your agenda?’ Phoebe added.

‘We wanted to have a healthy child, one that did not have the disease genes your mother and I were both carrying – that was our agenda, nothing else,’ John said, scarcely believing he was having this conversation.

‘Fine, here we are, you succeeded. We are healthy,’ Luke said. ‘Would you like to see our medical records? They are really quite exemplary. We are very much healthier than the world you have brought us into.’

Then Phoebe said, ‘Everyone seems to be afraid of genetics. We read that people are saying that Mother Nature isn’t great, but she’s better than the alternatives. Oh yes, hallo, what planet are you on? Mother Nature has dominated Homo sapiens since the species first appeared five hundred thousand years ago. And what a screw up! If Mother Nature was a political leader, she should have been executed for genocide! If she was chief executive officer of a multinational company, she’d have been fired for incompetence. Why not give science a chance at the helm? Is science, in the right hands, going to make an even bigger mess?’

‘What do you call the right hands?’ John replied.

‘The man you have just tried to murder,’ Luke said, staring at Naomi. ‘Dr Dettore. The biggest visionary this planet has ever seen. The man you just tried to kill.’

‘You need to leave now, Parent People,’ Phoebe said darkly. ‘Before too many people here find out what you have done. We will take you to your plane. You need to know that everything on this island is recorded. If you go now, we’ll erase the tape showing you trying to commit murder, Mother, which is more than you deserve, but you are our parents…’

‘We don’t really want to kill you,’ Luke said. ‘That would just bring us down to your level. We want you to leave. Forget you were ever here. Forget all about us and everything you saw.’

‘I can never forget you both,’ Naomi said.

‘Why not?’ Luke replied.

Naomi blinked tears from her eyes. ‘You are our children and you always will be. Our home will always be your home. Maybe, one day, when you are older you might come and visit us.’ Her voice faltered. ‘Perhaps you have things you’ll be able to teach us.’

John nodded, then added, ‘Our doors will always be open. I just want you to understand that there will always be a home for you with us, if you ever want or need it. Always.’

‘We understand you very clearly,’ Phoebe said.

Naomi’s Diary

Once upon a time I nearly killed a man.

I write it this way because it makes it feel less real to me. That’s one good thing about the human brain, it constantly revises the past, cutting bits here, adding bits there, presenting it in an ever more palatable way – the way we would have liked things to have been, rather than the way they really were.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote that life must be lived forwards but that it can only be understood backwards. I wind back the tape inside my head all the time. Returning to Halley’s death. Returning to that decision John and I made to go to Dr Dettore’s Clinic. Returning to that moment – incredible that it was eight years ago – when I was following John and Dr Dettore up the path, in the bright sunlight. That moment I knelt and picked up the rock and threw it.

I wind that tape, trying to analyse what I had intended. Did I want to kill him? Or did I just want to throw the rock for no other purpose than to vent something out of me?