James Smythe - The Machine

There’s a door that she opens, and there’s nobody in here. There’s a cordon that she steps over, and there, at the back of the room, stands the Machine. The same model, which she knows is right. It would have to have been, really. She doesn’t know if it’s plugged in, and it doesn’t matter: because she steps to it and puts her hand onto the screen and it starts up. The screen lights up and the metal buzzes as the fans work. The dust and warmth in the room swirl around, so fast that she can see them moving, the fans behind the Machine churning them into something like a wind, and the vibrations of the metal – because this hasn’t been used in so long, and somehow it’s hungry, somehow – make the floorboards shake and the dust in the air shake. She knows it isn’t real. Vic, her Vic, the one inside her head, watches her. He doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing left for him to say. But he stands in the light coming through the windows and he watches.

She pulls the Crown down from the dock and adjusts it, moving the arms and the pads. There’s no lubricant here, no painkillers, nothing to make this easier. She thinks that’s about right. This should hurt. So she puts the pads onto her head with the Crown itself, and they sit in the same space as the bruises, as she knew they would. She moves a chair from the side of the Machine and then thinks better of it, taking just the cushion instead, and the cushion from another chair, and puts them on the floor. When she’s started she’ll sit on them, or maybe lie down. Whatever feels most comfortable. After a while it won’t be her choice anyway.

So then she flicks through the menus. PURGE. COMMIT. The vibrations through her fingers. One hand on the screen, the other on her chest, where her heart is. She can feel them both, pulsing together so quickly. She slumps down and starts to talk.

If they come in now, and they ask her what she is doing, she’ll tell them. And if they ask her why she’s trying to wrench Vic out, she’ll say, Who said anything about Vic. And she’ll plead with them to let her finish; and she’ll ask for a room here, and tell them about her savings, and say, That should be enough. Put me with him. Let us be whatever.

This is what I want, she will tell them. And she’ll pray that they let her keep on talking, lying there on the floor in agony, screaming the words out, thinking it all through, all about her and about Vic and about everything she can draw on from her entire life, and she’ll beg them to not put her back in, because even though they know how to, now, they would ruin this; and she’ll say, This is what I want.

Thanks to my editor Laura Deacon, Patrick Janson-Smith and everybody at HarperCollins; and to Sam Copeland, and all at RCW.

And thanks to early readers: Kim Curran, Holly Howitt and John Smythe.

‘[An] utterly gripping and highly original debut novel … a tour de force of virtuoso writing that explodes off the page’

‘As if Philip K Dick and David Mitchell had collaborated on an episode of The West Wing … unsettling, gripping and hugely thought-provoking’

‘A fiercely-imagined dystopia of the near future. Intelligent, visionary and compulsively readable’

Phil Gossard, sales executive, London

At first, we thought that the noise was just a radio. We didn’t even think about how long it had been since we’d had a real radio anywhere near the office; it just struck us that it was the same noise, tuning it. We were sitting in the office eating our lunches; the sandwich man had done his daily delivery, and I had picked a ham roll. I never had ham. We didn’t eat together, not usually, but we were trying it as something new, get the team together for a daily meal, something more social than just work. It promoted a sense of team-building that the management thought we were missing. At the talks, the meetings, they told us that we should learn to lean on each other more. This is a way to bring you all together, they told us. Three or four bites into the sandwich, I noticed it, niggling; like a radio, as I say, sitting at the back of the room. I asked the rest of them if they could hear it, and they couldn’t at first, and then one of them did – Marcus, I think, from sales – so we followed the noise, tried to find where it was coming from. Is it speakers, from the computers? somebody asked, but it wasn’t that. We thought it was louder as we went towards the window, so we opened them. Where’s it coming from? Marcus asked, but neither of us could tell because it sounded like it was coming from all around us. It seemed stupid to say it at the time, but it seemed like it was coming from inside my head; I didn’t say that, and then the others started to hear it, one by one. The whole thing seemed to take a few minutes, I reckon – but it could have been less, could have been more – and when the static reached its loudest, Bill, our boss, decided to go downstairs, see if it was louder there. We watched him out of the windows, in the street with people from all the other offices, and they all just sort of stood there and listened. Within a couple more minutes everyone from the other offices was either out there as well or crowded round at their own windows, and we were all listening to it. And then it was gone.

Simon Dabnall, Member of Parliament, London

It’s a rare day that you have silence in the House of Commons. There was some head of state in from one of the Eastern European nations, and that tended to make some of the back-benchers rowdy, make them show off. That’s attention-grabbers for you. Some of the rabble liked to think that it might make their names stand out for future PM-related references. Sad, really. The visiting chap just sat and stared at the panelling. But it was a loud day anyway: something about the NHS (again), immigrants (again), terrorism controls in the heart of Staines (again), and most of the front-benchers were going at it cats and dogs. That pillock from Chester was waving his hands around as he shouted like he was being pestered by a wasp, that way that he did, and nobody was listening to him. Then we heard the static – that’s what we all agreed it sounded like, at first, like the sound of televisions in the middle of the night – and Chester stopped his flapping, and we listened. There’s never any sound in the room that we don’t know about – there were no crowds outside, no tours, and it’s about as soundproofed as a room without real soundproofing can get – so we all looked around for the source, heads peeking up like we were meerkats.

When it was over – quick as it began, as if somebody just flicked a switch and turned the power off – we just sat there, and nobody said anything for the longest time, until the speaker told us to reconvene the following day. We all shuffled out onto the riverbank, seemingly along with everybody else on both sides of the river, and we just milled around. It’s like a fire drill, somebody joked, but it wasn’t really a joke. The tubes, the buses, nothing was running – everybody froze because this was an event – so we were all just stranded there.

Jacques Pasceau, linguistics expert, Marseilles

It was like you were trying to tune into the right frequency but you were wearing ear-muffs, that’s how clear the noise was. We were working on a translation of something – me, Audrey, Patrice, David, Jolie – working on verbs, some dull shit like that for an undergrad class I was tutoring, and suddenly there it was, Chhhhhhhhhhh . I’ve never heard anything like it. I mean, people called it static, but I thought it was more like a growl, even. I said that out loud when it was finished and we were just talking about it over and over, and Audrey said that I was being stupid, but you know, I wasn’t, not really.