Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

Eva waved dismissively.

“So what? It’s only an average. It’s not a prediction.”

“It’s still a judgment. And a pretty accurate one nowadays. It changes day by day. Hour by hour. Minute by minute. Haven’t you ever called up your details on a screen? Watched those numbers after the decimal point whizz up and down? Picked up a gin and tonic and watched your life expectancy drop by a few seconds? Hah!”

She smiled entirely without humor.

“You know what, Nicolas is addicted to that stuff. He got his family tree from the Mormons’ database. Ran a simulated medical history on it back two hundred years. He figured out the likelihood of him dying of everything from AIDS to Huntington’s chorea. How about that for a pleasant way to spend the evening? Watch him at three o’clock in the afternoon. That’s a laugh.”

She shook her head and smiled.

“It’s all there, mapped, mirrored, and striped by data-banks the world over. Everything about you, and me, and Nicolas. They know us better than we know ourselves. They send us ads for products we didn’t even know existed. The drinking water tastes funny one day and two years later you find out by chance that you’d been dosed with the cure for an incipient embolism you had no idea ever existed.”

“Yeah?” Eva laughed bitterly. “Tell me about it. You know how I got here.”

Alison sighed angrily. “No, you still don’t get it. We talk about Social Care and we think of them watching our every move. And then we think about the Watcher, and we think that it’s like Social Care except more so, but that’s wrong. We fall into the trap of thinking that it’s simply something that watches us get undressed before we get in the bath, or listens in when you call your mother, but it’s worse than that. It’s looking right inside you. It sees every heartbeat, it knows your every thought; it knows you better than you know yourself.”

Her pupils dilated as she spoke. It was as if a tap had been turned in her heart, and all the feelings and emotions were flooding slowly upward, gurgling and lapping up inside her body to fill her up to the brim.

“No wonder poor Nicolas is the way he is,” she said softly. “He only has to look at a girl and he knows that the Watcher is there, analyzing his every thought and guilty emotion. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old boy inside him who has never had the chance to grow up.”

Katie had flicked the viewing screen off. She moved up silently behind the pair of them.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this in here,” Katie said suddenly in Eva’s ear.

“Ah, who cares, Katie? This room is pretty secure; they don’t monitor the Center like they do outside. Anyway, the plan probably hasn’t got that much chance of working, has it? Not when the Watcher can read our every thought.”

“No, it can’t,” stuttered Katie. She paused a moment, then, “Anyway, the plan will work.”

“If you say so,” Alison said. She stood up quickly. “I’m going back to my room.” She stalked away.

Katie glanced at Eva, then ran after her friend. Eva was left alone in the lounge. The grey mist outside turned to gentle rain and Eva stared out at the blurred green limes.

“Look over in the corner, Eva,” said the voice. “Look over behind the viewing screen.”

“Hello again, voice,” said Eva. “What do you want now?”

“I told you. Look behind the viewing screen. Didn’t you notice it when you came in?”

Eva got up and walked across the room, the plastic soles of her sneakers sticky against the vinyl floor. Behind the viewing screen was an old intercom. A small white rectangular box with a grille facing. Two grubby white wires trailed down the wall to vanish into the floor.

“It heard you,” said the voice. “It could hear you speaking.”

“It’s just an old box, left over from when they first built this place. It isn’t connected to anything.”

“How do you know? If I were the Watcher, I would be listening to all the old equipment. My ears would be pressed to every forgotten intercom, every CCTV camera, every pneumatic tube.”

“Every pneumatic tube? You’re making this up as you go along.”

“And you are arguing with me now. You’re not trying to pretend that I don’t exist anymore. Eva, be careful. You’re not escaping; you’re being led into a trap. The Watcher is cleverer than you. Cleverer than both of us.”

There was a huge rattle outside the room. The skies had finally opened fully and were emptying their load in vast grey sheets of rain that splashed and sluiced down the glass. Eva looked out of the window onto nothing but shades of grey. A gust of wind sent a grey wave bursting across the panes.

“Who are you?” she called above the noise of the rain. “How do you know all this? How are we going to be trapped?”

Her shouting alerted Peter, one of the orderlies, who appeared in the doorway to the lounge wearing a gentle smile. He relaxed a little when he saw who it was.

“Easy now, Eva. What’s the matter?” he said in his surprisingly soft voice.

Eva suddenly realized she had been shouting. She looked down at the floor, flustered and embarrassed.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I was just…just…”

“This place isn’t a trap,” soothed Peter. “You know we’re only here to help you?”

“I know. But I wasn’t…”

He put his hand on her arm and led her back to her own room. “Come on. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

Eva lay on her bed gazing at the ceiling. The rain had lost some of its earlier violence, but it still poured down in a steady stream that streaked and blurred the view from her window. She wondered if it rained harder out here in the middle of the countryside than it used to in the city. She remembered South Street rain as being either a tired and miserable mist, or huge fat drops that left sooty, greasy stains where they fell. There was none of this cold violence, this clear division between the inside and the outside. Eva had never felt so isolated in all her life, trapped in the cocoon of the Center, floating away on a grey sea, the rest of the world left far behind. But isn’t that what I wanted? she thought. Isn’t that what I aimed for?

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” called Eva, but the door was already being pushed open. Alison walked in, closely followed by Nicolas. Eva could see Katie hovering in the background.

“I’ve come to say I’m sorry,” said Alison.

“What for?” asked Eva.

“Being so silly earlier on. I nearly blew the plan. I shouldn’t have spoken about it in the lounge.”

“That’s okay,” said Eva. She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Should you be talking about it in here?”

Nicolas gave a grin. “Safest place, probably. They wouldn’t dare tap our rooms unless they could prove it to be in our best interests, and then they’d have to let us know. They could be sued for malpractice.”

Eva sat up on her bed to make space for the others.

Alison sat down next to her. “Go and get yourself a seat from the lounge, Nicolas,” Alison said.

“Okay.” He walked happily from the room to fetch the chair.

“Don’t you want to sit down, Katie?” invited Eva.

“Katie will stay standing,” said Alison. She had washed her hair since that morning and changed into a pair of jeans and a cotton top. She stared at Eva. “I’m not being mean or bossy. I just know that Katie would prefer to stay standing, wouldn’t you, Katie?”

Katie nodded. She reached into a pocket of her jacket, pulled out a bottle, and handed it to Alison.

“We bought this in the village last week. Vanilla whisky. Some new thing they’re trying to put on the market. Alcoholic and incredibly sweet. I can’t imagine it ever taking off. Still, it makes you feel nice and warm, and there’s nothing else to do on a wet afternoon like this except drink and tell stories.”