Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Terror

“Look,” she said, leaning closer. “We’re not supposed to discuss this with wake-ups. Counselors usually deal with inauguration. I don’t know anything about you, other than you wound up here. I don’t know what you did or why they picked you. I’m just here to smooth your transition into a wake-up.”

“Why am I here?”

She sighed and made sure the door to our room was closed before she spoke. “Most of the wake-ups? They killed themselves, or arranged accidents, to avoid substantial debt. That’s why they started the program: too many people were in arrears. Too much debt, foisted off onto relatives who couldn’t pay. Scam artists and fraudulent insurance claims that paid off triple on accidental death. It was like an open faucet of money, and eventually, it needed to be fixed. That’s why the government endorsed the wake-up program.”

Death was no longer the end of the billing cycle, apparently. I said, “How?”

“That’s a little mysterious, too. Your engrams are sort of flash-frozen. But it also involves voodoo, magic, and that’s the part the mission breakdown never mentions, because I think they’re just a little embarrassed to have to resort to a combination of science and sorcery. The process was sped up, then simplified, then streamlined, until we have the system we have now. We process dozens of wake-ups per day.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Assignments are the responsibility of the individual counselor,” she said. “Mostly it’s industrial labor, from what I hear.”

“You mean like slaves?”

Her expression pinched and she exhaled in a snort. Obviously, she was running out of time. She probably had to get another wake-up in here and start her spiel according to a clock. “Try not to think of it that way. Remember, you divested yourself of human rights when you—”

“Yes, I’m sure it’s all nice and legal,” I said. “But what about my identity? My home? My relatives? My stuff?”

“That’s just it.” She lent me a tiny grimace. “You’re not supposed to remember any of that. Maybe your name, maybe a few basic residual facts . . . but you’re talking in whole sentences. Most wake-ups act severely autistic, or comatose, or zombiatic. They told us the personality prints through in one out of a thousand clients.” It was clear she now suspected somebody of fudging the curve.

“Well, then, I’m a special case and we should—”

“No.” She overrode me. “There can’t be any special cases.”

“Who says so?” I felt twinges of remote-control strength in my arms, my legs. Perhaps if I could keep her talking long enough, I’d muster enough energy to be more assertive.

She showed me her clipboard, helplessly. “ They do.”

That’s when my quiet time was up.

Another chair (more upright), another set of straps (stronger), and a conference desk. The whole sterile set-up resembled an interrogation cubicle. My counselor was named Eddin Hockney. He did not introduce himself, but had a sizable nameplate on his desk. He had attempted to avert his pattern baldness by shaving his head – and, it seemed, polishing and hot-waxing it as well. Watery brown eyes; thick spectacles; he was short and sciurine. His eyes darted furtively from detail to detail like some forest creature anxious to hoard nuts. His speech was better-rehearsed and more non-stop; as Bonnie had said, sped-up, simplified, streamlined.

“Surely you must agree that lost revenue via self-termination has always been an increasing problem,” Hockney said, not looking at me in particular, not searching me for signs of comprehension, just spilling out his rationale. “The data prove it. People try to – eh, do away with themselves, and stick anyone else with the bill. Old lovers. Ex-spouses. Heirs. Employers. Banks. Well, the credit companies just wouldn’t put up with it anymore. A country can’t function without viable credit and liquid assets. Do you know that some people actually run up their credit to the limit while they’re planning on killing themselves all along? And they expect to just skate on picking up the tab, their responsibility. Well, no longer.” He flipped pages, apparently disgusted by me.

“I don’t suppose—”

“Aht-aht-aht!” he overrode. “I don’t care. You have no rights. What I do see is an outstanding cumulative debt of $178,000. That gets you a standard Class Two work package – twenty years.”

I hadn’t put anything in my suicide note about monies owed, or regretting my expenditures.

“It’s basically robotic manual labor. You don’t retain any higher functions. If you think you do . . . well, those will fade.”

“What happens after twenty years?”

“Huh. Then you get to have a funeral. Cost is pre-figured into the package.”

It was not my bad finances that drove me to take my own life, but – possibly – the reduction of my character to no more than the sum of my debts. The badgering, the hectoring, the humiliation. The exponentially increasing lack of human connection in a world where everyone was the sum of their debts. “Death” and “debt” sounded alike for a reason, I concluded.

If what Hockney was saying was true, then I’d spend two decades lifting or slinging or swamping or whatever, losing pieces of the memory of my life every heavy step of the way. My wives, my lovers. My joys and ambitions. My concepts of beauty, or what was fair. My despair, which had driven me to purchase a handgun for several hundred dollars on credit. Pain, and my mistaken notion of how it might be ended.

But I didn’t forget.

I didn’ t forget that finest day of my life came unexpectedly in late 1990s, and that I realized what a flawless moment it had been, only in retrospect. Like most people. I didn’t forget abysmal black mood that prompted me to pick up gun. I didn’t forget that Victor Hugo wrote: Supreme happiness of life is conviction that we are loved.

Other things slipped away gradually.

My taskwork was in a large industrial foundry, using a ring-shank-handled skimmer over a crucible of ferrous lava that was channeled to several behemoth injection-molding machines. I live at foundry with other wake-ups. Constant labor is only interrupted by replenishment time: six hours of rest and an orally-pumped diet of fecal paste. Bodies relax, but no here sleeps. Sleep would provide oblivion. We are either awake, or more awake.

In this environment, flesh of wake-ups becomes tempered like steel, all leathery callus. No need for safety goggles, helmets, outerwear. Air swims with free silica and lead dust. Soluble cutting oils contain nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. There’s sulfuric acid, mercury, chlorinated solvents, potassium cyanide, xylene, carbon monoxide, infrared radiation, nickel carbonyl, toxic plaster, ethyl silicate. In this atmosphere, hexamethylenetetramine decomposes to formaldehyde. We can receive thermal burns from spattered pours. If molten metal slops on floor, heat will vaporize water in cement, causing steam explosion. Sharp objects. Falling and crushing hazards. I do not know these things. I read them, on warnings for supers, who are normal humans. I can still read.

I can read control number on forehead of wake-up working next to me. 730823. Used to be black man, half his head gone, replaced by a mannequin blank – half his number is printed on plastic, half tattooed on flesh. A tear falls from his single eye and makes a white path through black soot. When I weep, my tears leave black trails on white skin. My number is 550713.

Children work here. Ex-kids. Not suicides. Others, who damned sure didn’t kill themselves. Victims of others. I think supers are lying about program for wake-ups.

We cannot feel sparks of forge, though they hit us and sizzle.