Paradigm (9781909490406) (4 page)

‘What sort of accident?' Carter had asked, through his sobbing. ‘Have they been frozen? Will they be coming back?'

‘No,' said his grandfather, Milton. ‘This is the sort of accident where you don't come back. Not ever.'

It was later that evening that the ten-year-old Carter vowed to become Controller General.

‘What makes you think you would be a good Controller?' asked his grandfather, seriously. ‘You know they're going to ask you that one day. You'll need to have an answer if you get invited to the final selection.'

‘Because if I'm Controller General, I can do anything,' said the boy. ‘Even bring them back.'

‘Well, I don't think that's possible,' said his grandfather. ‘Not even for the Controller General. But I'd be very proud of you if you were chosen.'

‘Then I'll do it to prove that I can. And I'll show them. I'll make them sorry they left me behind. I'll be the best son they ever had,' said Carter between sobs. And that was the decision made.

T
here weren't
any further scouting missions after the one in which his parents disappeared. The Industry stopped asking for volunteers and the Scouting Programme was abandoned. On the very rare occasions where waste was needed to be deposited out in the Deadlands or land surveys were undertaken, now it was done by machine. The dangers were reiterated daily on the FreeScreens. It was a shame—if he hadn't been identified as a contender, he'd have quite liked to have been a Scout.

‘Your parents would have been proud of you,' his grandfather had explained when he was old enough to understand. ‘They tried out for Controller General when it was their time, but they were never real Contenders.'

‘But why?' said Carter.

‘They were bright,' said his grandfather, ‘but not exceptional like you. Only those who are
real
contenders get the chance to develop Contributions. The rest of us, well, we just do what needs to be done.'

‘Well, I'm doing fine without them. And anyway, my Contribution isn't going to be a stupid invention like Transporters,' said Carter. ‘It's going to be an idea that changes the world.'

His grandfather laughed and pointed towards the complex chemical equations on the slate that they had been working through.

‘Well unless you do well at Academy and do everything that Professor Mendoza says, you won't even make the Contender shortlist,' he said firmly and they returned to the Synthetics homework that Carter had so swiftly diverted them from.

‘Tell me about Richard,' Carter would ask him each night before bed, ‘about the old world. What was the difference between football and pinball? What were national anthems? And why were animals kept in zoos?' His questions were always factual, direct.

‘Football was a dangerous game played by kicking the bladder of an animal around a field for fun,' said his grandfather. ‘It caused riots and many, many deaths. Pinball was smaller and on a table, for money by gamblers who were greedy and not happy with their lot. Anthems were chanted to tell people who you were, and I don't remember why there were zoos. Maybe for disease research—I don't exactly recall what he said about those. But all of these things, Carter, they were what destroyed what it really meant to be human.'

The sound of his grandfather's voice lopping his tongue around strange words that no longer existed gave Carter a sense of awkward nostalgia for the things he never experienced. His grandfather seemed to talk about them fondly, almost lovingly, even though the stories were all second-hand, passed down from his own grandfather decades earlier. Like most, he despised any nostalgia for the old world.

‘Seems stupid to me,' he said. ‘It makes no sense at all.'

‘It was dangerous,' said his grandfather. ‘It sounds like a frightening place to be.'

Carter's last question was always the same: ‘Why was everything so complicated?' His grandfather would shrug and head downstairs, his answer also identical.

‘No one exactly knows,' would come floating up the stairs as Carter drifted off to sleep.

A
s he sat
in the coldness of the shelter, the memory of his grandfather's voice echoed around in the wind. He wondered if he was still alive—Professor Mendoza too. She might be able to help with his Contribution. Even now, Carter felt himself chill at the thought of his old mentor, the Censomics professor and most revered teacher in the Community. It was only those with a profound level of knowledge of Censomics who could become the Controller General—except Professor Mendoza had failed to a Synthetics graduate at the final assessment.

‘You could just become a professor,' his grandfather had said as they talked through theories of population control. ‘How about that?' Carter laughed.

‘I am not going to end up like Professor Mendoza,' he said. ‘I am the one.'

His grandfather smiled. ‘Whatever you choose, you should listen to the professor. She may not be Controller General but she knows more than anyone else here. She will be the one to help you.'

C
arter waited
in the shelter in the near darkness as his memories caught up with themselves. Nobody had said exactly why the Model had called him back to the Community but he couldn't imagine that it was anything other than it was his time to contend. He would be the youngest to be considered if it was. Then there was the strange girl with the bizarre message, who had disappeared. It had to be a sign. After all, life was all about signs. That was one of the first things he had learned from the professor's lessons.

‘The signs were all there in the days before the Storms,' the professor began in the first advanced Censomics lesson. ‘It was just that nobody paid attention to them. They had the technology to be able to control and manage their populations, resources, and could have anticipated what had happened if only they had not been preoccupied with nonsense.'

She cleared her throat and waited for the class to settle down. The quiet was pristine, beautiful, and she smiled at the class. While Carter melted in her enigmatic presence, there was something imperfect, incomplete about her. She hadn't made Controller. But
he
would.

There were nods throughout the room, especially from Isabella who had chosen to sit next to him. Isabella with the voice as velvety soft as moss, like the song of a nightjar. Isabella: the girl with the short white-blonde hair and eyes that sparkled in the sun. Carter turned his head to catch another glimpse of her sweet, crooked smile. Inquisitive, mischievous and daring, Isabella had been the first person to climb the tall oak on the west side of the Community to get a glimpse of the fallen city on the other side. She winked back at him as Mendoza continued.

‘We waged war on different sectors of our society, marginalised and sidelined until it was person against person, legitimised by the media. So much so that after the Storms we made no attempt to recreate the past. When something is broken,' she paused and looked around at the room, ‘we don't fix it. We reinvent it.'

From next to him, Carter heard a voice cut through the quiet.

‘So were the Storms a good thing?' It was Isabella.‘Anticipating my homework once again, Isabella?' said the professor. ‘As you have asked the question, I'll give you all a head start in your preparation. I would like you to pair up and, before the next session, debate whether the Storms were a good or a bad thing. Take whatever side you want to—there is no right answer. Because, in short, the Storms were what they were: a horrific and catastrophic disaster that destroyed the majority of human and animal life and created an almost impossible legacy. But what we have now, well, it's perfect, isn't it?'

Carter turned his head again and Isabella lifted her eyebrows at him.

‘You can be my partner,' she mouthed. Carter nodded in agreement with the air of someone who didn't care too much, but when he turned back to face the front of the room, his cheeks burned flame red. He lost himself in the words of the professor as she continued and tried hard to ignore the aching desire to see if Isabella was looking at him. But even when he felt her eyes boring into him, he didn't move.

‘Tomorrow we'll run the same exercise but discuss our cryonic freezing processes, so you'll need to complete your homework this evening,' said the professor. ‘But first, we're going to watch a short screening.'

When the picture stated moving, Carter alternated between his slate and the main screen, listening to Professor Mendoza and trying hard to stop thinking about Isabella.

‘There was simply nowhere above ground that was safe for a long time. The Storms, in one form or another, lasted for just over five years.' Professor Mendoza paused for a few seconds as the camera panned across expanses of black water, dotted with pale-coloured floating objects.

‘For those who survived above ground after the first storms hit—and there were very few—life was impossible. With no recourse to clean water, heat or food, most died within the first few days—others within weeks, and mostly from radiation poisoning. It was only those fortunate enough to have been rescued and brought to the Industry facilities who survived. You won't be surprised to know that a large number of those were under the age of eighteen. Children, it turned out, were a great deal more resourceful than adults.'

Carter couldn't imagine it any other way. Controller Generals were always appointed before their eighteenth birthdays. He planned it to be before his sixteenth, whatever era that happened to be in. Next to him, Isabella raised her hand and he felt the rush of cool air as she moved.

‘I have one more question,' she said. ‘What is beyond the Deadlands?' The room went very quiet and Carter looked at the professor.

‘Another good question, Isabella,' she said. ‘Does anyone else know the answer to this?' A thick silence fell across the room.

‘Monsters,' shouted someone from the front and the classroom burst into laughter.

‘Thank you,' she said, ‘but not exactly. We know that there are still areas that have been subject to significant contamination and there could be anything there. In the early days, when the second generation of Scouts went out into the Deadlands, we found out that the threats exist as far as the sea. But we were never able to get that far on foot—the terrain is extremely dangerous, which is why we keep our Community barricaded at all times. As you know,' she glanced briefly at Carter, ‘due to security issues we have currently suspended all research into those areas. All right, no more questions.'

T
he film started
with the usual broadcast warnings. The voice of the one of the original scouts filtered through the speakers.

I
n the years
since we have been underground, things have changed completely. Many of the buildings are gone, crushed under the forces of the water and withered to dust. The people are gone too—the only creatures I have seen so far are birds overhead west and some wolf-like creatures that have come from the north-east. The wolves are the most dangerous—they attack without provocation. We watch for the signs of when the rain is coming—it's all we can do. There are patterns.

T
here was
some whispering in the background that Carter couldn't quite distinguish before the narrator moved on.

Plant life has flourished; there are trees that have grown through the concrete, and branches with diseased fruit. It's unrecognisable as the city it was before.

My name is Alice Davenport and this is the Deadlands.

A
s the reveries
of his Academy days faded, Carter steadied himself against the edge of the shelter and stood upright. He rubbed the spot on his temple where the hailstones had hit him, but there was no blood. The Controller General had warned of dizziness and blurred vision, but this had been more extreme than he had imagined. He swiped into the FreeScreen, watching the colours change over and settle on his details. His name trickled onto his home screen, along with his address and connection information. The words bulged in and out with the after effects of the drugs; reading felt difficult and the words made no sense. His head hurt and his heart beat faster.

A
s he stood
there in the fading light, his eyes filled slowly with thick tears and his throat hurt. The one remaining thread of family he cared about was gone and he hadn't been able to come back soon enough to say goodbye. He had died this year—how long had it been? Carter swallowed hard to blink back the tears. The old man who had stayed up late at night helping him with homework, who had spent hours with Professor Mendoza planning his grandson's career and had arranged additional tuition, was gone.

Carter ran his finger gently over the old man's name on the terminal and held on tightly to the side of the shelter for support. As his finger traced through the letters, the screen scrolled upwards and what he saw next almost made him sick. His heart pounded and his legs shook. Underneath his grandfather's name there was one more line of text, where the screen usually stopped. He looked at the screen again. Then he swiped out of the terminal and back in again. He couldn't imagine it possible. It was too unreal. But however many times he looked, the one line of text glared back at him, making his head spin and his chest heave and fall as he slid back down the bricked edge of the shelter.