The Heart Goes Last (9 page)

Maybe he needs to spend some time in the woodworking shop, after his poultry shift. Saw something in two. Pound a few nails.

Charmaine slips her green smock on over her orange basics. There’s another Special Procedure scheduled for this afternoon. They always do them in the afternoons; they like to avoid the darkness of night. That way it’s more cheerful for everyone, her included.

She checks to make sure she has her mask, and her surgical gloves: yes, in her pocket. First she needs to get the key from the monitoring desk that sits at the conjunction of three corridors. There’s no receptionist in the flesh at that desk, only a head box, but at least there’s a head in the box. Or a canned image of a head. Whether it’s live or not is anyone’s guess: they do those things so well nowadays. Maybe soon they’ll have robots carrying out the Special Procedures and she’ll no longer be required for them. Would that be a good thing? No. Surely the Procedure needs the human factor. It’s more respectful.

“Could I have the key, please,” she says to the head. It’s best to treat the heads as if they’re real, just in case they are.

“Log in, please,” says the head, smiling. She, or it, is an attractive though square-jawed brunette with bangs and small hoop earrings. The heads change every few days, maybe to give the illusion that they exist in real time.

Charmaine can’t stop herself from wondering if the head can see her. She enters her code, verifies it with her thumb, stares at the iris reader beside the head box until it blinks.

“Thank you,” says the head. A plastic key slides out of a slot at the bottom of the box. Charmaine pockets it. “Here is your top-confidential Special Procedure for today.” A slip of paper emerges from a second slot: room number, Positron Prison name, age, last dosage of sedative, and when administered. The man must be pretty doped up. It’s better that way.

She keys herself into the dispensary, locates the cabinet, codes its door open. There’s the vial, all ready for her, and the needle. She snaps on her gloves. The man is attached to his bed at five points, as they always are now, so thrashing around, kicking, and biting are not options. He’s groggy but awake, which is good. Charmaine is in favour of awake: it would be wrong to carry out the Procedure on someone who’s asleep, because they would miss out. On what exactly she’s not sure, but on something that’s nicer than it otherwise would be.

He looks up at her: despite the drugs, he’s clearly frightened. He tries to speak: a thickened sound comes out.
Uhuhuhuh …
They always make that sound; she finds it a little painful.

“Hello,” she says. “Isn’t it a lovely day? Look at all that sunshine! Who could be down on a day like today? Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” This is true: from all she’s observed, the experience appears to be an ecstatic one. The bad part happens to her, because she’s the one who has to worry about whether what she’s doing is right. It’s a big responsibility, and worse because she isn’t supposed to tell anyone what she’s actually doing, not even Stan.

Granted, it’s only the worst criminals, the incorrigibles, the ones they haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure. The troublemakers, the ones who’d ruin Consilience if they had the chance. It’s a last resort. They’d reassured her a lot about that.

Most of the Procedures are men, but not all. Though none of the ones she’s done have been women, yet. Women are not so incorrigible: that must be it.

She leans over, kisses this man on the forehead. A young man, smooth-skinned, golden under the tattoos. She leaves the mask in her pocket. She’s supposed to wear it for the Procedure to protect against germs, but she never does: a mask would be scary. No doubt she’s being monitored via some hidden camera, but so far no one has reprimanded her about this minor breach of protocol. It’s not easy for them to find people willing to carry out the Procedure in an efficient yet caring way, they’d told her: dedicated people, sincere people. But someone has to do it, for the good of all.

The first time she attempted the forehead kiss, there was a lunge of the head, an attempt at snapping. He’d drawn blood. She requested that a neck restraint be added. And it was. They listen to feedback, here at Positron.

She strokes the man’s head, smiles with her deceptive teeth. She hopes she appears to him like an angel: an angel of mercy. Because isn’t she one? Such men are like Stan’s brother, Conor: they don’t fit anywhere. They’ll never be happy where they are – in Positron, in Consilience, maybe even on the entire Planet Earth. So she’s providing the alternative for him. The escape. Either this man will go to a better place, or else to nowhere. Whichever it is, he’s about to have a great time getting there.

“Have a wonderful trip,” she says to him. She pats his arm, then turns her back so he can’t see her sliding the needle into the vial and drawing up the contents.

“Off we go,” she says cheerfully. She finds the vein, slips in the needle.

Uhuhuh, he says. He strains upward. His eyes are horrified, but not for long. His face relaxes; he turns his gaze from her to the ceiling, the white blank ceiling, which is no longer white and blank for him. He smiles. She times the procedure: five minutes of ecstasy. It’s more than a lot of people get in their whole lifetimes.

Then he’s unconscious. Then he stops breathing. The heart goes last.

Textbook. If anything, better. It’s good to be good at what you do.

She codes in the numbers that signal a successful termination, drops the needle into the recycling bin – not much sense in having sterile needles for the Procedure, so they get reused. Positron is big on anti-waste procedures. She peels off the gloves, contributes them to the Save Our Plastics box, then leaves the room. Others will now arrive, do whatever is done. The death will be recorded as “cardiac arrest,” which is true so far as it goes.

What will happen to the body? Not cremation; that’s a wasteful power draw. And nobody in any form, dead or alive, departs through the gates of Consilience. She’s wondered about blood siphoning, about organ harvesting, but wouldn’t they want them brain-dead and on a drip rather than plain old dead, period? Surely the fresher the better, when it comes of organs. Protein-enriched livestock feed? Charmaine can’t believe they’d do that, it wouldn’t be respectful. But whatever happens, it’s bound to be useful, and that’s all she needs to know. There are some things it’s better not to think about.

Tonight she’ll join the knitting circle, as usual. Some of them are doing little cotton hats for newborns, some of them are working on a new thing – blue knitted teddy bears, so cute. “Had a nice day?” the knitting circle women will say to her. “Oh, a perfect day,” she’ll reply.

It’s mid-September. In the evenings, when Stan goes for a stroll around the block, he wears a fleece jacket. A few leaves have fallen on the lawn already; he rakes them up in the early mornings, before breakfast. Not many people around at that hour. Just the odd black Surveillance car, gliding past silently as a shark. Is it protocol to give them a friendly wave? Stan has decided against it: better to pretend they’re invisible. Anyway, who’s inside? Those cars may be remote-controlled, like drones.

After breakfast – poached eggs if he’s lucky, they’re one of his favourites – and then a goodbye peck from Charmaine, he goes to his civilian job, working at the electric scooter repair depot. It was a good choice: his one-time job at Dimple Robotics has been taken into consideration by those who hand out the jobs around here, and anyway he’s always liked tinkering, messing around with machines and their digital programs. He once took apart the cheap musical toaster some joker from Dimple had given them for a wedding present and rebuilt it to play “Steam Heat.” Charmaine had thought that was cute, at first. Though repetitive melodies can get on the nerves.

Each scooter has a number, but no name attached, because it wouldn’t do for a driver to know the identity of the Alternate, in case they happened to run into each other on a switchover day. There would be grudges held, there would be arguments: Who made the dent? Who scratched the finish? What kind of a dickhead would let its battery run down, or leave it out in the rain? It’s not as if the things don’t have covers! The scooters belong to the town of Consilience, not to any one person. Or any two people. But it’s amazing how possessive you can get about this shit.

The scooter he’s working on at the shop is the one Charmaine drives: pink with purple stripes. The scooters are all two-tone, to match the two lockers of their drivers. His own – his own and Max’s – is green and red. It’s infuriating to think of that bastard Max driving around on the scooter, with his ass-end clamped onto the very same scooter seat that Stan thinks of as his own. But better not to dwell on that. He needs to keep his cool.

Charmaine has been having trouble with her scooter for a couple of days now. The darn thing – that’s how she puts it – has been sputtering at start-up, then conking out after a few blocks. Maybe something about the solar hookup?

“I’ll take it in for you,” Stan offered. “To the depot. Work on it there.”

“Oh thanks, hon, would you?” she said airily. Maybe not as appreciatively as once, or is he imagining that? “You’re a doll,” she added a bit absentmindedly. She was cleaning the stove at the time: such chores are appealing to her, she gets some sort of a kick out of dirt removal. Since it means he always has squeaky clean underwear, he’s not complaining.

He’d identified the problem – frayed wiring – and spent a couple of evenings in their garage fixing the short-outs so the scooter was operating just right and he could drive it down to the depot to do some more work on it, or that’s what he told Charmaine.

Really he wanted to have the scooter all to himself. In two more weeks – on the first day of October – it will be turned over to Jasmine, and he wants to customize it in advance of that event.

Why has it taken him so long to figure this out? This method of tracing Jasmine? When it’s been right in front of him all this time! All he needs is a second Consilience smartphone; with a little hackwork and manipulation, he can then synch his own to it and embed the doctored phone in the scooter. Then he can track where Jasmine goes when he’s in prison and recover that stored information via his own phone once he gets out. No one in the Project can access outside Wi-Fi, but they can communicate on the Consilience Wi-Fi network within the system, and view maps of the town on the Consilience interactive GPS, and that’s all he needs.

It was easy enough to get hold of Charmaine’s phone. She’d been so preoccupied lately she convinced herself she must have set it down somewhere, maybe at work, and who knows what happened to it? She reported it gone and they issued her another one. So far, so good. He’ll be in the slammer all October, managing the chickens, but when he comes out on November 1 he’ll be able to reconstruct the pathways Jasmine has been following in his absence.

And eventually those pathways will lead him somehow to a point of intersection – a place where he might be able to catch a glimpse of her, or even ambush her. On a switchover day, he’ll bump into her in the supermarket aisle, or what passes for a supermarket in Consilience. He’ll linger on a street corner. He’ll crouch behind a shrub, on a vacant lot. Then, before she knows it, he’ll have his mouth on those cherry-flavoured lips, and she’ll crumple; she won’t be able to resist, any more than paper can resist a lit match. Whoosh! Up in flames! Ring of fire! What a picture. He can barely stand it.

You’re nuts, he tells himself. You’re a stalker. You are a freaking maniac. You might get caught. Then what, smartass? Off to the hospital for your so-called health problems? What do they do in Positron to lunatics like you?

Nevertheless, he proceeds. The seat of the scooter is the best place to hide the extra phone. He cuts a slit in the fake leather, low down at the side, where it won’t be noticed. There. Done. He uses a line of superglue to seal the cut; nobody who isn’t looking would ever spot it.

“Good as new,” he tells Charmaine as he returns her scooter. She exclaims with joy, a cooing sound he used to find provocative but now finds sickly sweet, then gives him a perfunctory hug.

“I’m so grateful,” she tells him. But not grateful enough by a long shot. When he crawls on top of her that night and tries a few new gambits, hoping for more than her limited repertoire of little gasping breaths followed by a sigh, she starts to giggle and says he’s tickling. Which is not very fucking encouraging. He might as well be porking a chicken.

But never mind. Now that he can follow Jasmine, divine her every move, read her mind, she’s almost within reach. Meanwhile, he can practise for a couple of weeks by tracking Charmaine around on the scooter. It will be boring, because where can she go? The bakery where she works, the shops, the house, the bakery, the shops. She’s so predictable. No news there. But he’ll be able to tell whether his two-phone system is working or not.

It’s already the first of October. Another switchover day. Where has the time gone?

Charmaine lies tangled in her shed clothes on the floor of the vacant house – quite a solid house this time, slated for reno rather than demolition. The wallpaper is subdued, an embossed ivy-leaf design in eggshell and truffle. The writing stands out on it: dark red paint, black marker. Short, forceful words, sudden and hard. She says them over to herself like a charm.

“You’re such a surprise,” Max says to her. Murmurs in her ear, which he’s nibbling. Will this be a two-in-a-row day? she wonders. She arrived at the vacant house early, hoping it would be. “Cool as a cucumber,” Max continues, “but then … That husband of yours is one lucky guy.”

“I’m not the same with him,” she says. She wishes he wouldn’t ask her to talk about Stan. It’s not fair.

“Tell me how you are, with him,” says Max. “No. Tell me how you’d be with a perfect stranger.” He wants her to turn him on by describing mild atrocities. A few ropes, modified screaming. It’s a game they sometimes play, now that it’s fall and they know each other better.