The Living (16 page)

‘Meerkat’ ‘Badger’. ‘Jerboa’. ‘Mountain Goat…’

As I go past the empty cages and tanks, I automatically whack the names into the search engine and
socio
spits useless
information
about non-existent animals into my skull like it were a bin.

I know a little bit about bears myself, without any wikipedia. Cracker told me about the bear – a long time ago, long before he was put on the Blacklist and stopped moving. He would tell me that the bear was a terrifying monster that lived in the forest and ate everything it came across, ripping apart the living flesh of its victims with long curved claws. It was a fierce and unpredictable beast with stinking breath and only the bees knew how to calm it down: they would feed it their sweet floral honey, and then the bear would curb its anger for a little while. When the monster was tired, it would crawl beneath the earth and temporarily cease to exist – it would fall into a deep sleep from which it could not be woken for half a year and then it would be reborn and go back outside, once again thirsty for blood and honey.

The ancients thought this beast was the god of the forest. In the pre-global dialect of region EA 8 the word for ‘bear’ was ‘medved’, which meant the ‘master of the honey’, but that was not a name so much as a term of respect used instead of a name. It was forbidden to say the name of the god out loud.

Cracker talked about this tradition with great excitement. He liked that unbridgeable, respectful distance which people tried to use to separate the mindless god from themselves. ‘Not like us! They weren’t a part of the monster, you see?’ Cracker rubbed crazily at his spots. ‘They were separate. And the god was separate. And if he wanted to devour them, they killed him.’

‘Elephant’. ‘Giraffe’. ‘Camel’. ‘Ostrich’.

I like the abandoned zoo. Empty cells, the doors thrown wide open, ponds filled with oozy mud, the dry, branching trees for
climbing, the brown boulders, the decayed little huts, the rusty troughs, the burrows in the petrified sand: everything here was in a strange state of half-collapse, as if everything was not completely finished, as if it had begun to die and then frozen in surprise. There was none of that smell here, that thick smell of fear and hate which permeated the Farm. They died quickly here, the imprisoned beasts and ancient gods. They did not have time to get really scared, let alone start to hate. People just brought them their food in the evening and they ate it as usual. And then they fell asleep and didn’t wake up.

…By the way that’s an idea. I’m thinking about my prisoner, whom I have left again, locked up, surprised and bewildered in the apes’ cage. ‘What’s up with you, mate? Finish me off,’ Ef begged me. ‘Stop, you’re not playing fair,’ he whispered hoarsely as I left. It’s cowardice. Cowardice is preventing me from finishing him off, although, of course, it would be easy and fair to do so. It would be good to use a gun – I do have a gun, but a shot might draw attention to the zoo… With my bare hands then, or with some object? One hit or two? Will his little oyster eye close up or will it bulge out? And what will the noise be like? A crunch or a splat? A croak or a groan? A groan or a scream…?

So maybe I could poison him? A good method for cowards… Indirect. Sprinkle poison in his vitacomplex, or not even poison, where would I get poison from, I could just feed him something that’s gone really bad, Megalopolis is full of stuff like that… No, that’s rubbish. I could just go and never come back, and without medicine and water he would cease to exist in a few days, but I’m not ready to do even that for him. Cowardice. It won’t let me temporarily take his life. But I’m not just afraid of killing him – after all what does it mean to kill someone who lives forever? I’m afraid of what will happen after I kill him. They will detect his pause. They will close his cell. What will happen to me? No. No. I can’t do without the
mask and the cell so soon… It’s too convenient to be
impenetrable
and mirrored. Too convenient to have access to private files…

So I go back. Two or three times a day I go back to the apes’ cage and extend his torture. And I leave him there on his own.

I left him on his own again today.

But he’s not going to last long… What are you hoping for?
Again and again, like an anthill in a state of alarm, panic spreads through me. It poisons my blood with the acid of
poisonous
bites. Poisonous questions… Oh, my panic has a
hundred
thin little voices and each one is striving to be the first to squeak out their question, to leave their comment. My panic is my own
socio
but there is no way to ‘exit’…
Or do you think that you can keep him in this cage for years?
I don’t think so. The planetman is giving up with every passing day. Even without my help he will die soon. I mean, sorry, he’ll
temporarily
cease to exist.
What if he doesn’t even die? How long will you last, eh, ‘
socio
user ef’? How long will you last in this role?
Not for long. No, no, no, not for long. Until the first
med-exam
, which, by the way, the
autodoctor
has already been gently inviting me to. In a week he will invite me strictly. I won’t go and then they will come to me and they’ll take off my mirrored mask – and after that it goes dark; the end…
So, maybe you could make a run for it? Right now?
Uh-huh, pull out this cerebron, chuck it away right here, in the zoo, and run off somewhere far away in the middle of nowhere – I’ve thought about it a lot… I’ll live in the woods, collect roots and berries…
Will you live there all by yourself?
I won’t be able to get used to the loneliness.
Will you just be surviving? Clinging on to your pathetic life?
That’s a normal instinct for someone like me. For a mortal animal.
OK, but in winter? When there are no roots or berries? When the snow starts to fall? I’ll live in one of the shopping centres. And medicine, food, water? You have to order them through socio, how else are you going
to get them?
There is food and clothing in shopping centres.
But hasn’t that food gone off?
For the most part, but…
And aren’t they tearing down the shopping centres soon?
Yes, yes, yes. The food there is spoiled. The winters there are severe. And they’re going to tear down the shopping centres.
Turns out you’re doomed?
Turns out I’m doomed.
What were you thinking when you ran away from the House?
But I wasn’t thinking. I was just saving myself, I was afraid of ending up in the Special Unit. I just wanted freedom. It’s a normal instinct for a mortal animal…

But you have to have a plan! Do you really not have a plan?!
Cracker had a plan for me. A crazy, ridiculous plan, dreamed up by a correctee who had spent several hundred years in the House, who didn’t have a clue about what first-layer life was like. He wanted me to fight his Monster. He wanted me to be like him, to sacrifice myself.
And you didn’t want to?
And I didn’t want to. I don’t have anything against the Living. I don’t want to threaten His peace and harmony. On the contrary I could even protect Him. I like protecting Him, I could become a planetman…
And take old men who call you the Saviour to the Pause Zone?
Yes, I would take the old men. I would be a part of the Living…
But you are not a part of it. You are not a protector, but an enemy, your duty is to commit apoptosis, to destroy yourself so that the organism can remain healthy.
I am not an enemy…
You are an alien cell!
How do you know?
Oho, you’re still hoping that something will happen?
I hope that if we repeat the Leo-Lot experiment…
Don’t make me laugh. Are you talking about that anonymous letter? That’s just spam
… ‘Don’t believe the lies. The Leo-Lot ray can shine in both directions, backward and forward, and it has revealed your great future. But they have taken away your future, they destroyed the discovery, they forced the scientists to keep silent, just so you would remain a nobody. So that you might not become he who you must be, for the greater glory of the
Living… But I will right the injustice.’ Signed – ‘A Dissident Well-wisher’. Just spam? This letter came on the third day of my life in the mask. No one knew that I was me. No one knew, but the person who sent it knew…. Just spam? I ran that ‘
well-wisher
’ through all the SPO databases, but I couldn’t
determine
the IP address. So it’s someone very serious. Someone who seriously doesn’t agree. A serious dissident.

So what now? So you are just going to wander about, shining away with your mirrored pie-hole?
I prefer being impenetrable and mirrored until I figure out what is actually going on.
And what if they catch me?
Well, so be it.

Well, so be it.

I walk away from the zoo on foot. Across some wasteland, marked by the black outlines of the metallic skeletons of a
gigantic
wheel, carousels, swings and a rocket leaning to one side and some absurd little railway carriages… The naive entertainments of the ancients. They would go spinning and whirling around there before the Magical Attraction Parks were launched in deep layers – with their miracles,
transformations
, flights and battles, with their first-class sensory
stimulation
…

…Three kids of pre-boarding house age swathed in inviz rags are hanging about on the wasteland: one is lazily trying to snap the crumbling wings off the rocket, the other two are unsuccessfully attempting to spin the wheel. They’re obviously from the roboslums, otherwise they wouldn’t come here. Either they don’t have physical access to those
socio
layers in which the Magical Parks buzz and flash away, or they do have access but don’t have enough
socio
money for entry. I can understand why they come here.

I used to come here myself. When I was a kid.

For me there was no way to get to the Magical Park. So I used to beg Hanna to let me go ‘to the swings’; she grudgingly
let me go. She didn’t like the fact that it was next to the
roboslums
, but she took pity on me because I was deprived. She thought that I came here to play about on these rusty stumps. But I didn’t play. Like them, I came here to break things.

…Beyond the wasteland is the beginning of the roboslums; my path lies through them. It’s not dangerous here: Hanna was worried for no reason, the robots are harmless. They almost don’t notice me, they don’t even notice themselves. Some are, despite the summer, wrapped up tight in torn inviz rags, others are sitting on the doorsteps of their fraying cardboard houses almost naked; many of the women are wearing bikinis taken from electronic cleaners. I hear hoarse cries coming from beneath a heap of rubbish:

‘Yeah, mantis, yeah, mantis, yeah…!’

‘Hor-net! Hor-net!’

‘Come on! Come on! Come on!’

‘Fofs! Fofs!’

‘Do him! Come on, mantis! Come on, fellah!’

…I hurry up and a wave of nausea rises to my throat. Like that time, a week ago, when I was digging about in Ef’s memory and I came across the file ‘Violence’. With video clips: a mantis against a centipede, a mantis against a stag beetle…

…In first layer the robots are not interested in anything but cockroach racing and insect fights. They don’t have the memory or the attention span for anything else; the robots are completely absorbed in the little they can make out in second. Morning, noon and night they root about in their
socio
-trash, picking fragments of series out of it, bits of second-layer shoot ’em ups and adventures, stupid chats, half-installed educational programs. Like allergy-sufferers scratching at their inflamed skin, they keep trying to
load, save to memory,
reinstall
and
add to list.
It’s pointless. Their cells are not fully functional: numerous installation errors and system failures. So the
fragments
of the shows don’t form a consistent storyline. The
adventures break off right at the beginning of the journey. Chats are blocked after five orthographic errors

But the robots aren’t able to download Happy Letters or Happy Numbers either.

They don’t have the brains to enter this code. They can’t. That’s where their name comes from.

…Someone comes diving out of a heap of dirty boxes and rags right at my feet. He strikes his forehead against the toe of my boot, rolls onto his back and lies there, looking up at me with festering eyes and arms waggling tiredly, like an upturned pet beetle. I ask automatically:

‘Are you in pain?’ But then I realise that he probably hasn’t noticed me at all.

I walk round him in a wide arc so I don’t hurt him by accident again, but he suddenly flips briskly onto his stomach, leaps up onto all fours, scampers over to me and takes a tight grip of my trouser leg.

He’s about thirteen, his face is lopsided, asymmetrical. This face seems vaguely familiar.

‘Pwease, pwease, pwease,’ he splutters and tugs at my trouser leg. ‘Mister pwanetman! Don’ tay’!’ He kneels in front of me. ‘Pwease!’

That ‘pwease’… Suddenly I recognise him.

‘Mark? Are you Mark?’

My voice, monotonous from the chatterbox, does not frighten him. He looks at me, tense and thoughtful, as if he is trying the name out on himself, then nods seriously:

‘Yeth, Ma-ak.’

In development group he could never say his name either. So he still hasn’t learned…

…They, the robots, can never get to
luxury
mode. In filth, in delirium, on the bare earth or on the polyethylene-
cardboard
floor, not clambering out from beneath the fragments and crumbs of second layer, slaves to blind instinct not
knowing
what they are doing, they mate and in pain do they bring forth children.