The Paper Eater (16 page)

– Quite a little
cohort
, aren’t we? smiles Wesley Pike.

Benedict eyes the others nervously, aware that they’re all now embarking on the same silent thought-process.
Leonard’s in his fifties or even early sixties. Miles is barely out of his teens. Salima’s Asian. Sonia and Larry are black. Hilary’s A1, and possibly a lesbian. Nathan’s C3. The rest spread in between. They come from all corners of Atlantica: Groke, St Placid, Harbourville, Mohawk, Lionheart. Age, race, sexuality, geography, class; a rough cross-section.

Benedict’s face clears. Yes; got it.

– But a
useful
cross-section, says Pike. Let me show you how. Let’s look at the internal slogans you all live by, each of you. As varied as can be.

There are murmurs. Wesley Pike paces the floor again, making sharp and individual eye contact as he singles out each liaison associate in turn. Benedict sits very still in his chair and clenches his buttock muscles, thinking,
a second chance a second chance a second chance
, and feeling the bolus swell inside him like a traitor.

– You’re different, aren’t you? Pike’s whispering.

Benedict scans the room, and notes that the woman called Sonia has jolted as if stung.

– Nobody understands you, do they? Pike declares.

Benedict senses the woman next to him begin to open like a flower.

– If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, is it not? says Pike.

Benedict watches the colour rise slowly and fiercely in the neck of the man in front of him.

And so it continues.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I’m special. I’m a survivor. Life is a half-empty bottle
.

Finally, Pike nods in Benedict’s direction. He braces himself. His green inhabitant, the traitor bolus, is about to be uncovered.

– I’m Benedict,
and I know best
, Pike articulates slowly.

Benedict tries to keep his pale features even, but a deep blush of recognition clambers up from his collar and ignites his face. His heart is still thumping. But there’s relief: other things could have been said. More things. Worse.

– So you see, continues Pike, your personality profiles all fit within the normal range, with a few minor exceptions.

Pike must be referring to him. He’s sure of it. But perhaps the others think that too.

– Justice, Pike pronounces. Good and evil, right and wrong, OK and not-OK.

His hand re-emerges from his pocket, and suddenly avuncular, almost benign, he’s handing out small coloured plastic discs to the group. They almost look like playing counters.

– They are indeed playing counters, Pike confirms.

Each associate is now holding a disc of a different colour, with a flat magnet glued to one side.

– All of which leads us straight on to an exercise, beams Pike, sliding out an easel draped in a sheet of beige fabric.

With a theatrical flourish he whisks the covering off, to reveal a square magnetic board, featuring a hundred squares and a brightly coloured design of boa constrictors, cobras, adders and pythons intertwined with classic, geometric scaffolds. A sight at first so unexpected, and then suddenly so alarmingly familiar that the associates’ thoughts are momentarily back-pedalling in shock.

– The time-honoured children’s game of Snakes and Ladders, announces Pike. Believed to have originated in China, home of Confucius, who said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Looks of irritation and puzzlement, giggles and nervy gasps buzz about the room.

– Yes. It’s about chance. Injustice, if you like. A stroke of luck, and you’re whizzing up a ladder. Is that fair? A bad run of luck, and you’re sliding down a snake. Is
that
fair?

They all stare at Pike’s smiling face, their mouths agape.

– A simple bonding mechanism, he explains airily. If we are to work together and learn together, surely we must also be prepared to play together?
Like a family
? Now. Who would like to be the first to roll the dice?

And from his other pocket, magician-like, he produces a chunky wooden cube pranked with big gold dots.

Pike waits until half-way through the game to speak again.

Miles is winning, perched on square 9. Leonard has had nothing but snakes and has barely left the second row of numbers. Benedict is cramped in the middle of the board with Hilary, Sonia and Salima. Nathan is locked into a vicious little cycle of his own, shuttling between squares 18, 22, 48, and 50, and despairing of escape. Benedict tries to keep a distance from the whole thing, see it in perspective. He is playing the game in an ironic way, he tells himself. The outcome is irrelevant. It is an old-fashioned game of chance. For kids.

– Unfairness, pronounces Wesley Pike. Injustice.

Then pauses, and writes the words on the white board in purple felt marker. The temperature in the room seems to drop a fraction. The associates inhale.

– Chaos, he says. Randomness.

And writes them down too. Written in capital letters like that, they look scary.

Pike swings round, his eyes glittering.

– We’re all in favour of ladders, aren’t we? he says. We all buy ourselves a lottery ticket from time to time, do we not? Does anyone here object to
being given a helping hand in life
?

He looks at Benedict, who blushes.

– But on Atlantica, it isn’t about luck, is it? It’s about give and take. Here, a customer goes up a ladder if he deserves to go up one. If he does wrong, he is punished. Down a snake he goes. And he has to earn his way back. If he does wrong again, he becomes a Marginal. Three strikes and he’s out. Off the board.

– Uh? goes the man called Leonard.

– What Libertycare has done, says Pike, is to stop randomness in its tracks, by imposing a system of fairness that’s respected worldwide. And it works. The life of a typical Atlantican customer is
not
a string of random events. It is an
incentive scheme in action
, is it not?

They all look up. He’s smiling again. Nathan drops the dice. It rolls from his desk on to the floor and shows a six.

– Perhaps it’s possible for a society to function
too
well, Wesley Pike is saying. Better than some of its inhabitants
deserve
.

Benedict frowns. What’s he on about?

– Libertyforce has detected a sudden, and serious, threat to our security, Pike says.

The gravity in his voice makes Benedict’s skin begin to tingle. From the corner of his eye, he can see the snakes on the board. Blurry and beginning to writhe.

– The strategy that the Liberty Machine has selected to deal with this –
emergency
– involves work at grassroots, says Pike. Fieldwork, conducted by people with a range of talents and outlooks. Which is why you’re here.

The woman sitting next to Benedict gasps quietly. The man in front murmurs something. Someone says – Emergency? Then the room goes very quiet.

Damage limitation
, thinks Benedict, feeling the green bolus turn to compacted energy inside him. And I’m involved.
It’s switched modes
. That’s what the screen technician said to
that oddball woman from Munchies, Hannah Park. What was his name? Hurley. That was it. Leo Hurley.

With a deft movement, Pike swivels the Snakes and Ladders board around to reveal a map of the island.

– Here’s our fried egg.

The field associates smile in recognition at the friendly shape of home. Then frown. There are odd markings on it. Little stuck-on flashpoints. Asterisks. Blocks of scribbled text.

For the next ten minutes, Pike outlines what is happening. It has been going on for a year now, according to estimates. In red felt pen, he draws circles around the endangered sites. Harbourville he rings once. Mohawk, Groke and Lionheart he encircles twice. St Placid has three rings.

– If the problems were the result of technical accidents, says Pike slowly, then we would have been able to deal with them long ago. The fact is – he pauses, looks down at the desk, then up – that these toxic leaks are due to – And that’s when he says the word. The word that is to stick in their heads for days, weeks, afterwards. Haunt them like a curse. Because it is a curse, isn’t it, being one of those selected to know.

– Terrorism.

Benedict feels his face flush, then drain. It feels, suddenly, like his heart has been shoved in a freezer, a big shock of cold.

– It’s an orchestrated campaign, Pike’s saying. And as you can see from the rings I’ve placed here – and here – and here – they are centred on – where, Sonia?

Her face is completely white.

– The purification zones.

– Meaning, what, Nathan, in your opinion?

– Well, that the whole island – must be at risk, I guess. His voice catches.

There’s a short silence.

– Well, there you have it, says Pike gravely. Then looks
at Benedict. The city of St Placid especially, as you can see.

Benedict closes his eyes. Home. He lets a room in his flat to a divorced bloke who rings the Customer Hotline in the nude and leaves filthy take-outs scattered about the lounge.

– Now fortunately, says Pike, nothing has filtered through to the customers – yet. You could say almost the opposite. So far, the change in weather-effects due to the side-products of leakage has been a source of
wonder
, rather than
apprehension
. Which is just as well, for now at least. We can’t afford mass panic. But on the other hand, key sections of the population – VIP customers in particular – must be put on the alert. He looks at their faces again, one by one. – This will be part of your job.

Damage limitation
, thinks Benedict suddenly. So that’s why. Of course.

The terrorists are eco-Luddites, Pike’s telling them. Their mission, according to the Boss’s analysis, the destabilisation of Libertycare. Their method, sabotage. The words and phrases float around Benedict, filling his head like a thrilling poison gas. Highly confidential … dangerous men and women … recruitment … stop at nothing … prepared to sacrifice their lives …

Benedict’s mind is racing. So who are these people, exactly? Customers, like the bloke sharing his flat in St Placid? Surely not. They believe in the system more than anyone, and they’ve got loyalty cards to prove it.
Eco-Luddites?
Who in their right mind would turn on the very technology that allows them to live on Atlantica in the first place? It’s suicidal. It doesn’t make sense. It’s meaningless. Motiveless. It’s rebellion without a cause. It’s like – well, it’s like vandalism in Paradise.

– Yes, says Pike, looking at Benedict. That, I am afraid, is the nature of evil. As a society we have grown rapidly, perhaps too rapidly for some. Instead of evolution there is …
mutation
.

Benedict’s never thought about evil before, or mutancy. Good and bad, yes, right and wrong … We’ve all heard about evil for the sake of evil, but – Well, it’s always seemed like a sort of cliché. It’s so …
Biblical
.

– Libertycare’s analysis, says Pike, is that what
begins
at grassroots must be
attacked
at grassroots.

Benedict stares at the map of the fried egg. There’s St Placid, ringed three times in red. Home to a million people. Including him.

It seems to throb.

THE CUSTOMER IS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT

It was like a small medium-priced hotel-room, where they’d put me, except I was locked in. A bathroom with the usual accoutrements, wafer-thin square soaps and fluffy white towels. A main room with a double bed and a pale-green quilt. Little rectangular packets of tea and instant coffee, to make you feel at home, if that was the kind of home you had.

I lay on my bed and uncrumpled the brochure from my pocket and tried not to think about Hannah Park and the way she kept scrambling my feelings. I wondered what kind of life she must have had, and what she thought about, and whether she was lonely, and what it would be like to have her lie next to me while I stroked her hair and kissed her face. I’d probably have to take her glasses off.

Stupid. She’d never be interested in a bloke like me.

Our cherished tradition of dedication to our customers … global recognition as a centre of excellence … we promise all our customers that we will ensure your security, peace of mind and happiness during your stay with us … enshrined in our charter and honoured by our customer-care manifesto … Created on the highest principles of consumer rights …

There were headings dotted about – familiar brochure slogans; I remembered them from the early days of Libertycare, and from the Festival of Choice.
YOUR CHOICE, OUR COMMITMENT. THE FREEDOM’S YOURS
. Words
like
provide
and
pledge
. But nothing hung together. The words butterflied before my eyes. There was probably meaning in there somewhere, but just looking at it made me feel knackered and dumb.

Ever since I left the Junior Welcome Centre at seventeen, I’d felt in charge of things. All my adult life I’d found my own way, run my own little world – and the family’s too. An island on an island, we’d been. Not any more.

The best thing, I’ve found, when you’re shit-scared, is to stick your head in the sand. To lull yourself into a sense of security. Doesn’t matter if it’s false. Sleep was what I needed. Engulfment.

It came, but not in the way I’d hoped.

I thought I was awake when I saw him. Wide awake. It was my brother Cameron, and his knitting-pattern face was all purled with fury.

– You fucking bastard! His voice was a grown man’s, angry and husky as though he’d swallowed gravel. But the rest of him was stuck in teenagerhood. – I’m going to kill you!

– But I haven’t done anything! I said. It came out as a horrible whine that grated on my ears. High-pitched and childish. – They stole you! I insisted. I couldn’t stop them! It wasn’t my fault! Tiffany did it! Blame her!

Then Lola joined Cameron, putting her arm around his shoulders. Her beautiful face was mottled with anger. For the first time in my life, I was scared of them.