Peter saw her staring, picked one up, and tossed it to her. “They’re a little old and going mushy, but still good. You’ve probably been living off long-life food, right?”
Clare nodded as she clasped the apple in both hands and took a bite. It had lost most of its crispness. She didn’t care. It was food and hadn’t come out of a tin or a bottle. She thought she could eat a dozen of them without stopping.
Peter tossed a second apple to Dorran then dropped into one of the seats, pulling his legs up under himself. Dorran turned the apple over in his hands but didn’t try to eat. He chose a double seat a little separated from Peter, and Clare took her place beside him. The radiation heater was close enough that she could stretch out her legs and warm her toes. She finished the apple in seconds.
“There’s a bin just behind you,” Peter said, pointing over her shoulder. “We’ve got to be careful with waste. No garbage man to take out the trash, no cleaners to come through and sanitise the place… I don’t know how long I might be living here. I’ve got to be careful not to turn it into a toxic wasteland. All it would take is a minor rat infestation, and life could become very unpleasant.”
“Right.” Clare threw her core into the bin then took a tissue from the table to dry her fingers. “I guess that’s the kind of thing we need to think about these days.”
“Exactly. It’s amazing how busy my days can become with mundane tasks I took for granted before. I keep all of the trash locked in one room on a different floor. My work area has to stay hygienic.”
Clare glanced behind them, where chip packets were still littered between the desks.
“Hah! All right, except for that.” Peter rubbed the back of his neck. “In my defence, it’s not mine. I can’t bring myself to clean up my co-workers’ areas. I lived with those people for the last year, and now, their clutter is one of the few parts of them I have left. I could have this room spotless… clear off the laptops and discarded jackets and trash… but that would be like erasing them from existence. And I can’t make myself do it. Not just yet.” He continued to smile, but his lips twitched.
They were circling around the most important subject—the quiet zones. The hollows. Clare did her best to ease them towards it in a gentle way. “Were many of you in the tower when… it happened?”
“Not many. To be completely honest, I was one of the lazy ones who lived here instead of driving home each night. So I was in the tower when everything went south. But most of my co-workers were at home or on their morning commute.” He took a deep breath and folded his hands in his lap. “You’ll want to know how it happened. It’s a bit of a story, so settle in.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Clare leaned forward in her seat. Dorran stayed perfectly still at her side, but she knew he was no less attentive. Peter turned his eyes towards the ceiling. He licked his lips and was silent for an agonising minute as he collected his thoughts. When he started his story, his smile was shaky.
“So, you know a bit about Aspect Laboratories. It liked to pluck the brightest minds fresh out of university and give them eighteen months to prove their worth to the company. All expenses paid and complete freedom to do whatever we wanted, within certain ethical restraints, of course. At the end of eighteen months, we were released if our results were underwhelming. But people who performed well were given full-time positions at the company. Often very lucrative ones. Being picked for the program was the dream for a lot of students in the medical science field. It was seen as the place to be if you wanted to make a difference.”
Peter picked up a bottle of water. He cracked the seal on the lid but didn’t drink from it. Instead, he screwed and unscrewed the top repeatedly. A nervous tic, Clare thought. He needed something for his hands to do.
“Nine out of ten students never amounted to much. Eighteen months sounds like a lot of time, but it’s really not, and it’s easy to fritter away on busywork if you’re not disciplined. Aspect relied on the one out of ten who discovered something or invented something that would go on to make them millions. For a program that was largely unsupervised, it was surprisingly lucrative for them. I was given a grant for my thesis on robotics. I was trying to develop an artificial eye. Something that would provide feedback to the brain. Not proper sight. That’s still a few years away. But my prototypes could feed in a sense of colour, shapes, and lights.”
“Couldn’t you just…” Clare shrugged. “Put a camera in there?”
Peter laughed good-humouredly. “That sounds like a great idea, huh? But the hard part is actually hooking it into the brain. And finding a way to make it comfortable and safe for daily use. While some parts of it were artificial, I found the product needed to be made from mostly biological material. But that’s beside the point. My artificial eye probably won’t ever see the light of day now.”
He sighed through his nose as he turned the bottle over in his hands. “There were sixteen of us in the program at a time. I liked most of my co-workers. A lot of them were pretty eccentric. It’s a cliché to say madness is just the other side of genius, but I think that’s sometimes true. There was one guy, Bobby, who was given a permanent position in the company about six months ago. He created
