The Departure

holding the device in place for a moment longer, till he finally retracted it.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

He helped her hobble over to the hydrocar, and she was more than glad to climb inside. Sudden light caught her eye and she looked round to see fire blooming inside the transvan cab. She then looked round at the scattering of indigents up above on the concrete bank, watching the show.

‘What about them?’ she asked.

‘They’ll disappear quick enough once the Inspectorate appear.’

He passed her a blister pack of painkillers and an analgesic patch, then concentrated on pulling the hydrocar out into a gap between passing autotrucks. Feeling no embarrassment, she pulled down her trousers and pressed the patch into place. She was so used to being watched. From behind came a whoomph and, glancing back again, she saw flames belch out of the gap where the transvan’s screen had been. Seeing this destruction too, the indigents began moving off.

‘You expected deeply implanted trackers?’ she said.

‘I expected more than just one.’

Another vehicle change ensued in an underpass, presumably another deadspot, and again it was a place inhabited by ragged, aimless people. But then where wasn’t, these days? Everywhere Hannah looked, she could see hopeless souls trudging about with the demeanour of seniles in late-stage dementia, even though many of them weren’t noticeably old. Her head felt light as she sat staring out of the windscreen at these sad beings, but, even so, something seemed to begin unwinding inside her – years and years of it. Her leg aching after having to walk from car to car, she swallowed some of the painkillers, then realized her abductor genuinely had expected more than just one deeply implanted tracker, for the pills were strong. She didn’t remember sleeping, but after an odd hiatus she found they were driving along a carbocrete rural road, then parking on a patch of old concrete, amidst fields. Here, at last, no people in sight – which seemed very strange.

He hid the vehicle under a filthy canvas sheet whose colour matched the concrete, then guided her round by a trampled path, to a hatch that he pulled up. He then led her down below, and lights came on as they entered some sort of underground bunker. Next he tore off his mask – the layer of silicone rubber she had somehow known was there – to reveal features that she recognized at once.

She gazed at him for a long moment, not quite sure how to handle this. Then she nodded slowly. ‘I thought Smith had killed you, Alan. I thought he’d finally got what he wanted.’

Thinner-featured, of course. Hair dyed a different colour from its usual acid white. Something almost unhuman wearing a human face and finding it didn’t quite fit. That was him; that had always been Alan Saul. Of course she was glad to see him alive, but it meant that a whole bunch of complicated emotions, once securely cached in her mind, were no longer quite so secure.

‘Smith,’ he echoed, momentary rage transforming his expression, shortly displaced by puzzlement. He shook his head. ‘I know my own name, but that’s about all I know.’

‘You don’t remember Salem Smith?’

‘No.’

She should not feel disappointed with his amnesia. Considering what Smith had done to him, it was miraculous he possessed a mind at all – or that he was even alive.

‘Alan Saul,’ she confirmed tightly. ‘But don’t even bother looking on Govnet or the Subnets for anything regarding yourself. You erased everything, and your work was so highly classified they put nothing back. Even I’m only allowed access to parts of it – after it’s been vetted by a committee of fourteen science-policy advisers.’

‘My work?’

She told him.

5

Prohibition Works!

The greater the power and extent of the state, the more room there is for corruption. The more inept state services and industries become, the more pies it takes its huge cut from and the more regulation it imposes, the greater the call for black markets. This last fact is one governments consistently failed to learn, even after the stark lesson of American Prohibition. Deadspots are where you’ll find them. Inspectorate officers grow rich in cash by selling the locations of such deadspots to the underworld, which in turn makes its cut from those it opens up such spots to. The breakers come there – those who burn out the tracers in stolen vehicles and disassemble them for their components, those who take apart computer hardware to sell on to others maintaining the Subnet, and those who chop up human bodies for usable organs – usually to be sold to low-echelon officials not yet enjoying twenty-second-century medical care. Retailers come to sell other blackmarket goods: food disapproved of by All Health, like high-fat dairy products, sugary drinks and sweets; cigarettes, drugs, illegal ABV booze, coffee and tea without the cumulative emetics to discourage abuse. And then there are the black surgeries dealing in illegal implants, ID implant excision and exchange, gunshot wounds, and all those injuries and illnesses not catered for under All Health – but only for those who can afford them.

In a totalitarian state, some people are just too dangerous to be allowed to live. Saul now considered his second-hand knowledge of the person he had been. He was a brilliant, brilliant man, indeed a genius, but with a huge drawback in that he was also only a marginally functional human being. It could be called autism, or maybe Asperger’s syndrome, but Saul liked to think that so focused on his work had he been, he simply had not found the time, space or energy to deal with the trivialities of normal human relationships. Able to speak and read even before he could coordinate his limbs, his previous self had been sent immediately into special schools, but even they could not quite handle him and he ended up being home-tutored by educational experts. By the age of ten, he also outpaced these experts, and thereafter had taken charge of his own education. Had Saul been a child of zero-asset-status parents, all this might have caused great problems, and sufficient funding and resources might have been hard to find, but his parents were high-level Committee executives and able to lavish attention on him.

For Saul, every test, both mental or physical, was of overriding interest and in nothing he tried did he fail to excel. He practised martial arts, taking his second black belt in shotokan karate whilst studying for eight doctorates in the physical sciences and three in the arts. Very soon he began to produce: making vast improvements to the software of agricultural robots, then designing a new kind of materially inert microbot that could hunt through the human body for cancer cells without causing rejection problems. Next he applied the same inert materials to someone else’s invention of a chip interface to the human mind, so it too would not activate the immune system.