The Paper Eater

HARBOURVILLE

In the week that followed the Festival of Choice and Harvey Kidd’s arrest, Atlantica glowed like a bride.

Warm breezes drifted in from the distant continents of North America and Europe, their limpid salt wash merging delicately with the peppermint freshness of the capital, where Atlanticans walked with a spring in their step, alive to the symbiosis between land, sky and sea, and the myriad lives that fluttered in the air, moved on land or writhed beneath the carpety surface of the deep, from whales and squid and octopuses down to the smallest, flickering urges of krill.

In the city, flat vistas of glass and cool cement juggled shadows in the changing light, the pylons murmured, and a static vibration swarmed across the sky, shooting fragments of pure energy down to the streets, the avenues, the hushed crevices where, beneath the safe shadow of skyscrapers, the customers of Atlantica went about the simple, proud business of being part of society.

From a small corner of this peaceful world – from a house in a street in South District, comes a low groan of physical and mental discomfort.

– Mmmmm, moans the woman. Oargh.

The street, a small cul-de-sac with its own gas pump. The house, one upon whose front door gleams a bronzed fibreglass plate bearing the words: Stress-Management Consultancy – Please Knock GENTLY. The woman, Gwynneth, turning listlessly in crumpled sheets, struck down by the whirling nausea of morning sickness.

Her lover Geoff is in attendance. His five o’clock client has cancelled his Winding Down appointment, and the stress-management consultant has taken advantage of this unexpected lacuna to return to the conjugal bed – only to discover that passion must play second fiddle to the tiny rival of their embryonic child. For Gwynneth, at the age of forty-two, is pregnant.

– Just take a deep-deep-deep-deep breath in, counsels Geoff, in the hushed, low, capable voice he has developed in a work capacity. He finds it can be applied domestically too. – And then let it out again very, very slowly. SLOWLY. Balance out your Yin and Yang, that’s right.

Gwynneth obeys. But as she breathes (– In… out. In… and out, murmurs Geoff soothingly), Gwynneth’s mind – rucked as the sheets – can’t help floating down the flowchart of possibility ahead of her, and meandering into its tributaries. Tiffany’ll be moving out, no doubt, once she’s got her Libertyforce promotion. And then she and Geoff will have the place to themselves and Baby. It’ll be like starting all over again. A brand-new family. And a second chance. Doesn’t she deserve a makeover?

Gwynneth sighs and blinks her round, mother-of-pearl eyes. She doesn’t feel bad about Libertyforce catching up with Harvey – that’s how she thinks of it, that’s the phrase she uses – ‘catching up’. After all, she’s at one remove from it, isn’t she? But – well, she can’t say she feels one hundred per cent good, either. It’s kept her awake at night – that and the pressure on her bladder, which forces her to piss a thimbleful of urine twenty times a night. She’s glad Tiffany didn’t tell Harvey about the pregnancy when she arrested him.

It wouldn’t’ve been fair, would it, to make him cope with so much at once.

– OK now, love? asks Geoff gently, nuzzling closer in, and burying his face between her breasts.

– Much better, she sighs, and her flesh squishes in welcome. Way better.

– Better enough to… his voice muffles as his head moves downward.

Gwynneth shudders in delight, the sickness forgotten. Gentleness could be Geoff’s middle name. She’s never come across a man with such soft hands, and such a caring manner, such an intimate knowledge of what women want to hear. And feel. Where, and when.

Like down there. Now.

– A sissy, Harvey had called him.

You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he was like in bed, she’d wanted to reply, but had stopped herself just in time. Geoff knew all about a woman’s anatomy, its little secret places, its little secret needs. Harvey wasn’t like that.

– There were always four of us in the bed, when I was with him, Gwynneth said. Geoff looked up from his nuzzling. – What with Gloria and Lola.

– Well, now there’s three, he said softly, with a puffy smile, reaching for the bottle of wheatgerm oil.

Carefully, he poured some of the thick liquid into his palm and reached down to massage the already visible swell of Gwynneth’s belly. His palm drew circles, wider and wider, and Gwynneth groaned with pleasure. Then groaned again, as Geoff ran an expert finger down. And in. He waggled it till she cried out.

– Huh, huh, huh! Yes, yes, yes! Keep doing that. Just keep doing that! The thrilling pleasure of being cared for properly by another man – being seen to – lapped over Gwynneth as Geoff continued his masterful ministrations.

– Now fuck me, she hissed urgently.

And so he did – and he still was, with his usual proficiency, when five minutes later, they heard the front door crash open and Tiffany’s urgent shout downstairs.

– Mum! Mum!

– Oh Jesus, groaned Geoff, his rhythm shot to hell.

– Oh God, what’s happened? gasped Gwynneth, panting, pushing Geoff off and reaching for a dressing gown.

Geoff pulled the bedclothes over his jilted penis and sighed, majesty subsiding as the thud on the stairs grew heavier and Tiffany burst in.

– My job, she wailed, throwing herself on the bed and squashing Geoff’s feet beneath her bulky rump. Her orange-and-blue Libertyforce uniform was all skew-whiff, and her peaked cap tilted precariously. My job!

– Didn’t you get your promotion then? asked Gwynneth, trying to fix her hair.

– No! I bloody fucking didn’t!

– Oh, poor love, said Gwynneth, but – I mean, how come? It’s so unfair! What happened?

Tiffany put her hands over her face, knocking her cap on to the floor.

– It’s not just that! It’s worse! She threw herself forward, her weight crushing Geoff’s knees. I’ve lost my job! Libertyforce just told me I’ve got to leave!

– What? mustered Gwynneth.

– Why? managed Geoff.

– Cos Dad’s a criminal! she wailed. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that! I’m unemployed! They’ve taken away my bar-code! They’ve locked me out! I’m nobody!

And the big girl began to bawl like a baby.

Outside, a delicate green-tinged sky surrendered itself, on the horizon, to the split blood-orange of the sun, whose acid juice seeped out slowly to stain the clouds. As Tiffany Kidd wailed in her mother’s lap, the hot glow pooled and spread, glinting off the Makasoki bubble-domes, the flat roofs of skyscrapers, filling stations, the trams and the malls, until it struck the pure block of glass, chrome and steel from where the Liberty Machine, impassive, serene and just, had set in motion the young woman’s sad but necessary redundancy.

Like some screen idols, she is in reality much smaller than people imagine her, being in volume no bigger than a household fridge. In some ways she resembles one: the flawless white flanks, broken only by the sliding lever that calls a halt, the boxy, human proportions, the humming technological beauty of outer blankness, inner genius. The screens she nurtures stand back against the walls of the Temple, like banks of hesitant admirers poised to react, flashing the products of her thought-processes out past the firewall, then sluicing the resulting data and policy down into the greedy heart of Head Office itself. The Boss has been keeping the building busy since developments at ground level prompted the mode-switch. Almost overnight, the Corporation has stepped up a gear. You can please some of the people some of the time, her software reasons, and most of the people most of the time, but can you please all of the people all of the time? Of course not, and nor should you try to. Liberty is a global enterprise, and no man is an island. No island is really an island, either. The word is full of connections. She has been making an unprecedented number of those recently, and the conclusions she has drawn, distilled from a statistical database that is the envy of the world, have led to a strategy which is now being applied in a multitude of different ways across the territory.

Spearheading an important element of which is the initiative now being unveiled in the People Laboratory on the forty-fourth floor of Head Office, where the Facilitator General himself is addressing a hand-picked team.

Among them, Benedict Sommers, chewing green gum.

He’s nervous, excited. Do the others know about his reprieve? Do they realise that it was Pike himself who intervened to block the questionnairing? For the past half-hour, following the introductions, Wesley Pike has been speaking to them in broad terms. Benedict eyes the tall, imposing frame. It radiates an odd, almost erotic energy. Nobody moves. The rumour is that the Facilitator General has eyes in the back of his head, that he can shrivel your brain to the size of a macadamia nut, that he can follow the trains of thought of five separate people at once.

And that he sprays his armpits with a sex smell.

– You have a good brain, Benedict, he’d said at the Festival party. Liberty needs good brains.

Benedict had looked right into his face then. They were both tall; their heads were level. Tall people don’t get to look others straight in the eye often. When it happens, there’s a soft shock of recognition and something’s born between them. Pike had smiled.

– The People Laboratory will be expecting you on Monday.

Benedict had swallowed his gum in shock.

He’s still glowing from it. He can’t believe his luck. They’re all of them field associates, he guesses. Junior and mid-level. It’s a wide airy conference room. Quietly plush, with a muted parquet floor, swing-out easels, classical Venetian blinds, understated beige fittings, a functional and aesthetically pleasing water-cooler.

– Let me map out something of the journey we are to embark on, Pike’s saying. Our project is part hypothetical, and part practical. Nothing discussed here is to leave the room. He pauses, then looks directly at Benedict. A sudden grin splits his face. – Assume all surveillance to be active.

Benedict looks up, alarmed. Pike’s making another reference, surely, to his close shave with the questionnairing process. He gulps, feeling the bitter dead taste of old gum that’s been chewed too long. Should he try to spit it out discreetly? Ever since he swallowed his gum at the Festival party he’s been picturing a green bolus growing inside him, a plastic parasite.

– 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.