I miss your music. They confiscated every recording of your final masterpiece, wiped your genius from my private virtuality and stripped you from the cube’s networks - a burnt offering to Pristine and her uncompromising agents of conformity. All that is left are my memories, and sixty years of quarantine have dulled even them.
I still play your harmonica, reviving your melodies for a few precious moments, but the old amp is failing and the low notes are more a snarl than the chilling drone you once coaxed from the little golden instrument. I’m not the prodigy you were; my timing is rigid, my expression flat and mechanical. When my arthritis flares my music is even worse.
The others tell me not to torture myself, though their weakly veiled anger betrays the pain your music burns into them. When they hear me talk to you they sigh and shake their heads. Patronising, gently mocking, they remind me you are dead, hinting at the dementia now so common amongst our cube’s ageing population. But they never want to talk about how you died. No, there is always somewhere they have to be, something that has to be done. Anything to avoid the truth of their brutal mob justice. Nobody talks about that night, and sixty years on I sometimes wonder if they even remember. Perhaps it has been buried beneath a lifetime of justification and outright denial. But it remains a disfiguring scar across my mind. Why can’t it fade as readily from memory as does your music?
There is a banging in the walls, an irregular clang and rattle growing louder over the five minutes of my failing attempt at your music. Another complaint about the controversial melody? But banging on the walls isn’t really the Browns’ style, Eve being too restrained, too proper for such crudeness, while Graham is in no physical state for even mild exertion. Besides, I’m pretty sure it’s coming from the outside wall. A couple of years after the quarantine began, after you were killed, I moved into one of the housing blocks built against the cube’s East wall, unable to bear the sight of those we used to call neighbours in the central tower. Living here I have grown accustomed to the vibration and muffled rattle which passes through the outside walls whenever the supply train hurtles through the single track-way still connecting us to the rest of the Pristine Lineage. This isn’t a supply train. Perhaps it is another slab of the Cube’s power-mesh getting ready to fail. The sounds of the collapsing mesh have become louder as the years have rolled into decades and the maintenance of our quarantined cube has been allowed to wane. I look to the illumination tiles in the ceiling of my one-room apartment, squinting to notice any variation in the light, straining to discern a flicker. I see none, though that doesn’t mean anything. The cube’s single functioning diagnostics suite advised me eight years ago to get my eyes retuned - it seems incapable of accepting that we have been without proper medical facilities for almost as long as the once verdant meadow around the central towers has been a desert. My eyes sting so I look away from the diffuse illumination and put a hand to the warm, slightly humming wall. Yes, something is definitely banging about in there. Our out there.
My thumb twitches and subdermal pick-ups in my swollen and arthritic wrist remotely activate the eye-screen I so rarely bother wearing nowadays. I grab the small square of thin crystal from its dock in the arm of my worn and sagging recliner and I stretch the flexiband around my forehead. The familiar headache hits as soon as I try to focus on the misaligned display half an inch from my right eye. The screen is just one more thing long overdue a maintenance run. I call up the single external channel available to our cube and eighteen virtual displays are arrayed before me. Cycling through them, bringing them one at a time to the fore, I observe the Pristine Lineage from different vantage points across its immense structure of dull white cubes and fragile-looking connective trackways. You never had any appetite for visiting those few cubes for which we had been granted access authorisation, but sixty years of quarantine in this single claustrophobic and isolated world has left me aching to see those other towns. One thousand cubes, every one a kilometre across, scattered in a rigid cloud around the fifty kilometre cigar of the polydimensional drive section which drags our vast colony across the skin of space at one fifth the speed of light and harvests a constant accretion of spontaneously generated matter and energy. Every cube home to a town of thousands, each internally different and yet conforming rigidly to the societal and technological strictures of HC - Homogeneity Compliance. Every town restricted in its access to others by the grading of generational bands to prevent any deviation from the society that originally left Earth. Evolution, genetic or memetic, is anathema to HC.
I have found the slowly panning viewpoint I need and now wait, scratching at the hard nodule on my wrist where the subdermal is starting to migrate, as our cube creeps across the display. Even from outside, in the vacuum of space where nobody ever goes, the quarantine is obvious. Of the nine trackways linking us to adjacent cubes and hubs, eight are dark. And the single active conduit is lit only on its underside where the supply train still occasionally runs. The skin of our cube looks the same as it always has, and likely always will: a dull and lightly tarnished white with not so much as a seam to show where the hull-tiles meet. What had I expected to see? Something clawing at the Pristine Lineage’s body? Somebody trying to break in, desperately fleeing hard vacuum? If something really was breaking in through the cube’s outer skin, the banging and rattling would not have been the first sign. Explosive decompression would have been an earlier and more dramatic clue. I try to shake my head at my stupidity, though I have practically no range of movement looking to the right - not since I braved the touch of a failing auto-surgeon ten years ago. The cancerous growth had to be excised from my spine and a little difficulty looking right is, so the others often remind me, preferable to the more gruesome mistakes inflicted by the auto-surgeons on some of our less fortunate cube-mates.
I dismiss the external views and deactivate the eye-screen, gladly returning the crystal square to its dock. I close my eyes against the hot lance of a headache and set my chair to recline. At least the banging has stopped.
Your song is playing softly in my thoughts with a rare clarity which is almost as real as a recording. The closest I have been, for so long, to how you used to make me feel. I don’t chase the memory, afraid of disturbing its fragile essence; I just let it brush delicately against my soul. And I relax, looking for sleep and for dreams of you.
Your melody shatters, its beat thrown into a chaotic and grating racket. The damned banging has begun anew. I open my eyes and scowl at the wall, muttering my agitation.
“Why don’t you just shut up?” I demand of the ruined power-mesh. Then I look up, the direction we always used to look when addressing Her. “And what about you?” I hiss at Pristine. “Why don’t you do something about it? Don’t pretend you can’t hear us. I know you see everything that goes wrong here.” The others mock me when I talk to you Amy, but everyone still rants, pleads, even prays to Pristine. Some are open about it; most do it under their breath and only when they are desperate. At some point everyone in our quarantined cube begs the colony’s omniscient AI for a miracle. But she has turned her back to us. She has disowned our cube.
A crackle of sparks and a flare of white flame erupt from the wall as if in response to my outburst and I jerk back tipping my recliner and falling hard to the floor.
“Jesus, Pristine, I’m sorry!” I yell. I don’t think this is her doing, but why take the chance when a feeble apology costs nothing? Electricity forks across the wall, arcing to the opposite surface like the lightning we occasionally saw when our cube’s external walls still created an illusion of open spaces, day and night cycles, and all manner of simulated weather. It has been decades, but I don’t remember lightning ever being so vicious, so angry. I don’t recall being this terrified. I close my eyes, bury my face in the carpet’s thick organic pile, and I scream horror over the hateful electrical snarl.
At the groaning crack of fractured metal I open my eyes and see a section of my apartment’s wall fall away near the ceiling as a shadow is chased out by a coiled tongue of pulsing flame. It is a heavy and substantial shadow and as it lands on me I hear bone snap and a far darker shade engulfs me.
#
I awaken to an unfamiliar face. Of the ten thousand people in our cube at the start of the quarantine, barely three thousand still live. I don’t think, however, I would be able to recognise a stranger as being out of place amongst their number. But this man’s incongruity is obvious.
“Just stay there. Don’t try to get up,” he says. The softness of his voice arouses goose bumps across my frail and skinny arms. “I think your hip might be broken.”
Of course it is broken; bruises don’t hurt this much. “You’re young!” I state the obvious.
“And you are old,” comes his equally uninspired riposte.
“But I’m the right age for this cube.” In spite of his warning and the protests of my throbbing hip, I shuffle in my bed to sit upright. When did I get into bed? How long was I unconscious?
“Careful,” he insists, rushing to my side, helping me up and rearranging my pillows to better support me. He glances down to my hip, bound tight in the garish blue plastic of a medical strap, and he grimaces. “I’m sorry about that, I wasn’t expecting anyone to be in here.”
“I should hope you weren’t,” I mutter, taking in the blackened walls and patches of charred carpet. The burns on the floor look deep, right down to the nutrient weave. I doubt the fibres will grow back. “Did you think everyone is living in the central tower?” I ask.
“I thought the cube was uninhabited.”
“People think we’re already dead?” I’m horrified. Offended. Is our cube so unimportant, our lives so meaningless, that we could be so easily written off?
“People have no idea what is in this cube. It appears on nobody’s approved contact schedule and isn’t registered as storage or agriculture. Most people don’t even know it is cut off; they all think it’s just on a generational band outside of their authorisation, along with all the other cubes they aren’t allowed to visit.”
“And how do you know what everyone thinks or knows?” I ask. I swallow hard, realising I already know. “Oh,” I mumble. “You’re HC. You’re an Assessor.” Looking to the ceiling, to ever silent Pristine, I say, “Decided to speed up our extermination? Couldn’t wait a few more years to get our cube back?”
He chuckles. “She has no eyes in this cube, and she is in no rush for anything,” he says. “She has infinite patience.” There is hidden meaning there. “And no, I’m not an Assessor.”
“Then why are you here?”
He shakes his head. “You first.”
“Sorry?”
“What’s your story? What’s with this cube?”
I shift to one side, favouring my right leg and relieving the pressure on my fractured left hip. The blue strap pinches at my skin, tightening in an attempt to keep me still. “How about getting me something to drink first?” I say through a grimace as the strap tenses and a stab of deep pain drills through me.
He looks across to the mess of the burnt wall, to where my small kitchen recess has melted into a grotesquely phallic sculpture. “I think I might have killed your kitchen.”
I give a weak smile. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that. It’s been mostly for show these past fifteen years. I’ve got a few crates of water bottles in the cupboard in the back there.”
He nods and grabs a couple of the small pressurised bottles from the large cupboard. After pulling the little stoppers from the straws, he hands me a bottle. “How long has it been since Pristine sent any maintenance workers to this cube?”
“Not since the quarantine,” I explain. “Sixty years ago.”
He takes a mouthful of water, pinching the straw to regulate the flow of water squirting into his mouth. “Quarantine?” he asks before taking another sip.
“Pristine put us under quarantine,” I tell him.
“Pristine, or HC?”
“One is the voice of the other, isn’t it?”
He sniffs and looks at the ceiling. Then back to me. “Yes, but perhaps not in the configuration you imagine.”
“You think Pristine is answerable to HC?”
He smiles, sadness dulling his eyes. “What were you quarantined for?”
“Music.”
“Sorry?”
I shift again, gasping at the raging ache in my hip but batting his hand away. I don’t need his help. “We were contaminated,” I explain, sliding back down to lay on my back, relieving the pressure on my hip. “We were only a young generation and we were exposed to the music of a far older cube.” I laugh in spite of the rising nausea whipped up by the memory. “We didn’t even know we were doing anything wrong. Nobody told us we weren’t supposed to be listening to it.”
He’s giving me a strange look. Disbelief? Doubt? “They wouldn’t quarantine the whole cube,” he says. “HC Assessors would have detained the culprits and any contaminated individuals. Not the whole cube.”
“By the time Homogeneity Compliance got involved, the whole cube was already contaminated.”
“Oh come on,” he scoffs and throws up his hands. “Pristine precisely manages the minutia of our lives, monitors and controls every petty aspect of a hundred million peoples’ social development. She micromanages every facet of existence across a thousand cubes. She takes note if we change our toilet routine! There is no way she didn’t notice an entire cube learning the music of a cube at the other end of the generational spectrum?”
Does he think that hasn’t occurred to us? We all know something went wrong, that we were let down and left unprotected from social contamination. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I say. “HC didn’t do anything until we had already integrated the music into out own creations and begun evolving styles beyond those Pristine had projected for the oldest generations.”
He is shaking his head and I’m finding my gaze drawn to the flawless supple skin of his young neck. I shudder at some forgotten and mutated urge. He isn’t my type - I’m not gay, for one thing - but I can’t remember when I last saw such youth. Such unspoilt flesh. That soft pink skin reminds me of your neck. In my memory, Amy, you never aged like the rest of us. You have remained eternally young. Forever perfect.
“Why didn’t they just order you all to keep the new music to yourselves and prevent you from sharing it with other cubes?”
We had argued that point. I remember you screaming it at an Assessor as he sealed the first of the trackways. But Pristine knew how dangerous and insidious music is. “It’s not like some new technology developed out of step by some genius citizen. It couldn’t just be taken away, confiscated and forgotten. Music gets inside you. It propagates and spreads like a virus.”
“And it evolves rapidly,” he says with a nod. “Just like a virus.”
I look into his eyes, young and yet aged horribly by stress or unwanted knowledge, and I try to find some hint of his purpose. Dare I speak openly? Even if he is an Assessor, is there anything he could actually do to punish me further? I doubt it. “And what if the music was allowed to evolve?” I demand. “What’s the problem? The whole philosophy of Homogeneity Compliance is a joke.”
Sucking through his teeth, sounding too much like a snake, he makes me uncomfortably conscious of the ugly gaps between my own sparse teeth. “I don’t know that it is,” he says. “Our ancestors constructed the Pristine Lineage in order that some part of Humanity might be saved to establish a new colony in a safer corner of the Galaxy.” He grimaces as if at some internal dilemma. “What is the point of it all if what eventually reaches our destination is no longer human?” I can’t tell if he believes his own words. He’s conflicted.
I scoff at the overused party-line. “And a new trend in music is going to turn us inhuman?” I throw up my hands, angered by the idiocy governing our world, but a lance of agony pierces my hip and bleeds the enthusiasm from my display.
“No,” he admits. “It probably won’t. No single development or meme would ever do it. It’s going to be a culmination of countless seemingly trivial changes in our society and technology. Do you think early hominids actually notices their evolution into us?”
“The difference is,” I say, “that took hundreds of thousands of years. Possibly longer.”
“Three million years,” he says in a flat and hushed tone.
“If you say so” I shrug, careful to keep my body still. “Ancient history was never my forte.”
He is shaking his head. “No,” he mumbles. “Three million years. That’s how long the Pristine Lineage has been searching for a new home. Three million years of HC and Pristine enforcing their unchanging template of human physical and social normality. Can you imagine what we might have become by now without Homogeneity Compliance?”
#
His name is Oliver he told me, almost as an afterthought, as he left my apartment. He has been out there, following my crude map to the food depot in the breezy half light of our cube’s faulty night cycle, for over an hour. There’s no food in my apartment, I had planned to go shopping today but I’m in no state to walk anywhere now. In cubes housing elderly generations it is normal for authorised and heavily monitored carers of far younger generations to start helping out - much as happens with the carers and teachers fostering the nursery and juvenile cubes. It’s just one more thing we are missing out on. Already we are having trouble unloading the supply trains. In a few years I can see things getting a lot worse.
He should be back by now. I’m worried someone has seen him, though I’m more concerned about who might come looking for him. Oliver’s transgression against HC utterly eclipses our own. He didn’t tell me how he came upon the Pristine Lineage’s calendar, but it is obvious they aren’t going to just let him go. HC will be desperate to reclaim and bury this incendiary knowledge. No generation has ever known where it stood on the colony’s genealogy; no hint has ever been given as to how long it has been since we left Earth. Every generation must, according to the strictures of Homogeneity Compliance, believe with equal certainty that it could be the first ship-born generation or the first to step on to our new home world. Or any generation between. I had always imagined we were the fourth or fifth generation; I remember you liked to believe the Pristine Lineage had been in flight for three hundred years and that we would live to see the new world. Had anyone considered a voyage of over three million years? Given the fervour of HC, I now see their founders must have known it was a possibility.
Will we ever find a habitable world? Is pristine even looking anymore? Or is the last of Humanity to be forever preserved in this static society aboard an ancient vessel of cubes and trackways? Three million years - surely it is time to just let evolution resume and allow our offspring to adapt to existence in space. And it is reasoning such as that which HC was created to resist. It was these notions which necessitated a ban on knowledge of time.
I loosen the blue medical strap and reach to my desk to pick up your harmonica. Christ, it hurts. I don’t want to imagine what it would feel like without the mildly analgesic effect of the strap. I hope Oliver brought more than one with him because our cube ran out years ago and the trains have been suspiciously lacking in medical supplies of late. The sooner we are all dead, the quicker the cube can be reassigned as a nursery for a new generation. Pristine’s plan is obvious.
Your harmonica is cold in my hand, but an indefinable heat spreads from it to warm my core. Your spirit, I like to believe. It buzzes against my cracked and blotchy lips; the tiny generator inside hasn’t been aligned properly since I recovered the old instrument from the fist stage incinerator in which you - No, I won’t think about that. The gold-coloured alloy polished up flawlessly, giving no hint of that dark pile of ashes from which it had been rescued.
I inhale softly through the row of tiny pick-ups, and the amp groans a dire cord on the table. Not quite the exhilarating first note of your masterpiece, but close enough to ignite memories. Goose bumps prickle across the backs of my arms and a shudder hurts my hip. Closing my eyes now, I blow through the lower strip and the six notes of that unforgettable riff snarl through my apartment. Sixty years ago it had been enticingly original and revolutionary. None of us had ever heard its like, and the whole cube was smitten with your genius. How were we to know nobody else had ever heard it either? You had assumed it was a natural progression, predicted and sanctioned by HC. We all had.
I play the riff again, delighted and grief stricken by its exquisitely mournful timbre. People gave up playing music once the quarantine was announced. They stopped even listening to it after they turned on you. But I didn’t. That upset them. For a long time I delighted in the discomfort my renditions elicited in the others, but now I play for only me. And for you.
#
“That’s beautiful.” How long has he been standing there in the open doorway? I have reached the final sombre melody of your complex masterpiece but I don’t remember playing it, just experiencing it. I scowl at his interruption, resent being yanked back to the depression of reality.
“What is it?” Oliver asks, dumping a bulging satchel on the floor where a few ready-meal cans fall out and roll across the burnt carpet which is beginning to scab over. Perhaps it will grow back after all.
“It’s a harmonica,” I say, putting your little golden instrument down on the table beside my bed, self conscious and very aware of my musical limitations now that I have an audience.
“I see that.” He smiles and crouches to retrieve the cans of food. “I meant the music. It’s like a love song, but sad and...” He waves his hand, as if the elusive word is buzzing about his head and needs to be snatched from the air.
“Chilling?” I suggest.
He nods and sets the satchel against the wall before sitting in my comfy chair. He opens a can of generic supper, snaps the fork from the lid and hands me the simple meal. “I’ve never heard music like that.”
I accept the proffered can and fork and give Oliver a sideways look, a knowing nod. “Nobody has, outside of this cube.”
“Oh, right, of course,” he says, opening a can for himself. “That’s the illegal music you developed? It’s lovely.”
“I didn’t develop it,” I correct him, but I don’t think he means me personally.
He prods at the thick slop in the cheap can and stirs in the hot patch developing at the base. “Hardly seems worth a quarantine, does it?” It is rhetorical; he obviously knows the danger perceived by HC. I’m not sure he believes it himself though.
“HC thought it was,” I say. We both know that is all that matters.
The bitter stench of generic supper is tingling in the back of my throat and I remember the can in my hands. I stir the slop and a mildly spicy sweetness is released to waft across my face. Oliver is picking at his own simple meal, seemingly hunting for the least offensive morsel in what is a thick grey paste which tastes the same right through. The supply train hasn’t come for a while and these cans are always the last thing to run out in the food depot. I don’t think he is used to budget meals. Even after sixty years I’m not either. At least it is easy on my few brittle teeth.
#
We have been eating in silence, with little enthusiasm, for twenty minutes. My can is still half full and has started to cool and congeal. I set it aside, washing the bitter aftertaste from my mouth with the last of the water in my bottle.
“So...” I drag the word out. “Three million years.”
“Three million,” he agrees. He has eaten even less than I have, though he is still poking at the thickening paste, making little patterns in the skin forming over the nasty meal. He’s frowning. “I don’t think we are ever going to find a planet,” he says. “We ought to be adapting to life on a ship, not clinging on to our irrelevant heritage and still pretending we live on a planet.” Now he is being honest, opening up to me. “We need to evolve.”
I shift my weight, finding the pain not so severe now. Sitting up straight I give him a slow shake of my head. “HC has kept us static for three million years. Nothing is ever going to change.” I reach again for your harmonica and for the first time in years it hits me that your music is going to be forgotten when I die. It will be as if you had never created those chilling melodies, as if you had never lived. The thought hurts. I clench a fist about the instrument until the rows of pick-ups press painfully into the rough flesh of my old palms. Then I put it down, sliding it across the little table, pushing it away.
“They’re never going to let us evolve,” I say.
“Your wife?” he asks, nodding at the harmonica, finally giving up on the can and putting it down on the carpet.
“As good as.” I’m not sure I want to talk about this with him. But who else is there?
“Dead?”
I nod.
“The Assessors?”
No, I can’t do this. I look away and neither of us say anything for a minute. Oliver stands and looks at the mess he made of my apartment wall.
“I’m going to have to get back in there,” he explains, pointing to the hole through which he fell. I tense, reigniting the blaze within my shattered hip. I know next to nothing about this man, but the thought of him leaving terrifies me.
“You can’t go,” I blurt. “You broke my hip; you have to look after me. You owe me!” But it goes deeper than that. He doesn’t belong in this cube, he is different, young. He reconnects me to the world of the Pristine Lineage, frees me of the quarantine, if only in some small way. “Please don’t leave me alone.” Hardly alone, I know, but who else in this cube do I ever speak to nowadays? Who is in any state to care for me as my old bones slowly heal?
His palm is pressing against the blistered metal of the wall, stroking it with a look of distracted wonder on his young face as if sensing the massive cavities in the sandwiched layers between us and the void of space. “I’m not going to leave you,” he assures me. “This cube is about the safest place for me now. HC have no presence here and even Pristine’s eyes have been disconnected or have failed through lack of maintenance. But I need to replace some of the larger power-mesh strands I severed on my way through the wall.”
“Why?”
“They’ll be looking for me.” He climbs onto the melted pile which had once been my kitchen recess and strains to reach to the lip of the hole in the wall, barely getting a fingertip over the charred metal. “It was quite easy to get through one of the decommissioned trackways without breaking anything they might detect, but I wasn’t so lucky with your wall.”
“You said nobody has eyes here,” I counter. “Who’s going to notice the damage?”
Trying to pull himself up with just the tips of his fingers, Oliver slips and falls. And he swears. Muttering something he drags my comfy chair across the room and stands on its high back, scuffing the old worn fabric. It isn’t much higher than the deformed remains of my melted kitchen.
“Who’s going to notice?” I ask again.
He has a slightly better grip. “They don’t need eyes to notice failures in the power-mesh,” he says. “That will show up on Pristine’s main monitoring systems.
I sniff and offer a tired smile as he drags himself up to the hole, scrambling at the wall with his flat-soled shoes. It’s just a little too high, he doesn’t quite make it. He looks about my apartment for something he can use to gain a few more inches.
“The power-mesh has been failing for years in this cube,” I explain. “So relax. I doubt she will notice your minor sabotage.”
“Had a lot of experience with Pristine’s most secure processing spaces have you?” he mutters. I choose to believe he isn’t trying to sound so patronising, but I give him a glare none-the-less. He shakes his head and says, “I’m sorry. It’s just that I got quite deep into her systems on my way to finding the calendar. I’m pretty sure she can differentiate between power-mesh slabs which have failed due to lack of maintenance, and the failure of deliberately severed strands.”
“In which case she will already know, won’t she?” I nod to the crates of water bottles in the open cupboard. “Try those,” I suggest.
“Thanks.” He starts pulling a few of the crates up against the burnt wall. “I think the monitoring systems will take a while to register the damage - the mesh is always suffering fluctuations. If I can get it fixed by the morning I’m hoping Pristine will dismiss it as a natural disturbance in the flow.”
#
He has been inside the wall for quarter of an hour, banging about and swearing as occasional fountains of sparks spray from the hole. I don’t know about fixing the damage - he seems intent on making it worse.
Little puffs of black smoke are coiling up from the floor as sparks incinerate individual organic carpet fibres, leaving a smell of roasting vegetables in the air. “Do you want to watch what you’re doing in there? You’re making a mess of my carpet,” I shout, only half joking.
“Give me a minute,” he yells back as something pops and he hisses in pain. The sound of metal crashing on metal echoes through the wall cavities, the racket finding a familiar rhythm which makes me smile. I wonder if he is finding that beat on purpose, if he even realises he is doing it. Your music is like that; it gets so deep inside people. I pick up your gold harmonica and snarl through the six notes of the opening riff. The clanging of metal isn’t really keeping the rhythm, I can hear that now, but I know your song so intimately, almost as an instinct, and I can keep to the complex beat with little conscious effort. As I reach the melancholy middle section it becomes apparent the amp is sending out your song loud enough to reverberate through the walls as the banging falls truly into step with the melody. Oliver can hear the song and I envy him. I envy the indefinable magic, the goose bumps and heart quickening shudder he must feel these first times hearing it. It has always been special, always touched me, but it can never be as intense as those first times.
The last notes rumble from the amp and I let the little instrument rest against my chapped lips realising the racket of Oliver’s repair work has fallen silent. I glance up to see the man crouching in the hole, looking down at me.
“Done?” I ask. His face is a grimace of stress and fear.
“What’s wrong? Can’t you fix it?”
A blinding pulse of white reduces him to a silhouette which remains as a shadow burnt into my vision when I look away. A thump, and I realise he has dropped to the floor, stacked crates toppling about him.
“Get out of the bed and kneel on the floor. Hands behind your head.” I return my stained gaze to the hole where a blotchy silhouette is resolving into something human. I know, even before my eyes have recovered, this latest intruder is a Homogeneity Compliance Assessor. I feel sick. Numb.
“I can’t,” I insist, holding my hands up, shaking my head and trying not to look at the body on the floor. If Oliver is dead, I don’t want to know.
“Do it!”
“My hip is broken,” I plead. Everything is seared white.
#
The pain in my hip is gone. Before I open my eyes I allow myself a smile which doesn’t feel quite right. It’s tight, restrictive and tugging at my cheeks. I go to feel my lips but my arms don’t respond. No that’s not entirely true. They respond, they strain to move but the bindings, the straps, are too tight. I open my eyes to a grey chaos of unfamiliar architecture which is passing me by at a brisk walking pace, though my legs are as immobile as my arms.
I am standing upright, supported, strapped to some kind of wheeled trolley. And I am gagged. A bump jars my old bones and I wince in anticipation of a blaze of agony though my hip makes no complaint at its rough treatment. Another bump as the trolley is rolled across a seam in the pavement. Whoever is pushing me - I am certain it is the HC Assessor though all I know of him is his heavy breathing a few inches behind my ear - turns me to look along the short platform of a track-way station. This isn’t the platform from which our supplies are received. I don’t think it is one of our cube’s platforms. The high vaulted ceiling, the grey columns and bland public address screens are of an unfamiliar style. No, not unfamiliar, merely relegated to the deep recesses of memory. I know this place yet can’t remember why.
I must have been unconscious for a while, long enough for at least one train journey. Probably several. Travel though the network of trackways is hardly the most efficient of all possible transport solutions, often requiring a change at every cube along the way. There are no direct express trains. It seems we - my arresting Assessor and I - are waiting for another train, and I have a feeling it is the last train in our journey. It is an ominous and chilling feeling. A grim yet inexplicable certainty.
The platform hums in anticipation of an approaching train and I dig my nails into the dense rubber of the trolley. The iris blast door at the end of the platform twists open and a punch of cold air dashes through the cavernous station. Featureless and white, the cylinder train rushes out of the tunnel and along the sunken pit of its track, decelerating with alarming aggression and coming to rest with only a couple of feet between its flat nose and the seemingly inadequate buffers at the platform’s other end. I never get to see the supply trains arrive in our cube nowadays; I had forgotten the brutality of their entrance.
Eleven doors open, sliding up around the train’s curve to allow a throng of infeasibly diverse men and women to step out onto the platform. Every generation beyond the nurseries and juveniles appears to be represented here, as if for some impossible and illegal summit. Although they are informally congregated in their various age groups, such close proximity to wildly different generations is unheard of. It’s beyond criminal. But now I notice the small lapel pins, and the deeply analytical gaze seemingly burned into there cold eyes. I know if I had my eye-screen - as everyone here does - I would be flooded with personal ID reams telling me of special permissions and authority. This is a platform full of HC Assessors and their support staff.
I know where I am. This is the hub from which the two Homogeneity Compliance administration and training cubes, and the three detention cubes, are accessed. It is to one of the latter the Assessor must be taking me. The others begin passing me, glancing at my restraints, looks of curious disapproval in their clinical stares. They want to know why I am being detained, what it is that I did, or know, which necessitates the gag. What is it my arresting Assessor is so afraid of me repeating?
Three million years. Will I ever be allowed to speak again? Will even my jailers be permitted to hear what it is I have been told by Oliver?
I’m moving again, being rolled on the trolley through the crowd, and I am afraid. At lease, I suppose, I will be cared for. Detention is said to be a grim place, but I will be fed and my health will once again be of concern to Pristine and her medical systems. But I am afraid. I wish I had your harmonica, but your music died with my arrest.
I close my eyes as I am rolled towards the train, and I imagine your song. Six notes of a chilling riff wash a calm over me. But it doesn’t sound right. It’s more acoustic, simpler, yet losing none of its power. I open my eyes; it is being whistles from behind me. Does he know he is doing it? Did he know what our cube was quarantined to contain? I smile against the tightness of the gag and issue a choked laugh as someone else, an Assessor with access to the entirety of the Pristine Lineage, takes up the infectious and unforgettable melody.
Your music, so insidious, will live.
End