Then
David skulked in the shadows of the overhead rail-line. He felt comfortable in the dark, and always dreaded the brief, brighter part of his journey that carried him across the well-lit block between the Skum ports and the Everlasting Escalator. There was no chance that enough light would reach him to provide any sort of genuine warmth. The brief period of real light was just a taunt, a reminder that there was somewhere better than here. Someplace that, unless he was very fucking lucky, he would never be a part of.
It wasn't the most positive way to start the day.
He absently wiped the drops of skum water from his boots onto the back of his pants. Don't give the fuckers any more excuse to look down on you. His slut-sister had whispered those words to him, when he was younger, every night before he fell asleep. He'd continued, silently repeating the same words to himself, every night since she'd gone.
Some people had prayers.
At first he didn't notice the ground shaking. When he did, he just assumed it was a passing train. He was busy humming a song in his head.
Beauty, like a cold day
Turns everything that lives to grey.
If he tried just hard enough, he could tune out all the noise around him, so that everything else became peripheral, just an illusory background to the song. Music became his snail shell, his cocoon. He liked it that way.
And so it was that he failed to notice the heavy metal pilon which smashed him in the back of the head and saved his life.
Now
It began, of course, with something small.
"Are you coming to the fuck-up?" he asked. A bunch of them were going to try to slow up a government road-train touring the inner-city states. Not exactly earth-shattering stuff but in these days of "time-is-money" government rhetoric anything that disrupted their simplistic worship of schedule was worth doing.
"No," she said.
He looked up from his paper in surprise. "How come?"
"It's too nice a day," she shrugged.
He frowned, concerned. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she said. She ran a hand through her short auburn hair. "Don't I get a day off now and then?"
"Fine," he said, raising a hand. It was no big deal. Everyone was entitled to some time out. "I'll tell the gang you're sick or something."
"Tell 'em what you like," she smiled, and he smiled back.
He didn't realise, yet, just what was behind it.
Then
Consciousness returned slowly and painfully. He knew straight away that something wasn't right inside him. It was only then that he really thought about the rumbling. The way it had held a slightly more insistent tone than train noise. Hooray for hindsight.
But what had happened? He forced his eyes open. He was on a stretcher, being carried through a crowd. Obviously there'd been some kind of an accident. Had a building collapsed? He tried to speak to the man nearest him, walking alongside the stretcher, but as soon as he opened his mouth his vision started to blur and he felt sick.
He shut his eyes and tried to catch the conversation of the men who carried him. It was hard, as though he was listening through perspex. He heard something about Sidewinders, and escalators. But no matter how many words he heard, his brain was unable to fit them together.
A man bent over him and said "You're lucky".
David wanted to ask what exactly was so goddamn lucky about his current position, but the words stopped at his chest, and turned into a burning wheeze instead. He tried to raise a hand to his mouth, reflexively, only to discover that it was wrapped in plaster and that moving it hurt like hell.
Maybe it was the pain, or maybe it was his brain's way of telling him to shut the hell up, but darkness chose that moment to swallow him again.
Now
Gradually, the itch became a sore. When she brushed him off for the fourth time with a smile and a half-arsed excuse, he felt his irritation start to kick in.
"You know, people are going to start wondering about you," he said. It was a bad move. Rachel had never cared what other people thought.
"Are they?" she replied. Her tone was pleasant but her eyes were frosty, dangerous.
"I'm worried about you," he said, trying to steer onto safer ground. "You never used to miss a fuck-up."
"Yeah, well, maybe I've changed," she said off-handedly. "Maybe I don't want to live like that anymore."
He didn't believe it. She wouldn't just change like that, not after all they'd been through. All the years spent trying to nail the fuckers for what they'd done. He knew her better than that.
"Well what do you want to do?" he asked, trying to understand.
She looked him in the eye, her expression serious. "I want to be happy," she said.
"Well I want to be happy too," he said, taking her hand in his own. "But we both know we never will be until we find out what happened to us."
She didn't blink. "Maybe that's what I used to think," she said. "But I don't want to know any more."
He couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You don't..."—he searched for the words—"How can you not want to know? Is it enough for you that they just let us walk away? Turned us out onto the street without an explanation? After all they did to us?"
"I don't know," she shrugged, and looked away. "I guess I just don't care anymore."
He didn't push it any further. He didn't know what to say. She really seemed to believe it. But how could she just change the feelings of a lifetime? Shake them off, like a dirty coat? It wasn't possible.
Someone had got to her.
Then
The next time he regained consciousness it was more pleasant. He was stationary, for one thing. It was easier to keep the world from spinning now that he was actually still. The pain seemed to have abated, too, although from the look of his plastered and damaged body, it was likely that this had only been achieved thanks to somebody slipping him some mighty powerful painkillers.
The hospital room was cool and empty, clinical in its bright white sterility. Just the way they always were on TV. He wondered what sort of angelic impulse had possessed the hospital staff to let him in here without checking his status. Maybe I struck a good one, he thought.
If I hadn't been so out of it, I might remember a face to thank.
He recalled what he could of the journey here, and a pocket of unease crept into his stomach. He remembered being carried through the streets on a stretcher, trying to talk and being unable, then realising he was plastered up...
Why the fuck was I in plaster before I got to the hospital?
There were only two solutions that immediately presented themselves. Either one of the doctors at the scene had done a pretty damn fantastic job on the spot, or...
David's eyes swept the room again, and he noticed now the shadows of bars that touched the translucent windows, the absence of monitoring equipment, the fact that the door to the room was closed, and not open as one might expect in a hospital ward.
Yup, he thought. Looks like I'm in a bit of a pickle.
Now
"I dunno, man." Marcus spread his hands helplessly, and David felt his spirits drop. If Marcus hadn't heard anything, nobody would have. He was the eyes and ears of the organisation. David always pictured him as some kind of technological octopus, operating dozens of computer systems simultaneously, keeping everyone in the movement connected. If there was anything to hear, he'd have heard it.
Marcus took off his cap and wiped his forehead, squinting through his uber-cool indoor shades. "I haven't heard anything about anybody getting heavied. And we've been keeping a sharp eye out for signs of mopping up for years."
"Mopping up" was what members of the movement called the common fear that the government or national security would come for them, in order to clean up their mess, remove the loose ends. It was a fear that David had experienced many times since they'd been let go, without a word, fifteen years ago.
"Then again," Marcus continued, "you and Rachel were the first. Makes sense that they'd come for you before the rest of us."
David nodded. He'd thought about that a lot, too.
"Thanks," he said.
Marcus shrugged. "I'll keep an ear to the ground," he said. Then, hesitantly, he asked "Have you considered the other possibility?"
David felt a mixture of hope and dread. "What other possibility?" he said, bracing himself.
"Well, you know how the song goes," said Marcus. "Women are changeable."
David just shook his head. "Keep looking," he said.
Then
They came for him about half an hour later, just as the pain was starting to set back in. He'd figured out that he had a broken arm and a broken leg, and a lump the size of a rockmelon on the back of his head. That didn't seem to register with his captors, who hauled him roughly out of bed and dragged him painfully down the hall as though he were a sack of rice.
Definitely not a hospital, then.
He clenched his teeth and held the pain inside. He wasn't about to give them the satisfaction of hearing him scream. People paid for that shit.
His silent escorts led him to a room, much smaller than the one he'd been asleep in, and threw him roughly into a hard wooden chair. There was a third man, already there, leaning against the wall with an air of affected nonchalance.
This is like a movie, was all David could think.
But no bright, shining light came on. The third guy just took out a dictafile and placed it between them to notate everything that was said.
"Name?" The nonchalant air remained. It could have been boredom.
"David."
"David what?"
The question was no doubt intended to drum his status in, and it did, but he tried not to let it show. "Just David", he said.
His interrogator nodded, as though that was what he'd suspected all along. "Who's your slut, David?" he asked.
"I don't know."
There was a pause, as the interrogator took that in. Maybe he was weighing up its truthfulness, but David suspected he was savouring it, stretching the humiliation.
"Where do you work?"
"Hamtown." There was a long silence. "I'm a pigmaker."
His interrogator smiled, then, as though that was what he'd been waiting to hear. He turned to the two silent henchmen. "Take him back," he said.
Now
"For the last time, David," she said calmly, "no-one has got to me, no-one is heavying me, no-one is following us around trying to keep us quiet about something that happened fifteen years ago!"
"Well, then, what the fuck is going on? Because I sure as hell can't think of any other explanation?"
"Is it so hard to believe that I've changed?"
"Yes, it is. It's the only thing you've talked about, the only thing you've thought about since they let us go."
"Ergo... maybe time for a change?"
It was her casual manner that frightened him most of all. Where was the passion that normally flowed through every artery?
"I'm going to find out what's going on," he said determinedly. "I'm gonna find out who's doing this to you and I'm gonna fix it."
"You do that," she said, waving him away with one hand. "Pick up some milk while you're gone." She turned back to the TV.
Then
There was a girl in his room. Someone had thrown a mattress on the floor, and there was a body sprawled on it in much the same haphazard fashion. Her hair was long and red, and curled naturally, the result of working in the damp air. He could tell from her clothes that she was a skum-dweller.
She looked up but didn't speak as his handlers deposited him roughly onto the bed. Then she looked away, stared at the window, as though she could somehow see through its frosted surface. When they had gone, she turned back to look at him again. Her gaze was wary but not hostile. She was probably about twenty, he thought, but like most skummers the lines on her face made her look much older.
"Hey," she said flatly. It was a greeting. "Looks like we're roomies."
"Nice to meet you," said David, then he realised it wasn't really appropriate and added "I guess."
"Did they do that to you?" She indicated his injuries.
"No." He paused. "I don't think so."
She smirked. "You don't know what happened to you?"
He shook his head, and tried again to remember. "I think something hit me in the head."
She stared at him for a long moment, then burst out laughing. "And they think you blew up the Everlasting Escalator!"
David opened his mouth to leap to his own defence, then realised what she had said. "They think I..."
She nodded, still grinning.
"Somebody blew up the...?"
"Uh-huh."
David's headache started to return as he tried to take it all in. So that was what all the questions were about. Presumably they suspected somebody from Hamtown. "Fuck", he said.
"I know," she said. "Pretty cool, huh?"
Now
"I'm leaving," she said. It hardly seemed necessary to say it. The house looked like it had been sterilised... all traces of her removed. The walls sure look bare, David thought, and felt a lump in his throat.
She had just the one suitcase.
"Where's the rest of your stuff?" he asked.
"New life," she said. "It was all junk, anyhow."
All junk. The mementos of all the years they'd spent together. The letters, the music, the movies, the books. The photos of them, younger, filled with passion and rage, screaming in the faces of security arseholes. The sketches she'd done of him, that summer in Nepal, waiting for the status quo to crumble like a stale buscuit. The collections of stories, of people just like them, collected in scrapbooks and painstakingly indexed.
All junk.
He nodded tiredly, having long ago run out of arguments. But still something inside him would not just let her walk away. "Please... stay," he said, taking her arm. They were the only words he had left.
She shrugged him off, and pushed past, then turned back, her brow furrowed in concern. "David, I still love you," she said. "But I can't live this way anymore. All the time focussing on the bad things in society. I don't want to do it anymore."
He opened his mouth but nothing came.
"If you ever feel the same, look me up," she said. He looked away, blinked the moisture from his eyes. When he looked back she was gone.
Then
He could just hear Rachel's voice if he concentrated. She was shouting something, but he couldn't make out any of the words. He wished he had the same courage, not that he supposed it would do much good. From what he could tell, her ranting had no more effect than his own monosyllabic responses.
Nothing seemed to make any difference.
The interrogator, who called himself Martin, which meant that his real name could be pretty much anything else, seemed to know what answers he wanted, but he wasn't giving away any clues. The first time Martin had tried to convince him to own up, David had felt like spitting in his face. For fuck's sake, he thought. The explosion nearly killed me. But he'd managed to restrain himself. He knew it wouldn't do any good.
How long were they planning on keeping him here? Wasn't there a law against this kind of thing? Rachel had tried demanding to see a lawyer. They'd just laughed at her. That was fine with David. They were skummers-a lawyer would be just one more person looking to sell them out.
The shouting stopped, and in a little while they brought her back. Rachel never spoke after an interrogation. Not for at least half an hour. She would just sit and stare at the window.
This time, though, she seemed different. David didn't consider himself an expert in human emotion, but he didn't detect the same anger he usually felt emanating from her after she'd been quizzed by their captors.
That made him worried.
"Are you okay?" he asked, feeling as though he were pushing his words through cotton wool.
She nodded but didn't look at him.
He didn't press it. She was entitled to her privacy. He lay back on his mattress and stared at the ceiling.
"David?" she said, after a moment.
"Yeah?" He turned to face her. She was burrowing into him with her sharp blue eyes.
"I don't know if we're gonna make it." She said it matter-of-factly, but he could sense her fear. He wasn't about to be a bastard and call her bluff, though.
"We'll make it," he said quietly, firmly. What had they done to her? "They can't keep us here forever." His words felt hollow, unconvincing, even to him. What do you know? spat the voice in his head. Take a look around. Where the fuck do you think you are?
She stood and walked over to him, her strides slow and even. Then she leant down and kissed him.
Startled, he almost jumped. He looked into her eyes. There was no sexual desire in them. None of the easy confidence he'd experienced in the past from women looking to seduce. Just an overpowering need, that mirrored the fear in his own gut.
He drew her close, and closed his eyes. And they were somewhere else.
Now
"Marcus told me about what happened with Rachel, and something about it just made me think..."
She was short, with long black hair that reached half way down her back. He'd expected her to look sadder, but that was stupid. The big hurts didn't always show on the outside. She rummaged through the drawer, and then let out a sigh of relief.
"Here it is." She handed him a tiny metal object, maybe a fragment of something larger. "I wouldn't have found it unless I'd done the autopsy myself. The coroner wouldn't have looked deeply enough to find it." She shrugged apologetically, as though aware of how morbid it sounded. "I am qualified. Monica made me promise. She said she'd had enough of the government fucking with her body for one lifetime."
He nodded. "What is it?"
"I had it analysed," she said. "By our side, of course. They weren't really sure."
He nodded again, not sure where this was heading.
"Apparently it was configured to stimulate the release of serotonin when it received certain stimuli," she said. "I didn't really understand it. I just gathered it was some kind of neural antidepressant. You know, technology and all that." Again, she looked apologetic. "Thing is, it never worked." She laughed bitterly. "Someone put a chip in my baby's brain to cheer her up, and the fucking thing never worked." She looked away. "Who the fuck was the audience for that little joke?"
David said nothing.
"Anyway," she said. "It wasn't what killed her. I never thought it might've been anything more sinister, until now." She opened the jar sitting next to her on the table and handed it to him. "Chocolate wafer?"
Then
He was still immersed in some kind of post-coital calm when they took him away again, and introduced him to the machine. Big and white, humming softly under its featureless façade, it looked like it should have been an appliance. David almost felt like laughing.
So, he thought, this is who's running the secret services. A fridge with no door.
The hooked him up. He thought maybe they were going to test out some new lie detector on him. He wasn't overly concerned- those things never worked.
Then they sent the first bolt of pain into his brain and he screamed.
Now
"David, you're fucking crazy. There's no way I'm going to..."
David waited until she stopped twitching before he removed the cloth from her mouth. Her unconscious body felt heavy in his arms. He stifled the prickling of his conscience. It's not her, he told himself. It's just the mechanism they put in her head.
The scan proved what he'd already known.
"There's something in her head," the doctor said. "It's the same size as the specimen you've shown me. And it's active."
David nodded, and took a deep breath. "Do it," he said.
Bring her back.
Then
It was just the beginning, of course. Day by day, after that, they would come for him or for Rachel, one at a time. The pain never got any less. He'd heard that after a while a person's pain threshold was supposed to increase as their tolerance grew. But he didn't think they'd have that kind of time.
The maddening thing, apart from the excruciating agony, was that it never seemed to follow a pattern. There seemed to be no particular questions or answers which sparked the barrage. If anything, the punishments seemed deliberately random. A response which elicited a shock one day might be met with nothing the next.
It had gone beyond an interrogation. Their captors no longer seemed to care what they might know. The escalator explosion no longer interested them. David had reached the point on several occasions when he'd started making things up, concocting elaborate conspiracies and confessing to crimes he'd barely imagined. None of it seemed to matter.
Amid the orchestra of pain he and Rachel clung to each other. She was his only touchstone, the only thing that kept him from tipping over the edge into insanity. She reminded him that there was still humanity, a world apart from the mindless cruelty that enveloped them. He lost count of the number of times, over the weeks, that one of them held the other while they cried. Enough times that he no longer felt self-conscious. It seemed as natural, as much a part of everyday life as sleeping, as waking up. Afterwards, often, they would fuck, lose themselves in the sensations… the only thing that could distract them, for a little while, from the insanity and hurt around them.
Until the next time.
Now
"They put something in your brain. In all our brains." The audacity of it was still sinking in. Had they really thought no-one would discover it? Surely, eventually, they must have known, it would be discovered. "It was designed to make you would feel happy anytime you avoided the thought processes associated with… what we went through."
"But..." Rachel looked at him in confusion. Maybe he should have let her rest. No doubt she was still recovering from the operation.
"And it worked on a time-release," he continued. "That was the clever part. It was designed only to kick in years down the track. They wanted to make it seem natural. Like you'd just reached a certain age and given up."
Rachel frowned as she stared past him, deep in thought.
He shook his head. "I still don't know why, exactly. What the purpose was. How long they thought they'd get away with it."
"Put it back"
He started. "What?"
She fixed him intently with her green eyes. "Put it back".
He placed a hand on hers. "You're probably still feeling the effects... You have to understand. It wasn't you. Feeling those things. It was just programming."
She snorted. "You're wrong," she said shortly.
He started to protest. "They put..."
"I know," she said, as though he were a child.
"Well, then..."
"I know it wasn't normal. I know something made me feel that way."
David was silent, trying to understand.
"I want it back," she said.
David found himself growing frustrated. He'd saved her. "What, after all they've done to us...?"
"Yes!" she spat. "After all they've done to us! I was happy."
David shook his head. "It wasn't you..."
"It was me. I was there, David, I felt it all. It was me. Maybe something was making me feel that way but I still felt it."
"But you had no control."
"Control?" She laughed now, a horrible bitter wheeze. "When have I ever had any control over anything? Over the pain they put me through? Over the disillusionment every day since? Everything I've ever felt has been out of my control..."
"That's not what I meant..."
"I'm sick of it!" Her eyes were on fire. "Don't you see that? Don't you feel it?" She was sitting up now. "How long do we have to go on? To prove ourselves?"
"What, do you think we should just let them get away with it?"
"David, wake up! They have gotten away with it. For fifteen years we've shouted and screamed at them to be honest with us. We've searched everywhere for some kind of answer. We've tried to tell people what happened, to change the way they think. We've marched and sung and written and fucking..."—she waved a hand in frustration—"we've done it. And it's done nothing. Every day for the past fifteen fucking years I've woken up and fought and torn and scratched my way through the world, hoping I could make it a better place, and every day I've been beaten down, every day I've hit the great wall of fucking indifference and every day I've achieved absolutely fuck all! I'm tired! How much misery do I fucking owe?"
David searched his brain for a reply. She was right. It was all true. But she was wrong, too.
"We have to keep going," he said, and he believed it. "We have to keep going, because it's right. Because if we give up, they win."
She shook her head. "No," she said. "If we keep trying, we keep failing. Every day we fail again, and every day they hurt us all over. That's how they win."
Then
If he'd been alone, he suspected he would have given up. But her presence kept a small fire burning inside him, and when he looked into her eyes he could see it burning in her still, too. No matter how accustomed they might become to the cruel rituals of their new surrounds, they would keep that flame alive.
Of the two of them, it was Rachel who was the stronger.
"Sometimes," he said one night, after a particularly gruelling session, "my body seems to exist separate from me. No matter how strong I feel in my head, it screams at me, pulls at me, begs me to just let it die."
She stroked his face with a pale hand, stared into his eyes. "That's why they'll never break us," she whispered. "They only have machines that hurt our bodies. They can't touch what's inside."
Click here for commentary by Ben Payne
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