Cronix (7 page)

Lola laughed, throwing her head back in a way that brought out the sinuous lines of her neck. Oriente found himself hopelessly staring again.

“No, she’s no fashion statement. She was sentenced to look that way.”

“Sentenced? For what?”

“She’d done some bad things up there. Very bad things. Almost got the Zone as punishment. But she had a good lawyer. She got life here instead…shhh, here she comes.”

Nurse Shareen waddled back into the room with a carafe of water and a plate of scrambled eggs on a tray. “Don’t worry, I never spat in your food, no matter what this harpy says,” she said, raising her chins at Lola. “And I can hear you from the nurses’ station. I may be ugly, but I’m not fucking deaf.”

Lola giggled and Oriente gaped at the pair of them. Shareen banged the tray on the bedside table and stood with ham-like fists on her broad hips, staring at them both defiantly. One last sneer and she turned on her heels and clumped off.

“Jeez,” whispered Oriente. “What did she do?”

The delightfully carefree expression faded from Lola’s divine features. “What did she do? She was found guilty of transporting Tamagochiite children to Earth.”

“Ikwan…you mean the kit kids? Ones that people build themselves, up there?”

“Yeah, that’s the ones,” she said. She leant over and straightened his blankets, pulling so hard that some of the water slopped out of his glass. “Not everyone can afford to come back to Earth and have real kids, so you get kits to build your own. Under the Law of Return, they’re never allowed to come to Earth. Of course, a lot of them grow up with identity problems when they realize they’re not ‘real,’ whatever that means. They run away, and there are gangs that smuggle them to Earth.”

“Doesn’t sound such a bad thing,” said Oriente. “Seems almost charitable.”

Lola snorted. “It would be, except to get here costs the kids a fortune they don’t have. So the nice people who smuggled them demand repayment. They end up in brothels and snuff movies and all sorts of sick stuff.”

“And Nurse Shareen was involved this trafficking?”

”Uh huh. She was a procuress, if that’s the word. Searched the cities up there for poor kids, offered them a future. The guys she was working with down here got packed off to the Zone. And good riddance to them. She was lucky, she just got subspeciation. Which is the technical word for being sentenced to live and die as an old-fashioned human being. Seems to me she got off pretty lightly.”

“I guess,” said Oriente. “And the …” he lowered his voice… “The body, the look. Was that part of the punishment?”

Lola grinned again. “The judge said she committed an ugly crime, and her life here should reflect that fact. Every time she looks in the mirror, she’s gonna be reminded what an ugly person she is, inside and out.”

Oriente shook his head. “And they let her work here? In a hospital?”

“Gotta work somewhere. And with that frame, she’s good for heavy lifting. Guess she might atone.”

“There’s no danger she’ll…I don’t know, run off and look for a way to get another body. Get a chip and get back up there.”

Lola shook her head. “She’s free to go. But where would she run to? The woods are full of Cronix and wild animals, and she’s not exactly built for the outdoors. If she ever managed to get a rogue chip, the DPP would pick her up as soon as she hit the Orbiters. Then she’d get the Zone. And no one comes back from there.”

There was a brief silence as Lola unwrapped a small vial from its wrapper. “Now listen, this is an eye spray. You gotta administer it every four hours for the next few days. I’ll come help you, but you know how forgetful I am.” She caught him gawking at her again as she spoke, and fluttered her eyelashes coquettishly.

“So come on, ask me.”

“Ask you what?” Oriente felt his cheeks flush.

“Where I got such great genes from. You’re the one who’s always so curious.”

“Okay.” He smiled. “Where did you get such great genes from, Lola?”

“Well, funny you should ask,” she said. “By great good fortune, I unexpectedly came into some money and I found a great carpet-beater who had worked in Europe, and he came up with something very different. And very expensive.”

“What was that?”

“Well, I shouldn’t tell you ‘coz it ain’t exactly legal.” She chuckled. “But then, neither are you. So what the hell? It’s Nefertiti.”

He was lost for a second. “What’s Nefertiti?”

“
I 
am. Well, genetically speaking. With a few updates and add-ons. She didn’t have these blue eyes, I bet.”

“Nefertiti the ancient Egyptian queen?”

“Wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, in fact,” she said proudly. “The greatest beauty of the ancient world, worshipped by her own cult as a goddess.”

“Where the hell did you get her genes from?”

“Like I said, I found a good carpet-beater. You know, those guys who comb all the old furniture and heirloom rugs for skin flakes and gene pool from lost civilizations? Most of them are grave-robbers. They collect all this genetic material, then test it to see who it might have belonged to. It’s legal. Except the grave robbing bit, but then nobody really gives a shit about that.”

“And this carpet beater of yours…what did he do, break into a pyramid or something?”

“Worse,” she giggled. “He broke into the Berlin Museum of Anthropology. Seems it’s not very well guarded these days. That’s where they keep her body, though of course, she doesn’t look quite as good these days as I do. But he only took a tiny swab. Not like he ran away a leg like a dog in a butcher’s shop. Anyway, so here I am.” She stood up and took a bow. “Wasn’t it worth it?”

”I’ll say,” nodded Oriente.

“Now, where did they get the model for Shareen, you ask?” asked Lola. “You know what I heard from the other nurses? 'English school dinner lady, circa 1940.'” She nodded happily, then tottered out of the room on her high heels, throwing Oriente a wave over her head as she went.

***

The man with wavy blonde hair stared at the rear wall of the large room, which was covered by a large, smoked-glass window.

“Are we recording? 
Testing, one two three. 
Okay? Sure? Right, I’m getting the thumbs up from the engineer. Shall we proceed?

“Good morning everybody. First of all, let me welcome those of you who haven’t been before to the Delpy Institute, one of the world’s foremost research institutes into bio-engineering and posthumous evolution. My name is Professor Jeffrey Poincaffrey, director of the Delpy. On my right this morning” – he pointed to a disheveled man in a cable-knit roll neck, his straggly beard crested with grey – “is Dr Brian Porter, head of our research department. To his right, we have Professor Leora Whiteling, director of the historical archive, and across from her is Dean Ashby Wattiki, of the Mowan Endowment, which as you probably know, is responsible for the study of indigenous inhabitants and their customs. And I’m sure you’ll recognize our very own mayor of London, Yev Lupo. Very honored you could join us this morning, Mr Mayor.”

The mayor gave a formal nod, and for a second the hunter wondered if he could possibly be a local. Certainly he had rarely seen an Eternal look as unappealing as the chief executive of the London Urban Reserve: he had an elongated face that should have been gaunt, but looked as if all of its natural angles had had been filled in with puppy fat: his teeth were so large that his mouth almost resembled a whale’s baleen filter. Yet, unless the law had changed recently, the mayor’s position was reserved for an Eternal, with a local serving as his deputy. Oriente made a mental note to ask Lola when next he saw her. If this man was Eternal, he was either a complete eccentric or had very bad line of credit.

“Now, across from Dean Wattiki is…” Poincaffrey cleared his throat “... ah, Mr Quintus Swaincroft, currently a doctoral student in post-evolutionary studies at London University. And to his left we have Chief Inspector…” once again, he glanced at his notes, the smile frozen on his lips as though these last two were only here on academic sufferance … “Chief Inspector David Hencock, from the Department of Profiles and Personalities. Welcome all.”

It was the first time Oriente had actually been able to see Hencock. Like nearly all Eternals, he was an impeccably good looking man, but in an understated manner. Trim brown hair, standard square jaw with clear blue eyes, his looks spoke of the imaginative limits of a bureaucratic mind. He appeared to be an old Earth hand, one of those functionaries who dutifully returned every so often, like a colonial administrator to an obscure posting in the days of empire. The only possible sign of vanity, Oriente noticed, were his elegant, long-fingered hands, the perfectly polished nails, which gave the impression of belonging to a fastidious pianist.

“Well now, our guest of honor today is sitting opposite me,” Poincaffrey said with a schoolboy grin. “And may I say what an absolute privilege it is for me to present to you all today to Mr Luis Oriente, who I believe is going to indulge us with a most
fascinating
tale.”

Oriente nodded, arms folded, a half-smile etched on his face. Though well groomed by now, and decked out in a brand new suit, he was tired, worn down by the weeks of darkness and confinement. The memories that had trickled back into his brain, like silt filling a waterway, had receded slightly since the implant of his new eyes, but the sudden breach of his defenses left him ill at ease. All the things he had never divulged to anyone else, had tried to deny even to himself, had flooded back. He was surprised to find that now, facing a room full of academics, he felt almost relieved to unburden himself.

“It’s an honor, professor,” he murmured.

“The honor is all ours, Mr Oriente, I assure you,” Poincaffrey said. “May I quickly take a moment to remind everyone here that what we are about to hear is subject to legal proceedings currently being undertaken by Inspector Hencock’s department, and therefore what is said within these walls must, for the time being, remain in strictest confidence. Now, Mr Oriente,” he said with a light clap. “The floor is all yours.”

Oriente nodded. “Okay, professor, but I warn you this could take some time.”

The pronouncement only seemed to increase the excitement in the air.

“Take all the time you need, Mr Oriente. “Time is what we have an abundance of.”

Oriente pulled a cigarette from the packet Nurse Lola had given him. He lit up and exhaled blue smoke at the ceiling.

“Well, it's difficult to know exactly where any story actually begins,” he said. “But what say we start with a certain Glenn Rose? One of those forgotten bit-part players of history, scuttling along the gutters of evolution like some leathery little cynodont at watering hole on the lost continent of Gondwanaland, 250 million years ago. One of those creatures, in fact, on whose thwarted little life so much of history has always turned.”

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

John Updike

It being self-evident that radical evolution has taken a quantitative leap to create an unprecedented and separate category of beings no longer susceptible to the laws of nature, free of the physical constraints of time and history, and able to endure indefinitely in a state of perpetual conscious presence, we hereby declare a new species to have emerged, entirely other than the Homo Sapiens that heralded it and that shall forever be accorded all protections and privileges while being acknowledged as a different branch of the human family.

The Tarpan-Winkowtiz Act of 2337

Glenn Rose sat in the gloom of the Station pub, contemplating his destiny. Or lack thereof. It was just after five in the afternoon, the hour when the office blocks around Liverpool Street station drained of their daily inhabitants: traders, secretaries and accountants turned their collars against the cold and spilled towards the railway termini and bus stops before night swallowed them completely.

Glenn stared at the palm of his hand. It was this hand that had kept him going through the difficult days, the same palm that eight years before had been stared at so closely during a drunken house party by Cathy Dunswick, red-haired enchantress of his student days, who had looked up at his expectant face and proclaimed Glenn’s Destiny.

“Oh my god!” she squealed, above the din of music and students body-slamming in the living room next door. “Glenn!” she said, looking up from the augurs of his sweaty hand and into his slightly unfocused eyes. Cathy took this gypsy stuff seriously, and Glenn, who wanted her to take him seriously too, willed himself to return her earnest gaze. “When you were a kid, were you ever trained up for something? Did you ever, like, take lessons in music, maybe, or arts?”

Glenn, feeling pleasantly wasted, extended his lower lip and pondered. Nothing came to mind, except the thought that his protruding lower lip, rimed black by a tide of red wine, might not be very attractive. He quickly retracted it and tried to dredge up something beyond the few lackluster hobbies he had pursued in his boyhood – skateboarding, soccer, some rock-climbing in summer holidays. Not exactly the stuff fate was made of.

“No,” he muttered, wary of letting Cathy down. “Nothing really springs to mind.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised. “Because I have to tell you, I’ve never seen a destiny line this strong.” She pointed to a groove traversing the center of his palm. “See? It’s like you were born to something, or someone had something in mind for you.”

Glenn shrugged, careful not to withdraw his hand from her soft grasp. His fingers looked to him as though their only possible destiny would be minimum-wage data-inputting, or wrapping sausages in greaseproof paper. But now he looked at them through the miasma of booze, minor narcotics and, for the first time, the heady skein of fate, he felt his hand held a message, a destiny that set him apart.

He stood up, holding his hand up like a treasure map.

“Hey Kevin, look at this,” he shouted at his flat mate, who was rummaging through empty wine and vodka bottles. “I’ve got the most dramatic destiny line Cathy’s ever seen.”

Kevin, his face dewy with sweat from dancing, blinked. “You can’t have a bloody destiny. You’ve got man boobs already, and you’re only twenty-one.”

Annoyed, Glenn pushed past him, sucked in his stomach and staggered slightly into the living room, where a thrashing melee danced in glorious abandon. He threw himself into the dance frenzy, his kismet hand held high and sense of happiness suddenly suffusing his body.

The moment didn’t last long. The next song was Kylie Minogue, and the mosh pit evaporated, replaced by girls dancing with each other and smoochy couples. Realizing his plastic cup was dry, he stumbled back to the kitchen, where Cathy Dunswick, French major, siren of his suppressed longings and divine witch, was still sitting, chatting now with her friend Becky.

Glenn held up his hand as though instructing her to stop. She smiled, evidently pleased with her skills.

“Oh yeah, baby, I’m gonna be somebody,” he slurred. “Amazing that you can tell all that just by looking at my right hand, isn’t it?”

“Oh.” Cathy looked down, then smirked. “Shit, was that your right hand I was looking at? Oops, sorry, bit drunk.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending.

“It’s supposed to be your left,” she said. Glenn felt the cloak of the elect briskly whipped from his shoulders, the cold wind of the unfated masses envelope him. Cathy grabbed his left hand and gave what appeared to be a placatory once-over.

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “No, no that’s cool. It’s not as pronounced on this hand…”

“Does that mean I’m gonna be an IT manager instead of the first man on Mars?”

“No, no,” she said, giving his fingers a consolatory squeeze that set his pulse leaping. “It just means that whatever is supposed to happen will just happen a bit later. But it’s still there.”

Sitting now in the almost empty City bar, years later, Glenn winced at the memory. He leaned on the wooden counter, polished by generations of city gents' suited elbows, those monotonous, smart-dressed men who had nipped in after work for a quick one for the road. Cozy as it seemed, this was a non-place, steeped in the impersonality of the City, of lives lived elsewhere. A place to lose yourself, and oblivion was precisely what Glenn sought that late afternoon. He didn't pay attention to the man on the telephone by the bar, jabbering in Italian to a distant girlfriend, or to the brash young city workers celebrating a deal with over-worked bottles of champagne. And they paid no heed to Glenn.

“Destiny,” he swore under his breath as the barman brought him his pint. He knew it was stupid, but somewhere, deep below his rational thinking, Cathy’s words had kept him going through the hard times: when he had run dry of ambition and hope, they were the fuel to tide him through the barren stretches. He took a swig of his beer.

He hadn't eaten and the alcohol soaked quickly into his dark mood. He ordered another and drank it off before he could bring himself to open the pages of the magazine in his bag. He forced himself to re-read the painful words.

"The self-financed junk of another bottom-of-the-pile, Turner Prize wannabe ..."

The phrase seared his brain, the unwholesome realization that he had failed. He read on. “They say that if an infinite number of chimps were given an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they would eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare,” he read. “The idea for this self-styled open-air installation appears to have been dashed off by a lone bonobo during its lunch break, after one too many G&Ts.”

The long years crushed in on him like faceless commuters: all the shitty jobs, the gritty determination that had kept him going for so long, but which now revealed itself to be have been nothing more than a sustained bout of self-delusion.

Destiny.
It had ruined Macbeth. But then he'd never understood Macbeth when he studied it at school: why, when the three witches predicted he would be king one day, didn’t he just put his feet up and wait for the crown to plop onto his head, instead of running around murdering everyone? After all, if it was all predestined, why make the effort? Or was that way of thinking precisely why his own promised encounter with Fate was running so far behind schedule? Was Kevin right: could a bloke with man boobs really have a destiny?

He groaned, a guttural lowing sound. He glanced to see if the barman had heard, but the man was staring into space behind the faux ivory pumps. In the bar beyond, laughter erupted from one of the tables.

Glenn's thoughts settled on the pile of scrap metal in the hallway of his tiny flat, the graffiti-scrawled plaques and the metal poles that had once rooted them to the grimy streets of East London. He had lobbied the local council for months to be allowed to put them all up in the locations he had chosen – in a park, outside a secondary school, near a bus stop, anywhere where people might linger: he had saved all his cash from the job in the mental ward (he taken the job after reading about how many successful artists had worked with the mentally ill and had drawn inspiration for their compositions – he had found none, and the pay had been terrible to boot) to be able to print the large metal plates with maps of the area.

The idea had been for the community to write their own history, to bring the maps to life with anecdotes of the comings and goings of the locals. For months he had battled all the elements: the theft of the pens secured, the disappearance of the laminated sheets explaining the organic community project and inviting people to join in. For weeks, the plaques had stood empty. Glenn would lurk in the park, or nurse a pint at the bar of the Rose and Crown, peering for hours like some dedicated bird-spotter. Miserable, he decided not to look anymore, working on the principle presence might somehow be inhibiting the timid locals from opening up their hearts.

By a huge effort of will, he stayed away for three weeks, after chaining as many indelible markers as he could to the support poles.

As the bus pulled up on the day he had marked for his return, his heart leapt. There was writing on the map! Lots of it, too. As soon as the bus doors hissed open, he ran to the first plaque, stopping short as it became clear exactly what the street poets had scrawled on his precious installation.

“Tracy sucks cock.”

“Garths a poof”

“Spurs rule”

“Fucking spacky”

“Cuntz”

Some bright spark had actually used the map, but only to geographically pinpoint his obscenity: “Shanaya and Latoya hore house” read the barely legible direction.

Glenn's heart sank, but he forced himself to head to the next plaque to see what horrors might have aborted his embryonic masterpiece there. It was covered with a similar smattering of teen hate and helpful hints on which public toilets offered fellatio-friendly facilities. The third sign was gone entirely, cut off and hauled off for scrap: only the one near the school offered some artistic relief, as it was so completely covered in multicolored graffiti that it resembled a Jackson Pollock. A smear of poor quality graffiti tags was the sum of his ‘big idea.’

Since he had already booked the space at a small gallery in Whitechapel, Glenn went ahead with his short-lived exhibition. He thought nobody had visited it, but the review in the free newspaper handed out at the Tube station had just informed him otherwise. Trashed in a worthless handout that itself would end up discarded on the seats of evening commuter trains, before being dumped in some Essex landfill.

Such is destiny.

Glenn was crushed. He ordered another beer, and a whiskey chaser, without checking his wallet to see if he could afford it. As the barman pulled pumps and pressed optics, Glenn pored over the other pages of the magazine, skimming over the world’s misery in an attempt to forget his own: a tale of a failed suicide bomber in Tel Aviv, charred and screaming at a suburban bus stop; an earthquake in Guatemala burying some holy festival; an American murderer who'd shot himself in the head years ago, before being patched at great public expense, had just been sentenced to death; a Korean man who'd played a computer game for days without moving from his chair and died of deep-vein thrombosis. Horrible stories from around the world, yet none seemed capable of piercing the bubble of self-pity that enveloped him.

An artist
, he said out loud. By this point he no longer cared if the barman heard him. Hitler had wanted to be an artist. Instead, he discovered he was a talentless prick and turned his thwarted ambition to war and hate.

“Maybe I’ll burn down the world,” Glenn muttered to himself, a trainee madman on his first field assignment.

He felt giddy. The glacial evening light inched through the leaded windows and leaked up the bar like a melting ice cap.

It took a moment for him to realize that someone was saying his name.

"
Glenn? 
Glenn Rose? Is that you?"

He looked round, ashamed at being caught indulging his misery so publicly. A tall man, good-looking and still young, was staring at him, grinning. "Oh my God! Glenny Boy Rose! It 
is 
you!" the man whooped, breaking into a laugh that filled the room.

“Don’t you remember me?” The man slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on! Rick. Rick Sparrow. From Boroughfield. Mr Bennett’s class? Get the fuck out of here, you must remember me, surely?”

Glenn did slowly recognize his former classmate. The handsome face was still there, fleshed out by time and booze. And the smart, dark blue suit and tie could almost be mistaken for the old school uniform they had both worn day in, day out.

“Rick Sparrow?” Glenn forced an unconvincing smile. He felt utterly confused and exposed. “What…what on Earth are you doing here?”

Rick was flagging down the barman and ordering himself a Pimms. "I know, a bit early in the year, but you know, a little taste of summer at the end of a long winter," he said with his infectious cackle. "What am 
I 
doing here? Man, I work just around the corner. Freeman Harker. Oil futures and all that. We just came in for a couple of cold ones.”

In Rick's world, Glenn remembered, nothing had ever been so serious that a few drinks and a night out couldn't cure it. Already, something of his carefree attitude was working its way under the carapace of Glenn's gloom.