Spares (7 page)

Finally, the man came. I was in several different kinds of pain by then and doing my miserable best not to show any of them. This guy was the last thing I needed. He was a small, fussy man in an expensive suit, a man who lived for the ticks he made at regular intervals on the sheet of paper he carried with him. He had a fashionable haircut and fashionable small, round glasses, on an unfashionable small, round head.

He took one look at me and smiled. Clearly I fitted the type.

It doesn’t take much to run a Farm. A caretaker and two support droids. The droids do the bulk of the work—all the caretaker has to do is keep an eye on things and deal with the white vans when they arrive. They’re token humans in the decision loop, installed in the way that a hundred years ago foremen were always white men, no
matter how intelligent or educated their black or female workers. The caretakers are generally ex-security guards or farmers who’ve lost either their land or the will to work it Men with no special qualities, because none are really needed—apart, perhaps, from a lack of imagination. Most stay on the premises all the time, day in, day out. The company doesn’t like to have to organize relief cover, and few of the caretakers have much to go out for. I was no exception. I had no reason to go out at all.

The inside of the main building was arranged around two corridors at right angles to each other. The outside door led pretty much straight into the control room where I spent most of my time. At the bottom corner of this room was a door that led to the main corridor. As you walked down that passage you passed three large metal doors, each with a small Perspex window. These led to the tunnels and were supposed to be opened only at feeding times and when a collection was made. A little farther down was the second corridor which led to the operating room. There were a few farther rooms off the opposite side, a kitchen and various utility areas. The walls and ceilings throughout the complex were painted an entertaining shade of drab gray, and it was always quiet, like a mortuary, because everyone except the caretaker lived in the tunnels.

I was told my duties, and shown how to operate the few pieces of equipment that were my responsibility. It was explained to me when the shipments of food would arrive, and how little I had to do to them. I was given the phone numbers of relevant people in Roanoke General, and told the circumstances in which I was to call them. I stood, and nodded, and listened, though I wasn’t really there at all. Hooks embedded in my mind pulled in three different directions at once, leaving me with a jittery blankness that occluded the outside world.

Then I was shown to the tunnels.

I won’t forget the feeling I had when I first stood at the observation window and peered into the twilight beyond. At first all I could make out was a color, a deep
blue glow chilled at intervals by white lights shining up from the floor. It looked like the coldest dream you ever had. Then I began to discern shapes in the gloom, and movement. When I realized what I was seeing I shivered, a spasm so elemental that it wasn’t visible on the outside. For a moment it was as if I was back in a different place altogether, and it was all I could do not to run. I should have trusted that intuition, and made the connection, but of course I didn’t.

The representative from the company stood behind me as I watched, and told me that each of the three tunnels was eight feet wide and eight feet tall, and housed forty spares. Experience had shown that it was best to keep them warm and humid, and he tapped the indicator panels at the side of each door. These I had to check every two hours, even though they were computer controlled. The instruction was repeated, and I turned to glare at the representative to show I understood. Our eyes met for the first time since he’d arrived, and I could tell what he felt about me. Distaste, primarily, together with boredom and a little amusement. To him I was merely a new component of the Farm, a replacement part, ranking in importance well below the electrified fence.

I hoped he couldn’t read what I was feeling for him, because as I turned back to look once more through the window I felt my hands tightening in the pockets of my battered coat, and heard the sound of blood singing in my ears. Perhaps it was from that moment, from within a minute of seeing the spares for the first time, that I knew I would not be quite the caretaker they were expecting.

Or maybe not. At the time I didn’t really know what I felt about anything. I couldn’t do joined-up thinking for long enough to finish a paragraph I could understand. It’s always easy to look back and assume a purpose in one’s actions. At the time I suspect I had about as much purpose as a streak of shit along a wall.

The man left eventually, once the opportunities for
patronizing me had been thoroughly exhausted. As he got into his company car he looked at me over his elegant spectacles, and snorted quietly to himself. I realized that I’d probably only said about ten words in the entire time we’d been there. He pulled slowly out of the compound, the gate shutting automatically after him.

Inside, I emptied the bag my friend had packed for me and stowed my few belongings in places that seemed sensible. This process took all of five minutes. Then I shakily made a pot of coffee, took it to the table in the center of the room, and prepared to wait out the rest of my life.

A week after I arrived, I received a parcel from Phieta, the woman who’d brought me there. It contained some more clothes, a couple of paperbacks, and a large quantity of Rapt. No note. I never heard from her again.

It was three months before I got my first call. I just sat in the main room for most of that time, staring into space and periodically frying my brains to dust. Now and then I’d go out into the compound. The view in front showed a gradually sloping hillside, dotted with trees, that eventually led to the outskirts of Roanoke. You could see points of yellow through the trees at night, proof that—somewhere in the distance—life was going on. I wished it well and hoped it would stay the hell away from me. I soon found I couldn’t enjoy the sight of the steep hillside behind the compound as much as I should. There were far more trees in that direction, and at that stage I still occasionally thought they moved and distrusted their leaves. Sometimes I thought I could see blue light coming out of fissures in the rock, beams of blue sunlight piercing up toward the sky. I couldn’t, of course. The tunnels were deep in the rock and lined with concrete.

Then one day, at around three o’clock, a siren went off and ten minutes later an ambulance arrived. Two doctors made their way immediately to the operating room, and I warily accompanied an orderly into one of
the tunnels. It was the first time I’d been past the heavy doors.

I stepped into a cramped, wet space, claustrophobic with humidity and thick with the smell of damp bodies and excrement. Naked children lay all over the floor, curled into fetal positions, sprawled on top of each other or huddled upright against the walls. I carefully stepped over them as I tried to find the particular spare we needed. The orderly kicked them out of the way with the casual impatience of a butcher walking through a slaughterhouse. The older spares seemed to know what was coming, and flinched and squirmed as we approached, turning their faces to the walls or attempting to burrow underneath other bodies. My heart started to beat unnaturally hard, and I began to sweat not entirely from the heat. I felt unsafe. Not because the spares were threatening—they were docile, brainless, without purpose of any kind. It was the tunnel itself that triggered bad memories in me, memories I didn’t want to place. The smell was at the back of it, I guess, and the absence of hope.

In the end we found the right one, Conrad Two, and the orderly took him away. Half an hour later he was returned without his right eye. The crater where it had once sat had been roughly stitched together, painted with antiseptic and carelessly bandaged. As the orderly shoved him past me back into the tunnel a smell I recognized crept into my mind, and my stomach cramped violently. It was the sweet, sickly odor of skinFix, a material used to seal incisions when cosmetic niceties are not an issue. I’d never heard of it being used anywhere outside the army, and hadn’t smelt it in over a decade. It’s not something you forget.

After the ambulance left I returned to the corridor tunnel, and stood for a while in front of one of the windows. In the blue, the bodies staggered and crawled like blind grubs, disturbed by the periodic moans of the spare who’d just had part of his face ripped out The body nearest the window looked up suddenly, a motion
that was random and meaningless. She had only one arm, and the skin on the left side of her face was red and churned where a graft had been removed. Her eyes flicked across the window and her mouth moved silently, and the worst thing was that her face and body were not yet sufficiently destroyed to hide how attractive her counterpart must be. I walked unsteadily back to the main room, shutting the door behind me.

I drank half a bottle of Jack, injected two mg of Rapt into my arm, and lay facedown on the bed with cushions pushed hard over my ears. And still, as I drifted into the twilight of an overdose which left me unconscious for over seventy-two hours, I thought I could hear the sound of bodies twisting unknowing against each other in the gloom.

Luckily, I guess, Ratchet the droid found me. I’d vomited onto the bed and, sharp thinker that it was, the machine had worked out I was not in the best of shape. It monitored me for the next two days, turning me over when I threw up again, and made sure the spares were fed at the regular times.

Maybe it also whispered to me in my sleep, because when I eventually made it back into the land of the living, I returned with a sense of purpose that seemed to come from nowhere. You’re going to need some back story to understand. Bear with me on the medical stuff, because it isn’t really my field.

The deal with the Farms is this.

The world’s a dangerous place, even if you don’t go looking for trouble. Chances are your body’s going to take some knocks. Diseases, cuts, bruises. Most of these can be dealt with pretty effectively now. There’s only one area where we’re still consulting tea leaves and waving dead chickens at the problem.

There seems to be some inherent difficulty with getting damaged bodies to accept replacement parts. Tissue-typing and test-tube organs never really got sorted out, despite the fact that any number of apparently more difficult conundrums have been tidily solved.
Donor organs or limbs would be rejected, and wither and die, and more often than not they’d fuck the patient up in the process. The doctors furrowed their collective brows over the matter, dallying with drugs and toying with synthetic antigens, nanotechnology and degradable bone scaffolds seeded with cells, but it just didn’t happen for them. The success rate climbed, but it was still too hit-and-miss, especially as the only people who could afford such treatments were exactly those who’d sue the ass off the hospital if the transplant went down the toilet.

And so, nearly twenty years ago, SafetyNet was born.

The company was founded by a biochemist who combined scientific ability with genius for cold-hearted, bloody-minded pragmatism which I trust will earn him a long stretch in the hottest corner of Hell. Almost certainly not, though. I’m sure Heaven takes Amex just as readily as everywhere else.

The idea was very simple. “Hey,” this man said to himself, one long dark evening in the lab, “we’ve got a problem here. People keep fucking up bits of themselves, and their bodies respond with a hard-line ‘accept no substitutes’ approach. Maybe we have to stop trying to fob them off. Perhaps we should try giving them something they’ll recognize.”

This biochemist approached his richest clients, got a positive response and venture capital, and so the Farms were born. For a sum which is not generally known, but which must be well in excess of a million dollars, when you have a child you can take out a little life insurance for it. You do this by creating a life, and then systematically destroying it.

After the child has been conceived, surgeons remove a couple of cells from the emerging fetus. These cloned cells are grown in a variety of cultures, test tubes, and incubators, the process matched to normal development as closely as possible. As soon as the fake twin
can breathe, it is left with droids for a while, until it’s got the basic motor skills and perception stuff worked out. Then they bring it out to a Farm, put it in a tunnel, and forget about it until they need it.

Twice a day, a medic droid checks vital responses and gives each spare a carefully designed package of foodstuffs to ensure that it grows and develops in tandem with its twin. Sometimes the droids’ll get them to move around a bit, so their muscles don’t atrophy. Apart from that, all the spares know is one long endless twilight of blue heat, the mindless noise of other spares, and the slow blur of meaningless movement that takes place around them. Then, when a spare’s real-life twin is injured, or gets ill, the alarm goes off and an ambulance comes. The doctors find the right spare, cut off what they need, and then shove it back in the tunnel. There it lies, and rolls, and persists, until they need it again.