Spares

‘Howie, what are you talking about?’

‘You watch, next time you break bread with a babe. You'll see I'm right. So this is the plan – I come up with a new diet. All you have to do is buy circular food. Whatever you want, you can have it – so long as you make sure that you never have more than twenty degrees at one time. What do you think?’

‘Complete and utter nonsense,’ I said.

‘Possibly, possibly – but who knows? Women understand some weird shit. Maybe they're on to something.’ He winked, leant over to a small fridge and pulled out a couple of beers from the multitude inside. ‘As you can see, there's a lot of beer. More than enough.’

‘For what?’

‘For however long it's going to take you to explain. I still say you should blow town, but I'm not letting you out of here before you calm down. Against my better judgement, you're going to be crashing in my storeroom tonight, Jack. These are aggressive people you're dealing with. Tell me what the hell's going on.’

I knew I was going to have to tell someone sooner or later. I'd assumed it would be Mal. As I took my first sip of beer in a long time, I looked at Howie's face and realized that it was going to be him.

I met the spares five years ago. I was thirty-four. I was put in a car and driven out of New Richmond in the middle of the night by someone, a woman who wasn't my wife but who'd taken the trouble to find me when everyone else had given up. There's a two-week period of my life which has just disappeared, and one of the very few things I'm sure about is that I want to leave it that way.

I didn't really know what the Farms were back then. Well yeah, I did know. Vaguely. I'd driven past one once, wondered what they were, asked someone, got half the story. I knew more or less what they were for, but not how they did it, and at the time I didn't really care too much.

We arrived in that scrag-end of night when the sky turns from black to blue just before dawn. The complex was a couple of miles outside Roanoke, handy for the hospitals. It was a two-storey concrete building up against a hillside, a drab grey structure which from the road you'd probably assume was something to do with the military. In front there was a small compound where collection vehicles parked for the brief periods they spent at the Farm. The whole place was ringed by an electrified fence, like so much else these days. In back were the tunnels, but you couldn't see them. They went straight into the rock.

I was left outside the compound, and waited shivering for the dawn and the representative from the parent company who was supposed to be coming to meet me. I waited two hours, two of the most wretched hours of my life. I'd evidently shot up from a bad batch and my head was completely fucked. I didn't really know where I was, but that was giving me no relief. It was like being dead without the peace.

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 gave pretty much straight into the control room where I spent most of my time. At the bottom corner of this room was a door which 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 further down was the second corridor which led to the operating room. There were a few further 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 grey, 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 which 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 colour, 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 centre 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 to the 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 towards 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 foetal 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 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 odour 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 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 face down 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 shapes. 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 testtube 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 pan.

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.’

He 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 foetus. 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 they'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 takes 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.

Example. There was a spare on the Farm called Steven Two, and I read his records. His brother out in the big room was a real piece of work. When he was ten he smashed up his right hand by getting it crunched in a car door. Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely his fault, but the way life is you're supposed to have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The real Steven never had to. The ambulance came and the doctors put Steven Two's arm on the table and hacked his hand off at the wrist. They went away, and sewed it onto Steven. A little discomfort for a while, some tiresome physio sessions, but he ended up whole again.

At sixteen, Steven rolled his car while drunk and lost his leg, but that was okay because the doctors could come back and take one of Steven Two's. After the operation the orderly carried him back to the tunnel, leaned him against the wall just inside the door, and locked it. Steven Two tried to shamble forward, fell on his face, and remained that way for three days.

At seventeen, Steven got a pan-full of scalding water in the face from a local woman he'd been cheating on. Not only cheating on, in fact: he'd stolen her car and forced her to have sex with two of his friends. But Steven probably looks pretty much alright now, because they came and took his brother's face away.

That was what the spares' lives were. Living in tunnels waiting to be whittled down, while mangled and dissected bodies stumped around them, clapping hands with no fingers together, rubbing their faces against the walls and letting shit run down their legs. Once every two days, with no warning or explanation, the tunnels would fill with disinfectant. A warning would have been irrelevant, of course, because none of the spares could speak. None of them could read. None of them could think. The tunnels were a butcher's shop where the meat still moved occasionally, always and forever bathed in a dead blue light.

They have no clothes, no possessions, no family. They're like dead code segments, cut off from the rest of the program and left alone in darkness. All they have is the Farm droids, and the caretaker, I guess – though they're generally worse than nothing. There's no ‘duty of care’ crap in the caretaker's job description. All he does is sit and do nothing at all while the worst parts of his soul fester and grow. Some let people in at night — for a small fee, of course. It was rumoured that one of the shadowy venture capitalists was a big customer of this illicit service. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh while they watched the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them.

When I woke, Ratchet was hoovering the sick up from around my face, and a pot of coffee was already on the stove. The sounds and smell filtered slowly into my consciousness, like water through semi-porous rock. Eventually I got up, showered and dressed, and then I sat at the table as I always did. My brain felt as if it had been roughly buffed with coarse sandpaper, I had the chills from the Rapt I'd taken, and my hands were shaking so much I spilt coffee all over the table.

But this time it was different. For the first time I was thinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.

For better or worse, I made them.

That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I picked my way through the bodies and chose some of the children that had been least used so far. In the first tunnel I found David and Ragald, the second Suej and Nanune, and in the third Jenny. At that stage all were unharmed apart from Suej, who'd lost a swathe of skin on her thigh. I brought them out of the tunnels and into the main room, and got them to sit on chairs. Tried to, anyway: they'd never seen chairs before. David and Nanune fell off immediately, Suej slumped forward onto the table, and Ragald stood up unsteadily and careered away across the room. Eventually, I herded them into a corner where they sat with their backs up against the wall. By then they'd stopped squinting against the relative brightness of the light and were goggling wide eyed at the complexity of the room — its surfaces and objects, its space, the fact the walls did not slope.

I squatted down in front of them and held their faces in turn, staring into their eyes, trying to find something in there. There was nothing, or as good as, and for a moment my resolution wavered. They'd gone too long with nothing, missed out on too many things. Most of them couldn't use their limbs properly. They sat unsteadily, like babies whose bodies had been accidentally stretched by years.

I wasn't qualified to make up everything they had lost, or perhaps even any part of it. I couldn't make a reasonable stab at my own life, never mind give them one of their own. The wave of decisiveness I'd ridden all morning was ebbing fast, leaving me adrift in a tired and anxious dead zone.

‘What are you doing?’

I turned, heart thumping. Ratchet and the medic droid were standing in the doorway. For a moment I built a lie to tell, but then gave up. People always think that it's what happens when you're awake that shapes your life and makes decisions, but it isn't. When you're asleep and go away, things happen. That time counts too, and in my case the last seventy-two hours had altered me. Unless something changed, I was going to have to go back out into the world. It would probably be the death of me, but if I stayed and watched the children slowly dismantled over the years I would die just as surely. I would be no different to them except I didn't live in the tunnels.

That's what I told myself, anyway. But I didn't think I could have left the Farm then, couldn't have faced going back outside again. Don't ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter.

‘I want to help them,’ I said. Both droids watched me impassively.

‘How?’ Ratchet asked. Behind me Nanune slumped sideways onto the floor. I turned and propped her back up.

‘Let them walk around. Teach them.’

Ratchet held up one of his manipulating extensions and I shut up. With nothing being said on an audible wavelength, the medic droid appeared to suddenly lose interest, turned and disappeared back into the corridor. Ratchet waited until it had gone.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why do you fucking think?’ I shouted, hoping he could provide an answer. When he didn't, I tried to find one myself. ‘They have a right to be able to speak. To see outside. To understand.’

‘No they haven't, Jack.’ Ratchet was impassive but interested, as if he was watching something in a Petri dish which had suddenly started juggling knives. ‘The spares only exist to fulfil their function.’

‘Half the people outside were born for worse reasons than that. They still have rights.’ I was beginning to shake again, and the bands of muscle across my stomach had cramped. I wasn't really up to a metaphysical discussion with a robot. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down my temple and dripped heavily onto my shirt. That's the problem with Rapt. You don't get much time off.

‘Do they?’ asked the droid, but he didn't wait for an answer. ‘You're proposing, against the express instructions of SafetyNet, to allow spares out of the tunnels. To attempt to teach them to read. To give them a pointless scrap of life.’

‘Yes,’ I said, with weak defiance, sensing how stupid and idealistic I sounded. The strange thing was that it wasn't like me. I had my idealism kicked out of me many years ago, round about the time I learnt about skinFix. If you'd have asked me, I'd have said I didn't give a shit, that I didn't really care about the spares or anything else. I didn't know why I was doing this.

‘You'll need help,’ the droid said.

It took a while for this to sink in. ‘From you?’