Nike’s trip out was not, as Omo thought, to see Helen. Instead he took the quick walk to the Trading House. Every step of the way he wrestled with the conflicting emotions of fear and excitement. Last time he’d been taken there. This time he was knocking on the door. He was making a choice. Acting independently. And acting against ULTIMATE® with every step and every thought.
Of course they had known Nike would be unable to resist coming back. No one could resist the pull of The Immortal Horses. It was like Habit∞. After being greeted at reception, this time Nike was ushered into a smaller room, an office which would have overlooked the street, had the blinds not been down. He hardly had time to wonder if he’d made a bad choice when the man he’d spoken with before entered the room. ‘Glad you chose to come back. I hoped you would. Have you got more questions?’ Nike couldn’t believe someone was actually encouraging him to ask questions. Whatever he didn’t know about the Immortal Horses, he did know that they were quite unlike ULTIMATE®. No one was making him pay credits for questions. Ask, and he got. It was simple and yet…. ‘So Nick. What can I tell you?’ ‘It’s Nike.’ Nike decided he’d better correct the man. After all, Nike was his name. ‘That’s Nick to us.’ ‘It’s just my Nan calls me Nick.’ ‘Because Nick is the name you had before ULTIMATE®. And we aren’t part of ULTIMATE® here. Nick is your family name. We’re family. So here, to us, you are Nick.’ ‘Okay.’ He wasn’t going to kick up a fuss about it. Nick, Nike, did it really matter? ‘You can call me Troy,’ the man volunteered, answering Nike’s first unanswered question. Nike took a deep breath. How far into his mind could this Troy read? ‘I’ve got so many questions. I don’t know where to start.’ ‘That’s fair enough. This has all come on you as a surprise after all. And you’re not properly trained in asking questions..’ Nike smiled at that one. Pryce would be livid. It was Pryce’s job to see that he was trained in questioning, but he guessed that The Immortal Horses and ULTIMATE® had different views on what a good question really was.’ ‘Listen Nick. I’m going to tell you the History of ULTIMATE®. There are things you need to know. You need to understand the enemy before you can understand yourself. Okay?’ Nike nodded. ‘Stop me at any point. Interject or ask for a more specific, detailed explanation. I want you to really know what’s going on by the time we’ve finished here.’ That was a first. ULTIMATE® questioning never seemed to be about actually knowing anything. It was about fulfilling your ‘productive’ work quota. Questions were currency, not a means of gaining knowledge. Troy began. ‘Let’s start with the HISTORY OF ULTIMATE®. We could call it the information transformation. Or the destruction of life as we knew it. Whatever. The title isn’t important. We’re looking for meaning not names. I know that you’ve asked questions about history before and I realise that you’ve got a basic picture of how things were ‘in History’. What you don’t know is the significance of that. Of how we moved from History to the ULTIMATE® present. You know, I think, about the ₲₨ΩHist?’ ‘Yes,’ Nike nodded, ‘but it’s never really interested me.’ ‘It should. It’s your history after all. It’s all of our histories,’ Troy continued, ‘okay, well you know that at the beginning of the 21st century things were very different. Branding was a concept where people chose between alternative companies, alternative ideologies, but big business meant that convergence became the only viable financial state for a capitalist system under threat and huge scale take-over’s and buy out’s began. People didn’t realise it at the time of course. They still believed in their brands as independent. Even when companies merged they didn’t see the bigger picture. They didn’t realise that with the global marketplace taking over, in fact their geographical set of choices regarding branding was getting ever smaller. Fewer and fewer companies, and fewer and fewer people had the real power. Branding was a smokescreen, but a comfortable, familiar state which people bought into. People don’t like being challenged, especially when things are changing rapidly, as they were in the early twenty first century. They like to hold on to what is familiar, even if it isn’t real. Follow me so far?’ Nike nodded. He couldn’t see what this had to do with him, or his history, but he was hopeful Troy would come to a point sometime soon. And he realised how much more enjoyable live conversation was compared with the US™ screen. ‘At the beginning of the 21st century people got used to the idea that their Tesco clubcard held details of all their spending patterns and could be used for marketing purposes to target their shopping. That Amazon could suggest books to you based on your previous purchasing choices. Some people even found this distasteful. Some were cynical. Some predicted the death of civil liberty. But people are remarkably indiscreet, especially when faced with new technology which makes life more interesting or just more ‘fun.’ People didn't think too much about what was happening with the information they were exchanging about themselves on Facebook or Myspace or in Second Life. These were the brands which dominated everyday life between 2000 and 2010.’ ‘People didn’t think about the giant databases in the background, churning out algorithms for the purpose of understanding and then controlling the choice patterns of the entire world population. That's the stuff of conspiracy theories. People, even intelligent people, shrugged it off. Some of them even worked on the false belief that with so much information bombarding back and forth through cyberspace, they were actually safer, because who could actually ‘look’ at what any individual was doing. Who would be interested? They believed that the more information that was out there, the safer the individual would be. They comforted themselves in the belief that as long as the IRS was incompetent, how could or would any organisation actually get their act together to gather or use this information. They ignored the obvious signs that Amazon and Facebook were NOT the IRS. They saw Google as a ‘cool place to work’ staffed and run by people with a hippy/liberal view of business and this comforted them. They didn't look to the power behind the throne. As we came out of ‘history’ people stopped looking at historical trends. So historical ‘truths’ became unimportant and nothing could be learned from such statements. It was easy for ULTIMATE® to do away with history. Contemporary studies became more important. History told us nothing in the face of an exponentially speeding up future.’ Nike wasn’t really following now, but he didn’t like to stop Troy in full flow. He had never seen a person speak so passionately, or with so much authority. And Troy seemed to know so much. Even Pryce had to refer back to the US™ screen all the time when he gave them study sessions. And here was Troy, speaking from his memory. Nike couldn’t fail but be impressed. ‘ULTIMATE® knew that he who controls the past controls the future. ULTIMATE® knew that knowledge is power. No one else cared any more. Everyone was too busy getting their kicks from the virtual world which offered them an escape from the real world which was, economically speaking, going down the tubes. And by 2013 ULTIMATE® was there, a real alternative. At the time, no one even questioned how it came about, it was like it sprang, fully formed, from the minds of the economic gods. People thought it was to their benefit, so they accepted it, largely unquestioningly. Anything that made life better must be good. ULTIMATE® played on the shallow concerns of the individual. While all the time working to destroy individualism.’ ‘Of course during the transitio n time which we now refer to as The ₲₨ΩHist, life changed radically. It was a time when people couldn't afford to eat out any more. Couldn't afford foreign holidays, lost their jobs, lost their cars... but it became easy to compensate for these losses. ULTIMATE® made it easy. For example: first they made food really expensive. Then they had numerous food scares, till people didn’t feel safe eating anything. The combination of price and fear pretty quickly made eating out a less appealing concept. And you don't need to eat out when you can get cheap food delivered to your door by the ULTIMATE® delivery system. You just shop online and say what you want and they bring it to you, pre-packaged, precooked and tasting wonderful. You don't have to worry any more about free range chickens because all the food is genetically created, never mind genetically modified. And if you had concerns about this in the past, hey, ULTIMATE® have done a good job in convincing you that no animals were being harmed any more in your food production. That your ‘meat’ now tasted better than ever and it didn't harm animals, didn't ruin the economy and it actually protected you from cancer and heart disease and you would never become obese as long as you purchased from the ULTIMATE® range. And no one in the world is starving any more. Everyone has enough to eat. You've got to buy into that. ULTIMATE® are making the world a better place to be. I bet you’ve never even thought about it, have you?’ Nike shook his head. Then said, ‘But I have tasted real food,’ He paused for effect. ‘at my Nan’s.’ ‘Yes?’ Troy was giving nothing away. ‘Yes. She had a birthday cake. A real one.’ Nike wasn’t sure if he should mention the RIP inscribed on it. He did realise he was in a new world with The Immortal Horses and he didn’t want to get any deeper into trouble than he felt he already was. But he was curious, wondering if there was a link between The Immortal Horses and the RIP. However, he didn’t feel he could ask Troy the question outright. He wanted to find out about RIP and he thought Troy might be the man to tell him, but he hoped maybe Troy would volunteer the requisite information. He did want to protect his Nan if possible. If Troy was interested in this information he certainly didn’t express it. ‘They did the same with transport,’ Troy continued, ‘first they made it really expensive. Then they piled on terrorist threats. Then they provided a virtual alternative. It’s the same modus operandi, and the effect was the same. Whereas in 2000 people worried about personal transport and public transport and motorways and holidays and the cost of fuel and diminishing oil stocks and the like, by 2015 these things were more or less outmoded and by 2020 they were part of a History which people had already abandoned in favour of the ULTIMATE® alternative. And this was all planned. All part of ULTIMATE®’s social model. And The PROJECT⌂ is the core of it all.’ ‘Why is the PROJECT⌂…?’ Nike couldn’t help himself. ‘I mean.. what is it for?’ ‘The big question should be: how did a bunch of kids surfing the net and living online change the world? The answer is simple. Because knowledge is power and information is a profitable commodity. ULTIMATE® took the idea of the ‘information’ age to its logical conclusion. At the turn of the 21st century they developed a means of analysing and eventually of controlling the population. ‘Productive’ work was the means to achieving this and The PROJECT⌂ was the place where they could really develop and perfect the concept, ’ Troy explained. ‘‘Productive’ work was born out of a combination of online elements which had become the forefront of the escapism from reality during the social transition period. It was Yahoo! Answers meets Amazon, meets chat-rooms, forums and social networking sites with a bit of online gaming and bingo thrown in. All developed by big business in order to increase their capital and dominance of the market. All used by individuals who the brands had convinced that these were must-have, lifestyle choices.’ Troy sounded bitter now. ‘The virtual life was easy to sell. And they sold to people who didn’t even know the price they were paying. They sold these ‘fun’ possibilities for spending your life virtually once they’d made real life almost unbearable for everyone. The alternative to the virtual life was a life in debt, with the worry of constant repossession and unemployment and no pension to look forward to after a lifetime of hard, boring, unfulfilling work. It was the time when people’s biggest dream was of a new conservatory, or a cruise and they realised they’d never afford their dreams and they’d still be in debt up to their eyeballs till the day they died. They realised that they’d never be able to retire till they were seventy and every day of life they’d have that sick feeling in their stomach that said you’re twenty grand overdrawn and counting. And if you fell ill..... don't even think about it. Believe me Nick. I know about this. I saw it. First-hand. And it was all lies. All lies perpetrated by the capitalist companies for whom the ULTIMATE® model was the answer to all their prayers. It didn’t need to be that way.’ Nike was a little bit frightened by Troy’s tone but he was learning in a way the US™ never taught him. He felt like he was experiencing real life for the first time. It felt scary but good. ‘But capitalism doesn’t exist any more,’ he said. ‘It’s part of History isn’t it?’ Troy laughed. ‘Nick. Thirty years ago you’d have been marching to MAKE POVERTY HISTORY. You’d have worn a white plastic wristband to show your allegiance. And a few left wing radicals subverted this in a postmodern/ironic statement, sporting a red plastic wristband stating MAKE CAPITALISM HISTORY. And no one believed it would happen and precious few wanted to make capitalism history. But then, the Capitalists didn’t really want to make POVERTY history either. Poverty was something they thrived on. And yet today, you sit here telling me that CAPITALISM IS HISTORY, and you probably don’t even know what POVERTY is. Am I right?’ Nike nodded. He felt stupid. ‘I’m here to tell you Nick. Capitalism is alive and well. It’s just ULTIMATE® capitalism now. Everything is subordinate to ULTIMATE®. Except us.’ Troy paused. ‘But I’m digressing. By 2016 ULTIMATE® overtly launched as the ULTIMATE® BRAND and revealed that they had the whole world all signed and sealed as participants. And people didn’t know, or didn’t care. They couldn’t see through the process and they didn’t understand the implications. Yes, they might remember a time when Mars wasn’t ULTIMATE® Mars, when Microsoft was Microsoft with Bill Gates at the head of operations. Before CEO’s were all discredited and went underground. By the time ULTIMATE® BRAND LOYALTY became obvious, ULTIMATE® made sure that individuals no longer ‘controlled’ brands. It was a key selling point. Individuals no longer had to take responsibility or blame. And people had become so fed up of the ‘fat cats’ that they were happy when they disappeared from view. Loyalty to the Brand became the important thing, not loyalty to people.’ He continued, ‘Anyway, people had got so used to all the big business buy-outs that they stopped questioning who actually OWNED anything. The power of the ULTIMATE® brand inspired unquestioning loyalty because it built itself on the accepted social fashions of the past while offering a new, improved version of the world. Whatever might have been considered a sacrifice was forgotten with the next ULTIMATE® improvement, because ULTIMATE® were seen to be working tirelessly to make each person’s lifestyle experience the best it could be. Individually tailored to your needs. At a tenth of the price of the old world. Which anyone in 2010 had to agree, was pretty second rate. By 2020 BRAND LOYALTY was born in the ULTIMATE® style. And the work of The PROJECT⌂ has been instrumental in bringing the world to an acceptance of the new ULTIMATE® model. Real choice had been eradicated, but no one noticed. And if they did, they’d probably consider it a small price to pay. ULTIMATE®’s greatest achievement was to make History HISTORY. Or to try.’ Nike’s head was spinning. He knew that he’d just heard something really important, but it was all so contrary to his previous lived experience that he just didn’t know how to compute the information. And he was struggling to see how any of this affected him, personally. Troy seemed to pre-empt his thought once more. ‘You’re wondering what all this has to do with you?’ Nike nodded. ‘Yes, I mean it’s interesting but it’s the way life is and….’ ‘Did you want to ask me a question about your Nan’s birthday cake?’ Nike was amazed. How could Troy read his innermost thoughts almost before he had them? ‘Yes.’ ‘About the RIP?’ Back in his room, with his US™ working again, Nike realised he should keep his head down. Make things look like they were normal. But nothing was as it had been before. Externally there was no change, but inside, Nike felt like he’d completely transformed. And he couldn’t tell anyone about it. He didn’t think he should tell his Nan, he couldn’t talk to Omo and he knew he shouldn’t breathe a word of this to Pryce. He was alone. Truly alone. In his case, knowledge was most definitely not power. He was beginning to experience loneliness for the first time.
He wasn’t the only one with secrets now though. Omo had a secret. Angela had a secret. Put them both together and that WAS the secret. Yet another illicit liaison that Pryce didn’t know about. If he had, he might have wondered why it was that his wife was interested in having sex with any and every other man but not with him. Why were some women like that? Why hadn’t ULTIMATE® done away with infidelity when they’d done away with everything else in the personal life? But Pryce was busy struggling with other questions. Pryce didn’t even recognise the ball, so it’s no surprise he couldn’t keep his eye on it. Right now, Pryce was under pressure from Graham to plug the gaps. He had to be extra vigilant. The system had been cleaned and checked and double checked and appeared to be safe again, but Graham was blaming Pryce for not pre-empting the problem and he was detailed to investigate Omo, Nike and Flora thoroughly in an attempt to work out how the breach in security had occurred. He had been left in no doubt that his career prospects were looking decidedly shaky if he made any more mistakes. And he had no idea how he was supposed to achieve the results Graham demanded from him. Even if he carried out 24 hour surveillance on the kids logs he wouldn’t be able to work out what was going on. It was physically impossible for him to carry out real time data collection on three people. That was the point of having an automated system. To work effectively, the system had to be far too complex for a human to work. And he felt out of his depth. Omo felt out of his depth too but for different reasons. He was still trying to make sense of what had happened between him and Angela once Nike had left the office. Not just how but why. He had no previous experience of real sex, precious little of virtual sex. Sex wasn’t a taboo in the ULTIMATE® world at large, but in the world of The PROJECT⌂ things had evolved so that there were many other things to focus on. Consequently sex had never really featured. And certainly not sex with emotion. At least Omo thought what he’d experienced was emotion. He had no idea that Angela had seduced him simply because she could. He thought that she’d picked him because she liked him and that their love-making was ‘the real deal.’ Not that the phrase would mean anything to Omo. He had no conception of reality and nothing to compare the experience to. For the first time in his life he had questions and emotions and he wanted them answered. So like a good ULTIMATE® citizen he turned to the knowledge bank. While Nike was doing everything he could to keep his head below the radar, Omo’s amorous liasion with Angela made him stick his neck out in a way that was bound to draw him to Pryce’s attention. Maybe this was part of Angela’s plan? But that was a thought Omo was incapable of having. Nike asked asinine questions about suitably meaningless topics, Omo started asking questions about love and sex, and Pryce was supposed to be following it all and making sense of things. ‘What is love?’ Omo asked the knowledge bank. LOVE: Definition. In History, an intense feeling of deep affection or fondness for a person or thing. Generally associated with sexual passion and sexual relations. Omo had experienced an intense feeling. It was a positive feeling so he assumed it was affection or fondness. He wasn’t Nike. He wasn’t going to waste credits getting definitions for ‘affection’ or ‘fondness’ ‘sexual passion’ or ‘sexual relations’. He worked with what he had. His question was answered. He loved Angela. He was less bothered about what that meant than about what would happen as a result of the fact. Did Angela love him back? Of course she must. After all, they’d had what she called ‘a shag’. He’d asked her what it meant. She’d had to spell it out to him. He’d felt such a fool. But then, quickly, he’d felt so good he wondered why he’d never known about this before. Why he’d never known that feeling could be so good. ULTIMATE® had never encouraged him to feel. If he was Nike he might have wondered why. But because he was Omo he just wanted to know what the feeling was, and when he could feel it again. And he realised this was a feeling quite unlike any virtual simile he could experience. ULTIMATE® sex focussed on physical sensation and that was enough for most people. What Omo had just experienced was physical sensation plus emotion. Omo could not believe anything could be better than the half hour he’d spent naked with Angela. Not even ULTIMATE® sex. Words and definition provided no practical resolution to his newly found emotion. Knowing what it was didn’t stop him thinking about it, or wanting to experience it again. So he embarked upon a dangerous path. Very out of character. He attempted to interface with Angela. ‘Uh..’ he was lost as he saw her face on the US™ screen, larger than life and even more attractive than he remembered. ‘Omo. Hi. How’re you?’ ‘Uh, fine.’ ‘What can I do for you?’ Angela was a piece of work. She didn’t bat an eyelid. Didn’t seem concerned that everything they said was being logged and could be seen by Pryce if he only put in the effort to check the logs. Or maybe that was exactly why she did it. ‘When can I see you again?’ She’d got him, hook, line and sinker. She knew it. One taste and he’d be back for more. She wasn’t even flattered. She knew it would be this way. He wasn’t the first, he wouldn’t be the last. And she was completely in control. Which was just the way she liked it. ‘Oh, I don’t know, it might be difficult… can you think of a good alibi?’ ‘What’s an alibi?’ Omo had never heard of the word. The US™ screen came to his rescue. ALIBI: Definition. A claim, supported by evidence that when an alleged act took place, one was elsewhere. This didn’t really help Omo. He didn’t know what an alleged act was…. Angela helped him out. ‘We need to come up with an excuse.’ ‘Oh. Okay.’ ‘Why don’t you think of one and then get back to me?’ And she was gone. Angela knew what she was doing. She was the last generation of women to grow up espousing the ‘Treat them mean, keep them keen’ philosophy. ULTIMATE® had consigned such doctrines to the far reaches of the knowledge archive where no one was likely to find them. But Angela had slipped through the net. She had known the art of seduction long before she used it on Omo. She was already an expert when she’d met Pryce and she was only twenty years old then. Angela was more than a match for Pryce and Omo was a minnow to Pryce’s trout. While Angela reeled Omo in, she was making her play for Pryce and Graham. Minnow, trout and shark. Three for the price of one. A job worth doing. Omo came up with his excuse a few hours later. It wasn’t a good one. He didn’t have experience and he didn’t dare ask Nike, who as far as Omo was concerned was the master of the good excuse. Alone, he did the best he could. Omo decided that his alibi would be that he had become interested in adaptive analytic theory after his visit to Angela’s office and he’d like to know more. Why he didn’t just ask the knowledge bank now it was back on line wasn’t a question that suggested itself to him, though it was the first question Pryce asked when, later on, he looked at the logs. But Angela hadn’t demanded a good alibi, just an alibi. And an alibi Omo gave her. ‘Hi. Me again. I wondered if you could come over and show me more of the analytical problems we worked on at your office.’ ‘You want me to come to your apartment?’ ‘Yes. Is that possible?’ ‘Should be. Will Nike be there too?’ ‘Not in my room.’ She pushed him. ‘You want to be alone with me?’ He felt his face heat up. His dark skin hid the blush, but Angela could sense his discomfort and played on it as though she could see into his mind through her US™ screen. ‘Yes,’ he replied. She knew she had him right there. She could have toyed with him as long as she liked but Angela was equally happy just to get right down to it. Actually, although what she usually liked in sex was the control with its attendant power, Angela found that she’d been strangely attracted to Omo’s innocence. She was used to using her considerable sexual prowess with the likes of Graham, men who could do things for her, help her up the ULTIMATE® ladder so to speak. Part of the challenge for her was to best men who were in essence themselves controllers. With Omo it was different. She was using him, of course, but he was just a pawn in her analytical game, and there was something naive and charming about him. And she found something sexually arousing about teaching him the practicalities and nuances of ‘live’ sex. It was a feeling she hadn’t experienced since she first met Pryce, when they were both barely out of their teens. Ironic really. ‘I’ll be over in an hour,’ she purred. Omo didn’t realise how long an hour could be. He found he couldn’t sit at his screen and he wandered through to make a cup of ULTIMATE® coffee. There he found Nike. Avoiding ‘productive’ work as usual. ‘Would you cover for me?’ Nike asked, immediately. ‘What d’you mean?’ ‘I want to go out,’ Nike said. Of course Omo should have asked where but he was thinking of his own alibi. Flora would stay in her room while Angela was there, none the wiser as long as they were quiet, but Nike could be guaranteed to intrude when least wanted. So this was a boon. Having Nike out of the way could only be a benefit and he’d offered Omo the perfect solution himself. ‘Sure,’ Omo felt that he might look like he’d given in a bit easily. So he added, ‘say Hi to your Nan for me.’ Because, after all, where else could Nike be going? Nike smiled. Omo didn’t suspect a thing. But why would he? ‘So if Pryce calls…’ he began. That pulled Omo up short. He hadn’t thought about that. What if Pryce called when he and Angela were….? ‘I know. Let’s call him now. Get him out the picture for a couple of hours and then we can do what we like.’ Omo was getting cunning. Like all lovers. ‘Yeah. Good idea. Better still. Let’s get Flora to call him.’ ‘Okay. How?’ Omo still had a lot to learn. ‘Leave it to me.’ Nike reassured him. ‘I’ll sort it.’ And Omo, being Omo, didn’t question any more than that. He really should have done. But it wasn’t in his nature. ULTIMATE® had seen to that. Several minutes later when Flora contacted Pryce, it was like a break in the clouds for him. And once again, he took his eye off the ball. It mean that just when he should have been able to see two potential problems (Nike going AWOL and Omo making love to Angela), Pryce had a more important task on his hand: dealing with Flora. He determined that it was time to take the bull by the horns and set things straight with the girl. She had no good reason to call him. They both knew that. But he found he was flattered by the attention. It made it easy to convince himself that the problem in hand was to deal with an inappropriate teenage crush, the sort of thing that had to be nipped in the bud. He’d have to be smart and find ways to divert her. He didn’t know enough about girls. He knew he should pass her over to a female social counsellor, but hey, why bother someone else on so trivial a matter. It would make him look even more incompetent. Surely he could sort it himself. He would talk it through with Flora and find something more ‘productive’ for her to spend her energies on. So, while Pryce became convinced that Flora was his immediate concern, and obsessed over how to deal with her, he missed the fact that she wasn’t his problem. THAT was his problem. Pryce was once more destined to miss the central point. His eye was firmly on the wrong ball. Again. As Nike left Helen’s to make his way back to Angela’s office he had it in his mind that she, or her systems, might help him find out about RIP. Nike had great confidence in his own ability to use other people’s knowledge, and if necessary knowledge bank interfaces, to his own advantage. And he had seen enough of the system Angela had access to, to know it kicked serious ass over Pryce’s. Angela was much further up the ULTIMATE® food chain.
Angela was a puzzle. Nike had never met anyone like her before and so she interested him but it was what she represented that interested him more. Which was a bit frustrating because in the office Angela had seemed a lot more interested in Omo than in Nike. Nike found this unusual. In his previous admittedly limited social experience, when he and Omo were in a room together he was the ‘interesting’ one, the centre of attention, whereas Omo was the sidekick. He’d never questioned it before. He’d always just accepted it. But it wasn’t like that with Angela. It was Angela who had suggested that Nike leave them and go see his Nan. He’d jumped at the chance, not given it a second thought, but now that he was on his way back he kept wondering why it was that Angela had wanted to be on her own with Omo. He was sure he’d noticed something between them. And Omo had been acting really strangely ever since Angela had pitched up in The Project House. What Nike hadn’t spotted was Angela suggesting to Omo that maybe he’d like some practical experience of ‘real’ sex. Nike had been too busy in the depths of Angela’s highgrade US™ system, the likes of which he’d never seen before, to notice what was happening right behind him. Lucky Omo was so dark skinned or the blushes would have given it away. Nike never heard Angela’s offer, or Omo’s response. All he knew was that suddenly, Angela suggested that he go and visit his Nan. It was less of a suggestion, more of an instruction. She promised him she’d tell him about The Immortal Horses at a later date, ‘when I’ve got the up to date accurate data collated.’ It felt like he was being palmed off but he’d bought it because he had to. But Nike was sure of one thing; Angela was the kind of person who only ever did anything with a reason. She would not act randomly, or on a whim. He’d seen in The Project House that she could run rings round Pryce (not that that was hard) and now he wondered if perhaps she’d run rings round him? He shrugged. He’d get his own back. He was going to get an answer for his Nan. He wouldn’t let Angela put him off. He’d get her data off her. He was so absorbed in the thought that he wasn’t watching what was going on around him. And so he didn’t see the man until he was right upon him, speaking to him. ‘Hey. You want to know about The Immortal Horses?’ Nike looked up. The voice belonged to a man about his own age, slimmer but taller, sporting a sort of goatee beard and wearing a hooded top which covered most of his head. He couldn’t help but look intimidating. Nike realised all too late that he’d been approached by what might be considered an ‘ordinary’ person. He didn’t have a term of reference for dealing with such a person so he didn’t know what to do. But he wasn’t going to run. Or look scared. Or be scared. ‘What?’ ‘I said, d’you want to know about The Immortal Horses?’ ‘Why?’ This was a high risk strategy, Nike knew. People didn’t usually like you answering questions with questions but he didn’t know what else to do. For the first time in his life that he could remember, he felt vulnerable. But also excited. Because of COURSE he wanted to know about The Immortal Horses. ‘I’m not playing games here mate. You want to know or not?’ ‘Yeah. You going to tell me?’ Nike sounded as cool as he dared. ‘Come with me.’ It wasn’t a command. It was only a statement. He could have walked away. He could have turned round, or pushed past the guy, or simply stopped the interaction. There was no gun, no knife, no threat, no coercion. Just an invitation. Come with me. It was enough. Nike went. He entered the erstwhile Trading House, where The Immortal Horses had been tracking him from, trying to look unconcerned. He couldn’t believe he’d never noticed the huge, glass fronted building before. In the extensive marble lobby he immediately began to attract attention from all the people who seemed to slip past in a blur as he tried to keep up with the brisk step of his contact. They went into a gleaming elevator and emerged some flights later. Nike was in sensory overload and didn’t have time to take in the detail of their clothes and hair but he did notice that they were different. Very different. Except of course, since he was the odd one out, it was he who was different. It felt strange. ‘Hey, it’s a Project Kid,’ some random guy spoke right to his face, as if he wasn’t real. Nike had never had the experience of standing out like a sore thumb. He was attracting all kinds of attention and it felt most uncomfortable. Of course he couldn’t know that the main reason for the interest being displayed in him was that most of the people he was passing had been involved in the tracking process which had led him here. To them, he was the ‘game’ come to life. He was a living, breathing success. He was an object of pride and curiosity. ‘Hey man, check him out.’ ‘Good job …’ Nike followed his contact in a daze through the building, trying to take it all in. They finally came to a halt at an office. ‘Wait in there.’ And Nike was left. Waiting in there. He took time to look round the room. Nike had never seen anything like it, although it would have been recognisable to any person in the pre-ULTIMATE® world as a company boardroom. It wasn’t retro. It was antique. It was authentic in the true meaning of the world. It represented a haven of financial capitalism, re-appropriated by The Immortal Horses in a spectacularly bizarre example of the now obsolete doctrine of reduce, reuse, recycle. It was adapted to purpose. A large wooden table all but filled the room. Almost inevitably there was the ubiquitous US™ screen drowning one wall but it wasn’t switched on. There were banks of smaller screens on the opposite wall. There was a two way mirror but Nike didn’t know that. He wouldn’t have known what a two way mirror was whichever side of it he stood. Observational techniques had gone on leaps and bounds since two way mirrors were the must-have boardroom tool. After enough time to realise how unfamiliar his surroundings were, just enough to make him realise he was really there, the door opened and another man came in. This guy was older, more impressive. He carried himself with authority. He stretched out his hand – a long outmoded gesture, but Nike stuck his own out in response and felt the firm grip. The man looked him firmly in the eyes, but didn’t introduce himself as an individual. Instead, he said, ‘So here we are. We are the Immortal Horses. What did you want to know?’ That was such a big question Nike didn’t know where to begin. ‘Uh… who you are… why….?’ ‘Yes. I imagine it is overwhelming.’ A silence. ‘We’ve been watching you.’ The man was still watching Nike. Closely. Gauging his response. It made Nike nervous. ‘Why?’ His question just slipped out. He couldn’t help himself. ‘That is a good question.’ The man’s stern face almost broke into a smile. Almost. Nike found that strange. In his experience Why? was not a question he got praised for asking. Things here were different. Very different. In his dis-ease Nike rubbed his ßß™, a gesture which didn’t go unnoticed. ‘That’s no good in here. We’ve disabled it.’ ‘What? How…?’ ‘Yes, they said you asked a lot of questions. They didn’t say you just uttered question phrases without meaning.’ ‘Sorry.’ Nike was well out of his depth. The man relaxed slightly. ‘Don’t worry. You surely don’t want the technical details, though I could provide them if you do. We’ve nothing to hide from you here. And anyway, we’re the ones watching you now, not ULTIMATE®. We can control the input and output from it. And we’ve commandeered your login. You belong to us now. One way or the other.’ Was there an implicit threat? Nike realised he was in very, very deep water without any idea of how he’d got there or how, or even whether he’d get out. ‘I’ll tell you what I think you want to know. Based on our profiling of you. If that’s not sufficient, just shout and I’ll fill in the gaps. Okay?’ Nike nodded. He felt every question he’d ever wanted to ask float out of his head which became filled with what he now vaguely recognised as an emotion. Fear. It was not pleasant. And he couldn’t shake it off. ‘As usual with you Nick, (Nike noticed that the man called him Nick) you ask the wrong question to get the answer you desire. You think you want to know about The Immortal Horses, but really you want to know about yourself. You want to know about The PROJECT⌂. Don’t you?’ ‘Yes.’ Nike wasn’t going to argue. ‘Okay. I’ll tell you about The PROJECT⌂, Nick. The things they didn’t tell you when you signed up. The things they’ve never told you.’ And he began. The man told Nike about the formation of The PROJECT⌂. On the big screen he showed Nike his own introduction into The PROJECT⌂. Nike found it both uncomfortable and strangely nostalgic to see himself as a seven year old boy, taken into The PROJECT⌂ by a woman he vaguely recollected was his mother. It was strange to be looking at himself all those years ago, and even stranger to be looking at his mother. He’d forgotten entirely what she looked like. ‘She sold you. For Habit∞.’ The man sounded hard. Almost brutal. But Nike realised that his mother was the target of the harshness, not himself. It did have a nasty ring after all, sold. Helen hadn’t told him that. She should have. But he could understand why she didn’t. He wondered how The Immortal Horses had these images. He wondered why they had them too but most of all for right now, he’d ask how. ‘How do you have these images? They should be my memories. But I don’t remember them. Well… not till I see them happening, and not like that. I don’t remember it like that.’ The man replied, his tone somewhat lightened, ‘ULTIMATE® never lets anything go, they archive everything, but they think they have a much more secure system than they know. We’ve been cross-referencing and storing your memories, the memories of your family, ever since that day.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Don’t run ahead of yourself, Nick. You’ll get your why. But you need context first or it won’t mean anything,’ the man continued to explain. ‘In 2016 The PROJECT⌂ started taking kids aged between five and eight with the aim of turning them into ULTIMATE® future citizens. Their education was an ULTIMATE® education and they learned the skills they needed to survive in the ULTIMATE® world. And while they were learning, they were teaching ULTIMATE® how to hone its own skills. The power of HYPE® was developed into an art form. Call it auto-suggestion or peer-group pressure, or marketing. Call it what you will, ULTIMATE® embraced all these concepts and manipulated the population mercilessly. These Project Kids were at the forefront of the creation of the UTheory∑™ without even knowing it. You know about UTheory∑™?’ Nike nodded. His knowledge was sketchy but… The man continued. ‘You were sold by your mother in 2017 and the first thing they did was to remove you from your memories. But they didn’t wipe them they just archived them. You had so many new things to think about that you didn’t even miss them after the first week. Young children are very, very malleable. And they had so much exciting, fun stuff to offer you. ULTIMATE®’s aim was to make the rest of the population just like you Project Kids. You were HYPED® and repackaged and used as the carrot for a generation of people who wanted something better for their children. The last generation who had children. You know, that by 2020 getting into The PROJECT⌂ was better than getting into Eton. Or Oxford. And harder.’ Nike looked blank. He’d no idea what Eton or Oxford were of course. The man carried on regardless. ‘They didn’t have to pay people to put their kids in The PROJECT⌂ for long. Pretty soon, people were begging for it. Like all created scarce resources, a place on the ULTIMATE® PROJECT⌂ became the thing to aspire to. And the Project Kids were to be the leaders in utilising and shaping ‘productive’ work for an entire generation. The living embodiment of UTheory∑™. Did you know how important you are?’ Nike didn’t feel important. He felt scared. He didn’t know where this was going. The man seemed to read his thoughts. ‘You can trust me Nick,’ he said. ‘Trust?’ Nike echoed. The man laughed. ‘Of course trust isn’t really an ULTIMATE® concept is it?’ Nike recognised the question as rhetorical, like the ones Helen was fond of asking. ‘You can believe that I have your best interests at heart. However important you are to ULTIMATE®, believe me Nick, you are more important to me and to The Immortal Horses. To our cause.’ Yes, that was the point. Why was he here? What did they want with him? Nike struggled to form the questions. ‘Look,’ The man saw his confusion, ‘It’s all pretty overwhelming to you at the moment, I understand that. You’ve just discovered your world isn’t what you thought it to be. You’ll need time to assimilate the information. I just wanted to touch base with you. You should go back to The Project House now, and just keep your head down. You can come back here any time of course. Now you know the way. ’ ‘But what about….?’ Nike pointed at his ßß™. ‘Don’t worry,’ the man replied, ‘we can disable it at will. In fact we’re working on how we can send false readings from archive through to your local server, but it might take a week or two to get that up and running. We’ve broken the back of the work. We’ve made contact with you and we’ve got the information we need now to finish the job.’ He didn’t ask Nike if he was okay with that. It was implied. And Nike hadn’t considered whether he had any choice in the matter. Choice wasn’t something that he’d learned about in practical terms as a Project Kid. Choice meant ULTIMATE® coffee or ULTIMATE® coke; ULTIMATE® chocolate or ULTIMATE® chips. It wasn’t a practical concept and it certainly wasn’t a daily reality. ‘What do you want with me?’ Nike did manage to frame a sensible question as he was on his way out. ‘Do you know what a Trojan Horse is? ‘ Nike shook his head. ‘Or a cuckoo in the nest?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, come back again and I’ll explain them to you. But don’t worry. Whatever we do, it’ll be in your own best interest, long-term. And it might just save the world.’ And with that, Nike found himself ushered outside the Trading House, back on the street, where everything looked the same as it had an hour ago, and nothing was. He didn’t go back to Angela’s office. There was no point now. He went straight back to The Project House. Meanwhile Helen was building up her Memory Bank for Nike. Despite her innate mistrust and disgust for the US™ technology and everything it stood for, she had to admit she was rather enjoying the process. As long as she didn’t think that anyone other than Nick would get access to it. It was like telling him the story of his family. Something personal. It shouldn’t matter to anyone else.
2005. The year they moved to Moray. Helen and Catriona were having what neither knew at the time would be their last walk together, on a wintery morning in the Galloway Forest Park. Catriona, now nineteen was studying at University in Edinburgh and had come home to help clear out her belongings before the big move north. Catriona hit Helen with the bombshell just as they’d stopped to marvel at the view looking down on Loch Trool. A beautiful view on a cold shimmery morning, destroyed by a bombshell which, in retrospect, Helen should have been expecting. ‘Mum. I’m not coming with you,’ she said. While Helen knew Catriona spent most of her time in Edinburgh, she still imagined that her daughter’s real ‘home’ would be wherever the family was. Unable to process the information she replied, ‘What colour would you like your new room to be? It’s your choice. As long as it’s not that awful sunshine yellow you picked when you were eight.’ She was startled by Catriona’s response, although of course she should have expected it. ‘I don’t need a room. Of any colour. I’m staying in Edinburgh. For good.’ ‘Yes, but you’ll want a room for the holidays. Somewhere to keep your stuff?’ ‘Mum. Don’t you get it? I don’t want to live in the country. I’ve moved out. I’m an adult now. Lauren and I are getting a flat together and we’ll be there all the time.’ Helen didn’t know how to respond to that. It seemed a bit inappropriate to feel that Lauren was a ‘bad influence’ on Catriona. After all, at nineteen, Catriona surely knew her own mind. If she was honest though, Helen couldn’t help but feel uneasy about Lauren and it wasn’t just the multiple piercings and red streaked hair. Helen could look beyond that. And when she did, she found something about Lauren that worried her. Helen wondered if she was just feeling jealous. Lauren was Catriona’s best friend. Her choice. It’s just that she was an urban girl through and through and Helen couldn’t reconcile that with the daughter she thought she knew. ‘Anyway, you’ve got Torquil. He’s more use on a farm than I ever was.’ Catriona dismissed the whole thing with the casual cruelty only a self-obsessed teenager, convinced she was an adult, could deliver, ‘You’ll tell dad for me?’ That really was the final straw. Helen couldn’t bow to that. ‘If you’re old enough to move on, you’re old enough to tell him yourself,’ she retorted, somewhat shortly. And that was it. The last walk in the Galloway Forest Park was ruined for both of them. That mother/daughter bonding thing was history. Only sourness and recriminations remained as they trudged their way down the hill with the dogs, playfully unaware of the atmosphere, running circles round them. Helen asked herself where it had all gone wrong? Catriona used to be her best wee pal, all the time she was growing up. Torquil was interested in tractors and machinery and noise and dirt but Catriona, like Helen, enjoyed the company of animals and the peace of the country lifestyle. Until Foot and Mouth. She reflected, not for the first time, on the trauma meted out by the Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001. No one who lived through the experience came out the same. No one survived untouched by it. The senseless slaughter of thousands of healthy animals against a fear of spreading disease. The rank smell of burning flesh lived in the nostrils and hung in the air for what seemed like weeks. It was overpowering and intolerable. It was infinite sadness. It made grown men cry, and more than that, it made them give up. It split up families and ruined livelihoods and generally depressed the countryside in a way nothing had done before. Helen and Randall had found it hard, but they were adults. Catriona was fifteen when her world changed. Helen hadn’t realised quite how much it had impacted on her daughter until now. It seemed that Catriona had felt her whole emotional life was being ripped away from her and she went numb. She turned away from the comfort of family and the country which no more represented peace but instead carnage. She went in search of other pleasures. And vowed to get away from the country as soon as possible. She moved out at sixteen and took Highers in sciences at the Glasgow Nautical College, from where she got into Heriot Watt to study Chemistry. She met Lauren who was studying Engineering, mainly, Helen unkindly thought, because it was something girls ‘didn’t’ do. Helen had long since forgotten her own aspirations in that respect. She had been six after all. Life moved on. But Lauren seemed like the kind of girl who wanted to kick over the traces at every possible opportunity. A mothers interpretation is not always the most objective and Helen found Lauren a bad influence on a peaceful, naïve country girl like Catriona. Catriona brought Lauren home to the Galloway farm a couple of times but Lauren didn’t like it. She scoffed at the second rate nature of the bathroom, lack of a power shower, the mud around the yard, the smell of the beasts. And Catriona was fooled by it. Worse still, Torquil fell under her spell. But that was later. Helen took a break from recording. She drank a cup of ULTIMATE® tea and wondered if it was meant to be Earl Grey or Darjeeling. You couldn’t tell. Tea was just tea. Very few people drank it nowadays anyway. Perhaps precisely because it was more ULTIMATE® than tea. But it was hot and wet and filled a gap. It’s just that for Helen it didn’t fill enough of a gap. The gap that needed filling was her real past and it became more appealing the more she relived it for Nick. However hard she tried to stick to purpose, Helen was still worried by the notion of shared memories. She had come to realise that her own perspective might not be as objective as she’d always thought it was. Through this process of recall she was beginning to understand that memory is intensely personal and that sharing it is in some sense impossible. The memories which make up ones identity are the deeply buried ones which in some vindication of a strange quantum theory seem to become transformed when let out of one’s head and heart and into the domain of another being. In 1984 she’d felt excited as she left her job interview, hoping to see a man she didn’t know. A man who would become her husband. But he wasn’t there. How did he remember that event? She’d never asked him. She’d never asked him why he wasn’t there. It had been enough for her that he found her again. But now she wondered what had happened that day. What was Randall’s memory of the event? How would it differ from hers? It was trivial, but all the more important because she couldn’t ask him. Her own memory was locked and there was no way of including Randall, the focus of the memory. He remained a projection of her memory. Was that all forty years of life together had achieved? She wanted to give Nick something he could hold onto for the future. Something more than memory. Some kind of truth. Otherwise ULTIMATE® had won. It occurred to her that ULTIMATE® had won anyway, but she refused to admit it. Even if she recorded her memories, even if ULTIMATE® owned the copyright, the meaning remained with her. They moved to Moray in September 2005. Without Catriona. Torquil was sixteen and excited about the possibilities a new farm would bring. Randall was, if not excited, at least resigned to the difference that ‘downshifting’ would bring to their lives. They were all trying to stay positive. The major change was that instead of being tenant farmers of several hundred acres, they would now be owners of their land. A mere ten acres. All their savings had gone, but as Randall pointed out, this was their final move so it was worth it. The land in Moray was more of a smallholding than a farm and the aim was towards self-sufficiency. Randall had become disenchanted with the way agriculture was going, the way society as a whole was going and he wanted to be master of his own destiny as far as possible. He knew that things would only get worse, not better. And he was right. The night before they left Galloway, with everything packed up and ready to go, they sat down round the fire one last time. Torquil was out with his pals playing pool at the local pub for the last time. Randall had no work to distract him and he picked up his guitar for the first time in years. There was still a dispute as to whether the guitar would make the trip north. Randall thought it a waste of space, Helen disagreed. ‘It’s part of who you are,’ she said. ‘It’s part of who I was,’ he replied, ‘a long time ago. Times change. We change. I don’t expect I can even play it any more.’ ‘Give it a try,’ she entreated him, ‘some of the old songs.’ He point blank refused to play any of the songs he’d written as Randall and the Reivers. She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she realised that maybe he had personal memories he had not wanted to hold onto. After a few rusty chords, his fingers were soon back into their old rhythm and they sang a medley of country and folk classics together in front of the waning fire. He paused for a break, obviously not enjoying the experience as much as Helen was. ‘What will you miss most about Galloway?’ she asked him. ‘Uh… I don’t know… what about you?’ ‘Nature. Things I just see. Being part of it.’ ‘Things like what?’ ‘Exploding thistles.’ ‘What?’ ‘ You know. When the down just bursts from them, after the purple head forms.’ ‘When they set seed and make more work,’ he replied unromantically. ‘White daffodils.’ ‘They’ll have white daffodils in Moray, I’m sure,’ he replied. ‘Cobwebs on the gate.’ She added, determined to get some sort of response from him. ‘Ah. Cobwebs. Of course.’ He was laughing at her now. ‘Oh stop it,’ she said, realising he was taking the rise, ‘you love it here too. Why are you acting like it’s nothing? It was your dream first,’ she added. It hurt too much for Randall to say out loud how his dream had been brutally beaten by the reality they’d lived through in the last fifteen years. While Helen’s memories of Galloway were of cobwebs on the gates and the soft down of ‘exploding’ thistles and the yearly excitement at the arrival of the white daffodils, Randall was bowed, but not totally broken by Chernobyl, and BSE and Foot and Mouth and being sold down the river by an increasing industrial approach to agricultural policy. He viewed Galloway as an example of betrayal. Of building everything up only to see it all knocked down because YOU DON’T OWN ANY OF IT. ‘Ah, everywhere’s the same,’ he said. ‘That’s not true,’ she added, ‘if that was true we’d have moved to Canada, or New Zealand, you know that. There are places where it’s easier to make a living.’ ‘Make a living yes,’ he replied, ‘but we don’t want to make a living do we. We want to live.’ ‘And that’s my point,’ she said. ‘That’s the dream. We know we’re tied to this land. We both felt alien even in London. We have to stay in Scotland. And we’ll own our own place now.’ ‘You sound like you’re trying to convince me to move,’ he said, ‘I’m the one who’s making you move from the place you love. Do you know how that makes me feel?’ ‘Don’t be stupid. I told you then and I still mean it. I just want to be with you. It doesn’t matter where.’ ‘As long as it’s not Canada, or New Zealand or London or….’ He was teasing her again. ‘Go north old man,’ he added in a mock-serious tone and picked up the guitar again. Torquil entered the house to the strains of Dougie Maclean’s ‘Caledonia.’ He’d never heard the song and he’d never seen his father play the guitar. They sat all three together by the fire, allowing themselves a moment of nostalgia. Making a shared memory before moving to a new life. And Moray was no bad place to live. Helen got to keep pigs and goats for the first time, Galloway being a fiercely beef and sheep land. The soil was more fertile in Moray and this made the possibility of self-sufficiency more real, even if it meant a change in farming mindset for them all. Urban people like Lauren just saw farming as farming, but the difference between a primarily livestock based farm and a primarily arable production method was immense. Randall used to joke that he was retired. He was used to being up at 4.30 every morning of the year. All through the winter of 2006 Helen and Randall enjoyed their first season of late mornings. They could still call 7am a late start. All around them, the Moray farmers who didn’t have to answer the call of animals, only to plough and sow and harvest, showed Randall the possibility of taking life that little bit easier. They even had weekends. The smallholding still provided plenty of work, however, and was still a harder life than the ‘lazy ways’ which was what Randall jokingly called largescale local arable farming. It would have been possible for Helen and Randall to become even more active and rooted in the community than they had been in Galloway. But they found that their time together became even more precious. They were working for themselves now and they resented any time spent away from this most precious of tasks. They shut themselves away, kept their heads down and lived for each other. And they loved it. They felt no need to be social beings, no need to take part in a life geared around social events and committees for the British Legion, civic pride and things which Randall scoffed at as part of the legacy of landed gentry than farming related activity. Things were fine as long as they lived in their own personal space. But inevitably, the wider world crept in. They found peace and learned acceptance in Moray but they also learned that the world is out there, and it won’t let you be in peace. Not indefinitely. In the autumn of 2008 Catriona made her first visit home. Randall was all for killing the fatted pig Helen had nurtured from a piglet. He had to make do with a lamb. He was excited about seeing his daughter again, having missed her during the three silent years while mother and daughter played out their mutual mistrust. Catriona had been too busy and Helen had been too proud. Randall had known better than to interfere but he had missed his daughter more than he had imagined. ‘It’s a new start,’ he told Helen, ‘we have to accept her as she is. Her life is her choice.’ Helen agreed to give it a go but when Lauren came too it felt like a challenge too far. Lauren despised the country. Catriona knew that. Why had she brought her? ‘Maybe she feels she needs some support,’ Randall observed. ‘Why? This is her home,’ Helen began. ‘No. It’s our home. Not hers,’ Randall pointed out. The visit went much better than any of them expected. While Helen was worried by Catriona’s pale, thin appearance, she didn’t comment on it. She took it as a sign of urban living. She even made an effort with Lauren, resisting the urge to ask why she felt it necessary to festoon her face with ironmongery. Both girls showed interest in the pigs, Lauren even expressed an interest in the farm machinery and suggested some ways in which things could be made more efficient. Helen was forced to admit that Lauren’s engineering skills had some practical benefits. But the person who was most affected by the visit was Torquil. Torquil was about to turn twenty. He’d adjusted well to their new life, indeed he revelled in it, though Helen had been worried he wasn’t ‘mixing’ enough. Between them, she Randall and Torquil had become if not self-sufficient, then perhaps too insular for their own good. It was okay for her and Randall, they had each other, but it didn’t seem right for a young lad. As soon as he met Lauren, Torquil was smitten. There was more than machinery being discussed round the back of the hayshed, as Catriona found out when looking for the friend that her brother had hijacked. A lot can happen in a weekend when you’re twenty. At the end of the weekend, as they waved Lauren and Catriona off at the door, Torquil charged with driving them the ten miles to the nearest station, Randall reflected, ‘Well that went better than expected, didn’t it?’ Helen had to agree with him, though she still felt uneasy. ‘Did you see the way she was making eyes at him?’ ‘Who?’ Randall had been lost in the joy of having his daughter back, he’d seen nothing. Lauren, with Torquil,’ she replied. ‘Oh woman. You need a television.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You’re turning it into a soap opera,’ he joked. ‘They’re just kids. Let them live their lives, eh?’ ‘He’s a good looking boy,’ she pointed out, ‘ a good catch….’ Randall kissed her. ‘Don’t judge everyone by your own standards. He laughed. And that was the end of the matter. Until a month later when Torquil announced he was going down to spend the weekend in Edinburgh with Catriona. Helen was reluctant. ‘Your dad needs you here,’ she said. ‘Dad?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be daft,’ Randall replied. ‘I’m sure you’re due a weekend off. We can manage fine without you.’ ‘Why did you do that?’ Helen asked when Torquil was packed off on the train. ‘It’s good for them to spend time together. And it might make Catriona more keen to come back up here. We’re opening doors, or building bridges or whatever you want to call it,’ he said. ‘But Lauren…?’ ‘We can’t live their lives for them,’ Randall pointed out. It was a statement he repeated the next spring when Torquil sat them both down to tell them his ‘news.’ ‘Lauren’s pregnant.’ ‘And?’ Helen wasn’t trying to make it harder for him, she just didn’t want to hear what came next. ‘And I’m the father.’ There was a long pause. ‘So we’re getting married.’ ‘Congratulations,’ Randall said, though Helen could tell he was as shocked as she was. ‘I’ll get us all a drink to wet the baby’s head.’ Which gave him the excuse to leave the room and left Helen alone with her son, barely out of his teens, to deal with ‘the situation.’ ‘You don’t have to marry her,’ she said, weakly. He gave her a very hard stare. ‘Mum. I want to marry her.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ she backtracked, ‘I was just….’ ‘Mum. You’d want me to do the right thing….’ he continued. She kept her question, ‘the right thing for who?’ firmly in her head. And they all drank to the uncertain future. Despite Torquil’s assertions, Helen was actually a bit surprised that a wedding followed. She hadn’t seen Lauren as the marrying kind, too young, too flighty, a girl with too much living to do. But to Lauren a wedding was a great event. A party. The opportunity to gorge on consumer activity. Torquil went along with it because he wanted Lauren to be happy. He wanted to be a good husband and a good father and the learning curve was steep. Lauren was high maintenance. A pregnant Lauren was even more high maintenance. Torquil’s world was changing rapidly in directions he’d never imagined possible. Randall joked that the marriage was less about losing a son and more about testing the limits of their self-sufficiency. It seemed that Torquil and Lauren never had the conversation about what they would do, where they would live when married with a baby – a son as it turned out to be. Torquil just assumed that because he was a farmer they would live in Moray and Lauren just assumed that because LIFE was lived in the city, Torquil would adapt to her plans. It was not a marriage made in heaven by any stretch of the imagination. It was a car crash of massive proportions just waiting to happen. And happen it did. Torquil Ellis Christie married Lauren Margaret Blair in July 2009. Their wedding seemed to be the last big party anyone ever had, before the country was plunged into recession. Nicholas Blair Christie was born in February 2010 in the middle of the coldest winter recorded in history. Fifty years to the day Helen was born. Better than a birthday cake. He was a snow baby as she had been. It gave them the strongest of bonds and Helen made a secret promise always to watch out for him, as long as he lived. A promise she had tried to keep. Baby Nicholas was born in Moray because Torquil and Lauren were living with his doting grandparents, who were there at the event. It was not a happy situation. Lauren had stuck it out in Edinburgh until the December. Torquil had abandoned the farm to try and find work in the city, but had no qualifications and no skills and people were being laid off right left and centre. Even Woolworths went bust. At the time of course no one knew this was the start of the ULTIMATE® take-over of the world. Much was said about how the world had changed when Woolworths ceased to exist, but with hindsight, it was more cataclysmic than anyone at the time could ever have imagined. People’s lives as individuals and also as a group, were changed for ever. Pryce was getting into ULTIMATE®. ULTIMATE® was getting into everything. And Torquil and Lauren retreated back to Moray. They came with the first fall of snow on December 18th. Randall and Helen’s self-sufficiency would just have to learn to expand to feed another two mouths. It did so. But Brand conscious Lauren would clearly never settle in rural Moray. Snow lingered until May that year and when it had finally gone, Lauren high-tailed it back to the city leaving Helen literally holding the baby. Lauren pointed out that someone had to earn money for her family and she was the only one capable of doing it. She left Torquil and Nick behind. Helen found looking after a baby again a strange pleasure. She strapped him to her front while she worked on the vegetable patch, for every bit like a South American peasant woman. He grew up a real child of nature. But mothers have rights and Lauren, for whom everything was commodified, saw Torquil and especially Nick as her ‘possessions’ so Nick also became familiar with the train between Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Things went on like that for several years. Helen wondered when it was that Lauren started with drugs. Had she been on them when she met Torquil? Or was it a response to a difficult situation. A way to escape a reality that was no longer what it had promised to be on the tin. Either way, drugs entered Helen and Randall’s family like they did so many other families at the turn of the centuries. Insidiously, furiously and catastrophically. Helen didn’t even know what drugs Lauren took. Lauren probably didn’t know herself. But Helen was sure that it was Lauren who got Catriona hooked. Not the other way round. Helen rushed the memory into the Memory Bank because there was no easy way to relive it. A spring morning 2016. A phone call. Torquil answered it. He was in for a cup of tea. A quick mid morning break from feeding the animals. ‘No. NO.’ Helen rushed out of the kitchen as she heard her son give the kind of noise she hadn’t heard since he was three and trapped his fingers in the tractor door. She found him pale faced and incomprehensible. She picked up the phone. The voice on the other end was calm, clinical, and Helen only picked up the vital words. ‘Your daughter….. overdose… post mortem….. arrangements for the body.’ The family which stuck together through everything came unstuck that day. Each of them had a different grief. Helen blamed Lauren. She’d known the girl was bad luck. Torquil blamed himself, he’d known Catriona was on drugs. He’d dabbled himself with the lifestyle his wife and his sister shared. Randall didn’t have time for blame, but he shut his emotions away. Even when he was holding Helen’s hand tight at the funeral, he was miles away emotionally. It was the first time she’d felt so far apart from him. Grief locks people away. Isolates them from each other. Grief, like memory, is intensely personal. Catriona’s death was the end for Torquil. The end of drugs. The end of Lauren. He saw his parents pain and he felt the responsibility for his own son more keenly. He and Nick retreated to the farm and locked themselves away. Randall buried himself even deeper in RIP, blaming society, not Lauren, for his daughter’s death. Helen was just numb. For months. Until something worse happened. Which was always due because things were always going to get worse as ULTIMATE® tightened their invisible grip. Helen closed her eyes for a moment to shut out the memories which were downloading in real time onto the US™ screen. It was too painful. She opened them with the feeling that she was not alone. She turned round, breathing deeply. ‘Hello Nan.’ Nike stood at the door. That was unexpected. ‘How much did you see?’ ‘Enough.’ ‘Well, it’s your history. You wanted to know.’ There was a long silence. Helen finally broke it. ‘Will you help me?’ ‘How, Nan?’ ‘Find out whether the RIP still exists.’ ‘Okay Nan. And do you want me to find out who sent you the cake?’ ‘Could you?’ ‘I think so. I’ve met… someone, who I think might be able to give me the answers.’ Helen was surprised, pleased and worried at the same time. ‘Be careful, Nick’ He shrugged it off. ‘Course I will, nan. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ If only he knew. After Nick left, Helen returned to the Memory Bank because there was nothing else she could do. She was relieved that he had come in before she got to the crucial point. Although she knew he had to know it one day, she couldn’t bear to be the one to tell him that his mother sold him to The PROJECT⌂ for Habit∞. She wanted to try and make sense of RIP past, and possibly present. Randall had first become involved in 2011, but it wasn’t till 2017 that he took a really active part. After the death of Catriona he shut down emotionally and physically. But when Lauren returned and left with Nick, he pulled himself out of his isolation. He couldn’t live without feeling he had a choice in the matter. He had to do something to fight against a system which could do this to people. He told Helen it was about injustice but she thought it was more about trying to make amends. It was locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. She had tried to talk him out of it, ‘can’t we just stay us?… I don’t care what’s happening in the wider world,’ she said as he prepared to go out for an RIP council meeting. She had lost all confidence in the outside world and wanted to keep what was important to her within sight at all times. ‘It doesn’t matter if you care or not. The changes will affect us either way,’ he replied. ‘Not if we don’t let them. Not if we keep our heads down,’ she begged. ‘I have to get involved.’ That was it. He made his choice. The choice that changed all their lives. Or maybe that was unfair. Maybe ULTIMATE® was making the choices even then. A sense of justice was something Helen thought she and Randall had shared. But looking back on it, perhaps they came at it from different angles. It might be true, as her father had never tired in saying ‘You can’t fight city hall’, but you could go down fighting. Randall’s view had been that you couldn’t just give in because you couldn’t win. You did the right thing because it was the right thing to do after all, not because it was comfortable or because you would be praised for it. In 2017 Torquil was devastated at the loss of his son. Randall was still reeling from the loss of his daughter and losing his his grandson seemed to change something fundamental in him. They were men and they wanted to do something about it. The doctrine of acceptance seemed like weakness under conditions when men wanted to fight. So they fought. They didn’t win. But they went down fighting. Their lives had had a value and a purpose. Looking at the magnolia walls, Helen felt not only that she’d let Randall down, but that she had let and was repeatedly letting both herself and Nick down. She remembered the words of a song….. ‘pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living….’ and then remembered who had originally uttered the phrase, one Mother (Mary) Jones who was an activist at the beginning of the 20th century. She had died in 1930, exactly 100 years ago this year. Helen felt ashamed. Mother Jones had never given up fighting, for the mines, for children. She didn’t let anything put her off. She was credited as saying ‘I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.’ And here was Helen, living like a dead woman in an ULTIMATE® Home. She had to resume the fight. If not for herself then for Nick. He was her only living relative, after all. She had to become an agitator. ‘Enough is as good as a feast.’ It was one of her mother’s more prevalent and more annoying sayings. The first time Helen heard it was when they were planting an apple tree in 1965. It was a birthday present for her fifth birthday. She was overjoyed with the task of digging and ran inside to get water, covered in mud from head to foot. ‘What are you doing?’ her mother asked. ‘Digging my tree,’ Helen replied, overjoyed. ‘However big is the hole?’ her mother asked. ‘As big as ever can be,’ Helen replied. ‘Well, just remember, enough is as good as a feast,’ her mother said as she wiped the mud from Helen’s face. Helen hadn’t understood the phrase then, and every time it was repeated throughout her childhood she’d failed to understand it. In her teenage years she used to laugh behind her mother’s back at the ridiculousness of the construction. Once she even challenged it. ‘It’s such a stupid saying, mum. Enough is OBVIOUSLY not as good as a feast. A feast is much, much better.’ As she scattered her parents ashes round the apple tree they’d planted for her fifth birthday, by 2004 a large productive tree in a house with a sale board outside, Helen wished she’d had the chance to tell her mother that Randall had finally taught her to understand and appreciate that most favoured of sayings. It was not that the two things were the same, it lay in the concept of good. A feast, by definition (ULTIMATE® or otherwise) required too much of something. Enough, was, well, enough. Sufficient. By definition, you needed no more. The sale of the house she had grown up in, and scattered her parents ashes in, helped pay for the move to Moray. She’d cried over not being able to move the tree. ‘We can’t move it.’ Randall was practical. ‘It’s far too big. It would never survive….. and… it belongs here. With them.’ ‘How can I sell the house… with them here?’ she asked, hoping Randall could make some sense out of a senseless situation. ‘This is where they always wanted to be,’ he replied, simply. ‘And they’re giving us the gift we need to be where we always wanted to be. That’s enough. Surely?’ He turned the key in the lock and didn’t let her look back as they drove away for the last time. Randall helped Helen realise that her parents had given her something more than money. Their house represented something more important than the careful, middle-class values which Helen had mostly despised. It represented acceptance. Her parents had tried to teach her, but it was Randall who finally made Helen understand, that enough was all you needed. You didn’t need a feast, you didn’t need to strive for perfection. The path to her own personal spiritual enlightenment lay in understanding that acceptance was the goal, not success. Success was a created capitalist concept which could never be achieved. Accepting life on its own terms, being happy with enough was deeply counter to the capitalist model, and therefore a revolutionary activity, albeit a peaceful and un-noticed one. Acceptance became the doctrine Randall and Helen lived by in Moray and was the value they had tried to instil in their children. Until ULTIMATE® changed the rules of the world. Then it was time to fight. Helen had assumed it was a fight they had lost. She’d somehow assumed for the last ten years that RIP had been destroyed by all powerful ULTIMATE® machine like everything else she held dear. But the birthday cake suggested otherwise. She felt a glimmer of hope. What would life be like if RIP did still exist? Could she dare to hope that Randall was still alive? No. That was a step too far. Her mind spun. If she or Nick could find out something…. Suddenly it occurred to her that rotting in an ULTIMATE® VCC home was a choice she shouldn’t have made. Because Randall believed that even when you had no choice, you still had some choice. If nothing else you had a choice of how you faced your lack of choice. Attitude, not image, was everything to Randall. Helen was pulled up short with the horrible fear that she’d betrayed Randall and in doing so betrayed herself. Maybe after all it wasn’t ULTIMATE® who had stolen her life, it was she who had laid it down, given up in the grief of losing the man who made her life complete. Pryce filed his report with Graham. Technical support were running every diagnostic and corrective test known to man on the system. It would take a couple of days. Which left Pryce with a problem. What could he do with the kids for a couple of days? They couldn’t remember a life without US™ at the centre of it. It would be disorienting and disturbing for them. Pryce’s job was to keep them on an even keel. Keep them out of trouble. Graham didn’t exactly use the outmoded word ‘babysit’ but this was what Pryce was detailed to do. He would become less a surrogate father and more a surrogate US™ until the system was fixed and foolproof again.
‘You wanted kids,’ Graham smarmed, ‘now’s your chance to try it out.’ His tone clearly said, ‘Good luck with that!’ Pryce wondered for just an instant how Graham knew he had wanted kids. He didn’t remember ever telling anyone but Angela that. How could it be on his files? He hadn’t used it as a reason in his interview. Angela had suggested it might make him look too desperate. It might threaten their place on the 3∆G programme. So how did Graham know? But he had many more pressing issues to deal with, so he filed that query away in what was left of his memory and turned to the present crisis. Pryce knew his new role would mean answering a lot of questions he was not prepared for. His heart sank as he returned to The Project House where Nike, Omo and Flora were neatly sat on the sofa, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for an interaction. ‘So who are The Immortal Horses?’ Nike asked. Nothing like hitting a man when he’s down. ‘A terrorist organisation,’ Pryce responded. Hoping it’d sound boring enough to leave it there, but knowing it wouldn’t. ‘What’s a terrorist?’ Nike pressed his advantage. ‘Okay, Nike, now remember I’m no match for a knowledge bank. I can’t give you a definition, only my opinion.’ ‘Sure. Whatever.’ Nike could see Pryce was uncomfortable. ‘It’s just… well, what else are we going to do?’ ‘Play charades?’ That was Flora. Where did they come up with this stuff from? ‘Charades?’ Pryce echoed, astonished. ‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘Pryce. What is charades and how do you play it?’ Flora asked. ‘What is the definition of play?’ Omo added. This was all getting out of control. Pryce felt his head spinning already. He’d never survive this. ‘Okay. Hold it right there. We’ll have to have some kind of structure here,’ Pryce pointed out, ‘I can’t deal with all these questions at once, I’m only human. And we’ve got plenty of time, so let’s just take our time and talk about things one at a time.’ The art of conversation had somewhat died after the introduction of US™. It wasn’t something that people did, sit and chat together. All the questions and answers and interactions were virtual, via the screen. Pryce didn’t remember just sitting talking being so hard, but then he’d not done it to any degree in years. Maybe that was the problem with him and Angela. They didn’t talk. No one talked any more. Not really talked. What was there to talk about in the ULTIMATE® world? And here he was, trying to interact with a generation he knew nothing about, despite having worked with them for the last fifteen years. He’d been bogged down in logging and admin and constructing suitable ‘productive’ programmes all that time. He realised he knew nothing practical about adolescents. Certainly not ULTIMATE® adolescents. Where did he begin? Pryce decided to try and recreate the sort of seminar feel he vaguely remembered from University. Not a father figure exactly, not a role model exactly, but a sort of mentor. Someone they could trust and rely on. Someone who occasioned respect. He had to try something. And it was the only thing he could think of. ‘Okay. Playing was something that children mainly did in History, to pass the time, to entertain themselves. Several theories of play developed which suggested that children learned through play and what kind of adult you would become depended on your play engagement as a child. In fact ULTIMATE® used some of these theories in the early days to develop our own systems. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries game playing became big business and this brought about the development of many of the ‘games’ you engage with today.’ ‘History, history,’ Omo yawned. Pryce pushed on, regardless. ‘Charades was known as a parlour game…. a game people played in their homes, in rooms like this.’ ‘But what was it?’ Flora was getting impatient, trained as she was to the superfast US™ system. ‘It’s pretty hard to explain. It was a sort of guessing game where for example I would think of a word and you’d have to guess what it was.’ ‘What’s the point of that?’ Nike asked. ‘How could we guess?’ Flora asked ‘I had to mime…. To pretend to do the word without speaking…. And you’d guess from that.’ ‘Sounds hard,’ Omo observed. ‘Sounds stupid,’ Nike responded. ‘Can we play it?’ Flora asked. Pryce shook his head. ‘Not now. Maybe later.’ ‘Okay.’ She smiled an accepting smile. ‘So who are the Immortal Horses?’ Nike hadn’t forgotten. ‘I told you, terrorists.’ ‘You didn’t give us a definition of terrorist,’ Nike pointed out. ‘History, history,’ Omo observed again. ‘Not history if they’ve hacked into our system and shut it down,’ Nike replied. ‘I guess terrorist isn’t really a good word,’ Pryce agreed. ‘It is a concept from History, not really applicable to our situation now.’ ‘But who are they?’ Nike knew he was getting to Pryce and he’d push home the advantage. ‘I don’t really know,’ Pryce admitted, ‘a group of people, well, I thought they didn’t really exist to be honest. And maybe they don’t. Maybe it’s a virtual virus simulation…’ ‘So why would ULTIMATE® create and use such a simulation, infect us and shut us down?’ Nike asked ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ ‘You’re right. It doesn’t make sense,’ Pryce acknowledged. ‘Maybe it’s a way of testing the system, to see how robust it is.’ ‘Maybe it IS real people. People out to destroy ULTIMATE®.’ Nike challenged. Omo and Flora looked at each other. They both remembered the birthday cake. The RIP inscribed on it. But no one wanted to say anything now. It was too frightening. ‘I don’t think so,’ Pryce replied, sensing their unease. ‘But there are people outside ULTIMATE® aren’t there? Ordinary people. In the street?’ Nike was giving it his best shot. ‘I think you’re getting confused,’ Pryce replied, trying to calm the situation. ‘Just because people aren’t part of The PROJECT⌂ doesn’t mean that they aren’t part of the ULTIMATE® system. It is an all embracing system, not something you choose any more than you choose to be a human being rather than… a… a….’ ‘A tiger?’ Flora was starting to wake up. ‘A tiger?’ Pryce was surprised. ‘Yes. We saw the death of the last tiger. It was sad,’ Flora replied, reliving the experience. ‘Why did it have to die?’ ‘What’s the point of tigers?’ Omo wasn’t asking a question so much as offering a response to Flora’s question. ‘ULTIMATE® doesn’t need tigers in the system any more than we need to play charades or ride on trains. We have to get rid of the pointless things from history to preserve the ULTIMATE® way of life.’ Omo was pleased with his answer. ‘But what if The Immortal Horses are real people? What if they do really exist? And live outside ULTIMATE®. What then?’ Nike relentlessly brought things back to the central point. If only his skills could be harnessed properly, he could have a bright future. ‘No one can challenge ULTIMATE®. Don’t worry about it.’ Pryce replied, less than convinced. For some reason the phrase ‘for your comfort, but primarily for your safety.’ resonated through his mind. It was the thoughtless mantra given out by air-stewardesses. Meaningless but potentially vitally important information. ULTIMATE®’s stock in trade. Was he just acting the part of an air steward here? Was the plane about to crash? He didn’t know the procedure. He was shaken. And he realised he had to keep the kids from asking difficult questions. He had to divert them. And not by playing charades. He succumbed to an earlier line of questioning and called for back up. ‘Would you like to meet my wife?’ he asked. A quick interface on his personal mobile US™ ( a perk of the job) and twenty minutes later, Angela appeared at The Project House. Pryce hoped the diversionary tactic would work. He was amazed she’d said yes actually. He didn’t expect her to help him in his hour of need. Especially not with her previously expressed views on children. But she’d been quite animated about the possibility. It certainly was a strange day all round. Omo and Nike weren’t in the slightest bit interested in marriage. But when Angela walked in the room, she proved she still had that something. She managed to exude that avatar-like sexuality which appealed to them in virtuality and stunned them when it was standing there in front of them. A lesson in the difference between reality and virtuality they wouldn’t forget. Most people of course had no reason to make themselves look stunning in real-time. Most people didn’t do that much interfacing. But Angela, even though she worked in pure theory, had hung onto the hair and makeup virtual plasticity of her generation. It was part of her reality. Part of who she was. Pryce couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen the ‘natural’ Angela, so he didn’t question it any more. He might, had he been unkind, have reasoned that the ‘real’ Angela was so well hidden because she was so ugly, inside and out. He wasn’t unkind though, he’d just given up noticing. Seeing the looks on Omo and Nike’s faces, made him look at her again though. Trying to see what they saw. What he’d seen himself. Because Angela had barely changed in looks over the last twenty years. ‘Age shall not wither her’ was her motto. ‘You’re married,’ Omo observed, trying to sound disinterested. He was disinterested, in marriage. But Angela was like nothing he’d ever seen. If this was a wife…. Life certainly took on a different dimension without the US™ around to keep you occupied. Flora found Angela another revelation in an extraordinary day. And she was interested in the concept of marriage. She knew about it in theory of course but ULTIMATE® didn’t really need weddings or nuclear families, and the Project Kids had all signed, or their parents had signed on their behalf, a contract which waived their rights to engaging in marriage or parenthood. It was part of the 3∆G scheme. The same scheme Angela had signed herself and Pryce up to. Like Pryce, Angela was not used to dealing face to face with young people. But unlike Pryce, she was used to taking charge. She took charge. ‘Any questions?’ she asked. Omo and Nike wracked their brains to think of any questions they dared to ask. Flora just asked. ‘Do you have children?’ Angela smiled and began to talk. ‘No. We are part of the 3 ∆ generation scheme. I’ll tell you about it if you like.’ And while Pryce went off to make them all a cup of ULTIMATE® coffee, Angela began: ‘The 3∆G scheme was set up as a response to world overcrowding. Following extensive research into chaos theory and various other things too complex for explanation to the general populace, ULTIMATE® revealed a scheme in 2013 which at first was voluntary, then became the norm; to instigate a moratorium on parenthood for 3 generations. There were benefits for people who chose not to have children. The population for 30 years was to re-balance with a 1% allowance for specially chosen breeding couples, to allow the gene pool to develop positively. The lack of wars and the curing of the devastating ailments of the early 21st century meant that something had to be done to contain the population of the world within the limits that could be sustained. It was a radical solution, but then radical solutions were commonplace as humanity dealt with the ₲₨ΩHist.’ Nike was impressed. This woman knew a lot of stuff. Omo was impressed, but mainly by the way Angela’s blouse was invitingly unbuttoned just one button too far. Flora just wanted to know, ‘Didn’t people mind not having children?’ She had vague memories of her own parents and she was sure her mother had cried when she came to The PROJECT⌂. ‘Yes, people complained at first, but subsequently came to realise the importance, and benefit, to their own lives of this first major ULTIMATE® policy.’ Angela neglected to point out that most people didn’t even know it was an ULTIMATE® policy at that time. People still thought that their governments were in control. They soon learned. ‘But now, in the second generation of the programme, people realise that ULTIMATE® has ‘saved’ the world, so it’s not an issue of importance.’ Angela continued. ‘History, history,’ Omo muttered. ‘You’re right.’ Angela remarked. ‘We don’t have to worry about History now we have virtuality.’ ‘So why are you married?’ Nike didn’t feel totally at ease with Angela and that made him want to ask questions. Difficult questions. See how she performed under pressure. ‘We were married before.’ Pryce stepped in. He didn’t want Nike to throw Angela off side. He didn’t want to be left on his own with them for the next 48 hours or however long it would take to get things sorted. So he covered for her. It was what you did, wasn’t it as a married man? Even if your wife was privately disappointing, you supported her in public. ‘Yes. It was before.’ Angela rolled her eyes, making it very clear to the kids that if she’d have had the option they wouldn’t have got married. Pryce regretted having tried to bale her out. She was poison. He made an excuse and left the room. Angela upped the ante. Decided to have some fun. ‘Now,’ she said in her slickest tone. ‘Surely there must be other things you want to know. Things you’ve not asked – him?’ They took up the challenge. Angela was standing before them, sex on legs. What else would they ask? ‘What about real sex?’ Flora and Nike were amazed when they heard this question come out of Omo’s mouth. What had happened to him today? The Project Kids were not encouraged to think about such things. Of course they had access to the full range of virtual sex interfaces, but it didn’t count as ‘productive’ work and therefore they didn’t spend much time engaging with it. Virtual sex was considered something that only those outside the privileged world of The PROJECT⌂ needed to bother with. Like Habit∞. Project Kids didn’t need either. They were special after all. Angela preened. ‘Let me tell you about sex,’ she said. And she proceeded to explain how after the ₲₨ΩHist, people got tired and scared and looked for the ‘easy’ way out. They were looking for a bit of fun, a bit of lightness, a new way of looking at the world. A new way to interact. Virtual existence merged seamlessly with ‘real’ life till you couldn’t tell the difference. There were precedents. When television got boring, the population had moved onto YouTube and Facebook. They found virtual friends with whom they had more in common with than the people you mixed with in ‘real’ life. ULTIMATE® updated and adapted the virtual social networks and ‘alternative world scenarios’, integrating them with the porn sites and creating a new and acceptable virtual reality. Real life itself shifted under the watchful eye of ULTIMATE®. Sex undertook a similar shift. It didn’t take people that long to believe, through personal experience, that Cybersex is better than no sex. Better than bad sex. Better than monogamous sex. If it's not harming anyone. There was no emotional come-back. No threat of disease and no danger of pregnancy. It wasn’t that hard to get used to, once it got really good. The shift from ‘safe’ sex to virtual sex was seen by most people, if they were honest, as an improvement. After having lived through a couple of decades of the seemingly innocent obsession with the ‘perfect’ celebrity re-touched created identity, which made people generally dissatisfied with their partners and themselves but unable to do anything about it, ULTIMATE® sex made it all so much easier for real people to give up their messy, awkward, unsatisfying real experiences for ones which made them feel like perfect, celebrity gods. ‘So you see,’ Angela opined, ‘what you call ‘real’ sex is more or less defunct for most people.’ She explained that ULTIMATE® had put a lot of effort into their virtual experience through the US™ and once people got used to good 3d graphics and avatars and the like... well, who could be bothered to sit in an overcrowded, overpriced pub with a bunch of folk you don't even know and with whose conversation you have no real interest in. When you could be home having virtual sex like a celebrity rock god. It was easy. And so successful that within the life of the 3∆G project there was a lot of evidence from ULTIMATE® consumer feedback that the project should be extended for at least another 2 generations. With special privileges for people who avoided real sex altogether. As a test. And it turned out that people did not miss having children, or having children around, when they had the ULTIMATE® virtual sex life. And the ULTIMATE® sex life was rated as better than “real” sex by 98 percent of the population. ‘And,’ she completed as Pryce re-entered the room. ‘For anyone who still isn’t happy there’s always Habit∞.’ Nike, Omo and Flora had all interacted with the data. None of them could see the point of families, marriage or children. But they’d never had this level of explanation. They were stunned. Pryce watched Angela interact with the kids. They hung off her every word. What the hell had she got that he hadn’t? How could she effortlessly deal with them when he found it like swimming through treacle on a daily basis. Her work didn’t usually involve live interaction because she was involved in pure adaptive theory work. Yes, it was as boring as it sounds. It had its perks though and it certainly seemed that Angela managed to get what she wanted as a result of it. Yet now, as Pryce watched her interact with the kids, he thought he saw something of the Angela he’d known when they were both in their 20’s. A side he’d not seen for a good ten years. She seemed freer with them, happy to talk, to answer questions and tell them things. Perhaps she would have been a good mother? Perhaps she should have had a job that involved personal interaction not one where all interaction was virtual. But it paid well and she was good at it. Omo said something, Pryce wasn’t really paying attention to it, but he noticed that Angela laughed. He hadn’t heard Angela laugh in he couldn’t remember how long. It was attractive. ‘What’s it like being married?’ Flora asked. Angela wrinkled up her nose. ‘That’s a hard question to answer,’ she said. ‘It’s an irrelevance to ULTIMATE® life really.’ Pryce wondered whether she was just very good at talking party line, or whether she really felt that way. He thought back to their wedding day in 2011 and to the vows they had made. Angela had not been sexually backward in the months leading up to their wedding and he had anticipated a honeymoon to remember. What he got was a wife who refused to leave the wedding party because she was having a good time, and then who sat up all night watching TV. It was the first of many times he’d felt used and cheated by her. He wondered if she’d felt marriage irrelevant all these years and if so, why had she married him? He’d asked himself this question often over the years and he never liked the answer he came up with. ‘It’s not really any different to the way you live here,’ Angela continued. ‘We rub along together and we share the things that it makes sense to share. But it’s totally different from what marriage meant in history. Marriage is really a historical concept and we’ve never really got round to…’ ‘When we married,’ Pryce interjected, ‘you made a promise, to stay married for better or worse, until death.’ ‘Or until divorce,’ Angela added. ‘Divorce being as outmoded a concept as marriage. ULTIMATE® phased both out at the same time,’ Pryce explained. He was sure he remembered some classic text which had stated similar, was it Hamlet? Those that are married should stay as they are, those who are not should not bother.. or something like that. This was effectively the ULTIMATE® policy. However, it seemed that there was a limit even to Angela’s diversionary properties and Nike was soon back on his old path, asking Angela (since he’d got no answer from Pryce and since it was a question more immediate to him than sex) about The Immortal Horses. Angela didn’t answer his question either. She did, he was sure, wink at him, however. And suggested maybe it was time to do something else. ‘Why don’t I take the boys to my office, to see the adaptive theory unit and show them something of the advances in question theory?’ she suggested to Pryce. ‘Flora too, if you’re interested.’ Delivered in the kind of voice that told Flora she wasn’t expected to be interested.’ ‘That’s okay,’ Flora said, ‘I’d rather stay here with Pryce.’ ‘I don’t know..’ Pryce wavered. He was a bit uneasy about this, but didn’t like to articulate his feelings. He was worried about Omo and Nike being out of his jurisdiction while the systems were malfunctioning. As if she could read his mind, Angela pointed out they’d be as safe in her office as anywhere, because the US™ systems there were up and running, uncompromised, uninfected. It was only the look that she threw him as she said, ‘Any other reservations?’ that made Pryce determined to keep his second reservation to himself. He was worried about being left alone with Flora. He knew he shouldn’t be but… and now he wondered if Angela had… no… how could she have an idea of his private thought? His ‘guilty secret.’ So he acquiesced. ‘No, that’s fine. You lot go and have a good time. We’ll entertain ourselves here.’ And tried not to look too closely at Flora while he said it. While Nike was thinking and asking unproductive questions, Pryce was keeping a close eye on his log. He saw Nike was pursuing EMOTION as a topic line. He knew he should have acted on this immediately but something stopped him. If he gave Nike some rope, if he could get into the kid’s mind, work out what made him tick… Pryce had a myriad of justifications ready. Really however, his own emotion was ruling his judgement. Along with Nike he viewed the definition on the US™ screen.
DEFINTION: EMOTION - 1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, hate, and love. 2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance. Pryce pondered on the combination of conscious mental effort and physiological change and what this meant. Nike was more interested in the immediacy of the words: joy, sorrow, hate and love. These were words which were foreign to a Project Kid’s working vocabulary. There was no profit in emotion for ULTIMATE®. They, after all, had worked very hard to stop their citizens experiencing mental agitation or disturbance of any kind. Virtuality might seem individualistic but actually there was nothing individual, nothing private about it. Thought and feeling were risky concepts and as such, very appealing to the likes of Nike. Confusing, but appealing. But mostly Nike wondered why the definition he’d got here had been so different to the one he’d got at Helen’s. That didn’t seem right. Surely a definition was by definition a definition…. As for Pryce, he just wanted to work out why his emotions were so close to the surface all the time. It was something that could seriously compromise his promotion prospects, although he was beginning to feel he had no prospects, no future, no real life. Pryce remembered when lack of emotion was imposed on depressives through prescription drugs. So surely, what he was experiencing was not depression. He had too many emotions, not too few. Did he need a dose of Habit∞? No, that would be an admission of failure. Far from ridding the world of depression, it seemed to Pryce that ULTIMATE® had effectively visited the state on the whole population through a virtuality more powerful than any medication. Yet in their emotional apathy, everyone else seemed content. Only he seemed depressed. How could that be? And more importantly, what could he do about it? How could he prevent people from seeing the weakness in his soul? The soul after all was no longer a viable entity in the ULTIMATE® world. Even ULTIMATE® couldn’t commodify the elusive soul. Pryce laughed, remembering his early Catholic upbringing and the notion of ‘wrong thoughts.’ It was so, so long ago. Like a story that had happened to another person. A life that was not his. His present worry was that if he knew his own shortcomings, so did someone else. Someone or something more powerful than God. His musings were interrupted by the ringing alarms and flashing word INFECTION on his US™ screen. In the remarkably predictable world of The PROJECT⌂, something remarkably unexpected was happening. It took literally seconds before Graham was on the US™ and there was a level of concern in his voice Pryce hadn’t heard before. ‘What the hell’s happening in your Project House?’ Graham yelled. ‘I don’t know. Why? I’ve just got red alarms going off all over… we’ve got an infection.’ ‘Shut them down.’ ‘What?’ ‘Shut down the systems feeding into your kids. NOW.’ Pryce couldn’t believe what he was hearing. There was no protocol for this. He vaguely remembered in his induction training programme something about major infection control, but like CPR, he’d never had to use it and he’d paid little attention. Infections were unheard of. Even minor glitches were not common but when they happened you just contacted technical services and they were sorted. The ULTIMATE® system was remarkably stable. And The PROJECT⌂ had up to the minute hardware supporting it. It was not like at the VCC Homes where they struggled with out of date equipment and people who didn’t know how to use it. The PROJECT⌂ was different. Such problems didn’t occur. Until now. Pryce would have to find instructions and quick. ‘Shut the systems down and get round to your kids to make sure they’re safe.’ Graham was seriously panicking. ‘Okay. I’m on my way,’ Pryce replied, no time to enjoy Graham’s uncharacteristic lack of control. However, he didn’t know how to ‘shut the systems down’ comprehensively, so he interfaced with a techie and left him to do the work. Thus buying The Immortal Horses valuable time. It was another mistake. Pryce was getting a reputation for making mistakes and Graham would make sure he paid dearly when the time came. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes later that Pryce entered The Project House. He went to Nike’s room first. Even though he had been watching Nike’s screen live.. well maybe he’d taken his eye off it for a moment while he was thinking… It was natural to assume that Nike would be the root of the problem. Entering the room, without knocking, he found Nike was staring at a blank screen. ‘What happened?’ he asked Pryce with a butter wouldn’t melt tone. ‘I thought maybe you’d be telling me that,’ Pryce replied. Nike shrugged. ‘No idea. But how can I get on with ‘productive’ work when…..’ Cute. But Pryce wasn’t in the mood for cute. There would be time to discuss the ‘productivity’ of emotion later. For now he moved on to Omo’s room, just as Flora came out of her own. ‘My screen’s gone blank,’ she said, surprised. ‘There’s an infection,’ Pryce retorted, not giving himself time to reflect on the combination of mental and physiological effects seeing Flora had on him, as they piled into Omo’s room just in time to see his screen reading YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED BY THE IMMORTAL HORSES Nike didn’t react. Outwardly. He’d sort of expected this, but he wasn’t going to own up to anything. Omo turned round to Pryce as his screen went blank. ‘What does it mean?’ he asked. ‘We have to shut the system down,’ Pryce replied matter of factly, ‘there’s a system malfunction.’ ‘You said infection.’ Flora was puzzled. ‘What infection? How?’ ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Omo said, ‘I was in the middle of my work and it just came up.’ ‘And you?’ Pryce quizzed Flora and Nike, ‘Did either of you get any message?’ ‘No,’ Flora replied. ‘My screen just went blank.’ Nike shook his head. ‘Mine too,’ he lied. The evidence suggested that the infection had most likely come in through Omo’s screen, and this was where Pryce would have to start investigations. Without all the facts. Because no one else knew that Nike had seen the infection message before, and not just in Helen’s room. ‘I didn’t do anything.’ Omo was getting worried. He was going to be the centre of attention and he didn’t like that. ‘When can we go back to work?’ Flora asked. Ever the optimist. Or pragmatist. ‘My ‘productive’ schedule hasn’t been updated,’ Nike grumbled. ‘What’s wrong with the system these days?’ Pryce called them all into the common room. Time to sit down and calm down and try to work out what to do. The techie guy had obviously got the screens shut down, which itself was enough to disturb kids for whom constant online access was as vital as breathing. He sent Flora off to make them all an ULTIMATE® coffee, and buy himself some time to think how best to approach this. He had started off certain that Nike was behind this, but Omo seemed to be reacting badly and Nike surely wasn’t that good an actor. Well, vactor. Actors had been done away with some twenty years before when ULTIMATE®’s virtual system of VACTOR’S came into their own. They made the 3d Avatar animations of the early 21st century look pitiful. They were more convincing and a lot cheaper and less temperamental than the 20th century Real Thing, and they were all these kids had ever known. But Pryce was digressing. No time for that. He needed to focus on the task in hand. Ask the questions. Answer the questions. Resolve the situation. But how? ‘Okay. Let’s look at this logically,’ Pryce began. The facts, such as they were known, were as follows. Nike, Omo and Flora had been going about their usual ‘productive’ work schedule. Pryce had got infection alarms and five minutes later the first thing the kids knew about it was that their screens stopped working. Apart from Omo’s, which was obviously the last to be shut down. He’d got that HACKING warning from The Immortal Horses. Pryce meticulously checked what each of them was doing leading up to the infection. Flora was completing an interactive survey on the relative merits of ULTIMATE® clothing brands. Omo was contributing to the ULTIMATE® discussion on how best to improve theories of choice. Nike claimed to be gaming, though Pryce of course knew he was seeking definitions for emotion. He let that pass for now though. He didn’t want Nike to think he was spying on him after all. He’d logged that question too. And Pryce could see no way in which Nike’s activity would be relevant to an infection. Irritating, off topic, but not an infection threat. And after all, Omo’s was the computer which carried the infection message. Pryce had no idea how anyone would hack into the system, but he’d have thought it would be through games. He wracked his mind for the dim distant past of his youth when viruses could be downloaded in software or through opened e-mails. There would be no point him mentioning any of this to the fresh faced, puzzled kids in front of him, because they had no idea what viruses, emails or even software downloading meant. All were terms ‘in History’ which you didn’t have to bother about, because the ULTIMATE® system was so transparent, immediate and ubiquitous that you didn’t need to have any idea what you were actually doing in computing terms. This was part of the problem with the older generation. Those who had grown up with computers had expectations of an interaction with them where computers were tools which went wrong and they, as humans had to fix them. This was no longer the perception. The US™ just WAS. Remember, there is no Us and Them, only US™. It wasn’t just catchy marketing speak. It was as fundamental a truth as could exist in the ULTIMATE® world. You didn’t question it. You didn’t ask yourself if you believed it. You just accepted it. ULTIMATE® would keep you safe. Except now, they hadn’t. ‘So, it looks like the infection came in through your terminal Omo,’ Pryce stated. He looked at them all to gauge reaction. If it had been Nike, surely he wouldn’t let Omo take the rap? The kids all knew that Pryce would have to report that back to Graham. Omo would have to be assessed at a high level to see where he might have compromised the system. Pryce found three blank faces staring back at him. ‘Any ideas?’ Pryce threw that one out. From reaction, Flora and Nike obviously knew nothing about the whole thing. Omo looked uncomfortable. ‘Could it be connected with Nike’s Nan’s screen? That was playing up too,’ Omo offered. He, like Pryce wanted a solution but he wanted one that let him off the hook. ‘Any reason why it should?’ Pryce asked. There was a long silence. Then Omo admitted ‘She asked me to look at it.’ ‘And did you?’ ‘Well, I touched it, but I didn’t do anything to it.’ Omo felt like he was about to be caught up in something he knew nothing about. It seemed unlikely that touching the hardware would bring about an infection but Pryce had nothing else to go on. This would have to go in the report too. ‘And you, Nike?’ ‘I never touched it.’ ‘No. But you’ve been back there since…’ ‘The techies were there all the time. We weren’t even in the room with it.’ Nike replied. Cast iron alibi eh? ‘Okay. Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now.’ Pryce stated the obvious. ‘I’ll get back to my boss with my report and we’ll get things up and running again as soon as possible. We’ll need to run diagnostics, and probably change all your schedules and the like… in the meantime, you’re on holiday.’ ‘What’s a holiday?’ Flora asked. People didn’t take holidays now. Not real holidays. If you wanted a break you took a virtual break, via the US™. And clearly they couldn’t do that, not with the screens off and the systems down. It was one of the key social transformations brought about by ULTIMATE®. Omo had at least a partial answer to Flora’s question. ‘Don’t you remember the tenets of social transformation?’ he asked her. Flora shook her head. Her mind was full of the immediate present, not with how we’d got there. Omo explained. ‘In History, people used to travel. It used up precious resources. It took time away from ‘productive’ work and they used to save up MONEY to do it. They used to go abroad… ‘What’s abroad?’ Nike asked. Even though he knew. ‘The world was split into countries, not regions and people would travel from one to the other to experience different ways of life.’ ‘How primitive,’ Flora noted. ‘Yes,’ Omo agreed, ‘But it’s what they did. In History. Then things changed. They were changing before ULTIMATE® transformed the world actually. Travel became hard work. People had to queue at airports, there were terrorist threats at every step of the process of travel. There were ash clouds and freak storms and it was really dangerous. Anyway, everywhere became like everywhere else and the sun tan you got would most likely give you skin cancer.’ Omo reported all this like a story he’d learned, with no sense of meaning, feeling or irony. It was just something he’d learned along the way. Not something very interesting. Just another reason to be grateful that he lived in the ULTIMATE® world. ‘Then ULTIMATE® developed the virtual experience which means that you can travel anywhere you like through the US™ system. It cost credits instead of money. It happened in real time with no wastage so you could have virtual mini-breaks anywhere you wanted without leaving your room. It was so much better that pretty soon people stopped going on real holidays. ULTIMATE® resolved the problems of carbon offsetting, time off work, the need for cars and caravans as personal possessions and ULTIMATE® even developed a way of giving you a healthy tan without ever having to expose yourself to the harmful rays of the sun.’ ‘How?’ Nike asked. ‘How what?’ Pryce responded. ‘How did they do it?’ Pryce sighed. Nike could never let well enough alone. What did it matter how it had been done? Any of it. It had been done. Omo was on a roll now though. ‘The information was gathered by ULTIMATE® through the sites people loved to interact with, and as the virtual holiday experience was developed, within twenty years the complete economic and social human genome was mapped, trademarked and owned by ULTIMATE®. Everyone played their part. Every time anyone interacted with technology they were part of it. ULTIMATE® made good on their statement. There is no Us and Them, only US™. Am I right?’ Omo asked, bright eyed, looking to Pryce for confirmation. He was, after all, just reciting information he’d learned. But he was trying to prove to Pryce that he was a conscientious citizen, not the sort of person who would get involved with infections. Omo did not want to lose his place on The PROJECT⌂. He had nothing else after all. No family, nothing. This was everything to him. ‘Yes.’ Pryce couldn’t decide whether to be proud of Omo or worried by him. He’d never thought Omo capable of such feats of memory or recitation. He’d have to report this as well. It probably wouldn’t go in his favour. The pertinent question would be: Why did Omo need to remember such things when he could find the answers afresh on the US™? A retentive memory was not a plus in the ULTIMATE® world. Omo had given a decent appraisal of the social transformation of holidays, but realising that Pryce had a real life perspective, with Omo spent, Flora picked up the baton. ‘Did you ever go on holiday?’ Flora asked Pryce. It was unusual of her to ask such questions, but then it was an unusual day. She caught him off guard. ‘Yes.’ ‘Tell us about it,’ Nike pressed him, ‘After all, there’s nothing else to do.’ Pryce tried to think what he could tell them. Tried to remember a holiday he’d enjoyed since the childhood trips to the country with his grandparents. Sliding down haystacks and fly fishing in rivers wouldn’t cut it with these kids. He had to think of something else. He thought back to 2016. The last time they’d been on holiday, him and Angela. ‘It was 2016,’ he said. ‘Before we came to The PROJECT⌂,’ Nike observed. ‘Yes.’ ‘How did you travel?’ ‘We flew.’ ‘You flew?’ Nike was interested. No one flew these days. Not in reality. There was no need. ‘Wasn’t it very dangerous?’ Flora asked. ‘And environmentally unsound,’ Omo added. They all knew about plane travel in theory. The ULTIMATE® version. Pryce thought back to the reality of plane travel. ‘Mainly it was just boring,’ he said, ‘a lot of waiting around and hours crammed into uncomfortable seats.’ ‘But how was the holiday?’ Flora asked. Pryce looked at her young, smiling face and remembered that last holiday. It had been marked by arguments. Over children. He’d always assumed they’d have them. And on holiday, he discovered that Angela had signed them up for the 3∆G project. Where you gave up your right to children in exchange for privileges. One of which was the holiday. He’d felt cheated. ‘That’s a decision for both of us,’ he’d raged. The Caribbean sunset didn’t look so beautiful when you stood next to a woman who’d betrayed you. ‘What about the woman’s right to choose?’ Angela retorted, bringing out of retirement a well out of date twentieth century argument. Typical Angela. She’d use anything to support her position. Smart, but not exactly principled. She’d talked him round by promising that now she had taken the decision, now there was no chance of her falling pregnant, maybe they should start having sex again, something that hadn’t happened more than a handful of times since they were married. Pryce had given up wondering why she didn’t want to have sex with him, tired of all the excuses, and unable to truly believe that a fear of pregnancy had been the real fear behind the excuses. He was the one with the hangover Catholicism after all. But that night Angela had relented, almost convincing him that things would be different. They had made love constantly during the two week holiday and he’d begun to think that life would be better in future. That some hoodoo had been resolved. Then, on the last day, just before they headed off for the hell of the airport and the long flight home, she’d pulled the rabbit out of the hat. ‘Take the job at genetics counselling. Work with kids. Just don’t bring them home.’ With the enthusiasm of a man who thought life was about to get better, Pryce took the transfer. You couldn’t always get what you wanted in life after all, and this might well be more practical. Did he really want the burden of being a parent? Wouldn’t their relationship be stronger if they could devote all their spare time to each other without the pressures of bringing up children? But hardly was the contract signed when sexually, things went back to normal. Angela was too busy, too tired. She was insistent he should focus on his work. It had been a step down after all, working with children rather than pure theory. ‘Work comes first, remember,’ she chided him as she turned out the light and rolled away. When he pursued her over the holiday activity, she dismissed it. ‘It was just a holiday thing. It’s over. Can you not find some virtual alternative. We’ve got all the privileges after all. It’s the 21st century for goodness sake.’ She was suggesting that if work wasn’t enough, he should find a hobby. Virtual sex would be fine with her. Any sex would be fine with her as long as she didn’t have to take part. Pryce took the rejection hard. They never had another holiday. The magic was well and truly over in that respect. But then, after 2016, no one took holidays any more. As Omo had explained, there was no need and a much better alternative was provided by ULTIMATE®. Pryce came out of his reverie to see three sets of eyes watching him, waiting for something. What could he tell them? ‘It’s my private memories,’ he said, ‘not something to share with you. Best kept between me and my wife. There’s no meaning in the personal.’ ‘Are you married?’ Flora asked, amazed. She’d never thought of Pryce being married. She’d never thought that much about him at all really, but certainly not about him having a wife. ‘Yes.’ Pryce didn’t want to pursue that line either. ‘Look, why don’t you three just relax and chat together while I get back to the office and find out what to do next,’ Pryce suggested. ‘We’ll find a way round it.’ He had to get away from Flora and her questioning. Retain a professional difference. The days of ‘my wife doesn’t understand me’ as a wooing tactic for a beautiful young woman were long gone. And precisely because of the way Flora showing an interest made him feel, he had to get some distance between them. ‘Will we get our credits re-instated for the time we can’t work?’ Nike asked. Cute again Nike. Always cute. ‘I expect so. That’s not the priority at the moment,’ Pryce noted. ‘First we’ve got to work out what went wrong and then we’ve got to get things up and running again. And in the meantime…. Keep away from the US™.’ That was a command none of them had ever expected to hear. ‘One more thing,’ Nike ventured, as Pryce was standing up to leave. He could see that they had Pryce on the run. Weakened. Now might be just the time. ‘What?’ ‘Who are the Immortal Horses?’ You could have heard a virtual brick drop. Nike knew how to ask them didn’t he? The most awkward question at the most awkward time. ‘Uh, we’ll talk about that when I get back,’ Pryce stalled, ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. Have lunch. Don’t worry.’ It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t an answer. But it was all Pryce was giving out. He had to work out what he was authorised to tell them. He couldn’t afford any more mistakes. As Nike walked from Helen’s to The Project House, a walk of some ten minutes, he was entirely unaware that his every move was being monitored. He had grown up, after all, in a world where everything you did was subject to US™ technology. It was a combination of CCTV and wireless access monitoring of the ßß™ barcode embedded in his arm which held all his individual (we might say personal if such a thing didn’t appear so totally impersonal) information. He didn’t look up at the cameras or the hoardings which, while boasting of various ULTIMATE® products and triumphs, could interface with him constantly. He was more concerned with the walking aspect.
Walking the streets was alien to Nike. Project Kids tended to stay in the compound. Why wouldn’t you? Within the compound, there was everything you could virtually need in the perfect world that ULTIMATE® had virtually created. Or created virtually. Or both. Project Kids were specially chosen and specially protected. The street was where the ordinary people hung out. The streets were dangerous. And in 2030 they tended to be pretty vacant most of the time. People didn’t go out that much any more, unless they had to. Most people worked (or consumed) from home and there was no real community transport system. That had died after nationalisation turned to privatisation turned back to nationalisation and then became redundant as a consequence of OIL PRESERVATION measures along with a restructuring of the workplace in late 2016. Some people had seen it coming, but no one expected it to hit as quickly as it did. In 2010 people enjoyed complaining about the trials of travelling. In 2020 no one really travelled any more, except virtually. If Nike had bothered to ask Pryce, he could have expected to be transported to the VCC home in a licensed fuel efficient pod (a type of electric car dreamed about since the 1960’s) But he couldn’t be bothered with the interaction. It might raise issues. Of course, Nike didn’t need permission to leave the compound. The PROJECT⌂ wasn’t a prison. It was just that he wasn’t really expected to need to leave and for that matter to want to leave. ULTIMATE® expected he had been better trained than that. If he had thought about it, Nike would have realised there was no freedom of choice in the matter. Even if he did leave the compound, they could still keep tabs on whatever he was doing, so it didn’t really matter. But Nike didn’t think like that. He just did it. His brand suggested his nature. As far as ULTIMATE® systems were concerned his unusual action merely substituted one set of statistical information for another set and gave psychological profilers something different to do. It would all be logged and passed on to Pryce one way or the other. Nike had his excuse all ready should Pryce pull him up. He’d run out of gaming credits. He hadn’t got his new ‘productive’ work schedule so he thought it didn’t matter what he did. Throw it back at Pryce. Attack is the best form of defence. It’s all a game. He pretended to himself that he was free, in control, but deep down he knew that as a Project Kid he was never free to do what he liked, if what he liked wasn’t authorized by ULTIMATE®. They owned him body and soul. Nike was beginning to resent that but didn’t know what to do about it. So he did what he could – tested the system. He appreciated that there might be consequences to his current actions but right now he thought the consequences might at least be more interesting than the usual routine. At least it wasn’t ‘productive’ work. Nike remained oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t ULTIMATE® who were watching him right now. It was The Immortal Horses. Both Nike and ULTIMATE® were unaware that there was a serious crack in the system. As Nike walked past the big glass fronted building on the corner of the main road, he didn’t give it a second glance. Yet inside that building was a room which looked like an early 21st century trading room in a major banking corporation (because that was what it had formerly been) with bank upon bank of computers. The terminals were worked mostly by dishevelled teenagers who looked out of place and certainly nothing like the high powered traders they’d replaced. Their heads were down, their eyes totally focused on the screens as they collected data; although to them it was like playing the mother of all games. It was a game to them. But it was Nike’s life. He was the character of their game right now. He was the protagonist they were pursuing through the streets. It was actually the game of all of their lives, if only they knew it. The ‘floor’ of this unusual Trading House was being run by a man who didn’t quite fit in with the rest of them. Known as Troy, he looked like a throwback to the twentieth century. Nike might have called him a hippy if he’d known what hippies looked like. But his attitude was all clued up. He hadn’t been around in the “tune in turn on and drop out” 1960’s and he was more guerrilla than beatnik. More Che Guevara than John Lennon. But he came from a later generation entirely. He was a child of the millennium. His childhood had straddled centuries. He had given up looking backwards for looking forwards. He was targets oriented and goal driven. The immediate target was Nike, the current goal was surveillance. The prize was a live link right inside The PROJECT⌂ Compound. The ‘gaming’ team had been trying to achieve this goal for months, if not years, and Nike was the latest in a long line of prospects. This time however, Troy was determined nothing was going to screw up the opportunity. This time it was different. As he watched his ‘gamers’ in action he realised he needed to take the mission away from the HABIT∞ kids who made up most of the ‘workforce’ in the building and give it to the few really trustworthy members who, like him, were motivated by ideology not by where their next fix was coming from. HABIT∞: Definition. In History, a settled or regular practice that is hard to give up. ULTIMATE® introduced HABIT∞ in 2013 in its attempts to deal with the out of control drug and alcohol dependence issues. Pryce had explained the HABIT∞ to the Project Kids in one of their sessions when Nike had queried the definition. It was the parental ‘drugs’ talk ULTIMATE® style. Pryce was determined to be up to the ‘facts of life’ section of his contract. ‘There used to be drugs. Heroin that made you sleep, Speed that made you live life in the fast lane, Cocaine that made you confident. Cannabis that made you laugh. Ecstasy that made you dance all night with a feeling of love in your heart for the whole human race. In History most drugs were illegal. There were legal drugs too. Alcohol being the most prevalent. They had similar effects; to mask pain, to make you feel better, to make you feel happier, to stop you feeling at all. They cost a lot of money, they caused untold pain and suffering, they unstabilised the people who used them and destabilised the economy they lived in. ULTIMATE® has done away with all that. Saving countless lives and making them so much better lived. So much more productive. In 2013 ULTIMATE® legalised and regulated what might be called the drug to end all drugs. We know it as the HABIT∞. It’s administered by counsellors to those in the population who need it, freely available and doesn’t stop them from undertaking ‘productive’ work.’ Nike had wondered if they could try it. Pryce shook his head. Had he oversold it? ‘No. You kids don’t need the HABIT∞. It’s for people who aren’t as lucky as you. It’s one of the differences between you and ordinary people. ULTIMATE® have constructed your lives so that you will be able to live without needing the HABIT∞. It’s what they want for all people in the end. You are the vanguard. ULTIMATE® aspire towards true freedom for all the citizens. And you will be the first to achieve it. That’s why it’s so important for you to be ‘productive’. Your productivity has so much more depth to it than that of an ordinary teenager on the HABIT∞. The assessments made from your actions, from your lives, will shape generations to come.’ Thus ended the ‘drugs’ talk. Like generations of parents before him, Pryce felt he’d done a good job. Omo bought it. Flora bought it. Only Nike felt like he might be missing out on something. He determined that one day he’d get out on the street and find someone to give him a practical demonstration. The thought came back to him as he walked the empty street back to the compound. If only he could meet someone out here, he might find out something more about ordinary life and be able to compare it with the so called privilege which felt like a prison to him. It was frightening, but it was also strangely compelling. PRISON: Definition. In history, a place where criminals were kept in confinement. In contemporary society there is no need for prisons. ULTIMATE® has done away with crime and with it the need for prisons. Nike had only recently spent his credits on the definition, but he still had a nagging doubt in the back of his mind that somehow the compound was a kind of prison. The VCC home seemed like a prison too, and he was beginning to wonder if the whole world had become some kind of large prison. Were The Immortal Horses fighters for freedom as Helen had suggested? At the precise moment Nike had this thought, Troy achieved the direct connection to his ßß™ barcode. Chance or fate? Neither of these were ULTIMATE® concepts of course. The Immortal Horses technology was sophisticated, but it could not read thoughts. Troy was hopeful that Nike was going to provide him with a real insight into The PROJECT⌂. If Nike was valuable to The PROJECT⌂, he’d just become even more so to The Immortal Horses. Troy knew that Nike was an investment. The trading floor analogy was a pretty good one. Nike had just become not just an ULTIMATE® commodity but the ULTIMATE commodity. Troy let go of the controls, returning the surveillance of Nike to a man in his early thirties who looked like he’d never seen the light of day. ‘Keep the good work up, Griff.’ Griff smiled. He was enjoying himself and he was doing something which might be considered ‘productive’ if he wasn’t part of a counter culture. Therefore, by definition he was doing something counter-productive. He’d only been on the surveillance an hour and look what he’d achieved. He was one of Troy’s ideological converts, much more useful than the Habit∞ riddled adolescents who made up the bulk of The Immortal Horses workforce. As Troy left the room, the music went back up to full blast and the room rocked to the beat of a long forgotten music. Before the mind-numbing ULTIMATE® digitised mantra music, there had been live music. Music with melody and meaning. And it played constantly in the Trading House. Everything from Elvis to the Manic Street Preachers. From Ska to Heavy Metal. The Immortal Horses embraced music as revolution. It was a world away from the ULTIMATE® created mono-pap which was now considered music and had evolved out of a combination of dance music, elevator music and Nintendo style gaming tunes. While from an outside perspective it might be hard to spot the difference between the ULTIMATE® and The Immortal Horses lifestyles, to those who lived them there was all the difference in the world. Back at the compound, Nike let himself into The Project House. He breathed a sigh of relief. He couldn’t help it but feel, if not safe, then relieved that nothing had happened. He’d got away with it. Again. However, he realized that he should keep his head down now, do some ‘productive’ work and take Pryce’s spotlight off him for a bit. Because if anyone found out about the trouble at his Nan’s with the infected US™ screen, he was sure to be implicated. And that could bring nothing but trouble. He sighed. He waved his arm at his screen to log in and looked at his options. His ‘productive’ work schedule still hadn’t been changed yet. But somehow he’d got another 100 credits. Pryce must have put them on. Nike reasoned that he’d better start spending them. Act normal. Look like he’d been here all the time. That would mean asking a lot of questions to get his production tally up on his daily log. The best way to do that would be to ask quick questions, not putting any real thought into either the question or the answer. Questions he’d asked before. Boring. But necessary. Nike was like a gambler who really thought he had a system on the fruit machine. ULTIMATE® let him think that, because that way their psychological profiling was all the more effective. They got right into his motivation. Nike had no idea how many games he was a pawn in, but like all gamblers he mistakenly thought he retained some level of control. So he settled down, and started asking questions. Not expecting any real answers. Of course before long he had lost the will to be ‘productive’ and asked the most dangerous question he felt he could get away with at that moment. After all, it was all a game, wasn’t it? ‘What is emotion?’ he asked. He’d already had this definition at Helen’s, so he wasn’t expecting there to be any interest in the answer. But it would give him time to think how he could ask the question he really wanted an answer to: ‘Who are the Immortal Horses?’ The technicians in Helen’s room were struggling with the US™. Clearly it was a software malfunction and they were hardware technicians. They’d had the thing off the wall, checked every circuit and run every diagnostic test possible on the biological components, and were one step off giving it a hefty kick as a last resort when the screen crackled, flickered and gave out a loud screaming stream of what might once have been called music but was now just a horrible noise (perhaps had always been horrible noise) and amidst a light show of flashing images came up the words
THE IMMORTAL HORSES The technicians looked at each other. Bugger. Not another one of these. It was getting more prevalent and it was scary. It undermined everything they worked for. It was a hacking job par excellence from the cyber terrorists who threatened to destroy the ULTIMATE® way of life. Not that that was possible of course, but it did mean there was a big problem here. The system was compromised and many, many hours of form filling would be required before this US™ system could be off quarantine. They’d have to check the whole VCC building. It would send the old people off the edge. Old people were so uncompromising. And could complain so much. Even though they were here at the goodwill of ULTIMATE® and not paying for the experience like they should do, they would still complain. This could be weeks of work. Bugger. The screen kept churning out the music till they managed to silence it, but the flashing messages kept on coming. You’ve been hacked by THE IMMORTAL HORSES The technicians were just glad they’d been on their own when this happened. If the ‘client’ had been present there would have been even more admin to complete. And like everyone else, they just wanted to complete their days work so they could go back to the virtual lives they lived outside of the daily grind. The only option now was to pull the plug. Metaphorically speaking. Reluctantly, they quarantined the system for the whole building. And the US™ screen went blank again. One of them went off to find a supervisor to explain themselves to. The other waited for the return of the ‘client.’ When Helen and Nike returned to her room some half hour later (Nike wasn’t sure about his ßß™ access outside and didn’t want to incur Pryce’s wrath again by being off access two days in a row) they discovered that she was still without a US™. The technician apologized. Profusely. Which Helen found funny since she didn’t want the damned screen anyway, but nothing in the technician’s mindset could imagine the imposed quarantine was in fact doing Helen a favour. He explained, very slowly (because she was old of course) that it was a software malfunction and so they couldn’t simply replace the unit, they would have to shut down the whole zone and work on the software. The fault was receiving priority status and ULTIMATE® would get the smartest software technicians on it as soon as they could, who would work without break until the problem was resolved. But for now he stressed that it was vitally important that Helen must not, NOT, he repeated very carefully, try to switch on the US™. Helen assured him she would not. The technicians left the building, cursing the VCC home who probably hadn’t updated their virus software and would doubtless blame budget cut-backs or overworked staff or some such. Someone’s head would roll but more importantly someone must fix it. The technicians were pleased that once they’d completed the admin, it wouldn’t be their problem any more. They’d done their job. Or tried to. Of course the first thing Nike did when the technicians had left was try the screen on again. Why wouldn’t he? No one would know and the only way you found out how things worked was to find out how they broke. As he waved his barcoded arm at it saying ‘What’s wrong with you?’ The screen burst into life again with the words You’ve been hacked by THE IMMORTAL HORSES Helen and Nike looked at each other. In silence. For a long time. ‘So who are The Immortal Horses?’ Nike asked. More in hope than in expectation. ‘Have you not been warned about them?’ Helen was surprised. She thought that The PROJECT⌂ would have warned the Kids about them, then on reflection, maybe not. Giving them an alternative world view would not benefit ULTIMATE® aims and so wrapped in cotton wool they would stay. Sometimes the level of ignorance ULTIMATE® required of their premiere generation amazed her. After all The PROJECT⌂ represented the vanguard, developing a template for what all people would be like in another twenty years. God help the world. Oh, no. Of course God couldn’t do anything, because he’d been appropriated by ULTIMATE® as well. She wondered if she should tell Nick what she knew about The Immortal Horses. Without time to weigh up the possible consequences, she took a snap decision. She didn’t like The PROJECT⌂, never had and this might be her only chance to try and reclaim him, if only that could be done, for reality. Whatever that was now. If The PROJECT⌂ rejected him (she wasn’t sure that was even a possibility) maybe he could have a real life again. As real as ULTIMATE® would allow. She decided to take the chance, even though a small voice inside her head told her it wasn’t her chance to take. ‘They are terrorists, seeking to destroy ULTIMATE®.’ She paused, wondering what response this would get. ‘What’s a terrorist?’ Nike asked, cursing that the US™ screen was broken just when he had some interesting questions to ask. He didn’t seem fazed. He didn’t have Helen’s concept of reality and danger. ‘Well. They used to say, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter…’ Helen weighed up whether it was worth pursuing this further. ‘Nan, don’t, you’re sounding like the knowledge bank. Just tell me, in straightforward terms.’ ‘Terrorists are people who use violence as a method to try and overthrow a government.’ Violence? Government? Just so many more meaningless phrases for a Project Kid. ‘In this case, they are an underground organization, no one knows where they are based, and their aim is to get rid of the ULTIMATE® way of life.’ ‘But that’s impossible,’ Nike sneered, ‘You can’t….’ ‘Maybe so. But people with ideals don’t care about whether something is possible or not, they care about trying to change things. About doing something and if necessary, dying in the attempt.’ Nike was amazed. ‘Who are they?’ ‘No one knows. If ULTIMATE® knew then they certainly wouldn’t still be around. They are a guerrilla operation and they must have found a way to hack into the US™ software. It’ll be interesting to see what they do from here.’ Interesting? Had his Nan lost her mind? Interesting? The overthrow of ULTIMATE®. No way. Nike realized he was sweating at the very thought of it. He felt guilty. Felt like he shouldn’t be here. This emotion thing wasn’t good. And he couldn’t stop it. He started to worry what would happen if Pryce got wind of this. What if Pryce had tried to interface with his ßß™? Then he thought of something far worse. What if The Immortal Horses had logged his ßß™ barcode? What if he was infected already? What if he was about to take that infection back to The PROJECT⌂? This was bad. Very bad. He needed to get out of there. ‘Nan. I have to go. Pryce will be wondering where I am.’ Helen wasn’t surprised by his response. He was a PROJECT⌂ product after all. She had had influence on him till he was seven, but despite the adage ‘give me a child till he is seven and I’ll show you the man,’ ULTIMATE® had done a masterful job in the last thirteen years of rebuilding her young Nick, creating him anew as a compliant if sometimes wayward ULTIMATE® citizen. Branded Nike. He must have been a challenge but then if they could crack it with the likes of Nick, they must be well on their way to complete success. ‘Okay, Nick. Don’t worry about it. You know where I am, when you have more questions. And after this is sorted, I’ll start work on the Memory Bank and the truth will be there, stored away, waiting for you to access.’ Nike had forgotten all about that; the Memory Bank, the past, the truth. He was now just thinking of how to save himself in the present. He didn’t know what to fear, he just knew that something very, very bad could happen very, very soon and he didn’t know how to avoid it. So he left. And of course he was tracked all the way back to The Project House by The Immortal Horses. Meanwhile, alone again, Helen turned her thoughts to her memories. Real, personal, private memories. After all, she had no excuse now. There was no US™ screen to reformulate or revision her reality. How odd it had felt being outside. Feeling the breeze on her face after so long. Breathing the air. It was nothing like the old days of course. She remembered when she had come to the VCC Home she had craved a room with a view over the park. She couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford any of it. She had to take what she was given. Her view, if she squinted, was towards the concrete monstrosity that had been the Scottish Parliament. Pretty soon she’d closed the blinds and left them closed. Forgotten that the outside world even existed. Because for her it no longer did. And now, after ten years inside, she had almost forgotten that for nearly forty years she lived most of her life outside. How could you forget? How could it be that humans adapted to just about anything simply because they had to, not because they wanted to. She realised it was because she had given up on life. It had seemed the only thing to do. Because ten years ago, life had finally given up on her. She didn’t want to remember the dull horror with which she faced her first night in the VCC home, knowing that things would never be good again. Knowing that now she was paying the price for the life she’d led. The price she had known would have to be paid one way or another, but which she’d hoped to put off… well.. indefinitely. But no, like all bad things, it finally happened. She had been numb to pain at that point, having lost Randall, lost Torquil, lost Nick.. lost everyone and everything that was important to her. She mused that in one respect, living was about losing. A constant journey of facing losses. Existence, she could not call it life, in the VCC home, was the final stage. The stage after loss. When there was nothing left to lose. But life just kept on going. Survival in an ULTIMATE® version of the Big Brother world. And yet, once, it had all been so different. Really so very different. Once, she could never have predicted this end. She found it hard to focus. Hard to think in any order as thoughts swirled round in her mind, jumbling together like so many jigsaw pieces. She wasn’t even sure if all the pieces were from the same picture. The one thought, forcing all the others out, was the cake. A real birthday cake. ‘Happy Birthday, mum,’ Torquil kissed her and entreated, ‘close your eyes.’ She closed her eyes, enchanted by his excitement. ‘You can open them now,’ Catriona said as she came in bearing a birthday cake groaning under the lighted flame of forty candles. ‘Put it down, put it down,’ Helen laughed. Torquil had turned out the lights and Helen was amazed how much glare there was from the candles. ‘Come on mum, blow them out.’Catriona could barely contain her excitement. ‘Make a wish mum,’ Torquil added. She paused for merely a moment. What more could she wish for? And blew… and blew…. And they were out. ‘Don’t sing happy birthday,’ she begged, ‘you know how I hate that.’ So they didn’t. Just in case that was her wish. ‘Try the cake, mum,’ Torquil said, ‘I helped Catriona make it.’ ‘I can see that.’ Helen laughed at the slightly wonky dimensions of the cake. She cut into it. Cut everyone big chunks and they ate it with relish. It was a bit uneven in density, but it tasted wonderful. It was made with the love of her children. At the time Helen thought it was a moment she would cherish forever. Now she thought of the cake she had shared with Nick, Omo and Flora and marvelled at how good it had tasted. She used to grow and cook all her own food but realised she hadn’t tasted anything but ULTIMATE® food for ten years. Like seventy, forty was a milestone birthday. Randall was determined they do something special. Helen resisted. She had everything she wanted. She didn’t need a fuss. ‘Get your coat on.’ Randall instructed her on the cold February afternoon in 2000. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked. ‘It’s a surprise woman,’ he said. ‘Do what you’re told without questioning for once in your life will you?’ ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she pleaded. ‘You’ll like this one,’ he said. He took the afternoon off work and they went to Cairnholy, an ancient burial ground which was one of their ‘special’ places. The views were spectacular and you could virtually guarantee you’d be the only people there. Certainly in February! The kids stayed at home and made the cake. Catriona baked and Torquil decorated. It was lucky Helen wasn’t there to see the mess they made of the kitchen. They obeyed their father’s instructions to clear it up, so she was none the wiser. Helen enjoyed riding in the beaten up Landrover which was their main form of transport now. Fuel was becoming expensive and they tried to restrict their other car to trips to the supermarket once a week. Helen still shopped for the things she couldn’t grow herself. Supporting a family of four on the rocky, infertile land was an impossibility given the time she had spare after washing and cooking and cleaning. Even if she’d dedicated herself to it forty hours a week, in real terms it would still have been cheaper to go for the BOGOF offers at the supermarket. In 2000 the food price increases hadn’t yet kicked in. That would change. Helen gave herself up to the warm, farmy smell of a vehicle more used to transporting hay and sheepdogs than people and stole a glance at Randall. It was sixteen years since she’d first seen him, strap-hanging on the tube but even now, especially now in this more familiar context, her heart skipped a beat when she saw those piercing blue eyes and that unaffected smile. ‘We are happy, aren’t we?’ she said. He turned and looked at her, ‘Of course we are,’ he replied. ‘And we still will be forty years from now.’ Little did he know. Little did either of them know. They got out of the Landrover at Cairnholy. They were alone, in nature. It was cold but bright and they stood together, marvelling at the link between past and present. ‘I don’t know how the kids did it,’ she mused. ‘Did what?’ he asked, afraid that she’d got wind of the cake making that was going on at home. She was a terrible woman to keep a secret from. ‘Camped out over the millennium.’ He laughed. Some six weeks ago the world had celebrated the onset of the year 2000 and Catriona and Torquil had demanded to be allowed to camp out in the ruined castle which sat in the home farm field, despite the cold weather. They spent the day building a bonfire and slept in their wellies. They crawled home frozen at five thirty, reckoning they’d given it a good go. Helen and Randall had gone and seen the New Year in with them and then headed back for home for a stiff drink and a warm bed. Helen was keener to see the sunrise on the first day of the year than spend her time drinking out the old year. ‘Wouldn’t you have been up for that at their age?’ he asked. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Would you?’ The conversation was cut short as the rain came down and they ran, laughing, back to the Landrover. Not before they were soaked of course. It had been bright when they set off and they weren’t wearing hats. Randall had taken his off deliberately because it was a holiday and a hat was one of the essentials of his daily working life on the farm. Helen hadn’t brought a hat, because she’d been surprised and hadn’t known where she was going. It was nothing that a hot shower wouldn’t put right. Helen stood in the shower and let the hot water trickle over her and thought how easy it was for things to be put right. What did rain matter as long as you could get warm and dry? She towelled her hair and went downstairs. For cake. They were happy days. Helen wasn’t so foolish to think that all the old times were the good times, they’d faced their fair share of problems over the years, but today, just today, she wanted to remember the good times. The year 2000 represented new hope for everyone, even farmers. Helen and Randall were tenant farmers in rural Galloway and like all farmers, struggling to make a living. They’d been there fifteen years and felt part of the landscape. Life in 1980’s London was a thing of the past. A story of a life that now seemed as if it had belonged to other people. Helen could barely remember it. She couldn’t completely disown London though, since that was where she met Randall, so there would always be one good, warm feeling to come out of it. But the best decision they ever made was to leave. 1985. They’d been seeing each other for about nine months. It was clear that things were going to go a step further. Helen thought Randall was going to ask her to move in with him. She was going to say yes. They were in bed, after another fabulous meal cooked by Randall. He leant up on one elbow and said. ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’ She was shocked. What did he mean? He caught her look of horror. ‘No..’ he said… ‘I don’t mean us.. I mean… this… London.’ ‘Oh.’ She didn’t know how to respond. ‘But you have to be in London. For your music.’ ‘That’s going nowhere,’ he replied. ‘I’m sure you’ll get another tour soon,’ she said, realising that a big part of her hoped he wouldn’t. She didn’t like it when he was away, touring. Not because she didn’t trust him. Because she loved him and wanted to be with him and they never seemed to have enough time together.’ ‘I don’t want to tour. I don’t want to be living out of suitcases any more than I want to stay here. Do you have a dream, Helen? A vision of the future?’ ‘I suppose so,’ she said, realising she’d never thought beyond being with Randall, wherever, however, forever. ‘And what is it?’ he asked. That was putting her on the spot. ‘Just to be with you,’ she said weakly, hoping that was enough. ‘Really?’ he sounded amazed. ‘Yes, really,’ she kissed him to prove it. ‘What’s your dream Randall?’ He told her a story.*The story he felt defined what he wanted out of life. The story which would change both of their lives forever. And then he launched into the plan. And within a year they were living it. A farm or smallholding, somewhere away from the rat race. A real life, together far away from London. ‘But I only want it on one condition,’ Randall had added. ‘What?’ she’d asked. ‘That you marry me,’ he said. She was amazed. They’d never brought the subject up but she’d thought he was the kind of man who thought marriage an unnecessary restriction. A piece of paper. Meaningless. ‘Nothing I do with you will ever be meaningless,’ he replied when she told him what she’d thought, ‘but can we avoid the meringue dress stuff?’ She laughed. She had never been one of those girls who craved a wedding with a party and a dress and all the trimmings. Too much fuss. And nonsense. So they married quietly and cheaply and both sets of parents, though they didn’t like it, respected their choices. Both sets of parents gave them what they would have contributed to a wedding in the form of cash which, along with the small amount of savings they had, was enough to secure them the farm tenancy. Randall, ever the dark horse, had studied agriculture at college before becoming a musician, so he managed to convince the landlord that he had enough experience to make it worth a go. And there weren’t that many people foolish enough to want to go into farming in the mid 1980’s. It was always going to be a struggle. It was a struggle. But they faced it together. The first challenge was Chernobyl. Soon after taking on the tenancy, and just before Catriona was born, the farm went under restrictions because of the danger of air pollution. That was just the beginning of it. Then BSE hit. The farm was mixed sheep and beef so they were as Randall so eloquently put it, ‘Screwed both ways.’ *for the story see appendix They struggled their way back from that crisis, never quite believing the Blair government message in 1997 that ‘things can only get better.’ Randall and Helen lived in a world of reality where thing could always get worse. They did. Foot and Mouth in 2001. But they faced it, as they faced everything, together. As a family. When Helen turned forty in 2000, Catriona, their daughter was fourteen and Torquil their son was eleven. Both were now old enough to be some use on the farm. It was a pretty relentless life however much they loved it. Had it been a good way for kids to grow up, Helen wondered? Memories started to flood back. Catriona aged three experienced her first lambing with all the excitement children usually saved up for Christmas. She was shocked that all the lambs didn’t have names. ‘We can’t name them all, there are hundreds,’ Helen coaxed her daughter. Randall observed the wavering lip and pulled Catriona up on his lap, beside a little lamb he was trying to bottle feed. ‘But you can name this one,’ he said. Helen was amazed. Randall was not a sentimental man. He didn’t go in for pet names, knowing the practicalities of the farming life cycle far too well. He didn’t do baby talk or hiding of ugly facts… but he loved Catriona. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked him. The lamb in her own lap squiggled and squirmed. Catriona was just learning the toddlers divide and rule tactic and felt she had some room for negotiation. ‘And that one? She pointed at the lamb in Helen’s lap. ‘Okay. That one too.’ Randall capitulated. ‘But that’s all.’ Catriona beamed. She pointed at Randall’s lamb. ‘Lucy,’ she said firmly. And then pointed at Helen’s lamb. ‘Eric.’ She was adamant. ‘Okay. Lucy and Eric,’ Randall confirmed, ‘but Catriona, it has to be the other way round. This (he held up ‘Lucy’) is a boy lamb and this (holding up ‘Eric’) is a girl lamb. ‘Lucy and Eric.’ She was not negotiating any further. Gender meant nothing to her. So Lucy and Eric they became. And Randall taught Catriona how to feed them. Helen remembered that Eric went on to become a good breeding ewe while Lucy went off for roast lamb. Every year after that, Catriona proudly named the orphans. Every year when the sheds by the house filled with odd calves; those whose mothers had died or who needed special attention, or who needed to be twinned; Catriona, and latterly Torquil, would stand by the gate for hours, debating names. Randall allowed it, as long as they fed the calves they named. There was Teeny, who was a runt and Tiny, who was even smaller, and Infinitely Small, who Helen swore was no bigger than Crogo, the biggest of the dogs at the time. Another year a calf was born blind and he became named Egor. He followed his foster mother around everywhere and seemed to get on quite fine without the gift of sight. Then there was Amber, her name reflecting her colour. They all went to the same fate eventually, but they were singled out, given special attention and special love for as long as they needed it, before heading out into the fields to become just another calf with a tag in its ear and a destination of the table. As long as people would still buy beef. Or until they faced death in the Foot and Mouth year. That was when the kids finally stopped naming cows. Foot and Mouth changed everything. Even Helen found it hard to be happy amongst the stench of death and the fear of more death round the corner. The financial implications palled into insignificance compared to the visceral horror of it every day, all around. The world had changed. The millennial hope had gone. Big Brother had become a reality game show. The kids had watched it, more shocked than entranced that first season but pretty quickly became bored. Who wanted to watch a bunch of ‘losers’ sitting around talking about nothing all day and night when you could be out driving tractors or training dogs? This was the time before virtual living was more appealing than real life for young people. Foot and Mouth was heartbreaking for Randall, but it proved the final straw for Catriona. As a fifteen year old, being surrounded by the stench of the senseless slaughter was too much for her. At sixteen she left home and went to college in Glasgow. Anything to get away from the memories of a beautiful life turned sour. Helen realized now, all these years on, that she’d never really thought about what it was that turned Catriona’s life around. But on reflection she supposed it was Foot and Mouth. Catriona, and all of them, were victims as much as the slaughtered cows and sheep, and it was a human cost that didn’t get counted. Without Foot and Mouth Catriona might have married a farmer, stayed in Galloway, been alive today. Randall would never have lost the daughter he loved so dearly. At the time, Helen had accepted the sadness as she accepted all sadness. As the price she had to pay for having a perfect life. She understood that perfect didn’t mean everything always the way you wanted it. There had to be some lee-way. The external world could never be expected to bend totally to the individual will. She was happy with her lot. Randall had bemoaned the fact he couldn’t take them all on holiday that summer after the Foot and Mouth restrictions were finally lifted. ‘We never go on holiday,’ Helen said, ‘Maybe we need to, this year,’ he replied. ‘To get away from this… to get some perspective back.’ She knew as she looked at his careworn face, it was not about holidays. It was about losing faith in the dream. About not believing the story any more. About wanting something different, or something more. ‘Why go anywhere?’ she caressed him. ‘There’s nowhere I would rather be than here, with you and the kids. This is my life and I love it. We can get through it.’ ‘What can you possibly love about this?’ he asked, a moment of depression engulfing him. ‘It’s enough,’ she replied. ‘We didn’t expect it to be easy, did we?’ ‘Not easy,’ he agreed, ‘but not like this…’ ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘It’s my dream too,’ she replied. ‘And my dream is that I’m married to a man I love beyond life itself. We have two healthy children and we live in countryside which never fails to take my breath away. Every time I go out with the dogs on a cold spring morning, even a wet wintry morning, I thank my lucky stars I’m not still fighting for my place on an underground train, living a pointless life chasing meaningless things.’ He laughed at her passionate outburst. He couldn’t help but laugh at her. ‘You’re an easy woman to please, Mrs Christie,’ he said. ‘Yes. I just need my husband to smile,’ she replied. He smiled. It was enough. It was perfect. Even in the face of the future. The moment was perfect. Randall was right, in many ways Helen was an easy woman to please. She didn’t want things, she didn’t even want experiences, in terms of trips or happenings; she just wanted to be able to live, to really live every day, being part of the nature around her, responding to the daily joys and emergencies that made up farming life. Chasing a cow down the lane. Fixing a gate when two bulls had faced up to each other across fields and when frustration got the better of them, simply charged through the barrier separating them, ignoring the fact that the barrier was two five bar gates which were reduced to matchsticks in moments. Staying up late and getting up early to help with the lambing. Struggling to get the ancient AGA to work so that the men had a decent hot meal every lunch time. This was enough for Helen. And if she could get a bit of time to hang on a gate herself, chatting with Randall while he tagged cows or dosed sheep, or to walk in the forest with the dogs, or gaze at the stars on a bright, crisp, clear, dark night round the back of the cowshed, then life was as near perfect as it could ever be in reality. Helen opened her eyes and faced the magnolia walls once more. That was the thing with memories – real memories not the ones mediated by the US™ Memory Bank – you couldn’t control them. And sometimes they took you places you’d rather not go. You couldn’t just stick with the good ones because your mind wandered, trying to make meaning, make connections and the darker places stuck out just as vividly as the good ones. Perhaps that was how ULTIMATE® had become so successful. They presented a way of only keeping happy memories. Pre-washed and pre-packaged and in pretty shapes and colours. They offered virtual happiness but Helen preferred reality, however grim. That was why she would never fit in. Not here at the VCC Home, not anywhere in the ULTIMATE® system. She couldn’t fight city hall. But she didn’t have to take their handouts. In general ULTIMATE® were right in their belief that you could make people however you wanted them to be. What was perhaps more shocking was that they had more or less achieved their goal wholesale in a mere twenty years. Now, life was as ULTIMATE® said it was for nearly everyone. But Helen could not capitulate. And her birthday cake proved she was not the only one. The existence of The Immortal Horses proved that there were a few, a very few, who were still managing to buck the system. But for how long? And how could she find them? Helen was enjoying her US™ screen being broken. She had never bought into the ‘There’s no us and them, only US™’ hype. Helen’s relationship with the ULTIMATE® world was strictly us and them. The silent interface allowed her space and time to think without intrusion. A chance to let her mind wander and her memories run free for once. She understood that she would be considered odd by most people for even thinking that the US™ screen was an intrusion. After all, it was generally considered essential to modern life. It was the best thing since… well, the best thing ever. And yet Helen couldn’t think so. It’s not that she was against technology per se. Once upon a time Helen had relished every new technological advance. In her day she had also been right in ‘the mix.’ It felt like a lifetime ago. Another person, another life. Another story in another world. It was 1984.
You couldn’t get away from it, 1984 was a seminal year. Not just for Helen, but perhaps especially for Helen. It was the year she’d read Orwell’s novel for the first time. The book changed her life. It was still the time before Big Brother moved beyond cliché, into reality game show and then became part of History itself. Over the years one might say Big Brother became synonymous with visual rather than literate culture. One might say synonymous with an illiterate culture. The dumbing down of the message before it faded into obscurity with the onset of ULTIMATE® who had no need or desire for the population to ponder the meaning of Orwell’s classic creation. Back in 1984 itself, unsurprisingly, there was great interest as to how accurate Orwell’s predictions had been. There was a lot of debate but few sensible conclusions. It was hard to avoid the debate. Helen, who had read very little since she’d graduated two years previously, was reading the novel on a tube journey on her way to a job interview. The London Underground was normally an intensely private public space, but this day.. ‘What do you think of it?’ She looked up to see a slender young man, standing over her, strap-hanging and pointing at the cover of her second hand Penguin classic copy of Nineteen-Eighty Four. She didn’t know what to reply. ‘Uh..I’m.. I’ve only…’ ‘It’s very relevant, don’t you think?’ ‘Yes.’ It seemed the easiest way to get him to go away. But he wouldn’t. He was determined to talk literature. Or politics. Or something. Although Helen was out of her comfort zone, he was difficult to ignore. He was handsome, with piercing blue eyes and a soft Scottish accent. He had a guitar slung over his back. He was clearly not your average commuter. She decided to take a chance and continue the conversation. She didn’t really have much choice. He was determined to converse with her. ‘Of course 1984 is an arbitrary date Eric Blair created by altering figures. It was finished in 1948 you know,’ he added. ‘No. I didn’t,’ she replied, hoping she didn’t sound stupid. As the train pulled out of Leicester Square station she stood up, ‘Uh, the next stop’s mine,’ she said, hoping she didn’t sound rude. He wasn’t to be shaken off that easily. ‘Me too,’ he replied and smiled. What a smile. They went up the escalator together and out into the hazy sunshine and urban clatter. He was talking all the way. ‘I think its universality is part of its appeal. I mean, you can read almost anything into it.’ ‘Yes. I suppose so.’ Helen replied, wondering what she should read into this man. ‘It’s been appropriate in every decade since it was written. In different ways… sorry..’ he shepherded her to the inside as she was jostled on the overcrowded pavement. ‘London,’ he grimaced, ‘the rat race.’ ‘Yes.’ She realised she was not really contributing to this conversation but she didn’t know what to do or say. ‘I mean, some people say it’s a diatribe against communism and others fascism, but if you think about it they’re pretty much the same thing. The opposite ends of the spectrum come together to form a vicious circle. D’you think?’ He was looking for something. Helen was looking for the address for her interview. He noticed she was a bit pre-occupied and tried another tack. ‘Are you lost?’ ‘No. Yes. I’m on my way to an interview. It’s a hundred and something but.. the numbers…’ ‘Ah yes, even numbers are the other side,’ he smiled. ‘You take your life in your hands if you cross this street away from the lights,’ he said. They were quite far away from the last set of lights. He looked at the interview letter she clutched in her hand. She’d been using it as a bookmark. ‘It’s right over there. And you’re a bit tight on time. Come on, let’s risk it.’ Without giving her time to argue he grabbed her by the arm and helped her skip through the heavy, hooting traffic until they stood, breathless at the other side. ‘Here you are. Safely delivered to the jaws of the capitalist monster.’ That smile again. She didn’t know what to make of him. He was unlike anyone she’d ever met before but in a good way, she thought. ‘Thanks.’ She could only hope she was more articulate than this in the ensuing interview or she’d be stuck in Bracknell for ever and a day. ‘Can I take you for a coffee… after?’ He was persistent. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ she stated, hoping she didn’t sound like she was putting him off. ‘You must have other things to do…’ better things to do, she thought, wondering if she did want to go for a coffee with him. ‘I’ll wait,’ he replied. At seventy, Helen wasn’t sure if she was suffering from memory lapses due to age, or if it became inevitable over that much of a life that one’s personal narrative became rewritten; like films that you swore had one storyline and then when you watched them again you found out that things happened in a different pattern. But while she barely remembered the interview which was to change her working life, she remembered clearly the excitement welling up inside her as she left the building and looked out on the street for the mystery man. And the disappointment when he wasn’t there. That was a memory which had stuck with her for over forty years. It was a part of her life. The Memory Bank had done away with the inconvenience of memory lapses. All you had to do was pay your credits and put your trust in the US™ system, that it would record and store your memories accurately, and you could revisit them at will. But Helen didn’t have that faith. Never had. She had been tutored in the many meanings of Nineteen Eighty-Four until she knew the original Big Brother well enough to believe it could exist in infinite variations. It changed as the world changed. Yet it stayed terrifyingly the same. In the early 21st century people purported that it was really global capitalism Orwell was predicting and railing against. Helen knew that more than that, in its text you could see every scientific and technological advance debunked and described in a negative sense. You could read it as a prediction of the rise of the post-capitalist world of ULTIMATE® (though you’d have to be stupid to air that view out loud.) And every way you read it you would be right. That was the beauty of the work. That was the danger of the work. No one read Nineteen Eighty-Four in the ULTIMATE® world. They couldn’t. It didn’t exist in the system any more. Not in an accessible form. The world had been different in 1984. And Helen had been a different person. She’d given up being a lab rat of the M4 corridor, living in suburbia in Newbury and working in Bracknell for HP, exchanging it for a regular stint on the Northern Line from Balham to Tottenham Court Road. Every day for the first month she wondered if she would meet that guy with the blue eyes and guitar again on the train. She didn’t. London was dirty and busy and in her desperation for something different she thought it was exciting. But it was worlds away from home. 1982. A sunny morning in July, in suburban Dundee. Helen was waiting for the post. Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, knowing her future would be determined by the marks on the paper in the envelope that would drop through it sometime before 8.30am. It dropped. ‘Mum, dad, it’s here,’ she called out. ‘Bring it into the kitchen,’ dad replied. He’d stayed off work for this special day. The day his only daughter got her degree results. He’d done the same the day she got her Highers. Exams were important. Helen had grown up in Dundee, an only child in a comfortable middle class family. Her mother was a teacher and her father a lecturer. The one thing Helen knew from an early age was that she didn’t want to work in education. Not even with the long holidays taken into consideration. But as she was growing up, in her comfortable world, she had no idea what she did want to do or be. She did well at school – not surprisingly. She passed all her exams with A’s and played hockey and netball for the school teams. She played the violin and did Scottish country dancing. She was quite the product The High School of Dundee wanted to turn out at the end of the day. She just missed out on being dux, but made up for it by getting into St Andrews to study Classics. She was academic but an all-rounder and unremarkable in every way. She was expected to get a 1st class degree. The envelope remained unopened. They all looked at it. ‘I’ll open it if you can’t,’ her mother offered. Typical. Everything was always about her. Helen took the envelope and ripped it open. This was her life, her future. She was not going to allow her mother to hijack this. She read it and burst into tears. ‘It’s okay,’ dad said. ‘Whatever it is…. It’s okay…’ ‘It’s a first, dad.’ She said through the tears. ‘Why are you crying?’ her mother asked, unable to understand that tears could be for anything other than failure. Her dad understood. She was on her journey. Of course a first class degree in a subject that had no obvious practical application didn’t necessarily mean anything. But it was an external validation Helen had never taken for granted. Now there were other envelopes to open. From prospective employers. The one that arrived the same day as the exam results was from IBM. Helen had taken advice from the careers centre that a degree in classics would represent skills transferable to the computer industry. She’d never seen it herself, but in 1982 even graduate jobs weren’t that easy to come by. Thatcher was on the rise and people had to get on their bikes. Helen thought the interview had gone well with IBM. She had convinced them, and almost herself, that she wanted a career there. She was even prepared to move to the West of Scotland for it. And here was their response. She opened it. ‘Well?’ Mum was desperate to know. Helen scanned the letter down to the words… sorry to inform you…. Unsuccessful on this occasion… high quality of applicants…… ‘No.’ She stated baldly with a shake of her head. She didn’t cry again. ‘Their loss,’ dad said as he bit into his toast. ‘How could they? Are you sure…?’ her mum wrested the piece of paper from her, incensed that her daughter should have been rejected. Helen winked at her dad, ‘Can’t fight City Hall, eh dad?’ He nodded sagely. ‘Plenty more jobs in the fishpond Helen,’ he replied ‘and with a first you could still apply for a doctorate…’ That, Helen knew was her dad’s preferred choice of career for her. But she did not want to end up a classics professor in any university, good or bad. Classics was a long dead world and she wanted to live. A week later, she turned down the job offer from Mars. Her mum wasn’t pleased. ‘I don’t want to go schlepping Mars Bars round places, mum,’ Helen pointed out. ‘It’s a graduate trainee programme,’ her mum replied tersely. ‘You might not get a better offer.’ ‘I’m not selling chocolate for a living,’ Helen replied and that was that. However much her mum tried to persuade her that management trainee experience was all the same no matter the industry, Helen failed to buckle. What did her mum know? She was a teacher for goodness sake. She had no experience of the real world. Dad was on her side. Mainly because he thought in a year’s time she’d be happily ensconced in an academic career. They were both wrong. In August another brown envelope dropped through the door. From Hewlett Packard. The nemesis of IBM. Helen took only a second to think about it. She was off to Bracknell. Bracknell had been quite an eye opener. Not in a good way. In Thatcher’s Britain you went where the work was and the work was in Bracknell, Britain’s rather second class version of silicon valley. It was a long bike ride to the Graduate trainee programme. Despite the story her careers advisors came up with, which she had churned out at interviews, about how Classics gave one a good grounding in pure language which would be useful for programming computers, Helen was not recruited for computer programming. The job was in marketing. It was boring. From day one. Not as boring as programming though. She stuck it out for two years. Till 1984. The young man with the blue eyes and guitar must have been a good omen, she thought as she opened the envelope which told her she’d got the job and was going to work for Apple Computers in Tottenham Court Road. She wished she could tell him she got the job. She wondered why he hadn’t waited. Looking back, the 1980’s were interesting times. Beneath the boredom. A revolution in computing was taking place in the form of the advent of the personal computer. Helen laughed as she remembered the limitations of the early computers and of how the advent of the Macintosh in 1984 had seemed like a truly revolutionary experience. She had bought into it bigstyle. And yet, what did these computers do? It was pitiful really. Graphics? Basic. Colour screens – you’re joking. Music? No way. Networking? You’re dreaming. If you looked back to computing in 1984 it was amazing to imagine that in less than fifty years the ULTIMATE® US™ would actually control virtually (and virtually control) all aspects of human existence. Incredible. Yet that was the harnessed power of exponential growth. Helen had immediately handed in her notice at HP (her parents thought she was crazy giving up a good job, a good pay packet and a company car) to pursue a new venture in computer retailing (her parents called it becoming a sales assistant!) It was the first really not sensible thing that Helen had ever done in her life. The first risk she had taken. Apart from crossing the road with a strange man and hoping he’d be there to go for a coffee with her after the interview. So, in 1984 Helen moved from the ticky tacky box world of the suburbs of Newbury to a room in a shared flat in South London without a backward glance. And travelled every day on the Northern Line. The job was selling Apple Macintosh product. More specifically, the Macintosh personal computer which launched on January 24th 1984 and sold over 50,000 units in less than 100 days. It was a success story. Helen was employed to demonstrate its tremendous potential to prospective customers, of whom there were many. She was selling Steve Jobs baby. And Apple was going to change the world. Apple was going to set people free. Apple was going to unleash the creativity of the individual. Apple was going to kick IBM’s ass. Helen had to admit, even all these years on, that she could still clearly remember the sense of joy she got from buying into IBM’s competitor. It had really rankled, being turned down by IBM. It was her first rejection and the first time she realized she was capable of holding a grudge. Selling Macintoshes seemed like exacting a personal revenge. But it didn’t make her as much money as working at Hewlett Packard. Helen hadn’t quite come to terms with the idea that money wasn’t the only real measure of success in life. The euphoria of revenge quickly palled against the pay cut and the day to day reality of life as a commuter in London was far from exciting. But there were other compensations. A slow afternoon a couple of months later and Helen was playing with the Apple in the showroom. ‘Still on for that coffee?’ She looked up to see a familiar pair of blue eyes. He was still toting his guitar bag over his shoulder. She knew she should play it cool, pretend she couldn’t remember him… but her heart was already racing, her face already flushing. ‘I’m working,’ she whispered. ‘You got the job then?’ he replied. ‘Yes.’ ‘Despite me nearly killing you on the way over the road?’ he laughed. ‘Yes.’ She smiled back at him. It was as if they were old friends. And yet, they’d spent what, ten minutes together two months ago. What was wrong with her? She wanted to ask him why he hadn’t waited but before she got the chance, ‘What time do you get off?’ he asked. ‘Five thirty,’ she replied. Her manager was honing down on her. Personal interactions during work hours were not encouraged. ‘Can I help?’ her manager asked. The man smiled back at him. ‘This young lady is being most helpful,’ he replied. ‘I saw the TV ad, you know, the one, ‘showing you why 1984 won’t be like 1984’ and I thought I’d come and see what all the fuss was about.’ That shut the manager up. He hadn’t seen the controversial commercial yet. It had only been shown during the Superbowl. These were the days before YouTube. He assumed the young man must have come from America. A casual manner and a guitar. He might be a pop star. With money. There were enough of them around these days. They were about the only people with money these days. ‘Well, if there’s anything I can do….’ The manager replied… ‘We are authorised to offer discounts for special circumstances.’ The young man nodded, as if he was considering the offer. The manager took his cue to leave but remained hovering behind the till, just out of earshot. ‘If I buy one, will you come and install it for me?’ The man with the blue eyes asked Helen. ‘It’s not part of the service,’ she replied, missing the point. ‘What’s this?’ he asked and she demonstrated the mouse. It was Jobs’ radical new interface device. ‘And can you record music on it?’ he asked. She laughed. ‘You’re joking. It’s a computer, not….’ ‘Just asking,’ he replied. ‘Just trying to keep talking till you say you’ll go out with me.’ The manager was hovering. Helen needed to close the deal. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I will..’ ‘I’ll be outside when you finish,’ he said. She gave him a look. ‘I’ll be there this time. Promise.’ He nodded to the manager. ‘I’m really looking for something I can record music onto,’ he said, heading for the door. The manager was left perplexed. After ‘the customer’ had gone he opined, ‘The man’s an idiot. Recording music on a personal computer. It’s a personal computer for Chrissakes… not a recording studio. What world does he live in? ’ Helen smiled. ‘It might be possible one day,’ she said and went back to making the mouse dance. The young man was outside the shop at five twenty and spent ten minutes trying to distract Helen by pulling faces at her and tapping his watch when her boss wasn’t looking. She was sure she was going to get into trouble but instead managed to head out of the door as soon as the clock hit five thirty with only a sarcastic comment, ‘Watching the clock won’t help you hit your target.’ She didn’t care. He was out there. Waiting. Someone more exciting than the Apple Mac would ever be. He took her by the arm and they danced through the busy traffic, across the road to a café. It was hooching with people. Everywhere was hooching with people. London rush hour. It wasn’t a place to be alone together. ‘We could go to McDonald’s?’ she suggested. ‘At the top of the road, it’s not usually as busy this time of day.’ He gave her a withering smile. ‘Do I look like I eat at Mickey D’s?’ ‘I thought everyone ate at McDonald’s,’ she replied. He laughed. ‘Ah, so young. So beautiful. And so much to learn. And I’ve not even introduced myself.’ He stuck his hand out, in what seemed a ridiculously inappropriately formal gesture. ‘I’m Randall.’ ‘Helen,’ she replied, aware of his flesh as she touched it for the first time. No Memory Bank could store that for you. The aching sensuality of the first time touch. They kept walking up the street. He was chattering on, ‘When the universal experience has a profound impact on personal experience, that’s when significant change happens.’ He paused to let her catch up with him. ‘Don’t you think?’ Helen didn’t know what to think. But she was prepared to let Randall turn her into a risk taker and accepted his offer of dinner. ‘Obviously I don’t mean McDonald’s,’ he teased her. ‘Obviously.’ She replied, trying to sound unfazed. ‘I’ll take you to the best place to eat in North London,’ he stated. And they fought their way back onto the Northern Line. She hadn’t expected he was taking her back to his flat. ‘I know. It’s a long way from home.’ It was his soft Scottish brogue that had really convinced her he was a risk worth taking. If he’d been one of the many slick southerners who had tried to get off with her since she’d been in London she probably wouldn’t have given him a second glance. She couldn’t be wooed in Estuary English. But his accent put her at ease. ‘You can always stay the night.’ Helen opened her eyes. No, that had come later. The memory was getting confused. And it was such an important memory. How come it still came back to her as the kind of fuzzy blur it was at the time? He’d cooked her a meal. She couldn’t remember what it was. It was good though. His food was always good. He’d shown her a VHS copy of the Apple Mac ‘Big Brother’ advert. It had blown her mind. The whole experience had blown her away. And she’d stayed over. And they’d made love. Helen had never done that on a first date before. None of this was anything like anything she’d ever done before. She remembered going into work the next day in the same clothes. Unprecedented, unheard of and it didn’t go unnoticed. It was a Friday. She sailed through it. She had a date that evening. All she had to do was get home get changed and get back to a gig in Finsbury Park for 8pm. It would be a tight call, but the whole world was in a whirl round Helen that day. She made it with minutes to spare. The display posters proclaimed: Billy Bragg. Supported by Randall and the Reivers. And before she had time to work out how to get a ticket, Randall was there, ushering her in, ‘She’s with me. Backstage pass, pal.’ He kissed her and left her in the fast filling auditorium. ‘Gotta go and get ready. See you after,’ he said. The music Lord Randall and the Reivers played was a kind of anti-folk music, punk influenced, somewhere between Billy Bragg and Runrig. As Helen stood there, alone in a crowd, two steps away from the man who had stolen her heart, the music melted into her and made her think of home, though Dundee was hardly the fantasy Scotland the Reivers or Runrig celebrated. The music was poignant, yearning and yet fresh and new. Until that moment Helen had never known what she wanted to do or be in life. She’d just gone with the flow, got on with it, unquestioningly; imagining that one day it would all be made clear. In the darkness of an overcrowded room in North London, heady with an aromatic mixture of smoke, drink and sweat, she knew all she wanted was to be with Randall. For the rest of her life. The set ended with an Orwellian inspired song titled 1984, a heady, rocking number which encapsulated the angry young man she hadn’t yet seen Randall as. She was lost. Her heart was bound to his forever. Backstage with him afterwards she held onto him tightly as he hummed his encore song, just for her. It was the song that had given the band their name, an upbeat, updated version of the ballad of Lord Randall. He hummed it now at a slower pace, lyrically, just for her. She literally felt her heart skip a beat. Randall was an enigma. There was so much depth to him. That night she had made her date with destiny, and determined not to let go. Ever…. …Helen opened her eyes and looked around her room. The blank US™ screen. The magnolia paint. The impersonal institutional feel. She missed Randall so much. She couldn’t bear the present reality. She shut her eyes again and hummed the Reivers tune softly to herself. She could almost hear him singing it. She paused. She listened. She could hear his voice, inside her head. He was there, in memory, yet more real than the magnolia walls around her. ‘Name is the thief of identity.’ ‘What?’ It had been his explanation when she had found out his name was not Randall but Callum Christie. His voice came back to her, from the past, ‘Our name isn’t what people call us by. It’s who we are. Remember that.’ And he kissed her. As he had so often kissed her over the years. She sighed. And opened her eyes. The pain of a memory that intense was too great for her to bear. Helen had lived with Randall for nearly forty years with barely a night spent apart. And now, ten years on, she still missed him every minute of every day. It was a physical loss as much as a mental one. However hard she tried to block him out of her thoughts, somehow he was still always there, part of her. Part of her present experience. She couldn’t live without him. But she had to keep his memory closed up, inside her. She didn’t use the Memory Bank to see him on the US™ screen. She knew that he existed in just one place, her heart. And she would keep him safe there. Safe from ULTIMATE® at last. But today, right now, in the aftermath of yesterday, the cake and the moment of hope that someone was getting a message to her, she decided she would allow herself the pleasure of the pain of seeing him. The knock on the door reminded her that the US™ was dead as well. She couldn’t indulge her pain by seeing Randall virtually. ‘Come in,’ she called out, expecting to let in the repair men. She glared at the US™ screen. How could it have been that people used to go into ecstasies over a 42 inch plasma screen back thirty years ago? It was the bane of her life…. ‘Hello Nan.’ Nike entered the room. Helen beamed. ‘I thought you were the repair men,’ she said. ‘Come on in. Sit down.’ Nike looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Your screen’s still not working?’ ‘Yes, thank goodness,’ she looked at his worried face. ‘Is that a problem?’ ‘Uh, yes, no.. uh..’ He might be twenty now, but he was an inarticulate teenager to the last. ‘It’s just that I’m not supposed to go off access.’ ‘Oh, did I get you into trouble yesterday?’ ‘A bit.’ He shrugged ‘Ah, who cares. What can they do about it?’ Neither of them wanted to think about, never mind answer that question. Best divert. ‘So what are you doing back here so soon?’ He held up the watch she had pressed into his hand the previous day. ‘I thought I’d better bring this back.’ She took it from him. ‘Thanks. But it was for you to keep. Your grandad would have wanted you to have it.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I’ve already upset Pryce enough this week, and I don’t want to ask him if it’s okay.’ She held the watch close to her. ‘Well, that’s okay. I’ll keep it here for you. But it’s yours. It belongs to you. It’s part of your history.’ ‘I don’t have a history, Nan. I’m part of The PROJECT⌂.’ Another pause. Now they were getting closer to the crux of the matter. ‘You said you wanted me to come back, on my own. I thought you might be lonely, here, on your own, without your Memory Bank working.’ Lonely. Now there was a concept not generally understood in the post-capitalist ULTIMATE® world. LONELY: DEFINITION. In History; solitary, companionless, isolated or sad because without friends or company. In the ULTIMATE® world no one was ever isolated. Each person was too important a commodity to be isolated. Everyone was part of the whole. A consumer in the ULTIMATE® lifestyle event. A cog in the ULTIMATE® wheel. How could you be solitary with a US™ screen interacting with your every movement? There is no ‘us and them’ now, remember. Only US™. Helen had often silently baulked at the significance of the trademark. Life itself seemed to have been copyrighted, trademarked and registered by ULTIMATE®. And no one seemed to notice or care. The definition of loneliness was one of many examples of ULTIMATE®’s complete mastery. How could you be sad when emotion was not considered a valid experience? It was logically impossible and became practically impossible. If it couldn’t be commodified, it was of no use to ULTIMATE® and if it was no use, it was phased out. In Helen’s youth, emotion had been commodified like everything else. The prime example was music. Music spoke to people and you bought the music to enhance the emotion. Then the music industry collapsed. It wasn’t a question of ‘keeping music live’ it became a question of keeping it real. Of letting people actually experience music other than as a commodified exchange. Technological advance eventually killed music as it killed all creativity. The battle over downloads was essentially an economic battle and when it became impossible to police the system or for the corporations to make money from the transactions, there was a moment when the ordinary people thought they’d won. But the corporations fought back. YouTube and the like flooded the market with ‘free’ creativity until the stock in trade became so devalued that no one bothered any more. If people wanted stuff ‘free’ then the proto- ULTIMATE® corporations would give them enough to stuff themselves like pigs at a trough. And quality turned to slops. It became impossible to find the good stuff amongst the rubbish and then it became impossible for most people to tell the difference. What need was there to create music when there was no way to sell it, and what point in writing novels when no one else was interested in what you had to say? The logical conclusion of everyone being able to be as creative as they liked was that no one could be bothered any more because as any demand and supply economist could explain to you; the stage after diminishing returns was that the bottom dropped out of the market. So, sadness was no longer an emotion that could be commodified. Nike’s generation couldn’t feel the yearning brought about by songs such as those played by Lord Randall and the Reivers. Although in the ULTIMATE® world emotions were not banned, they were deemed unnecessary unless they were being pulled up from Memory Banks for five credits a time. And for the younger generation, it generally wasn’t worth it. Emotion was irrelevant. Who needed it? EMOTION: DEFINITION. In History, a strong mental or instinctive feeling such as love or fear. In contemporary life emotion is unnecessary because feelings are modulated by the knowledge and Memory Banks and are not useful commodities due to their lack of application in anything other than a personal arena. We are lucky to be free from strong emotions as it allows more ‘productive’ work to take place and society to generally be a more stable, balanced and comfortable place. In History emotions gave rise to wars and social unrest, both of which were destabilising economically and therefore phased out in the post-capitalist economic structure which was made global law in the 2016 ULTIMATE® United Nations declaration. ‘What do you know of being lonely?’ Helen asked Nike. ‘Nothing really. I was on a ‘productive’ work cycle, looking at history. I thought it would be interesting but it’s pretty nads really. I thought you’d probably have something more interesting to tell me. Because you were there.’ Helen laughed. She’d been there. In history. She may not have made history but she had certainly been part of it. And now she had a rare opportunity to share that with her grandson. ‘What does nads mean?’ Helen asked. Nike was stunned. He’d come to ask questions, not to answer them. Especially when he didn’t know the answer. He shrugged. ‘No idea, Nan. Just a word.’ His face told her everything. ‘And you want to ask me questions, not to answer them?’ He smiled. ‘How’d you know that?’ ‘Oh come on Nick. I’m your grandmother. I’ve known you since before you were born. I know everything there is to know about you… well… all the important things.’ Nike couldn’t imagine that there were any important things to know about himself. Apart from that his name was NOT Nick. But she was old. He’d let it go. ‘Come on then, tell me all the things you want to know.’ Helen didn’t mind what Nick’s questions were, it was just nice to have someone to share things with. Someone to stop her being lonely. And Nick did bear an uncomfortable physical resemblance to his grandfather when he furrowed his brows and hunched his shoulders in that particular way. ‘I want to know about the past.’ ‘That’s a pretty big subject Nick, and not one I think The PROJECT⌂ would want you to spend too much time on. I thought that the future was all we thought about now. That and economic prosperity?’ ‘My past,’ he paused, ‘I mean our family. I want to know about our family. The truth.’ That was another unusual word from the mouth of a Project Kid. Truth. Haven’t we already had that definition? ‘You know this could get you into big trouble at The PROJECT⌂?’ He nodded. Then grinned. His grandfather’s grin. ‘Only if they find out.’ Helen sighed. He was not his grandfather. How could he be? He had no concept of the central message of 1984. We’ve all been found out already. So, what did it matter then? You can’t fight but you can survive as long as possible. You have to take what you can get. And right now her grandson was here, and he was asking questions. He wouldn’t be allowed to do that for much longer and so she’d better tell him all she could before ULTIMATE® stopped them once and for all. ‘I don’t really know where to begin,’ she said. Before she could start, there was another knock on the door and this time it was the US™ technicians come to repair the screen. The technicians suggested that maybe Helen and Nike would like to go to a public area while they fiddled with the screen. The room being the size it was. So Helen and Nike headed off for the dining area, but then Nike suggested they go outside. Outside. Helen couldn’t remember the last time she’d been outside. There was never any point. But yes, the thought of outside suddenly was appealing. It kept Nike in ßß™ range of the US™ but meant that no one could really tell what they were talking about. It seemed like the perfect solution. Except where could they go outside? People didn’t just sit around outside any more, even on lovely sunny days like today. It wasn’t ‘productive’ and so it wasn’t encouraged. She looked around and saw the imposing crags above. Once she would have yearned to climb up there. Not now. Now she was happy to stay on the grass below. ‘Shall we walk?’ Helen suggested. Nike looked at her, bemused. Walk? Just for the sake of walking. Why? She offered him her arm and he took it. ‘I’m not that used to walking any more,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you can steady me.’ ‘Happy to Nan,’ he smiled. ‘Can you believe,’ she said, ‘twenty years ago I probably walked about five miles a day. Every day. Come rain or shine.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Walking the dogs.’ ‘You had dogs?’ ‘Don’t you remember? We still had dogs when you were little. You used to come with me, just like now. Except it was you who was wobbly on your feet and me who supported you.’ Nike crinkled up his brow. Thought really hard. Tried to remember. Not easy for someone who had been trained not to store memories for the last twelve years. He thought maybe he could, but he couldn’t guarantee if it really was a memory or if he was responding to the picture his Nan was painting. ‘Maybe.’ They kept walking. ‘Was there one called Buchan?’ Helen clapped her hands together with joy. ‘Yes. Yes. You do remember. He was a pointer. A crazy dog. Lived to run and obsessed with chasing birds. Any bird.’ Nike thought he had a memory. ‘Did he used to sit and look at birds on the high wires?’ ‘The telephone lines. Yes.’ Nike had had a memory. And now he felt an emotion. Excitement, mixed with nervousness that this was something he really shouldn’t be doing. Yet Helen acted like it was the most normal thing in the world. If they asked him, if Pryce questioned him, he’d just say he was playing along with her, helping her while her Memory Bank was being fixed. Surely they’d buy that. ‘You were an early walker,’ Helen said, ‘you didn’t bother with crawling, you were too inquisitive. Needed to be on your feet, exploring.’ Nike found he liked this talking about the past, his past, a person he didn’t even know he had been. ‘I wish you could tell me everything about back then,’ he said, ‘but…’ ‘But they wouldn’t allow it, would they?’ Helen finished his sentence. ‘No, I don’t suppose they would. And it would take far too long. We’d never be allowed to spend all that time together without someone getting suspicious. It would keep you away from your ‘productive’ work after all.’ ‘I hate ‘productive’ work.’ Nike never thought he’d ever actually voice that thought, but here, outside, holding onto his Nan, he felt free in a way he’d never experienced before. It wasn’t just the wind blowing off the crags, he felt like Helen blew a wind through his… mind… soul… he didn’t know the right word. But it was a way that was new and it made him feel brave. He realized once he’d said it, why feelings were so dangerous. Helen smiled. ‘I’ll cut you a deal. I’ll put all my memories onto my Memory Bank, in a special vault and I’ll give you the password.’ ‘You can’t do that.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘It’s against the privacy code. If we were found out…’ ‘All right, Nick. You’ve a point there. But, you’re a bright boy. You can hack anything I hear. You run rings round Pryce I bet. If we work it out together I’m sure there’s a way you can get access to my Memory Bank and then you can find out everything you want to know. Even after….’ He shook his head at her… he didn’t want her to say it. She carried on anyway, ‘Even after I’m dead.’ Pryce returned to his office thinking he’d done a good job. But his satisfaction was short-lived. No sooner did he sit down with his ULTIMATE® cappuccino than Graham was on the US™, larger than life and twice as ugly, demanding a personal interface. In other words, get up and come over to my bigger, plusher office and get a dressing down. Pryce sighed, picked up his drink, and went. The theme of the meeting was IRREGULARITIES. Pryce could really live without this. Remember the party Pryce said the kids could go to? No problem? Well, seems there was a problem. Graham found one. Graham was excellent at finding problems where seemingly none exist. And Pryce was hauled over the coals. The conversation went something like this. ‘Where were your Project Kids yesterday afternoon?’ ‘Doing ‘productive’ work, I expect.’ Pryce attempted an offish tone. It was a mistake. ‘You expect?’ Graham had a definite sneer to his voice, ‘you expect but you don’t know?’ ‘I don’t keep track on them every minute of every day.’ There was a prolonged silence. It was a classic Graham tactic. Pryce held on as long as he could. Clearly Graham wasn’t going to break the silence and clearly the silence had to be broken. Eventually Pryce cracked. As usual. ‘I could check back over the logs.’ A sigh. A look. A terse response. ‘You do that.’ Back in his own office Pryce hated the way Graham made him feel. And he felt even worse when he went back through the records and found a gap. Damn. Why did this always happen? He was doing his best. Why was everyone so damned difficult to work with? He had limited time for recriminations because he had to work out what the error was and correct it if he wasn’t to have Graham at him for the rest of the week. The gap was while the kids were in Helen’s room and had managed to disable the US™ screen, so there was no wireless access, and effectively no accounting for a period of about an hour. Pryce of course, didn’t know about the US™. And had forgotten all about the party. They’d never followed it up after all with a travel voucher request. So with nothing else to go on and with Graham peering over his virtual shoulder he made a wild guess and reported back. ‘There must have been a malfunction.’ Graham smiled. A sneering smile. ‘But you didn’t pick it up.’ Pryce was smart enough to know when Graham was going in for the kill. Nothing to do but take the hit. ‘My office. Now.’ On his way there, Pryce reflected that Graham could easily have dealt with this over the US™. Another personal interface was unnecessary. Graham just wanted to intimidate him and this was better done face to face. He needed to come up with some better answer but he had only moments to wrack his brains as how it could have happened, and he wasn’t ready for Graham to side-swipe him the moment he stepped into the room. ‘Does a birthday party ring any bells?’ All too loudly. Pryce remembered he’d forgotten either to log this or clear this or do whatever he should have done with this. But did it really matter? An old woman’s birthday party. For goodness sake. Hardly a crime, albeit an unusual event. ‘Yes. They asked to visit Nike’s grandmother. She’s in a VCC home. I didn’t see what would be the harm.’ Confession seemed to be the only option. Pryce tried to underplay it, though he knew he’d just handed Graham a free hit. And harm there was aplenty. Graham had a weapon to add to his armoury. Not only had Pryce neglected to fill in the requisite forms but now the kids had been off system and no one knew what they were doing. Graham would enjoy this for a long time to come. So, before his ULTIMATE® coffee was cold, Pryce was back to The Project House to fill in the missing pieces. Interrogation was never his preferred method of communication, but he had to get answers which would get Graham off his back. However he did it. Method was less important than result at this point. He realized of course, that having allowed the kids to go, he was not in a strong position. He sighed as he entered the Project House. He was annoyed with the kids, mostly with Nike. All he had done was to try to help him and it turned out, again, that Nike made him look a fool. He couldn’t face Nike first so he knocked quietly on Omo’s door and on getting no response, opened the door. Omo was lost in his US™ screen. He jumped when Pryce tapped him on the shoulder. Good old Omo, a ‘productive’ worker. A model of ULTIMATE® technological dreams. ‘Can you come to the common room please?’ Pryce asked. Omo nodded, gesturing to his screen, ‘Just let me finish this question and I’ll be right with you,’ he beamed. A young man happy in his work. Good to see. Pryce next went to Flora’s room. She was also busy, online debating the relative merits of some product or other. Her fingers flew across the virtual keyboard. ‘Hi Pryce.’ She greeted him with a smile in her voice. ‘Common room, when you get a minute please.’ ‘Sure. Be right with you. I’ll be finished this review in a couple of minutes.’ She flashed him a real smile. It almost brightened his day. Almost. Nike was last. Pryce pulled himself together and re-focussed. He had to retain control. Not lose his temper. He was a counsellor, not a father. Still, he knew Nike was behind this. And he knew Nike would resent being pulled up twice in one day. He’d have to play it carefully. ‘Hey, Nike?’ Nike spun round, closing down screens right left and centre. Never a good sign. ‘Yeah. Pryce. What’s up?’ ‘How’s your game going?’ ‘Uh, yeah. It’s… well.. you know… ‘ ‘Keeping in credit?’ Nike shrugged his shoulders. ‘So..so. Uh.. surely it’s not time for a scheduled meeting yet?’ ‘We need an extra meeting, Nike. I’ve called the others into the common room.’ Nike jumped up. ‘Sure, I’m right with you man,’ he answered, with the attitude of a look-out who was attempting a casual whistle. Pryce tried to keep his temper. Nike’s smile annoyed him as much as Flora’s pleased him. He knew he was too emotionally involved with both of them. He should ask for a transfer. He wouldn’t give Graham the satisfaction. However annoying Nike was, Pryce wouldn’t give in. Not yet and not without a fight. The kids sat on the sofa and Pryce sat opposite. It was clear a telling off was coming and there was no way to cover it up. Not even with ULTIMATE® coffee and cookies on offer. No way was this just a casual call. ‘So,’ Pryce began, feeling out of his depth. He needed to regain equilibrium. Emotion didn’t work with this generation. They just didn’t “get it”. It had been effectively programmed out of them. But it hadn’t been programmed out of him. His tone was terse, whether they picked up on it or not. ‘Where were you yesterday afternoon?’ The kids looked at each other. Omo to Nike, Flora to Nike, Nike to…. Pryce. The looks clearly said: ‘You tell him, Nike, you got us into this.’ ‘At my Nan’s, remember, you said we could.’ Nike replied. Omo looked carefully at Pryce’s response. He was increasingly sure that Nike hadn’t even asked Pryce and he was expecting a lot of trouble. ‘Yes, I remember.’ Omo breathed a sigh of relief. So what was the tension about then? ‘Is there a problem?’ Nike gave Pryce his most winning smile, hoping it would work, though he didn’t know why he needed it. ‘I just wanted to know how it went.’ Pryce wasn’t giving much away. The boys knew that wasn’t a good sign. Flora was still thinking about her product review, wondering if she could do one on this cookie. It was light and tasty and the chocolately bits were… but it wasn’t a patch on that cake from yesterday. Nike decided to play Pryce at his own game. Test the water. Give nothing away. ‘Nothing really. Just some talking and…’ ‘We had a cake,’ Flora added. That wasn’t good. Too much information in the current climate. Nike and Omo looked at each other again and then shot Flora a combined look that told her to keep it buttoned. Flora didn’t get it. Pryce did. ‘A cake?’ There was no way out. ‘Yeah. Someone sent her a birthday cake. As a present. You know old people.’ Nike tried to underplay it. ‘And how was it?’ Pryce wasn’t interested in the cake, except that they seemed not to want to talk to him about it and that made it interesting. ‘The cake?’ Nike effected surprise, ‘or the party?’ ‘Both. Either. I did tell you I would want a full report on the visit.’ Pryce banked on Nike not having been paying any more attention than he himself had been to the initial conversation. He was right. Of course Nike hadn’t listened to anything other than being told he could go to his Nan’s. So he couldn’t call Pryce on that one. But he did feel something, maybe the slightest sense of suspicion. Nike wasn’t good at working out what his emotions were. He had them, and he knew he shouldn’t, but he certainly couldn’t make sense of them. Maybe he should try a line of questioning that would explain emotions to him. Maybe he should get out of this trouble before he plunged himself into more. Pryce would hit the roof if he suggested EMOTIONS as a ‘productive’ topic. It might be worth it just to see the response. Nike realised he wasn’t paying attention. ‘I’m waiting.’ Pryce was really working hard to hold it together now. He was fed up offering carrots to Nike. It was time for a dose of a big stick. But what sanctions did he really have? He was still trying to work this out when Omo couldn’t take the silent stand-off any more. It wasn’t an emotional response. It was pragmatism. He had nothing to hide. Pryce wanted information. Give him information. Then he would go away and leave them to get back to ‘productive’ work. Which was much more interesting than this current situation. After all, he’d only gone along to Nike’s Nan’s to be polite. A quick resolution would be in everyone’s best interests and if Nike wasn’t going to offer a report, he might as well. ‘I think she’s probably losing her mental faculties,’ Omo ventured. ‘She was seventy and I think she won’t last that much longer, really. She was old, rambling. It wasn’t a lot of fun.’ He hoped this might be enough. He was being as helpful as he could. But Nike couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t have Omo saying things about his Nan that were patently untrue. ‘She is not losing her mind. She’s totally with it. She knows more interesting things than you, or you (he waved at Pryce) or that thing (the US™).’ That would be the proverbial cat right amongst the pigeons now, Omo thought. Nike really couldn’t just leave well alone could he? ‘What sort of things?’ Pryce was digging. ‘I don’t know. Just things. About the past.’ ‘We’ve talked about the context in which you study the past Nike.’ ‘You’ve told me it’s all a waste of time.’ ‘Not exactly. I just suggested that where the knowledge bank doesn’t answer all your questions, you need to reappraise the question value and type.’ Normally Pryce would have thought about how such a criticism sounded, but today, right now, he just didn’t care. Nike was due a telling off and if it was in front of his peers, maybe that would be enough to get the message through. ‘Of course the knowledge bank can’t answer all my questions. I want to know about my past. My Nan was there. She knows. She was in History.’ Nike wasn’t going to back down. ‘You know that personal past is not a topic we can consider valid. As a PROJECT⌂ participant ULTIMATE® requires that you focus on the future and on purposeful questioning,’ was Pryce’s inevitable reply. This was as far as Pryce was prepared to go. He had shown his displeasure. Nike should take a telling. There was a brief but awkward silence. He thought he’d got the message through. ‘But what is purposeful?’ Nike challenged him. The boy just didn’t know when to give up. Pryce was not getting led down that blind alley. ‘We’ve already agreed that you are finding History too frustrating as a subject topic. As a priority we need to adapt your production schedule for the next month. If you won’t take responsibility for choosing a topic, I am authorized to do it for you, but I’d like you to have some say in the matter. It’s your ‘productive’ time after all.’ Pryce was being accommodating. Nike didn’t see it that way. There was always a catch. Flora didn’t like conflict and she could see it brewing, so she diverted the conversation and saved the day. ‘I’m interested in animals, Pryce. In species extinction. Can we find something for me to do on that? Something to do with product testing. That would be a ‘productive’ topic wouldn’t it?’ ‘Yes, I think it would. What’s sparked your interest in that?’ Pryce was back on familiar ground. This was the way he was used to interacting as a social counsellor. He continued, ‘I’ll check the change with my boss and make sure it’s okay. If so, we’ll upgrade in two hours. Have a lunch break till then.’ ‘I’d rather finish off the work I’m on just now. It’ll only take an hour or so.’ She flashed him a smile. That was what Pryce liked to see. A kid so keen on her ‘productive work’ that she’d choose it over the option of free time. That was the way things were meant to be. He turned to Omo. ‘Do you want to change your ‘productive’ task for the next month?’ ‘No thanks, Pryce. I’m fine with what I’ve got.’ There was a pause. Omo didn’t like pauses. They were another thing that made him feel uncomfortable. ‘So, just you Nike. Pick a topic.’ Nike didn’t want to pick a topic. He wanted to be able to ask whatever questions he liked and to get proper answers. Like his Nan gave him. But he knew when to pull his horns in. He wasn’t going to win on this one. Not right now. ‘Uh, social trends in gaming techniques? Is that the sort of thing…?’ Nike said the first thing that came into his head. It wasn’t the time to suggest EMOTION as a topic. He’d save that for later when Pryce was less pumped up. ‘That’ll do nicely.’ Pryce felt he was making progress at last. Nike was coming back in line. ‘So is that it? Can we go back to work?’ Omo was keen to get back to his ‘productive’ work. He hated all this social interaction stuff. He was happier with virtual interaction, like a good ULTIMATE® citizen should be. But it was not that easy. Pryce couldn’t afford to be half-hearted in this investigation. He picked up the loose thread, ‘Well, I’d like to hear a bit more about the party.’ ‘Have you ever been to a party?’ Nike tried to turn the tables. You could usually divert Pryce that way. ‘Not for years. And depends how you define party.’ Pryce waved his arm at the screen. He had won. He could afford to be beneficent. Maybe all Nike had needed were some boundaries. To know that Pryce had a limit beyond which he wouldn’t be pushed. Flora’s smile and Omo’s compliance gave Pryce the confidence that he could win over Nike too. He just had to play him right. It was time to give, to be a role model, to re-establish friendship. ‘Have this one on me,’ he said to Nike. ‘What’s a party?’ Nike asked. PARTY: DEFINITION. In History, a social gathering of invited guests. A group of people united in a cause – for example a political party. ‘Why does it always do that?’ Nike asked Pryce. ‘Do what?’ ‘Give you nothing. Only give you enough that you have to ask other questions.’ Pryce thought.. ahh, that’s the beauty of the system. But realized it was not a beauty to Nike and so replied, ‘To keep you interested.’ ‘To keep you working.’ Nike snorted. Omo could see the way this was going. He just wanted to get back to his own work. He didn’t want to be in the middle of something between Pryce and Nike that he didn’t understand and didn’t find interesting. ‘What else do you want to know? We went to Nike’s Nan’s. It was a social gathering. We were invited. We were guests. We had that horrible tea and that weird cake and..’ Omo was filling in gaps as fast as he could. If he’d known the party was going to cause this much aggravation he wouldn’t have gone. Trust Nike to get them all into trouble. ‘Ah yes,’ Pryce picked back up on that, ‘the cake. Tell me about the cake.’ ‘You’re worse than the US™,’ Nike grumbled. ‘It was a cake. A birthday cake.’ ‘And what made it a birthday cake?’ Pryce asked. ‘It was a cake. And it was for her birthday.’ Come on, Nike thought. This is stupid. ‘Did it have candles?’ What did Pryce know about the cake? What did Pryce know about birthday cakes in general? What did Pryce know? ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Nike asked the US™. ‘What’s a birthday cake?’ BIRTHDAY CAKE: Definition. In History people used to celebrate the day of their birth by having a cake decorated with greetings and with candles on top. One candle for each year of their birth. They used to light the candles and sing a song (for the song cross reference Happy Birthday) If they blew them all out at the same time, they could make a wish. They believed that the wish would come true. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON WISHES YOU NEED TO SPEND ANOTHER 5 CREDITS. TO HEAR THE SONG ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ WILL COST YOU 10 CREDITS. TO SEARCH YOUR MEMORY BANK FOR BIRTHDAY WILL COST 30 CREDITS.’ ‘No thanks,’ Nike replied. Omo was now determined to get this over and done with. To give Pryce what he wanted to know. If only he could work that out. ‘There weren’t any candles on it,’ he stated. ‘How would you fit seventy candles on a cake?’ Nike laughed. ‘There was just writing on it.’ Before he knew it, Omo had gone too far. Given away too much. Made it interesting. ‘What did it say?’ Pryce felt he was onto something. ‘Uh, happy birthday Helen.’ Nike looked at Omo, willing him to agree.’ That was it, wasn’t it?’ Omo nodded. He didn’t know why, he had nothing to hide, but he did feel that mentioning the RIP inscription would get them into some very sticky waters and he had really had enough of all this to last a lifetime. Best let it go. ‘Where did the cake come from?’ Nike was able to be totally honest on this one. ‘No idea. A friend I suppose. If we’d have thought, we could have taken her an ULTIMATE® cake for a present.’ ‘But we didn’t think,’ Flora said. ‘It wasn’t an ULTIMATE® cake?’ Flora had blown the gaff. ‘No way. It was a real cake. It was delicious. Made with real ingredients.’ There was another very long, very uncomfortable pause. ‘That’s what she said,’ Nike added, ‘But I think maybe Omo’s right, her mind was wandering on that one a bit. I mean, how could it not be an ULTIMATE® cake?’ He turned to Pryce. ‘We played along with her. She’s old. And a bit lonely I think. She was thinking about the old days and we thought it was best just to humour her. Isn’t that what you should do with old people?’ Pryce knew there was more to this than met the eye. But he also realized he was beginning to lose ground. Or maybe they were using the cake as a diversionary tactic. He needed to get back to the main issue. The fact that they’d been out of contact. That wasn’t acceptable. No one lower than Graham’s level could really justify being out of contact. The Project Kids didn’t have a privacy option on their ßß™ implants. So how had it happened? ‘We lost contact with you while you were there. How did that happen?’ The kids looked at each other. They knew this was potentially serious. They had had the importance of total access drummed into them since they first entered The PROJECT⌂. It was one of the central tenets on their contract. It was a non-negotiable. This was a problem. Omo decided to deal with it. ‘Her US™ screen just died. That’s all. I told her to get a technician. We didn’t think it would matter because you knew where we were and we weren’t doing anything, and we were only there for an hour at the most…’ Omo’s nervousness almost convinced Pryce that this was the reason for their shifty behaviour regarding the whole event. Almost. But he was learning to question everything these days. Otherwise he’d be answering to Graham without all the information to back him up. ‘How did that happen?’ ‘I don’t know. It was just playing up. Flickering on and off…’ Omo ventured. ‘I don’t think she likes it very much.’ Flora added her penny’s worth. ‘What do you mean?’ Pryce probed. ‘No, she’s just confused by it. She was sorting out memories and I think she overloaded it.’ Nike came to the rescue. And added quickly, ‘What was it like before US™?’ He was priding himself on his diversion when, inevitably, the US™ kicked into action. BEFORE THE INVENTION OF THE US™: You have a range of options. FOR 10 CREDITS THE HISTORY OF THE US™. FOR 20 CREDITS INFORMATION ABOUT THE DECADES LEADING TO THE INVENTION OF THE US™. 10 CREDITS PER DECADE AND SPECIAL HISTORICAL CREDIT CLEARANCE AUTHORISATION. FOR 40 CREDITS INFORMATION ABOUT THE ALTERNATIVES TO THE US™ IN HISTORY. WITHOUT CLEARANCES YOU CAN ONLY… Nike couldn’t stop himself. ‘What is the US™?’ The others shook their heads. No wonder Nike was always out of credits. Asking stupid questions when he already knew the answer. The reply came immediately, stripping him of credits. The US™ was first marketed in 2020 and has reached its 3rd effective generation. It is ULTIMATE®’s most successful lifestyle product to date, bringing a whole new dimension to social interaction and truly fulfilling the original marketing slogan ‘There is no more Us and Them, only US™. ‘Nike. That can wait,’ Pryce interjected. ‘This is a group meeting. It’s inappropriate to ask ‘productive’ questions in such a context.’ ‘So what can YOU tell us, Pryce?’ ‘You want me to tell you about the US™?’ ‘It’ll save me a good sixty credits, which I don’t have. And since we are talking about the malfunction of one, I thought it would be contextually appropriate to know something more about them.’ That was Game On as far as Nike was concerned. It was Pryce’s job to help them hone their questioning skills and general knowledge. ‘What I do know is that they are very reliable,’ Pryce said tetchily, ‘and so I can’t understand how it is that the one at your Nan’s conveniently broke down just when we needed to…’ ‘What did you need us for anyway?’ Nike wasn’t stupid enough to use the word ‘spy.’ It’s a word he wasn’t supposed to know the meaning of but he’d checked that one out quite some time ago on the knowledge bank (in the context of the History of gaming… so he thought he was covered… but not enough to just throw it into conversation.) Nike found it exhausting trying to remember the things he knew and wasn’t supposed to, or didn’t know and was supposed to. It just got worse and worse. No wonder Omo was always happy. His life was simple. He played by the rules. ULTIMATE® rules. Even though memory was not considered necessary or skilful, Nike could remember the definition as given. It had struck him as important somehow. SPY: DEFINITION. In History, a person who secretly collects and reports information on the activities, movements etc of an enemy, competitor etc. This word has fallen into disuse in our contemporary world, because the arrival of ULTIMATE® and the new economic order means there has been total transparency in dealings and therefore no need to use this concept. Funny, thought Nike, because if you thought about Pryce’s relationship to them, despite being called a counsellor, it seemed a lot like the definition of a spy. Apart from the enemy/competitor element. He wondered if you could spy on a friend. Not that he would consider Pryce a friend. FRIEND: Definition. A person with whom one enjoys mutual affection and regard (exclusive of sexual or family bonds) A sympathiser, helper or patron. Nike broke from his musing and as he came back to the present, he realised that Pryce was talking and he wasn’t listening. Pryce just thought it was Nike being Nike. Dumb. Adolescent. His tone hardened. ‘Did you report the malfunction of the US™?’ ‘No, we told her to. She wanted me to fix it.’ Omo bent the truth just a little bit. He had a preservation instinct if nothing else. ‘And has she done so?’ Pryce had given up on Nike and this question was clearly directed at Omo. ‘How would we know?’ Nike butted in. ‘Poor old woman,’ Flora added, ‘her memories are all stored in the Memory Bank and it’s not working properly. No wonder she’s confused. How can she access her memories? It must be awful for her.’ She smiled at Pryce. He liked it when she smiled. She had a nice smile. ‘Can you make sure she gets it fixed as soon as possible?’ she continued. ‘Yes,’ Pryce replied. ‘I intend to.’ ‘And what did you want us for anyway?’ Nike asked. He was getting more and more suspicious by the minute. ‘Oh, just to arrange this feedback meeting,’ Pryce replied. He saw Nike’s subtle double-take on that one. That’s one up on you sunshine, he thought. At last. He pressed home his advantage. ‘Okay. Thanks guys. That’s all for now. We just needed to understand why we couldn’t get in touch with you. Make sure you don’t go off access again eh? Just gives me a headache I don’t need.’ ‘Sure. Sorry Pryce.’ Nike felt like he’d won, so he could afford the smile. ‘Yes. Sorry. It won’t happen again.’ Omo was a bit more conciliatory. ‘It was nice to see you, anyway,’ Flora said. Was she flirting with him? Pryce couldn’t handle that. And couldn’t get the idea out of his head. No, she couldn’t be. Young people didn’t do that these days. He’d ignore it. He ignored it. Almost. He left. Rather too swiftly, and with rather too much of a flush on his face. Flora was twenty years younger than him after all, and very pretty. Too pretty. He’d need to watch that. Either she was flirting with him, which was dangerous; or he was projecting an action on her, which was equally dangerous. And distracting at a time he needed no more distractions. As Pryce left The Project House he wondered what he would be able to write in his report. What of this did Graham actually want to know? Certainly the facts. The kids had been at Nike’s Nan’s for an hour. The US™ screen had been playing up and broken down. They’d had tea to drink and cake to eat and been confused by the ramblings of an old woman who was trying to remember things without the help of her Memory Bank. That would do surely? That would be enough for Graham. Right at that moment Pryce was more interested in what was going down with Flora. She shouldn’t be flirting. She couldn’t have had access to the kind of information which would have taught her the etiquette, the skills or even the existence of flirting as a method of social interaction. He’d need to go back into her logs. Was she inappropriately interested in him – or was he inappropriately interested in her? He shouldn’t be thinking about this at all, he reasoned. And if he had any kind of a wife…. maybe he’d better leave it for now. He had enough trouble brewing with Nike. Turning his thoughts to Nike, Pryce mused on whether the interaction with his Nan might explain why Nike was getting so interested in History. And whether the relationship should be stopped? It seemed harsh. He needed to think about it before he made a judgment call or alerted Graham. Not many Project Kids had any kind of contact with relatives. It wasn’t encouraged. But maybe he could put a case in for Nike to be used statistically and analytically to see what effect such a relationship could have. Pryce decided that the basis of his report would be that Nike had a predilection for trouble and his inbuilt solution would be that if they monitored the ‘troublesome’ relationship, it might give them some clues as to how best to handle him. Give them an insight into how to change things for the future. He also thought that if he could give Nike some positive feedback for a change, Nike might respect him more, even thank him. It might turn a troublesome kid into a worthy participant. And winning Nike round as a ‘productive’ ULTIMATE® citizen would be a feather in his cap. Pryce found himself thinking about his own grandparents. How he’d loved them and how he missed them now they were both dead. He tried once again to ignore the clear signs that he was getting too emotionally involved in the current situation, something he should report to his line manager. It only hardened his resolve not to be too hasty in severing Nike’s ties from his only living relative whatever The PROJECT⌂ dictates said. For now, he’d wrap things up and get back to the office. Set up new production schedules for the kids and lodge his report. Get back on track. Pryce was smart enough to realise he needed to get back on the ball. What he didn’t realize was how many balls he was juggling at any one time. He had no idea how Graham was playing him. Because Graham didn’t really care about the missing hour. He was more interested in diverting Pryce, in knowing where Pryce was at any one time. Graham and Angela met while Pryce was out chasing wild geese. They liked it that way. And they saw no reason for things to change. |