The Heist of Hollow London, page 5
“That kind of speculation isn’t helpful,” replied the HR guy she’d approached, wearily.
And that was when Drienne knew for sure it was true. She went away and tried to work out how she felt about this. Their next situation was unlikely to be better than their current one. The mades had been produced in response to a dramatically declining birth rate and consequent labor shortage. All the megas had invested hugely in them. But global demographics had changed, and the need for mades had become less pressing. Production of mades had fallen by over 95 percent since Drienne was created, and right now none of Oakseed’s rivals needed more, or at least not in any great quantities. It would be nice to think the dissolution of Oakseed meant the mades’ debts would be canceled and they’d be libbed, but realistically they would be sold to pay the creditors that were always left behind when a company collapsed. And as demand for mades was low, their contracts would be sold cheaply and their lives would be treated as such.
The future was uncertain. But Drienne’s sense of inevitability about her life had come close to crushing her many times, and she couldn’t help feeling excited by the possibilities opening up, even if most of them were bad. She found herself aching, almost physically aching, to talk to Arlo about this. She was forming sentences in her head, rehearsing for a conversation they weren’t ever going to have.
* * *
For the second time since arriving at the hospital, Arlo awoke and couldn’t understand why.
This time he was not in the hospital holding room, he knew that much. He could feel an actual bed underneath him, and he could hear extraneous noise now, unlike the holding room that had been entirely soundproof. But he couldn’t see anything. Upon inspection, he found his eyes to be heavily bandaged.
Sluggishly, Arlo thought back to the last thing he remembered: lying on a gurney that steered itself down the corridor and into an operating room. No one had spoken to him; they’d barely looked at him. He hadn’t asked what was about to happen, because he’d thought he knew. The doctor who’d come to get him was there, plus another doctor, and an anesthetist drone. Then Samson had been brought in. Arlo had tried to get a glimpse of Samson’s face, hoping that if the xec was conscious, Arlo could look him in the eyes—but Samson’s features stayed frustratingly out of view, like in a dream. And then the anesthetic hit.
Arlo flexed his left hand; it felt strange without the sheath that housed his backhand. He only ever took the sheath off to clean it and the skin underneath, and always put it straight back on afterward. He raised the hand and pushed up his hospital gown so he could touch his fingers to his chest. He almost expected to find a hole there, to realize he’d been plugged into some life-support device that would do the job of all the organs they’d just removed, because they needed to keep him alive a bit longer, for reasons he couldn’t imagine right now. But there was no hole, no incision, he hadn’t been cut open, the skin wasn’t even tender. He poked at his rib cage just to make sure, then when it didn’t cave in under his touch, he moved his hand down to his abdomen and even his genitals. Everything was still where it should be.
It was just his eyes. They didn’t hurt, but the skin around them was tight and stiff, and he became aware he was on heavy painkillers, without which they would hurt a great deal.
What the fuck was going on? Had they just taken his eyes? There’d been no talk of eyes when he’d arrived at the hospital. Had there been a ludicrous mix-up, and what they’d told him had been wrong, and he was actually just here so they could reap his eyes? He became increasingly furious about this. It was patently a better deal than death, but how did they expect him to live? He wouldn’t be able to do his job now, and he wasn’t trained to do anything else. What would they do with him? But maybe he wouldn’t be left blind—maybe he’d been given some cheap substandard eyes reaped from a dead made, while Samson got Arlo’s young, fresh eyes slotted into his middle-aged head.
Someone had to come here and explain to him what was going on. So he called for assistance.
Assistance arrived quicker than he expected, in the form of not just one person, but two. He wondered why he merited this level of attention. They both sounded female. Arlo assumed they were medical staff but he had no way of knowing. One of them, speaking Mandarin into a translator, asked what he needed.
“Are your painkillers working?” the other one added, sounding concerned.
“Yes,” replied Arlo. He tried to form his next sentence in Mandarin—not using translators was a point of pride for him. But he felt too wiped to speak coherently in his second language, and making himself understood was more important than pride. “I just don’t know what’s going on,” he said in English.
“The operation went extremely well.” This member of staff was moving around Arlo’s bed as she spoke; it sounded like she was carrying out tests.
“You’ve been an excellent patient,” said the first member of staff kindly.
Arlo hadn’t been thinking of himself as a patient. Patients come in to be treated; he was a resource to be mined. “What was the operation? Nobody’s explained anything to me. I thought I’d come here to donate back—” He realized he was using the polite language, and for what? “Donate” implied someone with more than they needed giving it to those less fortunate, and that didn’t describe what was happening here at all. “I thought I was here to be reaped.”
“Didn’t anyone explain it to him?” said the other woman. Her translator didn’t put this into English, but Arlo understood the words.
“I don’t think there was time,” said the first.
“Right,” said the other woman, who seemed to be a doctor. Now she was addressing Arlo again through her translator. “So yes, that was why you came.”
“Yes—they told me he needed my heart, and liver—”
“But Mr. Samson’s situation changed, as did yours.”
“How?”
“I’m afraid the hospital’s code of conduct doesn’t allow us to discuss his situation. Patient confidentiality.”
There was no point getting angry with the hospital staff over this. “Are you allowed to tell me what you’ve done to me?” Arlo said, as nonconfrontationally as he could manage.
“Yes! You’ve been given an eye transplant.”
“But there was nothing wrong with my eyes. Was there?”
“No. Their condition was extremely good—wasn’t it?”
“Extremely good,” the woman who wasn’t a doctor agreed. She was on the other side of the bed now, applying a device to Arlo’s upper arm. He guessed she was a nurse.
How odd. He’d had those eyes more than half his life. He’d been given the standard operation at the age of eleven, as soon as he was deemed old enough, and at the time it had upset him deeply—which he knew was a common, unremarkable reaction. Everything looked different through the replacement eyes—not very different, but still different. The world looked a little washed out, a little colder somehow. The nursery autodoc told him there was no difference, he was imagining it, and if there was any difference then the replacement eyes would be superior.
Over the years he’d gotten used to those eyes and rarely thought about it anymore. The idea of having to go through the adjustment process again was dismaying.
“Why do it,” Arlo asked, “if my eyes were fine?”
“We weren’t furnished with that information. We received the instructions and payment, and all was in order.”
“Fucking hell,” muttered Arlo. Maybe it was a security issue?
“Your body’s responding very well to the accelerated healing program,” said the nurse as if he hadn’t spoken. “These bandages should be able to come off in sixteen to twenty-four hours.”
“So I’m not going to be reaped?”
“No.”
“What’s happened to Mr. Samson, then? Is he dead?” That certainly qualified as a change in circumstances.
“I’m afraid so,” said the doctor. “May I offer the hospital’s condolences?”
“You may, but I don’t need them. I don’t know the guy, I’m just his clone.”
“Nevertheless.” Then the two women spoke to each other with the translation turned off, too quietly for Arlo to hear. One of them left the room.
“Good news!” the nurse (who was still here) said to Arlo.
“Really?”
“You’re well enough to travel and we can arrange for you to be put on the next flight to Vancouver.”
“Vancouver?”
“That’s where we were told to send you after the operation.”
“But I live here.”
“Not anymore. Have you enjoyed your time in Shanghai?”
Arlo was going to give a sharper answer to this. But he simply said, “It’s a very beautiful city.”
* * *
Loren had been at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, offices for about eighteen hours. They were dealing with the boredom by playing games of Go in their head. There was nothing to do here except talk to the others, and no one seemed to have anything interesting to say. They were partway through a game when they noticed a team of twenty or so people in dark gray shirts had turned up. One of them spoke to the mades, explaining they were representatives of RookDivest, the receivers dealing with the breakup of Oakseed’s assets. The woman who said this was clearly unaware that this was the first official confirmation the mades had been given of the company’s collapse, and was surprised when it provoked some shocked responses from the mades. Loren felt surprised too: they’d assumed everyone else had worked this out and were resigned to it at this stage. But unrest quickly bubbled up from the crowd, some members of which surged forward, angrily engaging with the receivers.
Loren didn’t hear much of the debate that followed, but it seemed the protesters believed they were being lied to, that Oakseed hadn’t collapsed at all and this was just a fiction to mollify them while the company sold them off. Some said they refused to be sold and demanded to be taken home, back to their jobs. Loren couldn’t understand this at all. If Oakseed still existed, why would they take back workers they’d unceremoniously gotten rid of? And surely the fact the mades were being kept in a gutted Oakseed office strongly supported the notion the company had collapsed? Were they just unable to accept the demise of the entity that had made them, housed them, and used them all their lives?
The discussion, such as it was, began to turn violent. Loren made their way to a part of the office that was away from the fighting and resumed their game of Go until it all died down.
* * *
They’d forgotten about her.
After escorting the depot mades to the port, Nadi had expected to be allowed to go home. Instead she was told to continue guarding the mades as they waited for a flight, then to guard them on the flight itself. Everyone who gave her these instructions seemed to believe an outbreak of unrest was imminent. Nadi’s training meant she considered the implications of every movement: she could look at crowds, sense trouble brewing, and pinpoint it. She saw none of that from the mades, who all looked bewildered and exhausted. Nearly all the passengers slept through the flight, including Nadi.
When the flight arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, it landed at the airstrip of Oakseed’s private resort, the one the xecs used for board meetings and whitepage summits. It was fancy. The mades were told they were all going to stay here for the time being. It sounded nice, but wasn’t. The suites and chalets were all taken, so the mades were sent to bed down in the sports complex. They slept on the floors of squash courts and in the clubhouse of the golf course. Some HR managers oversaw the allocation of space, so Nadi had asked them when she’d be going back to Frankfurt. They’d told her they didn’t know, and in the meantime it would be great if she could continue to watch over the mades she’d come here with, because there was a shortage of securits here.
A made called Edison who had worked at the sports complex as a fitness trainer told Nadi there was a shortage of securits because people had come over from the city and kept trying to break into the resort. Every available securit had been corralled into a militia to keep them out.
“Why are they trying to break into the resort?” Nadi had asked him.
“Because the xecs are here,” Edison replied. “They’ve been here for weeks, working on their plan to save the company. Now they’re just here wondering what the fuck to do.”
“But what do people want with the xecs? The people who are trying to break in, I mean?”
Edison shrugged. “Answers. Apologies. Revenge.”
Later that day, Nadi went out to check that the gates and fences around the sports complex were secure. This was just an excuse she came up with to get out of the building. Observing the mades for any sign of insurrection was exhausting and boring and she couldn’t switch off. She walked the perimeter and spent a while looking at the tennis courts. She had never seen a real clay court before, let alone played on one. On the rare occasions Nadi got to play on a real-life court, it would be a low-quality hard surface, poorly maintained, with cracks big enough for mice to live in. She had asked one of the managers if she might play on one of the resort’s courts in her breaks, and the request had been rejected without consideration.
Nadi’s walk around the perimeter took her past the croquet lawn, which lay between the sports complex and the hotel. She looked up and saw a middle-aged man standing on one of the hotel’s balconies. He looked out at the marina and the ocean beyond. He had his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t smiling.
He caught sight of Nadi watching him. She gave him the casual salute you were meant to do with higher-ranking employees, the familiar but respectful gesture used by security staff for well over a century.
The man nodded an acknowledgment, turned and went inside.
The next day, the reps from RookDivest turned up and Nadi asked one of them when she was going back to Frankfurt. The guy she spoke to blinked, told her she wasn’t, and she should go and join the other mades, because the sales were starting.
5
A FAINT SMELL OF MARZIPAN
Arlo assumed he was now in Vancouver, but how would he know if he wasn’t? He had no idea what Vancouver sounded or smelled like and even if he did his senses weren’t keen enough to distinguish it from every other city on Earth. The people who’d helped him board the flight had said they were going to Vancouver, the pilot had said at the end of the flight they had landed in Vancouver, but Arlo wouldn’t trust he was there until he could see it with his own eyes. He searched for reasons why someone might lie about sending him to Vancouver. It could be a reassuring fiction; he could think of plenty of places he’d be a lot more worried about going to.
The flight had been amazing, except for two things: he couldn’t see anything, and he had a bulky carrying case handcuffed to his wrist. He’d been given the case before leaving the hospital and been told someone would take it from him when he arrived at his destination. He hadn’t been told what was in the case, because no one ever told him anything if they could help it. The chain on the cuff was reasonably long, so he was able to put the case down and had freedom of movement, but he still kept catching the chain on the arm of his seat.
The flight had been first class, or at least he’d been told it was, and he believed it: he’d been seated in a private pod and supplied with audio entertainment, excellent food, and drinks on demand. A member of the cabin crew who dealt with disabled passengers had guided Arlo through the port and onto his flight, and regularly visited his seat to see if he needed anything. The young man had a beautiful voice, coarse yet warm, and Arlo wondered what it would be like to fall in love with someone and never see their face; to know them only by the sound of their voice, the touch of their hands, the feel of their body underneath yours …
Arlo had become prone to flights of fancy such as this since the operation. He’d had little to do in the hospital except think, and for the first time in his adult life he was off the sales carousel; he didn’t have to worry about hitting his next target. He now realized how much these concerns had occupied his thoughts, even when he wasn’t consciously thinking about them. He wondered if his brain had now reset into its default state and would be like this from now on, or if he’d built up a backlog of thoughts he needed to process, and they were all coming out in a barely filtered gush, and it would calm down after a while.
The flight attendant (the one with the voice) guided Arlo through the port in Vancouver, through border control and security, and into a car that was waiting for him. The attendant bade him goodbye and Arlo tried to hold the voice in his memory.
As the car drove away, Arlo placed the case on his lap and ran his hands over it. Even though it was chained to his wrist, he couldn’t shake the feeling someone might have covertly taken it off the other end of the chain and switched it for a different case while it had been resting on the ground. But when he’d been waiting at the port in Shanghai he’d familiarized himself with the shape and texture of the case, including any nicks and dents he could find, and he felt fairly confident the one he had now was the one he’d been given at the hospital.
During Arlo’s operation, his slate had performed a full factory reset, and each time he tried to use it, it asked him for authorization he didn’t have. It appeared not to know who he was. This was probably a deliberate tactic aimed at making him dependent on the structures taking him from one city to another. He needed the booked flight, the helpful attendant, the car at the other end, because he was unable to arrange such things for himself, so he couldn’t change course and run away. But he had no intention of running away. You’d think they’d know that, with all the personality analytics they ran on the workforce.
