The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 72

Byron was not at the apartment; of course.

She’d left an envelope taped to the wall by the door, the word HOPE written on it in large letters.

There was a USB stick in the bottom of the envelope. I took it to my hotel, plugged it into the computer, put headphones on, listened to the audio file within.

Nothing surprising; my stomach tightened at the sound but I did not flinch, did not run, did not move.

“The sword outwears its sheath,” said Byron’s voice, steady and resigned. “The soul wears out the breast. Trust me. I am your only hope. You will come to me.”

She said this last several times, then repeated the poem, and I listened, unmoved, and felt okay. Hey Macarena.

I went to Daly City, to the empty office up its little concrete path, Hydroponic Fertilizers Ltd., Water Is Our Future. The sign was still there, but the office was empty. I broke in through the back door, wandered past the place where Byron’s chair had sat, a place of needles and drugs and…

… other things I had forgotten.

Did I feel horror?

I ran my hand over walls, under the window sills, and didn’t. Thought perhaps I should, tried to force myself to feel queasy or angry at what had happened, felt nothing. I looked for anything, something, a sign, and found everything bleach-clean, empty, gone.

I looked up Hydroponic Fertilizers Ltd., but the company had vanished as quickly as it was created, the records blank. I knocked on the houses next door, asked if they’d seen anyone leave, lorries or faces, but they’d seen nothing, except for one old woman with insomnia, who’d been woken at 3 a.m. by a white van pulling away, and thought it was thieves, but no, you didn’t get thieves round here, not where everyone was so nice.

In the end, I fell back on a stake-out.

For two weeks, I sat outside the house of Agustin Carrazza, the ex-MIT professor of dubious ethical practices whom Byron had visited during those long, long weeks of experiments. I watched him come, watched him go, followed him to meetings and dinners, and hid, not from him, but from CCTV cameras and mobile phones, hiding from the machine, for the machine never forgets.

Discipline; all things, discipline.

If he was working with Byron, he showed no sign of it, until one Wednesday afternoon, when he drove to a lab with no name, in an industrial estate off Route 24, where bright young things in slacks rushed out to meet him and shake his hand, before leading him inside to admire their operation, their well-guarded, locked-door operation. And when the lab was dark, I broke in, and found the self-same chair and the same needles and the same drugs and the same everything, electrical, brain-altering everything that had been in Byron’s little office in Daly City, and unwashed coffee cups and cutlery left in the sink, and a glass full of green washing-up liquid that was beginning to crystallise from neglect, and a Giants calendar, because everyone here supported the same team, and a password-protected PC that didn’t yield to anything obvious — password1, 123456, Giants001, etc. — and in a yellow biohazard bin, needles caked with freshly dried blood, waiting to be taken away and incinerated.

Three more days of staking out the building gave me the names and identities of everyone working in the outfit. A couple of grad students, a pair of researchers who should have known better, a trio of undergrads from Berkeley in it for the credit on their CVs. I approached them all, chatted in the canteen, brushed up against them in the library, and within a few days could have greeted any of them warmly and asked after their pet cat/lizard/spider/fish by name.

At the heart of the group was Meredith Earwood. Two years into a psychology major, with a minor in English literature, she was the lab rat in the treatment chair, her blood on the needles in the biohazard bin. Her hair was dyed, crafted and sprayed, five dollars for every snip of the scissors; her teeth were perfect little moons in her mouth, her home West Virginia, her ambition to be a counsellor to the famous in LA, her CV adorned with pageants won, her stomach a display of stone-carved muscle, her place on the top of the cheerleading team assured, she somersaulted and backflipped her way to popularity and fame but it wasn’t enough, not enough, never enough.

I opened a conversation with her outside the library with an easy route in: do you have Perfection?

Of course she did, she’d got to 543,000 points back home, no one in her town had achieved so much but then, surprising, unexpected, “But I don’t use that bullshit any more.”

I raised my eyebrows, sat down on the edge of a wall beside her, held my student bag close, purchased three hours ago from the campus shop and rubbed down against bricks until it looked suitably used, and said, “What do you mean you don’t use it?”

“Perfection is an elitist tool of social division,” she explained with the absolute confidence of a second-year humanities student destined to rule the universe. “It’s almost impossible for the poor to achieve more than a few hundred thousand points, and the only way you can achieve a million is by accumulating both the material goods, and the material values of the extremely rich and privileged. You know how the company behind Perfection decided what ‘perfect’ was?”

No, no I didn’t, how did they…?

“The internet. They took Google, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, Weibo — all the algorithms, all the data, and mined it for what ‘perfect’ meant. Figured the cloud mind would know, because people always know best, all the people, data and numbers on the web and you know what they got?”

No, what did they…?

“George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, that’s what. They got movie stars and models. Rich boys and pretty girls. They got fashion and fast cars, Caribbean holidays, blue skies, clean waters, organic socks and vegan diets. They got fairytales — fantasies — a social construct of ‘perfect’ that’s unobtainable, that’s been pumped out by TV and films and magazines to make us buy, buy buy buy more stuff more advertising buy buy buy buy a house buy a car buy new shoes buy perfection — and they programmed it into their algorithm as the definition of what we should all be. I mean shit, that’s nothing new, Hollywood’s been doing it for years, Perfection’s just riding that wave. Perfection is whatever the marketing men say it is, and we bought it.”

“So you stopped?”

“Sure.”

“But—” I caught myself before the words “you are having treatments” could pass my lips, half closed my eyes, put my head on one side, looking for a better way in.

“But I’m beautiful?” she offered, into my silence.

Not quite where I was going, but…

“I choose to look good,” she exclaimed, highlighting every word with a stab of her finger. “The world admires me, and I like being admired. I know it’s bullshit, but it’s easy, it helps me get where I want to be, and I want to be at the top.”

I counted bricks in the pavement, held my bag tighter, the weight of books that weren’t even mine — must have stolen them from somewhere — pulling me down. “Did you hear about treatments?” I murmured.

She looked up, sharp, then smiled, hiding the knives in her eyes. “Sure.”

“The 106, they say…”

“Sure, I heard that.”

“I hear they make you perfect.”

She didn’t reply, and that night, I followed her to the lab, and watched through a hole I’d drilled in the walls three days before, fibre-optic camera pushed through the gap, as she sat in the chair, didn’t flinch when they gave her the injections, smiled when they put the goggles over her eyes. A man in blue plastic overalls — who I’d never seen before — parted the hairs around the crown of her head, pushed a needle, four inches long, a round sort of antennae at the top, into her skull, all the way. Her heart rate didn’t rise, her breathing was steady, O₂ 99, BP 122/81. They put headphones on her, a metal node on her tongue, a tube up her nose. They waited. Machines ran and someone made coffee, and they waited.

Thirty-six minutes later, they disconnected her, a little bit at a time, and nothing had changed, but when she opened her eyes the man in blue overalls said, “A simple child that draws its breath, and feels life in every limb, what should it know of death?”

And she smiled, in no apparent pain, and answered, “I met a little cottage girl, she was eight years old, she said; her hair was thick with many a curl that clustered round her head.”

They gave her a lift home, after the procedure, and she waved at them from the door of her house, and the next day got a 78 in her paper on cognition and culture, which was a ridiculously high mark, and went to English beaming, until her lecturer said,

“The little maid would have her will, and said, ‘Nay we are seven!’”

At which point Meredith turned, still smiling serenely, and, with the corner of her expensive grey laptop, smashed the brains out of the student sitting by her side.