The Actuality Page 26

  Then the remaining slat Sola is on flips and she is swung under. For a few seconds she dangles upside down, hair hanging in the wet air . . .

  Then plummets, her scream snatched from her by the roar of the water.

  37

  Evie clings to the tangled rope. The churning water rages between the rock walls. She peers down for Sola and spots her head in the foam.

  The men are just four or five yards away. They shout at her to return, saying that they will not harm her, that instead only good things lie in store. But they are lying and have given David a net, which he casts towards her. It is a long throw but delivered with mechanical precision, and catches her around her shoulder, clinging stickily and gluing up her fingers.

  She wrenches it free. Tottering on the wet planks, she gives him one last look. But there is nothing for her there.

  No longer caring what may happen to her, Evie lets herself drop.

  Evie goes straight under. The water is shockingly cold, even to her, knocking out her breath. She gasps, taking in a chestful of water. Her ears yowl. Her nostrils fill.

  Channelled between the hills, the river below the rapid surface is deep and the muscular current grips her. The sun is above, glowing through the layer of water like plate glass.

  A moment later it is below, gleaming up.

  The current tugs at her clothes. Rocks pass close to her shoulder. She reaches for a branch and a handful of leaves come away in her fingers.

  A root grabs her ankle, drags her back, snaps . . .

  . . . and she catapults forward.

  Evie breaks the surface, her lungs empty. A wave crashes over her head, stunning her. She goes down. Her shoulder strikes a wall of rock. She is swung about, rebounds like a pebble, and again breaks the surface.

  ‘Sola,’ she shouts above the roar, water filling her mouth, which she cannot afford to happen.

  The current races her along past the bank, the dangling branches out of her reach.

  ‘SOLA!’

  For a moment she sees the girl’s head near hers. She stretches for her arm, but her hand closes around nothing. She stares into the foam where she’d been . . .

  The broken water spins her about.

  Evie sees her again. They shoot through a canyon. A drop looms ahead.

  She watches Sola slip between the rocks, the length of her body gliding over the edge heels first. Evie follows her, striking the surface hard.

  Here the river forms a basin and lumps of granite confuse the flow. She grabs for one and her nails gain a hold but then slide over the pitted surface as the river tugs away her legs. Evie takes another gulp of water, and feels it collect inside, filling tubes and cavities. Is this drowning?

  She sees Sola again. The child is twenty yards from her, sailing backwards through water that is now green rather than white, an arm stretched above her head.

  ‘SOLA!’

  Evie throws herself in her direction, swimming instinctively over-arm with all her strength, discovering the ability within her although it makes no sense that they would have programmed it. Her shoulder strikes granite and she is spun about. She grabs hold. Clings on. Treads water.

  She clambers onto the slab, her sodden clothes hanging. Sola is fifteen yards away, trapped in the eddy where the river curls sharply back upon itself.

  ‘Sola!’ Evie shouts, above the racket of the water. She crawls across the rock and, reaching the other edge, leaps to the next.

  She is close and can see Sola clearly. The girl’s head bobs like a cork. Her neck is cast back. Her mouth hangs open. Her face is washed over by the swell, disappearing under the surface for a second or two at a time before re-emerging.

  Evie plunges and swims.

  And becomes ensnared in the same centrifuge.

  Grasping the child’s arm, she reels her in and holds her against her, keeping her head above the water. ‘Sola, Sola,’ she wails.

  The girl lies limply in her arms and Evie crushes her to herself, her cheek against Sola’s forehead, sobbing into her hair.

  She pushes out with her free arm for the closest rock, feeling the steeply shelved riverbed under her feet. Shielded from the flow, she lifts Sola from the water and places her on the granite.

  Evie wipes beads of moisture from her temples. The child’s skin gleams in the noon sun. Her cheek is so smooth, so soft, but also as clammy as stone.

  She lays her head on the child’s neck, listening for her breath, but absorbing only the green smell of the river. She attempts a clumsy resuscitation, not knowing how to go about it, pumping her chest and blowing into her mouth. She stares down at her still face. She cups her palm over her lips but feels nothing. She puts her ear to her chest again, even now desperate to believe.

  ‘Sola, Sola, Sola,’ she whispers, cradling her in her arms.

  The rocks are just close enough to step from one to another, albeit a daunting stretch in places, and algae, moss and slick weed make each leap hazardous. In addition, the solidity of the stone after the motion of the river leaves her heavy-footed – one moment the ground rising to meet her boot, the next plunging – so that the child’s body swings in her arms.

  Evie lays her gently on the bank and kneels above her.

  The girl stares up, eyes wide and a vivid cornflower-blue in the yellow sunlight. Evie strokes her hair helplessly, then, collapsing over her, lays her face against the child’s cold skin.

  38

  Evie moves slowly between the trees, her damp clothes clinging to her legs and arms. Her trousers are stiff with silt from the river, rubbing her thighs. A strand of bright green weed is coiled in Sola’s hair like a ribbon, creating a false braid. She thinks to remove it but lets it hang.

  She is drained. Head drooping. Energy almost spent. And the child in her arms grows heavier at each step. But she has survived. Her systems didn’t fizz or shut down on contact with the water. Where had any of that caution come from? She can’t remember – the sense of fear has always been with her, repeated endlessly in her inner ear by Simon until she believed that any excess moisture would cause her to seize up like the Tin Man.

  The river has taken its toll, however. Her skin is torn by the rocks and frayed insulation exposes a loom of wiring around her hip.

  More painful than the physical damage is the loneliness.

  Amidst the numbing rhythm of moving one leg and then the other, she ponders the enigma of David and why he betrayed her. Except that it wasn’t him any more, just his shell. Maybe they’d accessed his memory to find out about her plans to come to Am See. Maybe they hadn’t needed to. As Evelyn had demonstrated, it was near-impossible to travel without being tracked. Perhaps they wiped his cortex, polished away both consciousness and identity like steam from a mirror, and rebooted him as a machine. Or maybe when they’d dragged him out of the Seine, that was all they were able to revive.

  It didn’t matter. David, whatever was left of him, was beyond her reach.

  Evie’s chin dips. She catches herself entering standby and her head jerks back up.

  As Evie climbs, the ground turns barren. The trees shrink, becoming crooked, the thin soil rinsed from under their bony roots to reveal jagged rocks. The landscape grows larger, harder and sharper.

  The hillside narrows until the only way forward is by a single steep trail as constricted as attic steps, with the rock face on one side, rearing over her, and a descent to the treetops on the other. The ground is littered with lumps of stone washed from the cliff above. Roots break the surface, lifting and tilting ledges of rock to form a giant’s stairway, the treads of which are in places up to a yard apart. Here and there iron rungs, pitted with rust, have been driven into the cracks. With both arms holding the child’s body, she struggles to climb, scraping her elbows and tearing her shins.

  At the top the ground plateaus. Below her stretches the canopy of trees. At first it is difficult to establish the geography, which only emerges slowly in the form of the paths and rocks she has traversed
to reach this spot. The river that took the child’s life runs along the valley’s floor catching the sun with flashes like from a mosaic laid with broken mirror.

  She is tempted to leap, to end it all, but self-preservation is too deeply fixed in her and despite the hopelessness of her situation, she backs away from the edge.

  She descends again into a shallow valley and presses through shoulder-height ferns, so that it would seem to an observer that she swims with her head above the fronds.

  Evie becomes aware of lying face down in the dirt, her body crushing that of the child. She can’t hide from the pain in her chest, nor the high-pitched off-axis whine of the gyroscope as it violently spins. Picking up the girl, she staggers on.

  Almost invisible between the trees and lumps of stone, she sees a small building with a steeply pitched roof, built close to the rock face.

  She pushes the door inward with her shoulder.

  Inside, narrow windows pierce the walls, and behind an altar coloured glass casts a mosaic over the wooden pews. A vase of shrivelled flowers stands in a niche.

  The light reminds her of the church she was married in, where it all started forty-one years ago. Forty-one years isn’t so bad, many humans don’t get that long. Forty-one years and she’s still just twenty-one. Is that a riddle or a piece of arithmetic? And how to work out the answer – borrow from one side or simply take away?

  Evie lays Sola’s body on the altar, making a pillow for her head with her jacket, smoothing her damp hair from her face and spreading it over the stone. She kneels and closes her eyes and tries to pray. Seeking a god, who, even if found, would deny her existence as beyond its creation.

  Her knees tremble. Her power has as good as run out and she slumps with her back to the wall. The sun from the window falls on her neck and face.

  Her eyes close and she is visited by an image of Evelyn sprawled by her piano, her stick trapped between her hip and the floor, her grey hair plastered to her scalp, the blood from her splintered skull forming a pool.

  Did she really do that? Did she in her fury pick the woman up, ignore her terrified pleas and throw her across the room against the wall? In the process, revealing herself to be capable of exactly the kind of ghastly violence that she and her kind are accused of ?

  Had Sola watched open-mouthed as she did it, Evelyn’s blood spattered in a startling splash of red over her white pinafore? Was it truly the endpoint of her ill-fated journey, to erase from life the actuality behind her existence?

  Deep within, Evie feels Simon stir. His voice, which has been so absent of late, rouses itself in a last desperate bid to endure and transcend her fragile shell. But as her mind darkens, it is neither he, nor a murder, nor any god, that fills her head but an encoded memory, buried as deep as a fossil and which for forty years has lain out of sight.

  In it, she is a small child, maybe even younger than Sola. Her mother, face alight in the sunshine, is spinning her by the hands. Evie’s hair, girlishly long, flies out in a tail and her feet are one moment on the ground and the next in the air.

  Notes on the text

  The created world of The Actuality

  Europe as depicted in The Actuality is over a hundred years further down what seems to be an inevitable descent into climate change and pollution. As a writer trying to invent a cohesive future, I had to consider how the different factors would interact and what was possible or likely in the time frame. Everything I included needed to be plausible.

  Some of it is obvious: we can expect more extreme temperatures. England I depict as colder in winter, because of the failure of the Gulf Stream, but Paris milder and the Austrian Alps relatively balmy, despite it being still only January when Evie visits. The more extreme impacts on southern lands are to be indirectly witnessed such as through Evie’s glimpse of the vast camps for immigrants she passes in the train after crossing into France.

  I think we can expect man-made pollution to have had a significant deleterious impact on the food chain, with increased contamination of agricultural and fishery produce. From this, it seems not unreasonable to assume that fertility will decline, birth defects increase and, in general, life expectancy shorten. The effect would be a population in sudden steep decline.

  The resulting deterioration in economic activity would lead to increased hardship, in extreme cases reminiscent of the early industrial age. I enjoyed including imagery of Victorian horses and carts alongside the state-of-the-art, such as the hovacar stolen by Daniels with its holo-guidance system.

  Buildings and infrastructure require continuous maintenance – steel rusts, concrete fractures and roots squeeze into the resulting cracks and expand. It has been shown in studies of the area around Chernobyl, abandoned just thirty years ago, how quickly the modern world backslides when left to its own devices. In The Actuality, under-occupied tall buildings, many over a century-and-a-half old, have become unsafe and complex transport systems are failing. The London Underground, so dependent on being pumped dry twenty-four hours a day, is drowning under rising water levels, making it hard to get around.

  Under all this pressure, society is fragmenting and becoming insular, with communities shunning strangers – you get a glimpse of this when Evie and Daniels pass through a barrier at the end of the canal path erected by the local East End estate. On a national level, the UK now comprises only England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland having gone their own ways – a scenario which may soon not be so imaginary.

  But not all are losers. Apart from the option of hiding away like Matthew, those agile enough to adapt would be able to reap the benefits that technological advance brings. In The Actuality this has led to pockets of affluence, such as Cambridge, wedged uncomfortably alongside a crumbling society powered by human toil. The outcome would be civil unrest and its inevitable concomitant heavy-handed policing, and even the unworldly Evie quickly becomes aware that the main purpose of the police in 2130 is to protect the haves from the have-nots.

  Technology in The Actuality

  Technological advances, in just a few years, have created pocket devices thousands of times more powerful than the original room-sized mainframes, and the pace is accelerating. The internet as we know it is still just in its early twenties – no more than a young adult. What will the next ten years hold? The next twenty? The next fifty?

  Evie is created in 2091, seventy-two years from the time of writing. For certain there will have been fundamental breakthroughs by then, transforming science fiction into everyday fact. Bioengineering, perhaps the next frontier, will surely be generating new substances and structures to far surpass the humble limits of traditional materials.

  Artificial intelligence will fuel this, with AI entities sharing and learning and then harnessing that knowledge to improve upon themselves in a virtuous loop. It is fiercely debated among scientists whether these entities will ultimately achieve ‘consciousness’, and what even that means, but from their inception they will be capable of independent analysis and decision making, the usefulness and safety of which will be completely dependent on how well their goals are programmed.

  Such entities of course do not require a human-shaped shell, and in many ways such a structure would be limiting. On the other hand, a familiar exterior, a mirror unto ourselves, would facilitate interaction and the commercial applications are more than obvious, indeed they would be screaming out to corporations like Realhuman.

  In The Actuality, the lowest of such devices are the mannequins collected by Maplin, designed to assist humans but limited both physically and intellectually. Above them are advanced service models, such as the assistant David and Evie encounter on the train, programmed to perform repetitive tasks with dexterity but not to go further. Above them are the so called AABs – Artificial Autonomous Beings – able to operate independently, the most sophisticated of which are physically indistinguishable from humans. At the top of the pyramid are those AABs which have had the opportunity to develop human-like thought processes and
the associated messy baggage of conscience and morality. These are the legacy of a braver time, before a global crackdown. Very few still exist. Some of those that do are in private hands, as Evie is at the start of the novel, some are corporately owned like David and some, like Yuliya, having outlived their original owners, survive below the radar.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First of all, thanks to Joanna Swainson, my agent, for believing in me and making this possible.

  Thanks to everyone at Sandstone Press and in particular my super-talented editor, Kay Farrell, who always knows what is needed and has a nice way of asking.

  Thanks to my friends and family for being patient over the years and have read my previous work. You know who you are and I know who you are!

  And of course thanks to Mary and Thomas – who have had to put up with me talking about all of this for far too long and have been so enthusiastic about my success. This is my dream come true.

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