15.5

‘Ah,’ said Mr Harris. ‘You’re awake, that’s good. You were having some kind of a fit.’ What was he doing in her condo? Perhaps staff had access to every building owned by the school. Harassed was kneeling by the side of her bed. He had a glass of water in one hand. Hatsuka realised that she’d drooled in her sleep and quickly wiped her mouth. ‘You may have just seen some things that confused you,’ said Harassed. ‘You’re undertaking some very sensitive counter-intelligence and it’s vitally important that you don’t spend too long undercover in one sitting.’

Hatsuka sat up.

‘Textbook stuff,’ said Harassed. ‘You’ll forget who you are, whose side you’re really on, et cetera, et cetera. A little like what’s happened to our friend Immanuel. Coffee on the veranda in ten minutes, okay?’ He left her to get up.

Hatsuka went to the bathroom and put toothpaste on her brush before looking up at the mirror. Immanuel? The silver asterisk was still floating by her left ear. She reached up and touched it and the room flooded with orange. It washed her back to the coloured papercut forest, the Matisse branding of the Nautilus interface. But something was askew: the trees were grimy, as if the paper had been dipped in resin, and the Ookami logo was just a black circle. No Holophin orbited.

Beyond the trees Hatsuka could see the entrance to the white marble hall. After the dirty paper trees, the hall looked refreshingly clean: a kitchen, a bathroom, like a spaceship from a science fiction film.[1] As she approached she could see two gurneys laid side by side in the hall. When she entered she saw that on one lay her father, unshaven and pockmarked. On the other her mother, her cheekbones too prominent. They were wired up to a bank of bleeping monitors and winking diadems.

This was a wrong turn in the narrative, and Hatsuka instinctively backed away as if she had caught a nail on a jumper and had to try very carefully to withdraw without tearing it. A smokescreen. The real news buried deep within a footnote to the smallprint. Her parents opened their eyes and looked at her, blinking.

There is a child that looks out of everyone’s eyes, said the Nautilus. Every life begins with such effort and such love. It is no coincidence that the tortured prisoner calls for his mother moments before he is shot. It is all so very, very sad.

A large monitor depicted red and green orbs floating around, bouncing off one another and sometimes landing in a white square at the bottom of the screen. When a green orb landed in the square it vanished and her parents’ breath became regular and audible. When a red orb landed in the box their muscles tensed and they seemed to be in pain. She touched the screen and found that the green orbs gathered around her finger and she could drag them to the white box where they vanished.

I strongly recommend you get out of here before you do any permanent damage, said Max’s Holophin.

The red orbs, when she touched them, burst. She dragged five green orbs to the box at once. Her parents sighed simultaneously. Her mother gave a mild but unmistakable smile.

And Hatsuka spent the rest of her life collecting glowing green orbs to keep her parents alive.

[1] Hatsuka won the Takin essay prize last year for her thesis on science fiction as sanitisation, the starship as glossy, white, well-maintained kitchen/bathroom, aliens as germs and disease. The Starship Enterprise as giant toilet.