Yet another day, another grey, smelly, rubbish-strewn day at the dump. There had been several deliveries, but two of them had been bulldozed straight into the ground without giving us any chance to scavenge. Slash and I were concealed, waiting for the vehicles to depart so we could head down and see what the day’s pickings would bring. They finally left around five o’clock and we were just about to scramble down when a lorry entered the grounds I hadn’t seen before. It bore the logo of Richardson’s Recycling.
I held Slash back and we watched as it halted, and out stepped a beautiful girl with a halo of black hair and a man carrying a rifle. They looked like they weren’t here to work. I turned up my camera’s digital zoom. Now I could tell the man was a hybrid. The rifle was part of his arm.
What about the girl? She had her hand in her pocket. As I watched she took it out—it was a mobile phone. I turned to Slash. “They’re hybrids. It’s cool, p’raps they’re looking for someone they know, one of us. Let’s go down.”
“I don’t recognise them myself,” he said and we ran down the slope kicking rubbish as we went. As we got near, the girl gave a cry of recognition.
She flung her good hand up to her face and started running towards us—it was me she was looking at. Next thing she was flinging her arms around me and crying on my filthy T-shirt. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
I guessed I should know her, but I couldn’t find a trace in my memory. Unless—those people who brought me here had mentioned a girl with black hair. Her arms encircled my torso, her hand and phone met in the small of my back. My own hands hung by my side. I guessed I must have known her well. I felt stupid.
Slowly, experimentally, I brought my arms up underneath hers and round her shoulders. She relaxed, but I still felt awkward. My arms seemed to recognise what they held. Had they done this before? In what circumstances? I inhaled her perfume, this wonderful scent drifting into a sensor under my chin, and suddenly something clicked inside. I don’t know what the smell reminded me of, but there came a vision of sunshine, long hair, smiling eyes and laughter. Where did that come from? Kestrella—oh yes, that was her name—felt the change inside me and pressed against my shoulder blades. I began to sob. I had no choice.
Yes, it is possible to cry without eyes: my body heaved, my chest expanded and collapsed rapidly. Strange noises emitted from my speakers. I had no idea what was appearing on my screen. All that time with the Flotsam, I’d given no thought to that. Now I began to panic. I shouldn’t let myself go like this. I’d seen what had happened to some of the others when they’d given in to their emotions. Self-pity gave way to self-abuse, like attacking the inorganic parts of their bodies, smashing their electronic attachments. I’d seen a girl like Kestrella punching concrete with her mobile phone. Later, she was weeping from the pain, fragments of metal, wires and skin hanging off her arm. She couldn’t talk properly, couldn’t think. Then the fever came. With some people, it left after a while. But with her, secondary infections set in. A week later, she was dead. Maybe it was what she’d wanted. For me it was another reason for keeping the floodgates closed.
I pushed Kestrella away. I couldn’t see properly. I remembered about a certain block of ice, that precious block of ice in my heart. I could feel it beginning to melt. I was aware that Kestrella had sat down beside me. She took my hand, she was whispering. What was she saying?
“It’s OK, it’s OK to cry, it’s good. You’ll feel better. Don’t fight it.”
I tried to speak but I couldn’t put words together. Exactly what I’d feared. Now she was stroking the back of my head.
“You need to cry. You’ve been through hell, Johnny.”
Suddenly the sobs came back. For no reason, no reason at all. I began to hit the side of my screen with the palm of my hand. She grabbed hold of my hand to stop me damaging myself. I resisted at first. Slowly, awareness of my surroundings returned, and there she was kneeling in front of me, gazing up with concern. Why was she doing this? I felt the block of ice melting inside, I felt the ground open up beneath me. Then I saw her hand on my wrist and looked for her other hand, the one that was a mobile phone. I saw how inflamed it was—bright red and flaking.
“Look—look at your wrist!” I managed to say.
“Yes, I know. It’s flared up since I last saw you. That damn I-So-L8. No good any more.” She hid her hand away.
“It’s OK,” she managed. “Compared to you it’s nothing.”
Meanwhile, the rifle hybrid had been talking with Slash. Slash had explained about the Flotsam, what they did, how they survived. How they thought they would all probably die here, as some of them already had. They were buried with the other rubbish.
“How many of you are there?” he asked.
“Thirty,” Slash said. “At the last count.”
The rifle man looked as though he were working something out in his head. Then he spoke. “I’m going to make you an offer. All of you. You like living here?”
“Sure, it’s like the Paris Hilton,” Slash replied, looking at me.
“How would you like it?” I said.
“And you all’re hybrids?”
“Sure. All types.”
“So,” he said. “How about if I said you can all come back with us and join our organised group of hybrids fighting for our rights, fighting the Gene Police? In exchange for a roof over your heads, a square meal once a day, security and friends, you would be joining the Hybrid Resistance Army, led by yours truly, Thom Gunn.”
“You know,” Kestrella told me. “They’re all inspired by that thing you wrote, Johnny—I mean—no, I’m sorry, I can’t call you Pixelface. You remember—the Declaration of the Rights of Hybrids.”
“The what?”
Gunn said, “Yeah, Kestrella said you wrote that. I wanna say that I’m so proud to meet you, Johnny, or Pixelface, or whatever you call yourself.” He held out his hand. I took it limply. “That—manifesto—is what inspired us to start the HRA.”
“I don’t remember anything about it,” I said.
“Well, I do,” said Slash. “I read it once. I thought, all right. That’s the business. That guy rocks. It speaks for all of us. Hey, I never knew you wrote that! You kept quiet about it!”
But search as I might I could find no trace of it in my files, whatever it was. “I’m sorry…” I muttered.
Gunn took my arm. “Come with us. You’ve had a hard time, comrade. We’ll tell you all about it when we get to HQ. What about the rest of them, Slash? Will they want to come?”
“He’s our leader, Thom,” said Slash. “If Pixelface says we go, what’s to stay for?” He looked at me expectantly. Kestrella’s expression made me go weak at the knees.
I shrugged. “Can’t be any worse than here, can it?”
Two hours later, all thirty of us were crammed into the back of the lorry, with Gunn, Kestrella and myself in front. Kestrella held my hand as she recounted how they found me.
“I thought you were still in the CGR. I wanted Thom to rescue you. He had contacts in the peace camp, so he called his friend and she said the army had evicted them from the land a couple of days earlier. They’re now banned from going within ten miles of the place. But then she said they’d found you—that somehow you’d managed to escape—and she told us where they’d brought you. So that’s how we got here! Oh, I’m so happy I found you!”
I told her what I’d pieced together: something about a combined retro and software virus they’d given me to wipe my memory clean. But I didn’t know how I’d escaped—it was all a blank. Kestrella said she’d help me get my memory back when we got to their hideout.
“I’m not sure I want it back,” I replied.
“Don’t talk like that,” she responded. “You’ve got to know who you are. You’ve got to face the truth. What would your friend Bruce Lee say?”
“Bruce Lee? Who’s he?” I said. “Somebody I know?”
“Oh, Johnny! You’ve got so much catching up to do. They must have really damaged you.”
The lorry rolled on. When we were safe inside the scrapyard, Gunn took the rest of the Flotsam to meet the resident members of his Hybrid Resistance Army. Together with those living off-site, there would now be nearly a hundred of them, he said, and you could see his eyes gleam with the thought of it. But he looked at me kind of suspiciously, as if I was a potential threat to his power.
Kestrella showed me the shower. Underneath the hot water I scrubbed off the accumulated grime and dust of the last few weeks from my skin, my hair, my fingernails, my plastic. It was luxury.
Afterwards I felt much better. She was waiting for me as I emerged from the bathroom wearing a white towelling bathrobe that Gunn had lent me.
“Mmm, you smell clean and bright as a newborn lamb,” she said.
I let my pixels form a rainbow. The rainbow glittered and sparkled and turned upside down into a radiant smile.
“You don’t really know who I am and probably I don’t really know who you are, but right now I don’t care,” I heard her say. “I just want you to know that I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind all the time we’ve been apart. I think you are the most amazing boy I have ever met: talented, thoughtful, kind…Come to me, come here,” she whispered.
I didn’t recognise myself in her description, but I approached gingerly. She held out her arms and slowly, warily, I moved into them. My chin resting upon her shoulder, our ears pressed against each other’s, flesh against flesh. We sank into each other like feet into quicksand.
“Tighter,” she said. “I thought I’d never see you again, and never be able to tell you how I felt about you.”
I felt the muscles in my body uncoil and a long groan fell out of my muffled speakers. We stayed like that for a while, feeling the warmth of each other’s bodies, me savouring her delicious, flowery fragrance, the fingers of my left hand stroking her long hair, while hers combed the dampness of my locks.
At this point an older woman entered.
“Oh, Maman,” said Kestrella. We drew apart a little and I recognised a family resemblance. “This is Johnny, the boy who was helping me look for you. Johnny, this is my mother, Jacquelyn. I found her—but I guess you don’t remember she was lost!”
I didn’t. Jacquelyn came over and placed a hand on each of our shoulders. She recoiled slightly at my appearance.
In my cracked electronic voice I said, “I don’t know how to thank you for rescuing us.”
Jacquelyn smiled, stiffly. “You don’t have to say anything and you certainly don’t have to thank us. We had to track you down in order to preserve my daughter’s peace of mind! Really, we were getting so bored with her going on about you!”
Question marks flashed over my liquid crystals. “I don’t know who you are,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s what they’ve done to me.”
“You’ve been through a terrible experience,” Kestrella said. “But it’s over now. You’re with friends.”
“I didn’t know I had any,” I said.
“Oh, my precious, I’m your friend! And now we’re together I’m never going to leave you again. Listen,” she said. “I have an idea for how you can get your memory back. Come here!” She took me by the hand and led me into an office in the corner of the warehouse where there was a computer connected to the Internet. Her mother watched us leave with an expression that left no doubt she was disturbed by her daughter’s choice of boyfriend.
“Once,” said Kestrella, “you told me that you backed up your files all over the Internet, splitting them and putting them in different places, encrypting them or something. I don’t know. Anyway, why don’t you have a look? Here, I’ll sit by you while you do it.”
And so I did. I used the Internet connection to explore. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. But somewhere in my files I’d already found server addresses, usernames and passwords, and I’d wondered why they were there. By typing in some of these randomly and getting results Pixelface was able to realise how Johnny had organised and hidden his work.
Kestrella sat behind me with her arms draped over my shoulders. Every so often I’d utter little grunts of satisfaction, or shouts of frustration. Finally, hours later, I logged out and turned around gently to find that she’d gone to sleep, her cheek against my back. I felt like a different person. I lifted her shoulders and she raised her eyelids.
“It’s coming back. There’s still big gaps—it’s like a jigsaw with pieces missing. For example, I found my blog site with the Declaration on it. And I’ve discovered who you are. You came into my life and rescued me from the streets.” Her hand was exploring my hands. I tried, by brushing my fingers tenderly over hers, to say how I felt in a way that seemed more human than my voice could.
“Yes,” she smiled. “I did. And now I’ve rescued you again. Seems to be becoming a habit. Do you know why I did it this time?”
I shook my head. And I heard her say words I thought I would never hear from anybody. “Because I think I love you, Johnny.”
I had no idea how to respond to this. To start with, she used the name Johnny. But from my limited new knowledge I didn’t like the person that Johnny was. He was bitter and full of hate and anger. Before that I’d just read that I was Robert—the name my mother had given me. But I knew next to nothing about him either because I’d written little about that. More recently, I’d been Pixelface. I guessed I felt more like him than any of them. But he was quickly fading. The one thing I did know was that life was changing around me faster than a security software upgrade and I was changing to keep up with it, as well as changing within my body. I was very aware that Creep was gradually taking over my body, modifying my cells. Would my self-knowledge ever be able to keep up with all these changes?
For now, I decided not to worry about any of this and just enjoy the moment. We hugged for a time without measure and then I said: “Here’s something funny. I just found it in one of my files. Shortly after I met you I wrote that I could never have a girlfriend because no girl’d ever want to go out with someone she couldn’t kiss.”
“Oh!” Kestrella laughed and started pecking my neck with rapid kisses. “Any girl with any sense would love you for what they can see inside and not care what you look like! It’s like me thinking nobody would want to go out with me because they can’t hold my hand.”
“That’s really stupid,” I blurted. “I mean, there’s lots of other things to hold!”
And we both burst out laughing. My pixels painted a desert island all sunshine, sand, blue sea and palm trees.
“Yes, it is like paradise, isn’t it?” she said. “God, Johnny, you were so closed up. You were so ’I can do it on my own, sod off’. Like you really had something to prove.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t know that till I’d lost everything. Now I’m starting again from scratch. I feel—like a new man!”
“You are!” she laughed. “In more ways than one.”
We ate with the others—takeaways donated by Charlie Richardson, the yard’s owner. Slash sat by me—like the other Flotsams he was happy. I’d never seen them happy.
“I always thought you’d get us out of that dump, Pixelface,” he smiled. “You’re a hero, man!” It felt good, but it didn’t seem to me like I’d done anything.
“Yeah, man—decent nosh! Forgotten what it tasted like!” shouted Metal Gristle further down the table, waving his spoon in the air. I looked at the people I’d come to think of as my friends—Wirey, Plasma, Remote, Poker and the rest. They were all tucking in like they hadn’t eaten for months. Well, they hadn’t, not properly that is.
“I guess that means you want to stay,” I said.
“You know what they say,” joked Gunn. “An army marches on its stomach! Of course you’re going to stay—and give the Gene Police a taste of their own medicine! Eh, Johnny?” He turned to look seriously at me, and the rest of the Flotsam looked too, waiting for my reaction. But I wasn’t convinced yet.
“I need to know more about what you’re up to first, Thom,” I replied.
So later, I looked in on the training. In a cleared space inside a warehouse, seventy youngsters were doing a ramshackle drill. Somehow, I didn’t feel like joining in. Something about it didn’t feel right. A bunch of underage misfits thinking they could take on the state, led by an elder boy with a rifle for an arm. Kestrella sniffed and said she wouldn’t trust Thom Gunn further than she could throw a tissue. Followed by Gunn’s suspicious gaze she led me back to the office, where I continued my research. I was following obscured data trails through the net to collect pieces of the jigsaw that was me, trying to fit them together without a guide. Pretty soon I came across something that made me shout out loud.
“What is it?” asked Kes.
“I’ve found a mailbox. Five weeks’ unanswered mail: 5000 messages.”
“Uh-oh. Nightmare. Maybe I’ll go and work out for a bit while you sort through them. Au revoir!”
She kissed my head and left. I began to trawl through it, sorting out the spam, hate mail and mail from online buddies. Pretty soon I noticed 30 emails from the same .gsi.gov.uk email address—that’s a government address. Curious. Why would somebody in the government be trying so hard to get in touch with me?
I opened one and got another big surprise. I printed it and went off to show Kestrella.
“It’s from my dad,” I said. “He wants to meet me.”