One
They had her in a room, her wrists kissing under cable ties.
I put my hand to the smoky glass. She was familiar. The frizzy hair. The way her stubby fingers tapered to tiny, nimble tips. Her huge stomach and gelatinous haunches strained the men’s orange prison issue they had given her to wear. Ebony lids kept trying to slide shut over bloodshot eyes.
‘Let her out,’ I said and a current ran down my scalp to the back of my neck.
‘It’s working,’ the white woman behind me said, checking a hand-held device. But I didn’t care about that.
‘Who is she? Let her out.’
‘She’s Marwa,’ the man with the moustache said. He smiled but his lips didn’t move; instead, it was a strange spreading and parting of salt and pepper bristle. ‘And you’re Marwa B.’
My face in the glass was the same as Marwa’s. There was a word for that. When I said it, a shock ran down my scalp again.
‘I’m a clone?’
‘You’re not a clone. You look identical because we need the sensory net to be the same. But Marwa’s natural DNA doesn’t have acceleration capacity. The thing that matters is your brain is a facsimile of hers, only we’ve loosened your synapses. Can’t make connections that are already made, after all. Now go outside. Experience things. Paris awaits.’
Out of context, his gibberish meant nothing to me. I felt overwhelmed by colours and sounds, even in that muffled darkness.
The white woman took my arm.
We passed the door to Marwa’s cell and I stopped to touch the cold keyhole, but something was wrong. I stared at that hole and for a moment I couldn’t remember what belonged inside of it. Pencils? Wakefulness? Satiety? Light?
All I knew was that I wanted it to open.
‘This way,’ the white woman insisted.
She led me through chilly, sun-washed streets. I saw little cars and long buses. I heard laughter. Pigeons cooed in empty stone archways under the eyes of corroded angels.
Everything I saw and heard, I could identify. Little shocks down my scalp each time.
Darkness approached. I smelled chocolate and geraniums in window boxes, their dropped petals crushed underfoot. The white woman led me back to the police station. She put her hand-held machine into a bigger machine.
‘Nothing,’ the moustached man said irately. ‘Tomorrow send her out by herself.’
He popped a boiled sweet into his mouth and sucked on it sharply.
Two
Thinking was easier. The world made more sense.
They released me out onto Rue La Fayette with coins in my hand. I studied a timetable and took the metro to Tuileries Station. Boys in hoods jumped over the turnstiles. I smelled cigarette smoke on cashmere jackets and the metallic worn-brake tang common to trains all over the world.
All over the world?
I could remember images from yesterday but it was difficult to think of anything prior to seeing the girl behind the glass. There might have been a wrinkled hand, turning the pages of a book. The warmth of a giant lap. Maybe there was a boy, with a broad, flat nose and a keyboard smile.
But I’d have to see them to be sure. I’d have to see them to remember their names.
Had the man with the moustache sent me out to recover a memory? Marwa’s memory? Why hadn’t his name come to me? Was he a stranger? He’d said I couldn’t make connections that were already made. I tried to make connections but I didn’t have enough information. The thoughts were too difficult. I discarded them.
I saw the river gleaming and I remembered its name, la Seine.
A man with a peaked cap and a rumbling bass voice sang a song about swallows on the riverbank. He had a second cap, on the ground, with a few coins in it. I dropped one of my coins into it. My feet wanted to keep walking. There was a way, somewhere close to here, that I had walked sometimes, in secret. A place that nobody was supposed to know about.
‘Cage them and their hearts stop,’ the man sang.
I knew the next line of the song. I opened my mouth wide and felt lightness in the pit of my stomach.
‘You cannot keep them any more than a crocus keeps the dew.’
My voice was high and pure.
I remembered singing in a peaceful place with tall windows of aquamarine and navy blue.
The old man reached his gnarled hand out for mine. I gave it to him and he drew me closer, so that we both stood behind the cap on the ground. His lips curved joyfully as he sang the next line.
‘Do they mourn their fallen?’
I answered with the chorus.
‘The clouds do not mourn their death as rain to be free in the time that you have is more precious than gowns in thread of gold and Tyrian purple silk.’
A woman in a red trench coat dropped a handful of coins into the hat. A dozen other pedestrians followed suit.
When the song was finished, the old man took some of the coins and came back with two tiny cups of strong coffee. I drank, but it was so bitter. I wrinkled up my face and gave the paper cup back to him.
He laughed. He gave me an almond croissant in a paper bag.
We ate and drank and sang together all the rest of the day.
The white woman came to fetch me at sunset.
Three
‘I’m telling you,’ the white woman hissed, ‘she’s defective. She didn’t like the coffee.’
‘And I’m telling you,’ the moustached man replied, ‘it’s a one-off. Statistically insignificant. They’re not the same down to the last molecule but they’re close enough.’
He offered me a boiled sweet and I took it. It tasted of raspberry and cream.
‘Two days wasted,’ she said.
‘I think you should take her to the airport today. Run her past some of the potential targets.’
I saw swallows at Charles de Gaulle airport. Criss-crossing, clear plastic tunnels conveyed travellers up and down. I heard jet engines and the foul language of baggage handlers. I saw flashing signs with lists of departure times and destinations.
An army base. A naval base. More airports, secret ones, nestled between hillside farms and bored into mountains. Feedlots full of accelerated cows and chickens flew by the windows.
There was a tree on an airstrip, wired to a stake. The wire was cutting into the bark. I removed it. The ends had been trimmed close and twisted tightly with pliers, but my short fingers tapered to tiny, nimble tips and I was able to untwist them.
I stared at my fingers in the car on the way back to the police station. Acceleration was ubiquitous in agriculture, illegal in humans. Yet, they had made me. They’d loosened my synapses.
Why?
Four
A new woman appeared at the station.
She had a tight grey bun on top of her head, and she had no name, either. When she came into the moustached man’s office, he jumped to his feet, the white woman beside him.
‘Sit,’ the bun-lady barked.
They sat. I shifted, not sure what to do, but the bun-lady ignored me.
‘So. She’s not talking. And yet you have not handed her to a higher authority.’
‘We have a complete dream sequence,’ the man answered quickly. ‘Repeatedly elicited in response to the subliminal messages regarding the second target. She isn’t talking but she can’t stop dreaming.’
‘Explain.’
‘Suppose Marwa B has experience X, which triggers brain pattern Y. We record pattern Y. When Marwa dreams and we see pattern Y, we then know she is experiencing X in the dream state. Marwa B carries audio and video recorders, so when the computer is through compiling, we can see into Marwa’s dreams, in a manner of speaking.’
‘But?’
‘But we haven’t got a great deal of overlap so far between Marwa B’s experiences and Marwa’s dreams.’
‘What have you got, exactly?’
The moustached man nervously checked the computer.
‘A little girl in the Tuileries blowing dandelion clocks. A lady eating a hot crossed bun. A busker striking a match.’
Bun-lady became livid.
‘We have three days,’ she shouted, ‘and you’re telling me the bomb is hidden in a place with dandelions, buskers and sticky confectionary? That could be anywhere in the world!’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘Can’t you show her photographs of actual cities?’
‘That would invalidate the process. It only works when she experiences things directly. There isn’t enough time to fly her to all the possible places, but most cities have things in common. We hope for a metaphorical pastiche—’
‘I’ll turn you into a metaphorical pastiche if that second bomb goes off.’
Moustache man swallowed. ‘We will do better.’
‘You could hardly do worse. Waste your time with the dream sequence if you wish. I’m taking the old-fashioned road. I want the contact list. Communications records. Family tree right down to every dead leaf and shrivelled root.’
‘Ma’am, we don’t even know her last name.’
‘Send her to the Agency. They’ll find out.’
‘But the treaty. The international observers.’
‘Lives are at stake. Don’t you understand? Now get your useless science experiment out of my sight.’
My brain, a hundred zippers ripped apart and then zipped up again, couldn’t process all the things I’d heard. Some of the words made no sense to me. I needed to see the things the words described for my mind to file them in their proper place.
I was made to be a window into Marwa’s head and yet I’d inherited no clear memories.
Otherwise, I would already know what the bun-lady and the moustached man were trying to find out. But maybe if I knew, I wouldn’t want to tell them any more than Marwa did.
If I did find it out, I would have no choice about telling the white woman or not telling because something would happen in my brain and they would have it. They would see it.
My thoughts were not mine.
I tried to think what I should do, how I should escape, but I remembered how they had Marwa in that room with her hands tied so she couldn’t get away and I thought they’d do that to me too if I tried to run.
Maybe they would even know I was going to run before I knew it myself.
The white woman took me to famous landmarks. I looked without saying anything.
I saw a seashell-white church. In front of the steps, there was a carousel with tinny music and angry, gilded horses. I saw men in black robes outside the Palais de Justice. I smelled a hundred perfumes on the Champs Élysées.
There was an eternal flame. It would always burn, the engraving said. But people were not eternal. Not even the sun would burn forever, so what hope did that leaping sprite have?
Five
‘They found out her name,’ the white woman whispered, not to me.
‘Did they find the bomb?’
‘They found her boyfriend. A student at the University.’
‘I suppose he’s not talking, either.’
‘No, he isn’t. He’s dead.’
‘Huh. Was it the Agency? Did they … you know. Did they torture him?’
‘No. The Hand got to him first. Now Marwa is the only link we have.’
‘We don’t have her, though, do we? And maybe they got her last name, but I bet they didn’t get it from her. You saw the file. She’s got an IQ of a hundred and sixty-five.’
‘We have the dream sequence. That’s all we need.’
I pretended to be in a kind of daze, but I watched the moustached man put his identification badge in a drawer. He locked the drawer with a key. He dropped the key into his boiled sweet jar.
The white woman took me to the dirtiest, darkest parts of the city. I smelled rotting garbage. I heard shouts and running footsteps. Once, a gunshot. I walked up stairs and down stairs.
Then, we found a dead baby, wrapped in a sheet. The white woman had to call her friends before we could go any further.
I cried. Maybe it was because I couldn’t really remember anyone that Marwa loved. The baby could have been hers; it could have been mine. Maybe it was worse when someone died that you didn’t know. At least if you knew them, you could remember them.
The baby was like a priceless painting burned before it could be revealed to anyone.
At the station, I asked the white woman for a boiled sweet. She gave me one to keep me quiet while she worked.
They matched another part of Marwa’s dream. It was a pile of cardboard boxes blowing over in the wind.
Six
The moustached man took me out on the sixth day.
His eyes bulged and he barely said a word; just shoved me into restaurant rooms and empty clubs. I saw art deco lamps, mirrors, wine and waiters in white aprons serving expensive, non-accelerated meats. I heard jostling and cursing as stages were assembled and screeching as microphones were set up. Night fell, and we didn’t go back to the station. After a while, the clubs were no longer empty. I saw breasts and vulvas. I smelled sweat and semen. I heard loud, thumping, electronic music, car alarms and barking dogs.
In the early hours of the morning, I saw a man in an alley, wearing a baker’s hat, unlocking the back door of his patisserie. His eyes widened when he saw me. The moustached man had a tight grip on my arm. I stumbled with exhaustion.
‘Hey, are you alright?’ the baker called.
‘Yes,’ I called back.
But I wasn’t.
Seven
‘Is she Muslim?’
‘No, Ma’am,’ the moustached man said. ‘Not as far as we know. She was in a church choir. Her parents were non-practicing Evangelical.’
‘Were?’ snapped the bun-lady.
‘They died in the UraniumSafe disaster. That’s the motive we’ve been looking at all along for the Hand organisation. But we can’t be sure. Nobody claimed responsibility for the first bombing.’
‘The UraniumSafe Initiative had six founding member states. One of them has been attacked already. There are five remaining countries. Tell me what new information you have.’
‘Two ducks and a baker’s hat, Ma’am.’
‘You are kidding me.’
‘No, Ma’am.’
‘I think it’s time for Marwa B to take another trip to the Tuileries. This time, dress her like a hot screw with a cheap DirectNutrition scar, put Lady Adelaide’s mark on her palms and set her up for business on Muddy Brothers turf.’
‘They’ll kill her.’
‘Maybe. Maybe that’s what Marwa’s dream is about.’
They spoke as if I didn’t exist, as if my own life or death meant nothing to me. I struggled not to react, to keep my face blank and my eyes distanced.
‘Come on, Marwa B,’ the moustached man said irritably. He took me to another room and gave me chains and braided leather to wear. With black ink, he painted mermaids on my palms, and with white clay he fashioned something small and bumpy on the back of my neck.
He wrapped me in a long, brown coat.
We went to the gardens and sat on a bench.
‘Do you have to do what she says?’ I asked.
He looked startled.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you have to do what I say, or we’ll switch you to manual control. It won’t be realistic but it’ll be better than letting you run away.’
Manual control. So I wasn’t like the accelerated cows and chickens. I had some robotic parts in me. Of course I did. The little shocks of connection. They travelled to the back of my head. I put my hand there and touched only skin. It was inside of me. I couldn’t get it out.
When darkness began to crawl across the sky, the moustached man took my brown coat away. It was cold.
‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens.’
I shivered, alone on the bench. I saw the wind in the trees, a black bag fluttering in a garbage bin and an empty food container forgotten on the path.
I closed my eyes, focusing on recreating that scene, that experience, in my head. I could fool that robotic part. I was smarter than it.
Eyes still clenched, I set my body adrift; it began crawling towards the garbage bin. In my head, I saw the wind in the trees. The black bag fluttering. The empty food container. I concentrated hard on feeling the wooden planks of the bench pressing into my bare thighs, my shivering folded arms against my hard nipples, as if I hadn’t moved an inch.
Not the graze of my knees, or the feel of the plastic bin liner in my hands. By touch, I emptied the garbage out of the bag. It was big enough to fit over my head. My fingers stretched it, trying to tear a hole in it for my head. I would put it on and I would get out of the park. They didn’t know what I was feeling; only what I saw and heard.
By memory, I emblazoned the scene from the bench on the back of my eyelids. The wind in the trees. The fluttering bag. The empty food container.
‘Who are you?’ a gruff male voice demanded. Somebody grabbed my wrists.
My eyes snapped open.
Three young men, with black knitted hats on their heads and beer bottles in their hands, stood in a triangle around me. The one who had grabbed me uncurled my stubby, tapering fingers, staring at the mermaid.
‘It’s one of Lady Adelaide’s.’
‘Doesn’t belong here.’
‘Let’s break it.’
‘Smash it.’
‘Yes.’
I came to consciousness back in my cell. There was daylight in the tiny window.
Daylight. My heart stretched towards it. I ached all over. One of my eyes was swollen shut.
‘She’s awake,’ the white woman said dispassionately.
‘Good,’ the moustached man said. ‘They damaged the unit. It was recording but not broadcasting. We’ll have to remove it for analysis.’
I tried not to scream when he touched the back of my battered head. Two unnoticed metal pins turned abruptly to ice skewers in my brain. He pulled them out; handed a blood-smeared electronic part to the white woman.
‘We’re supposed to observe her for thirty minutes after removal,’ she said.
‘Bring her to the office. We can observe her while we’re running the match.’
‘If we get the match? What do we do with her then?’
‘Nothing. She’s only built to last a week. By sundown she’ll start autolysis. She’ll be entirely broken down by the morning.’
‘If we don’t get a match?’
‘We’ll get the surgeon to put it back in and send her out again while we can.’
In the office, the white woman’s computer zapped and bleeped. Pink spots lit up in her cheeks.
‘A complete match,’ she said. ‘All the pieces have come together. Call the others in, quickly.’
The moustached man began tapping buttons on his communicator. Police and others in different uniforms began crowding the room.
‘Can I have a boiled sweet?’ I asked.
‘It can wait,’ the white woman snapped.
‘It can’t really,’ the moustached man told her. ‘She’s accelerated. Needs to keep eating.’
The white woman handed me the whole jar.
Bun-lady arrived, flanked by men in dark suits.
‘Show me,’ she ordered.
Projected onto the wall, a bright city flickered to life. Its skyline was made up of cardboard boxes, matchboxes, sweet jars and upturned paper coffee cups. The sky itself was a stained glass window, aquamarine and navy blue.
Ferries represented by ducks plied the city’s waterways. There was a great statue at the entrance to the harbour. It was a boy in a black knitted hat. He held a bottle by its neck, raising it threateningly above his head. Fire flickered at the base of the bottle. An eternal flame.
‘It’s New York,’ the white woman breathed.
The viewpoint shifted. It zoomed down into the streets; to a crossroads that was the icing on a hot-crossed bun. There, a package like a wrapped boiled sweet sat at the base of a street lamp which was actually one of the art deco lamps I had seen in a café.
‘I want that spot cross-referenced with satellite pictures,’ bun-lady said.
Suddenly, explosively, the boiled sweet came unwrapped. The cardboard boxes fell apart.
A mushrooming cloud, a baker’s white hat, filled the projection.
Before the dream finished, I had the moustached man’s identification badge out of his drawer and tucked up my sleeve. In the excitement and confusion, I wandered out of the office and down the corridor. I used the badge to get out of the restricted part of the police station.
I didn’t know where to go. I was going to start dying when the sun went down.
I had no money. I was nothing. An illegal application of a technology designed to give genetically modified crops an accelerated lifespan; a lifespan so brief that they would not escape and cross-contaminate natural species.
Well, I had escaped. I could have tried to find Marwa’s mother and her faintly remembered warm, safe lap, but they said that Marwa’s mother was dead.
I could have gone to the newspapers and melted spectacularly in a variety of multimedia formats.
I went to the banks of la Seine.
The old man with the peaked cap and the rumbling voice waved his arms excitedly when he saw me. He smiled, like a fresh baguette breaking open, but instead of steam rising into the cold air, it was love rising from his heart.
I took his hand and together we sent our voices over the water. We sang about clouds and spires and buds on branches in the spring.