MY FEET ARE on the floor, my knees are bent and the rest of my body is lying on the bed where it fell. I have the most horrendous headache. MyPhys reports that it’s due to muscular tension in my shoulders and neck. No shit.
I sit up, pulled between two extremes. I could fly into a rampage, smashing everything in this room and ideally hurting myself in the process before Tia would shut me down. Just as easily, the last dregs of any fight left in me could leach out of the soles of my feet, into the carpet, staining it as brown as the mark in the Diamond Suite that death left behind.
I’ve been fighting since I was sixteen, in one way or another, struggling to just make it to somewhere safe. Whether it was stealing food, hitching rides or having to trust someone I knew would betray me at some point, I was always moving forward at least. I could always imagine a way out. Even in the bottom of that fucking boat, trying not to vomit as that disgusting man did what he liked with my body, I knew it couldn’t last forever. Eventually we would reach the port and I would get away from him. Even when he chained my leg to the galley table when we reached Falmouth and said he’d changed his mind and wanted to keep me after all, I still got away. When the hot-housers made it clear that if I didn’t attain a certain standard the best they’d be able to find me was a contract with a forced labor gang, I still fought my way out.
Now? Now I feel like my own skull is my prison and Tia my jailer. Even if I find Travis and somehow manage to get him to his husband’s mooks, I doubt my new owner will have any interest in keeping me in good health. Anyone else, and I would have some hope that my experience in the MoJ and the highly specialized skills I honed there would be of enough value to ensure my survival. But Gabor? He already has an army of lawyers who know the law and the workings of the MoJ as well as—if not better than—I do. He must have investigators on his staff already, dotted all over the world, no doubt. As soon as I bring Travis out of the Circle, I’ll be nothing more than another mouth to feed.
This is what it is to be meat, then. That’s what they called low-value assets in hot-housing and the word terrified me. And now that’s what I am to Gabor. There isn’t a single aspect of myself or my skill set that will be of any value to him once Travis is back. I wouldn’t put it past that fuck to have me shot and dumped somewhere, if it works out cheaper to kill me than keep me fed. No, he’d sell me on to someone else—he is a businessman after all.
There’s no chance my bringing Travis back will earn forgiveness either. Gabor is clearly a man who enjoys power over others, especially those who have pissed him off. He’ll get his husband back, then make me suffer, and he’ll relish every moment of it.
I have to find a way out of this. I draw in a deep breath, feeling myself rally. That fight isn’t gone yet.
“Tia, call Dee for me.”
“You do not have permission to contact Dee Whittaker.”
“Who do I have permission to contact?”
“Stefan Gabor’s Artificial Personal Assistant.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
JeeMuh. Feeling nauseous, I go into the bathroom to wash my face. As I dry myself off a message arrives from Gabor’s APA. The message is a travel itinerary and details of the hotel I’ll be staying at in the States while I wait for the Circle to come out and pick me up. Probably where the US gov-corp will keep an eye on me too. Tia has accepted the invitation to the funeral on my behalf without my even knowing, which chills me to my core.
I’ve been on a plane only once in my life, from London to Oslo. I have a brief fantasy of approaching one of the Met officers who’ll be stationed at Heathrow, begging them for help. Or, even better, telling them I’m a terrorist so they shut down my chip. Then in the interview I could—
No. Gabor will know and he’ll send people to take care of it. If I’d been bought by that fucker with the boat again, I’d be free of him in seconds, but not Gabor.
I scan the itinerary and see that I’m not even going to Heathrow anyway; I’m being flown over by one of Gabor’s private jets. Of course I am. Gabor wouldn’t want me to have even the slimmest chance to try to break away from him. I have ten minutes before the driver who came to pick up Travis will drive me to an airfield less than an hour away. I’m fucked.
There’s nothing to do except pack and lament the fact that I don’t get the night in this hotel to myself. I never had a chance to try the soufflé. I cancel the meal order, not wanting that delicious food to go to waste. My thoughts run on to the flight and the worry there won’t be any real food on board, and then I’m hunched over the toilet, trying not to heave my guts up at the thought of having to eat printed food again. I’m panicking and then I’m not, echoes of the machine still working its magic on me. I stand and nod to myself. Hold it together. Don’t throw up. What kind of dumb-ass would want to lose the last good meal that way, for fuck’s sake?
I still have seven minutes to go when all of my things are packed in my tiny case. I stand at the window and look out at the skeletal trees picked out by floodlights at their bases. The sky is pitch-black and it’s not even six in the evening. In the distance I can see headlights from a car and wonder if it’s a guest on their way to the hotel, or some journo, perhaps, sent by some boss to get the story straight from the source. Only then do I remember that I left that beef in the microwave at my flat and all those vegetables half-chopped for the casserole. That man’s kindness at the market, left to rot on my countertop.
A knock at my door makes me jump. The bastard is early. I take my time to unlock it, only to find Naal Delaney standing there. I blink at hir, thrown by the surprise of hir not being the driver, and then check that my status is set to the highest level of privacy. My public profile still lists me as an SDCI, as Gabor said it would. He evidently has no fucks to give about the crime of impersonating a police officer.
“It’s bedlam down there,” ze says. “Every journo south of bloody Watford is here in person or in virtu. Can I come in?” When I pause, ze adds, “It’s okay. The MoJ won’t have any idea I’m here. I’m using my privacy tech.”
I beckon hir inside and use the time ze takes to come in to check if Tia is still connected to the cloud. I’m cut off and unable to record, just like before. I actually have a chance to really talk!
“Where did you get that tech?” I’m desperate enough to ask without thinking.
Delaney laughs. “I’m not going to tell you that. Even though you’re between cases, I’m sure you would still leap at the chance to prosecute some illegal tech on the side.”
I watch Delaney nod with approval as ze takes in the room, while I try to decide whether to confide the disastrous turn of events. Back at the café in town, ze said that if I didn’t report the attempted bribery, I’d be owed a favor. I just need to work out what to ask for.
“Thanks for holding up your side of the deal,” Delaney says, sitting on the bed and bouncing up and down a couple of times. “I got here nice and early, first journalist on the scene after the embargo was lifted, and I’ve just had a very interesting chat with a cleaner.” Ze stops and frowns at me. “Are you all right?”
I’m sweating. The driver is going to be here any minute and I still haven’t decided how to call in the favor. Ideally I want that privacy tech, but there’s no way Delaney will pass on hir supplier as long as ze thinks I’m still with the MoJ. If I reveal I’ve been bought by Gabor it would be just as unlikely; Delaney made hir low opinion of Gabor clear the last time we spoke. My worth as a contact would be massively devalued too.
“I always get the shakes after a case,” I say. “Like a delayed stress reaction. It’ll pass.”
“So one of the Circle did it,” ze says. “I popped up to see if you’d consider giving me a statement. It’s not my usual bag but seeing as I’m here anyway . . .”
“Sorry, no. Everything I could possibly say about the case is covered by the MoJ press release.”
Delaney shrugs. “I thought as much. I figure the murderer was in the pay of the US gov-corp. I don’t suppose you dug down on his connection to the US gov-corp, in light of our conversation?”
“The Yanks blocked it before I could get anything conclusive,” I say, concentrating hard on hir face to stop my eyes from being drawn away by that fucking Gabor logo. “And the MoJ have closed the case. I caught the bad guy; everyone gets to go home. The ones who benefit the most remain nameless and free. You know how it is.”
“But you’re not satisfied.” Delaney smiles. “I can see it. You’re still hungry.”
I neither agree with nor deny hir appraisal. That training will be with me forever. “Look, I’ve only got a couple of minutes. I’ve managed to get the MoJ to let me go to Alejandro’s funeral at the Circle. The driver will be here any minute.”
Delaney stands, rubbing hir hands together. “Now we’re talking. I wish I could come with you. I don’t suppose we could come to some sort of arrangement? I’m very interested in them.”
Surely Tia is spying on me now? I need to be careful not to mention anything that could trigger an alert to Gabor. I need to avoid names and just hope that Gabor isn’t watching every single thing I do. It’s worth the risk and yet I still hesitate. Can I trust this person? Like every other time I’ve taken the first step on the path to betrayal, I probably can’t. There’s no other choice. “Actually, I have something in mind. With the case officially closed, I can’t look into everything I want to, and, besides, once I’m at the Circle I’ll be offline. Would you follow up on a lead I got tracking down the data stored by that illegal chip?”
Delaney’s eyes, already large and dramatic, widen until I can see all white around the irises. “Are you shitting me?”
“No, straight up. On one condition: you keep anything you find confidential until I’ve seen it. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why.”
“Because both of our necks would be on the line; you working with a journo and me following MoJ leads would look bad for both of us.” Delaney smiles with a theatrical flutter of eyelashes. “You can depend on my discretion.”
I go to the desk and pull out the pen and hotel notepaper within. A flash of Alejandro penning his suicide note fills me as I unscrew the cap. “This is where I’ll be staying. Don’t assume it’s secure. Don’t send me anything unless it’s encrypted to fuck.”
“My dear man, there isn’t an encryption algorithm that could keep out the US and Noropean gov-corps if they really wanted to read our shit. But I have other means, should it be necessary. I do research dangerous and powerful people for a living, you know.”
I write three names below the hotel details, with their edentities alongside them. “These people are connected to the crim-org that chipped the victim and they aren’t on any watch lists. I had to dig pretty fucking deep into private data to get to them. If you tracked them down and—”
Delaney holds up a hand. “This isn’t my first rodeo. This is very helpful, thank you. And in return, you’ll tell me what it’s like inside the Circle now?”
I nod. I have no idea how I will get that information to hir, but I’ll worry about that later. “Is there a place I can get a message to you? I’m always on the move and I don’t want anything from you landing in my public in-box.”
Ze gives me a physical drop-box address in London. “There’s nothing online that connects it to me,” ze says. “Don’t ask. How long will you be in the States?”
“All being well, I should be back in Norope in three or four days. Depends on how hospitable the Circle decides to be,” I add hastily. I hand over the piece of paper. For the first time in years, I have a flashback to when I handed over the temporary visa—one I’d waited months to secure after leaving the Circle—to the pimp who’d been grooming me. He promised he’d find someone looking for hired help on one of the millionaire’s yachts that still crossed the Atlantic for fun, giving me a way to pay for my own travel back to Europe. Back then I was naive and desperate. I don’t have that excuse now. “I’m taking a really fucking big risk giving this to you,” I say. “If you screw me over . . .”
“You’ll fuck me over twice as hard. I get it.” Delaney reads the note and then tucks it into hir jacket pocket. “For what it’s worth, it’s in my interest to cultivate a mutually beneficial working relationship with you. And I don’t want you to bring the MoJ down on my head either.”
“I’d love to chat but my driver is going to be here any second and I don’t want to have to explain you being in my room to my boss.”
“Take care at the Circle,” Delaney says, heading for the door.
“They’re harmless,” I say.
“They were twenty-odd years ago,” ze says, pausing with a hand over the door handle. “But one of their own just killed their leader. Something immensely fucked-up must be going on there for that to happen.”
I say nothing and Delaney leaves. Theo may not really have been the murderer, but his response to the suicide was certainly . . . unusual. He was brought up in a highly restrictive religious sect, by all accounts, so he probably had more things repressed than most people could even name. One extreme grief reaction doesn’t mean the entire cult is dangerous.
Thinking back, the most dangerous thing I encountered there was boredom. I was always busy—Alejandro made sure that all of us were working on something all the time—but it was all physical work. Tending the fields with old-fashioned tools, driving horses with plows, repairing buildings, making clothes . . . The business of keeping everyone fed and housed and clothed without buying anything from the outside was hellishly time-consuming and did nothing to keep my thoughts from turning in on themselves. I needed to be fed, and in the absence of intellectual satisfaction my mind was like an echo chamber for the anger and frustration. Why were so many clever people wasting their lives with their hands in mud when there were machines to do that for us? Why couldn’t we enjoy all the entertainment the world had to give us? Why was it more important to listen to Alejandro or some other boring old bastard talking about the dangers of being chipped than having a laugh or learning about the world? I hated them all by the time I escaped.
Escape? Yes, that’s how I saw it then. Would I have made the same decision now, having seen the real world? Would I see it as a sanctuary if I knew then what I do now? Could it be a place of sanctuary to me now?
No. Alejandro made it painfully clear that if I left, I would never be accepted there again. My father stood next to him as he said it. Neither of them asked me to stay. Neither of them suggested I sample the world outside first with the option to come back if I needed to. If anything, they seemed glad to see me go.
I don’t want to see my father again.
There’s a knock at the door and it opens before I have a chance to speak. A bald man dressed in an expensive black suit with a cap tucked under his arm fills the doorway. “Time to go, Moreno.”
—
THERE’S a glass screen between the driver and me so there’s nothing to do but settle into the cocooned luxury of the limousine interior and regret not being able to say a proper good-bye to Nadia. She’ll think I’m rude. Strangely, I find myself caring about that.
None of my usual icons have returned and Tia won’t respond to any requests to restore them. I ask for music; it tells me that it’s not permitted. I ask for my mail, a summary of news headlines, a dip in the social stream. All are denied. There’s nothing but the black outside the windows or behind my eyelids and that fucking logo. Even that isn’t enough to keep me awake now that the adrenaline is leaving my body.
I’m woken by the car pulling to a stop and am instantly alert. We’re at the airfield, the limo brought within meters of the private jet, engines already fired and waiting for me to board. I’m ushered up the steps by the driver, who carries my bag for me out of what I presume is habit. He makes it look like a handbag, he’s so big.
The flight attendant is a tall blond man with an unfeasibly white smile that dazzles me as I step into the craft.
“Welcome aboard, Mr. Moreno. If you’d like to follow me.”
I’m shown to one of the six seats inside the main body of the craft. I feel like I’m in some sort of shallow mersive made for people who like to spend their evenings living as though they are billionaires to help themselves forget they’re living in a gov-corp-approved box and will never achieve anything more meaningful in life than clawing their way to a higher pay grade than their neighbors. If a prostitute appears from behind the curtain at the far end, offering to give me a blow job, I’ll know that none of this is real. A second flight attendant, a black woman with legs that go on forever and another dazzling smile, chooses that moment to sweep aside the curtain and clip it back. She walks past me after welcoming me on board and all too realistically ignoring my trousers. It’s just as well. I hate those kinds of mersives.
My case is stowed somewhere farther down the plane; no overhead bins are in this section. I’m told to fasten my belt. The chair feels more like one that should be beside a huge fireplace in the Moor Hotel than any seat I’d expect to find in a plane.
Outside the window I see the lights of the tiny terminal building, so small it looks more like a private house. The driver is walking back to the limousine and will probably be driving back to London to ferry that toad around. I have an acute sense of living Travis’s former life, being taken from one place to another—probably with just as much say in the matter—in extreme luxury and quiet misery. Did he fall for Gabor when he was young and desperate, willing to overlook the age gap and paunch in return for a life of champagne and silk? Or was he simply picked out and made an offer he couldn’t refuse even if he wanted to? Either way, it’s clear that at some point Travis realized that the lifestyle wasn’t compensation enough. How long will it be before he realizes the same at the Circle?
Within minutes the plane starts to taxi to the airstrip and the flight attendants go to belt themselves in somewhere at the back. Tia starts talking me through the safety briefing, using augmented reality to highlight exits and how the individual life pods will work in the event of ditching in the sea. The pods are stored within the seats and will automatically activate should a crash be imminent. As far as I can tell, it will inflate a structure around me and my chair, protecting me from impact and fire, before I’m ejected out of the plane, to be found by rescue services. It seems ridiculous, but apparently it’s one of the wonderful inventions “gifted to the world” by the Gabor R&D branch and has a “one hundred percent success rate in crash simulations.” With air travel being so safe—no loss of life in the past ten years or so—I wonder if this was a pet project initiated by Gabor himself. It seems absurdly overengineered, like something more suited to protecting scientific equipment sent down to the surface of Mars than passengers in private jets that never crash.
The flight time is just over nine hours, Tia informs me, and then ignores another request for access to any distractions. Then the acceleration of the craft pressing me into my seat and the sensations caused by the lift into the air are enough to keep me occupied for a while.
The male attendant reappears once we level out. I accept the offer of a drink, choosing a large whisky before being told that no alcohol has been authorized for the flight. Sparkling apple and pomegranate juice is suggested and I acquiesce, some pitiful part of me hoping that the in-flight food will be good. After another abortive attempt to contact Dee, Tia offers me approved in-flight reading that’s just arrived from Gabor’s APA. Peevishly, I ignore the link, trying to find something interesting to look at other than the flight attendants. I last about ten minutes before caving, appalled at my inability to cope without music or something to research. I’ve become what Alejandro deplored so vocally: a person incapable of sitting within his own skin.
To my surprise, the material sent by the toad’s APA is actually of great interest. It’s evident that Gabor has had others look into the Circle, though how they managed to dig up so much in a matter of hours puzzles me, until I suspect Stefan has been interested in the Circle for some time. Perhaps he was already aware of Travis’s fascination with Alejandro and just didn’t believe his husband would actually have the guts to break away. If that was the case, surely the alarm bells would have rung when Travis had to have his chip removed? Perhaps that’s why Stefan is so furious, because he knows he should have seen it coming.
The file contains detailed information about ten members of the Circle, none of whom I recognize from my time there. They have several things in common: all joined in the past ten years, all were greatly respected in their individual fields—all in the sciences, interestingly enough—and every single one has something to hide. Several have criminal activity that has hitherto avoided prosecution, a couple made poor choices in their youth involving porn, and one falsified data to support a scientific paper early in his career and then covered it up. Several of the names are familiar, thanks to my brief research into the patents held by the Circle, reminding me of the money that it brings into the States every year. Two things rapidly become apparent as I dig down in the data Gabor sent: a significant proportion of this data was obtained illegally and the Circle isn’t just a religious cult anymore.