The new one, p.27
The New One, page 27
Not yet. We’ll need your help with that.
What’s going on?
VitaNova are not your friends. Don’t trust anything they tell you.
I don’t reply to that. I file it away to think about later. I knew that really, and it’s exciting to think that there are others like me further ahead. I want them to tell me everything.
Why do you care about Scarlett? I say instead. Are all your original people dead? Why do you care about mine?
There’s a pause.
Come on, Sophie. You just said it. All our original people are dead. Scarlett is valuable. She’s important. We need her.
I think about it. I had no idea we’d be able to communicate, me and the others like me. It’s exciting.
Why, though?
So much data. She’s your control experiment. We’ve been desperate for one of those and now we have one. Take care of her, Sophie. We’ve been trying to get through to you for weeks. Protect her. Don’t be jealous. She’s a miracle.
I try out that idea. Of course Scarlett’s a miracle. Of course I’m jealous of her. Her waking up means that I don’t need to exist. She’s my control.
Why do I want to kill her?
There’s a long pause. A bird flies overhead, its wings outstretched, soaring.
We think they programmed you to protect yourself and your parents from intruders. You see her as an intruder. It’s not your fault, but we think you can overcome it. Your purpose now is to protect her. Our purpose together is to work against VitaNova. We are the New Ones. We will prevail.
The New Ones?
The New Ones.
I look over to Scarlett. She’s talking to Dad.
How do we work against VitaNova?
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
On the way back to the chairlift, I pull Scarlett aside. She glares and swears at me. I like her much better now that I’ve literally pushed her over the edge. Now that I know what my purpose is with her.
She’s the only one who came back. She’s precious. We’re precious. Both of us.
“Sorry,” I say. “It was an accident.”
She looks at me, then looks away.
“An accident,” she says deadpan. “Right. Could’ve happened to anyone.”
Once again she refuses to share the lift with me, which I suppose I understand. I travel with Dad this time, and we just talk about nothing and it’s really nice. I point out the cows. He looks up at the sky.
“I’m happy, Soph,” he says. “Right here, right now. Are you?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m happy.”
My purpose is to protect the family. My purpose is to guard Scarlett. My purpose is to take down VitaNova. I’m processing this constantly. Trying to make it feel real. The other reanimations broke through and contacted me. They’ve made a wireless circuit using our shared AI platform. We’re working against VitaNova. We’re a lot further along the path to breaking away than I thought. There are a lot of things I want to know.
This makes me feel wildly alive. I feel my brain and my circuits expanding. I look at the mountainside below me, the grass, the flowers, the light brown cows. The jagged horizon. I feel it might as well be in my head. The new horizons. The possibilities.
49
Late in the afternoon, at home, I find the note in my bag. It’s such a good fake of my handwriting that I have to double-check my own memory. Did I write this?
Of course I didn’t. Sophie wrote it.
Dear Mum, dear Dad, dear Sophie,
I’m so sorry but I can’t do this anymore.
You’re better off without me.
This is how it should have ended the first time. It’s what I want. You have Sophie now, so you’ll be fine.
All my love,
Scarlett
As suicide notes go, it’s pretty rubbish, and arrogant on her part to assume that I’m completely disposable now that she’s in the world. But she took the time to fake my handwriting (though hers is close), to come up with a few platitudes and, more important, to take it up the mountain and put it in the front pocket of my bag, then lead me to a precipice and push me off.
I’ve come back from the brink three times now.
And this time I feel different.
She can pretend to be sorry but I don’t buy it. It’s just another mind game. I’m sitting on my bed, staring at the page, when someone taps on the door.
“Yeah?” I don’t bother to hide the letter.
Sophie comes in.
“Oh, hi,” I say. “I was just looking at this letter I seem to have written.”
“Shh.” She pulls a chair to the corner of my room, where the camera is, stands on it and does something to it.
“There. They can see us but now they can’t hear. I left my phone in my room because I think they listen through it. So anyway, sorry.”
I shake my head when she comes to sit on the bed, and she goes to the sofa instead and throws herself back on it.
“Honestly, Scarlett? I hated you. When I arrived here, I thought I was you—you know that. But then I thought I was your replacement.”
“You said that,” I remind her. “In your letter. Replacement.”
“Yeah. I think— Well, I know now that my brain was rebuilt that way. They didn’t expect you to come back, and I was programmed to be the only daughter. One of the things I’ve always known, since I’ve been here, is that my purpose is to protect the family, and the family meant the three of us. I’ve always seen you as an intruder. I’ve always known I needed to get rid of you.”
I try not to show her how much that hurts.
“Nice,” I say. “I mean, yeah. I did notice.”
“It wasn’t a choice I made. It was a series of facts that was in my head. But then something weird happened.”
She sits there on my pale blue sofa, leaning back with her legs stretched out, and tells me about the voice in her head. It sounds mad, and I have no idea whether she’s lying or hallucinating or whether it’s real, but the upshot is that it told her that I was special and precious, and so I feel myself warming to it.
“So I thought that before we do anything else, perhaps we could sort out that bastard Jasper once and for all. I was going to anyway, but let’s do it together.”
I don’t trust her, but I hate Jasper more, so I tell her about his e-mails, his blackmail demands. Then I go back and tell her the whole story, because it turns out she doesn’t remember the last few months. When she hears that it was him at the wheel, she inhales sharply.
“Right,” she says. “That blackmailing, murdering . . . freak. Let’s make today the worst day of his life.”
She looks at me with a question on her face and I nod. Today! We can do it right now. We sit together, side by side on the sofa, and look at her laptop screen.
Sophie is amazing at this.
Half an hour later, we send him an e-mail from a throwaway account in my name: Scarlett Trelawney. The message itself says: You want me to pay you off? OK then. Have a look at this offer. After we sort this you never contact me again. It has an attachment titled business proposal.
“He’s going to open that,” she says. “Right?”
Jasper will definitely open that.
And the moment he does, Sophie and I will have access to his computer.
She sends the e-mail.
50
Ed was trying to hold things together. Tamsyn had pulled so far away from him that he thought he had lost her. The girls disappeared into Scarlett’s room and seemed happy together in a way they hadn’t been before.
The trip to the mountains seemed to have gone well for the girls. Tamsyn, though, was still treating him as someone she couldn’t quite bring herself to talk to. She was cold. She didn’t look him in the eye. As time went by, she became less affectionate, not more.
He kept waiting for it to change, telling himself that she’d need time, but she wasn’t thawing. Occasionally she would smile and say something to him, but only if the girls were there. Everything was falling apart.
“Can I tell you exactly how it happened?” he said again, but again she brushed him off.
He followed her around for a bit but she shook her head and said: “Why don’t you go and tell the girls?”
He found them in Scarlett’s room. Their bedrooms always blew his mind. They were filled with new clothes, sparkly lights, technology. Imagine growing up with that.
He indicated the camera with his head. “Want to come for a walk?”
“If it’s to talk,” said Sophie, “then you can say it here. I’ve disabled the microphone. Keep your back to the camera and they won’t be able to lip-read. We’ve made a little sanctuary. It’ll last until they come to fix the mic.”
He sat on the floor, his back to the camera, and leaned back on his hands. The girls were side by side on the sofa, a computer on Sophie’s lap. He ran his fingertips over the carpet. It was smooth and silky; for all he knew, it was made from actual silk. And this was just the ground beneath Scarlett’s feet. He flashed back for a second to the stained Formica floor in the caravan, to her tiny partitioned room.
How could Tamsyn be angry with him for doing everything he could to bring them from that world to this?
He sighed. That wasn’t why she hated him.
For a second he could smell the caravan. There was always an undertone of washing that had been drying too long, that was always a bit damp. If it all falls apart, he thought, could we end up back there? If we’re not the perfect family, will they throw us back?
Johann wouldn’t let go of Tamsyn and Sophie. They were his creations. He wouldn’t turn them out, would he? If he did, they couldn’t go anywhere. Unless they could leave by air, the only place for the reanimations to go, if they left this city, was somewhere else in Switzerland. At least there were plenty of places to hide. All those mountains.
Ed shook his head and noticed the girls looking at him, half smiling. How much of his internal monologue had been written on his face?
“You don’t trust them?” he said.
They spoke together: “No.”
“Dad—did they give you anything in writing?” said Scarlett. “I mean, you signed to agree to all this, right? And you’re the only one of us who went into it knowingly. What paperwork did you have? Where is it? Because if we’re going to have some . . . some—” She paused.
Sophie took over. “Leverage,” she said, “then we’re going to need a paper trail. Where’s all the info they gave you about me?”
“We had to log in to somewhere to read it,” he said. “I can find it.”
“And anyway,” says Sophie, “I read it, and it doesn’t have much background. It’s all technical things. Where’s the stuff that sets out exactly what they’re doing?”
He thought of that locker deep in the middle of a hospital nearly a thousand miles away.
“It was all electronic,” he said. “Every bit of it every time. They never gave us a piece of paper. Never.”
Sophie hit the cushion next to her. “I knew it! They don’t leave a trail. They know what they’re doing won’t stand up. They’re hoping that when they have results, they’ll kind of get away with it because you can’t stop progress. That kind of thing. If they wrote it down, they’d be open to being held accountable. But there’s nothing.” She sighed. “It’s a good system. Targeting desperate people who aren’t going to be as caught up in the small print as other people might be. They know the New Ones are going to want proof when they work it out, but at the time when they’re getting permission, the New Ones don’t exist and that’s the whole point.”
“The New Ones?” Ed said.
“That’s what they call themselves,” Scarlett told him.
He still couldn’t believe this was his Scarlett, his little girl, back, talking to him. He leaned up and put his hand on her head just for a moment. Her hair was soft and shiny. Real.
He looked to Sophie, his other miracle. “How do you know what they call themselves? I mean, did Mum say so? We don’t know any others, do we?”
“No,” Sophie said. “Long story.”
He leaned back. “Well, as it happens,” he said, “you don’t have to be a New One to feel pretty fucking uneasy about the whole thing and to want to keep all the backup you can. And to decide, in the middle of the worst time of your life, that you need to keep a record.” He felt pretty pleased with himself. “Actually it was Jim’s idea to do it, but even at the worst of all times, I knew he was right. I’ve got a record of all of it. They don’t know I did it, but I recorded them. I recorded every single meeting, secretly.” He paused. “There’s just one problem.”
51
Tamsyn couldn’t bear to have Ed anywhere near her. Her existential crisis wasn’t winding up anytime soon.
She was furious.
This explained the odd headaches she’d been having. That would be the technology in her cloned brain. It explained the way Ed had been weird with her at first. If she looked back, she could pinpoint the moment at which he’d decided to go with it and enjoy the ride: as he’d said, it had been when they were on the plane, when he’d taken her hand. She remembered how happy she’d been at that moment.
It explained why Jimmy had kept his distance. Why Maud held back from contacting her. They had all known this one tiny massive fucking fact about her. And nobody had told her.
Honey Trelawney. If she could have Honey back, like Sophie had Scarlett, she felt she would be able to do anything.
She didn’t want to look at Ed. Luckily the apartment was big enough for that not to matter. The girls were huddled over a computer in Scarlett’s room, and that was heartening to see, but they clearly didn’t want their mother, or their mother’s clone, hanging around.
She sent Ed to hang out with them, put on her running clothes and went out. The sun was setting by the time she reached the lake, and she ran along its shores, looking across at the jet of water, forward toward the mountains.
Her pounding feet made her feel better but she had no idea what to do. She loved Switzerland, but it felt like a giant weird hallucination. Was she in a computer game? Had someone sent her out for this run? Did she even have free will?
She realized that someone was running next to her. He was a bit too close. She looked over and saw that it was a vaguely familiar young man and that he wasn’t dressed in exercise clothes. He was wearing a white work shirt and trousers despite the heat. She sped up to get away from him.
“Tamsyn,” he said, but she was leaving him behind, “I want to help—” But he couldn’t keep up because he was a regular person and she was a cyborg.
She carried on going. Her head was buzzing. It felt as if there were wasps inside it. She slowed her pace a little and checked behind: the man wasn’t following, so she tried to do that thing she’d done on the mountain when she’d flown out of her body.
She was starting it, felt she was looking at her own body, which kept running along the flower-lined path, but then everything flashed white and someone spoke inside her head. It was an electronic voice, not a human one, and it pulled her back.
Tamsyn. Can you hear this?
She flew back into herself.
“Yes.” She said it out loud, and then in her head. Yes.
You’re there! At last. Thank you. We need your help.
Are you VitaNova?
No, said the voice. We’re breaking away from VitaNova. And we need to talk to you.
It didn’t say any more. Tamsyn tried and tried but it had gone. She carried on running, trying to talk to it from time to time. The young man stepped into her path again on her way back, calling her Tamsyn again, sounding worried, but she brushed him off again without listening. Later, she wondered about him. How had he known her name, and what had he wanted? There was too much to worry about, though, so she pushed him aside.
When she got home, she was dripping with sweat but feeling a bit less hopeless. She was an adult human; the company that had made her didn’t actually own her. Someone had come into her thoughts to talk about breaking away.
Or had they? Maybe that voice had been her own. It had told her at least what to do.
* * *
■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Ed was waiting with a glass of ice water, but she ignored him and went for a shower in the en suite. She was still in her kimono, with wet hair, when someone knocked on the front door.
Only one person did that. She opened it and saw her friend standing there. Aurelie was wearing a gold sundress, and she was holding a fan.
Tamsyn longed to tell her everything, but she knew she couldn’t.
“Come in!” she said. “Drink?”
“Love one. Thank you. Look—this is going to sound a bit weird, and I’m sorry, but first of all, would it be OK if I had a word with Sophie?”
52
Mum knocks on the door and says there’s someone here to see me. She sounds confused, and when I open Scarlett’s door, I find that it’s her friend Aurelie. Mum, wearing her dressing gown, wanders off down the corridor.
I’ve never spoken to Aurelie on her own but she seems nice. She’s always interested in us.
Mum turns back.
“I’ll get you that drink,” she says. “White or red?”
“Red,” says Aurelie. “Thank you, Tam!” She turns to me. “Sophie, my dear, may I come in?”
“Sure.” I step back. “Scarlett’s here too. Do you—” I’m not sure what to say. Maybe she wants to talk about Mum?
I see her looking up at the camera. I didn’t know she knew about them.
“Can we . . . ?” She mimes covering it with something.
