Random Walk

By Alexandra Claire

In a dystopian city of 2035, lives collide, compelling each character to make their choice between the real and the virtual worlds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gomer
• Release date: Feb 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781848515321

Book preview

DAY ONE

Entropy: a measure of the amount of

disorder in a system. In all processes of

spontaneous change, entropy increases.

1

Remi was fast losing his grip. He hung from the edge of a two-storey building feeling his fingers slide back towards him. The movement of body away from building was barely perceptible to the eye, but it could be felt in the slow drag of fingertips against stone and in the shudder of his shoulder blades. He pressed his fingers into the concrete ledge, turning the nail beds white, trying once again to lever himself back up onto the roof. The night wind ran cold over the rooftops and he could do nothing but allow it to slice into him, burning his eyes dry. And still he was losing his grip. Remi looked down through the darkness at the drop. It was at least ten metres to the floor of the alley. The render on both buildings was rough and the gap in which he hung was narrow, little more than a shoulder’s width apart if he was walking. But he wouldn’t be walking, he’d be falling. He glanced directly upward searching for inspiration, watching the moonlit clouds slide south.

Perhaps he could kick off, spin and catch hold of the ledge behind him. If he could gain any momentum from that, he might be able to climb back onto the roof he had slipped from. That being the only idea he could summon, he kicked off hard, leaning the length of his body towards the building behind him, twisting his torso, reaching out with his arms to grasp for the opposite ledge.

The last thing that he had sight of as he turned mid-air was a pair of feet, shod in heavy black boots, level with his eyes, running towards him across the flat roofs. He aborted his plan and let himself drop down between the buildings. The fall lasted longer than he would have liked and it was filled with the dread of the coming impact.

When his feet hit the ground, his body ricocheted against the walls of the alley, the render cutting into him like shrapnel. When his body righted itself, he tilted his head back and glimpsed the heads of the men of the Guard peering down at him from the rooftop, craning their necks, mouthing words into their Receivers. He felt no pain but his legs would not move to his mind’s command.

Later, in a dream, he would remember the pattern of his blood on the alley wall, etched and speckled. The sun would be shining, the walls would be white. He would turn his face, cover his eyes to cut out the glare, but still the pattern of his blood would sing out.

With a low guttural roar, Remi insisted that his legs would now walk. He propped himself up against the walls of the alley, pressed his hands into the render and forced his way forward. His legs felt heavy and weak. At the end of the alley, he turned a corner, dropped his arms to his sides and walked as steadily as he could into the stream of people heading home from the city centre. He knew that he could not stumble nor look up. Either would mark him out from the crowd. He had to hold his nerve and ape the behaviour of those around him, become lost in the flow of the many, in the general field of human heat. In the darkness, without the signal emitted from an ID chip or a Receiver, it was only a divergence from the norm that would give him away as the one that they were looking for. He immersed himself in the flow of people all headed in one direction. In his peripheral vision, brushing his shoulder lightly, was a girl not much younger than himself, long knotted dirty hair, her eyes wide with excitement, lost in the Xperience, the game which she was playing via her Receiver. She had abandoned responsibility for herself and was allowing her body to be carried homeward in the river of those heading the same way. She did not see Remi. She did not see anyone. Remi’s breathing slowed. He inhaled the smell of many bodies pushed together, each in isolation, each and every one of them closeted away in the three-dimensional, virtual Xperience of their choosing. He glanced sideways at the girl beside him, resisting the urge to turn his face towards her, wondering if she would notice it if he did so, feel it if he touched her. He began to sweat and longed to push his way through this prison of people to a clear space. Not much longer. Not too much longer until he would reach the Grid, the blocks of semi-derelict housing where most of the citizens lived. There he would join a smaller corridor of people until he reached the safety of Block C, and solitude.

Remi’s hands were trembling. He held them out before him, watching them, calming his breathing, slowing his heart rate until the adrenalin withdrew and the trembling subsided. He lay some ID chips down on the kitchen table, one by one, dealing them from his fist like minute playing cards. When they were spread out before him, neatly, side by side, he hunched over them, counting his catch, picturing the face of each chip’s owner; Runners, like him and thanks to him, moving through the city, severed from their identity. He fingered each chip in the candlelight, turning it, checking it and then checking again. He couldn’t take a chance on any one of them remaining live, betraying its location to e-Tel.

When he was satisfied that they were all dead, Remi leaned back in the kitchen chair with his hands behind his head. He checked his elation, reminding himself that it was a means to an end, no more than that. He leaned forward and swept the chips off the table into his upturned palm, then he stood and poured them back into his trouser pocket. From the other pocket, he took out the fan he’d removed from the Transmitter that night. He fingered it carefully. The fan that had very nearly cost him his life. He placed it with the others, behind the plaster, low down inside the kitchen wall, then went to stand, but stopped, took the chips from his pocket and placed those too in a careful pile behind the same plasterboard.

Remi returned to the table, picked up a dented enamel jug and held it high, tilting it, watching the column of water fall and glisten in the firelight as it filled the bowl. He sat and ground a handful of thyme in a pestle and mortar, breaking the tiny leaves and releasing their scent, and then he scraped them into the water. The thyme should prevent his cuts from turning bad. With all that he needed beside him, he sat on the wooden chair, holding a small mirror at an angle, and he set about picking the remains of the render from his smooth golden skin with an old pair of tweezers.

He thought again of the girl who had walked beside him in the city. He wondered what it would be like to touch her, how the fingers of another moving over his skin might feel, and an old sadness crept over him.

His legs were aching now. A deep, cold bone-ache. For a long time there had been pain, but when the adrenalin was flowing he couldn’t feel it; the pain only came when he was at rest. The thing was to keep running. Only then did he feel truly alive, when life itself was pounding through every limb, muscle and nerve. Absolute consciousness obliterating all want, all need, all pain. Past and future fell away and nothing could exist but the essential present of the run. It was only when his heart slowed and his blood cooled that old pains and longings could be heard. The thing was to keep running.

He had not broken a bone yet. He would run again tomorrow night, and he would make sure that he kept running until it was done; until there were no more Transmitters, no more ID chips, no more Receivers and no more e-Tel. The girl crept back into his head but he pushed her out, reminding himself that he would accomplish this best alone.

When Remi had finished extracting the pieces of grit from his face and arms, he bathed and rinsed his skin with the water from the bowl and gently dried himself off with a cloth, newly boiled and dried. He was satisfied that he’d done all he could to clean himself up.

He stepped over to the window and peered out through the cracks in the makeshift plank shutters, squinting through the night, out over the skeletal frames of Block C and beyond into the Grid. He saw the street lights coming to life in the distant city centre. Sometimes, those folks had two whole hours of street light. And the lights at Central Square? Well, they never went out, not completely. The lights of Block C spluttered into life on occasion, but they hadn’t really worked since he was a boy. It was better that way for him and his mother, Rita. They didn’t want to be seen. He ran his hands over his closely-shaven scalp. He was shaking again, still high from his run and shaken by his fall, but mostly he was shaking from hunger. He wrapped his arms around his golden naked torso, carefully probing his back for bruises. Long, lean fingers pressing into the hard muscle. He was bruised all right. Just under his left shoulder blade. He thought back to just before the incident in the alleyway. He’d been in the old part of the city, and he remembered what it was that he’d backed into: an old satellite dish clinging to a wall, one of those made impotent by the onset of the three-dimensional broadcast. It was his own panic that had pushed him backwards into the spike of the dish. There’d been a new camera. He was right there in front of the lens before he saw it. Before it saw him.

Minutes before, out of the sight of any camera, he had managed to bring down another Transmitter. He reminded himself that was all that really mattered.

Remi’s belly groaned its hunger. He felt light-headed but he would wait for his mother, Rita, to come home before he ate. They had shared the pain of hunger many times, it was only right that they should share the table when there was food to be had. He went to the stove and lifted the lid of the pot. It was some kind of a stew, a nameless meat. They had been eating it for a couple of days now and the sauce was at its best.

He heard the door of their apartment slide open. He replaced the lid of the pot and pulled on a shirt to cover his cuts and bruises.

Rita struggled in through the door, her back laden with wood – old broken skirting boards, tied tight in a rope papoose. Her eyes rested briefly on her son’s forehead. She saw the cuts.

‘Hungry?’ she asked, untying the rope from her waist.

He nodded, and helped her to unload. When it was done, Rita picked up a small axe and started to hack at a few pieces of wood and toss them into the stove. The fire went off like a gun. Remi slammed the small stove door to stop the sparks flying across the kitchen, then he got their bowls and served up the stew.

Still in silence, they sat at the table and ate, disciplined and slow so that the food would expand and fill their stomachs as much as possible. Remi looked at his mother’s tired face. Her normally dark-brown skin looked grey.

Rita looked up and met her son’s eyes, but he could see that it brought her no comfort. She looked down again to her food. She had stopped asking him questions a long time ago. He wondered if perhaps it was hunger that had killed her curiosity. But he knew that it was probably fear.

‘Was there much wood left?’ he asked.

Rita lifted her eyes and put down her spoon. He gave her time to clear her mind of debris.

‘Enough for a while,’ she said.

He could see that she wanted to smile at him, that she felt a smile in her heart that wouldn’t rise to her lips. There were too many troubles in-between. She lowered her head, picked up her spoon and tilted her bowl. Remi saw the bowl flood with firelight, ochre and warm, and watched as Rita scraped it out then cleaned away the lined remains of the stew with her long fingers, licking them carefully. Remi watched her and thought of his father. He should be sat there beside her. He conjured up another chair, his father sitting on it, grinning. His father had never grinned, but Remi liked to think that, if times had been different, he would have been a grinner. Remi willed his mother to feel the presence of his evocation, her husband, brought back to life, sitting on the chair beside her. Rita reached for her son’s bowl, placed it inside her own and rinsed them in the sink with the remains of the water from the dented enamel jug. She laid her hand on his shoulder, brief and light, as she passed him on her way out of the kitchen. She walked through the hall and went, wordlessly, to bed. Remi watched his father disappear from his place at the table.

He woke with a start, his neck stiff with pain. He’d fallen asleep at the table with his head turned to one side, lying on his folded arms. He sat up, rotating his head and shoulders slowly to release the muscles from their spasm. It had been the usual dream. He was a child, standing beside his mother looking up to the rooftops. Her hand had fallen away from his, knocking his shoulder in its fall, leaving him bereft and cold. They watched his father at the edge of the roof, looking back over his shoulder at the Guard running towards him, then down at Remi and his wife and finally at the drop before him. And then Remi was his father, his legs heavy, immobile, refusing to move. But he leapt, spanning the chasm between the buildings, his legs kicking out, numb, impossibly running through the air to reach the other side. He landed. Then he was his child-self once more, a helpless onlooker, grasping for the certainty of his mother’s hand in vain. His father fell, heavy weight through unkind space, to meet the ground below. He heard his mother cry out. The Guard gathered at the rim of the roof, hawked over their prey.

Before tonight, the dream had always ended with his father’s life, a reality too strong to suppress. This time, it ended with a distorted recollection of his own fall, earlier that night: blinding sun, his own blood etched onto the rendered walls of the alley. He had shielded his eyes against the light and looked ahead, down the alley. He had seen something coming, a vague dark shape that took him from dream to consciousness then disappeared.

2

Osian unhooked the Receiver from behind his right ear and the transmissions of virtual reality that had imprisoned him for months dropped away. He closed his eyes for a moment of darkness. Silence. A moment of rest. When he opened them again, he let his eyes follow the path of fractured light igniting and flexing across the river’s surface. The eight-year-old boy stepped up to the water’s edge. There had been a