Spares Read online

  But this time it was different. For the first time I was thinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.

  For better or worse, I made them.

  That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I picked my way through the bodies and chose some of the children that had been least used so far. In the first tunnel I found David and Ragald, in the second Suej and Nanune, and in the third, Jenny. At that stage all were unharmed apart from Suej, who’d lost a swath of skin on her thigh. I brought them out of the tunnels and into the main room, and got them to sit on chairs. Tried to, anyway: They’d never seen chairs before. David and Nanune fell off immediately, Suej slumped forward onto the table, and Ragald stood up unsteadily and careened away across the room. Eventually, I herded them into a corner where they sat with their backs up against the wall. By then they’d stopped squinting against the relative brightness of the light and were goggling wide eyed at the complexity of the room—its surfaces and objects, its space, the fact the walls did not slope.

  I squatted down in front of them and held their faces in turn, staring into their eyes, trying to find something in there. There was nothing, or as good as nothing, and for a moment my resolution wavered. They’d gone too long with nothing, missed out on too many things. Most of them couldn’t use their limbs properly. They sat unsteadily, like babies whose bodies had been accidentally stretched by years.

  I wasn’t qualified to make up everything they had lost, or perhaps even any part of it. I couldn’t make a reasonable stab at my own life, never mind give them one of their own. The wave of decisiveness I’d ridden all morning was ebbing fast, leaving me adrift in a tired and anxious dead zone.

  “What are you doing?”

  I turned, heart thumping. Ratchet and the medic droid were standing in the doorway. For a moment I built a lie to tell, but then gave up. People always think that it’s what happens when you’re awake that shapes your life and makes decisions, but it isn’t. When you’re asleep and go away, things happen. That time counts too, and in my case the last seventy-two hours had altered me. Unless something changed, I was going to have to go back out into the world. It would probably be the death of me, but if I stayed and watched the children slowly dismantled over the years I would die just as surely. I would be no different from them except I didn’t live in the tunnels.

  That’s what I told myself, anyway. But I didn’t think I could have left the Farm then, couldn’t have faced going back outside again. Don’t ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

  “I want to help them,” I said. Both droids watched me impassively.

  “How?” Ratchet asked. Behind me, Nanune slumped sideways onto the floor. I turned and propped her back up.

  “Let them walk around. Teach them.”

  Ratchet held up one of his manipulating extensions and I shut up. With nothing being said on an audible wavelength, the medic droid appeared to suddenly lose interest, turned and disappeared back into the corridor. Ratchet waited until it had gone.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why do you fucking think?” I shouted, hoping he could provide an answer. When he didn’t, I tried to find one myself. “They have a right to be able to speak. To see outside. To understand.”

  “No, they haven’t, Jack.” Ratchet was impassive but interested, as if he was watching something in a petri dish that had suddenly started juggling knives. “The spares only exist to fulfill their function.”

  “Half the people outside were born for worse reasons than that. They still have rights.” I was beginning to shake again, and the bands of muscle across my stomach had cramped. I wasn’t really up to a metaphysical discussion with a robot. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down my temple and dripped heavily onto my shirt. That’s the problem with Rapt. You don’t get much time off.

  “Do they?” asked the droid, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re proposing, against the express instructions of Safety Net, to allow spares out of the tunnels. To attempt to teach them to read. To give them a pointless scrap of life.”

  “Yes,” I said, with weak defiance, sensing how stupid and idealistic I sounded. The strange thing was that it wasn’t like me. I had my idealism kicked out of me many years ago, round about the time I learned about skinFix. If you’d have asked me, I’d have said I didn’t give a shit, that I didn’t really care about the spares or anything else. I didn’t know why I was doing this.

  “You’ll need help,” the droid said.

  It took a while for this to sink in. “From you?”

  “There is a price,” Ratchet said, and then the bad news came. “You come off your drug.”

  “Fuck off,” I said, and strode unsteadily out of the room.

  Half an hour later Ratchet came and found me. I was slumped at the end of the long corridor, as far away as possible from any life-forms, either carbon- or silicon-based. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, my long muscles twitching in true Rapt-withdrawal style, and I was losing it. Cold so bitter it felt like liquid fire was spreading up my back, and I was starting to hallucinate. I looked blearily up at the droid when he appeared, and then turned away again. He wasn’t interesting to me. Certainly not as interesting as the inch-high men who were trying to climb onto my leg. Some of them looked like people I had known in the war, people I knew were dead. I was convinced they were trying to warn me of something, but their speech was so high-pitched I couldn’t hear it. I was trying to turn myself into a dog so I’d have a better chance.

  You know how it is with these things.

  The droid didn’t leave, and after a moment his extensible tray slid toward me, bearing a syringe. I stared at him, my eyes hot and bright.

  “The dose you take would kill four normal people,” he said. “Immediately, within seconds of injection. You need this today, or you’re going to die. But tomorrow you have less.”

  “Ratchet,” I mumbled, “you don’t understand.”

  “I do. I know why you are here. But you will kill yourself in weeks like this, and I want you to remain alive.”

  “Why?”

  “To teach them.”

  In the end I don’t know which of us won—whether I’d convinced Ratchet with my initial inarticulate outburst, or he blackmailed me into colluding in some bizarre impossible idea that had seeped into my mind while it teetered on the edge of slipping forever beneath deep water. Maybe Ratchet was Jesus all along, and I was just his fucked-up John the Baptist.

  Either way, I kicked Rapt over the next eight months, and life within the Farm began to change.

  The phone rang in Howie’s office, and he reached across to pick it up. The first part had taken an hour to tell, and Suej had fallen asleep, lying crumpled in the chair. As Howie listened to whoever was on the line I stood up, took off my coat, and laid it over her. She stirred distantly, a long way away, and then settled down again. Her eyelids were flickering, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. I hoped it was something good.

  Howie put the phone down. “That was Dath,” he said. “No one below thirty knows shit.”

  “What about Paulie? Nothing from him?”

  “He’s out in the Portal.” Howie shrugged. “He’ll call if he gets anything.”

  He sat, and waited, and I told him the rest.

  The first thing I did was introduce some new wiring into the Farm complex, setting up a subsidiary alarm system. Then, with Ratchet’s help, I disabled the automatic relays which would trip if the tunnel doors were left open for longer than five minutes. As the relays would flash lights on panels in both Roanoke General and the SafetyNet headquarters, they had to be cut out before step one of the plan could be put in place. We couldn’t just destroy them, because that would set off a different alarm.

  When we were convinced that it was safe, we opened the doors. From then on they were left that way all the time, unless the alarm went off. I let the spares pretty much come
and go as they pleased in the facility, distressing though that sometimes was it was never a relaxing experience to look under the table and find a naked man with no eyes or a girl with no legs lying underneath.

  I didn’t make any other changes for a few days, waiting to see if freedom of movement caused any of them distress. It didn’t appear to. The spares Ratchet and I were especially targeting soon seemed to prefer being outside the tunnels, though they usually went back there to sleep. The others reacted in a variety of ways: from occasional accidental excursions into the main facility, to never leaving at all.

  Then I started the classes. I could never have done what I did, or even a fraction of it, without Ratchet. I got through a year of college, but I studied history. I didn’t tangle with child psychology, language acquisition, or any kind of teaching practice. I was starting with kids in their teens, none of whom had received any human interaction in their lives. It ought to have been impossible to overcome that, and I think that had I been on my own it would have been pitifully little, far too late.

  But Ratchet was more than the cleaning drone I’d largely ignored until the night of the overdose. For a start, he did something to the medic droid. It was a company machine, designed and built to do what SafetyNet wanted. Yet at no point in the following five years did it ever show any sign of turning us in, or complain about having to chase the spares all over the compound in order to monitor and feed them.

  Second, and most importantly, it was Ratchet who did the teaching. Sure, I was the one who sat with the spares and hauled them upright, held their heads still so they could see the letters I waved in front of them and hear the words I repeated, over and over, in their ears. And yes, it was me who stood behind them, arms looped up under theirs forcing them to learn how to use their limbs properly. Their muscles were ludicrously underdeveloped, despite all the magic in the medic droid’s food preparations. The day-in, day-out hauling around of the spares was probably the only thing which kept my own body from wilting into oblivion.

  I did these things, and talked to them nonstop, and held them when they were unhappy, though such contact comes far from easily to me. But it was Ratchet who did the real work. He insisted I be the front man, on the grounds that the spares needed human nurturing, and I worked hard years of watchfulness and manufactured warmth. I tried to guess at the things they would need, and as they finally started to hold rudimentary conversations I did what I could to ensure that their intelligence gained some hold, and some independence. But without Ratchet’s apparent understanding of the ways in which a dormant human brain could be hot-wired into life, none of it would have passed step one. He planned the lessons, and I carried them out.

  After a while, the project—because in some ways I suppose that’s what it was—took on its own momentum. I became less dependent on Ratchet’s advice. I let the spares watch television and listen to music. I tried to explain the stuff that Ratchet couldn’t—like how the outside world really worked. But throughout, Ratchet was there every step of the way.

  I often wondered how Ratchet came by his knowledge, and never came to any real conclusion. Except one, which may or may not be relevant. I wondered if Ratchet was broken.

  I didn’t begin to suspect this for a long time—the droid was so capable in so many ways that the idea would have seemed preposterous. But I began to notice things. Sudden changes of activity, occasional brief periods when he seemed to stall or slip into a quiet neutral. He had some weird theories too, about unifying the conscious and the unconscious, which I never understood. And then there was the coffee.

  Every day I was on the Farm, Ratchet made enough coffee to waterlog about twice as many people as the place could hold. Each time I went into the kitchen I was baffled, amused and increasingly concerned to see the huge pots on the stove, each of which would quickly be replaced when it became stale. Unless the machine had spent time in some large hotel as Droid in Charge of Beverages, I couldn’t imagine why he might do such a thing.

  I asked him about it once, and he said simply it was “necessary.”

  Years passed, and gradually the changes in the spares consolidated. The ones we spent most time with now understood, at a basic level, what was said to them. They also began to talk, though for a long period there was a kind of crossover where some of them, notably Suej, spoke in an odd amalgam of English and what I thought of as “tunnel talk.” This was an incomprehensible system of grunts and murmurings, and I’m not even sure it was a proto-language of any kind. More probably it was simply a form of verbal comforting. As time went on they settled into using English most of the time, and of course most of them ended up sounding oddly like me, because mine were the only verbal rhythms they’d heard face-to-face. I let them watch television, too, so they could learn about the world outside. Possibly TV isn’t much of a role model, but then have you seen real life these days?

  Almost none of the older spares picked up anything at all, even though some were hauled into the classes regularly and the younger group were encouraged to pass things on to them. A few, like Mr. Two, gained a shadowy grasp of a handful of forms and words, in the way a cat may learn to open a door. Most learned nothing, and just rolled and crawled round the Farm for a little while each day, before returning to the tunnels to sleep and wait for the knife.

  Because it kept happening, of course. The ambulances kept arriving. Sometimes it seemed that the people out there in the real world delighted in living recklessly because they knew they had insurance. At intervals the men would come, and go again, leaving someone maimed. Nanune lost her left leg, a hand and a long strip of muscle from her arm. Ragald’s left kidney went, along with some bone marrow, one arm and a portion of one lung. In addition to the graft which had been taken before I got to the Farm, Suej lost a strip of stomach lining, a patch of skin from her face and then, six months before the end, her ovaries. By that time, Suej had learnt enough to know what she was losing. David lost two of his fingers and a couple other bits and pieces. The group got off comparatively lightly.

  And you know, it didn’t have to be this way. If the scientists could clone whole bodies, then they could have just grown limbs or parts when the need arose. But that would have been more expensive and less convenient, and they are the new Gods in this wonderful century of ours. If parts had been made to order, the real people would have had to wait longer before they could hold a wineglass properly again. This way spare parts were always ready and waiting.

  It didn’t take me long to realize the trap I’d backed myself into. When the orderly grabbed Nanune out of the tunnel the first time, I only just managed to hold myself back from violence at the last moment, converting my lunge into a pretense of helping the orderly which was, in any event, ignored. As the years went on, it got worse, because there was nothing I could do. Literally nothing. If I caused trouble of any kind, however small, I’d be out. SafetyNet owned me. They housed me, fed me, paid me. Even my ownCard was theirs. If I lost the job, I was in trouble, but that was the least of my worries.

  If I stopped being the caretaker at Roanoke Farm, then someone else would take my place. Someone who wouldn’t help them, who would shut them back into the tunnels and make the taste of freedom I’d given them the bitterest mistake of my life. A man who would shut the tunnels and keep them that way, except maybe to yank jenny or Suej or one of several others out in the middle of the afternoon, rape them, then throw them back on the pile. With rotten empty men left alone, you never can tell what they’ll do. Morality is all about being watched; when you’re alone it has a way of wavering or disappearing altogether. Ratchet knew stories about a caretaker who finally slid inside himself one long, cold night and started playing Russian roulette with the spares. He pulled the trigger for both of them, obviously, and as fate would have it the first time the hammer connected with a full chamber the gun was pointing at his own head. They say a fragment of the bullet is still embedded in the tunnel wall, and that when the caretaker’s body was found, one of the spares
was licking the remains of the inside of his skull.

  I’ve also heard about complaints being made when spare hands turned out to have no fingernails left, only ragged and bleeding tips, when internal organs were found to be so bruised they were barely usable, when spares’ skin showed evidence of cuts and burns which did not tally with any official activity.

  Maybe they should have hired proper teams of professionals to look after the spares. Perhaps SafetyNet’s customers thought they did. But they didn’t. That would cut into the profit. People sometimes seem to think that letting financial concerns make the decisions produces some kind of independent, objective wisdom. It doesn’t, of course. It leaves the door open for a kind of sweaty, frantic horror that is as close to pure evil as makes no difference.

  I might have been okay if I’d just done the job I’d been hired to do, that of sitting and letting the droids get on with the tending of livestock. But I didn’t, and once I’d started, there was no possibility of just walking away. I’ve turned my back on a lot of situations in my life, too many. Each time you do so a sliver of your mind is left behind, cut off from the rest. This part is forever watching the past, glaring at it to keep it down, and the only way you know it’s gone is because the present begins to bleach and fade. A smell grows up around you, a soft curdled odor which is so omnipresent that you don’t notice it. Other people may, however, and it will prevent you from ever really knowing What is going on again, from ever understanding the present

  When David lost his fingers I sat him down and explained why the men had done that to him. As I talked, conscious of the smell of Jack Daniels on my breath, I looked into his eyes and saw myself reflected back, distorted by tears. For the first time in six months I wanted some Rapt, something to smooth away the knowledge the pain in his eyes awoke in me. I was the nearest thing he would ever have to a parent, and I was explaining why it was okay for people to come along every now and then and cut pieces off his body. I was honest, and calm, and tried to make him realize I was on his side, but the more I talked the more I reminded myself of my own father.