Zero Bomb E-Book

M. T. Hill

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

From Philip K. Dick Award-nominated author M.T. Hill, Zero Bomb is a startling science fiction mystery that asks: what do we do when technology replaces our need to work?The near future. Following the death of his daughter Martha, Remi flees the north of England for London. Here he tries to rebuild his life as a cycle courier, delivering subversive documents under the nose of an all-seeing state.But when a driverless car attempts to run him over, Remi soon discovers that his old life will not let him move on so easily. Someone is leaving coded messages for Remi across the city, and they seem to suggest that Martha is not dead at all.Unsure what to believe, and increasingly unable to trust his memory, Remi is slowly drawn into the web of a dangerous radical whose '70s sci-fi novel is now a manifesto for direct action against automation, technology, and England itself.The deal? Remi can see Martha again – if he joins the cause.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for Zero Bomb

By M.T. Hill and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Part II

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 13

Epilogue

Part III

Part IV

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Part V

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PRAISE FOR ZERO BOMB

“Conceived at the height of an unprecedented national crisis, M.T. Hill’s Zero Bomb is a violent, vital novel about virtue, loyalty, decency and love, even as we watch these timeless human attributes dissolve in the stomach acids of the World Machine. Think E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, written for the Westworld age, and you may just gain a fingerhold on this crazed colt of a book.”

SIMON INGS, author of The Smoke

“A beautifully-written and profoundly dislocating book about a chillingly-plausible near future and its discontents. Absolutely essential reading.”

DAVE HUTCHINSON, author of Europe in Autumn

“An ambitious novel that effortlessly combines speculation, social commentary, metafiction, and a compulsively readable story. Thrilling, audacious and timely, M.T. Hill’s visions of the future feel closer to reality than they should.”

HELEN MARSHALL, author of The Migration

“The fragmented story of Remi, a traumatised man struggling to remake his life, reminds me in its surrealism of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Intense and well observed, Zero Bomb delves into our fears and distrust of technology, and our political anxieties stoked by twenty-four-hour news.”

ANNE CHARNOCK, author of Dreams Before the Start of Time

“Vivid and richly imagined, Zero Bomb is a passionate examination of who we are and a warning of what we could shortly become. I couldn’t put it down.”

CATRIONA WARD, author of Rawblood

“Zero Bomb is a novel on the bleeding edge of desperate times. Delicious shivers of strangeness – an allotment of limbs, a fox that is also a surveillance device – bring an old magic to a future Britain broken by zero-hours contracts, algorithmic bosses, and 24/7 alienation. Using a bold structure, the novel reveals its mysteries across different facets of a compelling near-future North.”

MATTHEW DE ABAITUA, author of The Red Men

BY M.T. HILL AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Zero Bomb

The Breach (March 2020)

ZERO BOMB

M.T. HILL

TITAN BOOKS

Zero Bomb

Print edition ISBN: 9781789090017

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090024

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: March 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2019 M.T. Hill. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Lucie and Raymond

PART I

REMI

1

Remi took to running when his daughter Martha died. His wife Joan called this denial, deflection – a kind of coping. But Remi called it running or jogging and nothing else, and within weeks his running had consumed him. He ran to the shops for milk, he ran to the shops for bread, and he often ran hours into the night so he couldn’t dream of her.

Remi wanted to run a marathon the morning of Martha’s funeral. Almost two months had passed by then, owing to a gross delay on the post-mortem. A fatal backlog, the coroner said, without irony, without so much as a twitch. Their service being tested, underfunded and overstretched. In the end Remi and Joan were on countdown so long that when the day finally arrived, Remi saw it as just another. He woke at three-thirty in the morning with plans to leave home by four; he woke to Joan sitting in low lamplight on the floor by their bed, freshly bereaved by the simple act of waking, and he saw she was weeping again. ‘It’s just the thought of her lying in that cold room,’ she told Remi as he dressed in his luminous running clothes. ‘She’s on her own.’ And Remi nodded his agreement and left anyway, went out with the foxes but before the dog walkers; out early enough to be the jogger who finds the body. He ran an easy eight miles into the day – was there as the late-spring mist rose from the fields and hills that hemmed Manchester. There to witness the rising sun, the neon-edged moorland, with the glowing feeling he might be the first or last man alive.

As the morning’s warm light planed in low, Remi lapped two reservoirs. There were geese on the water, static and wary. The power lines, strung between elegant new pylons that overlooked the site, chattered in the breeze. Remi only broke his stride when he came across a neat square of rabbit entrails on the path, and even then he didn’t stop for long. There was no fluff or blood nearby. The entrails sat there glistening, a uniform plum colour. Remi’s shin splints hurt. He was thirty-nine years old. His jowls were loosening, his crown was thinning, and his only child was dead.

Reaching the other side of the reservoir, Remi drew parallel with a fence that bounded a working farm. Snuffling sounds drew his attention – some donkeys were eating god-knows-what from a smouldering bonfire. Like the geese, they stopped to regard him dumbly. He wondered if they had the capacity for shame, if they could register being caught with their snouts in the filth. Then Remi considered if he should be ashamed. Not for intruding, but for being out here at all. It was then Remi noticed a dark fox, apparently following him, and saw its bloodied maw, and he understood.

* * * 

Later, as Remi helped to bury Martha in the grounds of a church he’d never attended, sweating freely as he worked the shovel, he pictured those donkeys from the farm by the water. We each keep little rituals, and there are things we do when we think nobody’s looking.

The shovel was small and, owing to the church being quite new, the pile of soil beside the grave was full of crushed hardcore. Remi worked hard and committed this dark rubble with his sweat; it made a terrible sound as it showered the coffin. He was still wearing his luminous running gear. He was burying his daughter. He was thirty-nine and gravity was claiming his body and his child was dead, and here he was, amid this faceless mass, throwing smashed rock upon her. Convinced he was going to break the casket lid with the weight of the rubble, he stopped shovelling. He didn’t want to see her again.

Then the priest did his bit, ashes to ashes, and Remi stood away from Joan and her estranged family and sought something to hold on to, something real. He tried to list what comprised the England his daughter had known. What remained of his own England now Martha was gone. He considered his own anchoring points, his childhood – son of a French mother, an English father. The hills around his parents’ village near the Pyrenees, and then their move to Manchester when Joan fell pregnant, not long before the Brexit referendum. He began listing the things that made this England: the grey cracked pavements and potholed roads you ran along into town; the vascular tree roots breaking through tarmac on narrow streets; the font used on motorway signs. Passing a convoy of Volkswagens on their way to a club meet somewhere in the Midlands. Rooting in your pockets for loose change at a railway station toilet gate. Lying deeply hungover in a cheap hotel bed, your infant daughter kicking you in the chest, your wife laughing quietly as she tries to nurse.

Martha had not long turned seven when she died. England had changed so much in her scant years.

* * * 

After the wake, the quietest the pub had known, Remi and Joan caught a taxi back to their house. Remi made a pot of tea and a plate of limp sandwiches that went untouched, and then he began to leave her. He packed his sports rucksack, energy gels, a bottle of water. A money belt and his bank card. He sniffed his way through the house, which seemed poisoned, noxious. He announced, ‘I’m going for a run.’ He pulled on his trainers on the front step and stretched his hamstrings, his calves. He rolled his shoulders and locked the door and posted his keys.

Remi reached the fringes of Birmingham the next morning.

2

It was Birmingham for a while, after that. No contact with Joan as a policy, a means to sever the connective tissue, annul their relationship mentally if not legally. To get by, Remi started washing cars at less than minimum wage for a friendly Polish family, until something of a turf war erupted with a rival firm down the road. When an early-morning petrol bomb nearly cost Remi his sight (and took his remaining hair), he gathered his stuff and ran himself out to Solihull, where he was forced to rough it properly. Unfortunately, he settled on the wrong patch – earned his licks from a band of local homeless who didn’t trust his accent, nor his unweathered face. Soon Remi was huffing spark as a crutch, and sooner still he could not run. He lost a year this way, though it made no odds since Martha’s death – time had become irrelevant to him; eating and drinking were little more than necessary hindrances.

Then an intervention, a ray of luckshine. Street pastors from a Christian charity arrived in the squat where Remi lay sored and broken, and brought with them the faint promise of redemption. Remi was unsalvageable, he thought, addicted and numb, but he went along to their centre and for several months ran clean for a lack of other options, having all but forgotten why he started taking spark in the first place. Making good progress, getting through the worst of withdrawal, he was in turn given a semi-permanent address from which to make job enquiries. A sort of alms postbox.

Some weeks later he began delivering food-aid parcels on foot. It was enough to keep a pay-as-you-go mobile going; brought in enough cash for him to hop between youth hostels or, occasionally, treat himself to a bed-and-breakfast. The work got his pulse up, and helped his muscles recover some of their previous form. He remembered something of what it was to run.

Not long afterwards, however, Remi’s luck ran dry. In the space of mere weeks his postal firm was swallowed up and mostly automated – redundancy culled all but two staff, the legwork farmed out to drones. Suddenly Remi’s prospects seemed shapeless, dismal, until a chance meeting with a metalworker stayed the fresh allure of spark and took him south to Kent, where he laboured long hours operating microcranes on the border fence.

Some days he can still smell the steel on his hands. Some days he can easily spend an hour counting the nicks and scars on his fingers and forearms.

Today, though? Today it’s London. Crushing, vital, imperfect London. Fractured, febrile London – London its own country, forever skirting ascension or total collapse; a shattered or immutable city, depending where you are and what you can see. Or how much you earn, and with whom you spend your time. London where Remi’s alarm is going off early, because he needs to get out and courier a hot manuscript to an agitprop publisher in Walthamstow. London where he’s scraped enough together to rent a studio flat in post-bomb Hackney – a shoebox, but a nice shoebox, in a converted Victorian gas holder on the Regent’s Canal. London where Remi sleeps in an old iron carcass, but still can’t believe his good fortune.

London where his daughter Martha’s voice is fading, the last low whisper of an exorcised ghost.

* * * 

Remi dithers at breakfast. His ears are already full of rain and traffic. It’s a grey morning – a filthy week, all in all. He takes his toast with a cup of black, sugary tea, and pops three anti-emetics from a blister pod. Chewing and sipping, he grabs his traffic bug from its wall charger and tethers it to his watch. The bug is a newish Gilper on loan from a pawnbroker – it features urban-camo skin and a high-capacity cell that’s more than enough for a working day’s footage. As he pours himself into bike Lycra, his street armour, he lets the bug hover outside the flat window. According to the pawnbroker, the bug’s previous owner jail-broke it with introspective software. Now it seems to enjoy taking its own mysterious pictures of the pre-dawn, none of which he can ever find on its memory drive. Idly, Remi turns on the cooker hob and turns it off again.

Outside, and into London ramping up. A freezing pall has passed over the city, and the streets sparkle with ice. The bike lanes are hectic, too: riders running wheel to wheel, while above them streams an almost continuous river of bugs, every single rider leashed invisibly to their own, as if it’s really the bugs dragging their owners to work.

By the time he’s on street level, the smog has settled. Just as quickly, the whole scene is shot through with lasermesh from the City’s high-rises. Holo adverts rally in the pall. The sun, more of a backlight, gives everything a bright yellow density. Squint a little, and the sky is falling.

Remi numbly pulls on his breather, joins a fast lane and powers into the flow; he heads straight down the central chute past Spitalfields, minding his own business. He’s Kevlar-heavy and constantly swallowing what feels like nylon string. Early riding can do this to him, plastic lung being at its worst first thing. When it’s as cold as this, it can be as bad as the day he quit huffing. All around him, riders are bunching up as if subconsciously seeking each other’s heat. You’re meant to take your time on these mornings – especially if you’re rolling with tyres as thin as pennies, on a surface that’s been relaid to deal with each successive summer’s obscene heat. But Remi’s having as much fun as what’s left of him allows – digging in, running true, bang on time. The eerie hiss and clank of hard breathing and chaingear. Give it some extra welly down the off-chute, and he might just break some community trial records by the time he arrives. He might even feel something at all.

Remi’s bug flashes a right arrow to him, and Remi leaves his lane.

* * * 

The literary agency is situated down a narrow side street. Remi stands the bike and checks his watch: he’ll make the manuscript collection six minutes ahead of schedule. This means an instant bonus, a guaranteed three-star review, and the possibility of repeat business.

The agency’s front gate is hidden behind a lattice of scaffolding and mesh. Shoring-up works, probably – more buildings damaged by tunnel boring for the next Tube line. He hits the buzzer. The Gilper lands on his shoulder and chirrups.

A bank of locks pop open, and a severe-looking woman comes out to the gate, a lead-coloured case in her hands.

‘Morning,’ Remi says. ‘Run to Walthamstow.’

‘You’re the courier?’

Remi flashes his ID. Freelance and fancy-free.

‘Very early,’ the agent mutters. She rubs at a coffee stain on her top, and doesn’t open the gate. ‘I hope we’re not paying you by the minute.’

‘I got lucky,’ Remi tells her, shaking his head. ‘No extras for you. What we quote is what you pay.’

The literary agent nods, but she doesn’t look him in the eye. She passes the cased manuscript from one hand to the other, and then out to him. Trembling, ever so slightly, like she’s glad to be rid of it. Remi takes the case with polite reverence: he can tell from the weight it’s a geolock-and-key job, proper contraband.

The literary agent nods. ‘Is that everything, then?’

Remi nods, and the traffic bug lifts away from his shoulder.

The agent murmurs something about payment gates and backs into the shadows.

‘You have a good one too,’ Remi says. He walks to his bike, slides the envelope into the shock panniers, and holds his wrist against the connector pad. This links the envelope to his bug, in case he gets jacked.

* * * 

Remi doesn’t know much about art, though he’ll blag his way through a client briefing to win a delivery contract. But by doing this job, he’s part of the scene’s nervous system. When you’re creating under a government that demands to see it all, you have to adapt. To paint or cartoon or write books these days is subversive at the very least, and to shift it through the city is not simple complicity – it’s open defiance. Remi reckons about half of his traffic is typed or handwritten manuscripts, and the demand for grey couriers like him is only growing. The current buzz on deep channels is that foreign embassies have cottoned on and started paying big, if certain assurances are met. If the art market takes a whack – if there’s another big crackdown, say – Remi might yet explore that route himself.

The commute only intensifies as he cycles on with the manuscript. His bug is flashing the directions, but he knows these roads, counts the miles instead through personal nodes: the pubs, the automated bookies, the empty temples and mosques and synagogues, the libraries-turned-flats, the sets of traffic lights you can safely skip. Graffiti tags and fissures in tarmac on certain roads. Grids and H-for-hydrant signs making for esoteric markers and signals.

Then he’s waiting at a heavy junction, caught in electric traffic. Sandstone brick surrounds, Georgian everything. You can tell a wealthy enclave by its heavy gates and partially exposed gun-turrets – is this really Mayfair, already? He scans the run of luxury shops while his bug traces a lazy helix above his head. He admires another rider’s cycle as it pulls alongside him at the lights, a sliver of a thing with a carbon-fibre frame. Next to the two of them, a driverless car paused so perfectly on the dashed nav line it could be screencapped from an advert. Remi and the other cyclist share a cautious smile as they notice simultaneously the passenger asleep on the car’s rear bench.

Then to the traffic lights, foot on the front pedal, and back to his idle quantifying. What makes this city? What makes it breathe? Remi has some ideas: the crane verticals and cables; the old and new in visible sedimentary layers, history compressed and overflowing from the grids; blues and reggae and old-school jungle from open windows and passing cars; a grimjazz band practising in the middle distance, steady cymbal wash; a food courier arguing futilely with a driverless white van; a steaming coffee outlet selling weed and beta-blockers; lads outside a takeaway sharing shock-joints and quiet dreams; a mobile shop blinking deep cuts on stolen derms; hidden London delineated by the warm vanilla lights of bedsits above shops; sleazy-hot London with its shapeless blood-glow; sex bidding and street shouting; the wealthiest Londoners slipping by undetected in silent taxis—

‘Hear that?’ the other cyclist asks him.

Remi pulls down his breather, wipes the condensation from his top lip. ‘Sorry?’

The other cyclist nods. ‘That noise. You not hear it?’

And then it comes again, and Remi does. A sad pop, like someone closing a door in another room.

‘What the hell’s that?’ the other rider asks.

‘Tunnel works?’ Remi shrugs and looks at the ground. ‘I dunno.’

The other cyclist shrugs back. Not cold, or even polite, Remi understands, but familiar. The death-spiral fraternity of cycling in London.

Again comes the popping sound. A series of popping sounds. ‘Seriously!’ the other cyclist says. It does sound like it’s coming from beneath them, but it’s too clipped to be a passing Tube train, and Remi’s sure they stopped tunnelling work to repair the collapse at Tottenham Court Road.

Once more the noise comes, this time much closer. Remi squints at the other rider. The lights turn green and the driverless car glides away. Remi and the other cyclist wordlessly mount the pavement, intrigued or unsettled enough to hang around. They both lean on their tiptoes, holding the traffic light post. Their bugs begin to fly in tight circles around each other, as if they’re conspiring.

‘Right then,’ the other cyclist says, gesturing to the bugs. ‘That’s no good.’

Remi grimaces. The bugs often know.

Then the smog draws closer, dry and sour, and the popping sound is all around them. The driverless car has faltered in the box junction, its motor screaming painfully. The passenger has woken up and is banging on the windows. Without saying anything, Remi dismounts his bike and props it against the post, and the other rider does the same. Together they approach the car, stilted by adrenaline. There’s a smell of hot wires. Other vehicles start to beep as the traffic lights turn red again. Remi’s bug emits a shrill alarm to warn him he’s abandoned the manuscript case.

Remi heads directly for the car. ‘You all right?’ he calls, mouth sticky. Behind them, doors are hissing open, other voices rising. Pap-pap-pap from the driverless car’s front end.

Closer, the offside window, and a pair of thick boot soles fill the glass. The passenger on his back, kicking at full stretch, because the car’s cabin is filling with smoke. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Remi manages. And now the car’s reverse note sounds, hazards glitching on and off. Remi instinctively steps away just as the driverless car accelerates, brakes to a pause, and restarts itself. Before he can react, the car swings away from the box junction and turns to face the mounting traffic. To face Remi.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Remi says.

The passenger window glass gives and speckles the road, and then the car comes at him.

3

In the moment – syrupy, elastic – London reveals to Remi its starkest face: a blanked sky, impassive glass, reflections of ancient buildings that will long outlast him. Remi needs to move but his limbs won’t have it, and then the second cyclist is there, clamped to Remi’s arm, rotating him, and the driverless car passes so close it draws a hiss from Remi’s rain-shell. Remi and the second cyclist tangle and hit the road. The tarmac is bright black and wet. A wrench. A lucky roll. The driverless car is still pulling away when it hits the traffic lights, and the whole fixture tilts out of its base. The pole collapses, sparking, and gouges chunks of masonry from the nearest building. The car digs in and tilts backwards, driving wheels lifted away from the road and spinning furiously. Thick smoke rises from the arches, the bonnet seams, and on the street the exposed mains start crackling.

Finally, the crowd. London’s white cells rushing to the site of attack. The passenger’s arms and head emerge from the smoke as he clambers out. The other cyclist is back on his feet. Remi’s sitting up on the road with his head pounding, purple blotches in his vision. His hands and knees are studded with grit.

‘The bikes,’ the other cyclist says.

The bikes. The package. And a roiling panic. From his seated position, Remi just about sees what’s left of his bike: the wheels creased and tyres off, the frame wedged against the base of the traffic light pole. The panniers have been folded in half. The manuscript case is in the mix.

As if to offer sympathy, Remi’s bug descends to his shoulder and stops flapping.

‘I’m insured,’ Remi says, mostly to himself. He shields his eyes to survey the mess. ‘Hang on. Is that—’

‘Wait!’ the other cyclist calls. ‘Oi!’

Because the car’s passenger is sprinting away down the road.

‘What’s he doing?’ Remi manages. He’s getting up. Unsure but apparently without serious injury. A semi-circle of concerned faces. An older woman holding out a flask. ‘Jesus,’ Remi adds, shaking his head. ‘I’ve got the lot on tape – how’s that his fault?’

‘You all right, though, love?’ the older woman asks. A cup of tea now. ‘Could’a done ya, that! And to say them cars are clever!’

Remi doesn’t argue with her. It’s difficult to say much at all. He waves away the tea and stumbles towards the other cyclist, who’s doing his best to separate their bikes from the tangled car and post.

‘The bikes,’ the second cyclist says, forlorn.

‘I know,’ Remi says back. He kneels down to free the package from the panniers. Its reactive protection layer means the innards will be fine, possibly creased – but the agent will already know something’s wrong, because the tracker will show it as stationary for longer than Remi’s service-level agreement permits. Worse still, she might think Remi’s tried to tamper with it, get inside.

‘This has to go,’ Remi tells the other cyclist. ‘I’ve got to get it somewhere…’

Their eyes meet briefly. Both of them stinking in their armour-panelled Lycra, panting like dogs. The other cyclist looks lost. No – he looks bereft.

‘It was a present,’ the cyclist tells Remi, as if he might know. ‘From my late wife. What the bloody hell do I tell the kids?’

And with this arrives a vision, white-hot and livid: Martha’s body.

Remi stoops low to offset the dizziness. Not here. He closes his eyes. He’s dragging it up. The smell of burning. He’s dredging again. He plants one hand on the road, the manuscript case clutched against his chest. A voice from an old room, a memorial. His first and failed attempt at therapy: Remi, I want you to imagine you are standing before a cove. You have rowed ashore and tied the boat to a slimy post. You can hear the sea. It is different from shore – flatter and stiller than when you were out there. There is a tall figure in the breakers. There is a lighthouse on the hill. You can walk towards the lighthouse, if you like. You can ignore the figure and walk along the ridge towards the lighthouse. You don’t have to look back. You don’t have to look down. Inside the lighthouseyou find a table set for one. You sit before a bowl of light, and in the light is the colour blue, which you can taste and swallow and feel yourself digest—

Remi grips the package. He straightens it as well as he can, and the action brings him back from the edge. He checks his watch. He clears his throat. Without another word to the other cyclist, he pockets his bug and tries to run.

4

Remi can’t remember how to do this. Two steps, two breaths in; three steps, three breaths out. Wasn’t this the pattern whenever he went out back home, back in the other time, his first life? Something about maximising oxygen flow to needy muscles. A pattern he internalised and made automatic, once so natural that it became his response to any pace beyond a brisk walk. Within minutes he’s hitting the chest burn, early fatigue. Wanting to stop. It’s natural, he tells himself, remembering old pains at least. This is before you settle in for the long haul. Don’t be too harsh on yourself – you haven’t run anywhere for so long. Doesn’t he remember? How he used this to free himself from having to think? Two in – one, two. Three out – one, two, three. The uneven pavements and cold down his neck. Towards the meditative state that saved him each and every time he went under.

Except it isn’t working. Remi’s tearing through West London’s back streets, and everything seems volatile and disconnected. The city is shifting around him, becoming unknowable.

He pulls up, staggers a little. A starburst overlay. He could’ve been killed back there, injured at the very least. Yet it’s not even the idea of a malfunctioning driverless car that fazes Remi most. Despite their advancements, hiccups happen, albeit rarely. Batteries can fail, and without due care, circuits corrode. No – what really bothers Remi is that the passenger fled. You can’t even start a car these days unless you’re comprehensively insured, with a subdermal chip to prove it. Can’t pass a traffic signal without your car being immobilised if your licence is about to lapse. And casualty rates for car occupants are the lowest they’ve ever been. The passenger wasn’t injured by the impact, nor rendered so shock-stupid that running made sense. So was it the smoke? With an electrical fire you might panic, seek to clear your lungs… but why would you run?

Another plausible motive is shame. Not wanting to be seen. Because, Remi considers, given the media’s fatalistic obsession with driverless anything, today’s incident could well make the nine o’clock bulletin.

Or – what if the car was hacked? What if it was deliberate? What if it was to do with the manuscript?

Remi clutches the case to his hip. He checks his watch, whose screen displays his job rate dwindling in real time. He unpockets his bug, which bobs in circles around him. If he doesn’t land the manuscript on target, he’ll lose half a day’s wages, and possibly the next contract. He retches. Running all the way to Walthamstow just isn’t an option.

* * * 

Remi descends the stairway at the nearest Tube station, Green Park, and jostles his way on to the eastbound Piccadilly Line platform, trying to remember the name of his contact, of his issuing agent. In the moment it’s hard even to recall the name of the editor he’s delivering to. The address. Given the sensitivity of the documents they move, a courier’s memory is their lifeblood, and Remi’s is scattered, failing. Then the train is in the platform and he’s being pressed into a heaving crowd, blood and plasma still damp on his knees, sweat running freely from his brow. He winces inwardly as his knees rub on someone’s long woollen coat. He finds a gap, a pocket of air. He gulps it.

The stops filter past. Remi stands with his hand on the bar, woozy and distracted. Fading in and fading out. Then it hits him: Walthamstow. Fucking Walthamstow! Why is he on the Piccadilly Line and not the Victoria? How’s he even managed that? He swivels to the live Tube map scrolling down the carriage, questioning himself. Okay, so he’ll just change at King’s Cross, or even Finsbury Park. He retightens his grip on the handle. He wipes his wet face down his other arm.

At King’s Cross, the carriage empties at an impressive speed, leaving plenty of empty seats. The chance to rest makes Remi’s decision for him. As he sits down, the people on the opposite row gawp at his torn knees, his clammy skin. He tries to ignore them. He closes his eyes. He attempts to tot up the value of his lost bike, and the faff it’ll take to replace it. He squeezes the bug in his pocket, and it gives a tiny haptic response. Some attempt at reassurance.

At the next station, Caledonian Road, two heavyset men seat themselves either side of Remi. He notices them because they’re wearing near-identical tracksuit bottoms, fleece-lined cardigans and heavy-looking work boots. They carry a stink of ethanol. Labourer-grubby: the lemon sourness of a urinal cake. Between them they casually muscle Remi’s elbows into submission, his torso frail by comparison. The man to his left has long, dirty fingernails, and a tin of beer concealed in a degrading plastic bag.

‘Want me to swap?’ Remi asks the man on his right, tilting his head sideways to his friend.

The man flashes Remi a bored glance. He might as well be in another carriage, another universe. Then the man drops his sports holdall on the carriage floor. From this the man produces a pad of paper, an old fountain pen – instantly curious to Remi because he does it so delicately, and because it makes no real sense: a labourer with a fountain pen between his thick, dirty fingers. Besides, who doesn’t watch their fellow passengers from the corners of their eyes? Who doesn’t try to peer into another life and imagine, briefly, what it might be like to occupy it? The stolen glance is a transaction from unwritten London. It’s another way the city trades its secrets.

The man’s pad contains reams of squared paper. An artefact in the same way the pen is, given this day and age. Perhaps Remi’s first impressions were wrong: he might well be a labourer, comfortably scruffy with it, but he might also be a man for whom organisation matters. A foreman, or engineer, old-fashioned to the point of being contrarian about technology. Is the pen really his? Is it an heirloom? Remi marvels at the possibilities. A whole life story spun from an object out of sync. And as the man begins to write on the pad, a silky motion, arched hand, Remi follows what he can of the fresh ink, refocusing his gaze as the man reaches the end of the first row of squares and drops down to the next.

There the man stops, as if sensing Remi’s gaze in some unknown, atavistic way. Remi turns away too obviously. He locks eyes with the woman opposite, whose scolding expression says his movement, however minor, has pulled her out of her book.

The train rattles northwards towards Finsbury Park. Less than five. The carriage lights strobe through dead spots in the tunnels. And the big man goes on writing furiously in his squared-paper pad, corner to corner, his forearm rippling with each stroke, every point of exerted pressure. Next time Remi glances over, his guts shift with surprise. In so little time, the man has filled half a page – and not with any real words. Instead, the man has plotted an unbroken string of figures and letters, seemingly at random, into every square. Something about the pace of it, and the hand’s steadiness, gives Remi the impression these letters and numbers have been learned and repeated here by rote. Unnerved yet fascinated, Remi continues to follow as the man completes a new line of characters, and then another. Is it a puzzle, Sudoko-like (remember those)? Or a calculation, some bizarre theorem—

‘Hey,’ the young woman says to Remi over her book. ‘You’re bleeding pretty bad you know.’

Remi shrugs with one shoulder. As he does, the train brakes to a sharp stop in the tunnel. The carriage lights clank off. The man next to Remi stops writing and taps the page three times with his pen. Remi keeps his eyes front. The man taps more insistently, and Remi finds it irritating. Tap. Tap. Tap. Remi glances across the way, startled to find the man staring back from the reflection opposite, lighted and dimmed as the lights flicker; fully, surreally there when the light floods, and then a blank mass in darkness, facial features absent entirely.

The man is smiling.

A second jolt as the train lurches forward half a metre. And more tapping, each time in the same place. Remi looks now, and this time he notices the word on the pad, the word under the pen, with the sensation of insects climbing his neck. The squared page, for all its apparent randomness – hundreds of tiny letters and digits – bears a name. Four little letters, right at the end of the man’s pen, that spell it out:

R E M I

Remi squeezes his eyes shut. It’s the strobing. He’s overtired. He’s shaken up.

He opens them, and the man’s pen has moved to the top of the page:

L O R R Y

S P R A Y

The pen moves to the middle of the page:

T A L L O W

G R E A S E

The page like some abstraction of a word-search puzzle. The page full of messages:

W O O D

P I G E O N

C O L L A R

The train driver gives an apology for the delay and announces Finsbury Park as the next station. The big man leans forward over the pad, as if to better study Remi’s reflection.

‘What is this?’ Remi hisses, breaching the silence of the carriage, and with it the gravest rule. ‘What are you doing?’

The pen taps:

O I L E D

P U D D L E

The pen taps:

M A R T H A

Finally Finsbury Park is sliding across the windows. The two big men rise and push forcefully up the aisle towards the carriage doors.

Without a thought, Remi gets up to follow them. Shoulders first up the platform, scattering, a half-jog, half-stumble, keeping in sight the writing man’s pattern baldness; the figure and scene already etched on his bones should he ever try to forget them, double-exposed with the shattered image he tries to maintain of his daughter.

Up the wet stairs and into Finsbury Park’s tiled tunnels, glossy with condensate, the sheen and colour of wet teeth. The writing man is only just ahead now, and the second man has vanished. The manuscript case jangles under Remi’s armpit. Nothing is cohering.

‘Wait!’ Remi calls after them. The crowd thins out under North London’s surly sky. The big man doesn’t turn, much less waits. The man and his holdall, his jogging trousers; his work boots leaving dirty wet prints on the tiles.

‘How?’ Remi shouts. ‘How do you know her name?’

The man is outside on the concourse, sprinting now through the bus ranks, before walking again in a longer stride, seemingly focused on a place unknown. Remi watches him pull a large woollen hat over his head. Remi follows. ‘Wait!’ he shouts. ‘Wait!’

By a pub on the corner of a main road, the writing man turns at last. Their first proper eye contact: a moment of curious recognition, incomprehension. Remi is coming in fast, yet the man remains nonchalant. He rolls away as though preparing to throw a punch, but instead takes something small from his pocket, folds it quickly, and posts it through the grate of a wall-mounted ashtray. He lights a cigarette, takes a short drag, and posts that also.

Finally, the man steps off the pavement and into a waiting cab. Remi instantly unpockets and throws his bug into the air – ‘Shoot! Shoot it! Get the reg plate of that taxi, you little bastard!’

But the bug falls to the ground, wings inert and body dull.

5

Remi wavers in the Finsbury Park drizzle, the writing man gone. Now Martha returns to him from the recesses, the flooding drains and cobbled alleys. Of all the places, they’re in the old bathroom, her legs around his waist and belly, backside on his forearm, and she’s proudly repeating her newest word – teesss for teeth – laughing at herself, the tickling sibilant, and at Remi’s over-the-top movements as he uses his finger to demonstrate brushing. It’s painful to him, an old scar raised as they sometimes do in heat, picked at. It was always so bittersweet to watch Martha develop. The dissonance of completely loving a child so bright and fearless and full of potential, and yet having to second-guess who she might become, what might await her out there; what anyone her age might go on to do in the onrushing England, the irrupting future, where the jobs would change, or slip away, and the opportunities would all be so different, the stakes so much higher. All those evenings he sat there in Martha’s room feeding her from a bottle as she gently tapped his nose for comfort, he and Joan the entirety of her world. Remi would feed her milk as he read with his spare hand about new atrocities: the horror show of western Europe convulsing in some kind of pre-collapse; another vote going this way, another heart-deadening lurch that. The recession of empathy they had to witness and endure (some, of course, in more acute or violent ways than others). The triple threat of heat and war and high water. And Remi feels again the perverse relief he enjoyed in the months following her death. The release to know that, even though she’d gone, leaving an absence that completely anaesthetised them from the world, he’d never have to see his daughter heartbroken or sobbing or suffering. For every moment of beauty nested within her, for every moment of pride she had seeded in him, Remi would never have to watch Martha suffer the ignominies of adolescence, young adulthood or the otherwise unknowable – be that robots, riots or plain human wrath.

And yet, as the smell of burning paper fills him up, it’s the missing her that matters more. Her breath as she settled in for sleep, how it deepened yet softened as she drifted away. A small green boat, he would tell her. Lower the oars, Martha, and hear the rowlocks rattle. The sound of water will carry you. Later, when he was sure she had gone, how he would open and close the door in such a way as to not disturb her; knew so well the creaks of the landing, the stairs, every patch of carpet to avoid. He misses her sleep-smell and her impossibly tiny fingernails, the fine hairs of her neck, the way she would sneeze without a care in the world, then laugh with thick snot in her mouth, let it down