The Living (6 page)

He hurriedly
cancels
the elephant.

I can physically feel his mistrust.

From surprise, almost as a reflex, I become inviz. As if an invisibility cloak will protect me… He smiles. He reaches out his hand and calmly feels my invisible face. He kisses me politely on the forehead with his mirrored lips, and silently, without saying goodbye, leaves
luxury
. I’m left alone. I feel fear pouring down me in icy streams, all over my body, and it’s like it’s coming from the place on my forehead which he touched with his lips. The Leo-Lot ray… He’s figured it out. Of course he’s figured it out. He is going to destroy me. Lock me up in a House of Correction until the end of time.

Only in
luxury
can fear be so thrilling. Somewhere by my solar plexus the streams of fear get warm and pour down past my stomach in thick, hot waves… I decide to stay on in
luxury
for a little while to enjoy this feeling of fear.

It’s not like I’ll get any pleasure from it when I’m out of
luxury
.

Yesterday I visited the regional Farm with a group.

I don’t like going out to the Farm. Two trips a year would be, I know, an unrealisable dream for most people, but
personally
I prefer working in the lab. I’ve never asked Lot if he likes it at the Farm: we rarely discuss things that aren’t directly connected to our project, but a few times I’ve noticed
something
in his expression, something… like disgust. So I think that he’s also less than thrilled about these trips.

It’s all about fear. You can sense it from a few kilometres away, in your nostrils, in the pores of your skin and in your hair; the air is saturated with fear, like an electric shock, and there are no words to describe its nightmarish essence. The closer you get to the Farm, the more the fear thickens, until, finally, it turns into a warm stench cloud which is very easy to describe – the evaporated fumes of animal urine, animal blood and sweat… We wait by the gate in the wall. It’s made of concrete, four metres high and half a metre thick. I can’t imagine that any of the animals here would suddenly take it on themselves to try to get over this barrier – but
nevertheless
, according to the Farmer, there have been incidents where their instincts stopped working, and, as they tried to escape, cows and goats hit the wall, ramming into it on the run, again and again, until… until it was all over. So now as well as the wall they’ve installed an electromagnetic barrier too.

We wait for the Farmer to let us in, he turns off the
electromagnetic
barrier for a short time and opens the gates.

And lets us onto the domain of death. The domain of the mortal.

Lot and I always tell the correctees that these visits are part of their nature therapy. Studying nature, contact with living creatures unlike ourselves is an ancient form of relaxation. An extremely effective method for persons with destructively criminal incodes: it helps them develop empathy for the weak. Promotes kind thoughts. Creates a good constructive
background
… That’s what we always say.

But it’s all lies.

In actual fact we bring the correctees to the Farm to arouse entirely different emotions in them. Persons with DCIV are often inclined to perceive an animal as a potential victim (which can be explained by the fact that the animals
fundamentally
behave like victims), which is to say, an animal is, in this case, a PIA – a potential incitement to aggression. We test the correctees for cruelty. We want to know to what extent the cruel tendencies of those that gave a positive result last time round have progressed in half a year. And whether any such tendencies have emerged in those who reacted negatively before.

For thirty minutes the correctees have the opportunity to observe the animals through the metal bars. The correctees are sure that their
socio
has been switched off for the duration of their visit to the Farm. We tell them that this is necessary for their therapy to be maximally effective, so that they are not distracted from visual contact with the animals in first layer. This is true to a certain extent: the correctees can’t be distracted from first layer – we block all the signals going in. But second layer is active. We record all the signals coming out in second layer. We calculate their potential threat coefficient, PTC, in this specific situation and determine the nature of their reaction to a PIA.

So that I will understand later on, I’ll list a few examples.

The standard signals for a low PTC are like this:

Those are negative reactions to a PIA.

With an average PTC we observe transitional reactions. Characteristic for this condition are the following signals:

High PTC, examples of positive reactions to a PIA:

High PTC, examples of maximally positive reaction:

On contact with the animals some correctees produce
mediated
signals as a reflex action. They tend to be quotes from the Book of Life or from various educational and developmental programs:

Mediated signals prevent us from accurately determining the nature of the reaction to the PIA. In the absence of other signals, we classify this reaction as transitional, but we take into account that it could also belong to either the negative or positive type.

The above is just a short professional digression. I’m trying, as I did in my previous reproductions, to pay a little attention to scientific aspects. I hope that at eight years old digressions like this will be interesting and useful and help me make my choice of specialisation…

Now I’ll go back to yesterday’s visit to the Farm.

Lot and I had brought a group of fifteen correctees. Among them was Zero – the very same. The person with no incode.
I don’t know if I was expecting something special, but he turned out to be a completely ordinary eleven-year-old boy. Nothing remarkable about his appearance: in the evening when I went through what happened I tried to imagine him and I couldn’t. I only got flashes of different fragments of his face, like pieces of a picture in third layer that’s not loading. A lock of dark hair on his forehead. Narrow hazel eyes. Frowning brows. It was his first visit to the Farm.

He kept himself apart from the group, but when people talked to him his reaction was entirely friendly. Lot and I
registered
only one vaguely positive signal from one of the teenage correctees (
naked tail like an earthworm if i cut it off i wonder if it would crawl off or not
), the majority of signals were standard (
rats are gross
) or mediated (
before the nativity of the Living rats lived in people’s houses and carried all sorts of diseases
).

From a distance of several metres correctee Zero looked at the rats with something like interest, but what real conclusions can you make about someone when your only basis is
observation
in first layer?! Zero is not connected to
socio
. As a part of the Living, I realise that this is correct. I recognise the full extent of the danger of connecting him… But as a scientist I’m full of regret that I don’t have the chance to observe his
behaviour
in deeper layers… With all my respect for the Council of Eight’s decision, by not connecting Zero to
socio
we have, in essence, turned down a chance of understanding him, and, consequently, of controlling him.

Then we let the group get up closer to the cages. The rats, as always, shrank back against the back wall, huddling together into one huge tangled ball, which trembled, squeaked and bit at itself. Several wounded rats fell out of this ball onto the bottom of the cage and at that moment froze and curled up, paralysed by fear. Then one of them convulsed and ceased living. None of the correctees, luckily, understood – we didn’t
register any signals of alarm, for the most part they thought that the motionless animal was ‘
tired
’. Except perhaps Zero… if anyone might have guessed what happened to the rat, then it would have been him. He looked at it, only at it, with an expressionless stare. Even when everyone else went over to the cage with the cows, he stayed standing there. I called him over but he didn’t even turn round – I had to lead him away by the hand. His hand was cold and damp, and I
barely managed
to put up with touching it. At that moment the thought struck me that I’d missed something important. Something was wrong, not how it should be, when he was standing there and looking at the rats. Something was wrong with the rats. I led him by the hand and tried to think about it, but disgust stopped me concentrating and the thought slipped away.

I realised what was going on only when we got to the dogs.

I know: what is a dog? Something very different from the creature whose image opens along with the file ‘Ancient domestic animals’ after you have had A Living Childhood installed. Something very different from the thing I can download in a
socio
-game. One ear hanging down sweetly, the other standing up, its face tilted to one side inquisitively, the shaggy tail making circles in the air… That’s just a reconstruction. If you believe the documentary evidence that has come down to us, this is more or less what a dog looked like before the birth of the Living. I repeat – if you believe it.

Real dogs are different. Gruff beasts with bared teeth, ears sticking close to their heads, wrinkled noses, and lumps of dried foam around their dirty mouths. And the stink of them. I can’t imagine how once they could have lived in houses, how mankind managed to breathe the same air as them… After visiting the dog cage we always give out special respirators to the correctees, but even they can’t entirely block out the
unpleasant
odours… For this reason correctees rarely go up close to the cage. Zero went up close.

He went right up to the bars, and then I, at last, realised what was going on. I remembered that ball of rats, which had fallen apart and crawled off in different directions when that little boy had been left alone with them. I remembered the cows and the pigs – so subdued and quiet (before I hadn’t thought that they were even capable of being silent). I looked at the dogs… They were not afraid of him.

But if the rats, cows and pigs simply ignored him, then these dogs – however fantastical this may sound – actually made contact with him.

Yesterday, in the heat, their smell was particularly
disgusting
. The correctees kept their distance from the cage. All of them, except Zero. He stood, his face pressed against the bars, and watched the dogs wheezing and barking manically, as if they were trying to cough out their stinking fear which was tearing them up from the inside. Then he started to whistle something, the lullaby about animals, I think – and then I saw it. One of the dogs leapt forward towards the bars, to where Zero was, and froze half a metre away in a strange pose: its spine bent, the front half of its body pressed against the ground, but the back legs at full stretch and the tail up. Like it was trying to bow to him. Like it was begging him for mercy.

Unbelievable. He stretched his hand out to it through the bars and it came up to him. It sniffed his fingers and then went frightened back to the pack. I had to lead him away again, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch his hand. Dog saliva glistened on his right palm.

Lot and I carried out a disinfection. Then we forwarded a message about what had happened to the SPO and the Service for Assisting Nature. We requested all the data about similar cases, we called up all the available archives in fourth and even fifth layers, but, as I was expecting, no one had ever witnessed a reaction like this from an animal.

Animals have always been afraid of the Living. That’s a given, it’s axiomatic. The animals were not frightened of
correctee
Zero. They didn’t recognise him as the Living. What can we conclude from this?

There are actually two options.

Option No. 1. Zero is a neoplasm. A sort of a poor-quality, alien cell in the organism of the Living. In this instance, his confinement to a House of Correction is a completely natural step and a very sensible measure. In the human body alien cells are also put ‘in quarantine’ and isolated by the immune system. Then, ideally, if the cell cannot prove that it’s harmless, it commits apoptosis – self-destruction, so it doesn’t harm the organism. If this does not happen, the outsider has to be destroyed by the immune system’s ‘army’. When the immune system is weak, the outsider wins. It multiplies, infects healthy tissue, takes honest soldiers and ‘drives them mad’… In our case there is no risk: the organism of the Living is healthy and strong, and the poor child is weak and confused. And anyway it’s just a metaphor.

Option No. 2. Zero is a useful reverse mutation. Maybe he’s carrying a retrogene and the animals recognise him as ‘ancient man’, whom they weren’t afraid of. The proliferation of this mutation might be very useful for the Living (in which case Zero’s isolation is a dubious measure). First, it opens up the long-awaited possibility of the domestication of animals. Second, we should note: correctee Zero has a phenomenal first-layer memory – according to surviving sources, just such a memory was a distinguishing feature of ‘ancient man’. Bereft of
socio
, and therefore, of all the educational programs installed as he grows up, Zero nonetheless demonstrates that he is extraordinarily well-informed about various things; he can read, write, and knows how to count; the speed of his reactions and his ability for logical and abstract thought are outstanding. If this mutation were to proliferate we could
expect an increase in the extra-
social
intellect of the Living even in the near future, and, consequently, an increase in interest in first layer. Interest in first layer would be a natural stimulus for the reclamation of new territories, the further development of engineering and instrument-making, the transformation and study of the environment, travel, personal appearance, physical fitness, and the proliferation of the species. An active first-layer life would help us solve the problem of early-onset obesity, thrombosis, strokes and heart attacks.