Dark Lullaby by Polly Ho-Yen (the gingerbread man read aloud TXT) 📗

Just over an hour after Mimi had gone, we left too. An enforcer might have dropped in that weekend and realised we had fled. Or perhaps, we hoped, OSIP would not realise we had gone until Thomas’s unexplained absence from work was noted.

918.

I say the number aloud. I picture them: metallic, silver and screwed on to a door. It helps, it makes me feel a little more whole.

Then the postcode: NNW 1HW. I remember the bald man telling me that I couldn’t write it down anywhere. I’d not hidden my scorn – I would never consider writing it down, not only because of the risk, but because I would never forget it. I say it aloud and then again, with the number.

NNW 1HW. 918.

The numbers and letters merge in my mind, oscillating, growing and revolving; for a moment they are all I can see. That’s when the sharp, strident boom of a horn cuts through me.

It’s a lorry. It’s passing me, coming in the opposite direction, but it’s impossibly close; our sides seem sure to scrape against each other. I am too close to the middle of the road. I brace myself for a deafening clash and crunch and twist of metal, I am so certain we will hit.

I swerve away violently. My car climbs the grassy bank and I hit the brakes, throwing myself forwards as the car screeches to a halt. There’s another horn now, the car behind has had to swerve too, to avoid me. It zips past me angrily. I don’t see the face of the driver; I can only stare at my hands, still clasped around the steering wheel, still claws.

My breath comes ragged, in wheezes.

I want to cry, I want to scream.

I can’t bear that I still have so far to go.

I have doubts, worm-like, carnivorous doubts, that I will make it. I wonder if I am actually able to do this. I remember Thomas’ insistence that I try the medication that Santa offered me, the bottles of pills that he lined up like soldiers going into battle. She’d pulled them out of a box stashed at the back of a cupboard, as though they were treasure she’d been hoarding.

918. NNW 1HW.

They come again. The numbers and letters. And then I see a face – a tiny, newborn face that yawns and puckers its lips, eyelids flickering slightly as though dreaming.

It doesn’t belong to Mimi, though. That dark hair can only be Jakob’s.

THEN

I happened to be meeting Evie and Seb for dinner after their first induction session.

I was flustered, askew, at the thought of them starting, and my day had been off-kilter, like it had not properly begun but was passing me by anyway.

There was a rainstorm that lasted for hours. It flashed up on the Spheres as a possible flood warning and so I wondered if the dinner we had planned would be cancelled. But in the end, the downpour came to a stop; there was no flood.

I tried to concentrate on work but the words were just out of reach. Stubborn, furtive, they resisted my melding. I worked remotely, as most people did, through my workSphere. I was a life documenter, which meant I wrote biographies for people who lived more exciting lives than most; ‘exciting’ meaning that they made more money than most of us would ever see in our lifetime.

I never met my clients. They may as well have lived in a different universe to the rest of us. While we clustered in the quarters around the last of the cities, my clients resided in gated communities or in remote luxury dwellings built in bucolic idylls. Even so, sometimes I felt I knew their faces, the cadence of their voices, their particular turn of phrase, far better than my own family. I would be there through their lives, not just viewing their public media, but privy to anything private they opted in for. Life documenting encouraged them to share almost everything; it was a huge volume of data that never stopped growing.

I was recruited in my final months of university through one of my professors. Before I really knew what I was doing or why I was doing it, lured by a salary and an advance of a sizable amount, I’d signed a contract with them. The very next day, files of content arrived on my workSphere and so without ever really considering what job I actually wanted to do, I was plunged into work.

I’d reached a cap now in how much I could earn because of my out status, so there was little reason for me to switch career for monetary gain, and I found that I did in fact like the work. Much of the time, I barely wrote but spent hours untangling sense from the phone calls, home videos, emails, messages and articles that amassed on my workSphere. The subject of the life document, of course, never knew who I was, or that my job even existed.

Clients preferred to believe that their life document was written by a computer, rather than a person. A stranger out there, a voyeur, some silent passenger always alongside them – it was so obviously unappealing, even by our standards. But human writers composed the best life documents.

Biographies written by algorithm failed to capture the essence of a person. AI could not linger on the important events long enough, it was unable to add the necessary embellishments, trim the grey to create the perfect memories our clients so dearly wanted to capture and leave behind them. And so the company behind life documenting let them believe that there was a computer programme that was good enough and wrote contracts so obscure that the truth was hidden beneath clauses, assurances and promises.

Life documenters like me had to sign so many legal agreements about confidentiality that it would have taken me months and months to read them through properly – but it