Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (ebook reader that looks like a book .TXT) 📗

thought, speaking of herself. You and Bruce are the same. Just information. The chip in your brain – the very seat of your personality, the Real You – is just information too.

Saskia gazed and Bruce. He sensed her attention and smiled.

She thought, You are one of the Unreal like Bruce. You have made the transition from physical to non-physical, concrete to abstract, flesh to ghost, fuel to fire.

She saw three witches sitting around a fire. One turned to her and said, Your fate is decided, for I have written it.

You will return, said another, as you have returned before.

She saw Scottie. Poor, dear Scottie. It was night. He was walking towards a small boat, which was tied to a small jetty. On the boat was a hooded man. Saskia called out and Scottie turned. He smiled and said something she couldn’t make out (Don’t worry about me) and reached into his pocket. He withdrew something (a Zippo lighter) from his pocket and struck it on his thigh: the lid opened on the downstroke and the wick lit on the upstroke. She waved. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear (The gift of fire) him.

She blinked.

She was back on the smooth riverbed. Bruce was near the cabin. By moonlight, he was digging a grave. His own, dead body was nearby. She reached up to remove the headset. She had to help David. Just as her hands touched the dull plastic, she heard Scottie calling from (Remember what you’re carrying) a far away place, though she could not make out his (…Ute) words.

Jennifer looked down on her father, who lay bloodied and curled around Frank’s feet. Though this was still the man who had sent her away to America, the last of her anger disappeared.

The cubicle was cramped, so she hauled him out by his lapels. He was oiled by his own blood. Frank was immobile. His muscles clenched and unclenched, but the thin film of microbots held him rigid. She wondered if he could breathe. She didn’t care.

“Dad,” she said. She slapped his cheek. There were cuts and several large swellings on his forehead. There was blood everywhere. Perhaps he had lost a great deal, perhaps not; she had no idea.

Think.

During the weeks of preparation prior to her arrival at Met Four, Jennifer had been given numerous intellectual and psychological tests. The first-aid exam had been the last. For a job in a research facility that teemed with hidden cameras and expert medical staff, Jennifer had viewed the exam with some contempt. She had downloaded a manual on the Friday evening and memorised its contents for the test on Monday. She had not given the topic a single thought since.

She pictured the first-aid manual and read the cover: There’s no place like home.

She saw a door with the letter ‘A’ written above. It was the garage door from their old house in Oxford. She would need to remember its layout – and her past – to unlock the medical knowledge she had stowed there. The garage was main route. Each room was a mnemonic that corresponded to the table of contents in the first-aid manual. She could readily summon help from research centre’s medical sickbay; but she would not do it yet, because it would mean disaster for her father, herself and Saskia.

Underneath the letter A – it was not coloured, but neither was it colourless – was the word ‘Airway’.

Jennifer knelt by her father’s head and checked his airway. On the garage door, beneath the word ‘Airway’, there was a picture. It showed a cartoon woman with her cheek near the casualty’s mouth. Jennifer did the same. She eased two fingers under his chin and tilted. She could not feel breath on her cheek or see his chest rise.

She imagined the garage door opening. It tilted upwards with a creak because her father had never cared to oil it. From inside came the smell of black paint and sawdust. The best smell in the world. It was a friendly place. She remembered running inside, aged four or five, to watch her father tinker with chairs and cupboard doors. She watched him clamp them to his Workmate and commence torture with screwdrivers, hammers and electric sanders. Invariably he would become angry with the chair or cupboard door: a screw would not enter correctly, or it would drop to the concrete floor, never to be found. “The universe conspires against me,” he would rage, and Jennifer would clap her hands, because she knew that he would never be angry with her; she could disarm him with a glance. When she was older, she would fetch him cups of tea, though he worked in the garage less and less. He spent more weekends at the department. The times when he worked there became more precious. He talked her through her homework as she sat in a corner of the garage at a badly-constructed desk. Once he had made a hanging mobile from marbles and strings in order to demonstrate the movement of the planets. She watched silently with amusement. The mobile did not work; few of his creations did.

But his enthusiasm was a powerful force. She saw it less and less as she grew older. She became a woman. Her father became more distant. He was not sure who she had become. Their conversations became more superficial. More silences. Not awkward, but more frequent. She began to excel at school and, with that, came the bullies. David did not know how to help her. It was not an equation to be solved or a mobile to be built. Her bullying found his limits.

She looked back now, almost smelling the garage, and realised that she had overreacted. At the age of twenty, she had an aerial view of her teenage years and realised that her tantrums and silences and her solemnity were acts of a kind. They were not real. And she knew that, when she reached thirty, she would look back