Ghost of the Navigator: The Talent Show, #2

P r o l o g u e

By the time I knew I’d injected the wrong dosage, it was too late to know anything else.

It wasn’t like the first time I’d almost died, in the street with my bones shattered and my lungs flooding with blood. There was no desperation, no fighting, no ‘I just want one more minute.’ I didn’t even register it as dying at all. Just the mattress turning to warm quicksand underneath me and my thoughts evaporating with the coolness of petrol spilt on skin. Not just a few drops on my hands like I sometimes did in the yard when filling up a machine. This was like I’d stripped myself bare and taken a bucket–shower in the stuff, head to toe.

Taking a deep breath with the euphoria, everything was fine, until I couldn’t take another one. The air became so heavy that my lungs had to lift weights just to get it into me. It didn’t matter, because there was no pain, just a thought salad that kept slushing around, the same garbled nonsense I often got before drifting off to sleep.

No thinking that Ebony was going to find me dead on my bed. No remembering that the dosage I’d mainlined into my veins was the one Kit had given me once my body started resisting a normal one—the one I’d had in those early stages of recovery when I’d been barely conscious and still writhing in agony.

No thinking that it was surely okay after all, because people got less high than this on way bigger measures. Doctors sometimes filled whole syringes with morphine, and I’d seen it while volunteering at the hospital and practicing my Talent walks around the place. I’d seen misery solved this way, and the patients always survived. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Or that shooting up was a bad idea. Or that I’d already known that before I got it wrong. It was just what was available.

This didn’t happen on pills. Why the fuck did I not just stick to the pills? They kicked in slowly enough to tell someone they’d done too many, and allow time for the best cry for help they could come up with. Enough time to think about who to call, what to say, how to keep things quiet. Needles always resulted in the opposite.

But I’d needed this. Christ, I really had.

At least that went through my head when I woke up in the hospital. No point in regrets. No point in panicking at what was sure to be fallout. At least it was over. After this there wasn’t going to be any more. Forced clean–up was what I needed anyway. Another accident saving my life.

Unless I got lucky. Because somehow, I knew that it was Gary Stormont who’d found me. I’d heard his voice, heard the call he’d made for the ambulance. Just the one voice.

Ever since I’d let him into my life, and then my family’s with it, he’d been looking for atonement, for being one of the men who’d kicked me in the street with my bones already broken, who’d done the same to the man who’d come to my aid, who’d opened the window for Brian Carson to stab my guts with a pair of kitchen scissors. Gary was still desperate for people not to know him as that man. Now he’d called me an ambulance and gotten me to hospital so I could get away with the life I almost no longer wanted. Would that be enough for him to wake up feeling like a human being of some worth again?

Perhaps nobody knew where I was besides him. Perhaps nobody had found the morphine bottle and linked it to the hospital. Maybe if I begged him enough...

Too late, the police were already here. Two officers I didn’t recognise, but they had the bottle in an evidence bag and a copy of the chemist’s inventory. I didn’t hear them read me my rights, or what they charged me with. I knew it all anyway.

They weren’t remanding me in custody for my own safety. The hospital weren’t sectioning me as a suicide attempt either. That part I did hear, because it was the punishment I was desperate to avoid: going back home to my parents and Ebony. Explaining all this. Telling them why I’d just created another legal bill on top of everything else we were struggling to pay for.

Gary wouldn’t judge though. Gary couldn’t judge anyone for this. Drugs had taken him all the way to what he’d helped Brian Carson, Shane Bridger and Steven Lange do to me. After I answered the letter he wrote me from prison with a visit, he talked and I listened, mostly still wishing he’d just die in front of me. I left without speaking. I returned determined to see something else besides a drug addict. I’d done it only for myself. I’d heard of the idea that forgiveness could feel selfish sometimes, but I’d only understood why after forcing myself to visit him again.

I’d once imagined myself murdering him, wishing he could have been at my bedside in the hospital two and half years ago, so I could have done to him what I’d done to poor innocent Walter, but then not have anyone stop me doing the rest. I would have scratched and torn Stormont’s face until there was nothing left of it but a gouged out red and white shell. Like scraping out a Halloween pumpkin with human bone and tissue instead of earthy orange fibre and thick skin. Now I was desperate for his help. Almost as desperate as I’d once been for Ebony’s.

All it had taken to make Stormont part of Brian’s gang that night was the promise of the Dream Morphine he hadn’t been able to get anywhere else. Dry streets had been the ruin of him. Now they were going to ruin me, unless he’d help me.

‘Please tell me you kept them away from here,’ I said. ‘All of them.’

‘They’re all back at the farm,’ he said. ‘Brought you some clothes.’ He dumped a bag on the bed. ‘Get changed.’

He’d never given me an order before. I didn’t know if I obeyed it out of surprise, or out of knowing I couldn’t delay the inevitable. All I knew was that Gary Stormont wasn’t going to help me cover up anything. He was about to make me wish I’d never answered his letter.

∗∗∗

I knew Gary could fight. Most people who’d been to prison could fight. Especially if they already knew how, because it was part of the trade that had helped put them there.

Gary knew fighting like Kit had once taught me. Gary knew that an open hand strike could be worse than a punch. He laid it on me as soon as we got to the gardens outside the hospital, a backhand swipe to the face. I didn’t have time for shock, or naming any emotion. I just reacted. Good old–fashioned human rage at flash point.

My balance only just holding, I swung my crutch at his face. He grabbed it, pulled me towards him and shoved his body into my chest; I staggered, the force of the blow driving all the air out of me. My useless right knee and foot wouldn’t get me off the floor fast enough. He hauled me up, immune to the fists I punched into his face, and shoved me back again. Somehow, I stayed on my feet long enough to stagger back towards a tree and grab the trunk.

‘What’s the matter? I hit a cripple? Look around you. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody gives it because it’s you.’

My mouth was filling with blood, the inside of my right cheek torn against my teeth.

‘You’re a waste of a life, you know that?’ Stormont said. ‘You got a family that helped you do everything you ever did, you got a roof over your head and food in your mouth and this is what you go do to yourself? You wanna try my family, just try them one fucking day and see if you don’t take that OD on purpose next time.’

‘Oh, my family don’t love me! Boo hoo hoo! Get me a fucking hanky! I answered your letter. Without me you’d’ve taken one yourself before you even got out of the cage. I should have let you.’

‘Yeah, but here I am. Hit me then. I crippled you for life for one night’s high. I didn’t even get any cash out of you. Cripple me back, cripple boy. Oh wait, I think I hear a spacecraft taking off. Look who ain’t flying it. Look who ain’t nothing but another waste of a hospital’s money.’

It didn’t matter that I had no hope of winning. Or that he was right about nobody caring. Nobody was breaking this fight up. Most were just shaking their heads, like they knew who I was and they knew I deserved anything I got.

I hurled my crutch at Stormont this time, close enough to get one good punch on him as he swatted at it. I went for his nose but barely dusted his chin. He grabbed my coat as I went down under my own momentum. He tried to twist my arms, his grip clamping on both my wrists as if trying to wring me out like a wet towel. I spat into his face as hard as I could, a shower of blood droplets spraying everywhere. He let go, and this time my fist went square into his mouth.

Both of us staggered back.

Stormont wiped a string of blood from his face and laughed. ‘Feel better yet?’

‘You’re never coming back to my farm again.’

‘How are you going to stop me? It ain’t your farm, you don’t own it. You ain’t never gonna own shit, carrying on like you do. You know why your dad let me come here on my own? Because he don’t care how I sort you out. All I wanna do right now’s put you back in that hospital. Why shouldn’t I do it, Hatcher? Ain’t fuck all else getting through to you.’

I spat more blood onto the floor, my good leg only just supporting me without my crutch and sure to drop me any minute. ‘Do it then,’ I said, spreading my arms wide. ‘Put yourself back in prison. Kill any chance of another life you ever had.’

‘I only got out of prison for you. I ain’t got nothing else. I just got you. Because you came. I thought you were worth it. I thought there was one good person left. All I did was make friends with another junky. So what am I free for now, huh?’

It hit me hard enough that I didn’t want to keep my balance. I limped my way to the benches by the water fountains, hoping he’d just walk the other way and leave me there. He didn’t.

‘I’m sorry, Gary,’ I said. ‘Okay? Come on, don’t tell me you can’t understand it. So I’m a drug addict. It was working until last night. I was trying. You know I was trying. What have you seen me get for everything I tried? Doors slammed in my fucking face by every Talent school going. People right up to the Seekers’ Council talking about me like I deserved to die on that birthday. People say it doesn’t even matter I forgave you, all the way to giving you a job, because I’m just a liar. Like they deserve to know the truth. I’m not even telling you. I can’t. You don’t know what I live with and you were smart enough not to ask. So what do you want now, everything? Forget it.’

‘I want you to do something.’

‘Do fucking what?’ I shouted at the sky.

‘I dunno, just fight me if that’s what it takes. Just be angry and get it out of your system. Do it in some way that ain’t gonna kill you. You know what really pisses me off about you? I ain’t never gonna change nothing about the world. There ain’t nothing about me like you’ve got. You could change anything. If you got over yourself.’

‘It’s too late for any of that.’

‘Bollocks. Look at that billionaire guy who runs Lucid Theatre. Look at what people said about him after that BlueSky shit. He wasn’t never s’posed to change the world either. Now he’s like...what do you call it when you get to be a Seeker? Nobody from Earth ever got that far before.’

‘Investing,’ I said. ‘They call it investing, and you’re an invested Seeker.’ Why were we even talking about this?

I knew the answer as soon as I’d silently asked. I’d always told Stormont he wasn’t stupid. Now here he was proving it.

‘Daniel Penhallow,’ I said. ‘That’s the name you can’t remember. Yeah, he got to be a Seeker. And now he’s one of the people stopping me from getting anywhere. They control everything from Talent schools to jobs. They’re why nobody will touch me. They want me walking through their doors and surrendering every story I won’t tell. They don’t dare put that kind of pressure on the Talent Council for protecting me too. Just on me. Until I crack or someone on the Council gets the guilt trip too strong. They’d kill me, Gary. You understand that? I get no kind of life no matter what I do. And I don’t even know why. Dad won’t talk to me about the past. I can’t reach him. I couldn’t do it before he knew about the drugs, how am I supposed to do it now? Ebony’s never going to stay with me. Nobody wants to employ an addict with a record. Nobody wanted to employ me before I was that. I worked hard my whole life at trying to be someone. Look at me now. Working on tills in a fucking supermarket.’

‘At least you’re talking,’ Stormont said, sitting down next to me. ‘First thing you’ve gotta do? Do this in rehab. People who don’t know you.’

‘I’m not going to rehab. I did the DTs already. I’ll just stop.’

‘You don’t got a choice if you want to avoid prison time,’ he said. ‘You gonna trust someone who’s been there to know which is worse? Getting cracked open by a bunch of strangers wins every time. When I did time, I did time. People in that prison are gonna hate you if you go there. You’re wasting a life that could have been something they never had.’

‘I won’t get prison,’ I said. ‘Cody White can keep me out of there.’ Right now, Cody seemed like the one person I could call who genuinely wouldn’t care what I’d done. Cody never cared what anyone had done; he was just doing the job they brought him. I went for my UniPocket to find I didn’t have it. Back at the farm, along with everything else I didn’t know how to face.

‘Ebony already called him,’ Gary said. ‘He’ll be back at the farm. When I call her to come pick us up we go back there and we all sit down. I got it under control. Told them we’re doing this like I wanna. Your folks ain’t gonna—’

‘I don’t need an intervention. Aren’t you already doing that right now? Fine, just get me into somewhere and I’ll do the time. I just don’t want to see anyone. Not until I can work this out.’

‘We ain’t bargaining, Hatcher. This is how it’s happening. You’re going home with me one way or another.’

‘You can’t make me.’

‘Sure I can’t. You were winning that fight. You din’t even think of using your Talent mind shit. You really wanted to hit me? I could have been going back in there with brain damage. Why didn’t you do it?’

Because it would have been wrong? Made everything worse? That wasn’t why. I simply hadn’t thought of it.

So much for the mind and body that had once taken me to success at the end of a walk down that famous Selection Centre corridor. I put my hands over my eyes, expecting Stormont to tell me just to shut up crying before I even started. Instead, he sat there until I was done.

‘I don’t use Talent like that,’ I said. ‘That’s just what they’re all afraid of me doing. They all look at me and see a criminal. I guess they were right.’

‘Who cares if they were? Listen, you’ve got this afternoon. We don’t go home till I make the call. Why don’t we go get some coffee?’

‘Looking like this?’

Stormont had never touched me before, apart from the fight, but he put a hand on my shoulder now. ‘We’ve both looked worse.’

∗∗∗

Walking into a coffee house with my mouth still bleeding and Gary still covered in the blood I’d spat at him didn’t attract as much attention as I’d expected. The two teenage girls serving behind the bar didn’t know what to make of it. Neither had asked someone to leave a shop before, that much was obvious from the rabbit–eyed stares and awkward looks around, as if any of the other customers would help them.

‘He took an OD and we had a fight about it coz I had to knock some sense into him,’ Gary said. ‘We’ll get cleaned up if we can have some coffee.’ He pointed to the sign about how the bathroom was for customer use only. ‘Black Americano. Extra espresso in his.’

I might have laughed if my arm hadn’t started stinging, and I’d rolled up my sleeve to see the veins around the crook of my elbow darker than they should have been, the skin around them taking on a blackened tinge. ‘Shit, Gary, look at this.’

‘Put it away. You’ll be fine.’

The girl who’d been trying to make the coffee stopped now and looked as though she could bolt.

I just want a cup of coffee, I said. I’m no trouble. Don’t call the police, they already charged me for possession this morning. I’m cool about this if you are. Just let me have some coffee and when I’m in prison you won’t need to worry about me coming back. I rolled my sleeve back down as I sent the girl some calming waves of Talent, thinking about how it was this same coffee house where Kit had given me my first ever lesson, all the way from my hospital bed.

At least I’d made progress with one thing I had.

Calmly and silently, the girl made us coffee, then gave us a clean dishcloth from under the counter, telling us to throw it in the bin after we were done cleaning up.

We drank our coffee together on the corner sofa. I hunched over slightly to relieve the ache in my back, and found myself feeling for the pocket where my pills would have been. I gave a resigned sigh, knowing I probably wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight, and the pain would be the least of it.

‘Just promise me one thing,’ I said. ‘Promise me you didn’t call Kit Calloway. Promise me nobody did. I’ll do anything you want, anything the family wants, I’ll sit through the whole goddamn intervention and do nothing but cry. But I’m not doing it with him there.’

‘Nobody called him,’ Stormont said. ‘We all know this was about him.’

‘It was nothing like that.’

‘It was you and him falling out two weeks ago. That how long you resisted mainlining?’

‘We’re not talking about me and Kit.’

‘I only hit you,’ Stormont said. ‘Kit nearly broke your jaw. What did you do?’

We’re not talking about this.

He ignored the warning shot. ‘If it wasn’t Kit then what? You didn’t just shoot up because you needed a hit. You needed the next stage. I know what needing the next stage is. You don’t need it because shit ain’t happening.’

‘I’ve already told you what I feel like. Stop it. Stop asking questions. Just sit here and drink coffee and stop trying to think you can help.’

Stormont shifted to the edge of his seat, putting his face close to mine and dropping his voice. ‘I was going to kill myself as soon as I got out of prison. I was still gonna do it after you visited. I wanted to do it more after that. Then you told me you wanted to get some coffee together when I got out. You actually came got me, release day. Remember? We came here. I’m alive because of you. You don’t feel like that’s worth anything?’

‘You know I do.’

‘Whatever you’re going through, why don’t you just let me go through it with you. All of it.’

I gritted my teeth. I’d thought he was beyond all this. ‘You mean why don’t I tell you what I won’t tell the Seekers’ Council?’

‘Yeah. I never asked. Respect, y’know? But maybe it’s time somebody did. What could I judge anyone for? I’m alive because of you. I’d do anything for you. I’ve probably done worse things for worse people than anything you can come up with. Try me.’

I looked at him. Gary Stormont didn’t look like much, other than the bug–eyed, skin–headed wiry–framed Dream Morphine casualty who still lived in a halfway house, but nobody would have doubted his sincerity right then.

‘Gary, look, I already tried one person. Walter. You remember him?’

‘That pilot who fancied you?’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than just fancying me,’ I said. ‘It’s...when I told him, he looked at me like you always said people looked at you. The judgement, the disgust, the fear...that’s what I got for telling the truth. And I already told you, I don’t know the worst there is of it. Dad doesn’t want me to know, and I don’t want people looking at me like Walter did. He would have done anything once. He promised that too. Then I gave him a reason to take it all back. I know you’re not him, but it doesn’t matter who anyone is as soon as I start talking. Trust me when I tell you some things are better left buried. Even in rehab. Where they’re going to try and get this out of me too. It’s not happening.’

‘There ain’t nothing you can bury forever, Hatcher.’

‘Watch me.’

‘I don’t wanna watch you die trying.’

‘I’m not going to die,’ I said. ‘Things won’t get like this again. I want my mind back. I want anything back that I can get. Before it really is too late. If it isn’t already. Call Ebony. I’m ready. I need to talk to her.’

∗∗∗

When Ebony hugged me I dared think that it might all be easier than I’d feared, and it gave me a moment of fleeting relief, until she let me go so I could look at her face, and her eyes promised this was the start of the worst part of my life. Recovering from attempted murder was going to look like a skirmish.

‘I’m not going to be mad,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to be furious. I’m not even going to be anything. We’re just going to get this sorted out.’

This was beyond the voice she’d used in the hospital, all the times she’d forbidden me from dying. This was more than ‘Shadow, I am NOT planting a fucking memorial tree.’ This was a silence that told me she might be better off if I went to prison, and she knew it. The family knew it too, and I was destined for the same look and voice from everyone.

There was only one sensible thing to do: nod and saying nothing. She looked like she was going to give in to her urges and just launch a nuke strike of questions on me. How long had it been going on, had every way I’d behaved really been a sign, had it been the reason I had the fight with Kit, then the row with her, then anything else she could think of to use against me. She didn’t. She looked at Gary and I saw the support in the look he gave back.

All through the ride home, she stayed that calm. It would have been far better if she’d just exploded.

It only took an hour of me being home for my father to beat her to it.

∗∗∗

‘There’s nothing else they can get you for besides the theft and possession,’ Cody said, with my parents, Ebony and Stormont sitting around the table with me. ‘But I still need to know it all. Everything you stole, how you did it, when you took it, anyone else involved. As much as you can remember. And your folks want the truth so here they are, but just talk to me. Confession. Go.’

I confessed everything I could remember, managing to ignore the eyes around me. Nobody made a sound, hiding all feeling from me. I didn’t engage a Talent field, deciding I would rather not have any insight. The sooner I did this, the sooner I could get away from everyone. Rehab was starting to look as friendly as any bar or hospital I’d ever been to. All it took was one hour in my own home, with the people who’d helped me fight for my life only to see me destroy it.

I had a two–year knack for stealing pills, for using Talent to help me find ways, for learning how to take few enough that no–one would know. It was the only reason I still volunteered at the hospital at all. I offered a few patients cash to share their prescriptions, when all else failed, and they always took it, because I picked the ones who’d talked to me about their desperation. Support the family on top of mounting costs insurance wouldn’t pay for.

There had been nobody like that to tap last night, and no pills within my reach. I’d been dry, my last two oxys kicking in just after lunch and only lasting a couple of hours before my spine was complaining every time I sat down. The only salvation was Talent–spotting one bottle of liquid H through the eyes of a pharmacology student.

Needles were easy: we had them at the farm for the cattle. All I’d had to do was play deceive–confuse–swipe with the junior intern on duty in the ICU after following that bottle from the pharmacy to the ward. I distracted the security watching the cameras at the same time, my third eye working in two places and my real ones going as well, along with my body. Damn, I was good. The score was a high in itself. Almost enough to make me forget why I was doing it at all.

I’d never mainlined before, always swallowed. I hated needles. I’d spent enough time as a human pincushion. Needles were for junkies. Anyone who had to tie a belt and pump their veins up ready for a needle was the worst kind of addict. I was always a functioning one, ingesting my high and controlling the change it made in me instead of taking out my brain with a sharp sting and a rush.

I’d function without it all as soon as something picked up for me. Two and a half years since I’d been crippled for life and woken up Talented, and only taking narcotics had gotten me through. First it was just for the pain, the kind that doctors insisted could be treated with physiotherapy only, because they weren’t experiencing it. Then it was because I needed it. Even waking up next to Ebony every day didn’t make me want to be alive. I managed not to say it though, knowing that once I had, there was no way of telling her I was sorry. I’d tried to be the same person I always had, but unless I took the drugs, that person was long gone.

‘Okay, this is good,’ Cody said. ‘This is all mitigating circumstances. We go with a guilty plea and I help you mitigate. We can paint a picture here that no judge can ignore. Go all the way back to what happened to you and everything you’ve done can be explained. You’ve been fighting a battle trying to get your life back on track and you needed something to help. To take your pain away so you could do it. It spiralled, escalated. Getting it back under control isn’t going to happen by putting you in prison. This is as easy as making breakfast.’

‘But I do the rehab, right? I go into it before we can even get to a courtroom.’

‘That’s the easy part. I need you to talk to Kit and make up your differences so he’ll be a character witness.’

‘No.’

‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ my father said.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I bet you still think you can make me.’

‘You can go to prison for all I care, thief.’

‘Mick,’ my mother said. ‘Count to ten.’

‘You count to fucking ten!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve been counting since they brought that back in here.’

‘That is our son,’ my mother said. ‘And you promised me none of this.’

‘I’ve had it with him!’ my father shouted, flinging his chair back behind him as he got up. ‘What’s the point in helping now?’ He stood at the door, pointing his finger at me. ‘I tried to help. I told a truth that got you and that doctor your lives back. I gave you that truth, remember? Three memories. What did you do?’

‘You got over all that. So you said.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I smashed them all.’

‘You’ve never had anything go wrong for you!’ my father shouted. ‘Not compared to me. If you’d taken those memories you’d have the tiniest idea. You see me pumping drugs down myself to survive? You see me stealing from people? You see me taking my family to hell and back when they already went there for you enough?’ He stopped, leaning against the doorframe and breathing hard. ‘You were right, Sue.’ He looked at my mother. ‘I should never have let him have a motorbike. I should never have let him have anything.’

I had all the retorts going, and for the first time in my life I felt like using none of them. Because he was right. All I’d ever done to repay my family for doing their best for me was destroy myself, while pretending I never could.

I wasn’t going to cry. Not in front of everyone.

My father slammed all the doors on his way out.

‘He’ll calm down,’ my mother said. ‘In a few hours. You’re checking into the clinic tonight. Go and pack your stuff.’

∗∗∗

Ebony had already sorted out what I needed. Cody and Stormont were going to take me together. I hadn’t heard of the place; it was all the way down in Dorset, deliberately far away from anything that had ever been part of my life. Far enough that running away and trying to get home or anywhere else familiar wouldn’t be an option.

I checked in like a zombie, barely registering the name and details I wrote down as mine. It was near midnight.

‘Most of the staff here are Talented or know plenty about it,’ Cody said. ‘Don’t try any tricks.’

I barely heard him. I was too busy listening to Ebony’s words to me on the farm driveway on repeat inside my head.

‘Shadow, you’ve got one more chance.’

Nothing about how she’d left her own family for me, nothing about any of the past, or what we’d been through, or even that she was crying because the sheer exasperation had finally got to her. Just that.

∗∗∗

I craved the high I’d used to sleep every night for the last thirty months, even though I knew I was clean and had to stay that way. I’d be going downstairs tomorrow for my introduction on no sleep at all.

The bed was too soft. It didn’t smell like home. Ebony wasn’t here in it with me. I was locked in the room at my own request, knowing that failing anything else, I’d try using Talent to get into the main grounds and find a tree to climb.

I got in and out of bed for hours, leaning against the door, trying the handle in the hope that they hadn’t really locked it. I drank so much water to relieve my dry mouth that I ended up having to relieve my bladder every hour, unable to sleep for fear of wetting the bed as my system went into insomniac overdrive.

I got too hot, too cold, too hot again. My spine complained so much I began to wish it would just re–break and be done with me. I tried exercising when all else failed, doing push–ups as much as my back would let me and stretching my leg in all the ways the physiotherapist had shown me. I felt only marginally better as the light started to come through the curtains.

Running would have been a lifesaver tonight. Just jogging on the spot would have done. Instead I could only focus on my useless knee and foot and pray for some kind of miracle where my nerves sorted themselves out and suddenly I’d just lift them again. Even just slightly and I’d feel better about everything.

Do you need help sleeping?

It wasn’t one of the hospital staff. Even though I’d barely met any of them, I knew that. This was a voice with an echo in it I instantly disliked. Someone whose tricks did get through any Talent field, even in a rehab centre.

I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, the room blue with the first stages of morning.

We’ve never met, the voice said. The heat’s been a little bit high. Too high for me to help you out before. Now though, I’m very glad you’re helping yourself. But you need a good night’s sleep. Let me in and I’ll send you off.

I know you, I said. We’ve never met but I know...

I knew the face, as I focused on the voice and knew the first time I’d heard it, on a spacecraft television, feeding me the news on the way home from CASL and the Colony.

Rowena Cardale, I said.

Hello, Shadow.

You followed me here?

I’ve no intention of harming you. I want your rehab to be successful. There’s a lot I want that would benefit both of us. You’re a man searching for a break in life. One that could make it all worth it again. I’m someone who makes breaks like that happen. But it starts with a good night’s sleep. I spent enough time married to a doctor to know how to make a person’s body do what it needs to.

Drake was a criminal and so are you.

So are you. Does it matter what any of us are?

I don’t want you here.

I don’t blame you. Drake was a fool for dragging your father into his business. I warned him that your father and I had a mutual agreement. One he now thinks I was responsible for breaking. Drake should never have ignored my advice. I’m sorry about him. I want to get mistakes of the past sorted out so we can move on.

You killed him, didn’t you?

I shut my Talent field off before I could say it, but I felt her Talent slowly creeping back in. A woman who by all accounts didn’t have Talent at all. She’d had a mutual agreement with my father. He’d never mentioned her in any confession he’d made to me about his involvement with Drake.

She knows, I thought. She knows everything. What could she do with it?

I let her back in.

You need things back to normal before we start dealing with big issues, she said. Let me put you to sleep. From now on I’ll stay away. Next time just ask the staff here for help sleeping. When the time’s right, I’ll come and visit again.

I didn’t want her visiting, but my body was so desperate for sleep I didn’t care. Sleep was the only way left of clearing my head.

I respect you, Rowena said as she went deeper into my field and made my head drowsy. You kept your father’s secrets. You had a choice, and you chose to protect your family. People who make choices like that are important. Especially to me. Go to sleep thinking this: I can help you get where you want to go. All the way to the Seekers’ Council listening to you. If that’s still what you want. This is your real ‘one more chance.’

She’d been there since Ebony’s words to me, back at the house?

Let me help and you’ll soon have more chance to do things than you can possibly have dreamed of. There are ways to the Seekers’ Council. Ways to what you’re being denied. I’m someone who knows what fighting rejection’s like.

It was just like falling asleep to an audiobook. The next time I woke up, it was to the voice of a nurse telling me it was time to get up, because I was being introduced. I couldn’t have slept for more than two or three hours, but I felt like I’d hibernated. Through the haze of coming out of R.E.M and the hunger gnawing at my stomach, I realised what had happened. I asked what day it was, my own voice an echo in my ears. When the nurse told me, I knew I’d lost an entire day and night.

We let you catch up. I think you had a friend help you. A very Talented friend. Don’t be too quick to say your friendship with Kit Calloway’s over.

‘He wasn’t here,’ I said, too sleepy to trust myself with Talent. He’d never be there again. I wasn’t going to have to refuse him as a character witness in court. He’d refuse himself.

‘Take a shower and get dressed,’ the nurse said. ‘And shave.’

I obeyed, and as I got dressed and went down to the start of getting my life back, I made myself a new promise: Rowena Cardale was never helping me get anywhere.

I was done with it all. No more promises about flying. No more hammering on doors that would never open. Maybe even no more Talent. I could just ignore it and let it sit there. Had it really ever done me any good since I got it? What was everything I’d done with Kit worth when all he’d done was deny me all the next stages? I was already a competent Level Three at least, without needing to pass the test no Talent school would sign me up to take. What was the point in it all? I might as well have let Ozzie McCaffrey lock me back up again, back when he’d offered.

No matter. From now on I was responsible for my actions, and my actions were only going to be good ones. Even if that meant a lifetime of being content with a dead–end job to pay the bills, and living on a farm I could hardly do any work on. I had what I had. Only misery would ever come from wanting more.

∗∗∗

When the other addicts got to all the questions about my secrets, I stopped letting them crack me open. It was just like Stormont had said: you had to surrender with nothing left to hide. But I hid one last thing: the name of Telfen Lockyer.

The people I went through my recovery with all tried for it, without knowing what they were really trying for. I talked in circles about why secrets sometimes ate at me until I needed to get high. I talked about pushing my father away as if it were just normal family drama that everyone else had and understood. I talked about lost friends, lost chances, my lost life, all the while knowing I was evading any mention of the secrets behind my Talent.

The clinic released me for my court hearing. I got an eighteen–month suspended sentence and a hundred hours of community service. On the ride back, I wished I’d thought of asking ‘Can I do them in a hospital, Your Honour?’ When I told the doctor in charge of both the clinic and my impending release back into society, he pretended to find it amusing. I knew because I was using Talent again, after weeks of shutting it off.

‘Shadow, you may be leaving us but I get the feeling you’re not finished.’

‘In what sense of finished?’

‘The things you don’t talk about.’

‘Do we really have to go there again? There’s no clever line you can come up with. I’ve said what I’m going to.’

‘I know that. Here’s my advice, take it or leave it: reach out to Dr Calloway. Mend the bridge. Then you have at least one person who can fully understand.’

I shut my eyes. ‘This conversation’s a broken record. Can you just sign my papers without putting it on again?’

‘I don’t know him,’ the doctor said. ‘But I know he’s a man as troubled as you are. I know the stories about him, I know your version; I know he’s been in treatment himself. Mend the bridge and go to a meeting together. One of his, one of yours. Complicated people in the world you both come from need to stay together.’

I was more tired of this than ever before. ‘Well before I can live in any world other than here, I need to go home. And before I can go home, I need your signature.’ I touched the paperwork and pushed it closer to him.

He signed it, then as I was about to take it, whisked it from my reach before my fingers could touch it. ‘Shadow. I know about the letter you wrote to the Seekers’ Council.’

No surprise there, I’d shared it with the group. ‘I’m going to publish it on the Pocketsphere. I hope at least one of them reads it.’

‘It was agreed in your sessions that you were better off no longer protesting for things you’ll likely never get. And to drop your support for legalising Dream Morphine.’

‘Well sure. And that’s exactly what the letter says, doesn’t it?’

‘Shadow. How honest are you being?’

‘As honest as I’ve ever been.’

He leaned over the desk. ‘You were making progress. Enough to be able to leave here. For your own good, don’t publish that letter.’

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’

I think he knew how honest that statement was as well. I left the clinic and waited for Ebony to pick me up with my best promise yet: I was going to show the Seekers’ Council what happened when a man like me got his life back a second time. No help from Kit, no help from Rowena Cardale, or any of the people I was long since finished with. I had no idea how, but I was going to get what I wanted. Just like Stormont had said back on that bench, with his face covered in my blood: people on Earth could always find a way off it. People like Daniel Penhallow.

I was going to become an invested Seeker. Or I was going to show the Council what happened when they denied me investment, and refused to make Hatcher a Seeker name.

Out there on a planet few people alive on Earth could locate was the world my father had come from. I was going to make my peace with him and he was going to tell me about it.

Because one way or another, I was going to reach it.

An Open Letter to the Seekers’ Council – April 2276

To the members of the Seekers’ Council,

My name is Shadow Alex Hatcher. I have always been surprised that the Names Bureau let my parents call me this, but it is the identity I was born with and the one I still have twenty years later. If you read no further than this, let one message stand above any other: I have no desire to be anyone else.

Yet it seems that I cannot convince the members of the Council that this is true. One member of your Council recently referred to me in a public forum as ‘a subversive and dangerous individual who campaigns for legal drugs solely because he is addicted to them, and who should not have a platform from which he can shout so–called truths when the world knows nothing true about him.’ This letter is about the truth as I see it, and I write it despite my certainty that I will convince none of you I am worth hearing.

My life would never have been remarkable had it not been for an attempt on it two years ago. During the many procedures it took to save my life, I became Talented. It is common enough knowledge that no charges were brought against Dr Kit Calloway for doing this because it was proven, albeit behind closed doors, that I was in fact born with Talent, and the real ‘crime’ was that someone switched it off.

Yet Hatcher is neither a Seeker name nor a name associated with Talent, and no link has ever been made between my Seeker genes and anyone else’s on record. What the Seekers’ Council refuse to accept is that there are reasons why some records do not exist and why certain doors are shut, despite the Talent Council being granted powers of law to protect people involved in events of the past.

Collective pacts of forgetting are problematic, yet they are what we have. Perhaps it is better then to think of them not as pacts of forgetting, but of progress.

Pacts of progress are the reason that societies have risen from the ashes. I need not give any of you a lecture on the civil wars following Hour Zero, or the abuses and corruption of Stuart Coburn’s government, including the subversion of members of your own Council. Mentioning Galt Devrish in the Great Halls, I imagine, is still akin to injecting liquid nitrogen into the veins of every Council member. Yet the Council still exists. Progress. The kind that meant Esteban Devrish was never made a member in his father’s stead. I’ll give you this much: sometimes a family name does make the right kind of difference.

Progress cannot be made without certain problems being either put away or solved with little or no public knowledge. Who broke Galt’s neck for you, I wonder? Who threw Coburn off the top of that skyscraper? Who blew the whistle on Esteban before it was too late to stop him unleashing his anti–Talent on two planets? The underworld has certainly kept your secrets, and it is doing it for me as well. It is the reason why, by law, I am afforded the right to my freedom, and my Talent, and the identity I was born with, even though I know that if certain things had been different, I might have been born someone else entirely.

But things are how they are. I am a citizen of England and Earth, and this is what I wish to be, even though the problems your Council continue to create on this planet often make me wonder why any rational person would want this.

I will give Arko Rockford this much ground: I am subversive. I started a campaign for the legalisation of Dream Morphine, and have shown my fair share of disregard for the laws concerning it. I am only one of many, yet I have become a voice people have heard for one obvious reason: I am someone your Council cannot touch when it comes to my secrets, and such people are rare.

Such people often disappear. Even this long after Coburn’s time in power. I am still here. There is truly no convenient way for you to be rid of me, is there? If only our current High Chancellor would sanction for you what Coburn once did for Galt Devrish.

I will give Mr Rockford a little more: I am a drug addict, even though I’m clean. Recovery lasts for life. Yet like many, Mr Rockford uses this description ‘drug addict’ as a term of abuse. Part of the problem with drug addiction is that even for those experienced, it can be difficult to spot. An addict can be the same high–functioning person as those who are sober–living or teetotal. Mr Rockford, from what I have found out about him, has a fully functioning body with no long–term pain problems. For someone with a soldier’s background in the Carnathian armies, I find that surprising. But then again, commanding officers often don’t bear the brunt of that sort of work. Let us pity Mr Rockford, who has probably never had a day’s pain in his life to appreciate. I do wonder how the soldiers who have borne it for him dealt with it. I really would enjoy a drink with some members of the Carnathian infantry, sometime.

Perhaps that’s unfair though. Mr Rockford started in the ranks, by all accounts, and has probably seen plenty of active service, and perhaps a convalescence bed or two. It is a shame, then, that he appears to have forgotten any such experience. Another convenient privilege afforded to those promoted to high places.

I write this letter in my free time at The Cloud—a rehabilitation facility, which I entered of my own free will after admitting that I am addicted to opiates. My ability to function on them was never going to last forever. I have no desire to go where the likes of Brian Carson have gone before, either with one substance or another. While it is true that some people have become addicted to DM and caused themselves and others considerable harm in the process, it seems all too easy to ignore the idea that these problems stem from the illegality of the substance, a state of law created by the Seekers’ Council supposedly for the purpose of protecting people. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you still believe it is protection you give.

The name Dream Morphine is in itself misleading—the substance has nothing to do with the suppression of physical pain and very little to do with dreams. Why not call it Liquid Talent, the direct translation of the Carnathian name for it? The Seekers’ Council helped to create misconceptions by perpetuating the Dream Morphine name, and with it the society in which people treat the substance like an illegal drug, right down to the manufacture and supply.

After the BlueSky disaster, you instigated a full–on propaganda campaign to make people afraid of Liquid Talent. This was supposedly a ‘Never Again’ campaign, a sort of homage and honour to those who died in BlueSky’s ‘experiment.’ This idea, rather than being filled with humility and recognising the sanctity of human life, is a lie and an insult to those who died. Not to mention an insult to the intelligence of those of us who live.

Had it not been for Esteban Devrish’s sabotage turning the BlueSky experiment into the BlueSky disaster, the world would be a very different place. History would have called those trials a world–changing success. It would have put legal Liquid Talent on retail shelves—an undertaking worth millions, if not billions of credits in the very revenue your council appears to love the benefits of.

But let’s put money aside. What do you say about the ability to not only read memory and the inner workings of the human mind, but to create entirely new levels of engagement with each other? Do we really honour those who died during BlueSky by outlawing the vision they once shared with me?

We certainly didn’t outlaw BlueSky itself, the fine makers of gaming technology all over this world and indeed Carnathia as well. We simply banned them from making progress unless a certain Council approved of how they made it.

We didn’t outlaw Level Four Talented citizens from obtaining a simulation control licence, and practicing the creation of memory–based simulation in a regulated and beneficial way. We simply made it a way for people to actively play with the mind and conveniently forget that Liquid Talent was ever an option.

Liquid Talent has the potential to surpass the limits of simulation control, yet the people who regularly see a controller seem afraid of admitting that given a chance to take the next step legally and safely, they would do so. People are afraid of signing up to my campaign because they do not want the same unpopularity I enjoy. To speak out against the Seekers’ Council, who effectively regulate world peace by controlling the oil flow, is an act deemed unthinkable by most media sources. Or more accurately, deemed inappropriate when most of them are controlled by Sekaro–Henderson News Corp and they have a high–standing relative with a seat on your Council, three places left of Sarko Prodi’s ‘high chair’ (and I do love that name for it!).

Let’s hear from Alissa Tremaine, esteemed member of the Seekers’ Council, who said of me: ‘He has no respect for tragedy and does not consider the feelings of the families of those who died because of what he seeks to legalise.’

If the loss of human life means nothing to me, I do wonder why I testified against Matt Carson, who I witnessed taking two, after a Dream Morphine deal gone wrong. Does ‘respect for tragedy’ mean that we are going to outlaw painkillers every time someone dies from an overdose? Oh yes, that’s fitting: I recently took one. If I had died, would the Seekers’ Council have afforded me a respectful comment in my obituary? I do wonder.

Before the likes of Alissa Tremaine question my respect for the dead, perhaps they should think about what their Council has actually done to protect anyone. The Seekers’ Council refuse to imagine a world where legal, regulated and beneficial uses of our ability to record human memory could have prevented stories like that one that led to me writing this letter, and other situations where people have either had their lives ruined or lost them.

Law enforcement being allowed to use Liquid Talent to record memories as evidence has been a poor compromise, with noted abuses and corruption by trusted people who were allowed access to the substance. If law enforcement agencies are the only ones allowed the substance, why would a hard working drug dealer not seek to tap them for it? Do you still believe this can never happen even though several officers in the police have now stood trial for their ties to Drake Cardale?

Even though I have many followers who would agree with me, I still find the lack of protest at all of this to be verging on paradoxical, along with how Earth is effectively a planet held hostage by Seekers through oil control and a refusal to allow citizens without Seeker status to travel to Carnathia.

There is not even the compromise of bringing the advanced technological benefits from the other side of our universe to Earth; we only believe there is because we have colonies in space and ecological travel methods with which to reach them, and even these are privileges afforded mostly to people with wealth. Even if you imported the medical technology and knowledge from Carnathia that could restore the damage done to me, and thus allow me to pursue the career and activities for which I once put all of my problems with this world aside, I would never have a hope of affording it.

Let us take a moment to talk about Samuel McCaffrey. The society he saw was one where his family’s billions in Seeker wealth were redistributed into the hospitals he built and the care they gave. Sammy McCaffrey was the Seeker who alienated his family to the point where it was even suggested he was responsible for the deaths of both his parents, during the riots that brought Stuart Coburn to power. Sammy McCaffrey saw the kind of future that I am now sitting in the present waiting for, where I would have had both the right and the means to reverse my bad fortune. For all his evil manipulation and the stain he cast on the world that we still see today, Stuart Coburn once saw this future too.

Instead of Sammy’s vision, there is a Seekers’ Council that allowed all the systems of the past to come back in following Sammy’s death, and with them the kind of wealth that many of you have amassed for yourselves and done precious little with, save for enjoying an elite lifestyle and membership to the class that not only holds this planet to ransom, but makes us believe we should be thankful for it.

I am not thankful for this. Nor are many other people, but unlike the majority of them I decided there were certain things I was not going to be silent about any longer. When you walk out of a hospital knowing you should have died in it, that kind of epiphany does sometimes happen, so I’m told.

So here I am, still alive when your Council probably wishes I was not, and another voice in the wind whose letter will probably be torn up by the very people who need to read it most. I am not writing this as an exercise advised by a rehab counsellor, or because I can’t sleep until I have made yet another declaration of how unfair I believe this world is. I am writing it to let you know I have given up trying to reach you.

Surrendering is fine. It’s just like admitting you have a drug problem. I might as well sit in some of these sessions and say ‘My name is Shadow and I have a social conscience’ and then let other people help me take twelve steps to deal with it.

You win: ignoring this letter is the ultimate resistance to me. When attempts to assassinate my character do not stop me, pretending I don’t exist at all just might. The denial of my existence won’t be hard for you: you’re already well practiced in pretending reality simply isn’t there.

But I want you to consider this: I would have shared my secrets with you and surrendered everything if I believed that you could make this world a better place, and that you could be trusted with secrets and not use them to stab people in the back for your own advantage. I have many friends to whom I can apply that description, and none of them sit on your Council because they are sensible enough to not allow your way of life to rob them of these virtues.

I am settling for a simple life and making peace with things being the way they are. I will be a better person for this. Protesting at the world only serves to make me angry. The Talented do need to manage anger, as I’ve frequently been reminded by one or two people who learned that lesson the hard way.

But