of people who'd like to whack me for free, and never mind the five thou gig. He didn't know about the spares, and I didn't try to explain any of the history or mention SafetyNet, so he probably just thought I'd gone nonlinear.
But he wouldn't let me go, and he was probably right, and that's why I was sitting in his office and smoking furiously. Howie had people out asking questions for me, against his better judgement. He thought I should just take Suej and get the fuck out of town. I'd refused, and we were waiting for word to come back. In the meantime he sat in his chair opposite me, watching through the one-way mirror as the bar filled up for the small hours session.
Eventually he turned, and looked at me shrewdly for a moment. ‘I've had a better idea,’ he said. ‘I don't think there's any money in Date Cancelling.’
‘You could be right.’ I lit another cigarette and waited, as I had so many times before.
‘So try this. You know how women eat cake?’ I didn't answer, so he filled in for me. ‘Instead of having a normal-sized piece – you know, like a proper slice – they have a tiny sliver. A tiddlywiddly bit. Generally, my research shows, it's about a twenty-degree angle of pie. You know why they do this?’
‘No,’ I said. I knew what he was doing, and was content to play along. He was relaxing me, in his roundabout way. I thought that was okay. I felt I could do with some relaxing.
‘They do it because they think that if they have a piece that small, then in some way it doesn't count. It's too tiny. It slips through the calorie net, like candy you eat in a car. Then they can have another piece a bit later on – less than twenty degrees, of course – and that piece won't count either.’
‘Howie, what are you talking about?’
‘You watch, next time you break bread with a babe. You'll see I'm right. So this is the plan – I come up with a new diet. All you have to do is buy circular food. Whatever you want, you can have it – so long as you make sure that you never have more than twenty degrees at one time. What do you think?’
‘Complete and utter nonsense,’ I said.
‘Possibly, possibly – but who knows? Women understand some weird shit. Maybe they're on to something.’ He winked, leant over to a small fridge and pulled out a couple of beers from the multitude inside. ‘As you can see, there's a lot of beer. More than enough.’
‘For what?’
‘For however long it's going to take you to explain. I still say you should blow town, but I'm not letting you out of here before you calm down. Against my better judgement, you're going to be crashing in my storeroom tonight, Jack. These are aggressive people you're dealing with. Tell me what the hell's going on.’
I knew I was going to have to tell someone sooner or later. I'd assumed it would be Mal. As I took my first sip of beer in a long time, I looked at Howie's face and realized that it was going to be him.
I met the spares five years ago. I was thirty-four. I was put in a car and driven out of New Richmond in the middle of the night by someone, a woman who wasn't my wife but who'd taken the trouble to find me when everyone else had given up. There's a two-week period of my life which has just disappeared, and one of the very few things I'm sure about is that I want to leave it that way.
I didn't really know what the Farms were back then. Well yeah, I did know. Vaguely. I'd driven past one once, wondered what they were, asked someone, got half the story. I knew more or less what they were for, but not how they did it, and at the time I didn't really care too much.
We arrived in that scrag-end of night when the sky turns from black to blue just before dawn. The complex was a couple of miles outside Roanoke, handy for the hospitals. It was a two-storey concrete building up against a hillside, a drab grey structure which from the road you'd probably assume was something to do with the military. In front there was a small compound where collection vehicles parked for the brief periods they spent at the Farm. The whole place was ringed by an electrified fence, like so much else these days. In back were the tunnels, but you couldn't see them. They went straight into the rock.
I was left outside the compound, and waited shivering for the dawn and the representative from the parent company who was supposed to be coming to meet me. I waited two hours, two of the most wretched hours of my life. I'd evidently shot up from a bad batch and my head was completely fucked. I didn't really know where I was, but that was giving me no relief. It was like being dead without the peace.
Finally, the man came. I was in several different kinds of pain by then and doing my miserable best not to show any of them. This guy was the last thing I needed. He was a small, fussy man in an expensive suit, a man who lived for the ticks he made at regular intervals on the sheet of paper he carried with him. He had a fashionable haircut and fashionable small, round glasses, on an unfashionable small round head.
He took one look at me and smiled. Clearly I fitted the type.
It doesn't take much to run a Farm. A caretaker and two support droids. The droids do the bulk of the work – all the caretaker has to do is keep an eye on things and deal with the white vans when they arrive. They're token humans in the decision loop, installed in the way that a hundred years ago foremen were always white men, no matter how intelligent or educated their black or female workers. The caretakers are generally ex-security guards or farmers who've lost either their land or the will to work it. Men with no special qualities, because none are really needed – apart, perhaps, from a lack of imagination. Most stay on the premises all the time, day in, day out. The company doesn't like to have to organize relief cover, and few of the caretakers have much to go out for. I was no exception. I had no reason to go out at all.
The inside of the main building was arranged around two corridors at right angles to each other. The outside door gave pretty much straight into the control room where I spent most of my time. At the bottom corner of this room was a door which led to the main corridor. As you walked down that passage you passed three large metal doors, each with a small perspex window. These led to the tunnels and were supposed to be opened only at feeding times and when a collection was made. A little further down was the second corridor which led to the operating room. There were a few further rooms off the opposite side, a kitchen and various utility areas. The walls and ceilings throughout the complex were painted an entertaining shade of drab grey, and it was always quiet, like a mortuary, because everyone except the caretaker lived in the tunnels.
I was told my duties, and shown how to operate the few pieces of equipment which were my responsibility. It was explained to me when the shipments of food would arrive, and how little I had to do to them. I was given the phone numbers of relevant people in Roanoke General, and told the circumstances in which I was to call them. I stood, and nodded, and listened, though I wasn't really there at all. Hooks embedded in my mind pulled in three different directions at once, leaving me with a jittery blankness that occluded the outside world.
Then I was shown to the tunnels.
I won't forget the feeling I had when I first stood at the observation window and peered into the twilight beyond. At first all I could make out was a colour, a deep blue glow chilled at intervals by white lights shining up from the floor. It looked like the coldest dream you ever had. Then I began to discern shapes in the gloom, and movement. When I realized what I was seeing I shivered, a spasm so elemental that it wasn't visible on the outside. For a moment it was as if I was back in a different place altogether, and it was all I could do not to run. I should have trusted that intuition, and made the connection, but of course I didn't.
The representative from the company stood behind me as I watched, and told me that each of the three tunnels was eight feet wide and eight feet tall, and housed forty spares. Experience had shown that it was best to keep them warm and humid, and he tapped the indicator panels at the side of each door. These I had to check every two hours, even though they were computer controlled. The instruction was repeated, and I turned to glare at the representative to show I understood. Our eyes met for the first time since he'd arrived, and I could tell what he felt about me. Distaste, primarily, together with boredom and a little amusement. To him I was merely a new component of the Farm, a replacement