Megacity: Operation Galton Book 3 Read online

  A theory floated around: there was something in Nucrop, the new sustainable, vitamin-rich grain, that caused infertility. Wonderful Nucrop, able to adapt to our ever-changing climate. Of course, the infertility rumour was labelled a conspiracy theory. I stopped eating the products, just in case, but I still didn't get pregnant.

  Soon though, infertility would become the least of our problems.

  Eric's contracts had been drying up all year, and I lost my job just before Christmas 2041; my department was being 'streamlined', I was told, but we knew the real reasons. Nutricorp and the government required their workers to be good, compliant megacity citizens.

  We existed as best we could on the little money we had coming in, and our savings, but our battle against the Great Shift was finally lost on the 3rd of January, 2042. On that freezing cold winter day, the Nutri-government opened up for the New Year and played several winning hands.

  In my message inbox was a notice from our doctors' surgery, 'regretting' that it could no longer accept patients who did not live within a blah-blah mile radius, i.e. within MC12. I tried others, but the situation was the same everywhere.

  I was just wondering what the hell to do when Eric walked in from outside—the cottage was tiny, 19th century, and the door opened straight into the living room. He brought the bitter wind with him, and looked as though he wanted to hit someone.

  "Collection point's gone," he said. "I left the bags on the roadside when I was driving home. Sod it; if they want it gone, someone can come and pick it up."

  Oh dear, oh dear. The bin men had stopped coming to our area months before; we had to take our rubbish to a collection point just outside MC12.

  "Perhaps there's another one we can take it to." I brought up the local government website, which advised me that the collection points for non-megacity residents were now closed, and we would have to make our own arrangements for refuse disposal. Then followed a long list of the places we couldn't dump it, which included roadsides. The penalty was a hefty fine, even for a first offence.

  "Bonfires it is, then," Eric said. "We'll have to bury the plastic and the aerosols. It'll take some sorting, but we can do it."

  I told him about the doctor, to which he said, "Stuff them. We're both young and healthy. You'll get pregnant when you get pregnant, and if anything dire happens I'll phone an ambulance."

  So the non-compliant were being shut off from society. Eric said he refused to be bullied into submission, and stormed upstairs to fire off emails, hoping to get some work.

  I decided to look for jobs, but as soon as I'd applied thumb to screen to reveal my identity, I would be informed that the opportunity was available only to megacity residents.

  I wondered idly about off-grids, spent a pleasant hour browsing sites then went upstairs thinking I would ask Eric to take a look, only to find him snoring on the couch by his desk.

  The camel's back broke when I logged on to do my weekly grocery shop.

  'As from the 3rd of January, 2042, NuMart will only deliver to addresses within the megacities.'

  Aside from a couple of independent wholefood markets that still remained, there was nowhere else to buy food. Over the past fifteen years, every independent shop had been bought up by Nutricorp, or gone out of business.

  I couldn't believe there was nothing I could do, that we would be forced to leave the house we loved. I browsed self-sufficiency sites—we could keep chickens, maybe a goat, plant crops in the spring. But what did we eat in the meantime? We had enough food in the house to last until February, at a pinch. I looked up the sites for the markets. Both had closed down from the 1st of January.

  We should have prepared for this a year ago, but we didn't believe it would get this bad. We thought there would always be options, however awkward.

  They said removal to the megacities was 'not mandatory'. But if they make day-to-day living impossible if you don't, then it kind of is mandatory, isn't it?

  We were beaten.

  I opened a document I'd told Eric I'd deleted. The official offer of a place in MC12, jobs appropriate to our experience and current position, and a generous rent-free period dependent on the value of our house. Even as I was re-reading it, another missive pinged into my inbox.

  Our village was due for demolition in April 2042; if we chose to stay, our house would be the only building still standing, and we would have no access to electricity or running water. We had until the end of January to accept the offer.

  I knew about the super-resisters who would accept neither megacity nor Hope Village, people who wouldn't leave their homes, or fended for themselves in abandoned towns and villages that remained standing. But I didn't know that I could face life with no electricity and hot water. And our children, when they arrived, would need education, doctors and dentists. Opportunities.

  I got up from my desk, and went upstairs to wake Eric.

  He would have stayed, but I couldn't.

  Our new address: Flat 17, Stack 308, Walkway 5224, Sector 14, Megacity 12.

  The apartment was tiny, smart, all white, with reasonably comfortable, neutral-coloured furniture. The walkways were peaceful, with no traffic, each one a short walk from a ziprail connect, or you could flash your com at ridiculous little contraptions called segs to take you there: two-wheel, stand-up, motorised scooters. Segs were lined up outside each stack; you slotted them back into stands at the zip connect, where others would use them to go home.

  So far so not-too-awful, but the only position offered to Eric was way below his capabilities. Instead of doing his own research and planning, he became part of a team that provided this service for some nitwit called Elijah who produced the reports Eric used to write himself. There was no working from home, at his new level. Each day he caught the zip to Tech Village, where he toiled alongside kids fresh out of college. His team leader was nine years his junior.

  Each day he came home a seething mass of frustration, mostly to do with Elijah.

  "He's just a glorified fucking data analyst. Basically, he writes up the research I've done for him, half of which is analysed as I do it, because that's how I work, and claims all the credit. I reckon we're being punished for holding out on them. I could've done this job when I was eighteen."

  The best I could find was a sales advisor job in the NuHome department in the Retail Village, secured because of my previous experience in that area.

  "Marketing, homewares―this job should be like falling off a log for you!" said the smiling woman on my com screen who told me to report for work at eight-thirty on Monday morning.

  I stood in a showroom that sold kitchenware, and tried to make people add more items to the cart on their smartcom screen. Yes, I knew my way around a handy shelving unit or two, but I was not a salesperson. I found the job daunting, and struggled to meet my targets each week. But that wasn't the worst part.

  In the megacities, salaries are standardised. Grades A to F, depending on what job you do. Eric was a C, I was a D.

  Unless you're in the A or B paygrade, you are only allowed to have one child.

  Everyone else has to do their bit for the overpopulation crisis.

  Our only hope was for Eric to prove himself and climb to B grade, but he put the chip back on his shoulder when he dressed for work each morning, which I was sure did not escape the attention of his superiors.

  I can mark the beginning of the end as the day we found out about the one child rule. Like Eric, I felt I'd been robbed of that family I still believed I could have, but we'd reunited with some of our friends, there was much to do in the megacity, and I wanted to take every step possible to conceive our one child. We had a choice; we could exist in seething resentment, or we could play the hand we'd been dealt. Eric, though, was so angry, all the time. When we went out with our friends he'd drink too much and start ranting about all that was wrong with the world.

  Most of them agreed with him, to a varying extent, but like me were determined to make the best of it. One night, when he'
d completely spoiled the evening for everyone yet again, he continued his tirade as we walked back from the zip to Stack 308, and something snapped. I'd had enough.

  I said, "So what, are you going to do something about it? Join a resistance group? Petition the government? Or are you just going to carry on ranting? If you're not happy, do something about it or give it a rest."

  The sentence 'join a resistance group' must have hit its mark, though I would not discover this until much later.

  The next day he woke up to a 'social demerit'; an anonymous someone had reported him for using 'language likely to offend'. I knew why; while we were sitting at the bar, surrounded by people, he'd referred to Elijah as a 'mincing retard', and Josh had tried to shut him up. Another fine, debited straight from his account, another point off his social awareness score.

  That day the crack in our marriage widened, and continued to do so when, after we'd been there for two years, the NuSens biometric sensors were introduced. A tiny chip in the arm that monitored our nutritional needs, our health. Each day you clicked onto your com to check your body's vitamin and mineral levels, and received personalised menu suggestions. Eric and I both thought it was frightening. Again, they said the NuSens was not mandatory, but we soon found out that if you wanted to keep your job, and thus your place in the megacity, you had to comply.

  When Eric discovered, after a weekend drinking binge, that it also monitored your alcohol intake and forwarded the results to your employer, I thought he was going to explode. He'd received his first health maintenance demerit; another debit straight from his bank account arrived with a warning that his job required a certain health maintenance score, and this demerit took him down to the 'alert zone'.

  "Fuck this place!" he yelled, about twenty times that night. "Why is everyone just accepting it? Why?"

  I began to get scared he would leave. Just disappear into the wasteland, if he could find a way. It wasn't uncommon; everyone knew someone who knew someone whose friend had been unable to take the restrictions, and had chosen to go out there, instead. We read that most ended up knocking on the door of the nearest Hope Village, just to have a dry, warm roof over their heads and enough to eat.

  By the time the calendar clicked round to our third megacity anniversary, Eric had been a whisper away from the sack on many occasions, had been forced to go for 'talking therapy' at a place called Balance, and said he was glad I hadn't become pregnant.

  That hurt.

  "I don't want to bring a child into this dystopian nightmare," he said. "No brother or sister to play with and nothing to look forward to except more of this shit show."

  So that was why he'd been avoiding sex.

  One of the reasons.

  The way I looked at it, he was letting himself be the victim. He was allowing 'them' to ruin his life. Our friends faded away, because Eric only had one topic of conversation, but I wasn't going to let it beat me. I would find happiness, and I would have my one child.

  I lied to him. Sounds bad to lie about something so huge, but I did. I told him I'd been back to the doctor, who said it was highly unlikely I would ever conceive.

  Eric said, "Good." Just that, nothing else. He didn't think for a moment about how that news might have affected me. Well, it didn't affect me at all because it wasn't true, but you understand what I mean.

  By then I was sure he was having an affair. Unexplained absences, unanswered com calls and, yes, the lack of interest in sex. This upset me, but it was all part of the general, slow disintegration.

  I wanted a life. I couldn't deal with Eric's constant negativity, and decided to take steps to get what I wanted.

  I went to the doctor for real, and he told me about an infertility clinic that was offering a ground-breaking new procedure to increase egg production.

  "Ninety-five per cent success rate," he told me. "More, if your husband has a strong sperm count."

  I had to cash in all the savings I had left, but if it worked, it would be the best possible use for the money. I took masses of vitamins, rested and ate well, did yoga, stopped drinking alcohol and coffee. I did everything I could to turn my body into a place where a baby could germinate and grow. The only problem was getting the seed in there in the first place. If Eric was screwing someone else, I was no match for her, simply because he hadn't been with her for nearly a decade; whatever I did, I couldn't compete with 'new'. However, like many foolishly optimistic women before me, I hoped a baby might save us.

  If I caught him at the right time, once would be enough. My twenty-ninth birthday was coming up in November, and it just happened to coincide with prime ovulation time.

  He couldn't deny me on my birthday, could he?

  In Megacity 12, there are few places of worship. More in the Senior Village, I imagine because older people grew up in a world in which going to church, or the mosque or whatever, was still a thing. However, when I pondered how our daughter would be brought up, I discovered that, although not forbidden, religious devotion is not encouraged in the new UK, and is not taught in schools. Instead, children have ‘ethical awareness’ classes, in which they learn about being kind to others, obeying the law, and self-sacrifice for the ‘common good’.

  I thought our baby daughter should at least know about religion so she had the option of whether or not to believe, but when I mentioned this to Eric, he said he didn’t care. I should have seen the writing on the wall then; he left us when Leah was eighteen months old.

  I'd given up work at seven months and been a stay-at-home mum ever since, because I wanted to spend every moment with her, and because childcare would have taken up most of my D-grade salary.

  Our marriage was struggling by the time she was born, and her arrival did nothing to bring us together. Now I wonder if he distanced himself for her sake, and for his own, because he knew he wouldn't be with us for much longer.

  One evening in February 2048, he just didn't come home. I was used to him stopping off for a drink after work with his colleagues, especially on a Friday, but he was usually back by ten. When the clock ticked round to ten-thirty, I hit 'connect' on my com.

  Nothing.

  I tried over and over, but each time I got the same message: This smartcom device is not taking calls. I became angry. How dare he make himself unavailable, when we had an eighteen month old daughter? What if there was an emergency?

  I went to bed after midnight. Woke up at four; the space beside me was still empty. Tried his com again: same message.

  He wasn't back in the morning, either. At around nine-thirty, I was just putting Leah in her playpen when my com rang―I leapt on it, only to see a name I didn't know. Marc Halston wants to connect. Select: Holochat – Interface – Chat – Message - Ignore - Block.

  I selected interface. I assumed Marc Halston was some workmate of Eric's who'd been primed to bullshit me, and I wanted to see how good he was at lying.

  I saw an attractive guy with what might have been a winning smile, had it not been so obvious that this was a call he didn't want to make.

  "Hi―are you Aileen?"

  "I am."

  "Oh―good―I'm, er, right outside your stack. Can I come up?"

  "What for?"

  He shook his head. "I'm sorry―of course, you don't know who I am. My name’s Marc Halston. It's about your husband—I thought you'd be better hearing it face to face―"

  "We are face to face." My heart thumped. "Hearing what? Tell me, and I'll see if I want you to come up." Then I got scared. "Is he okay? Has there been an―"

  "I'm sorry, Aileen, he's left you. And he's taken my wife with him."

  "She was going to these meetings. Hush-hush ones. About Link."

  "Link?" I couldn't take in what he was saying. I lifted Leah up from her pen and bounced her around, more as a displacement activity than anything else, but she yelled, so I put her back.

  "It's an underground network with an HQ somewhere in the wasteland. It's like a resistance movement, I think―anyway, that's where my w
ife met your husband."

  Her name was Sophie; she'd been a behavioural analyst at MC12 University. He showed me a picture of her, the woman my husband loved. Attractive, with long, dark blonde hair and intense eyes. "Did you know he was going to the meetings?"

  "No—no, I didn't know what he was doing or where he was half the time. Where have they gone?" I pictured them set up in another stack, somewhere else in MC12, but I was wrong.

  Marc took something out of his jeans pocket; the torn off back of a greetings card. "Here."

  I read. 'I'm sorry, Marc. I'm in love with someone else. His name is Eric Phillips, and I met him at a meeting. By the time you read this, we will be in the wasteland. My com's in my underwear drawer. This way you can find someone who is right for you, and doesn't mind living in this dystopian nightmare. Take care, Sophie x.'

  She used the same phrase to describe this life as he did. Dystopian nightmare. I stared at it, reading those few words over and over. My husband's name, written by a woman I'd never met. Didn't know existed until that moment.

  I looked into Marc's eyes, properly, for the first time. He'd been crying. I hadn't. I was a mass of numb, cold anger. Shock, I suppose. Even though I'd suspected it for so long—but the trouble with suspicions is that deep down you expect to be proved wrong.

  "Are you going to look for her? Even if she's left her com behind, her NuSens will still be active, won't they?"

  He shook his head. "The first thing people do when they get out there is remove their chips. We won't be able to find them, and there's no point, if they want to be gone."

  I stood up, and stroked my daughter's dear little blonde head. She looked just like me at the same age. "But Eric's a father. He's got responsibilities. Missing Persons―they'll have to find him, won't they? I'm going to call them, now." I picked up my com, but he shook his head.

  "They won't bother to look. They'll tell you they will, but they won't, at least no more than a cursory drone to the areas nearby."

  "Not even when he's got a child to support?"