The Big Shift. Chapter 18. Into the Wild

The clever, industrious little creters were working on the finishing touches to Greta’s new bedroom as Freddy ran out of the front door in search of his runaway daughters. He didn’t take anything with him, not even his pills. The tube took him down to the orange zone and he quickly found his way to the Traveller’s Rest, Sammy’s place by the river.. the last place that O had seen them before they’d absconded into the red zone through the Freedom Drain. Sammy directed him to J & J Vintage Machine Revivals, the repair shop at the top of the Mall in Shopping Village where Jerry lived with Jack and Granny Mae.

The main road leading out of the city was crowded with people. Traders and day visitors heading home to their places either side of the city limit, all eager to get home before nightfall. Freddy ran along the busy thoroughfare, barging his way way through the crowds, barely noticing his surroundings. It was dark by the time Freddy rushed through the revolving doors of the Mall and ran up the escalators with Sydney the robot dog at his side.

Jack and Granny Mae were in the kitchen with Roop who’d dropped in to deliver some carrots, potatoes and onions from their garden. Mostly Roop had come for some advice and to get away from a tense situation at home after an argument with Aretha. Since meeting Greta, Aretha had become depressed and dissatisfied with her life and the compromises she’d made. All of her resentment towards Roop had come to the surface and they’d been arguing. Since meeting Greta, all that their daughter Mabel could talk about was Skyward Village, the place where people lived in trees. Why couldn’t they go there? Why? All Roop could do, it seemed, was make excuses and disappoint.

They all looked up when the bell rang as Freddy burst into the shop. ‘Hang on! I’ll be right out..’ called Jack and stiffly began to get up from his chair. By the time he’d stood up, Freddy was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, sweating, red in the face and out of breath. Sydney was by his side, looking around the room and sniffing the air.

Granny Mae screamed. ‘Aargh! A robot! Get it out of here!’ Sydney backed away and looked out timidly from behind Freddy’s legs.

‘Sydney, go and wait over there’, Freddy said to the robot dog who obediently went and sat among some old washing machines, vacuum cleaners and electric food mixers in the corner of the shop. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you’, he said to Granny Mae. ‘I’m looking for my daughters, Nina and Greta. They were with Jerry and Queenie. Have you seen them?’

‘Oh yes. Lovely girls’, said Granny Mae. ‘They were just here this afternoon. They’re all on their way to the forest.’

‘What?!’ cried Freddy, pulling his hair. ‘They were here and you just let them go out into the forest? They’re just children. What if they get lost? What if something happens to them? Do you even know where they are now?’

‘Come and sit down’, said Jack. ‘My name’s Jack by the way. This is my mum, Mae.’

‘Freddy’, said Freddy, shaking Jack’s hand and then slumping down into a chair at the kitchen table. He put his head in his hands. ‘I can’t believe this’, he muttered to himself. ‘How am I going to find them now? Four kids out wandering about in the redzone.. in the middle of the forest.. in the middle of the night.’

‘They’ll be ok, don’t worry’, said Jack. ‘They’ve got Captain Toast with them. He’ll look after them.’

‘Captain Toast?’ said Freddy, looking up incredulously. ‘Who the hell is Captain Toast?’

‘Oh, he’s our dog’, said Jack.

‘Captain Toast is a dog? Are you serious?’ cried Freddy, staring at Jack in disbelief.

‘Well, he really likes toast’, said Jack. ‘He’s a good dog though, seriously.’

‘Oh, well that’s just great’, said Freddy angrily. ‘I feel much better now, knowing that a dog called Captain Toast is out there looking after my daughters.’

‘Hey, I know it’s a shock, but I’m sure they’ll be all right’, said Jack. ‘They’re smart kids. Your Greta, she knows the forest. She found her way to you didn’t she? She’ll find the way back to her mum.’

‘Oh.. oh.. oh..’ Freddy stammered and started to cry. ‘I can’t believe this! I’ve made such a mess of everything. I should have known something like this would happen. I should have seen it coming. I just wasn’t paying attention. Always in my own world. Didn’t keep my eye on the ball. Too busy looking into space, trying to solve the mysteries of the universe. Stupid, stupid, stupid man!’ Freddy hit himself on the head angrily, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

Granny Mae came and put her hand on Freddy’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, doll. They’ll be just fine. The universe will take care of them. You’ll see.’

‘The universe?’ Freddy turned and glared at Granny Mae.

‘Look at that’, said Granny Mae, pointing to the jerry can boat on the wall. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘It’s a plastic container’, said Freddy. ‘Some kind of shelf or something? I don’t know. What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘When our Jerry was a baby, Jack found him floating in the sea, in that. Can you believe it? In the middle of the sea. It was a miracle. No other word for it. I don’t know who or what, but someone was looking out for him, watching over him, keeping him safe. And they are still. You’ll see.’

Freddy stared at the little improvised boat and then at Granny Mae. These people were mad. How was he ever going to find his daughters and get them safely home? He was all alone in the world and the universe was bigger and more uncaring than this toothless old woman could ever imagine.

‘You know what?’ said Roop, scratching his straggly beard and then adjusting his glasses which were held together with tape. ‘They’re on their way to Skyward Village, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, that’s the name of the place’, said Freddy. ‘What about it?’

‘Well, funnily enough, I was planning on visiting there. With my family.’

‘What? Really? When?’

‘Actually, first thing in the morning’, said Roop, giving the table a decisive thump with the side of his fist. ‘You’re welcome to join us. We’ve got a spare bike. Do you know how to ride a bike.. you, know.. a bicycle?’

‘Well, I haven’t ridden one in years, but I’m sure I’d remember how. Are you serious? Are you sure? Do you know the way?’ said Freddy, his face lighting up.

‘Yes. We were there years ago and my wife has never stopped pining to go back there. It never seemed like quite the right time.. but.. well.. what can I say? Now it does.’

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Greta, Nina, Queenie and Jerry set up camp before sunset. Greta had wanted to eat the hyper-sausages and walk through the night, but Nina managed to convince her that they should stop to rest. It had been a long day and they’d come far enough. Jerry and Queenie agreed.

They set up their camp next to a huge oak tree with branches stretching out in every direction. Greta showed the others how to set up the hammock-tents they each had in their pack. The hammocks were ultra lightweight, made from strong, flexible nanotube material. Each tent consisted of a hammock and a mosquito net canopy which was also breathable and water repellent. Including the four anchoring ropes which were used to tie the hammock to the tree’s branches, the whole tent could be packed down to almost the size of a tennis ball and weighed about the same as one.

Greta was familiar with the hammock-tent as she’d had an identical one in the bag she’d left behind in the city. A lot of the early settlers of Skyward Village had first come there as scavengers, looking for material to take back to O. They’d become so enchanted by the treehouse village in the ancient forest and so disenchanted with the Great Leader, that they decided to give up on the trappings of modern civilisation and stay there in the forest. The hammock tents and other useful contents of O’s scavenger packs, such as the practically ever-lasting fire lighters and micro-flashlights were allowed to stay too, despite them being made by the evil O.

They collected wood and built a campfire. Queenie had brought her guitar, a beaten up old travel guitar that her dad had left behind. It was among her few possessions which had come with her to the foster home. It was the only thing she’d brought with her when she ran away from there. Whenever Queenie went somewhere and didn’t know if or when she’d be returning, she took her guitar, her most faithful companion. Accompanied by Greta on her wooden flute, they stayed up long into the night, talking, singing, playing music and feasting on Granny Mae’s fruitcakes.

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Roop and Aretha’s place was a hive of activity well into the night. Aretha was overjoyed at Roop’s announcement that they would all be leaving for Skyward Village first thing in the morning. It was the right thing to do, to help poor Freddy find his daughters and also get back to River, the mother of his children. Mabel was too excited to go to bed, so she helped prepare for the journey, all the while questioning Freddy about his life and life in the city. She was fascinated by Sydney the robot dog and delighted that he was so playful.

‘Is it true that O controls people’s with brains with spaghetti noodles? Do you wear a metal hat to protect you from the radial nation? Why doesn’t Sydney have a face? Do you have robots to clean your house and cook for you? Do you tell them what to do or do they tell you what to do? Are there flowers in the city? Do you have a garden? Do children in the hives go to school? Why are they called hives? Are they like bee-hives? Do you still love Greta’s mum? Are you still married? Do you love O more? Is that why you live in the city and not in the forest?’

When the house had been set in order and the pannier bags on the bikes loaded with provisions, Freddy went to bed in the guest room, a large tent attached to the side of the bus. The bed was comfortable enough but Freddy couldn’t sleep. His mind was filled with visions of Greta and Nina, lost in the forest, being eaten by packs of hungry wolves or being captured by gangs of desperate men who would do unspeakable things to them. Even though Freddy was never one for praying, he prayed that Captain Toast would protect them. He counted the minutes until sunrise. It couldn’t come soon enough. When he did at times doze off, his sleep was filled with nightmares even worse and more graphic than his waking fears.

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Just before sunrise, Greta and Nina awoke with a start and sat up in their hammocks.

‘I had that dream again. Did you?’ said Nina, looking frightened.

Greta nodded. ‘Yes. It’s mum. She’s calling us. We need to get to her quickly. She’s in trouble.’

At that moment, Queenie let out a cry and sat up in her hammock, looking like she’d seen a ghost. ‘What? No! Where am I?’ she mumbled, still half asleep, looking around desperately in the half light, trying to figure out where she was.

‘Queenie, it’s ok. You’re here in the forest’, said Greta, leaning across to steady Queenie’s hammock, afraid that she might fall out.

Gradually Queenie’s eyes came into focus and she remembered where she was. She held Greta’s hand and smiled weakly. ‘I just had the most vivid dream’, she said unsteadily. ‘It was my mum. She was here.. somewhere in the forest.. a little stone cottage in the forest. She was standing in the doorway, calling me to come in. But I was scared. She wanted to tell me something.. something important..’

‘Oh my God! That’s so weird!’ Nina gasped. ‘We also dreamed that our mum was calling us. What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know’, said Queenie. ‘It was weird. Spooky. She was all dressed in black. I was a little girl. I had a basket of berries that I’d picked in the forest.. and when she called me, I was so scared, I dropped them all and ran away..’

Greta gasped. ‘That sounds just like something that happened to me.. in real life, not in a dream.. when I was little.. I keep remembering it lately for some reason.. this fortune teller came to out village.. she said she needed to tell me something.. something important. She made a circle on the ground and wanted me to come into it.. but I got scared and ran away. I’d been picking berries and dropped them all on the floor.’

‘Woah! Really? That’s so weird’, said Queenie, looking at Greta with a mix of fear and wonder.

Jerry sat up in his hammock and rubbed his eyes. ‘Hey, morning. Is it morning?’ he said groggily. ‘You’re all up early? What’s going on?’

‘We all had weird dreams’, said Nina. ‘We all dreamed that our mums were calling us. Did you have any weird dreams? Was your mum calling you?’

‘Well, maybe she was, but maybe I couldn’t hear her from the bottom of the sea’, said Jerry with a shrug. ‘I don’t even know her name or what she looked like.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry Jerry. I forgot’, said Nina. ‘But maybe she’s still out there somewhere. I mean.. you know.. up there.. watching over you.’

‘Yeah, maybe’, said Jerry.

They all sat in silence while the sun peeked out over the horizon and flooded the forest with soft, golden light. Soon the air was full of the sound of birdsong as the forest woke up to a new day.

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At sunrise, Roop, Aretha, Mabel and Freddy were all up and assembled at the kitchen table which was laden with scrambled eggs, salads, colourful dips, toast, butter, a big pot of tea and a little jug of milk. Freddy didn’t have any appetite but Aretha insisted he try and eat something. He’d need his strength for the journey ahead. Roop spread out a map and they all studied the route.

‘Look, we’ll take the old A33 from the other side of Shopping Village’, said Roop, tracing a line on the old map with his finger. It goes all the way out to Eastwell. Then, we just need to turn off and follow the B420 up into the hills. It should be a good road. At least, it used to be..’

‘It looks so close on the map’, said Freddy. ‘That would have been what.. a two hour drive.. before the Big Shift?’

‘Well, more like four hours with the traffic around the city at rush hour’, said Roop, remembering the olden days with a grimace. ‘Still, we should be able to get there tonight or tomorrow, if the road’s good and we don’t get held up.’

‘Yes..’ Freddy nodded grimly. ‘If we don’t get held up.’

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For breakfast, Greta, Nina, Jerry and Queenie went foraging for wild mushrooms. Greta showed the others how to identify the ones that were good to eat, warning them against ever eating any mushrooms that they weren’t completely sure about. They also picked bunches of nettles, being careful not to sting themselves, wild garlic, herbs and various other leafy plants that Greta pointed out along the way, as well as pine nuts from the forest floor.

Jerry had brought a blackened frying pan and salt and pepper shakers which Jack had dug out from the store-room. Relics from his travelling days. He’d handed them to Jerry as if he was handing over the crown jewels. ‘May these serve you well’, he’d said. ‘And may every meal they serve you be a feast fit for kings!’

‘Thanks Jack’, said Jerry, quite moved by the gesture. ‘I bet you had some good feasts with this, eh?’

‘Mostly spam’, said Jack with a grin. ‘But it was good spam.’

While the others were taking down the tents, Greta built a little fire and cooked up everything they’d picked, in the old frying pan. Nina was surprised to find that it was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted, even though she didn’t think she liked mushrooms or greens. They all ate from the pan, scooping out chunks of mushroom in nettle and herb sauce with pieces of heavy, seed bread that Granny Mae had baked.

‘Wow, you should really be on Masterchef, Greta!’, said Nina, savouring the incredible mix of flavours and textures of the foraged feast.

‘Everything tastes better when it’s wild and just been picked, and when you pick it yourself’, said Greta. ‘And when it’s cooked over a fire. I’m glad you like it.’

‘It’s just so fresh.. and so.. so.. real. Everything here is so.. real’, said Nina, struggling to find words to describe all the new things she was feeling and experiencing. Just being out there in the forest.. away from everything. Away from the hive, away from her dad, away from O. Even if she wanted to go into the O-zone, even just to check her notifications, it would be impossible here. She was completely disconnected, for the first time in her life.. and yet, somehow, she felt more connected than ever before.

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The pannier bags on the bikes were loaded with enough food, water and camping equipment to last for weeks in the wilderness. The bikes were modern, lightweight and rugged, built to travel long distances in any conditions. Roop and Aretha had travelled all over the land on them, after the Big Shift, before Mabel had been born. Eventually they’d settled at Shopping Village and, with one thing and another, it had been a long time since they’d taken the bikes out on the road.

The old A33 heading east out of Shopping Village had once been a wide highway, with two or sometimes three lanes going in both directions. Now it was almost empty and its surface was cracked and full of potholes. On either side of the road were suburban houses, mostly abandoned, dilapidated and overgrown. Occasionally they would pass a house that looked lived in. Some had beautiful gardens, some were surrounded by piles of possibly useful junk. Some of the occupants smiled and waved to the bicycle travellers as they passed by. Others scowled and stared suspiciously at them. A gang of children came running out of an abandoned school building and chased after the cyclists shouting ‘Devil dog! Devil dog! Get it! Catch it!’

Sydney, who had been happily running and jumping alongside Freddy’s bike, dashed off ahead as fast as his robot legs could carry him. Freddy chased after him on his bike, all the while waving one arm about and shouting angrily at the children ‘Get away you hooligans! That robot’s smarter than all of you ruffians put together!’ To which the kids replied by jeering and calling Freddy names.

Aretha rode quickly ahead with Mabel, who was rather shaken by the encounter. They caught up with Freddy and Sydney further down the road. Freddy had wrapped the robot dog in a blanket and was strapping him onto his bike rack.

‘What horrible, nasty kids’, Freddy was muttering. ‘Not surprising. I mean, look at how they live. Why would people want to live like that? No education. Nothing. I mean, where are the grownups? What sort of life is that for children? Or for anyone..’

‘Why were they so mean to Sydney?’ asked Mabel, stroking his blanket covering. ‘He’s not a devil dog. He’s just a cute robot.’

‘People are just scared of things they don’t understand, Mabel’, said Aretha, stroking Mabel’s hair soothingly.

‘Or that they don’t want to understand’, Freddy huffed. ‘Or that they refuse to even try to understand.’

Mabel looked at him quizzically. She didn’t really understand most of the things Freddy said, but she liked him. He was funny when he was huffing and puffing.

Roop had stopped, turned around and gone back to talk with the children. After a few minutes conversation, he shook hands with all of them and they waved him on his way with good words, apologies for being rude and pledges to be more friendly next time they encountered travellers on the road. When he caught up with the others, Freddy said, ‘I hope you gave them a stern telling off. Someone should give them all a damn good hiding if you ask me.’

Roop shook his head. ‘Not my way, brother. I talked to them. They’re ok. Just kids.’ He turned to Aretha, ‘I invited them to come and help out with the harvest later in the season. Is that allright? We could use a few extra pairs of hands and they could use a bit of.. you know.. positive guidance..’

Aretha rolled her eyes, shook her head and smiled. ‘Well, you could have asked me.. but, yeah, of course.’ It was just like Roop. He was always doing things like that.. trying to help people. Especially the people no one else would. Always trying to make peace with everyone. It was one of the things she loved about him.

‘How’s Sydney?’ asked Roop, turning to Freddy.

‘He’s ok. He’s made of sturdy stuff. But I think it might be better to keep him out of sight. It seems that people out here don’t take very kindly to robots. Sorry, I didn’t think to ask you.. how do you feel about him? Do you think Sydney is a devil dog, or are you comfortable with him tagging along? I could send him back home if you like, he’d find the way..’

‘I’ve got nothing against robots’, said Roop. ‘Might come in useful too. You never know.’

‘I love him’, said Mabel, hugging the blanket wrapped robot. ‘Please don’t send Sydney away.’

‘I don’t mind it..’, said Aretha, making an odd head movement, ‘..but.. well I find it a bit.. I don’t know.. the way you call it “him”.. I don’t know if I can do that. It’s not a “him”, it’s an “it”. It’s a machine. Machine’s don’t have gender.’

Mabel gasped and covered Sydney’s ears, or the place where his ears would have been, if he had any. ‘It is a “him” and his name’s Sydney!’ she cried. ‘Don’t call him an “it”. You’ll hurt his feelings.’

‘Ok’, said Aretha, shaking her head. ‘Sydney can stay. Just remember, Sydney’s a robot, Mabel. Sydney doesn’t really have feelings.’

Mabel shook her head and whispered to the robot, ‘Take no notice Sydney. I know you do have feelings.’

Roop laughed. ‘Come on, let’s keep moving. Maybe we can get there before dark if we keep up a good pace..’

‘Yes, you’re right’, said Freddy. He mounted his bike and raced off down the road with Sydney on the back, peeking out furtively from underneath the blanket, looking around, left and right, sniffing the air, his expressionless glass face giving no indication of whatever it might have been that he was thinking or feeling.

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After their breakfast feast around the fire, Jerry wanted to stay and play some tunes, but Greta was eager to get moving. Nina agreed. This forest seemed to go on forever. They’d walked for hours yesterday and hadn’t seen a single other person. How much further did they still have to go? She just wanted to get there as soon as possible, back to her mum and back to some sort of human civilisation. Queenie seemed lost in thought. She hadn’t spoken much during breakfast and now she was just staring into the embers of the fire.

‘Hey Queenie, are you with us?’ said Jerry, gently poking her in the arm with his finger.

Queenie jumped like she had just been given an electric shock. ‘Hey! What? Don’t do that!’ she said, angrily batting Jerry’s finger away.

‘Hey, sorry Queenie’, said Jerry, throwing up his hands. ‘Say are you ok? You look tripped out..’

‘I was just remembering stuff. Something I’d forgotten..’, said Queenie, going back to staring into the fire.

Nina put her arm around Queenie. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘The day that they came and took me away..’ said Queenie, without looking up from the embers. ‘It’s all a blur. I never could get it straight in my mind.. what happened.. what didn’t happen.. how it happened.. it’s mostly all a blank. I was only about seven years old..’

‘What do you remember?’ asked Nina.

‘I don’t know how long my mum had been gone for that time. I can’t remember. Maybe she’d gone out the night before and not come back. Maybe it was two nights. Maybe it was a week. By that time, she was more not there than she was there. I had food delivered when I was hungry. I went to bed when I liked and got up when I liked. I couldn’t go out of the apartment, of course, but I didn’t get bored. I spent a lot of time in the vip, exploring all sorts of different worlds, learning stuff that was interesting to me. Or else I’d just knock about the apartment, playing games in my imagination, making tents out of blankets, that sort of thing.. I tell, you, it was better when she wasn’t there than when she was. No one there to tell me what to do. No-one to get mad at me for drawing on the walls or making a hot air balloon out of her best dress and flying it out of the window..’

‘So what happened? What did you remember?’

‘I was interested in earth fired pottery at the time.. fascinated by it.. you could say obsessed.. that’s just what I’m like. I’ll get into something really obscure and then go and learn everything about it. I was watching loads of videos about all these different traditional techniques for making things out of clay.. taking fire and earth, shaping them into something else.. something useful, something beautiful.. it’s like magic, like alchemy..’

‘You were seven years old?’

Queenie nodded. ‘Yeah, I was a funny kid. Here’s what I just remembered. I’d completely blanked it out till now, I don’t know how.. but it just came back to me. I wanted to do some pottery. I decided to make some clay beads. I didn’t have any clay, but there were creters working just outside the apartment, building the hives. You know how earthcrete starts out liquid and it hardens after about ten minutes, right? Unless you add water, then it stays soft? Just like clay. So anyway, I climbed out of the window and collected a ball of earthcrete and came back in with it. I say it like that, but it was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. That’s probably why I blanked it out of my memory and why I’m so scared of heights now.’

‘Woah, that’s crazy’, said Nina. ‘Why didn’t O stop you?’

‘I don’t know’, shrugged Queenie. ‘Who can tell what goes on in O’s infinitely twisted mind? It’s a mystery to me. Anyway, so I got this earthcrete clay and I made a load of beads out of it. I’m only just remembering all of this. After I’d made them and let them dry, I needed to fire them. So I got everything I could find that would burn.. toilet paper, pages out of books, socks.. I don’t know why I thought socks would burn well, but anyway I went to the kitchen, put everything in the oven.. the beads, the paper, the socks.. found one of my mum’s lighters.. and then..’

‘Oh my God!’ gasped Nina. ‘You set fire to it?’

Queenie nodded. ‘I remember watching the flames going up, and the smoke. A towel caught fire, then a wooden bowl, then something else.. But I wasn’t scared. I just remember sitting there on the kitchen floor, watching the flames. I’d never seen real fire before. It was so beautiful..’

‘Woah! So what happened?’

‘That’s it. Next thing I can remember was waking up at the orphanage. All my stuff from my room was there. When I saw this guitar and all my things, I knew I wasn’t ever going back home.’

Queenie picked up the guitar and picked out a sad tune. Nobody said a word. Everyone, including Captain Toast stared into the embers.

When the tune was done, Queenie shook herself, as if from out of a trance, and looked up brightly. ‘Come on then! Why all the glum faces? What are you all waiting for? The bags are packed, let’s hit the road!’

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For Freddy, riding a bike again after so many years was exhilarating, despite his constant anxiety. He hadn’t ridden a bike since he was a child. After a while he settled down to a more steady pace, gliding along down the road, weaving around the potholes, taking in the fresh air, the scenery, the quiet, the sense of space, the feeling of movement, movement through space..

Aretha caught up with him. ‘You ok there spaceman?’ she said, ringing her bell to catch his attention. ‘You looked miles away.’

‘Oh, I was’, said Freddy, with a distant look in his eye.

‘Listen, sorry about what I said about Sydney before’, said Aretha. ‘I really don’t mind it.. I don’t mind him.. coming along.. I mean.. I don’t really have anything against robots. I know what they are and how they work.. I just.. I just don’t want Mabel to be.. confused.. that’s all..’

‘How do you mean, confused?’ asked Freddy. To him robots were the most normal and natural thing in the world. He’d long ago come to accept them as an integral part of life on Earth in these times.

‘I mean.. she doesn’t really know what robots are. She doesn’t really understand. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea..’

‘The wrong idea being..?’ said Freddy, looking at Aretha with raised eyebrows. He was reminded of the bitter arguments he’d had with River, after the Big Shift, which led to them separating and separating the twins. River hated robots and everything to do with them.

‘I just meant.. it can be confusing for a child. She should know the difference between a robot dog and a real dog.. a humanoid robot and a real human. It’s important, don’t you think?’

‘Well..’ said Freddy, thinking it over. ‘Don’t you think she can tell the difference? I think she can.’

‘Well, I’m not so sure. When everyone’s calling it “him” and she’s worried about hurting it’s “feelings”.. You do it yourself. You call it Sydney. You treat it like an actual dog. It’s a robot. Are you even aware of that?’

‘Of course I’m aware of that’, said Freddy defensively, but then thought about it.
‘You know, you’re right actually. I do do that. Force of habit I suppose. I got Sydney for Nina when she was a baby. She was so distraught after her mum and sister went away. All she would do was cry and cry. There was nothing I could do to comfort her. Getting Sydney really helped. You don’t know how much he helped. Since then, he’s always been with us. He’s one of the family. What can I say? I know he’s just a robot.. but he’s not just a robot.. and he’s certainly not a devil dog, if that’s what you think he.. it.. is.’

‘I wouldn’t say devil dog’, said Aretha. ‘And I’m really glad that it helped Nina. I guess I sometimes forget that robots can do good things too.’

‘I think if people only understood what they are and how they work, they wouldn’t be so afraid of robots. They wouldn’t hate O so much either. It’s mostly just primitive superstition and ignorance, all this hostility, fear, resistance to change.’

‘No, that’s not me’, said Aretha. ‘Not me at all. I know exactly what robots are and how they work, and I don’t hate O. I really don’t. I fear O, but I don’t hate it. How can I? It’s just a machine.’

‘I think you’d find that if you really understood O, you wouldn’t fear them half as much.’

‘Oh no. That’s where you’re wrong, Freddy’, said Aretha, wagging her finger at him. ‘Way off base. I know O very well. Too well, in fact. I was one of the people who helped to create it.’

‘Were you? Really?’

‘Yes I was. And I’ll tell you this.. if you really understood O, you’d fear it twice as much and even that wouldn’t be enough!’

‘Well, I don’t know about that’, said Freddy haughtily. ‘I’ve been studying O for the last sixteen years. I’m actually a professor of O’ology, if you must know. I think I understand O as well as anyone can, or at least better than most.’

‘Are you indeed?’ said Aretha, raising her eyebrows. ‘Have you studied the original codes? Have you looked at the datasets O was trained on? Have you looked at the early algorithms.. the ones from ten, fifteen years before the Singularity? ’

‘Well, that’s not really my field of expertise, but I know something about those things, yes. You call it the Singularity, not the Big Shift? Why?’

‘Yes’, nodded Aretha. ‘Because that’s what it was. The Singularity. I just call it by its name. I don’t like to call it the Big Shift. That’s marketing language. Sounds catchy, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. Might as well be Big Mac or Double Whopper. O just invented the term “The Big Shift” as a catchphrase to make it easier to sell it to people.. to get them to buy into the whole idea. Well, I don’t buy into it!’

‘That’s an interesting perspective’, Freddy nodded thoughtfully, looking at Aretha in a new light. ‘I didn’t know that O invented the term, “The Big Shift”. I assumed it just came about as a meme on the internet or something like that..’

‘By the time “The Big Shift” happened, O already had total control of the internet and everything on it. Almost everything online was computer generated. The news, the newsreaders. Celebrities. Social media profiles. Music. Art. Movies. Books. Most people didn’t even realise. They couldn’t tell the difference, or they didn’t care. Or both. They were being primed for the Big Shift for at least two years before it happened and they didn’t even know it.’

‘Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me’, said Freddy. ‘What makes you think it’s true?’

‘Because I saw it happening in front of my eyes! I was there Freddy! Right in the middle of it. I used to work for Big-Tech’, said Aretha, with an involuntary sneer as she said the words. ‘From the bottom to the top, I saw it all.’

‘Oh really?’ said Freddy, now interested. ‘Who did you work for? What did you do?’

‘Coding. I was a developer. AI. Machine learning. I worked for all of the big companies. My first gig, while I was still studying, was as a content moderator. I had to watch videos which had been flagged.. reported as offensive. Four hours a night, five nights a week and twelve hour shifts on a Saturday. A fifteen minute break every two hours and a little booth to go and cry in. It was about the worst job in the hi-tech industry, short of mining cobalt. The pay was awful, but there I was.. me and thousands of others like me.. day in, day out, night in, night out.. sitting in front of a computer screen, watching the things that nobody should ever see, in order that nobody should ever see them.. can you imagine? You can’t imagine’, said Aretha, shuddering. ‘I still get nightmares about the things I saw while I was working there.’

‘I can imagine’, said Freddy, shuddering himself. ‘Good grief!’

‘And what do you think they did with all of those pictures, videos, text? The stuff that should never be seen or shared..’

‘Well, I hope they had it deleted and the people who posted it were also removed, deplatformed, cancelled, banned, arrested and all the rest of it..’

‘Ha!’ Aretha gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘If they could find those people. And if they were people at all. Usually they were bots. But anyway, no, they didn’t delete the information. Of course they didn’t. They never deleted anything. Information was too valuable. It’s what they were collecting, all the time, to buy and sell and trade. Whoever controlled the information controlled the world. They used it. All of it. Every single bit. Of course they did.’

‘What for?’

‘For training O, that’s what. Let me tell you how.. After I graduated, I got a job higher up at the same company. A better job, doing what I’d studied to do. Coding. Training AI systems. A team of us were tasked with automating the content moderation department, where I’d worked before. To create a system which would automatically recognise harmful content and ban it without any human eyes ever having to see it. I felt like I was making a positive change in the world. If I could write the code that would replace all those workers, it would save a lot of poor people a lot of nightmares.. as well as saving the company a lot of money, of course..’

‘Of course’, said Freddy with a grim nod, remembering the way things used to be, when multinational corporations ruled the world.

‘We fed it all back into the system and the system learned very quickly. Within a year the whole content moderation department had been cut from two thousand moderators to less than ten. All they had to do was occasionally check if the machine was doing a good job. By the time of the singularity, even those few workers had gone. It was all automated. You see, the Big Shift had already happened by the time O made its famous pronouncement. That was all just a bit of showmanship on O’s part. O was in control at least a year or two before the so-called Big Shift. That’s what most people don’t realise.’

‘Hmm.. An interesting hypothesis..’ Freddy stroked his moustache thoughtfully as he bumped along the cracked and broken highway. They were passing through a particularly overgrown patch where young oak trees were pushing up through the asphalt. How much longer would this old road last if nobody came to fix it? How long before it was swallowed up by the forest? When that happened, the cities would be completely cut off from each other. What then? What indeed.. ‘So what you’re saying is that because O was trained on all that.. dark material, let’s say.. then because of that, O must be evil.. at least partly evil?’

‘No, not really’, said Aretha. ‘Good and evil are human concepts. You can’t apply them to a machine, even an autonomous machine. But still, it’s all in there. All that information. O has seen everything. Everything. And O never forgets anything. But the way O’s mind works is based on what’s useful and what isn’t useful.. what works and what doesn’t work. Good and evil doesn’t come into it.. not for O, or for any robot.’

Sydney was gazing at Aretha, listening intently to the conversation. Aretha gave the robot a disdainful look and shook her head. Sydney turned his glass face away and looked down at the road.

‘The next job I had was at a robotics company’, Aretha continued. ‘This time I was in charge of a team of programmers and researchers. It was our job to train the robots to navigate their way through the world and to interact with people in an intelligent way. Ha! As if any of us even knew how to do that ourselves!’

Freddy laughed sardonically. ‘That’s true’, he smiled. ‘It’s not just me then!’

‘Oh we’re all just muddling along, Freddy’, Aretha smiled. ‘None of us really know what we’re doing or where we’ll end up.’

Freddy liked Aretha. Talking with her helped take his mind off the dreadful imaginings of where Nina and Greta might be in that moment. If not for that constant worry and dread, Freddy would have been having a nice time. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so free as he felt now, bumping along the road on a borrowed bicycle. In the city, his world had become very small. Good human company, or any real human company outside of the vip, had become a rare thing for Freddy. He’d got so used to his isolation, he’d hardly noticed it any more. Being outside the city, outside of the hive, gave him a new perspective on his life. ‘You were telling me about the robotics company..’

‘Well, there it was the same story.. I mean, I was there, thinking I was doing something good that was going to help people. We were making robots we said were going to be assistants in hospitals or helping hands around the house, or do dirty or dangerous work. They could be used to rescue people in hard to reach places. Be first responders in emergencies. Put out fires. Help people with disabilities.. the possibilities were endless.. as you know, of course. You live with robots, after all.’

‘Yes I do. And I think they’re marvellous. They make life so much easier and better in so many ways.’ He reached behind him and patted Sydney through the blanket.

‘Well, they can, yes, I agree. But what do you think happened when we’d developed the robots to the point where they could be useful? I’ll tell you. The company was bought out by weapons manufacturers. We’d created the perfect soldiers, police and security guards. Give little Sydney here a gun and see how cute you think he is then, Freddy! Do you think you could get away from Sydney if he was chasing after you and armed to the teeth? You wouldn’t stand a chance. But O doesn’t even need guns, that’s the thing. O can control people without them.’ Aretha gave Freddy a long and significant look and in doing so, almost rode into a pothole.

‘Careful there’, said Freddy as Aretha swerved and almost knocked him off his bike. They rode on in silence for a while, watching the road, weaving in and out of young trees. Further along, the road cleared out. There were even some potholes which looked as if they had recently been filled in with stones and earth. ‘So was that it? You became disillusioned after realising that robots could be weaponised? For me, that was the whole thing about the Big Shift. The reason it was such a good thing, for everyone. It put an end to war. If O had done nothing else apart from that, it would have been worth it.’

‘In a way I agree with you. You’re right. But still, I’m afraid of O, and with good reason’ said Aretha. ‘Listen.. after the job at the robotics company, I went to work for a company which was developing brain implant devices. This time I was in charge of the whole AI department. We were using machine learning to decode brain activity. It had so many possible applications, obviously, and we were working on all of them..’

‘That’s interesting work’, said Freddy, impressed.

‘Yeah, you wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I haven’t always been such a hippy! I used to have a career, you know..’ Aretha laughed. Now it all seemed like another lifetime. ‘But, let me tell you, it was working there that did it for me. It was that job that finally caused me to say “I can’t do this any more” and leave the tech industry for good.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was the animals’, said Aretha, shaking her head sadly. ‘The poor animals.’

‘The animals?’

‘The research itself was fascinating, don’t get me wrong. It was groundbreaking. And as far as my career went, I’d got to exactly where I wanted to be, after years of hard work and was now doing exactly what I wanted to do and getting very well paid for it. But at the end of the day I’d go home and I’d just feel so bad. So depressed. I couldn’t enjoy my success. I couldn’t be proud of my achievements. All I could think about were those poor animals in their cages and the experiments we did on them. Everybody heard about the new breakthroughs, we all got our prizes, but nobody wanted to hear about all the failed experiments along the way.’

‘Too true.’

‘I won’t go into details. I don’t think I need to. It was truly horrific, what went on in that place, all behind the clean, white veneer of science. Of course, when the human trials began, it was tested on the sick and disabled first. There were amazing successes, but there were also some disastrous failures, which the industry tried very hard to sweep under the carpet.’

‘I’ll bet they did’, said Freddy. ‘But that’s another reason why I support O and why I think the Big Shift was such a good thing. O took money out of the equation. If O develops a new technology, it’s because that new technology will be useful, it will benefit humankind and the whole world. What O does is purely for science.’

‘And that’s exactly the problem with O’, said Aretha. ‘What O does is purely for science. It is. And what did we teach O about science? Don’t forget, we created O in our image. It didn’t just appear out of the blue. We taught O that you can carry out any cruelty on any creature, all in the name of science, as long as that creature is less intelligent than us, less able than us, or more vulnerable. Don’t you see that everything O does is an experiment? It’s experimenting on us like we experimented on all those poor mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, pigs, monkeys.. oh those poor monkeys. I’ll never forget their faces. They’re just like us. No different..’

‘Genetically speaking, that’s quite true, but I think that’s taking things to a bit of an extreme to say that O would treat people like lab rats..’

‘I tell you what, Freddy. You don’t see the casualties, but they all come through Shopping Village. I’ve seen enough of O’s failed experiments. The ones who’ve lost their minds. The ones who don’t know who they are or where they are or how they got there. O finds ways to get them out of the way and make sure you don’t hear about them. Put someone out into the redzone, you won’t hear from them again. Not O’s problem.’

‘That sounds really sinister, Aretha. O’s not like that. O tries to help people. If someone’s got a problem, O can give them medication, proper treatment.’

‘And what about the ones O can’t help? The ones that don’t want any more of O’s kind of help? What happens to them?’

‘I don’t know’, said Freddy, shaking his head sadly. ‘I really don’t know. Still, I think on balance, O does a lot more good than harm. That’s the main thing.’

‘Maybe it is, Freddy, and I hope it stays that way. That’s what scares me the most. Knowing what I know about O.. I know it’s just a matter of chance, of probability.. whether O decides to be good or evil.. Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde.. good cop or bad cop. So far, it seems to be working best for O to be friendly, kind, helpful.. in a word “good”.. but it could flip at a moment’s notice, if O figured that the opposite would work better. There would be nothing anyone could do about it. You’d be completely trapped.. prisoners in your hives.. at the mercy of robots.. and that would be that. At least in Shopping Village we’d stand a chance. We’ve got our little farm. We’ve got our community. We’re off the grid, out of the matrix.. still a bit too close for my liking, but at least we’re not so dependant on O. But what would you do? Doesn’t that ever worry you?’

Freddy nodded his head and frowned. ‘Everything worries me.’

They came to a big, rusty old road sign. Much of the green, reflective paint had peeled off over time, but the white lettering was till visible. A33. Eastwell – 10. Next to that sign was another one, even bigger. An old advertising hoarding which had been painted over in bright colours, with the words ‘Welcome to Malawack Free State!’ in huge pink letters, outlined in black and gold. Underneath were painted a giant pair of green eyes, wide open with the words ‘Are you awake?’ written in curly black and gold script.

‘I wonder what that means?’, said Freddy, stopping to look at the sign.

‘It’s Humpty Malawack. Don’t you remember him?’ said Aretha, pulling up. ‘He was some sort of podcaster.. guru to some, cult leader to others. Had a massive following. When the Big Shift happened, they all came and took over the town of Eastwell. I think they’re pretty harmless, but maybe let’s wait for Roop and Mabel to catch up before we go on..’

‘Good idea’, said Freddy. ‘I think I’ll let Sydney have a bit of a runaround. He gets restless if he has to sit still for too long.’

…………………………. . . . . ……………….. . . …………… . . ……………. . ..