"Could I have the key, please?" she says to the head. It's best to treat the heads as if they're real, just in case they are.
"Log in, please," says the head, smiling. She, or it, is an attractive though square-jawed brunette with bangs and small hoop earrings. The heads change every few days, maybe to give the illusion that they exist in real time.
Charmaine can't stop herself from wondering if the head can see her. She enters her code, verifies it with her thumb, stares at the iris reader beside the head box until it blinks.
"Thank you," says the head. A plastic key slides out of a slot at the bottom of the box. Charmaine pockets it. "Here is your top-confidential Special Procedure for today." A slip of paper emerges from a second slot: room number, Positron Prison name, age, last dosage of sedative, and when administered. The man must be pretty doped up. It's better that way.
She keys herself into the dispensary, locates the cabinet, codes its door open. There's the vial, all ready for her, and the needle. She snaps on her gloves.
In the assigned room, the man is attached to his bed at five points, as they always are now, so thrashing around, kicking, and biting are not possible. He's groggy but awake, which is good. Charmaine is in favour of awake: it would be wrong to carry out the Procedure on someone who's asleep, because they would miss out. On what exactly she's not sure, but on something that's nicer than it otherwise would be.
He looks up at her: despite the drugs, he's clearly frightened. He tries to speak: a thickened sound comes out. Uhuhuhuh...They always make that sound; she finds it a little painful.
"Hello," she says. "Isn't it a lovely day? Look at all that sunshine! Who could be down on a day like today? Nothing bad is going to happen to you." This is true: from all she's observed, the experience appears to be an ecstatic one. The bad part happens to her, because she's the one who has to worry about whether what she's doing is right. It's a big responsibility, and worse because she isn't supposed to tell anyone what she's actually doing, not even Stan.
Granted, it's only the worst criminals, the incorrigibles, the ones they haven't been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure. The troublemakers, the ones who'd ruin Consilience if they had the chance. It's a last resort. They'd reassured her a lot about that.
Most of the Procedures are men, but not all. Though none of the ones she's done have been women, yet. Women are not so incorrigible: that must be it.
She leans over, kisses this man on the forehead. A young man, smooth-skinned, golden under the tattoos. She leaves the mask in her pocket. She's supposed to wear it for the Procedure to protect against germs, but she never does: a mask would be scary. No doubt she's being monitored via some hidden camera, but so far no one has reprimanded her about this minor breach of protocol. It's not easy for them to find people willing to carry out the Procedure in an efficient yet caring way, they'd told her: dedicated people, sincere people. But someone has to do it, for the good of all.
The first time she attempted the forehead kiss, there was a lunge of the head, an attempt at snapping. He'd drawn blood. She requested that a neck restraint be added. And it was. They listen to feedback, here at Positron.
She strokes the man's head, smiles with her deceptive teeth. She hopes she appears to him like an angel: an angel of mercy. Because isn't she one? Such men are like Stan's brother, Conor: they don't fit anywhere. They'll never be happy where they are - in Positron, in Consilience, maybe even on the entire Planet Earth. So she's providing the alternative for him. The escape. Either this man will go to a better place, or else to nowhere. Whichever it is, he's about to have a great time getting there.
"Have a wonderful trip," she says to him. She pats his arm, then turns her back so he can't see her sliding the needle into the vial and drawing up the contents.
"Off we go," she says cheerfully. She finds the vein, slips in the needle.
Uhuhuh, he says. He strains upward. His eyes are horrified, but not for long. His face relaxes; he turns his gaze from her to the ceiling, the white blank ceiling, which is no longer white and blank for him. He smiles. She times the procedure: five minutes of ecstasy. It's more than a lot of people get in their whole lifetimes.
Then he's unconscious. Then he stops breathing. The heart goes last.
Textbook. If anything, better. It's good to be good at what you do.
She codes in the numbers that signal a successful termination, drops the needle into the recycling bin - not much sense in having sterile needles for the Procedure, so they get reused. Positron is big on anti-waste. She peels off the gloves, contributes them to the Save Our Plastics box, then leaves the room. Others will now arrive, do whatever is done. The death will be recorded as "cardiac arrest," which is true so far as it goes.
What will happen to the body? Not cremation; that's a wasteful power draw. And no inmates in any form, dead or alive, depart through the gates of Consilience. She's wondered about organ harvesting, but wouldn't they want them brain-dead and on a drip rather than plain old dead, period? Surely the fresher the better, when it comes to organs. Protein-enriched livestock feed? Charmaine can't believe they'd do that, it wouldn't be respectful. But whatever happens, it's bound to be useful, and that's all she needs to know. There are some things it's better not to think about.
Tonight she'll join the knitting circle, as usual. Some of them are doing little cotton hats for infants, some of them are working on a new thing - blue knitted teddy bears, so cute. "Had a nice day?" the knitting circle women will say to her. "Oh, a perfect day," she'll reply.
SCOOTER
It's mid-September. In the evenings, when Stan goes for a stroll around the block, he wears a fleece jacket. A few leaves have fallen on the lawn already; he rakes them up in the early mornings, before breakfast. Not many people around at that hour. Just the odd black Surveillance car, gliding past silently as a shark. Is it protocol to give them a friendly wave? Stan has decided against it: better to pretend they're invisible. Anyway, who's inside? Those cars may be remote-controlled, like drones.
After breakfast - poached eggs if he's lucky, they're one of his favourites - and then a goodbye peck from Charmaine, he goes to his civilian job, working at the electric-scooter repair depot. It was a good choice: his one-time job at Dimple Robotics has been taken into consideration by those who hand out the jobs around here, and anyway he's always liked tinkering, messing around with machines and their digital programs. He once took apart the cheap musical toaster some joker from Dimple had given them for a wedding present and rebuilt it to play "Steam Heat." Charmaine had thought that was cute, at first. Though repetitive melodies can get on the nerves.
Each scooter has a number, but no name attached, because it wouldn't do for a driver to know the identity of the Alternate, in case they happen to run into each other on a switchover day. There would be grudges held, there would be arguments: Who made the dent? Who scratched the finish? What kind of a dickhead would let the battery run down, or leave the scooter out in the rain? It's not as if the things don't have covers! The scooters belong to the town of Consilience, not to any one person. Or any two people. But it's amazing how possessive you can get about this shit.
The scooter he's working on at the shop is the one Charmaine drives: pink with purple stripes. The scooters are all two-tone, to match the two lockers of their drivers. His own - his own and Max's - is green and red. It's infuriating to think of that bastard Max driving around on the scooter, with his ass-end clamped onto the very same scooter seat that Stan thinks of as his own. But better not to dwell on that. He needs to keep his cool.
Charmaine has been having trouble with her scooter for a couple of days now. The darn thing - that's how she puts it - has been sputtering at start-up, then conking out after a few blocks. Maybe something about the solar hookup?
"I'll take it in for you," Stan offered. "To the depot. Work on it there."
"Oh thanks, hon, would you?" she said airily. Maybe not as appreciatively as once, or is he imagini
ng that? "You're a doll," she added a bit absentmindedly. She was cleaning the stove at the time: such chores are appealing to her, she gets a kick out of dirt removal. Since it means he always has squeaky clean underwear, he's not complaining.
He'd identified the problem - frayed wiring - and spent a couple of evenings in their garage fixing the short-outs so the scooter was operating just right and he could drive it down to the depot to do some more work on it, or that's what he told Charmaine.
Really he wanted to have the scooter all to himself. In two more weeks - on the first day of October - it will be turned over to Jasmine, and he wants to customize it in advance of that event.
Why has it taken him so long to figure this out? This method of tracing Jasmine? When it's been right in front of him all the time! All he needs is a second Consilience smartphone; with a little hackwork and manipulation, he can then synch his own to it and embed the doctored phone in the scooter. Then he can track where Jasmine goes when he's in prison and recover that stored information via his own phone once he gets out. No one in the Project can access outside Wi-Fi, but they can communicate on the Consilience Wi-Fi network within the system, and view maps of the town on the Consilience interactive GPS, and that's all he needs.
It was easy enough to get hold of Charmaine's phone. She'd been so preoccupied lately she convinced herself she must have set it down somewhere, maybe at work, and who knows what happened to it? She reported it gone and they issued her another one. So far, so good. He'll be in the slammer all October, managing the chickens, but when he comes out on November 1 he'll be able to reconstruct the pathways Jasmine has been following in his absence.
And eventually those pathways will lead him somehow to a point of intersection - a place where he might be able to catch a glimpse of her, or even ambush her. On a switchover day, he'll bump into her in the supermarket aisle, or what passes for a supermarket in Consilience. He'll linger on a street corner. He'll crouch behind a shrub, on a vacant lot. Then, before she knows it, he'll have his mouth on those cherry-flavoured lips, and she'll crumple; she won't be able to resist, any more than paper can resist a lit match. Whoosh! Up in flames! Ring of fire! What a picture. He can barely stand it.
You're nuts, he tells himself. You're a stalker. You are a freaking maniac. You might get caught. Then what, smartass? Off to the hospital for your so-called health problems? What do they do in Positron to lunatics like you?
Nevertheless, he proceeds. The seat of the scooter is the best place to hide the extra phone. He cuts a slit in the fake leather, low down at the side, where it won't be noticed. There. Done. He uses a line of superglue to seal the cut; nobody who isn't looking would ever spot it.
"Good as new," he tells Charmaine as he returns her scooter. She exclaims with joy, a cooing sound he used to find provocative but now finds sickly sweet, then gives him a perfunctory hug.
"I'm so grateful," she tells him. But not grateful enough by a long shot. When he crawls on top of her that night and tries a few new gambits, hoping for more than her limited repertoire of little gasping breaths followed by a sigh, she starts to giggle and says he's tickling. Which is not very fucking encouraging. He might as well be porking a chicken.
But never mind. Now that he can follow Jasmine, divine her every move, read her mind, she's almost within reach. Meanwhile, he can practise for a couple of weeks by tracking Charmaine around on the scooter. It will be boring, because where can she go? The bakery where she works, the shops, the house, the bakery, the shops. She's so predictable. No news there. But he'll be able to tell whether his two-phone system is working or not.
PUSHOVER
It's already the first of October. Another switchover day. Where has the time gone?
Charmaine lies tangled in her shed clothes on the floor of the vacant house - quite a solid house this time, slated for reno rather than demolition. The wallpaper is subdued, an embossed ivy-leaf design in eggshell and truffle. The writing stands out on it: dark red paint, black marker. Short, forceful words, sudden and hard. She says them over to herself like a charm.
"You're such a surprise," Max says to her. Murmurs in her ear, which he's nibbling. Will this be a two-in-a-row day? she wonders. She arrived at the vacant house early, hoping it would be. "Cool as a cucumber," Max continues, "but then...That husband of yours is one lucky guy."
"I'm not the same with him," she says. She wishes he wouldn't ask her to talk about Stan. It's not fair.
"Tell me how you are, with him," says Max. "No. Tell me how you'd be with a perfect stranger." He wants her to turn him on by describing mild atrocities. A few ropes, modified screaming. It's a game they sometimes play, now that it's fall and they know each other better.
Now she has to think about Stan. Stan in real life. "Max," she says. "I need us to be serious."
"I am serious," says Max, moving his mouth down her neck.
"No, listen. I think he suspects." Why does she even think that? Because Stan's been looking at her, or rather looking through her, as if she's made of glass. That's scarier than if he'd been crabby or angry, or outright accused her.
"How could he?" says Max. His head comes up: he's alarmed. If Stan walked in through the front door, Max would be out the window like a shot. That's what he'd do, she knows by now: he'd bolt, he'd sprint, he'd run like a rabbit, and that's the realistic truth. She shouldn't spook him too much, because she doesn't want him fleeing, not before there's a need. She wants to clutch him against her, the way kids clutch their stuffed animals: the thought of letting him go makes her sadder than anything.
"I don't think he knows," she says. "Not knows. As such. But he looks at me funny."
"Is that all?" says Max. "Hey. I look at you funny too. Who wouldn't?" He takes hold of her hair, turns her head, gives her a brief kiss. "Are you worried?"
"I don't know. Maybe not. He has a temper," she says. "He might get violent." That has an effect on Max.
"I would," he says. "Hey. I would love to get violent with you." He raises his hand; she flinches away, as he wants her to. Now they're entwined again, snarled up in random cloth, falling down into namelessness.
--
Eyes closed, getting her breath back, she realizes how worried she is really: on a scale of one to ten, it's at least an eight. What if Stan really does know? And what if he cares? He could get ugly, but how ugly? He could turn threatening. His brother Conor is that way, from what Stan's told her: he'd think nothing of bashing a girl senseless if she cheated on him. What if Stan has a bad part like that hidden inside him?
Maybe she should protect herself now, while she can. If she saved just a little from each Procedure vial - if she pocketed one of the needles instead of depositing it for recycling - would anyone notice? She'd have to slide the needle in while Stan was asleep, so he'd be denied a beatific exit. Which would be unfair. But there's a downside to everything.
What would she do with the body? That would be a problem. Dig a hole in the lawn? Someone would see. She has a wild thought of stashing it in her pink locker, supposing she could even drag it down there: Stan is quite heavy. Also she might have to cut part of him off to make him fit in, though the lockers are big. But if she left him there it would make a horrible stench, and the next time Max's wife, Jocelyn, came down to the cellar to open her purple locker she'd be sure to smell it.
Max has never said much about Jocelyn, despite Charmaine's gentle pestering. At the outset she'd vowed never to be jealous, because isn't she herself the one Max truly wants? And she isn't jealous: curiosity isn't the same as jealousy. But whenever she asks, Max stonewalls her. "You don't need to know," he says.
She pictures Jocelyn as a rangy, aristocratic woman with her hair skinned back from her head, like a ballerina or a schoolteacher in old movies. A distant, snobby, disapproving woman. Sometimes she has the feeling that Jocelyn knows about her and is contemptuous of her. Worse: that Max has told Jocelyn about her, that they both think she's a credulous pushover and a dime-a-dozen little slut, th
at they laugh together about her. But that's paranoid.
She doesn't think Max would be much help with Stan, supposing Stan was dead. Yes, Max is overpoweringly sexy, but he doesn't have backbone, he doesn't have grit, not the way Charmaine herself has them. He'd leave her holding the bag, the bagful of danger. The bagful of Stan, because she'd have to put Stan into a bag of some kind, she wouldn't be able to look at him in cold blood that way. Lying inert and defenceless. She'd remember too much about how it was when they were in love, and then when they first got married, and had sex in the ocean, and he had that green shirt with the penguins on it...Just thinking about that shirt while at the same time thinking about Stan being dead makes her want to cry.
So maybe she does love him. Yes, of course she does! Think of how lucky she was to meet him, after Grandma Win died and she was all by herself, since her mother was gone and her father was gone in a different way, plus she had no wish to see that person ever again. Think of everything she and Stan have been through together, of what they had, what they lost, what they still had in spite of those losses. Think of how loyal he's been to her.
Be the person you've always wanted to be, they say at Positron. Is this the person she's always wanted to be? A person so slack, so quick to give herself over, so easily rendered helpless, so lacking in, lacking in what? But whatever she's lacking in, she would never want to harm Stan.
"Roll over, dirty girl," says Max. "Open your eyes." At some moments he likes her to watch him. "Tell me what you want."
"Don't stop," she says.
He pauses. "Don't stop what?" It's such pauses that will make her say anything.