Madeleine’s Drug
Bryan Murphy
Copyright 2013 Bryan Murphy
Dark Future Books
Cover by Mao Qing
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, places or events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author’s imagination.
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Table of Contents
Madeleine’s Drug
About the author
Other e-books by Bryan Murphy
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Heresy (extract)
Madeleine’s Drug
She was happy with life. In the evenings, she was deliriously happy.
In the evenings, she was again part of a crowd. The air crackled with expectation and rising, silent tension. Madeleine caught the tang of her own sweat, distinct among the odours of the multitude. When the words came, she strained to catch them at first. Then she gradually relaxed, and let them flow into her while she let her own imperfect personality drain out.
Madeleine paid little attention to the message of the words. She just let her emotions rise or recede and change in accordance with the vibrations she felt around her, vibrations engendered and guided by the words. She felt those emotions with a depth and commitment far beyond anything she experienced in her daytime life. Hate, solidarity, fear and hope flowed through her veins like incandescent lava. They seared her mind and wracked her body, as they pitched her out of herself into a transcendent ecstasy.
The oration drew to an end. The voice stopped. The crowd disappeared. She was alone, her body drained and weak, her skin providing the only aroma, her mind empty. Madeleine felt exhausted and happy. She rose, stretched, removed the chip, stepped out of her cabin and strolled along the corridor lined with similar cabins, most of them with the “occupied” sign on the door lit up. At the reception desk, Madeleine handed over her chip and took a ticket for the shower room.
There were several men and women in the shower room, but none whom she knew. This was a relief, for she still felt high enough to resent an intrusion of mundane, friendly words. As a perpetual-ticket holder, Madeleine had her own locker, with her name engraved on it in fancy letters and numerals. She laid each item of clothing neatly inside as she took it off, then moved across into one of the cubicles and turned the shower on. The hot jets of water stung her skin back into response to the world outside it, helping her mind ease down from its heights, slowly and painlessly, as she recalled the speeches she had taken earlier. This time, though, her mind paid attention to the words, and to the voices that delivered them.
The last speech, the one Madeleine had just stepped out of, had been by one of those new-style internationalists, who had proclaimed the sisterhood of all humanity and urged world unification. Before that, she had taken a local workist, who had lauded the results of the work policy in his district and denounced foreign administrations which, he insisted, were still refusing to concede adequate work to their people. He had ended by demanding that the work-blessed of Great Brighton concentrate both prayer and thought on those less fortunate than themselves. Madeleine wondered whether the performer had simply invented his facts. He had certainly made a good addition to his repertoire. And if those facts were true, well, we should really put our minds to helping those poor, distant people deprived of so basic a need for no discernable reason. Madeleine realised how lucky she was to live under an enlightened administration.
A memory seared though Madeleine’s mind of the pity the orator’s gravel voice had unleashed in her, a pity of excruciating intensity. Yet even that had not released her from herself as much as the masterful performer of her first take of the evening. His rant had led her, and the multitude she had felt around her, through a full spectrum of feelings of hate and rejection, as he played a supposedly historical character, a nation-state demagogue, a man whose archaic name had two parts and no numerals, and was unfamiliar to her, researcher though she was. Yet that bitter, frantic call to a long-forgotten barbarian war had given her the highest high she had experienced in months.
Twenty minutes later, washed, dressed and refreshed, Madeleine stepped out of the Huxley Centre and headed up Edward Street in the bright night. At the junction with Eastern Road, she turned off to the right and was soon letting herself in to the ground floor, the Work floor, of Hereford Court. In the slow lift, she was struck by the name of her building. Madeleine had always assumed that “Hereford” was a place, like “Eastern” or “Edward”, but now she realised that it could have been a person. In fact, they all could. It was a very different name from her own, XLCR418937BrightonECII, but then so was the name of that ancient politician who had lifted her into ecstasy tonight. That name, she felt sure, had been real, even if those burning words were not. She had to find out. Apart from her own feelings, you never knew what questions might come up in the Competition. Moreover, she was a researcher. It was her duty to find out. Her duty to the administration, and to the people of Great Brighton.
The next day, Madeleine woke up with the memory of the evening’s pleasure easy in her mind. She saw that it was not yet ten o’clock. Although she could not go down to work for another hour or so, she felt pleased with the world.
After a sparse breakfast, Madeleine read her two messages. Both were brief, but each dented her feeling of well-being. The first was a pink-label that set out her work schedule for the following week. She was losing half an hour in the morning! That was a hard blow: she only had two morning hours as it was. Still, she might get those precious thirty minutes back in the not-too-distant future. In any case, you should not hanker too much after luxury. The administration had its reasons, though it rarely saw fit to give them.
It was the brown-label which really unsettled her. It ordered her to report to Crown House at nine a.m. in fifteen days’ time.
“Another of those weird, archaic names,” Madeleine thought. Then she realised what the name implied, and froze. Crown House was used for just one purpose: Mate Protocol.
It was unusual for Madeleine to be unhappy, but she felt dejected as she rode the lift down past several floors of living units to the Work floor. Her mood carried the consolation of insulating her from disgust at the Drink-taker who pressed against her in the crowded lift and breathed the malodorous evidence of that choice all over her from the fourteenth floor downwards. Any other time, Madeleine would have sickened at the smell and the awful taste it revealed, but today all she registered was that the body tight against hers was that of a man.
On the Work floor, once she had her assignment in her hand, Madeleine felt better. She found her allotted space, and settled down to crossing out those names starting from XC through XF on the list of last year’s Great Brighton individual Competition entrants who had since died. The names had already been marked with an asterisk.
It was an absorbing task, but her concentration was broken after little more than an hour by a wave of unease. Memories of last year’s Mate Protocol assailed her. The process of identification, selection and scheduling had soaked up so much time, even time when she could have been at work. The meetings, the preparation and the mating itself had done something even worse: they had invaded her evenings. They had kept her from the cabins and the chips of the Huxley Centre, from the ecstasy of Oratory. Fortunately, Madeleine had not conceived, for that would have denied the joys of life to her for long weeks. Last
year, and the year before, and the year before that, too. All those few years since she became eligible for the brown-labelled message that called you to Crown House. Well, your luck could not hold out for ever. Madeleine shuddered, then made a big effort to pull herself together. She managed what had never before called for any effort: to focus on her work. For the next forty minutes, frightened for the future, she worked without enthusiasm, and was relieved when her supervisor gave her the tap on the shoulder that signalled the end of her shift.
In the queue for the food machines, Madeleine looked at the people in front of her. The men were certainly different in appearance from the women. It was easy to tell who was which, even though they wore the same kind of loose-fitting clothes. She paid attention to individual voices in the chatter, and again she could distinguish the men. Madeleine had a brief, uneasy inkling that the world might be more complex than she believed.
When her turn came, she pressed for a substantial meal, one that was nevertheless simple and low-taste. Madeleine wanted to avoid making food a pleasure, otherwise it might grow into a distraction and eventually worm its way into her evening hours. Because she had seen this happen to friends, Madeleine secretly called Food-takers “worms”. There was a group of them at a table to her left, loud and merry around plates heaped with multi-coloured mush the like of which she could not bear to look at, not even in the advertising corners of the glossy zines.
After lunch, Madeleine went on to her professional work as a researcher. Her morning work was a concession from the benevolent administration. This was the real thing.
Every month, all the municipal administrations on the Island, together with the famous five remaining rural ones, had the chance to take part in a knowledge Competition. They never spurned it. Madeleine’s task as a researcher was to provide factual material from which the central algorithm formulated questions.
Madeleine loved her work among the archives. The prize for the Competition winner was a mountain of prestige. Great Brighton had a splendid Competition record, but in recent years its success had waned, and its fame was much diminished. Madeleine and her colleagues had fewer and fewer dealings with Competition tourists bargaining for access to their archives.
This afternoon, images of Food-takers, of men, and of administration messages swam in Madeleine’s mind before the calm pleasure of sorting purposefully through the stored chips banished them. But not for good. In mid-afternoon, Madeleine finished her inventory of Chichester C-vice industries and approached the head of her section.
“Here’s the list. All sorted and checked.”
“Good. Now – ”
“Could I – ”
“What?”
“Do you think I could have the password for the Biographical Section?”
“What on earth for?”
“A name. To follow up a lead. Of my own.”
“Your own? You’re here to find input for the algorithm, not to waste our time following your own ideas. What do you think this is? It’s work, not a Hobby! Besides, I thought you were on Oratory.”
“Of course I am. Those Hobby people – But this is different. It could be useful for the administration to know.”
“In that case, put your enquiry in writing and I’ll make it a codicil to this afternoon’s search processing. Someone detailed for names can deal with it.”
“Oh, come on! For – ”
“Now here’s another list for you to check.”
Madeleine waited for her anger to subside. That mention of what she took was uncalled-for. Section heads were expected to leave people’s choices in peace, a private matter. However, it looked as though she would get the information she wanted.
“All right. Thank you.”
Madeleine checked the list. There were no mistakes. She turned it over to a filing clerk. The procedure was for her to pick up a new task immediately. Instead, Madeleine pulled up a chair, sat down and waited for the clerk to come back in person with the location code.
She let her body relax into the comfort of the hysterline upholstery and began to think about her colleagues in the section. Madeleine had done this before, but she had always classified them by what they took, be it Oratory, Drink, Dance, Narcotics, Contemplation, Hobbies or more exotic pursuits, and by the extent to which their choice dominated their off-work life. Now, for the first time, she classified them in her mind by physical sex and by voice: men or women, high or low in pitch. Thinking this way unnerved her. Perspiration chilled her as she visualised the ordeal ahead. Her colleagues would be going through it, too. It was mandatory for everyone except those who had freely chosen to take Sex: they had been operated on to ensure they would not upset the population plan. Yet sharing the ordeal was cold comfort. What if she should conceive this time? That wasn’t possible. Ah, but it was.
A poisonous thought crossed her mind, a lure, a way out. Madeleine swept it from her mind at once, but it had been there. It had laid its tracks and it came back to reinforce them.
“Don’t go,” it whispered. “Don’t go to Crown House for the Protocol. Avoid the Selection. Miss the Preparation. Don’t go to the Mating. Go to Work, go to the Huxley Centre. Take Work. Take Oratory. Take them while you’re young.” Then it went, and Madeleine was left numb with the knowledge that it had existed, had slipped into her mind and found sustenance there for its brief blooming. It was gone. The shock it produced was its own antidote. Madeleine would never again come so close to wrongdoing.
The numbness softened into feeling, and the feeling was remorse. Madeleine let waves of emotion flow over her, as she had done in the cabin. When she emerged, she saw clearly that the annual Mating Protocol, the Huxley Centre and the Work floor of the myriad living units of Hereford Court, were equally part of the administration’s wonderful design. Her happiness, her very life, depended on all of them, on each element in the blueprint drawn up by the benevolent Great Brighton administration. Madeleine lost consciousness of everything except this fact.
“Feeling all right?”
The speaker was a colleague whom Madeleine had recently classified as a man, a former acute Dance-taker, now a mild Narcotics-taker. This time, she just saw the concerned face of a friend.
“Er … sort of. No, not really. I’m just recovering from a … an … an Epi-”
“An Episode? I’ll get the head of the section.” The friendly face disappeared, shortly to be replaced by another one.
“Oh dear. You don’t look good. I’m sorry if it was anything to do with me, what I said.”
“No. No. Nothing at all.”
“Look, why don’t you take half an hour’s extra work? I’ll make sure you get the information you wanted to dig out for yourself.”
Shortly after seven, Madeleine was stepping down the steep part of Edward Street. Her mind was calm. It was cured. She would without question report to Crown House in fifteen days’ time, subject herself to the bureaucratic and physical rigmarole of the Mating Protocol, then return to work and Oratory if she did not conceive, or to the mystery of Confinement if she did.
The sky was brightening with the coming of evening. Madeleine spotted a group of Drink-takers gathering early outside Ye Olde New Alliance. As she crossed the road to avoid their fumes, she felt a rush of air and an odour of petrol and scorched rubber. A Speed-taker had passed within an inch of her skin in the kind of heavy, metallic vehicle that rarely found its way so deep into the city centre. Both mental and physical peril had closed in on her within a few hours. Madeleine had withstood both, and a single thought echoed in her brain.
“How fine it is to be alive!”
She approached the building which was home to the Huxley Centre. It had once housed law courts and a police station. Now that wrongdoing was deemed more apparent, and its punishment was more drastic and less time-consuming, the police were quartered in smaller buildings, alongside the fusiliers.
When she closed herself inside the cabin, the cured woman held a chip that could exploit to th
e full her mood of regeneration and righteous certainty. In her mind was the news her section head had given her at the end of work. Yes, the politician had been real, and so had his speeches. The knowledge exhilarated her as she inserted the chip. This speech had been made at a place called Nurnburg, another strange word. It proclaimed the virtues of a race and an administration, and called upon the listening multitude to deliver up the enemies, the wrongdoers in their midst, so that those wrongdoers might be physically destroyed, once and for all.
The harsh, grating man’s voice plunged into Madeleine’s brain and stripped it of all emotions save those he could play upon to his own ends. Madeleine pictured him in what remained of her mind, tall, blond and potent, alone with her there in the cabin, naked, tense like her with the urge to Mate.
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