Elytra - an extract

One thread extracted from a sort of dystopian novel from 2015, following the genesis of two characters.

1

Wednesday March 26 72AGF 9.30am

'It's not your place to question my judgement, Principal, any more than it is mine to question the facts as they present themselves. We neither of us have anything other than our duty to perform, and perform it we shall.' The speaker was well-dressed, and stood in front of a heavy oak desk, propping himself up with his left arm, elbow locked as his right index finger tapped on a pile of papers. The rhythmic thudding overlaid the muffled voices that dripped into the Principal's office from the air-conditioning ducts.

'It's not your judgement I question, Doctor,' he replied, 'it's the relish with which you carry out your duties that I find so distasteful.'

'What you term relish, I prefer to term professional pride. We are the gatekeepers, Principal. We are the ones who ensure the System's continual success. You ensure the next generation understand their role within it: I ensure that those who cannot live within the constraints of the System don't have to.' He turned and made to leave the room. He was overtaken­ by four terse words that practically locked the door in his face.

'I have not finished.'

The Doctor turned once more and returned to his previous position, this time leaning on both arms, head pressed forward, his nose practically touching that of his interlocutor. 'Neither have I, Principal', he whispered, 'neither have I.' He stepped back, sat in a chair, put his feet on the desk and steepled his fingers, looking over them towards the Principal. The Principal opened his mouth to speak but was silenced by the merest shake of the head. 

'I strongly suggest you remember your place, Principal. I do not report merely upon your resident charges. I have the ears of the seniors. They look to me, me, to keep things running smoothly out here in the Outzones, and with a few choice words I could have you shipped back to Slough or Coventry or Prestatyn or whatever swamp you emerged from, and you'd be able to enjoy a suitably squalid retirement.' He dropped his forehead onto his fingertips. 'Well? Are we going to behave?'

The Principal stood and turned to face the wall. 'Get out of my office. Go and do your job. Let me do mine. If we're lucky we'll manage the next six weeks with minimum contact. Understand that the slightest indiscretion will be treated as wilful disobedience and dealt with by total and rigorous action as required.' The Principal turned to face the object of his disdain, to ensure he fully understood how thin the line was upon which he danced, but both chair and room were empty.

The Principal's mouth went dry. 'Lunatic,' he muttered, and reached for the telephone.

2

Thursday 3 April 72AGF 2.15pm

The corridor was warm, in spite of the inclemency of the weather. Steven could both see and hear the rain lashing at the plain, barred windows, lashing as it invariably did, day and night, in thick, glutinous drops that smeared themselves against the outermost of the multiple panes of glass. The rivulets they formed on the semi-opaque sheets were slow, weary and turbid in their descent. Steven watched them intently as he waited, patiently, for his appointment. Finally, the door across the corridor opened, and a young woman walked out and towards him. She bent down to his level, took his hand and looked him in the eye.

'Hello, Steven. The Doctor will see you now.'

He stood up, and followed her into the Doctor's room. She shut the door behind them, and Steven heard the rattle of the lock being engaged, the key removed.

'Doctor?' She said. 'Young Steven for you.' At this she left the child in front of the imposing desk and exited through a side door, again locking it after her. Steven looked around the room as he waited for the man behind the desk to turn around. It was messy, almost chaotic, crates full of small blocks covered in writing and pictures were open everywhere.

'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.' The Doctor spoke without turning around. 'Do you know who said that? Oh, of course you don't. Ignatius de Loyola. Founded the Society of Jesus, and you don't know who that was, either, do you, Steven?'

Steven stood still. 'What are these things in boxes?' He asked.

'Well might you ask, young man. They are called books. They contain knowledge.' He  picked up the nearest couple of volumes. 'God, Genes and Destiny,' he read from the spine  of one. 'It's about snails.' Then the other, 'The Cat in the Hat. The title says it all. Well, except for the revenge aspect, naturally.' He threw them both to the floor. 'They are banned. Owning them is deemed wrong by the System. They can't be edited, you see: fixed code. Just as you and I have a code, Steven. But our code can be edited, and our code can go wrong. You know what wrong is, don't you, Steven?' Steven continued to stand, face impassive. The Doctor continued shuffling files on his screen. 'Oh yes, you know what wrong is, all right.' He said, sotto voce. He turned round. Sat down. Motioned for Steven to do the same. 'Well, I've not had you for your first seven years, Steven, but I have got you for the next.'

'Yes, sir.' Said Steven.

'No need for such formalities, Steven. Call me Doctor.' He didn't wait for the child to reply, and his two sentences crashed together. 'Quite the tearaway, aren't we, Steven?' he formed a bridge with his fingers and tilted his chin down so that Steven imagined he was being impaled on the carefully manicured fingertips. 'It's a mystery, your behaviour. It simply shouldn't happen. But it happens. Our little helpers don't merely tell the System who we are, where we are, and what we were, but they are wired into our Dopaminurgic system, controlling our desires, softening our propensity for taking risks, promoting a somewhat sheep-like passivity. Not you, though, Steven. You are the wolf in sheep's clothing. You continually defy the System, almost as if it were your purpose.' The Doctor leant back in his chair and drummed his fingers together while the child stared at him. 'Impressive. Dangerous.' The Doctor smiled. 'Of course, there are others whose chips are apparently malfunctioning, that don't take and they, mostly, go the way of all flesh, albeit somewhat earlier than usual. But you, you Steven are quite a different level. By rights I ought already have had you terminated, but you're such a fascinating case ...'

There was a rattle at the door as a dog entered through a large flap. It walked towards the child. Stopped, growled, backed up a few feet, turned around and lay down. 'Even Hector doesn't trust you, Steven.' The Doctor stood. 'The thing is, your test results are quite astonishing. The little matter of your behaviour notwithstanding, you have been selected for upgrading.' Steven couldn't help but think that the man was lying, though he wasn't at all sure about what. 'This will only occur if we get to the bottom of your behaviour. And if we don't, Steven? Well. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Well, you'll be the one crossing the bridge. Or hailing the ferry, yes, hailing the ferry. I wonder, Steven, does Charon bill the system directly, an invoice at the end of each month, or must the damned download a credit in order to drink from the waters of Lethe?'

Steven stared at the Doctor blankly. The Doctor simply grunted with displeasure, and pressed a small button on his desk. The nurse came in and led Steven out of the office  through the side door.

3

Thursday 24 April 72AGF 3.45pm

'You see, Steven, this world is, and always has been, full to the very brim with cowards. Cowards who don't dare to live, to taste life in all its extremes. Cowards who would rather live dull, circumscribed existences than taste the true meaning of the word.' The Doctor was on his haunches, hands on knees, and spoke in a clear, measured tone while he stared at the child in front of him. 'And now we are institutionalising cowardice, removing urges as we record, classify and digitise.' The child stared back, not even flinching when the Doctor brought out a hypodermic syringe from his jacket pocket and waved it in front of Steven's young and expressionless face.

'I'd say this won't hurt a bit but we'd both know that I would be lying. Pleasure and pain are very, very closely linked, you know. Your pain; my pleasure.' He picked up a small vial full of a thick, viscous liquid in which a small black dot lay suspended. The Doctor sucked the dot up with the needle. He mouthed the words 'this will hurt quite a lot' absent-mindedly as he brought the needle to within millimetres of the child's right eyeball. 'Your peers are weak. They feel no pleasure because they can bear no pain. You, on the other hand …' the needle penetrated. There was a sharp intake of breath. 'Ah, my Olympia.' The Doctor placed the words in a sigh. The child simply stared straight ahead. He was strapped to the chair, a thick cuff around his neck that dripped with electronic cabling of various types, all of which tangled found a conduit in the shape of a multicore arrangement that led to a small computer. His head was shaved, his scalp a mess of electrodes. In the corner, the dog growled quietly to itself.

Extracting the needle, the Doctor continued. 'Do you know how to cry, Steven?' He asked. 'I read once of a man who undertook a great voyage of discovery, one which he was sure would kill him. He wrote to his sister, while the ship he was travelling in was trapped by the ice, with these words: 'what can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man'. I admired his courage, his fortitude, his self-belief. He encountered a broken man on the ice, a man who he admired likewise, but when he talked of his belief that one man's life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which he sought for the dominion he should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race, his visitor groaned, saying 'Unhappy man! Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me – let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!'

The Doctor stood and walked away from the child. 'Steven, the story he told, of this man,  this Viktor who penetrated the secrets of nature, becoming a very god as he breathed life into a murderer's corpse, and the long, inevitable search for revenge by the creature that resulted, was a lie. A beautiful, miraculous lie, but a lie nonetheless. He sought to see the world through another's eyes, but there was no other. He sought because he did not dare look through his own.' His voice became louder and louder, his demeanour more and more animated. 'But that was not his true failure, this pitiful worm, no. His true failure was that he told this beautiful lie to hide an ugly truth: he was a coward. A coward who sought to turn back from his journey and run from greatness. No victor he.'

'You, Steven, hold within you the key to secrets, secrets I crave.' The doctor's eyes began to shine. 'You are the inevitable result of the society in which we live, in which we lived. We have no real purpose in this world, in the System. Our forbears were cattle, fed on the corpses of their brethren in a vicious circle of fear and consumption. Society ate itself for decades, Steven, decades, each citizen both consumer and consumed. You understand, Steven, that you will spend your life carrying out mundane tasks designed to keep your idle hands busy but which are of no intrinsic use whatsoever. Your life is worth nothing, Steven. Nothing.'

As the Doctor spoke, Steven watched as the dog raised itself up from the floor and walked towards the door that led to the outside. He watched it press its neck against the bulge in the middle of the door. He heard the same click he heard when the inner doors in the home opened. The doctor's door had no such sound, and was never locked unless the Doctor was in. With the dog it didn't need to be.

The Doctor watched the flap get pushed aside and the nose, now in the seemingly perpetual rain of the outside, follow some scent or other on the building's external brickwork. He watched it on a small screen.

'Except to me, Steven. Except to me. Through you I will know, I will discover how we become who we are. You will be my eyes, my eyes into a new world. I will see what you see, learn how you learn. I will unlock the secrets of the soul's evolution through you.' The Doctor unplugged the child, undid his collar. Showed him the screen. Steven looked, and saw screens within screens within screens.

'Like a dog, Steven. Like a dog.' The Doctor whispered into his ear while running his fingers over the nape of the child's neck. Steven smiled, for the first time, but the Doctor was too busy to notice.