Levelling a Novella: a dark mind-bending sci-fi horror Read online

  Standing before the vat, Two and Five hummed in satisfaction. As he watched these master craftsmen at work Addison couldn’t help but marvel. It was all so easy. Technology had made a mockery of the rudimentary nature of the human body, assembling an entire person from component parts like he was nothing more than flat-pack furniture. It was humbling, horrifying, and he couldn’t understand how humanity had mastered something as utterly godlike as levelling yet been unable to save itself. Or perhaps that was humanity in a nutshell: brilliance and brutality two sides of the same coin.

  “Levelling complete,” Five announced as the hulking machinery in the next room stilled.

  “No dysphasia,” Two added, glancing at his tablet. “Zero dyspraxic indicators, negligible genetic creep.”

  “Flawless work.”

  “As ever.”

  Five turned to Addison with a smile.

  “Now Mr. Moore, it’s over to you.”

  In the levelling room Addison had felt exhilarated, burning with inner purpose, but when Taka was moved to the vision chair he grew nervous. He was second-guessing himself, going round in circles trying to remember what he’d said last time.

  Repeating himself was critical as even the tiniest deviation could produce a different result. Addison wanted to precisely echo the first levelling – same words, same gestures, same everything – so Taka would react as he had previously. The thought that he would do or say something to hurt Taka (or god forbid, make Taka hurt him) was unbearable.

  But he needn’t have worried.

  “Are you okay… ?”

  The vision chair had stopped thrumming and the newly-resurrected man was gazing up at Addison from the floor. It was the same expression as last time, down to a smile line: concern, care and humour all in one look. But faced with that smile, Addison’s mind went blank. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember what he’d said the first time around, what came next in the script. Panicking, he clammed up.

  “Hey, Major Tom… ?”

  Think think think...

  “Ground Control here,” Taka said, waving up at him. “Is there anybody up there?”

  For a nauseating moment Addison thought he’d ruined it. He was way off-script, into uncharted territory, but then he saw the glint in Taka’s eye, the same spark that had so beguiled him the first time. Everything was going to be okay.

  Addison was so relieved he laughed out loud.

  “End of the world and I’m greeted by laughing boy,” Taka deadpanned. “Of all the luck.”

  He pulled himself upright, then glanced down at his body.

  “Oh shit, my tattoos!”

  Addison’s laughter grew even louder.

  * * *

  In hindsight, it was never going to be easy.

  “You want me to do fucking what?”

  Taka was furious, incandescent, storming up and down the narrow space of his cellsuite like a man possessed. Addison had just told him what his role was to be at the institute. He was not happy about it.

  “So let me get this right,” Taka shouted. “You want me to help you resurrect long-dead people, help a bunch of trumped-up ecofascists from the year two thousand and fuck, put them on trial, then help them do it all over again?”

  “Basically...”

  “No! I won’t! I won’t do it.”

  “We have to, Taka,” Addison pleaded. “They’re going to execute them all the same, so at least we can make their time comfortable. And besides, if we don’t the levellers will use the drone on us. It hurts Taka, it really hurts.”

  “I don’t care!” Taka roared, eyes flashing. “I will not be a fucking handmaiden of death.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I can’t believe you! Those people are dying, and you want me, what, to get out of the way and and let it happen?”

  “I’ve been here longer than you,” Addison replied, trying not to sound desperate. “If there were another way, I’d know. It’s this or we die.”

  “Then maybe we should die.”

  “We can’t.”

  “We really could.”

  “No listen, we can’t,” Addison insisted. “I tried. Nearly threw myself off a balcony, but this thing in my neck stopped me. Even if we could, they’d just re-level us. They have our blood, so all they’d need to do is take another sample and hey presto, once more round the wheel.”

  Taka had stopped pacing.

  “Really?” he asked, staring at him with a mix of rage and concern. “You nearly did... that?”

  “It’s okay,” Addison mumbled, staring at his feet. “I don’t know why I even told you.”

  He did know. It was because he wanted to tell Taka everything.

  “So you're saying we don’t have a choice?” the new returnee asked, resuming his pacing. “We have to do what those grey-faced pricks tell us, or they’ll just kill us and start over?”

  “There’s no other way.”

  “But we have to do something!” he cried, wheeling around. “If we can’t save them, then maybe we can do something else. Something we can’t see yet.”

  “That’s why you’re here!” Addison said, leaping to his feet. “I know you can help me. I know you can see things I can’t. Perhaps there’s a different way to do things. I’m just asking you to help me.”

  Taka frowned.

  “You don’t know me,” he said. “I could be a serial killer. What makes you think I’m that sort of person?”

  “I read your file,” Addison replied quickly.

  He hadn’t told Taka he’d been resurrected once before. He wanted to, he didn’t want to lie even a little to this man, but finding out you’d died days ago was perhaps a step too far, even for someone as open-minded as Taka. Still, it was tripping Addison up. Taka kept saying things he’d said before, last time.

  “Taka, will you help me?” he asked, sitting down on the bed. “Please.”

  “I need time to think,” the man replied, heading for the door. “I need time to process all this.”

  “Take as long as you need.”

  As the door hissed shut Addison pulled his knees up to his chest. This was already going wrong. Perhaps he should have just let Taka rest. Perhaps this had been the wrong way to go about things. He had envisioned them working as a team, but it had taken all of a few hours for them to fall out. Addison closed his eyes, horrified he had made a terrible mistake.

  When Taka returned a few hours later, he had calmed down. Addison got the impression he’d met one of the levellers – Five hopefully, Four more likely – and this had impressed on him the reality of their predicament. Either way, it must have worked.

  He had come back with ideas.

  As Addison sat listening, Taka paced the room reeling off the changes he wanted to make to the way they did things. Before long, Addison was smiling. And not just because the suggestions made perfect sense, because they also vindicated his decision to bring Taka back. The man had only been here, only been alive, all of half a day and he was already doing more than Addison had in weeks.

  “I’ll ask One,” Addison said. “I’ll go right now.”

  With the good will he’d stored up from rescuing Five, Addison got One to agree with only a minimum of resistance. The storm had forced the levellers to take a begrudging day off for repairs, which gave Addison and Taka time to try out their new approach.

  The first change Taka made was for the returnees to start doing things together. Addison had always gone to the returnees one by one – meeting them in the vision room, taking them to their cellsuite, repeating with the next returnee – but Taka insisted on collecting them up for a ‘group session.’ It seemed contrived at first, a little forced, and Addison was skeptical, but Taka was resolute.

  The first session was held that evening in Taka’s cellsuite. It wasn’t mandatory, and not everyone came (many of that day’s returnees were too angry or withdrawn) but Addison was surprised at how many did. At first, they came in dribs and drabs, but as the night wore on more turned up looking for company and solace. They repeated the process the following evening, after trials had recommenced and in time it began to work. The first evening was slow, the second a little better, but by the third intake they were beginning to see progress.

  Taka’s process was deceptively simple. He gathered anyone who wished to come, left his cellsuite door open and simply begin to talk. Talking was key. He would have each of the returnees talk about their old lives; telling simple, everyday stories of who they were and how they had lived.

  And what stories.

  Some returnees were born as early as the sixties, some as late as the new-twenties, but each had a tale to tell. And in the institute, those tales assumed a significance far beyond the events themselves. They spoke to a West German doctor who had been present when the Berlin Wall came down, a Chinese athlete who’d held the torch at the Beijing Olympics, a Canadian marine who’d fought during the fall of Tallinn, a Nigerian maritime engineer who’d helped create the first of the global flood defences. People talked so eloquently, so emotionally about their old lives, it broke Addison’s heart. He was disgusted with himself, appalled he’d once thought of these people as mere clones. Now, finally, he saw them for what they were: special. Gloriously flawed, irredeemably special human beings.

  But most special of all was the tree lady.

  “Dendrologist,” the old woman corrected. “As in, I studied wood.”

  It was a week after Addison and Taka had begun their sessions, the seventh intake of returnees, and the woman’s name was Mansi Harper.

  She was a scientist in her sixties with a kind face and silver hair she had twined into a braid. She had been the third or fourth returnee to arrive that evening, and although she hadn’t moved or made a big fuss, as she had told her story the room had pivoted around her, people shifting and shuffling until she was the undeniable centre of attention.

  “It was a good life,” Mansi told the rapt room. “I wasn’t wealthy, but my job took me to wonderful places. I saw the Amazon, the bamboo forests of Japan, the old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. I discovered new species, recategorised old ones. Saved a few, lost a lot. I slept in tents, on windthrow, in ancient forests and new. Yes, a good life.”

  Mansi smiled, playing with her braid.

  “But it was so much more than that,” she continued. “I got to see how the world stitched together, all its interconnecting branches and underlying roots. And not just of the natural world, ours too. I saw how an aboriginal Australian was linked to an Alabaman coffeehouse worker by a thousand different strands. Cultural, familial, political, environmental, all of it. I got to see the tapestry of life in all its frayed messy beautiful glory. It was all connected, one big web. Like an Armillaria ostoyae!”

  “A what?” Taka asked. He was sitting on the floor, gazing up at her. “You mean like an armadillo?”

  “A mushroom,” Mansi explained, flashing him a smile. “The largest mushroom that ever was, biggest organism in the whole world in fact. It covered over two thousand acres in Oregon, living underground, spreading out beneath the earth. They called it the Humongous Fungus.”

  A little ripple of laughter went round the room, and similar ripples shot down Addison’s spine. Something was happening here, something special.

  “It’ll be gone now, of course,” Mansi continued, smiling sadly. “Like everything.”

  “And how does that make you feel?” Taka asked.

  Addison knew what he was doing. Part counsellor, part teacher, therapist, confidant, friend; Taka was bridging the gap between the lost past and the dying present. He was performing some vital function Addison hadn’t even realised was necessary, acting as an emotional lightning rod, letting people ground their experiences. The vision chair told returnees the facts, but it was only through Taka’s sessions that returnees processed and accepted it.

  Taka was helping people to heal.

  “Angry,” Mansi replied eventually. “Helpless. Bereft. But also, vindicated.”

  “Vindicated how?”

  “In an odd way, nothing I saw in that chair surprised me. Even back home, I was expecting the end. I wasn’t expecting to live through it, but I was expecting it to happen.”

  Mansi turned thoughtful.

  “You know,” she said, cocking her head, “now I look at it, I think I deserve to be here.”

  “Surely you can’t believe that?” Addison said, leaning forward. “Surely none of us deserve this?”

  “But I saw it coming, didn’t I?” she replied, gazing at him calmly. “And did I do enough? Sure, I went on some marches, put my recycling in the right bins. I even thought my work was helping, that I was doing more than the average citizen, but in reality I was just tinkering around the edges. Did I really do enough? Really? I was so wrapped up in my own little corner of the world, I didn’t grasp how bad it was.”

  She laughed in realisation.

  “I didn’t see the forest for the trees.”

  When she fell into silence another returnee, a young Guatemalan called Jorge, took up the conversation.

  “I always assumed someone, something, would come and fix it,” he said, full of passionate intensity. “I tried to do my bit, but there was always work to do, bills to pay. I just assumed someone bigger, better, would come along.”

  “So did I,” Mansi replied.

  “We all did,” Taka added.

  “But we were wrong!” Jorge cried, eyes flashing. “We spent so long waiting for someone else to save us we didn’t save ourselves.”

  Addison had to agree. It chimed with what he remembered of his old life: his foundering acting career, his small circle of like-minded, self-reinforcing friends, his tiny room in the grotty little flatshare where he hid away from anything and everything confrontational. He’d always been one to plaster on a brave face, to avoid a fuss. His preferred course of action was always to postpone, to delay, to push to tomorrow what should have been done today. But when tomorrow finally came, things always ended up being so much worse.

  If he had learned to address things head on, perhaps things would have been different. But instead he had chosen the path of least resistance. And not just in his personal life. As he’d watched the crisis unfold, he’d become almost evangelical in his belief someone would come. Some saviour would arise, a bright young thing from Silicon Valley or some ecowarrior from Scandinavia. Someone, anyone, so long as it wasn’t him

  Suddenly, the truth hit home and Addison almost gasped with the weight of it.

  The levellers were right.

  He was guilty.

  Perhaps not by the traditions or standards of his time, but traditions and standards were irrelevant. His first real partner at university had given him a poster emblazoned with the slogan tradition is just peer pressure from dead people, and it really was the truth. His generation had been given a challenge and they’d bottled it, kicking the can down the road to a fictional someone who never came.

  It was a crushing failure: of imagination, of confidence, of compromise and cooperation, a failure so grand and sweeping it defied comprehension. Yet it was still a failure, the dying planet outside was indisputable evidence. Before, in Addison’s time, humanity’s culpability had been up in the air, but now – ex post facto – it was clear they had failed. The world had ended and that made them all culpable. The levellers’ punishment might be abhorrent, but their verdict was spot on: Addison was guilty because everyone was guilty.

  He breathed out slowly, letting the thought percolate.

  The levellers were right.

  * * *

  At her trial, accused of overtravel due to her extensive academic engagements, Mansi was the second returnee to plead guilty. It wasn’t enough to save her, but she went with a quiet dignity that overwhelmed Addison. That same day, three others pleaded the same way.

  And after that, nothing was the same.

  – Chapter 6 –

  More

  It was Mansi who gave Addison the idea.

  “Five,” he cried, running out of court. “Can I have a word?”

  The leveller had been doing a little better since his ordeal, and although he was now walking with a permanent limp, his spirits were up and he’d been treating everyone much more kindly. It was this kindness Addison now hoped to exploit.

  “How can I help?” Five replied, drawing to a halt.

  Addison took him gently by the arm, guiding him down the nearest ramp. The others were still filing out of court and this particular matter required discretion.

  “I was wondering if you could help with something,” he continued, walking out of sight around a corner.

  “After what you did for me? Of course. If it is within my power, I shall endeavour to assist.”

  Exactly what Addison wanted to hear.

  “This interpreter,” he said, fidgeting with the metal device on his neck. “Is there any way to show the other returnees what it shows me? The jungle I mean, not the translation stuff, just all the greenery.”

  “I see,” Five replied. “For what purpose?”

  “There was a woman, a returnee, Mansi. She talked a lot about the natural world. It helped people, so I thought if they could physically see things it’d help even more.”

  The leveller regarded him a moment.

  “So you are saying this is for reasons of efficiency?”

  “Well, more for––”

  “To make returnees more compliant during trials?”

  Five was looking at him intently, eyebrows raised, and Addison finally picked up the message.

  “For efficiency,” he said, nodding quickly. “Absolutely.”

  “Then leave it with me,” Five smiled.

  That night, Addison struggled to keep his secret to himself. He really wanted to tell Taka, to impress his new friend with his clever idea, but he also wanted it to be a surprise. Taka had done so much, brought in so many wonderful ways of doing things, that it was high time for Addison to give something back. So when Five summoned him to the lower levels the following evening, he was almost vibrating with excitement.