WE

  WE

  JOHN DICKINSON

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409098041

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  WE

  A DAVID FICKLING BOOK 978 0 385 61789 5

  Published in Great Britain by David Fickling Books,

  a division of Random House Children’s Books

  A Random House Group Company

  This edition published 2010

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © John Dickinson, 2010

  The right of John Dickinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  I

  He had asked to be alone when he woke. After all, he had reasoned, from now on he would always be alone.

  They had told him there would be no pain from the operation. He had looked up the techniques they would use, checked the possible complications and had understood why they had said that. Nevertheless, something in him was surprised to discover that they had been right. There was none. There was only emptiness.

  He blinked, automatically holding his eyelids closed for just that fraction of a second that would summon his displays. But no voice spoke in his head. No images appeared, no lists, nothing.

  There were no weather reports, news pictures, financial statements, alerts concerning the state of his house or vehicle or the transmission systems that he was supposed to maintain. There were no demands from his supervisors. And there were no personal messages. Like everyone else he always went to those first. But there were none – no loving images, no jokes or pictures, no one wishing him luck or promising to remember him. There was nothing more from Her. There never would be.

  His fingers felt gingerly for his eyes. The artificial lenses were gone. He touched the soft hollow behind his right ear. There was a small dressing there. It was numb when he pressed at it. The wound it covered would be tiny. There was no pain. But the implanted systems he had carried all his adult life had been taken away. Of course they had been. That was what it was all about.

  He focused on the things he could see.

  He was lying in a bed, looking up at a white ceiling. The room was unfamiliar. Automatically he blinked again, summoning the answers to his questions. But the displays did not respond.

  That moment – that first question, when his eyes blinked, his mind listened and waited for the displays, and nothing came – was the most dreadful he had ever known. It was as if he had suddenly put a foot out over the edge of a cliff and felt the depth beneath his toes. His ears heard a sound – a strangled gasp. His own throat had made it.

  Now his brain lumbered into action (brushing aside the habits of thought that said to him, Consult! Consult!). He did know why he was here. He knew where ‘here’ was. It was a room adjoining the implants surgery. He had been left here to recover. He had expected that. He had been put to sleep during the operation, to protect his mind from the moment of removal from the networks. Now he had woken. He was alone because he had asked that he should be.

  How long had he been asleep?

  What was the time?

  Automatically he blinked again. But there was only deadness. Nothing lit in his brain to tell him what the time was.

  Again, that lurch in his stomach – that moment of nightmare! What is the time? No answer.

  Sunlight came in through the window. It was day. But what time was it?

  Which day was it?

  He drew a long breath. It shook in his throat.

  He had been removed from the networks. There had been good operational reasons. There was a job to do, a long distance away. The networks did not work there. So he must be without them. He had known that.

  But he had not known it would be like this!

  Think. Breathe. Do not try to consult.

  Use the senses.

  He looked around him. His sight, once he had stopped hunting for projected look-up displays, worked perfectly well. He saw the calm pale browns of the bedclothes. He saw the single table by his bed, the cabinet in which his clothes hung, the old-fashioned, inactive walls. Opposite him there was a large mirror. It showed a man lying on a bed, propped on one elbow, looking back at him. It was himself.

  His face was the same: the light, even pigment of his skin, the round cheeks and the sloping forehead framed in fair hair so short that his head seemed like a block set upon his muscular shoulders. He looked healthy. Nothing in his appearance had changed. Except the way the eyes stared, as if they were afraid.

  Again he looked around. Things that yesterday would have been a background to his displays were real and immediate now. They were like soft punches on his brain: the white ceiling, the white walls, the window showing sky; the brown cabinet, brown bedclothes. The eyes of the man in the mirror.

  And again. White ceiling, white walls …

  Why white? he wondered.

  He blinked. Nothing answered. Grumbling with the unusual effort, his thoughts stirred.

  White reflects light. The more white there was in the room, the more light there would be. The more light there was, the less need to provide artificial lighting.

  It was not his field but the idea seemed sound. And it had not taken him very much longer to reach it in his own mind than it would have done to look it up on the networks. Good.

  But …

  It was only an idea. It was the product of one brain, working alone. It should be put for confirmation – especially since light and colour were not in his professional field. And …


  And it could not be put for confirmation.

  The thought must stay in his head. Because he had been removed from the networks, it could not go to anyone else. It would for ever be useless to anyone but him. He would never know whether it was accurate or not.

  This was another bad moment. Again it was one he had foreseen, and again he had not foreseen how much it would hurt that his ideas had nowhere to go.

  Of course it did not matter that his theory about the white walls and ceiling could not be shared. Such a simple thought would have been available to everyone on any network since the very beginning. But the same would be true for any insight he might have in his professional field. All his skills – all his understanding of the physics and engineering of radio telemetry – were now blocked off from the rest of humanity. Others would be trained to take his place. In training and operating they might use data that he had laid in the networks. But from now on he could make no contribution. He was useless. Except for the one overriding purpose for which he was being prepared, he was useless to everyone living now or in the future.

  Again he heard a sound – a sound that his own throat had made.

  Abruptly he threw off his bedclothes and swung his legs over to the floor. The calm brown flooring was cool beneath his soles.

  Look. See. Think.

  He repeated it to himself. Look. See. Think. He had barely seen anything since waking in this new, empty world.

  He rose to his feet. The tops of buildings bobbed into view beyond the window. Carefully (fearing, in some deep part of himself, that his sense of balance might have been robbed from him along with everything else) he made his way across the room. He looked out.

  He was high up, which was unusual. The implants surgery occupied a floor in one of the old ‘skyscraper’ buildings that still dominated the centre of the city. There was another opposite him, currently in the throes of demolition, but enough of it still remained to show what it had been: a tower of dirty tinted glass, rising to many times the height of any modern structure. Yesterday, approaching the surgery, he had noted these improbable buildings that stacked storey on top of storey in so many layers. Had he wished, his eyes could have blinked and tracked a few times and called up the reasons why recent generations had felt it useful to cram their physical bodies so close together. But his thoughts had been on other things. Now, when each sight seemed to be flooding in to fill all the huge spaces that had opened in his mind, he could only stare and wonder at that insane rush for the sky – the bewildering product of another time.

  And he would not form any theories. There was no point, if they could be neither confirmed nor shared.

  He looked down at the city. He saw the lines and lines of trees, planted along the verges of the avenues. He saw the angular shapes of old but still habitable buildings, constructed from masonry, peeping from among the green. Further off, the trees seemed to thicken and the glimpses of buildings showed not the old straight lines of tiled roofs and brick walls but the subtle curves of modern bubble-houses gleaming in the sun. There was the bright curl of the river, the beautiful inverted arcs of the old suspension bridges and the less pleasing but more functional criss-cross of modern cables that carried whatever traffic needed to pass from one bank to the other these days.

  No sound could be heard from up here, behind the glass of the window. And there was not much movement to be seen. The occasional vehicle or walker was passing peacefully down the huge avenues that previous city-dwellers had thought necessary to carry their transport. Yet all that landscape was humming with life, with messages passing from person to person, invisibly, inaudibly, but all the time. The city was a great living thing. And none of it was for him. None of it could reach him.

  All that living – and none of it could touch him! He could no more feel them than he could hear or see them, up here. That … That was what was different now. It always would be.

  His fist thumped the window, gently, but enough to make it shake and for him to feel the impact afterwards. He wondered why he had done it. He looked at his hand and found he could no longer see it clearly. His sight had blurred. He wanted to screw up his eyes.

  Something was happening to him! He could not see! His eyes were hot. His breathing was coming in gasps that he could not control. Something wet was on his cheeks. It was not sweat – not any kind of sweat that he knew. He could not call for help. He had no way of calling for help! His mind was dumb – dumb, and beginning to fight with panic.

  But there was a way. There was the red alarm button by the bedside. When they had showed it to him, he had noted it but had never thought that he might use such a thing. Now he must try, before things got worse. He stumbled back to the bedside. He fumbled for the button and pressed it clumsily with the tip of his finger. Then he sat on the bed, not daring to move. He felt the fit subsiding. His breathing was more even now. He wiped his cheeks on his arm. His sight returned, although his eyes still stung. He tried to order his mind. He tried to remember the various possible complications that could arise from his operation and match them with the symptoms he was experiencing. He could not. He longed desperately to be back on the networks, just for a few moments, so that he would be able to look them up and know what was happening to him. Knowing was so important. Not knowing was horrible – not knowing, when he should have been able to know! And no one was coming to help him. He had pressed the alarm and they were not coming! How long ago had he pressed it?

  Again he could not know.

  They came. Two people entered the room. He recognized one, a gentle-faced man in blue surgical overalls who had informed him beforehand of the likely course of the operation. The other was a young woman with short brown hair about whom he knew nothing.

  Yesterday he would have known. Yesterday, even before she had stepped into his sight, he would have known her age, qualifications, family status and preferred protocols. Notes of her financial status, social and antisocial behaviours (if any) would have been available. He could have dealt with her with confidence, knowing she knew the same about him. Now he was helpless.

  The doctor’s eyes blinked and tracked. The woman spoke.

  ‘You pressed the alarm?’ she said.

  She was a Talker: someone who was trained to use her throat and mouth to form words so that it was possible to communicate with individuals who, for whatever reason, were not on the networks. She was a Talker for the doctor.

  He looked at the doctor. The mild, concerned face looked back at him.

  No, not at him. The eyes were not focused on him. They were following their displays. If they saw his physical body at all, it was through a veil of images and symbols, options, communications with the Talker, all marshalled to address whatever the problem might be.

  And then he realized that he could not tell them what it was.

  It should have been so easy. An image of his own face, taken from his handcam and focusing on the symptoms. Colours of red and amber to convey alarm. Perhaps a word or two – dangerous side-effect query. Quick and unambiguous – that was all a message needed to be. And he could not do it. He had no handcam to take images, no display and pupil tracker with which to transmit, no World Ear with which to receive. Everything was gone.

  To communicate now, he had to talk. He could not do that either. He knew what words should sound like but he had had no practice forming them. Not for years and years.

  ‘Are you well?’ said the Talker. Her voice had a gentle sound.

  He opened his mouth.

  ‘Aa … Aaah …’ It was all he could manage.

  And in his stress his symptoms were worsening again. His eyes were hot and screwed up. His cheeks were wet. He choked.

  Desperately he jabbed his fingers at his face, pointing. ‘Aaarh!’ he said.

  The doctor’s eyes focused. He bent to look closely. His face wore the detached concern of one who knew he would never suffer as the person before him was suffering. His pupils tracked.

  ‘It is Tears
,’ translated the Talker. ‘Just Tears. They are …’

  She hesitated. The information the doctor was giving her had far outpaced her ability to put it into speech.

  ‘They are normal,’ she said.

  It was not a good choice of word. Tears were not normal. None of them could remember crying. But it was the best she could do.

  II

  That first stage – the operation, together with subsequent therapies and speech training – took knowledge, the right tools and materials, and some man-days of time from a number of specialists.

  The next required an effort greater than the output of a hundred thousand human lifetimes.

  At a moment determined by the relative positions of planets and the Sun, his training was interrupted. He was taken to another surgery, one that specialized in anaesthetics, and there he was put into a sleep. His body was fitted into a dynamic harness capable of exercising his limbs gently while his mind was unconscious. Then he and his harness were slung in a capsule and taken to a place unlike any other in the world.

  The vehicle that carried him left the city and passed through rich green countryside speckled with gardens and the shining domes of houses. It climbed through hills that were covered with thick forests teeming with birds, insects and brightly coloured life. Hundreds of different species crammed every square metre here, shrieking, scuttling, growing, decaying, but he saw none of it. He did not see the great blue gem of the sea, flecked with white, when it rose into view as the road climbed. Nor did he see the dusty uplands, coated with low thorns, across which his vehicle sped for hours under a deep blue sky.

  And then in the sky there was a line.

  It was like a crack in the blue, a pencil-stroke drawn from the heavens straight down to the earth. The vehicle sped on towards it, spurring light dust-clouds in its wake, and for a long time nothing changed. There was only the earth, the sky and that straight, impossible line that grew neither thicker nor nearer.

  In the last stage of the approach the road snaked among low, rocky rises. As it snaked, a watcher from the vehicle would have seen the line appear to move against the thorncovered hills beyond it. Only then could a human eye have been sure that it was something that really existed. The line was now just a few kilometres away, rising in a steep curve from the ground. It rose and rose. A bend in the road revealed the buildings and other structures that clustered at its foot. By now a traveller in the vehicle would have had to crane backwards for his eye to follow it up. And at last it would have gained a width that the mind could have grasped. It was a cable, as thick as the trunk of an ancient tree, yet in comparison to its length far more slender and frail than a spider’s thread, rising from the Earth to the sky.