The Machine (7 page)

Laura says goodbye to Beth. There’s no thought of this continuing onwards – Beth remembers when that wouldn’t have even been a question, that a pub shutting didn’t mean you had to go to bed and tuck yourself in and end the night – but Laura’s adamant. She’s drunk and swaying, and Beth asks if she can find her way; if she’ll be all right. She’s insistent that she doesn’t need Beth’s help.

I can get home, Laura says, I honestly can. She reaches over and grabs Beth’s shoulders. Beth, she says. Beth. It’s been such fun. We have to do this again.

Laura stumbles off and leaves Beth in the street. She starts home. The walk back takes her ages, as she keeps stopping, leaning against walls. She catches sight of herself in the huge mirrored windows of the porn shop tucked between the kebab house (heaving) and the tiny grocers (which is perpetually empty, and seems to survive only on the occasional sale of a bunch of flowers) and she realizes that she doesn’t look anything like the woman she’s been for the last five years. She’s relaxed, and it’s all over her face. Her posture, even; the comfortable slump of her shoulders. It’s enough to make her cry, and she does, facing the water on the far side, away from the street. She’s never been in one of those shops, but she wonders if they can see out of that mirror: if they’re all watching the strange woman sobbing on the other side of the window.

For the rest of her walk home – which she extends by taking side-streets, by passing back along the front, by stopping and watching the people drinking in the streets, grabbing each other’s arses, chewing each other’s mouths off – she wants to be discovered. She wants everything out in the open. She doesn’t think about Vic for at least half an hour, and when she realizes that, she feels incredible. Magical, even. He’s everything, but that pause … to take it was so freeing. She passes students and parents and colleagues, but they don’t notice her, or they aren’t looking, or they don’t say anything. She doesn’t know which. She’s drunker than she’s been in years, and she can feel it through every inch of her.

Beth opens the front door on her third try. She drops the keys on the mat and bends to pick them up, but her ankle shakes as she does it, so she props herself against the frame with her hands.

Shit, she says. She swats the keys into the flat, and they skirt along the floor, making a noise, scratching the fake wood floorboards as they go, ending by the wall of the living room. She kicks her shoes off after them. Then pulls the door shut as she staggers forward.

I’m home, finally I’m home, she yells, and she puts her bag down, takes her coat off and she marches down the hall, pressing one hand against the wall the entire way. Home is the hunter, she says, which is something that Vic used to say, as a joke.

She opens the door to the bedroom and there it is: the Machine. She kicks the power on and the vibrations start, more acutely than before: she can hear it, feel it coming through the floorboards, the carpets, the walls. She can feel its vibrations through the wallpaper. She says his name, once, quietly, to remind herself of him – of what this is all about – and then walks to the Machine and puts her hands on it, palms out, on either side of the front panel. Its vibration runs all the way through the metal of every panel and part as it readies itself. She paws the screen, which is black, blacker still than the metal body of the thing, and her touch brings it to life.

You’re in there, she says.

Through the scrolling list of dates one leaps out, one that took place on the day after his birthday that first year of his treatment. She wonders. She presses play, and the doctor speaks, a prelude to Vic.

What did you do yesterday?

Beth took me out for a meal. We, uh. She booked a Greek restaurant. We both really like Greek food.

You seem distracted.

No. No. Just, it’s just coming hard today. Difficult for me. Don’t know why.

She pictures him there, struggling to keep it together, and she takes the Crown down from the docking station and nearly puts it on but doesn’t. Instead she rests it on the bed next to her, and she moves her right hand from the screen and down between her legs, pulling up her skirt, and then into her underwear, sliding down. She rubs herself as she sits on the edge of the bed, and then moves her body along the lip of the mattress. She remembers how she used to do this before she knew him, when she was still a girl.

She moves herself to the bed proper, face down, hand back inside her, rubbing, her back arched like a cat caught in a stretch. She gasps, one hand propped against the Machine, the vibrations through every part of her body, through her skeleton, through the other hand as it pushes her forwards.

It’s over as fast as it starts. She sits up and listens.

Do you mind if we begin the process? the doctor asks.

No, sure. Start.

Talk to me about Beth. How did she feel when you were away?

I don’t know, Vic says. Beth’s heard all of these recordings before, back when she was administering the treatments for Vic at home. When – she joked with herself – she went rogue.

Don’t you talk about it?

We did, but I can’t. I mean, she was sad. She cried a lot, near the end.

Do you remember why you came home?

I was, uh. Vic sounds upset, and he breathes through his teeth. Was I sick?

You were sick, yes. The doctor stands up – the noise of the chair legs scraping against the linoleum floor of the hospital – and there’s some tapping in the background. Vic, listen. I’d really like you to lean back and shut your eyes, and listen to something for me.

You don’t want to talk? Because I can keep going, I think. He sounds desperate.

No, not for the moment. Just listen to this, and then we’ll talk afterwards.

There’s a click, and the playback stops. The end of that recording, and the start of the first session where the Machine started filling in the gaps in what it had taken away.

Beth lies back on the bed. The room spins. The light is still on, and the Machine is on, and next to her – she reaches her fingers out – and then in her hand is the Crown. She shuts her eyes. She can’t stay in here, she knows. Her bed is in the next room. And she doesn’t know what she might do.

She doesn’t hear her alarm. Or she switches it off without realizing, one or the other. Her telephone rings and she answers it, confused, thinking it’s the middle of the night because it’s still so dark; and then she realizes that she’s not in her room. She’s on the spare bed. The blackness is coming from the Machine. It’s on, still; the screen dimmed, but still alight.

Hello? she asks.

It’s Laura, comes the voice on the other end. I’m in reception at work. Are you ill?

No, Beth says, but even as she says it she feels the sick in the back of her throat, rising. Her head pounds. What time is it?

Just gone eight, Laura says. I’ll let them know you’ll be late.

Beth gets out of bed and stands still, trying to hold down whatever’s threatening to work its way out of her. She gently strips, trying to move as little as possible, and then pulls on underwear and a skirt and a shirt. She walks to the fridge and grabs a little bottle of water, and then drinks it as she sits on the loo. Everything’s moving still: she sits there with her eyes shut, the coldness of the water so sharp on her throat it threatens to be her undoing. Eventually she stands up. She braces herself against the wall. She’s just doing too much too quickly, she knows.

She pulls her coat on, slips her feet into her shoes. Flats today, even if they don’t go with this outfit. She’s about to leave when she realizes that she doesn’t have her keys, so she scans the surfaces, panicked. She sees them on the floor, by the back wall, where she kicked them the night before, and when she bends to pick them up she sees the Machine through the spare room doorway. The screen isn’t dimmed any more; it’s lit brightly, and the Crown (which she now sees is up by her pillow) is lit around its rim, small yellow lights that indicate the stages of use. Like traffic lights: red is off, yellow is primed, green is go. When it’s green, the Crown must stay on the head. Those are the rules that they were told. (They were never told what would happen if they broke them, and they didn’t ask. It’s not been done, that Beth knows. Some rules seem serious enough to never be broken.)

She picks up the Crown and puts it back on the dock, and then looks at the screen. It hasn’t been used, she doesn’t think – there’s no way of telling directly, because such an indication hasn’t been needed – but she feels okay. She thinks about the damage that she could do to herself, given the chance. She knows that she has these thoughts, but she’s close, now. If she’d had the Machine for longer, just sitting there, then maybe …

Her telephone rings again. It will be somebody else from school, checking up on her. She ignores it, and she’s out of the front door in seconds, and down the stairwell, along the shops, along the front, through the shortcut of another housing estate and then at the gates. Laura is standing in her place, in her classroom, reading the register. She thanks her and takes over, and with every Here, Miss McAdams that the kids give her, her head throbs just that little bit more.

The firmware update is the part that she’s been dreading. There are privately linked videos on the internet that show how to do the update, found only through the forums that she uses. The videos have told her what to do, with step-by-step instructions. This is all clandestine, all under the radar. She shouldn’t have a Machine, and it’s not like the instructions are easy to come by. Illegal firmware updates are even more so. Back before the mass recall, when they thought that there was a problem, the first lot of Machines – the ones that could be tampered with, that could have custom firmware installed – were all recalled, all sucked back into the system and, in theory, disposed of, repurposed and turned into the smaller, safer Machines. The one that she has is not small or safe.

The update isn’t something that can be done wirelessly, because of how the reboot process works. Instead Beth needs to get inside the thing. There’s a panel that needs unscrewing. There’s a USB socket inside there, tucked away. Download the firmware to your USB stick, insert it into the Machine. Reboot it by holding all the buttons down with the flat of your hand. Wait there until you hear the triple beep that heralds the Machine’s start-up process. Choose to update firmware, when the screen prompts you. Check the firmware numbers. If it says one thing, you’ve succeeded. Another, try again. Back to the start.

The panel comes away with relative ease. Four screws, that’s it. She looks for the screws to the second panel, underneath the screen. They’re tucked away. Beth has to lie on the floor to undo them, at the join of the screen and the black metal case. She looks up at the Machine towering over her. She hadn’t realized that the front of it isn’t entirely flush, but it’s definitely not. It has a slight undulation. From the floor, looking over its surface, there are slight peaks and troughs. Like razor-blade-black sand dunes.

The USB socket is crude in comparison to the rest of the Machine. Whereas it’s highly finished elsewhere, smoothed over and made accessible, this is like seeing into the guts of the thing. Behind the socket runs exposed wires, reds and greens and yellows, and one solitary black cable that’s thicker than the rest, that coils in and over on itself like an intestine, thick and lumpen. The rest of the Machine is cordoned off with internal panels. Beth reaches up and taps one of these panels and it moves, so she slides it. She’s intrigued. She expects fans and processors and a wall of circuitry that she doesn’t understand, something totally alien to her.

Instead there’s nothing. Past the wires, there’s a hollow, she thinks. Past it, a cluster of wires, leading to something in the centre, but she can’t see what. It’s so dark in there: far darker than the outside. Almost impossible, she thinks. She can’t ever remember seeing such an absence of light. She backs out and looks at the Machine itself, to work out which part of the shell this area lies behind, and see that it’s the bulk of the main section, where the screen is. Again she peers up into it, but can’t see past a few inches, because it’s so black in there. She thinks about getting a torch, but it would be too easy to be distracted. She has a job to do: there’s only five days left.

She goes to her computer. The files – one for every possible firmware combination – have been on the desktop for over a year now, sitting at the top left so she couldn’t accidentally delete them. She’s bought a new memory stick especially, still sealed, so she scissors and hacks through the blister pack to get to it. It’s so light, she thinks.

She puts it into the computer and then finds the right file, cross-matching the file name with that of the Machine. She copies the file across, then renames it into the protocol that will make it actually work. This is the part she’s most worried about: making sure that everything works first time. She’s thought about this, late at night. If she messes it up she worries that she’ll lose her guts and stop. That she’ll eke out the rest of her days with that Machine sitting there in the room, a reminder of her failure. And leaving Vic in that place, like he is. She checks the name of the file three times, making sure it’s exactly what the online guides have told her that it should be.

When she’s positive she takes the memory stick back to the Machine. The guide says to switch the Machine on and then insert the stick, before doing a hard reset. She flicks the power switch and the vibrations start, and the noise. Ding-ding-ding. The screen on, she squats and slides the memory stick in. It clicks neatly into the socket, and the Machine whirrs. Sudden and abrupt, the fans kick in, and the whole thing makes a grinding sound, filthy and enormous, and Beth is almost kicked back onto the bed by the shock. The screen goes blank, replaced with its own blackness – false and printed on, pixels approximating the tone that’s so exact and pure on the outside – and then the noise abates, slightly.

Okay, Beth says aloud. She looks at the instructions – her own transcription of the videos she’s watched, printed out on paper that she’s folded over and over and read a thousand times – and it doesn’t say anything about this stage, but that’s not her problem. She has to stick with the instructions. She can’t expect the people who hacked this all together to write down every little detail.

Put your hand on the screen, her instructions say, and hold it there until you get an option by your index finger to reboot. Press it, keeping your hand there.

She can’t be sure, but she thinks that the Machine is somehow colder. The screen as well, not just the metal. That must be an effect of having the fans on as they are, so loud it’s like being on an aeroplane: the whirr of the engines, readying to take off. That burst of noise and power. But here it’s coming from this box in her spare bedroom in her little flat. She presses her hand flat to the screen and makes sure it’s all touching, and then stands there as the vibrations run up her arm and into her shoulder, and from there to her collarbone and her teeth. Her back teeth she presses together, and they chatter. It’s almost like static: like rubbing a balloon on your head as a child, that same feeling. The instructions don’t say how long to hold it there for. Her arm runs with pins and needles after thirty seconds, and it’s almost painful after a minute, just as the option appears. INSTALL. She moves her finger across to the picture of a button and taps it, and as soon as she does so the Machine stops whirring and the sound completely drops away. She hadn’t realized it, but she had been pressing really hard on the screen, and she almost falls forward, suddenly not having to push against the Machine’s shaking. The screen goes black – not display black, completely lightless – and the sound disappears, and she’s in the room in silence.

She thinks about when they first saw the Machine, when she and Vic were brought in by Vic’s therapist. He told Vic how perfect he would be for the treatment, which was experimental but so perfect, so neat and tidy.

Conventional therapy is usually like sweeping everything away. Under the carpet. The doctor, Robert something, he was the same man who then led Vic through his therapy. She and Vic had thought of it as a sales pitch, and a pretty convincing one. This treatment, Robert said, isn’t sweeping. It’s cleaning. Hoovering. It’s taking a hose to the patio and washing away all the grime and dirt, and leaving it looking good as new. You understand what I’m saying, right? It’s taking the bad stuff away. All these conversations we have, the dreams, the shock you’re going through: we can simply get rid of it.

So why don’t more people do this? Vic had asked.

Because it’s still a secret, the doctor told them.

Beth watches the Machine doing nothing, and it hits her that she’s done something wrong. She’s ruined it: all that money, time, thought, down the drain. She reads the instructions again, which implore her to wait. They say, It will take longer than you think. She pushes herself back onto the bed, up towards the pillows and the headboard, and she folds her legs under herself and watches it. Eventually she lies down and shuts her eyes. She thinks she’s asleep when she hears the whirring, and the familiar ding-ding-ding, and when she opens her eyes the screen is already bright with the menus.

Has it worked? she asks. She presses the information button and the screen flicks to the year, the firmware. CUSTOM, it says, instead of a number. Shit, she says. Okay. She opens the instruction sheet again, her hands shaking. Congratulations, she reads. Okay.

She flicks through the Machine’s menus again. It’s internal structure has been rearranged: where the recordings of Vic from before had been buried in a folder of their own, now they’re the only thing accessible from the MEMORY tab. She presses the button marked on, to check that the files have survived the process.

What are we doing here, Vic? asks the doctor.

We’re here to get rid of the stuff I can remember about the war, Vic says.

And how do you think it’s going.

I think it’s going. Is that enough?

At this point, yes. Absolutely.

Beth presses stop. She shuts the Machine down, and then she goes to the computer and looks at the videos of the process again, and she starts to cry. She’s so close.