The Visit

For April, I decided to try to write the longest story I’ve attempted so far, and to combine two disparate themes in a cheeky attempt to enter two short story competitions with… the same story! Those themes were 'Whispers' and ‘Dystopia’.

All in the same month I relocated from Oxford to Seattle for a year, which included finding a new apartment, proving I wasn’t a South African terrorist at the social security office, and working a full time job.

Needless to say, I bit off far more than I could chew and the result is a convoluted, post-apocalyptic regurgitation of ‘Town Mouse and Country Mouse’. Kind of.

Enjoy this if you can… I f*cking dare you.

Amelia stepped off the train and searched the crowd for her cousin’s long, blonde braid. She cautiously followed the herd of commuters headed for the station exit, dragging her small suitcase behind her. Jasmine had said she would be there to meet her, in person, as her avatar wouldn’t work beyond the Meyden County Station. They were in Ring Five, after all.

Being out of reach of The Signal frightened Amelia, and terrified her parents, but also filled her with an illicit excitement. She knew that there was little danger while she was cosseted within Jasmine’s home for the weekend, but she secretly thrilled at being disconnected from The Signal for two full days.

After years of drifting apart the way cousins do as they grow older, Jasmine and Amelia had rekindled an adult friendship on the ashes of their childhood bond in recent months. This renewed enthusiasm for their relationship began when Jasmine found herself in sudden and unexpected need of somewhere to stay after being stranded at Soutea Port when her DI was corrupted. Amelia’s small one-room home was a daunting twelve leaps away, but as she lived in Ring Two, she was much easier to contact than any of her other relatives in the more remote reaches of The Signal.

Despite the initial awkwardness of their first conversation in almost twelve years, Amelia gave Jasmine the coordinates to her tiny apartment and sent an avatar to collect her. Jasmine was, at first, hesitant to engage with Amelia through the automaton. After a few stilted attempts at conversation and a handful of ill-received jokes, Amelia left the robot with only perfunctory instructions to escort her cousin to her home. Amelia found it hard to understand people who didn’t like talking to avatars. She preferred talking to them than to people most days. Their resting expressions always had a gentle smile, so even when they weren’t saying anything, they radiated kindness and reassurance.

They hugged when Jasmine finally arrived, tentative but tender and Amelia swiftly set about making up a suspension bed while Jasmine went to wash. It was hard for both of them to move at cross purposes through Amelia’s small and densely decorated one room home. Amelia found it hard to keep up with fashion and culture, so she often availed herself of The Signal’s suggestions for new things she might like. Jasmine huffed as she made her way to the shower.

Jasmine was six years older than Amelia, and when they were younger, had always seemed the bolder, stronger and worldlier of the two girls. She took more reckless risks, hung out with older boys, drank alcohol, and had even smoked a cigarette once. Amelia had followed Jasmine constantly, to the point of getting underfoot. She looked up to the other girl more as a celebrity crush than as an older sister, and never once entertained delusions of being like Jasmine one day. She knew she’d never be as brave, as unruffled or as wise. So she found it oddly heartwarming now that she was now in a position to help Jasmine, if only for a night, or −dare she hope− two.

Despite the inconvenience of having to program her avatar to collect Jasmine twelve loops away, and regardless of the clear disappointment on Jasmine’s face when she’d seen Amelia’s tiny, cluttered glass-lined home, Amelia was happy to have Jasmine as a guest. She would have to leave for work in a few hours, and Jasmine would probably only stay for as long as it took for her DI to be repaired, but until then she would enjoy playing hostess as a welcome distraction.

While Jasmine was in the shower, The Signal reminded her to wash behind her ears, to time her shower to five minutes or less to avoid wasting water, to take the opportunity to do some squats, and to leave her conditioner in for at least two of the recommended five minutes. The gallons of water she’d used were displayed live on the shower door. As she climbed out, The Signal warned her to be cautious on exiting, and reminded her how many domestic accidents occurred in shower cubicles annually in Ring Two alone.

“Does it ever shut up?” Jasmine asked as she towel dried her hair in spite of The Signal’s better judgement.

“Sorry?”

“The Signal. It’s so… intense here. Can you, like, turn it down? Or off?”

Amelia laughed. She tried to imagine a world where The Signal could be turned off. A world where you would even want to.

“Of course not. We are in Ring Two, after all.”

“I thought the only constants were death and taxes.”

“What are taxes?”

“It’s how governments used to pay for things. Governments were, like, local Administrative Centers, but run by people. They’d send you a bill and…. You know what? It doesn’t matter.” Jasmine smiled, her long, freshly shampooed mane lying damply across her shoulders.

“Thanks. I know what government is,” Amelia said, feeling annoyed at being condescended to, but trying to sound playful and sarcastic to avoid awkwardness. Later, when Jasmine was back in Meyden County, she would ask The Signal to tell her more about ‘taxes’.

Between the claustrophobic décor of Amelia’s furniture, books, clothes, toys and knick-knacks, the unbidden intrusion in the shower, and the uncanny experience of having to speak to her cousin for the first time in years through a faceless android, Jasmine was ready to bid a hasty farewell to Ring Two and never speak to Amelia again. But she was tired, and the suspension bed was up, hovering a meter and a half above the ground. Looking closer, Amelia had obviously laid it carefully with her own bed linen. It was the tidiest space in the whole apartment. Jasmine smiled at Amelia, sheepish. Amelia smiled back.

The wall glass lit up and politely remind both women that Amelia’s remaining time to sleep was less than her recommend nightly average, and was 62% likely to result in sub-optimal productivity at her job the next day. Jasmine didn’t like it when The Signal spoke. It masked itself beneath friendly overtones but its words were dispassionate. It provided direction, not conversation. More like an impartial prison warden than an overly protective parent. The Signal, Jasmine felt, was not the voice of a benevolent sentience. It was the endless echo of arrogant men and women who had filled it with so much useless, vapid, self-obsessed noise.

“Thank you, for letting me crash here for the night. I know it was very short notice. I appreciate it.”

The words felt forced and unnatural in Jasmine’s mouth, but they made Amelia flush a hot, embarrassed shade of pink.

“You’re welcome,” she’d whispered, trying to stifle the smile that was determinedly bending up the corners of her mouth. They went to bed, and the wall glass did its best to emulate the ambient sounds and visuals from Jasmine’s mother’s home. The program tried to replicate the nuances of the last evening the women had shared during a sleepover twenty years prior by compiling their shared, recorded memories to recreate the experience. Amelia found the new automated feature delightful, and indicated as much with a positive rating on her wrist piece. Jasmine swallowed first rage, and then tears, as her private memories were used for wall paper.

Jasmine had to stay in Amelia’s house for three more nights after that first evening. The Automated Administrative Centre in Soutea had traced the source of her Digital Information corruption to someone in Ring Eight who had been trying to enter the Ultra City under a false identity. His crime was clumsy, foolhardy and ill-planned, but the time he’d spent living ‘off the grid’ in Ring Eight had given him skills that made him hard to trace. Three days’ worth of ‘hard to trace’.

Amelia stayed home from work to keep Jasmine company and they spent the hours revisiting the important moments of their lives. They discussed the people they’d loved and lost, their proudest successes, their most humiliating defeats. They shared secret stories about their family members and confessed every spite and jealousy that had passed between them as girls. In their confined space and in the constrained time, Amelia and Jasmine filled the air with almost every kind of conversation two women can have.

On the last night, Amelia offered to make dinner for her cousin, and Jasmine gratefully accepted, even as she fretted over when her DI would be reinstated. It was 53 loops back to Meyden Country in Ring Five, and the privacy it offered from the overbearing reach of The Signal in Ring Two. She was eager to be back, beyond its interrupting, invasive and ceaseless ‘help’. She appreciated the signal, and used it for many aspects of her own life, but in Ring Two, this close to The Source, it suffocated her.

For dinner, Amelia dutifully opened a number of prepackaged ingredients, added the contents of other, smaller packets of condiments, mixed them all together and microwaved the lot. Jasmine immediately decided that her young cousin had to visit her in Meyden County as a matter of urgency, if only for the fresh tomatoes she grew on her own balcony.

The next morning, the wall glass announced that Jasmine’s DI had been reinstated and she was free to travel across the Rings again. They women hugged again, longer and warmer this time, and promised one another a reciprocal visit in the coming weeks.

Which is how Amelia found herself, approximately one month later, disembarking a train in Meyden County.

“I’m sorry I’m late.” Jasmine gushed and made to reach for Amelia’s suitcase. Amelia shrugged it out of her reach.

“That’s okay.” Amelia looked, and sounded, rumpled and spent from the long journey.

They left the station and Jasmine led her cousin to the car she’d rented for the weekend. She knew they could take a driverless cab to her house, but she wanted Amelia to experience everything that Ring Five had to offer.

“Do you want to drive?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Why not? It’ll be fun.”

Amelia looked unsure but took the fob from Jasmine as the older woman went to load the suitcase in the back. When Jasmine got in, she noticed Amelia staring blankly at the steering wheel.

“I can’t do this. I’ve never driven one of these before.”

“It’s easy, the wheel is just like a hand dial- you use it for direction.”

Jasmine helped Amelia to start the car and she hesitantly maneuvered the vehicle into the street. It went well for the first twenty minutes, and Amelia’s confidence seemed to soar with every passing mile.

Later, Jasmine would recall, with a sour twist of guilt in her gut, how she’d neglected to tell Amelia about the dogs.

Ring Two was so densely populated with humans that its animal inhabitants either lived as pets or died as vermin. There were no wild or stray large mammals who were not there intentionally for the entertainment or nourishment of people. In Ring Five, however, feral dogs roamed the open plains between the Meyden County Station and the residential communities that clung to the cliffs. The distant descendants of those pets and strays who had survived the melting floods.

The dog ran into the road in front of Amelia about a mile ahead of her. If Jasmine has been at the wheel it would have been enough time for her to safely slow the car, stop it, or swerve away from the animal. But Amelia had never driven before and so, she didn’t stop. Jasmine watched in horror as they bore down on a tall, light-brown, short-haired hound with big black eyes. The dog seemed as surprised as they were as the front of the vehicle swept the creature off its feet, up into the air, and over the bonnet of the car.

Long seconds after the visceral thump and crunch of bone and blood and rubber and asphalt had long passed, Amelia managed to re-engage her reflexes enough to bring the car to a juddering halt. She spilled from the driver’s side door and was sick in the road, and then pointed ahead to where the crumpled heap lay motionless on the horizon.

“Should we−“

“No. It’ll only upset you.”

“Is there someone we should….”

“There’s no one. Come on. Let’s go.”

“So, we just… leave it there?”

“Yeah.”

“No!” Amelia wailed. Her face folded in on itself and she burst into hysterical tears, “NO!”

Jasmine took a deep breath and carefully reached forward to take hold of Amelia’s upper arms.

“Honey, we’ve just had a little accident. It’s nothing. We should go before the other dogs come.”

“What?”

“Dogs travel in packs. The smell of blood excites them. We should get going back to the house before they get… curious. Give me the keys, I’ll drive.”

Amelia checked her wrist piece for advice from The Signal on what to do. For the first time in her memory, The Signal didn’t respond. She tried again and again, refusing to accept the default holding pattern that presented itself when connection to The Signal was pending. She’d never seen it before, but the endless, hopeless silence it represented filled her with a terrible fear.

She raised her wrist and slapped the small, elegant piece of technology, still sobbing and struggling to catch her breath with shock.

“Amelia, The Signal can’t help us here. We’re in a disconnected area. You don’t need to ask it anything, I’m telling you what to do. Get in the car.” Jasmine let her fear of the other dogs make her voice hard as she spoke to her cousin.

Amelia looked slumped in herself for a moment. Then her head snapped suddenly up and from a standing start she ran towards where the dog lay in the road. Jasmine realized a heartbeat too late. Although she raced after the younger girl, and reached her, heaving for breath, she was unable to spare Amelia the full and vivid horror of the dead animal. It’s jaw frozen in a twisted grimace of pain, blood already drying on the ground beneath it. Its black, dead, doll’s eyes staring in nothingness.

Amelia wept in the passenger seat for the remainder of their journey. Inside Jasmine’s minimalist, cliffside home, she looked forlornly out through the massive windows at the parched, empty plains of Meyden. Before the floods, the plains had been neighborhoods, playgrounds and strip malls. Now there was a hardened wildness to the land that suggested it was glad to be rid of the trappings of people, and determined to make itself especially inhospitable to aspiring settlers. Jasmine explained to Ameila why nothing could grow in the plains anymore, and why no one would live there. She confessed that she loved the raw emptiness of her surrounds and had tried to mimic them in her own spacious, and sparsely furnished home. The Signal was here, but it was weak and slow. Amelia’s wrist piece was still disconnected.

That night, Amelia dreamt of the dead dog, and the empty plains, and the oppressive silence of Meyden bearing down on her, suffocating her with its cruel and heavy vacuity. In the morning, she asked Jasmine to take her back to the station.

“So soon?”

“I can’t stay here. There are too many…” Amelia motioned vaguely around her head, “it’s too quiet.”

Jasmine felt ruffled. It was unfortunate, what had happened with the dog. But she felt that Amelia leaving so early when she’d gone to such great lengths to make this an enjoyable weekend for them both was quite rude.

“So you want to go back to your tiny home, filled with chattering machines?”

Amelia looked confused. Of course she did. Of course she preferred the ‘chattering of machines’ to the cold, unfeeling, uncaring quiet. This vast, answering silence that refused to help, or even acknowledge her. She felt inexplicably sad for Jasmine just then, for the loneliness it seemed her cousin had internalized, and for the hollowness she felt must be inside her. Jasmine’s thoughts, she imagined, must echo endlessly inside her, with nowhere to go, no one to guide her, no one to tell her what was right and what was wrong until after she’d already made her mistakes. A terrible hall of mirrors where every failing and every bad decision would be reflected forever.

“Yes.”

Amelia did think about promising Jasmine that she would stay in touch.

But when the train came to take her home, and the two women hugged for the last time- short and terse, she too adopted the silence of Meyden County.