The Wipe Read online

  THE WIPE

  Author’s dedication:

  For my lockdown family, Dan, Lily and Jack, for helping to keep me sane.

  THE WIPE

  Nik Abnett

  NewCon Press

  England

  First published in April 2021 by NewCon Press,

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  NCP257 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP258 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Wipe copyright © 2021 by Nik Abnett

  Cover Art copyright © 2021 by Ben Baldwin

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-912950-82-9 (hardback)

  978-1-912950-83-6 (softback)

  Cover by Ben Baldwin

  Text edited by Ian Whates

  Typesetting and interior layout by Ian Whates

  One

  Dharma Tuke crossed the lobby of her building and stepped over the threshold into the wipe.

  She lived on the sixth floor, but the lifts had been taken out during the Deluge: too many people, too close together. She didn’t mind the stairs, because she loved her comfortable apartment. She had large rooms and the ceilings were high. She even had a separate bedroom and kitchen. The bathroom was three times the size of its wipe.

  The lobby doors closed behind her, and she reminded herself to order a new canister for her bathroom wipe.

  If she’d ever smelled a geranium, she’d know that was the scent that surrounded her in the closed space for the few seconds that she stood in it, waiting for the exterior doors to slide open.

  One of the nicer aspects of her building was that the internal doors were acrylic and see-through, so if she felt claustrophobic she could see into the lobby of the building. She’d hated closed spaces as a child, and had sometimes screamed, alone in the darkness, trapped in the wipe of her mother’s building. She’d grown out of it. Still, it was nice to be able to see space for those few seconds; all she had to do was turn around. She almost never did.

  The solid exterior doors slid open in front of her, and Dharma walked out into the street.

  Five minutes later, she took a cup of coffee from the machine outside her office building, holding it in her gloved hand until she had passed through its wipe. She’d run late that morning and skipped breakfast, so she was really looking forward to that first sip of coffee.

  The smell of ozone wafted around Dharma. A moment later, she stepped through the interior door, and waited for it to close behind her before taking that first sip. It did not disappoint.

  The concierge, sitting at his desk in the lobby, smiled at her, and she raised a hand to him in greeting. They had never spoken, but the little human contact, at a distance of four or five metres, was always welcome. Dharma had never thought about why he was there, because he never seemed to do anything but sit behind his empty desk and smile at her. She had no digital connection to him, but had never wondered whether anyone else in the building had, or whether he was of any practical use to anyone. She didn’t even know his name.

  It was two flights of stairs up to Dharma’s floor. She took them easily. Since the Deluge, buildings had never been built higher than three storeys. But many of the old buildings remained. Money had been better spent on other projects, but all the lifts had gone, no matter the height of the building. Her mother had told her about them once, when Dharma had been a child, and had complained about the five flights of stairs up to their apartment.

  “You’re too big to be carried, any more,” her mother had said. “You’ll have to get used to it, just as I had to get used to it when I was your age. Your grandmother used to talk about the lifts she used when she was a child, and buses, too, but the Deluge ended all that.”

  She remembered the conversation, but it had all happened so long ago she wondered whether it was within anyone’s living memory. If it was, she wondered what those memories might be, and how accurate.

  History downloads were better. They told the truth about the Deluge. That’s how she’d learned about it, sitting in her mother’s apartment, downloading school.

  It didn’t matter. Life was as it was, and she was living it in contentment.

  Dharma passed through the wipe to her floor, the last before she could get on with her day. There was a rubber seal on the door to her cubicle, so that clean air could be circulated within, and the door closed behind her, using a simple cable and weight.

  All the cubicles on Dharma’s floor were singles, so all the maintenance had to be done by the occupants. Dharma had fitted a new cable to the hook above the door, and to the weight, when the old one had become frayed a couple of years ago.

  She took off her coat and gloves, shoved the gloves in the coat pocket, and hung it on the back of the door.

  She sat at her desk.

  One wall of the cubicle was made of a thick, discoloured acrylic which had become scuffed with age, but it allowed her to see out of her cubicle. She could see others coming and going, and she could partly see into several other cubicles if she looked at an angle. There was no light in her cubicle, except for what came in through the acrylic wall, so everything had a slight green colour cast: the white walls, sealed concrete floor, acrylic desk and chair, even the steel hook on the back of her door. Her blue coat was not quite as blue as it had seemed outside.

  Others on her floor had replaced their original walls; the new ones were more transparent, and less green, but Dharma liked the softness of hers, and didn’t plan to change it any time soon.

  Dharma had been working for Willoughby Woolman for six years, four of them in her current cubicle, but, like everyone else, she worked remotely. Her acquaintances in the building, the people she saw coming and going and anyone she encountered outside, worked in their own cubicles for other companies. She had never met another data-analyst for Willoughby Woolman, or anyone else who worked for them. It didn’t matter.

  Dharma put her face close to the sensor on her computer, and blinked. The screen came to life.

  She was one of the lucky ones. Her computing power was above average, and she had good access to the company intranet, and to parts of the internet. She also had capacity for five private connections, which could not be monitored by W.W.

  It was a condition of her solitariness. Cubicles of two, three or even four, had the same computing capacity as her cubicle. They were required to share, but Dharma had the advantage of being a single user.

  She knew, of course, that her private connections could be monitored; she wasn’t naive. But W.W. contracted not to monitor her, and she trusted that.

  Dharma’s computer logged on automatically to Willoughby Woolman’s intranet home page. She mouthed her passcode at the sensor. She had VR, but W.W. preferred this security measure. The cubicles were not soundproof, but when she was sitting at her station she had her back to the acrylic wall, so no one could read her lips.

  The passcode took Dharma to her personal schedule first, and then to feedback on her current project.

  Everything was looking good; there were some small adjustments needed from the extra data provided, but it all made perfect sense to her. This would be an easy day. All those years downloading school in her mother’s apartment had paid off. Her qualifications put her in the ninetieth percentile of the population. Education had its perks.

  Dharma started working through the data, making the adjustments verbally through voice recognition, and seeing the screen scrolling in front of her as her notes were added to the analysis. She’d be done in a couple of hours, maybe less.

  Two

  Blythe Dole remembered her first encounter with Dharma Tuke. It had mesmerised her then, and it mesmerised her still.
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  It had been several months after she had first had a request from Dharma, before she was able to allocate one of her private connections to their relationship. Dharma and Blythe could speak two weeks out of three. Blythe was hard-wired into her service connection, and she couldn’t give up her primary connection to her mother. It didn’t matter very much to her, but if she altered the connection Blythe’s mother would never let her hear the end of it.

  Blythe’s cubicle had two other occupants, and the three of them all worked for Anley Corp. Mostly, the work was dull and impenetrable. She didn’t understand the invoices that she generated on behalf of the company. She could calculate the rates for various services, apply the discounts and add the taxes in the right sequences, of course. Her work was almost never questioned or corrected, but the products and services that Anley Corp provided were given alpha-numeric codes, which were meaningless to Blythe. Anley Corp’s customers all had alpha-numeric codes, too, so, although she knew many of them as repeat customers, she had no idea what products and services she was invoicing for, or who was accessing them. Sometimes, she wished that she knew; sometimes she thought it was safer for her that she didn’t.

  Blythe’s computing capacity was barely sufficient to her needs, because she had to share it with two other Anley Corp workers. It meant that she had to key in every character, so she spent long hours of her working day sitting at her computer station. If she had voice recognition, she could at least stand, stretch, and walk around a little, a very little in the confines of the cubicle. On the other hand, she had company, at least in theory.

  Con sat adjacent to her on her left. He had introduced himself as Concord Penn when she had joined the cubicle three years earlier, but Joy Yardley, who sat on her other side always called him ‘Con’. The two of them were friendly, friendlier than Blythe thought they should be. Con and Joy would both rather speak to each other than to her. She knew their names but almost nothing else about them, except that ‘Con’ took his morning coffee with a double shot of hazelnut, which smelled too sweet and synthetic. It made Blythe think less of him than she might otherwise. Joy did not live up to her name. If there was anything to complain about, she was the first to open her mouth, and, too often, she chose to complain about Blythe.

  Being in company all day should have been a benefit; it had been one of her reasons for applying for the job in the first place. It hadn’t paid off. She had no real company here and her computing capacity was compromised. As a consequence of sharing the cubicle, Blythe also had to share the allocated private connections with two other people. Each of them had a dedicated service connection. She had a maximum of two usable connections, and for one week in three she only had one private connection. She also had to share the internet capacity.

  Blythe had waited for Joy’s fortnight’s holiday, three months after Dharma had reached out to her, before acknowledging the private e-mail. While Joy was out of the cubicle, she and Con had split the single extra private connection they were allocated. Con had pulled rank and insisted on taking the extra connection for the first week, so Blythe waited until the second week of Joy’s holiday. By the time she was able to connect with Dharma, she had worked herself up to a pitch of excitement that Con neither noticed nor cared about.

  Con always left the building for lunch, and the cubicle was never supposed to be empty during working hours, giving Blythe a forty minute window of opportunity. She was determined to make the most of it.

  She opened the precious extra private connection and began to write the e-mail that she had been composing in her head for weeks. She was hoping for an immediate reply, so she had to keep it brief; Dharma needed time to read and answer it during those forty minutes, so that they could have some kind of conversation. Blythe couldn’t know what kind of computer access Dharma had, or whether they took the same lunch break. If not, she’d have to wait until tomorrow for a reply.

  +This is Blyth,+ she typed. +Finally able to reply. Tell me about our bond.+

  She paused for a moment, before hitting the send button, wondering whether her brief message was enough. Perhaps she could have been friendlier.

  She hit the button. She’d planned the e-mail carefully, to give them time; it was pointless to hesitate.

  Within a couple of minutes, Blythe’s screen blinked, and filled with text. Before she read it, she e-mailed Dharma back:

  +No VR, text only.+

  She could type a hundred words a minute, but had no voice recognition, and Dharma could talk much faster than she could type, especially when excited, so the conversation would be a little one-sided. Blythe scanned the e-mail for the salient points.

  Three

  It was after Dharma’s mother had died that she began to wonder what other relations she might have. She was alone in the world, alone in her apartment, alone in her cubicle. She was always on her own.

  There were people around her, of course. There were people on the street, sometimes, and there were people on the other sides of the walls that always surrounded her. It wasn’t a physical connection she was looking for, although she’d been lucky to have one with her mother for so long. What she really missed was the emotional connection, the shared history. She missed knowing what her mother would want to talk about; she missed being able to finish her sentences, and vice versa.

  Dharma’s mother had not always been an easy woman, and their relationship could sometimes be tense. Dharma wondered if it was because it was the only physical or emotional relationship either one of them had. Dharma had been born while her grandmother was still alive, so her mother always had a connection to someone. Perhaps that’s why they had spoken every day, and perhaps that’s why they had met every weekend. Dharma’s mother would often complain that it was not enough contact, not secure enough a connection. Dharma had never questioned it.

  Then her mother died, and Dharma had begun to understand why their relationship, their connection, had meant so very much to her. She felt that she had taken it too much for granted, and now it was gone, with nothing to fill the void it left.

  Dharma had spent the majority of the past decade alone; she had grown used to it, but her mother had feared Dharma would be lonely after she was dead. She had spoken of it, often.

  Dharma was lonely. She was also resourceful. Her quick, analytical mind soon settled on a solution to this lack in her life.

  She had loved her mother, even when she resented her. She wanted someone to love again, and even someone to resent, a little, from time to time.

  Dharma didn’t remember her grandmother, but her mother spoke of her often, and it seemed to Dharma that she and her mother had maintained a similar bond. Dharma had no child of her own, nor any prospect of having one any time soon, but she must have blood relations out there somewhere.

  Perhaps blood was the connection. It had kept her grandmother close to her mother, and it had kept her mother close to her.

  She would look for more of their blood.

  Since the Deluge, women had raised children alone. There was no such thing as the romantic relationship that her grandmother had apparently shared with her grandfather. Dharma had often thought that her grandmother had lied about their relationship, or, at the very least, exaggerated the details. She fondly remembered her mother’s gloved touch, but could not imagine another’s skin against her own, could not imagine being naked in the company of another person, and did not believe any of the stories, passed down from her grandmother, about the process she called ‘sex’.

  The state had controlled the population since the Deluge.

  Dharma would not have to do very much to become eligible to have a child, but, knowing what the process entailed, she was not sure that she wanted one, or that she would ever want one.

  Nevertheless, Dharma had determined that blood was the key. She must find someone she shared genetic material with.

  Dharma began to use most of her out-of-hours time in her cubicle to trace her ancestry.

  She had choices
, but she also had questions. Knowing that both she and her mother were only children, her links were limited. She would begin by tracing her grandmother’s family. She thought about it, and quickly drew several conclusions.

  There were records from before the Deluge: Good records. Registers of birth, marriage and death had been kept for several hundred years, census records, too. She did not doubt the good intentions of the state in keeping the data, or in allowing access to it, but as she scrolled through facsimiles of the kinds of records she would be able to find, she began to question their reliability.

  She looked at the fields in the old twentieth century records. Birth certificates were registered by region, and were numbered with table references. Dharma assumed that meant there were paper records, books of information rather than clean, digital data. They must, surely, be riddled with human error. It was a serious concern.

  The facsimile she downloaded showed a certificate with data across the top, including application number, registration district, year, sub-district and county, some of which Dharma did not understand. Then the body of the certificate was divided into columns, labelled: no; when and where born; name, if any; sex; name and surname of father; name, surname and maiden surname of mother; occupation of father; signature, description and residence of informant; when registered; signature of registrar; name entered after registration.

  Dharma brought her skills in data analysis to bear, and came to a number of conclusions. Her biggest concern was the column headed ‘signature, description and residence of informant’. What had qualified a person to be an informant of a birth? Dharma left the tab open, and searched, randomly, for visuals of genuine artefact birth certificates. There appeared to be a great many in the public domain. She went from one to another, but found very little variation. In most instances, it appeared that the informant for the birth of a child was its father. When not the father, it was generally the mother.